Daily Gay Sex

Just when you think you’ve heard it all, along comes something like this. Mischa Badasyan claims he’s about to have gay sex every day for the next year in an attempt to create something artistic. He’s from Berlin but was born in Russia. This, however, is the most interesting/confusing part. He’s planning to find this daily gay sex in public…like supermarkets and highways in order to turn these destinations into places of “human connection.” Like that hasn’t been done before.

By using hook-up apps and sites like GayRomeo, Gaydar, Scruff and Grindr, he claims he wishes to turn ‘non-spaces’ such as supermarkets and motorways into places of human connection by having sex in them.

Frankly, I don’t want to sound glib here, but this isn’t something new. Maybe it’s new to HIM, but I had several friends who once spent an entire year riding up and down the east coast along the 95 corridor having sex in public places like rest stops and supermarkets just for fun, and this was long before there were even apps like Grindr. They did it for fun, in a discreet way, not to publicize it and call it art.

An HIV association is supplying this guy with condoms.

You can read more here, where there’s a photo of him and some of the most entertaining comments I’ve seen in a long time.

Side note: discreet, subtle cruising this way is nothing new. If you want to call it art, fine. But don’t make it sound as if this hasn’t been done before by millions of gay men, with discretion. In fact, there was a time when this sort of hooking up was the ONLY way to meet other gay men…unfortunately. I know more than a few gay men who’ve hooked up in K-Mart, or supermarkets, or at malls, and they didn’t think they were turning them into a places of human connection. They just thought they were getting some.

Gay Organ Donors

This just blew me away when I read it yesterday. Mainly because I’ve always believed in organ donation and I’ve always been an organ donor and I never knew this. But it turns out that a gay teen who died and donated his eye was rejected because he was openly gay.

A Food and Drug Administration policy, which prohibits men who have sex with men from donating tissue, barred Betts from fulfilling one of his final wishes.

They did, however, accept his other organs. Evidently, this has something to do with whether or not a gay man has had sex within the last five years. It’s a dated law that goes back to the early days of AIDS. The boy’s mother couldn’t say whether or not the teen had had sex in the last five years, so I guess they took a chance on his other organs? I’m not really sure, but I did do a search on the general topic and found this piece.

CDC guidelines say “men who have had sex with another man in the preceding 5 years” should be excluded from donation of organs or tissues unless “the risk to the recipient of not performing the transplant is deemed to be greater than the risk of HIV transmission and disease.”

The organ donation policy is like the one for blood donation. The FDA policy, banning man who have had sex with men from being donors, was put in place during the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s. But there’s growing opposition, including from the American Medical Association.

There’s more about that here. According to one comment, all organs now are tested and screened from everyone and the policy is dated and discriminatory.

The reason why they wouldn’t take the gay teen’s eye isn’t totally clear, but has something to do with not taking certain tissue donations. This article put it this way:

Because Moore could not confirm whether her son had been sexually active or not, the donor network had to assume he had been sexually active in the last five years, thereby ineligible to donate tissue or his eyes.

The exclusion is not limited to certain tissue donations. Gay men are also banned for life from donating blood. It’s a regulation that many say needs to be updated.

More here.

The bittersweet ending to all this is that someone did receive the deceased teen’s heart.

Now you see why I rant when James Franco mocks us and exploits us for his own personal gain.

George Takei’s Crowdfunding

For those reading this blog you most likely know that I’ve always been on the fence about crowdfunding. There’s too much room for fraud and I’m not too fond of the honor system.

In this case, it seems legitimate, though. A boy scout who is over 18 is trying to put together a series that talks about the boy scouts in a positive way (I think) and he’s raised $100,000 thanks to a little help from George Takei. George Takei was moved by this because of boy scout anti-gay laws and the fact that this teen who is over 18 is not allowed to be a boy scout anymore.

Simon is making a web series called Camp Abercorn which confronts the BSA’s discriminatory policies by telling authentic stories about scout camping.

He successfully raised the $100,000 needed to produce the series by crowdfunding via IndieGoGo and got a big boost in the final days of the effort from Star Trek icon George Takei.

The concept of this series is wonderful. And maybe this is a wonderful way to use crowdfunding. I just hope we don’t see this kid putting a down payment on a new house as well.

There’s more about George Takei here.

Gay Dad on Robin Williams

Here’s a link to a heartwarming tribute about Robin Williams that was written by a gay dad. So many of us have been gutted by the news of Williams’ death we’ve been searching for ways to process it. I think this is an excellent example, and one of the best tributes I’ve read so far.

My first recollection of Robin Williams as a dad was in The World According to Garp. It was in this first venture in which he depicted the true complexity of modern fatherhood. Garp was a dedicated dad, but he was tragically imperfect. He had failure, guilt and resurrection. His story was strange and atypical, yet the spirit of what many good men, and good fathers felt was true.

Even monumental roles where Williams did not literally play a father still spoke unflinchingly to the behavior of fathering. From Aladdin to Good Will Hunting, Williams embodied the influential fathering figure inspiring a young man to be himself. In Dead Poets Society, he inspired boys whose actual fathers had emotionally abandoned them. William’s character taught them to not only ‘seize the day’ but to look at life from different angles.