Across the Tasman, Catholic World Youth Day is hogging an inordinate amount of media time. Despite the hype, there are some strains starting to show through the devotional ecstacy and euphoria, however.
Case 1: The No to Pope Coalition won an ambivalent ‘victory’ in the Federal Court of Australia. Two NPC activists, Amber Pike and Rachel […]

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Burlesque wasn’t originally a synonym for female (and, later, male) striptease.  It originally referred to distinctively working-class vaudeville theatrics, involving bodily humour by female and male performers. In the case of the female performers, mild transgression of bodily exposure taboos was usually accompanied by comic repartee from a male co-presenter. Over time, the comedian evolved […]

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Over in Sydney, certain sartorial anarchists are vying for the most ‘annoying’ t-shirt for deployment against Catholic World Youth Day pilgrims, Cardinal Pell has been forced to reopen the case of Anthony Jones’ prior experiences of abuse at the hands of a Melbourne Catholic priest, and Dennis Altman has weighed into the fray.
The elder statesperson […]

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On the eve of the already controversial World Youth Day commemoration in mid-July, Catholic Cardinal George Pell has been in the news over the revival of old allegations about an historical incident of same-sex sexual violence against one of his former priests, while Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne in the early eighties.
Pell does have a masters […]

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It has become a common criticism of the UK Blair and Brown administrations (as well as our own Jim Anderton) that they represent a species of left-wing “puritans.” Or so says Scots libertarian Fraser Nelson…
Why? Nelson’s primary target is ‘drug prohibition,’ as well as the ban on firearms in the United Kingdom, and alarming announcements […]

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I realise that there was an apparent omission from my earlier descriptions of LGBT fare at the latest Wellington International Film Festival, although I think this one is so fabulous that it deserves a seperate entry of its own, in any case.
Warwick Broadhead is a performance artist, currently settled on Waiheke Island, and noted for […]

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In Vancouver, the formerly scheduled closing date for Insite, that province’s safe and supervised injecting room facility, has come and gone, due to its life extension by Justice Ian Pitfield of the British Columbian Supreme Court.
Unfortunately, the ideologically driven Canadian federal government isn’t taking no for an answer, and despite British Columbian police, Vancouver Downtown […]

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Hardly has the ink dried on the right-wing Iemma administration’s attack on human rights, civil liberties, free speech and meaningful religious freedom in the name of Catholic-dominated “World Youth Day” when some dissident Catholics have announced that they don’t like the overkill involved either. Moreover, it has emerged that the institutional church negotiated with the […]

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David Herkt and I have had one of our periodic spats between creative genius and technocrat about Chris Brickell’s landmark Mates and Lovers.
Due to the significance of Chris’ book, I thought I’d take a more scholarly perspective in this second review of his work, given space and time availability in this format. How does Chris’ […]

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 Pagan Kennedy: The First Man-Made Man: New York: Bloomsbury: 2008.
As I’ve earlier provided a capsule biography of Michael Dillon, the first recorded female to male transsexual, I thought I’d focus on some more particular details involved in this biography of the world’s first transman.
Michael lived an austere professional life, whether as a mechanic, or after […]

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