Clip found at Reality Curbed.

A runaway from Nicaragua, where having a same-sex relationship is a crime, has been denied asylum in Canada because he cannot prove he is gay to the Immigration and Refugee Board.

[Alvaro Antonio Orozco], now 21, is slated for removal next Tuesday to a country where sodomy is illegal and to a family that he says beat him and taunted him for his sexual orientation ever since he was a young boy.

“My father called me ‘marica’ [a derogatory word for gay], and told me he would beat it out of me,” Mr. Orozco said. “But it’s impossible to prove you are gay.”

…snip…

Since coming to Toronto two years ago, Mr. Orozco says he has finally felt comfortable to live a gay lifestyle, and spends his weekends at gay bars. “The law protects me here. In Nicaragua, I could be put in jail,” he says. “I still fear my father, who threatened that he would kill me for being gay.”

Globe and Mail reports a board member did not believe Orozco is gay because “he wasn’t sexually active during his teen years, and wasn’t clear about his sexual orientation when he fled Nicaragua at the age of 12.” You know how gays are such sluts in their teen years.

Many of you fell in love with the Rakku Shoe Wheel featured in the premier edition of the Carnival of Shoes and Bags. Here’s your chance to win one: Style IT is giving away a Rakku Shoe Wheel.

Hurry. The contest ends tomorrow!

JURIST reports the KKK is using gay marriage, along with issues such as urban crime and immigration, to spark new cells in Mid-Atlantic and Great Plains towns.

Transparent: Love, Family, and Living the T with Transgender Teenagers by Cris Beam was released last month by Harcourt. In Transparent Beam introduces four teen trans girls whose lives she found herself deeply involved with when she decided to volunteer at a Los Angeles school for gay and transgender kids.

You’ll find an excerpt after the jump.

I’ll have a review copy of Transparent soon. More after I finish it. And maybe an interview with Cris Beam, too.

Read more »

The Carnival of Shoes and Bags

Submissions for the next edition of the Carnival of Shoes and Bags are due on Feb. 10th.

You can submit anything shoe or bag-related, including posts on: unusual finds; manufacturers that have a strict no-sweat-shop policy; shoes or bags made from only environmentally-friendly materials; shoes or bags made by small-time craftspersons who also have an interesting personal story; art museum exhibits that focus on shoes or bags as art pieces; essays that connect shoes, sexuality, and power; trends in shoes and work protocol, like should doctors wear open-toe sandals, etc.

The 2/1 Carnival of Shoes and Bags can be found here.

Edition #2 is here.

If you missed the premier edition of the carnival, you can read it here.

Renting Designer Fashions in NYC

NY1 recently covered Wardrobe NYC, a business in Tribeca where you can rent designer fashions, including designer shoes and bags, for 15 percent of retail price. Watch the segment here.

Hiding in Hip-Hop: Confessions of a Down Low Brother in the Entertainment Industry, a book by former MTV producer Terrance Dean, has been sold to Atria Books, a division Simon & Schuster, and is expected to be published next year.

Pink News reports the book will expose “[t]he author’s life as a closeted homosexual working in the film and music industry and his relationships with other closeted homosexuals—film stars, rap artists, and music producers.” While the book will not name any of the film stars, rap artists or music producers, an Atria spokesperson said those who know the hip hop world will be able to identify the people in Dean’s book.

Already published popular “down low” titles include:

On the Down Low: A Journey into the Lives of ‘Straight’ Black Men Who Sleep with Men

• The Human Rights Campaign and the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation have issued statements condemning the ad and the three “alternate ending” ads Snickers posted online at AfterTheKiss.com. Snickers also posted player reactions to the two men kissing; here’s a still shot of one:
  
  
  
  More shots from the site here.
• AfterTheKiss.com has disappeared.
• The New York Times reported the goal of the ads was to “capture the attention of [the] core Snickers consumer, primarily 18-to-24-year-old adult males.” A spokesperson for the Masterfoods division of Mars commented: “We know that humor is highly subjective and we understand that some consumers have found the commercial offensive…Clearly that was not our intent. We do not plan to continue the ad on television or on our Web site.”

Why does that sound like the title of a fucked up children’s book? And is rehab the answer to everything these days?

Does anyone really believe that Isaiah Washington is sorry for calling T.R. Knight a “faggot” because he went to counseling? Is anyone really going to believe that San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom is sorry for sleeping with his now ex-campaign manager’s wife because he’s decided to seek treatment for alcohol use? I guess he had to do something. But what does his sex life have to do with his mayoral responsibilities?

After three weeks of intensive counseling by four ministers Ted Haggard is now ”completely heterosexual.”

Haggard also said his sexual contact with men was limited to the former male prostitute who came forward with sexual allegations, the Rev. Tim Ralph of Larkspur told The Denver Post for a story in Tuesday’s edition.

”He is completely heterosexual,” Ralph said. ”That is something he discovered. It was the acting-out situations where things took place. It wasn’t a constant thing.”

Ralph said the board spoke with people close to Haggard while investigating his claim that his only extramarital sexual contact happened with Mike Jones. The board found no evidence to the contrary.

”If we’re going to be proved wrong, somebody else is going to come forward, and that usually happens really quickly,” he said. ”We’re into this thing over 90 days and it hasn’t happened.”

Haggard stepped down as president of the National Association of Evangelicals last year following allegations that he had sex with and used methamphetamine with Jones, a (former?) male prostitute (who recently visited Haggard’s former church, btw).

James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, commented late last year to Larry King that it could take four or five years to turn Haggard into an ex-gay. No wonder they used four ministers.