I admit that I wasn’t a particularly great fan of Kevin Rudd before his overthrow last week, but I have just learnt that the fundamentalist Australian Christian Lobby held a seminar on 10 June 2010 at which both Rudd and Tony Abbott spoke.
For many LGBT and secular progressive straight voters, this may well have been a […]

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On this side of the Tasman, the forthcoming Australian federal election looks rather reminiscent of New Zealand’s own General Election back in 2002. Popular female incumbent, conservative religious opponent, lacklustre and demoralised opposition? Is there any truth in this?
Well, according to initial poll results, Julia Gillard and the ALP now seem to have a commanding […]

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Canadian New Democrat Party MP Bill Siksay is encountering some success in his ongoing quest to include gender identity as an antidiscrimination ground under the Canada Human Rights Act.
Siksay is New Democrat Party MP for Burnaby-Douglas, a British Columbian federal constituency and also an out gay man himself. His trans-inclusive CHRA amendment bill is a […]

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When the news broke on the impending Australian federal leadership change, I wasn’t all that surprised. Kevin Rudd’s leadership had been endangered over the last year, primarily to do with a series of policy gaffes that involved a bungled national home insulation scheme, the Australian federal Emissions Trading Scheme and headaches in the Australian Senate, […]

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 Anne Herendeen: Pride/Prejudice: New York: HarperCollins: 2010.
Anne Herendeen has rung in the changes and reimagined Jane Austen’s classic Pride and Prejudice as ’slash’ fiction. For those unfamiliar with popular culture fandom, this is what happens when two (usually male) same-sex characters discover they’re homoerotically attracted and bonk like bunnies. It began with Star Trek (apparently […]

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The Christian Right pressure group “Family First” will be holding another one of its presumptuously named “Forums for the Family” in Auckland on August 5. Included are faux Australian “feminist” and anti-abortionist Melinda Tankard-Reist and Aric Sigman, a figure controversial in the United Kingdom for his claims about the adverse ‘effects’ of new media technologies […]

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In analysing the “Cartergate” news firestorm, many straight journalists were too quick to dismiss questions of professional homophobia. Sorry, I beg to differ.
In saying this, let me clarify that Chris Carter should have apologised far sooner than he did for his ancillary ministerial credit card expenses. I don’t think that his demotion was homophobic in itself, […]

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Lesbians and gay men have different community histories when it comes to sporting prowess. It plays different roles for members of each community.
Given the historic New Zealand-Slovakia draw that progressed us further in the FIFA World Cup recently, I decided to reflect on why lesbians and gay men have such dissimilar trajectories when it comes […]

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I’d much rather discuss the hard tackle (…) of the Nude Blacks in Otago yesterday (…). However, there’s something just as amusing happening in Victoria- the implosion of the conservative Catholic “Democratic Labor Party.”
The DLP has been around since the fifties. It was originally a progeny of the National Civic Council, a Catholic Right anticommunist […]

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As a friend of the late Palmerston North gay murder victim Stan Waipouri, I’m honestly torn when I contemplate criminal justice issues.
Part of me says that those who severely injure or kill others should face severe retribution from Parliament and the Courts and that one option should be increased severity of sentence duration. On the […]

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