A Dog’s Purpose and Animal Abuse Claims

I’ve been following this one all week. It’s about the film, A Dog’s Purpose, and a video that surfaced showing a terrified German Shepherd being forced into water over some kind of waterfall. If you do a simple search you’ll find all kinds of information out there.

Time is money, as they say on set. That might explain the video, obtained by TMZ, of a fearful-looking dog being placed in turbulent water — ostensibly before he was ready — on the set of A Dog’s Purpose, which was filmed in Manitoba. The clip of the incident, where the dog, Hercules, later becomes submerged, went viral online and provoked calls to boycott the film ahead of its now-cancelled premiere.

You can read more about that here. I think this piece covers the story better than most other things I’ve read. I’m a dog owner and I know, almost instinctively, when my dogs are under stress and when something is about to stress them. I’ve never once forced my dogs to do something that would put them in a place of stress.

With that said, Hollywood person, Dennis Quaid, made a few strong statements about the movie, too. It’s also important to note that Quaid is starring in the film.

PETA has denounced the film, and there have been protests over it.

The protest was triggered by a TMZ video showing a trainer trying to pull the dog star — who was clearly unwilling and upset — into the water.  Producers say it was a one off, where the dog actually liked jumping in but they changed the angle and that’s why the dog freaked out.

And, here’s a link to the actual TMZ video that broke this news so you can decide for yourselves how you feel about this. I’ve seen it several times, and I’m still gutted. I’m also wondering why they continued to force the dog into the water, knowing he was freaked out, because they changed the angle. You wouldn’t force Meryl Streep into the water if she wasn’t ready. So why force the dog?

Racism and D. C. Bar

Here’s another story that reminds me of the one I posted about racism in the Philadelphia gay bar that opened up a long overdue discussion.

The manager of a popular gay bar in Washington, D.C. says he’s not racist despite some rather damning evidence to the contrary.

David Perruzza is the manager of JR’s in Dupont Circle. A recently leaked between him and Aram Vartian, a graphic designer hired to make promo material for the bar, shows the manager requesting a “hot white guy” instead of a black man in a 2012 advertisement.

There’s more here. There are 27 comments with this one.

Russian Web Site Counts Gays In Cities

I’ve been watching a show on Netflix called Between, where it seems the entire town of Pretty Lake is gayless…not a gay in sight. Totally gay-less. Well, in direct contrast, here’s a story about a Russian web site that actually estimates about how many gays there are in towns and cities.

“The website’s questionable methodology for ‘measuring gays’ relies on tracking the number of online requests for pornography in a city and compares it to the number of Internet searches for gay porn, and then applies the differential to the city’s total population and ‘calculates’ the LGBT population,” they report.

They then walk through what a user might experience.

“In Moscow, for example, the website says there are ‘173,851 gays,’ and warns visitors, ‘Oh my! That’s a lot of gays! Danger!’ while offering help in ‘fending off the gays.’

You can read the rest here. Someone should tell them about Pretty Lake.

Bisexual Frat Boy and Masculinity

I think this interesting because it’s an ongoing topic in my current work in progress. I wanted to write about a gay character who questions his own masculinity constantly, and who breaks down the stereotypes.

This article is about a frat boy who identifies as bisexual, and who questions everything he’s ever been told about masculinity and how he should think and behave.

For the first 19 years of my life, I lived under the impression that in order to be recognized as an equal to other men, I had to fit the mold. It was the small details — the words I said, the way I behaved and the things I did — that made me self-conscious of my own identity,” writes 19-year-old Allen Pham, in an article titled “What does it mean to be a man?” for Daily Trojan, the student newspaper of the University of Southern California.

You can read it all here. I think we need more conversations about this, for men only.