"Robert - The DL Chronicles" - The story of what happens when love forces you out of the closet.
Friday, April 5, 2013
"The Imitation Of Life..."
"Robert - The DL Chronicles" - The story of what happens when love forces you out of the closet.
"The Truth About Love..."
- Cyril Connolly
Thursday, April 4, 2013
"Same Gender Loving People - No. 1300"
"A Family Is Made Of Love..."
Positive images of people like me... The truth of the matter is that we all need to see people like ourselves. So everyday, I'll post a photo, drawing or some other artwork that depicts Same Gender Loving People as what we are... Only Human.
"In The News..."
Activists fight for LGBT rights as pressure to produce offspring pushes country's gay males to marry unsuspecting women.
Raphael Balenieri
01 April 2013
Beijing, China - When Xiao Yue decided in October 2010 to marry her boyfriend, she imagined a life full of love, happiness and laughter. She knew marriage was a bumpy road, but she never expected hers to end within a month, after discovering she had tied the knot with a closeted gay man.
"I remember the date perfectly, because I asked for divorce only 25 days after the wedding ceremony," said the 30-something from the front seat of her car, which she deemed the safest place to talk. Xiao Yue asked that her real name not be used, also out of concern for her safety.
Two years after her marriage collapsed, she still fears the exposure of her life as a former "tongqi" - a new Mandarin word coined to describe straight women trapped in loveless and miserable unions to gay men. The word comes from "tongzhi", or comrade, Chinese slang for "gay", and "qizi", which means "wife" in Mandarin.
"China's gay men marry to have children and pass on the family name. There is an old saying in China which says the worst thing you can do to your parents is not to give them a grandchild."
This is neither a new phenomenon nor it is specific to China, but many say the one-child policy, which prohibits couples from having more than one offspring, has made the country unique in this regard.
"It has put a lot of pressure on China's homosexuals," says Wei Xiaogang, founder and director of Queer Comrades, a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) organisation based in Beijing, which documents gay life in China via online videos.
According to several demographic studies, between 70-90 percent of China's gay men are currently married - or will marry - a straight women, compared to 15-20 percent in the US. China's tongqi could then number as many as 25 million across the country, according to Liu Dalin, a pioneering sexologist now retired from the University of Shanghai.
More conservative estimates, including one from Zhang Beichuan - a sexologist from the University of Qingdao - put the figure at 10 million. China's government has not released any official figures on the phenomenon.
Although the exact number is still debatable, the motives behind these empty unions are readily apparent. In China, a family-dominated culture, sons are expected to marry and later have children - preferably male - to appease their parents.
"China's gay men marry to have children and pass on the family name. There is an old saying in China which says the worst thing you can do to your parents is not to give them a grandchild," says Li Yinhe, a well-known sociologist with more than 720,000 fans on Sina Weibo, China's Twitter-like micro-blogging service.
Because of this, Li - a long-time advocate of women's and LGBT rights - has submitted a proposal calling for same-sex marriage since 2003 to the National People's Congress (NPC), China's rubber-stamp parliament that concluded its annual parliamentary session on March 17.
Although her proposal failed again to get the approval of at least 30 NPC members out of 3,000, which meant it was not formally examined and will unlikely be adopted into Chinese law, Li believes the new light shed on China's tongqis will help advance the cause.
"He introduced him to me as a friend, and since the 'friend' had a spouse, I didn't suspect anything."
Like Xiao Yue's husband, many male homosexuals who marry women hide their sexuality to gain wider acceptance by society. Although homosexuality was removed from the list of mental diseases in 2001 by the Chinese Psychiatric Association and gay communities are now booming in Beijing and Shanghai, it is still largely taboo in China's inner, less-developed provinces.
A native from Liaoning, a northeastern province bordering North Korea, Xiao Yue settled down in Beijing in 2008 after her studies and started working for a financial institution. There, she met her soon-to-be husband. The pair lived close to each other, and after work they would walk together back home and chat along the way.
After 12 months of dating, she thought he was the ideal candidate: He had a car, a flat and a good salary. But it soon became clear the groom also had a lover - a married gay man who came regularly with his wife to house parties and dinners where Xiao Yue would cook for the four of them. "He introduced him to me as a friend, and since the 'friend' had a spouse, I didn't suspect anything," she recalled.
But 25 days into her marriage, the wife of her husband's "friend" told Xiao Yue their husbands were lovers. After she heard, she started looking through her husband's mobile phone and computer, and discovered evidence of a relationship between the two men.
While state-controlled media now report regularly on LGBT issues, the desperate lives of China's tongqis only came into the public eye in June of last year, when a 31-year-old bride from the southwestern province of Sichuan jumped to her death after discovering her husband was gay.
Since then, online and offline support groups have efforted to provide psychological and legal help. Many tongqis have also opened micro-blogs where they talk about their sexless marriages and the conundrum they face: live in the closet with a gay man, or become a stigmatised divorcee.
Xiao Yue decided to go with the second option. "The divorce itself was done in a day. I was lucky enough to have no kids, my own job, and my parents' support," she says.
But for financially dependent women, divorce proves more difficult, especially after they have a child.
******
"Fear Eats the Soul"
"Sometimes In Advertising..."
"Fear Eats the Soul"
"A Truth To Remember..."
Dr. King had come to Memphis in support of black sanitation workers that were on strike due to poor working conditions and inadequate pay. While in town during this visit, he made his now famous, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech at the Mason Temple in southwest Memphis. In retrospect, his words were eerily foretelling:
"And then I got to Memphis. And some began to say the threats, or talk about the threats that were out. What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers? Well, I don’t know what will happen now.
We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will."
Final 30 seconds of "I've Been to the Mountaintop" speech by Martin Luther King, Jr.These are the final words from his final public speech.
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"Fear Eats the Soul"
"The Imitation Of Life..."
"I Accept Me" - a lovely unspoken short film by Danish Khan about longing, fear and acceptance set in modern day Karachi.
"Sometimes The Truth Is Surprising..."
I ran across this article on Yahoo and at first I didn't know what to think of it. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized, I support him... be what you want to be - we should all follow our dreams as long as they don't hurt us or anyone else... And by the way, although it's buried deep in the story (as it should be), he happens to be gay. I think my "gaydar*" picked my interest in the story when I saw his photo.
Like any other 22-year-old Floridian, Eric Ducharme loves to swim, except when he dives into the water, he trades his swim trunks for a floppy tail.
Ducharme is a self-proclaimed merman, a mystical male counterpart to the mermaid. As the legend goes, these seductive sea creatures with the upper body of a human and the tail of a fish, make themselves visible to ships during thunder storms and would lure the opposite sex into the water with their siren-like singing.
According to a story in The Daily Mail, Ducharme says he eats, sleeps, and breathes mermaids and mermen and tries to impersonate them whenever he can. "It's a lifestyle. It's a path in life that I have chosen," he says during a Wednesday night episode of TLC's "My Crazy Obsession," a reality show that follows people whose adoration for objects has become an obsession.
Eric Ducharme: The Real-Life Merman
Like any other 22-year-old Floridian, Eric Ducharme loves to swim, except when he dives into the water, he trades his swim trunks for a floppy tail.
Ducharme is a self-proclaimed merman, a mystical male counterpart to the mermaid. As the legend goes, these seductive sea creatures with the upper body of a human and the tail of a fish, make themselves visible to ships during thunder storms and would lure the opposite sex into the water with their siren-like singing.
According to a story in The Daily Mail, Ducharme says he eats, sleeps, and breathes mermaids and mermen and tries to impersonate them whenever he can. "It's a lifestyle. It's a path in life that I have chosen," he says during a Wednesday night episode of TLC's "My Crazy Obsession," a reality show that follows people whose adoration for objects has become an obsession.
"Fear Eats the Soul"
* By the way, research on the gaydar phenomena shows that the most significant clues that we pick up on are found in our facial structure and expressions and not generalized stereotypes that many people believe in.
Wednesday, April 3, 2013
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