Category: Gay Rights Bill

Male Full Frontal Nudity TV; Gay Shame; Gay Rights Bill

Male Full Frontal Nudity TV

I think I once posted about a parody a group of women put together about the lack of male full frontal nudity in TV…and the double standard. It was entertaining and spot on.

“For every topless background extra, every actress that bears her bouncies but doesn’t even get a line, every minute we have to sit through this dumb double standard, you owe us an inch of grade-A man meat.”

Remember how I recently posted about a film titled, Unhung Hero, and we never got to see any “man meat,” and the title was all about “man meat.” Little “meat.” But “meat” is “meat.”

This article from which I quoted above discusses male full frontal nudity in TV in more depth, and also has a few photos that could have been more interesting. But some of the comments are highly worth reading.

Comment About Oz:

the actors recalled an episode in which one of the directors became uncomfortable with a scene of male-on-male affection and kept cutting it short. After the director made an antagonistic remark, Tergesen stepped in. “Lee goes, ‘Look, just because you’re uncomfortable with the sexuality going on here doesn’t mean you have to rain on our fucking parade,’” Meloni related.

I wonder if the director would have made the same antagonist remark had this been hetero male-on-female affection. In any event, it’s an interesting piece that discusses other TV shows and male full frontal that in most cases you probably would have missed if you hadn’t been paying attention. Because even though there are some films and TV shows with male full frontal, it happens to fast you barely even get to see it.

 Gay Shame

This time I’m linking directly to wiki about the Gay Shame Movement because it seems to have all the elements that describes something as abstract as this. And it is abstract to most people because the more gays are accepted into mainstream society the more heteronormative they become…and want to become.

 A relatively new phenomenon that sprang up on both coasts in recent years, Gay Shame is an outgrowth of a younger generation’s disgust with over-commercialized pride celebrations that are more about corporate sponsorships, celebrity grand marshals, and consumerism than they are about the radicalism that gave birth to our post-Stonewall gay-liberation movement, and radicalism such as that displayed by the Cockettes.

From what I gather, Gay Shame as a movement has lost a great deal of steam in recent years. San Francisco Gay Shame started around 2001, and one of the things they were/are against was/is gays trying to go for what they call “straight privilege.” As I said, it’s an abstract concept to many because it sounds so counter productive to what we read and hear in the mainstream. But as a gay man, I can’t help feeling more and more as if we’re losing gay culture each day and a good deal of what gay culture has always been is turning into cheesy romance novels with titles about warm cider that sound more like Debbie Macomber wrote them. I’ve even been guilty of this to a certain extent myself, but my content is never something that I feel is pushing gays more toward heteronormativity. In other words, like African Americans, I want to preserve my culture just as much and I don’t like it when others try to take that away from me.

And, gay pride events have become commercialized events that every sell-out in America wants to be part of. In New Hope, we have a gay pride event where many straight owned and operated businesses take part because they make a good deal of money that week, not just because they care about gay pride. However, when gay pride is over the gay flags come down and it’s back to business attracting a straight clientele as usual. It’s okay to take the gay dollar once a year, but they don’t want to be known as gay establishments.

Gay Rights Bill

The Employment Non-Discrimination Act was designed to help protect LGBT people in the workplace, all over America, from any form of discrimination that could arise because they are LGBT. The senate is pushing the bill forward this week, and it’s getting some opposition as well as a great deal of support.

“I think back to Martin Luther King’s commentary that the great arc of the universe bends toward justice and I feel that our notion of fairness about employment, how central that is to pursuit of happiness, how central it is to equality, how central it is to the golden rule …. means that we will accomplish this,” said Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., a chief sponsor of the bill. “But I do hope it’s sooner rather than later.”
 
According to this article, Republican Speaker John Boehner is opposing the bill. But the article also mentions other Republicans are supporting it, and then mentions a shift in American opinion about gays that shows how much the scales of balance have tipped in favor of gays. And this isn’t the first place I’ve read something like this. The fact is that most Americans, Republican or Democrat, are learning to accept gays and treat them equally, and that’s partly because most Americans know someone who is gay or they are related to someone who is gay. And, even more important to consider, there are, indeed, many gay Republicans who haven’t even begun to speak out yet.
 
So I can’t help but wonder just how out of touch some of our leading politicians in America can be? It’s like there’s been a huge revolution happening all over the world, especially with social media and technology, and people like Speaker Boehner missed it all. Does the guy still listen to records? Does he still have a flip top phone? And to be brutally fair to Republicans who are opposing the bill, there’s no better example of this lack of information than the huge debacle our Democratic leaders produced with the healthcare web site. People who know the Internet and know technology wouldn’t have let that happen, especially not with something as vital. Steve Jobs wouldn’t have done that.
 

Nude Photo Attribution, here.