Lgbt

Can this country go a week without a chicken-related controversy? Barely had we survived the Fried Chicken Sandwich War of 2019 when Chick-fil-A shook the world with the announcement it was halting charitable donations to three organizations that opposed gay marriage, including the Salvation Army and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. It made me miss the days when a chicken sandwich was just that — a crispy golden buttermilk-crusted hunk of chicken breast topped with mayonnaise and pickles, perfectly nestled between two buttered buns. Now, this Southern culinary export turned national icon comes served with a side of God or politics, although one could argue that they are really the same thing.

Today, international singing(?) sensation Sam Smith [EDIT: not sure who he is… did he win The X Factor?] announced that from now on they wish to be referred to by the pronouns ‘they/them’. They posted on their Twitter feed: 'After a lifetime of being at war with my gender I’ve decided to change my pronouns to THEY/THEM.' You could almost feel the entire planet heave a sigh of relief. 'Hooray! Hooray!', the Earth’s inhabitants seemed be unwittingly emitting a joyous chorus, 'Sam Smith has changed their pronouns!' Ever since Sam’s birth [I don’t know when that was, but I’ve just remembered seeing him on The Ellen DeGeneres Show and he definitely did a song], each and every one of us have sensed something wrong.

Do you find yourself uninterested in jumping random men at your local coffee shop? Have you ever become interested in a person after getting to know them? Do you like to have a conversation with a person before ripping off all your clothes and showing them your most intimate body parts? Maybe even several conversations? Does the idea of having a strange dick in your mouth give you the yucks? Congratulations — you are completely normal. Which is, apparently, the worst thing to be in this day and age. So much so that the notion that one would form romantic connections after, not before, getting to know a person has been given its own special category on the LGBTQI&%$! spectrum. That’s right, your completely healthy behavior makes you a 'demisexual'.

It’s the news every LGBTQ individual has been waiting for. The penguin community has finally openly embraced non-binary and genderqueer identities by allowing keepers at The Sea Life Centre in London to bring up a penguin baby as gender-neutral (presumably until they are old enough to decide themselves whether to go ahead with hormone treatment). I am tremendously excited at this news and will be monitoring the progress of the infant over the coming years. According to experts, pre-pubescent penguins are naturally gender-neutral. You could prove this by dressing a penguin who was assigned female at birth in a pink frilly dress, they will show their discomfort by violently flipping around in the water until the dress falls off.

One night in November 2013, I found myself slurping down sturgeon caviar and salted pork with about a dozen slobbering, obese, gay oligarchs at a dacha outside Moscow. I’d been sent to Russia to report on the lives of gays there under a vague, new law that prohibited ‘LGBT propaganda' and a journalist invited me out to the country for the night to meet some local influential homosexuals. At first, the scene had all the trappings of the odd and colorful situations that I lived to write about. I’d been in Russia about a week and after speaking to activists, American expats, journalists and everyday Russians, a more nuanced portrait of the country emerged than the hysteria Western media pumped out for months over the anti-gay legislation.

When I was 13, I wore my dad’s clothes to school every day. Men’s overalls, stinky old t-shirts, a flannel shirt tied around my waist...sometimes Dr Martens, sometimes too-big combat boots. If I was feeling bold, I’d ignore my insecurities about my bony knees and skinny legs and wear a skirt and tights with my unisex boots. It was called 'grunge.' No one ever thought of it as 'gender bending': it was just what we wore. Apparently, those of us who came of age in the Nineties, smoking on the corner instead of going to class, our second-hand itchy wool sweaters soaking up the stench of rain and cigarettes, were revolutionaries. This week, the New York Times, one of the world’s most-respected sources of journalism (or so they'll tell you), published a story about 'nonbinary fashion.

I’ve written repeatedly for The Spectator about how the Western media has a track record of misreporting on the plight of homosexuals in the Middle East. However, an outrageous article by Benjamin Wenthal for the Jerusalem Post on the hanging of a child kidnapper and rapist in Iran, which was picked up by dozens of major news outlets, has introduced new depths of inaccuracy and sensationalism to the coverage. Published under the headline ‘Iran Publicly Hangs Man on Homosexuality Charges’, the article quotes Iranian student media as saying a 33-year-old man was executed in the southwestern city of Kazeroon ‘based on his criminal violations of “lavat-e be onf” – sexual intercourse between two men.