Penwing's Journal

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Stonewall have decided to name Julie Bindel Journalist of the Year 2008. Over the weekend I received two messages on Facebook from the Say No To Stonewall Syndrome group. The first informing me of this decision and pointing me to a lovely article by "Our" Julie - Gender benders, beware.

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I don't know how much people will care about this, but I've added some URL shortcuts to certain types of post. Queer, Digital Age, Geek, Life/blog and SciFi all have their own shortcuts now (in the form http://www.penwing.me.uk/queer etc (all lower case, no spaces).

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On 7th October Matthew Shepard was beaten, tortured, pistol whipped and tied naked to a fence in the Wyoming night. Found 18 hours later he survived a few more days in a coma in hospital before passing away on October 12th.

He suffered this horrific fate because he was gay.

Two months later David Copeland nailbombed the Admiral Duncan in London in an attempt to stir up homophobia.

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This weekend holds (Inter)National Coming Out Day on 12th October in the UK and 11th October for everyone else. 8 years ago I took advantage of this and another event I'll talk about later, to come out to two of my RealLife{TM} friends. Over the rest of that year I slowly came out to more of my friends and my parents. The following year I went to uni on this very weekend and decided I would just be out rather than repeat the process of coming out.

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I have several groups of friends. There are those that live nearby that I see a lot. There are those that inhabit my online social scene who I "see" a lot.

And then there's those I neglect. Those who don't live nearby. Those who don't spend time in my online locale. Those I'm crap at writing emails/letters to. To you guys, I'm sorry. You can take comfort in the fact that you're not alone and that I wish it were different and I was better at this.

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Recent text from my brother:

genderist toilets?!? what bollocks have you been campaigning for now?

Question from my Mum at Sunday dinner this week (paraphrased):

It's not your lot done the barmy thing with the toilets is it?

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Two stories about religious folks commenting on queers but very differently.

First up, the Chaplain of the London Stock Exchange thinks I should be tattooed with cigarette style health warnings. But that's alright, because he was only joking. And I don't think I need to say much else there really, because I think the other story is more important...

Father Geoffrey Farrow has spoken out against his church's position on gay marriage. This needs celebrating - especially if I'm to criticise liberals for not speaking out often enough:

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According to Margot James, Tory Candidate, I, as a gay, have a duty to vote Tory. The reason for this duty? because I, as a gay who therefore has no children, gets substantially less out of the public services than a.n.other person would as a straight with multiple children.

"Gay people are net contributors to public services through their taxes, because very few of them have children.

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Liverpool is having a series of Queer related events as part of Homotopia and Outsiders. There's a few events I'm planning on going to including:

• 8th October - An Evening with Holly Woodlawn
• 18th October - Were the World Mine

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Attitude this month has a "debate" between Will Nutland of the UK's largest HIV/AIDS charity - Terrance Higgins Trust - and a gay journalist - Johann Hari - about whether the Blood Transfusion Service is right to refuse blood from gay and bisexual men. "Debate" in this instance means they've each had a page to put forward their opinion and they've been printed next to each other.

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So, last night was the season premier of Merlin. We had Vicky and Dave round to help us watch it, poke fun at it and generally have a good laugh. And, well, we succeeded. The show provided us with many things to comment on but overall was fairly enjoyable.

Spoilers below the cut... Spoilers and lighthearted ribbing...

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Yarrr.... Avast ye scurvey dawgs. On this International Talk Like a Pirate Day I be finding myself having to act all professional as we fought the landlubbers who mounted a daring but ultimately foolish drop in on our trusty vessel. But there be a fair number of them who offered a good fight.

Today saw the busiest and most stressful drop in we've had for a while. And term doesn't even start until Monday.

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I was recently asked to do a blog post on two stories which had completely failed to either find their way to my news collector (Google Reader) or failed to be sufficiently eye-catching to be sieved out by my amazing speed reading.

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The (hopefully soon-to-be-ex [UPDATE: Only took 4 days]) Director of Education of the Royal Society has suggested that creationism should be taught in school science lessons.

Professor Michael Reiss says that if pupils have strongly-held family beliefs about creationism such ideas should be explored.

...

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Have a read of this Pink Paper article - Boy to sign Sex Offenders' Register:

A 14-year-old boy stood before a judge today, accused of sexual offences following a gay friendship with a 12-year-old boy.

The older child, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, admitted a month-long relationship with the other boy and pleaded guilty to a string of sex charges against him.

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Last weekend was the August Bank Holiday which can mean only one thing - Manchester Pride Big Weekend. The cumulation of the previous week's selection of queer events including London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival On Tour (bringing us "Otto; or, Up With Dead People"), exhibitions and performances. But it's the Big Weekend that everyone knows about and refers to as Pride. And it has nothing to do with Pride.

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I've recently finished reading a couple of books which I've found through rather different methods than I'm used to and thoroughly enjoyed. My normal method is "oooh... I know that author, I've read their stuff before", "recommendation from real life friend", "That's been made into a movie - the book will surely be better", "amazon (or similar) says it's similar and it has good reviews" and similar.

It's not often I find recommendations on blogs, but that's what happened with the first - Troll was a story I saw recommended on The New Gay (as blogged here).

Necromancer's Gambit was the only book in the Sci Fi/Fantasy section at Borders which made me want to look at it. I put it back as it was a little more than I wanted to spend on a complete unknown. Then noticed the posters advertising the author coming to do a signing later that day (Local author 8-). I returned and brought the book complete with signature.

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So, looking through the stats I see that the 3rd most popular search term* arriving here is "club penwing". Now, whilst there is no current "club penwing" I think this shows that there is sufficient demand. So Club Penwing is officially launched.

Nope, I have no idea either...

Alex
x x

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So, the opening night of Warrington's first gay bar and I'm sat here at ten thirty typing away on my computer with a rather cryptic title to the blog post. This was going to be a video post so my voice could do loooooots of inflection and I could gesticulate wildly, but YouTube didn't want to QuickCap from my camera for some reason and I've not had much luck with pre-recorded videos encoding correctly. So you're stuck with black and white static pixels.

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Kandi Bar.

Warrington is getting a gay bar. A gay bar with a genuine bad drag DJ. Warrington is getting a gay bar. Warrington.

That's my Saturday night planned this weekend. It's going to be awful. But in the best possible way.

EDIT: Not been well advertised. I wouldn't have known if I hadn't seen it in the local paper - which I don't normally buy. The "Who Wants a Warrington Gay Bar" Facebook Group didn't have the news. It's not filling me with confidence.

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