WARNING! OSTOROZNO! POZOR! ACHTUNG! LET OP! PERICOLOSO! UWAGA! PELIGROSO! ATTENTION! DANGER! They are between us. We don't see them, but they are! Be careful. You can meet them anywhere. Who are we talking about? Straight people!! Are you shocked? You definitely should be! So look up and protect yourself. These are steps taken by FROG (stands for Comittee of Friends of Rainbow Over GLBT): Because of homonormative environment showing up heterosexual preferences is not allowed. Any heterosexual propaganda is prohibited during the seminar. All opposite-sex relations are undesirable. Any such intimate contact is strictly prohibited! All straight and heteroflexible people are supposed to wear a white circle of 10 cms in diameter on their clothes all day long so as to be easily recognised.This badge must be visible all the time, not covered with anything. Do not stay near to even talk to anybody about whose orientation you are not absolutely sure. About such weird person FROG must be immediately informed! No potentially straight person or anybody alone is allowed to cruise in public areas of the educational centre after 10 p.m. Our trustful LGB participants are asked to lock their doors properly at night so as to minimize potential danger. We want to set up a spirit of tolerance, friendship, inclusion and diversity and we will try on condition that all of you are going to behave according to these rules! Your local FROG Comittee. J.+ I.+I. How to contact us: http://www.frog.qe/blackmail/tell_us_now/
First evaluation session on wednesday and a big trauma: no monkey tree. For those who don't know, monkey tree is to QE what Marx is to socialism or beer to the Kellerbar. And in a time when the positions of the Left are constantly jeopardized, one cannot afford to get rid of such fundamental traditions as the monkey tree. Coloring session after session the little guy who represents your mood of the moment is an essential support while facing the long days and short nights of QE - withouth the monkey tree, how could we exorcise our doubts and exhaustion, how could we find the energy to keep on preparing a better future for LGBT people and the Left? And please no comment such as "i'm not 8 year old"; actually you all love it. The monkey tree is our only daily instant of poetry and bliss in a week of fear and mayhem. Yet our happiness is not complete: the penguin energizer, yet another QE milestone, is still missing. Its return will be our next objective.
To start with I can say that in Belarus we've got a big amount of gay-sites. But the main problem is that the information posted on them is not always new and actual. The sites are not checked up for a long period of time. Besides all sites contain almost the same information and the design is too poor. Another question is that in our country there are some sites that people can't visit, they are just forbidden.So if you're using internet in public places don't even try to visit any gay-site:) Then gay-sites have many viruses, so it's not a problem to get one. Not a secret that some people usually use sites to make friends but the problem is that all forms are the same. And in the end I'd like to say that Belarus has got positive potentian because in many organizations people discuss the questions of rights of LGBT people and the best provement is that we sre here today:) Ira (BLR)
During QE, there's another slightly different queer event taking place in berlin: the Easter fetish week. So now, you know who's your neighbor in the train coming to berlin, this guy looking like your butcher but with piercings and tattoos: looking for fresh meat, but definitely not for a butcher convention. Stereotypes can be deceiving though... Knowing this, during the day in Berlin, some QE participants played at counting the fetish people they saw in the street. One, two, tree, and a couple of them, and even this one, what is he doing with a girl. In few minutes, they've counted dozens of them. Might be a problem. After encountering this straight couple with piercings, tattoos and... a child, they've learned their lesson; don't assign people to a community just because of their look. Perhaps this guy in a suite jumps in a leather outfit on saturday nights!
On Saturday morning, I gave the Red Berlin tour, which was the least sought after tour, but I think the best (I am biased. Afterall, I was the tour guide!!!). The only difficulty was that I stumbled out of bed, while still half asleep and therefore, forgot to bring my jacket. The climate in Berlin wasn’t what could be described as temperate, so this cannot be described as my brightest idea. In fact, it was very cold, which was made a little more unpleasant, in that all the places I was taking people, were a little exposed. Putting aside the cold (and it was brutally cold), we made our way to see the graves of the socialist revolutionaries, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebkneckt, as well as the leaders of the former German Democratic Republic in Friedrichsfelde. Here, the main discussion was, surprisingly not dead socialists, but rather bananas. They were a luxury item in the former DDR, which came as a surprise to some of my four participants, though it then led to an interesting discussion about life in the DDR and also, allowed me to tell the others of the trauma of a friend of mine, who missed out on her new uniform in the Free German Youth (Freie Deutsche Jugend), because the state that it supported had disappeared. I also talked the experiences that some of the people I know had had with the secret police, the Stasi. This allowed us to have something approaching an objective discussion about the former East Germany, which was the aim of the tour, in my opinion. People got chatting and everybody had something to say. So, I think, success. We then went to see the memorial to the Soviet soldiers that fell in the liberation of Berlin at the end of the Second World War. The Soviet Memorial is my favourite site in the city. It is huge, built from concrete and granite, taken from destroyed Nazi era buildings. What I find fascinating about it is that it perfectly represents the perverse and all controlling nature of Stalinism. Of course, this was not its open intention, but that is what you can see now. It is a grand attempt, in the heart of Berlin’s Treptower Park, to exonerate the Soviet regime. It brushes over the Non Aggression Pact between Hitler and Stalin, and instead looks at the attack on the Soviet Union in 1941. It was a tool to show the power of the then Soviet Union, clearly intended to intimidate the East German puppet state that it had installed. It is complete with quotes from Stalin in Russian and German, expressing the national unity of the Soviet people, in the face of Nazi aggression. It was there clearly to provide a logical rationale for the Warsaw Pact satellite states and their subservience to Moscow. But back to the tour, we walked through the park and I think that the others were impressed. Also, one of the participants told me that he had a stone fetish, so I think he was happy. After the windswept park, we got back on the train and made our way to Alexanderplatz, where we did the standard very tourist sites, before making our way to the Marx-Engels Forum, where we joined a large group of people, who were climbing all over the statues. We decided not to climb the statues (I did not want to have any dead participants) and then turned our gaze to the half demolished Palace of the Republic, which is being torn down by the new federal government. At this point, I think the tour participants had had enough of me, so I left them to their own devices. I went home to bed and well, that was that. A cold morning in Berlin, but hopefully one, where my fellow wanderers learnt something and hopefully, despite the cold, had some fun. Bernard
Pierre is jealous on Sweden!
When looking at the website www.godhatesfags.com Pierre Pontet stated that he was jealous of Sweden for being so much in focus of the Westboro Baptist Church´s website. The Westboro Baptist Church and their website is one very good example on when hatered are spread on the internet and actually reach out to people it otherwise wouldn't reach.
The WBC is a small christian group in Topeka, Kansas. The members are mostly close relatives to the founder Pastor Phelps. They say that they preach against any form on sin, but the fact is that they almost exclusively attack gay people or gay friendly happenings or policies. One of their most visible and probably most hurting activities are funeral pickets.
When they do these pickets they basicly go to a funeral of a gay person and stand outside or close to the service and shout that the dead one deserve what have happend to him and that he (it's mostly gay men they attack) will end up in hell.
When we in our MWG discussed which influens the web has on the LGBT community we realised that we only listed positive sites. We also realised that we have to be a ware of that also our enemies use and more easally can keep in contact with eachother.
Jonas
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Blog 'Queer Daze' 
