"Hate crime is nonexistent in Japan," "Japan only recently started having pride marches," "homosexuality is accepted in Japan because of the traditional male-male shudo sexual/romantic culture," "Japanese media are LGBT-friendly," and "Taiga Ishikawa is the first openly gay politician in Japan" are all false! (more…)
Queer Filmmaker Graham Kolbeins talks about interviewing queer people, funding for queer documentary filmmakers, creative freedom vs focus, the Western gaze, the male gaze, the issue of representation of minorities, and his upcoming project Queer Japan. (more…)
While a gay YouTuber in the US asks his fans to donate money to an anti-LGBT bullying charity, YouTube Japan is filled with homophobic content like "let's go inside a gay bathhouse" and stuff. In this video I invite Kody, born in Japan and currently residing in the UK, to talk with me about the differences between YouTube Japan and YouTube US/UK. (more…)
Translated by Masaki C.
Edit (May 2): If you are using Google Translate or a similar service in order to read this, please do not trust the translation. If you think that Tokyo Rainbow Pride is the main topic of this article, that is not true. The main topic is English-language LGBT journalism.
At SWAAY I found out about this new campaign calling for a moratorium on arrests etc. of sex workers until the end of the Olympics.
Stop the Arrests Campaign is calling for a moratorium on arrests, detention and deportation of sex workers in London with immediate effect until the end of the Olympic Games.But what happens after the end of the Olympics? (more…)
ORIGINALLY POSTED ONLINE MAY 3, 2011.
The following quote has been and still is circulating rapidly on the Internet, even spreading beyond the English-language online communities:
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Japan tsunami and earthquake: 30 children sit silent in classroom after parents vanish | Mail Online. Ok. I almost cried. I almost cried not because of the devastation that those people in those stories and photos are experiencing, but because they are now a target of the Western pornographic gaze. I mean, look at that picture of 'an old Asian woman standing in the rain' - how photographically well-crafted it is! Oh my god, it surely provokes some emotional, sympathetic, um, hard-on (figuratively). (more…)
There is no doubt you can get all sorts of benefits and rights through marriage. I myself will not stubbornly stick to my anti-marriage belief if I really need to marry someone for, say, the purpose of surviving. I will even let myself take up a job in the marketing industry who utilizes gayness as a commodity, if there is no alternative. To me, survival always comes first and always before my political beliefs. However, in fact for precisely that reason (that I will put priority on my life), I should not act as if there were no problems in the marriage system or the LGBT marketing. When I take part in those things, I should not feel I have the right to. I should be ashamed. (more…)
Beaten and burned, a gay man was found dead in Cumnock, Scotland, possibly for being gay, although the attacker's motive has yet to be investigated. I have seen some online responses to this incident describing how it was shocking. This reminds me of the now-almost-vanishing stereotype of Scots being brutal, savage monsters. (more…)