Welcome to a weekly roundup of news related to the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and otherwise “other” community.

• If you really need your heart broken today, check out the state of Iraqi LGBT, a group that has been running safe houses in Iraq for people who’d otherwise be targets for brutal anti-gay violence.  Two of their shelters are scheduled to close due to lack of funds, and a recent attempt to raise money yielded relatively slim results.  The situation in Iraq is dire:
  

  Violence against all the gay community has intensified sharply since late 2005, when Iraq’s leading Shiite Muslim cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, issued a fatwa (religious decree) which declared that gays and lesbians should be “killed in the worst, most severe way”.

  Though there are many crises in Iraq, this is a rare one that we can have a direct impact on, since the houses provide shelter for victims under threat of violence.  Read through the site if you have the stomach for it, and please consider making a donation to maintain the shelters.

• Congratulations to Singapore, which just decriminalized sodomy…. Whoops: only if you’re straight!  The Singapore parliament finally released legal restrictions on oral and anal sex, provided the participants = one man + one woman. In a seriously bizarre statement, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said that the government could not allow decriminalization of anti-family homosexuality, but then delivered this nugget:
  

  Gays “are free to lead their lives and pursue their social activities,” the Prime Minister said, citing the existence of gay websites and gay bars…

  Lee said keeping the statute unchanged, while not aggressively enforcing it, remained the best option.

  (h/t Towleroad)

• In happier news, I’m sure you’ve heard that some character in some ludicrously popular series was apparently gay.  Major props to author J. K. Rowling, who just assured that her novels will be burned in schools for many decades to come.

  Seriously, major props to her: there’s no reason she had to go back and announce that a dead character in a completed series was gay, other than to stick it to the fundies.  Maybe I’ll actually read her books now, in gratitude!

Greetings, literature-loving dharmiacs!  Last week we discussed the bizarre and wonderful Oulipo, who helped free us from notions of rules and rule-breaking by refocusing our attentions on structure and organization.  This week we’re going to take a step back and throw ourselves into one of the largest debates around literature: the canon.

What is the canon?  It’s that generally accepted corpus of books that we consider “great”, even if there’s a bit of variation about the specifics.  It’s why our high school reading lists are similar without being identical – Homer, Shakespeare, Twain – and why certain books get the deluxe leather-bound treatment centuries after they’ve been written.  But the canon is also a  problematic concept, and today we’re going to talk about why.

Don’t forget that today is International Blog Action day for the Environment.  I’m not a regular writer on environmental issues, so rather than post something generic and/or sloppily researched, I’ll instead provide a roundup of articles and blog posts that are popping up all over the internet by far more qualified writers.  Check some of these out, give feedback to the authors to let them know you’re reading, and spread the word at sites that may not know about today’s Blog Action.

The internet is still a fledgling tool for activism, and whatever successes it has had have been modest at best.  Whether this kind of collective harnessing of powers can have any real impact remains to be seen, but it’s at least refreshing to see authors all over the world participating, sharing what they know, and trying to get their readers excited about an important cause.  At any rate, I hope you enjoy reading these as much as I have…

Welcome to a weekly roundup of news related to the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and otherwise “Other” community.

First, a friendly PSA: tomorrow is National Coming Out Day.  There are two very important things that members of the queer community can do: 1. come out to people who don’t already know, and 2. remind people who do.  As someone (I forget who) at the yearlykos LGBT caucus noted, even the friends and family who already know don’t intuitively realize that being queer is a 24/7, 365 day a year proposition: it helps to remind them that your difficulties didn’t end when they accepted you.  Good advice, as far as I’m concerned.

In the meantime, a more stylish PSA from GLAAD, featuring some actor dude:

News and stuff below the fold:

Greetings, literature-loving dharma bums!  Last week we traveled to contemporary Japan to rub elbows with bestselling pseudo-surrealist author Haruki Murakami.  This week I’m taking a slightly different tack than usual and profiling a group rather than an individual author.

Did you ever wish you could break free from the constraints of language and literature and simply express yourself purely?  Well, one group of mid-20th century writers would tell you that’s nonsense, and we’re bound by more constraints than we even realize.  In fact, why not pile on more!

Sound crazy?  Then let me introduce you to the wickedly funny, darkly screwball, surprisingly warm group of radical theorists who started meeting in France in the 1960s: the Oulipo.

Serj Tankian, otherwise lead singer of the fantastic System of a Down (no strangers to anti-war videos themselves), released a video last month for his solo single “Empty Walls” that really deserves watching if you haven’t seen it already.  The whole thing is good, but the ending especially is a zinger:

Don’t waste your time
on coffins today

The video was released on September 11, but has recently picked up enough steam to score rotation on MTV, which is how I first saw it (albeit late at night, when MTV’s not showing one of its million non-music shows).

Welcome to a weekly roundup of news related to the gay, lesbian, bi, trans, and otherwise “Other” community.

• First openly gay person to have a celestial body named after him?  The honor goes to George Takei, famous for his role as Star Trek‘s Hikaru Sulu, who came out in 2005 and has been working as an LGBT activist ever since – And now his name will grace the asteroid formerly known as 1994 GT9. (h/t Mombian, also mentioned in ek’s Morning News) By the way, if you’ve never seen Takei’s hilarious response to Tim Hardaway’s anti-gay comments, watch it now!
• Senator Barack Obama has called on President Bush to reconsider his veto threat (yeah, right!) against the Hate Crimes Act, which recently passed in the Senate.  Obama was one of the bill’s co-sponsors.  In other candidate news: gaining some ground since his gaffes at the HRC-sponsored debate, Governor Bill Richardson has said he’d refuse an honorary chairmanship of the Boy Scouts of America, on the grounds of their discriminatory policies.
• You know we’re achieving progress when we’re upgraded from comparisons to animal-lovers and murderers to comparisons to… kleptomaniacs!  The Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church made the comparison in a speech yesterday in front of the Council of Europe (h/t Towleroad):
  

  Attempts are made to justify homosexuality by calling it a disease, the patriarch said. Yet kleptomania can also be considered a disease, he argued. “Why then no one advertises kleptomania while homosexuality gets advertised via gay parades?” he said.
    “It is advertisement that is being forced on people who are a very long way from it,” Alexy said.

  Dear Alesha (can I call you Alesha?): Your anti-gay speech is also advertisement that is being forced on people who are a very long way from it.  But I suppose we shouldn’t expect better from former KGB, now should we?

More below…

Welcome to a weekly round up of news related to the gay, lesbian, bi, trans, and otherwise “Other” community.

• We’ll start off with grin-worthy story from the least expected place.  While attending the hyper-right wing “Family Impact Summit” (or: “How can we use neutral rhetoric to support an agenda of hate?”), Jim at Box Turtle Bulletin watched as a member of the audience – a lesbian and mother of a seven-year-old – put the panelists in their place.  And all she did was ask simple, straightforward questions that cut through the thick haze of b.s. that passes for ‘evidence’:
  

  Peter Sprigg [from the Family Research Council] jumped in to assert that “without question” the best family structure was headed by a man and a woman. But Cathy persisted:

  …But now you’re devaluing, what, over fifty percent of the children who live with one parent or that one parent as died or that they’re divorced and now they’re just living with one parent. You’re devaluing them and that’s not fair.

  Right on.  It’s a shame someone has to make such obvious points, but we’ve learned not to accept better from this crowd: Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’intrate.  At least for today, we can applaud one woman who braved that viper’s nest.

• Here’s what happens when you don’t have enough brave people: fearing a split in the Anglican Church over ordination of gay clergy and recognition of same-sex marriage, the American branch has caved to the demands of bigotry and supported a moratorium on both.  This, despite widespread support for by U.S. Episcopal leaders:
  

  The leaders of the 2.3 million US Episcopalians, however, reaffirmed their commitment to the civil rights of homosexuals and opposed “actions or policies that does violence to them, encourages violence towards them or violates their dignity as children of God.”

  Nevertheless, violation of their dignity as children of God will continue “until a broader consensus is reached.”  (h/t Pam’s House Blend)

Greetings, literature-loving dharmosets!  Last week the series had a guest poster who tackled a close reading of one of Edith Wharton’s best known works, The House of Mirth.  This week we’re going to crawl into the WayWayback machine to address one of history’s most baffling short stories.

Why do people suffer?  If there is a God, and he does have a ‘plan’, why do people who believe in him find themselves suffering the same indignities as people who don’t?

I have no interest in the religious side of this question (I’m an atheist), but the it makes for fascinating art. If you think religious texts aren’t appropriate fodder for literary analysis… well, then this ain’t the essay for you!

Otherwise, join me below for a trip through ancient Edom.