Category: headlines

OK. So there’s no reason for these guys to be headliners, except to serve as a reminder that it’s a sizzling hot summertime down under in Australia, the home of DNA.

But up here in the north, this blog is thinking about bundling up, rather than stripping down. (Not that we’d do that anyway.)

This site's 'NewsEditor', cook, bottle-washer, etc. will be taking a trip to Montana for a holiday break during the next couple of weeks. Updates to this site will be infrequent during that period.

As I always do during such a break, I’ll spend a bit of time reconsidering the whole idea of this site. Other than adding a spam filter to the post comments, I don’t plan on making any major changes, but the main thing I think about during such periods of reflection is whether the site as it stands is even worth continuing.

There’s clearly no financial benefit to it. The site costs me more than the paltry fees generated by the ads you see on the pages. And I spend way too much time on it. Since I offer more than the kind of clipping service is offered by dozens of other sites, I have to rewrite each of the posts. But because I do more than the news-clip sites, I’m able to post fewer items. And it is just news. Only occasionally does an opinion slip through. And because strongly (if often stupidly) stated opinion is a more popular form on the blogosphere, folks don’t have much reason to link to one of these posts or even to comment on them here.

And all of that taken together means that I really can’t even guess why the folks who do come here do so. If a reader or two cares to tell me, then please add a comment below, or post something at the site’s Facebook fan page.

On the night that Boyzone singer Stephen Gately died, Bulgarian model Georgi Dochev was a guest of Gately and his husband, Andy Cowles, at their apartment on on the Spanish holiday island of Majorca. That’s been known since the shocking news broke in October that Gately had died suddenly and unexpectedly of natural causes.

Dochev had remained silent. But he has now told the London tabloid Sunday Mirror about that fatal night.

Dochev tells the tabloid that he was introduced to the couple by a mutual friend during what the paper calls a “laughter-filled night out at Majorca's bars and clubs.” Eventually the three of them headed off to the elegant vacation flat owned by Gately and Cowles.

“Stephen and Andy were very open-minded and obviously had a really strong relationship, so they were both comfortable with the idea of bringing another man back to their flat,” Dochev tells the paper.

He tells the paper that the three of them enjoyed a long session of sex together. “All three of us were totally comfortable with what happened. It wasn’t anything sleazy. It was three consenting adults enjoying themselves,” Dochev explains.

He says Gately had had quite a bit to drink during their night at the clubs, and smoked a marijuana joint soon after they’d returned to the apartment. Gately dozed off fairly quickly and at one point, Docev says, “was lying with his head on my chest, snoring.”

Dochev said he eventually went into a bedroom to sleep, but noticed a few times during the early morning hours while passing through the living room on his way to smoke a cigarette that Gately hadn’t moved much on the couch.

At about noon, Dochev says he wandered into a bedroom where Cowles was sleeping. “One thing led to another and we had sex for about an hour. We couldn’t have known Stephen was probably already dead.”

He tells the newspaper that Cowles became inconsolable when he and Dochev realized that Gately had died.

“There were tears streaming down his face. He wouldn’t let go of Stephen. He kept repeating. ‘wake up baby’.”

Even when police arrived at about 2 pm, Cowles was reluctant to stop hugging Gately, Dochev says.

Gately was pronounced dead at 2:25pm on October 10. An autopsy revealed he died of natural causes, a build-up of fluid on the lungs.

Tripathi’s friend, photographer Firoze Shakir, considers her his “metrosexual Hijra Guru”. He took this and other photos to help reveal the world of the hijra on their terms.

Hijri activist Laxmi Narayan Tripathi is given a chance to tell her own story in the Sunday edition of India’s Deccan Chronicle.

Tripathi is a noted activist for hijri or third-gender people in India. In the Sunday first person column, “For your eyes only”, Tripathi says that the past few months have been a whirlwind with frequent interviews and TV appearances and TV appearances, especially since the Delhi High Court overturned the Victorian-era colonial law known as section 377 that criminalized sexual minorities.

Tripathi said she has a quick retort when “some loafer has tried to act fresh and pass lewd comments”

"Who are you and I to question God’s creation?” Tripathi asks, rhetorically. “It’s ridiculous to see some religious leaders and so-called culture-vultures challenge the HC ruling on section 377. How can these people decide what’s ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ for sexual minorities. ‘Hum asmaan se thodi na tapke (We didn’t fall from the sky)’."

In June 2008, Tripathi was in New York to address a UN conference. India’s NDTV offered this profile at the time:

Born in an orthodox Brahmin family in 1979, Tripathi has the distinction of being the only eunuch in the UN's Civil Society Task Force on HIV/AIDS. In fact a UN event on HIV/AIDS has included transgender persons in the work of civil society caucus for the first time: a development greeted with cheers among eunuchs worldwide….

Speaking flawless English to the surprise of many UN correspondents, Tripathi explained that throughout the global South, especially in countries where transgender persons were also part of an ethnic group, sexual minorities were forced to beg for basic services and health care or forced into sex work because there was no political will to recognize their fundamental rights.

17-year-old actor Taylor Lautner is usually referred to these days with the prefix “teen heartthrob”. That’s especially true since the actor—who has been a serious karate and Xtreme Martial Arts student since age six—packed on 40 pounds of muscle between his two appearances in the teen-heartthrob movie series Twilight, according to a Rolling Stone teaser for its cover story on the star. The new muscle helps him give a fresh style to the usually shirtless werewolf Jacob in the latest installment, New Moon.

Oh, and as often happens these days with kids who are judged to be “teen hearttrob” there are questions about whether he might be gay. All Taylor would say about it when RS attempted to broach the subject was, “There’s a lot of rumors out there.” 

Gawker observed, “While he is rumored to be dating Taylor Swift, there is another name popping up as a love interested for Lautner .  His name is Sean Fox Zastoupi.” Gawker observes about the Swift rumors: “[I]t doesn't sound too lovey dovey to me”