Paisley Currah, Richard Juang and Shannon Price Minter (ed) Transgender Rights: Minneapolis: University of Minnesota: 2006.
Most lesbian, gay and bisexual New Zealanders would agree with me that transgendered/fa’afafine/whakawahine folk have made notable contributions to our communities, and that they are integral elements of the diverse rainbow of our numbers. For example, Express’ commendably broad coverage […]

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May 15, Year of Our Lord 2196:
Saint: Anthony Dahl Personal Log:
At long last, our Theocracy of Redeemed America starship  Crusader is drawing closer to our new home, which Saint: Doctor Carlos has christened Oceania. Its primary, AUCHE- 03116BV, is almost an exact duplicate of our own Sun, and Oceania itself has landmasses in roughly the […]

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Serendipitously, Australia and New Zealand both have news items related to different sides of the faith/state separation barrier. Let’s begin with the good news.
Graham Capill isn’t going to be paroled. According to the Fairfax Stuff website portal, the Parole Board is unconvinced that he’s not still a risk to children. The article recounted the story […]

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Thanks to a copy of the 37th Wellington International Film Festival programme, I can report that there are two excellent gay-themed documentaries available on two pioneering gay male figures in the creative arts screening this year.
Celebrated Black British independent film-maker Isaac Julien has produced Derek, a beautiful and lyrical homage to the late Derek Jarman, […]

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In Gay Times (UK) (May 2008), there are a couple of fascinating pieces on same-sex parenting in the United Kingdom, which deals with what will probably happen when our own Parliament eventually gets around to amending our Adoption Act 1955.
In some areas, New Zealand is ahead of the United Kingdom. While I understood that lesbians […]

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I’ve often felt slightly queasy about the Christian Right’s apparent obsession with reddening rearends for righteousness, and found a rather nauseating little subculture. It’s all about “Traditional Christian Marriage,” or so say its practitioners.  Look, while I find their polarised gender role-playing to be rather quaint, this is going too far.
This, from one of their […]

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It seems to be the season for boundary testing across the Tasman, given the recent request from an Australian Muslim leader that Australia should contemplate legalisation of polygamous heterosexual marriages.
In Sydney’s Lakemba suburb, Sheikh Khalil Chami of the Islamic Welfare Centre clarified that while he didn’t perform polygamous marriages himself, he knew other Australian immigrant […]

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Who is that Masked Pope? No, not Joe Ratzinger aka Benedict XVI- I’m talking about the far more faaaaaaaabulous Pope Alice, a performance pontiff who landed on our planet several millenia ago, and will pope up at the forthcoming No to the Pope Coalition demo against her antithesis in Sydney during World Youth Day.
Pope Alice […]

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Courtesy of the GayTas website, I’ve now obtained a copy of the legal opinion that Tasmania may be able to legislate for same-sex marriage on its own- that is, if the ALP state government decides to let the Tasmanian Greens bill on the subject through the legislative process.
The proposed bill provides a procedure whereby two […]

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From the United Kingdom comes news that conservative Catholic Labour MPs are not happy about the way that their opinions were summarily dealt with, inside the Brown administration. “Anti-Catholicism” is the accusation, but is it valid?
Apparently, these conservative Catholic Labour MPs are up in arms about the ‘coercion’ of Catholic adoption agencies to assist prospective […]

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