Έρευνες, ταινίες, νέα...

Έχουμε την περίληψη μιας έρευνας

Ellis, Lee et al. “Eye Color, Hair Color, Blood Type, and the Rhesus Factor: Exploring Possible Genetic Links to Sexual Orientation”. Archives of Sexual Behavior. 37.1 (Feb2008): 145-149.


The present study sought to expand the limited evidence that sexual orientation is influenced by genetic factors. This was accomplished by seeking statistical differences between heterosexuals and homosexuals for four traits that are known to be genetically determined: eye color, natural hair color, blood type, and the Rhesus factor. Using a sample of over 7,000 U.S. and Canadian college students supplemented with additional homosexual subjects obtained through internet contacts, we found no significant differences between heterosexuals and homosexuals regarding eye color or hair color. In the case of blood type and the Rh factor, however, interesting patterns emerged. Heterosexual males and females exhibited statistically identical frequencies of the A blood type, while gay men exhibited a relatively low incidence and lesbians had a relatively high incidence ( p < .05). In the case of the Rh factor, unusually high proportions of homosexuals of both sexes were Rh− when compared to heterosexuals ( p < .06). The findings suggest that a connection may exist between sexual orientation and genes both on chromosome 9 (where blood type is determined) and on chromosome 1 (where the Rh factor is regulated).

Σχόλια ταινίας απο Hong Kong

Khoo, Olivia. “The Ground Beneath Her Feet”. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian & Gay Studies, 14.1(2008): 99-119.

The author presents an analysis of the motion picture "Ho Yuk: Let's Love Hong Kong," directed by Yau Ching. The film is the first of its kind in Hong Kong, as it uses an almost entirely female cast and crew to present the passions and desires of lesbian women. Previous films about lesbianism from Hong Kong have all been directed by men and the author explains that they used the subject matter as a form of exploitation. The author discusses the importance of this film, how it effects the people of Hong Kong and what is being said about the women of this region


και νέα απο το Lesbian News

Wockner, Rex. “News International”. Lesbian News; 33.6 (Jan 2008): 14.


URUGUAY PASSES CIVIL-UNION LAW
Uruguay's House of Representatives passed a civil-union law for gay and straight couples November 29.
The measure had passed the Senate in September. It is expected to become law before year's end. Uruguay will be the first Latin American country to grant same-sex couples access to civil unions on the national level.
Couples must live together for five years before they can take advantage of the law. Spousal rights will be granted in areas such as health care, pensions, parenting and inheritance.
Other Latin American localities with civil-union laws include the city of Buenos Aires, the Argentine province of Rio Negro, the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul, Mexico City, and the Mexican state of Coahuila, which borders Texas

AUSSIE ACTIVISTS ARE PLEASED HOWARD LOST
Australian gay activists expressed satisfaction with the November 24 election defeat of anti-gay longtime Liberal Prime Minister John Howard.
In 2004, Howard successfully pushed for a national ban on same-sex marriage and, in 2006, he squashed a civil-union law passed by the Australian Capital Territory, a jurisdiction similar to Washington, D.C. Losing both his PM job and his longtime seat in Parliament, Howard was replaced by Kevin Rudd of the Labor Party, which has pledged to end financial and legal discrimination against same-sex couples by modifying 58 federal statutes.
Activists said they will hold Rudd's feet to the fire on that promise and other gay-friendly Labor pledges, including the party's stated support for the ACT civil-union law.

U.S. GAY SINGERS ALLOWED TO PERFORM IN SINGAPORE
U.S. Christian singers Jason and deMarco, a gay couple, have received permission to perform in Singapore on December 13.
The decision was a surprise given that the government has been on a gay-ban spree this year, prohibiting a gay photo exhibition, a gay story-reading event, a forum on gay legal issues and a speech by Metropolitan Community Churches founder Troy Perry.
Gay sex is illegal in Singapore and punishable with two years in prison.
But Jason and deMarco, who were banned as recently as 2005, got a green light this time after organizers convinced the Media Development Authority that "the aim of the concert is AIDS education and HIV prevention … targeted at the high-risk groups," an MDA spokesperson said.

BRAZILIAN TV NETWORK MUST PAY $42 MILLION FOR OUTING MODEL
A São Paulo court has ordered the Brazilian TV network Rede TV to pay $42.7 million to model Carlos Alberto Cunha Gonçalves after he was outed by a guest on the talk show Superpop, GayNewsWatch.com reported November 23.
Judge Carlos Dias Motta ruled that the remark invaded Gonçalves' privacy.
"Programs that are notoriously sensationalist should at a minimum make sure to respect the dignity of individuals because freedom of expression, achieved at a high price, cannot justify violating privacy, which is also a principle of the Federal Constitution," Motta said.

MAN HANGED IN IRAN FOR 'ANAL RAPE'
A 21-year-old man was hanged in Iran's Kermanshah Central Prison on "anal rape" (ighab) charges December 5 despite a November order from the nation's chief justice, Ayatollah Syed Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, that stayed the execution and sent the case for a retrial.
Shahroudi had determined that Makvan Mouloodzadeh's sentence violated Islamic teaching, decrees of senior Shiite clerics and Iranian law, after Mouloodzadeh's lawyer argued that there was no evidence of the alleged crimes and that several elements of the case violated proper procedure.
Shahroudi's retrial order, however, required review and assent from the Special Supervision Bureau of the Iranian Justice Department. According to the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, the bureau declined to assent, upheld the sentence and ordered the execution to be carried out.
Mouloodzadeh was convicted in June of committing rape when he was 13 years old despite the fact that, at his trial, his three accusers recanted their accusations, saying they had lied under duress. Mouloodzadeh likewise said his confession to the crimes had been coerced.
"This is a shameful and outrageous travesty of justice," IGLHRC Executive Director Paula Ettelbrick said after the hanging. "How many more young Iranians have to die before the international community takes action?"

RUSSIAN GAYS ARRESTED AT POLLING PLACE
Thirteen gays and lesbians were arrested in Moscow December 1 as they were voting at a polling place.
The activists, including lead Pride organizers Nikolai Alekseev and Nikolai Baev, were later charged with staging an illegal demonstration. The detentions were an apparent response to a call by activists for gays to write "No to homophobes!" on their ballots.
Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, who banned gay pride events this year and last year, was scheduled to vote at the same location about an hour after the arrests occurred.
The activists were taken to a police station and released several hours later after a representative of the city prosecutor's office pointed out that it is illegal to detain someone for more than three hours without giving a reason.

BRAZILIAN GOVERNMENT ORGANIZES LARGE LGBT CONFERENCE
Brazil's federal government is organizing a groundbreaking 1st National Conference of Lesbians, Gay Men, Bisexuals and Transpersons.
Subtitled "Human Rights and Public Policies: The Way Forward to Ensuring the Citizenship of Lesbians, Gay Men, Bisexuals and Transpersons," the event will be held May 9-11, 2008.

CROATIA SEES FIRST OPENLY GAY CANDIDATE
Croatia's small Croatian Bell party has put forward the nation's first openly gay political candidate.
Vinko Kalinic wants to represent the northern region of Zagorje in Parliament. According to Javno.com, Kalinic is a reporter, songwriter, fisherman and former intelligence officer and seminarian.
"I came out of the closet exclusively as rebellion and in solidarity with those who were discriminated against and humiliated, and I state that with pride everywhere I go," he told Javno. "My goal in politics is to, by coming out of the closet, have the sexual orientation of people become a completely irrelevant issue."

BRIGHTON TO BAN ANTI-GAY MUSIC
Local authorities in the gay-resort city of Brighton, England, are set to ban music that bashes gays. The ban would apply to live music and to recordings played in bars, clubs and other venues. Reports named rappers Eminem and 50 Cent and Jamaican dancehall singer Buju Banton as likely targets of the law.
An establishment that violates the ban would face losing its business license and being shut down. The ban also would extend to music that incites hatred based on religion or race.Councilor Dee Simson, chairwoman of the local council's licensing committee, told the BBC the ban "will be used in really extreme eases to stop the playing of what's loosely termed 'murder music.

Αν έχεις το όνομα έχεις και τη χάρη...

Λοιπόν, όταν ξεκίνησαν τα γυρίσματα του L Word η γνωστή Bette (δηλ. Jennifer Beals) κυκλοφορούσε με μια φωτογραφική μηχανή και έκανε πολλά κλίκ!

Απολαύστε κάποιες απο αυτές με σχόλια της!



Left: "That's Mia Kirshner at our first Television Critics Association appearance doing her makeup, and I thought, she's just so elegant, and I mean she's many things, but one of them is elegant." Above: "We can often get very silly together, especially Kate Moennig and Leisha. There was this big mattress on set and all of a sudden it's like we were 5 years 01d and it was really cold, so to stay warm, to just goof off, we started playing on the mattress." Below: "That's Leisha, Mia, Kate, and Pam Grier at one of our promo shoots. There's a slight anxiety--Do I look OK? Am I fat? Is this all working out?--but it's also a bit of a party."

Top: "I took this picture of Leisha Bailey at a photo shoot for Vanity Fair. I think it works as a photograph, period. But I also love that it--I don't want to use the word 'captures'--that it makes clear her joy." Bottom: "Leisha's holding this book where you think of a question and then you open the book to see what the answer is. We were slightly obsessed with it during downtime."

Transgender ιστορία

LAVERNE COX trans, actress-entertainer

Διαβάστε το ακόλουθο πολύ σημαντικό άρθρο που βρήκα στο Advocate, στο τεύχος της 18/12/2007. Παρουσιάζει την ιστορία των τρασέξουαλ. Το βρήκα πολύ διαφωτιστικό και ελπίζω να το βρείτε και εσείς:



TRANSGENDER HISTORY


1952 America learns of George William Jorgensen Jr.'s sex-change surgery in a New York Doily News story headlined "Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty." A World War II veteran, Jorgensen, who underwent the procedure in Denmark and adopted the name Christine, becomes an instant celebrity on her return to the United States in February 1953. She later has careers as an actress and nightclub entertainer.


1966 A riot erupts after police attempt to arrest rowdy drag queens at Gene Compton's cafeteria in San Francisco. Protesters break windows, throw furniture, and burn down a newsstand; one throws coffee in an officer's face. The subject of the 2005 documentary Screaming Queens, the event is the beginning of the transgender rights movement.


1969 Writer and scholar Virginia Prince coins the word transgenderal, to describe herself and others, in "Men Who Choose to Be Women," an essay published in Sexology magazine. "I, at least, know the difference between sex and gender and have simply elected to change the latter and not the former," wrote Prince. The word becomes increasingly popular in the 1970s and by the 1980s has been shortened to transgender.



Drag queens are among those who resist arrest during a police raid on the Stonewall Inn in New York City's Greenwich Village, widely regarded as the start of the modern gay rights movement.



In 1970 the activist groups Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries and the Τranssexual/Transvestite Action Organization are formed.


1972 Sweden becomes the first country in the world to allow unmarried transsexual citizens to legally change their sex; the government will even pay for it. Panama would become the second country to legalize transsexuality, in 1975.


1975 Minneapolis becomes the first U.S. city to offer legal protections for transgender people after revising its human rights ordinance to ban discrimination against them. Today, at least 92 jurisdictions have trans-friendly measures on the books.


1977 The New York supreme court rules in favor of professional tennis player Renée Richards, a trans woman who filed a discrimination lawsuit against the United States Tennis Association after she was not allowed to play in the 1976 U.S. Open. She later coached Martina Navratilova with great success, including two Wimbledon singles wins.


1986 Activist Lou Sullivan forms FTM, the San Francisco-based support group that would become FTM International, now the longest-running female to male organization. Serving 18 countries, it also offers panels and workshops.


1989 Drag performer RuPaul first captures the public's attention with a cameo appearance in the B-52's "Love Shack" video. In 1993 he would achieve international fame with the hit single "Supermodel (You Better Work)."


1993 Transgender rights groups protest against organizers of the April 25 March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation for not referring to transgender people in the event's title, though the march's platform does. Names of earlier marches on Washington, in 1979 and 1987, also failed to reference the transgender community,



With its Human Rights Act, Minnesota becomes the first state to ban discrimination against its transgender residents, in language that protects those "having or being perceived as having a self image or identity not traditionally associated with one's biological maleness or femaleness."


1994 Riki Wilchins forms the Gender Public Advocacy Coalition, aiming to educate people about gender identity.


The acronyms LGBT and GLBT begin to appear in print, according to the Lexis-Nexis database.



The first mainstream news article to use the inclusive acronym is a September 9 piece in the Minneapolis Star Tribune about a local theater's creation of a GLBT singles night.


1998 The Gay Games requires transgender people to submit documentation of a sex change in order to compete in Amsterdam, a policy the 1994 Games in New York did not enforce.


1999 The Transgender Day of Remembrance is first observed in November, one year after the murder of Boston trans woman Rita Hester, a case that has never been solved. The Day of Remembrance is now observed annually in hundreds of cities around the world.
Boys Don't Cry is released in theaters nationwide. Based on the true story of Brandon Teen, a, a trans man who was raped and murdered in 1993, the film garners an Academy Award for Hilary Swank. For many Americans, her portrayal of Teena is the first depiction they've seen of a trans man.


2001 San Francisco becomes the first U.S. city to offer its employees health coverage for transgender-related medical needs. The city will fund sex-reassignment surgery and related treatments up to $75,000, according to the mayor's LGBT liaison.


2003 Activists found the National Center for Transgender Equality, a nonprofit group whose work includes educating members of Congress about transgender issues.


2007 Both houses of Congress pass the Matthew Shepard Act, which would expand the existing federal hate-crimes law to include sexual orientation and Bender identity. The same day, Rep. Barney Frank introduces a new version of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act that no longer protects transgender people, sparking a controversy that continues even after the bill passes the House in November

Kαλή Χρονία

Σε όλες και όλους με υγεία και κυρίως χαρά.

Γράφω την λέξη χαρά και αισθάνομαι οτι είναι απο τις πρώτες φορές που δεν αποτελεί μηχανική εκφορά μιας ευχής απο τις τόσες κοινότοπες που ανταλλάξαμε και θα ανταλλάσουμε για λίγες μέρες ακόμη...Ώσπου όλα αυτά να τα ξεχάσουμε και να βυθιστούμε στην καθημερινότητα μας χωρίς χαρά στην ζωή μας..Γιατί ξέρετε υγιεία έχουμε αλλά την χαρά δεν ξέρουμε να την χαρούμε και να την ζήσουμε και όταν χάσουμε την υγίεια μας προσπαθούμε να ρουφήξουμε στιγμές χαράς.

Τι σκέφτομαι για την καινούργια χρονιά;

κλείνουν κύκλοι στη ζωή μου και (ξανα) ανοίγουν άλλοι:

μεταπτυχιακό φέτος τελειώνει οπότε θα έχω περισσότερο χρόνο να 'αφιερωθώ' στην επιστήμη μου με τρόπο ουσιαστικό,
αυτοκίνητο: τέρμα οι δόσεις,
Ταξίδια πολλά στο εξωτερικό. Αγγλία, Μόναχο (κλεισμένα) μας μένουν Πόλη και ίσως Βαρκελώνη, εσύ κυρία μου Βερολίνο και οφείλω να ομολογήσω οτι ζηλεύω πολύυυυ. Την επόμενη φορά όμως θα πάμε μαζί, έτσι;
Yoga, reiki επιστροφή
διάβασμα, "εξωσχολικό" όπως λέω πολύ
και ότι άλλο όμορφο ή challenging προκύψει (πάλι το πέταξες αμερικανάκι θα μου πείς αλλά σε πρόλαβα)

Σε γλυκοφιλώ και σε σκέφτομαι ομορφιά μου..

Άννα