I can’t even speculate on how this got to market.
“THE Australian toy of the year, Bindeez, has been withdrawn after a warning that the date-rape drug GHB may have been “deliberately” put into the product….Bindeez are made in Hong Kong and imported through Melbourne company Moose Enterprises.

The bead crafting kits won the title of Most Popular Toy in March.”

I guess there is an easy way to get a hold of GHB.

Julian Guthrie, SF. Gate

It was a typical Sunday Mass until two men in heavy makeup and nuns’ habits received Holy Communion from San Francisco’s top Catholic official.

On Oct. 7, Archbishop George Niederauer delivered the Eucharist to members of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence - an activist group whose motto is “go forth and sin some more” - prompting cries of outrage from conservatives across the country and Catholics in San Francisco. (more…)

Federico Ferrazza per “L’espresso”

Da qualche mese è uno dei video più visti della Rete. La pornostar Kelle Marie che si esibisce in una presentazione in Power Point dove al posto delle noiose slide usa il proprio corpo. Oggetto del suo ‘intervento’ (facilmente rintracciabile su YouTube) il business della pornografia su Internet. Così, mentre si spoglia, sul suo corpo appaiono scritte tutte le cifre dei contenuti per adulti in Rete.
(more…)

Sewell Chan - The New York Times

H.I.V. infection rates have risen substantially among young New York City men who have sex with men, indicating a shift in the population most vulnerable now to contracting AIDS, city health officials said today.

(more…)

  Scusa Umberto ma ho incontrato qui un gruppo di villeggianti milanesi che ti avevano ascoltato nella bella villa di un assicuratore dove avevi prospettato loro un futuro bisessuale per tutta l’umanità.

Questi bravi milanesi erano, nello stesso tempo, perplessi e turbati. Vuoi spiegare anche a me questa storia? «Non è una cosa così semplice…».D’accordo, ma in parole povere e comprensibili anche a un modesto laureato in legge.«Allora,per un laureato in legge, posso partire dal fatto che si è registrato, nel mondo occidentale, un calo di spermatozoi nella popolazione maschile. Questo è un fatto che dipende da cause ormonali». Cioè? «Cioè la ipofisi che controlla le ghiandole che producono ormoni androgeni ne stimola una produzione sempre minore per effetto dell’evoluzione, delle condizioni di vita dell’uomo, che non necessitano più di una intensa aggressività fisica per la sopravvivenza: caccia, guerra, etc».
(more…)

Ariel David | Associated Press Writer

ROME (AP) - Italian gay rights groups said Saturday they would hold public “kiss-ins” near the Colosseum next week to protest the detention of two men for expressing affection in front of the famous monument.

The men have said they were only kissing, but police maintain they committed “lewd acts.” Gay rights groups have accused the police of discrimination and some lawmakers promised to raise the incident in parliament.

The Carabinieri paramilitary police confirmed the two men were held for about 40 minutes early Friday and released after being accused of committing lewd acts in public - a crime that can carry a sentence of up to 2 years in jail. (more…)

Matthew Rettenmund | Boy Culture

The new Out (August 2007) drops on Tuesday and has a great story on barebacking called “Baring The Truth” by James Gavin. Ignore the silly illustration that merges bareback horseriding with bareback sex (the other illos are much better anyway). I’ve argued many of the points of this piece on my blog before—that barebacking is quietly becoming totally normal and acceptable in gay porn, that porn coaches us on how to have sex and therefore bareback porn can only be described as fetishizing and advocating unsafe sex, that some people will do anything to turn a buck. (more…)

James Gavin | Out

The sticker on the video box was as chilling as a skull and crossbones: bareback. It was 1998, and an HIV-positive couple from Palm Springs, Calif., had just begun videotaping bareback orgies and releasing the tapes under the company name Hot Desert Knights. After a decade of scrupulous condom use in gay porn, after all the deaths from AIDS complications and the struggle to curb HIV, these films seemed to betray everyone who had fought the fight. Chi Chi LaRue, the hefty cross-dressing porn director, who entered the industry in 1987, recalls his response to those first bareback videos: “Shock. Anger. Sadness. I thought, Why?”

(more…)

Francesco Merlo | La Repubblica

Prima Sgarbi ha mostrato i suoi eccessi e poi li ha nascosti. Prima, la sua era una mostra d´arte, ora è un nascondiglio di vergogne. E la politica a Milano è diventata una nave rinfusiera, una di quelle navi che, per fare carico, mettono di tutto nella stiva, anche la mostra che si occulta, si vela, si trasforma nel suo contrario. È infatti una Canossa, una ritirata, un pentimento la mostra comunale sugli omosessuali e l´arte con la statua di papa Ratzinger travestito con tette e tanga e con la foto di Silvio Sircana che sui viali di notte “incontra” Gesù. (more…)

by Giovanni dall’Orto | Photographic Reportage

The first exhibition ever in Italy about “Art and homosexuality - From Gloeden to Pierre et Gilles” faces Catholic vetoes and goes from grotesque to farce. A statue by Italian sculptor Paolo Schmidlin, who often depicts in his works the fragility of nude human bodies in their old age using famous people (from Queen Elisabeth to Joan Crawford) as semi-nude models, was first masked using a bandanna on its eyes “to make it unrecognisable”, and eventually removed from an exhibition. The statue is, in fact, a semi-nude bust of pope Joseph Ratzinger as “Miss Kitty”, and it had been chosen for display in the first exhibition ever organised in Italy about “Art and homosexuality - From von Gloeden to Pierre et Gilles”, which was inaugurated in Milan on July 9 2007.

The statue had been created as “Josephine”, but the name was changed, upon requests of the organisers of the event, which is also sponsored by the Municipality of Milan (ruled by a coalition of right-wing and centre/catholic parties). When on July 9 the exhibition was shown in advance to journalists, the statue was immediately spotted and its removal was requested by pro-clerical politicians as “offensive to the Christian sensitivity of the Italian people” since, as art critic and Assessor of culture Vittorio Sgarbi told journalists, “The pope is the symbol of the Christian religion in the whole world” (of little avail was the retort that “the symbol of the Christian religion in the whole world” is the Cross, the pope being but the head of one Christian institution). (more…)