Category: Uncategorized

By B. R. Gowani

Lesbians and gays
Have always been there
Sometimes accepted, or ignored
Mostly harassed, or persecuted
We are all humans, homos or heteros
Heteros prefer certain geographic location
More than the other
Homos visit the other location only
Unless bisexual
Lesbians ignore the bloody organ
Unless bisexual

Just for this slight difference
Religions and custodians of morality
Inflict wrath, incite revulsion
As if the world will come to an end
Without understanding the simple truth
Different people, different desires
Different needs, different chemicals
If pleasure is derived from one’s own gender
Where is the harm?

Amidst this backdrop
Prime Minister Johanna Sigurdardottir
Is great news and an inspiration
To millions of gays and lesbians
One hopes, the next country to elect a gay or a lesbian
Would be Pureland or Land of the Pure
Pakistan –
Sorely in need of such a revolution

B. R. Gowani can be reached at brgowani@hotmail.com

In Iceland, he’s loved by just about everybody, gay AND straight. No small accomplishment when you consider this guy has a reputation for being very out, and very candid.

This song,”International,” is the second single from Paul Oscar’s dance project “Allt fyrir ástina.” It was released in Iceland in October 2007. This song was also used as the anthem for the Reykjavik Gay Pride festival in August last year. Written by Örlygur Smári, Niclas Kings, Daniela Vecchia and Páll Óskar.

By Rene Rosechild

On February 1, Iceland made history by choosing Johanna Sigurðardóttir to be their prime minister, making her the world’s first openly gay head of state. After its government collapsed in January, the country’s political parties chose Sigurðardóttir, one of Iceland’s most trusted and longest serving politicians, to lead them out of economic turmoil.

But to Icelanders, the fact that Sigurðardóttir is a lesbian is of minor importance. In Iceland, the news about the new prime minister’s sexual orientation is that the rest of the world sees it as news. “Whom the new prime minister crawls into bed with at night seems to be fairly far down the list of priorities for people,” says Ingo Sigfusson of the Icelandic National Broadcasting Service (RUV). The Icelanders I talked to all know that that Sigurðardóttir is a lesbian, but none of them care. When I asked Inga Rós Antoníusdóttir of Reykjavik about it, she said, “I couldn’t care less and I honestly don’t know anyone who could. It’s not an issue for us here. We find it quite amusing to read how much the foreign media writes about it.”

Sigurðardóttir’s civil partnership to Jónína Leósdóttir is well known in Iceland. It appears on her official biography on her government ministry’s website. Sigfusson states that Sigurðardóttir’s emergence as the world’s first openly gay PM has barely rated mention in Iceland. “It’s by no means a big deal. It’s been reported, but it’s not something the public is focusing on,” he told the BBC. While headlines around the world report that she’s the “First Gay prime minister,” Icelandic bloggers are discussing whether Sigurðardóttir will be able to resuscitate their economy.

Sigurðardóttir’s rise to head of state was sparked by an economic and political crisis. After Iceland’s economy crashed last fall, unemployment soared, leading to widespread street protests, and the resignation of the ruling conservative Independence party. Under Iceland’s parliamentary system, the leading political parties agreed on a coalition government to hold power until elections can be held in April. Sigurðardóttir is not expected to be re-elected, because her party, the Social Democratic Alliance, holds a minority of seats in the Althingi (Parliament). Because the ruling parties felt that the government needs to restore the trust of the people, they chose the country’s most trusted politician to lead them until the election. According to a Capacent Gallup poll, she is the most popular politician in the country, and the only one whose popularity increased while the economy tanked.

Sigurðardóttir’s background is not that of a traditional politician. She did not go to university, which many Icelanders consider more controversial than her sexual orientation. Instead, she went to work as an airline stewardess after graduating from a commercial high school. From there she became a union organizer, which led her into politics. She was first elected to the Althingi from Reykjavik in 1978, and has been in and out of government ever since, held several cabinet posts, formed her own political party, rejoined her old one, led a new alliance, and was appointed as Minister of Social Affairs again in 2007. When she lost her bid to lead her party in 1994, she raised her fist and said, “My time will come.”

These words became part of the Icelandic cultural idiom and have proven prophetic. Icelanders can be seen sporting T-shirts in Reykjavik that read, “Her Time Has Come.” Many in Iceland are pleased they have chosen their first female prime minister. Árný Sandra Skúladóttir of Reykjavic thinks it’s great that Iceland has a woman prime minister, and no one in her family cares that she is gay.

At about the same time she was being elected to the Althingi, Sigurðardóttir left her banker husband and began living with Jónína Leósdóttir and both of their sons. That same year, gay and lesbian activists founded Iceland’s first gay rights organization, Samtokin 78. The gay movement has since made steady progress to full integration. In 1996, Iceland granted gay couples the right to civil partnership, which made Sigurðardóttir and Leósdóttir’s 2002 union possible.

Iceland is an island, about the size of Kentucky, with a population roughly equal to that of Connecticut. Until last fall, it had a thriving economy. The U.N. named it the world’s most developed country. However, its banks invested in risky securities and its economy nosedived last fall. In rapid succession, it borrowed money from the International Monetary Fund, nationalized banks, street protests broke out and its government fell. Just as the United States turned to Obama during its economic crisis, Iceland chose Sigurðardóttir. As Árný Skúladóttir told me, “She is hard working and she always stands by her beliefs. She works for the people. I hope that she can do something good for the Icelandic people, especially for the ones that are about to lose their homes and jobs.” Skúladóttir’s time has certainly come.

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Begum Nawazish Ali talks with Etizaz Ehsan

Ali Saleem or “Begum Nawazish Ali” Talks about US

Star-trek

“I get to have the best of both worlds”
-Ali Saleem

By Sohema Rehan

Ali Saleem, aka Begum Nawazish Ali, aka BB – son of a retired army officer – always evokes very strong reactions. Although his Benazir Bhutto impersonation may be his claim to fame, the Meera he has been doing lately tops that. Both acts, whenever performed, have always brought the house down, with the audience rolling over in hysterical laughter. Currently hosting The Late Night Show with Begum Nawazish Ali on Aaj TV, Ali chats up invitees comprising the who’s who of the Pakistani literati, glitterati and chatterati. Whether it arouses disgust, curiosity or appreciation, the drag show is undoubtedly the talk of the town. The same can be said of Ali’s not-so-clean break with Geo TV and the subsequent court battle that ensued over the intellectual property rights of Begum Nawazish Ali.

Apart from impersonations and drag, Ali also dabbles in writing and has penned Aap Jasai Koi, a series aired on HUM TV starring top models Aminah Haque and Iffat Rahim. Ali says he has “always wanted to be on stage,” and his ultimate fantasy was to “die performing on a glass stage in the middle of a vast sea with the whole world watching!” At some level, he feels he is spiritually connected to “the dancing girls from kothas” which he believes is the reason for his supreme confidence. Labelled a drag, a eunuch, a cross-dresser – Ali is firmly entrenched amongst the ever growing coterie of people Pakistanis generally love to hate. Over to Ali…

Q: You have been openly mimicking Benazir for ages now. Have you ever felt that you were stepping on political sensitivities?
A: Not for a minute. The first play I did was for Yasmeen Ismail at the Arts Council, organised by Interflow. I went on stage wearing a burqa and when I started my monologue, there was stunned silence – absolute disbelief – followed by a thunderous response. People even went to the extent of asking whether there was a tape recorder on, but they loved the performance.

Imran Aslam writes political satire and people who come to see the plays are politically aware and educated. The word of mouth publicity which we get is always good publicity. I was very young at that time and through the plays I was exposed to people much older than me as they were the ones who viewed my plays, giving me a chance to think better and mature faster.

There has never been a political reaction ever. I get my confidence from my honesty. I can face anybody in the world and don’t have to hide from anybody. I impersonate Meera on stage, wear saris and dance, imitate Benazir and am not scared of anybody because I am very confident and have never faced any problems.

Q: Have you ever performed for Benazir?
A: I did it informally once at her request, at Nazia and Zoheb Hassan’s house. It was Zoheb’s dholki, and Nazia had pre-warned me not to, even if requested, emphasising that Benazir had no sense of humour. However, Benazir requested that I impersonate her and Nazia gave me a silent nod of approval. When I started, there was pin-drop silence amongst the small group of people present – until the [former] Prime Minister burst out laughing. She enjoyed the performance a lot and said, “You have made my day.”

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By Adam Ellick

In Pakistan’s commercial capital, Karachi, a company that makes 2,000 fetish and bondage products operates next to a mosque.

KARACHI, Pakistan — In Pakistan, a flogger is known only as the Taliban’s choice whip for beating those who defy their strict codes of Islam.

But deep in the nation’s commercial capital, just next door to a mosque and the offices of a radical Islamic organization, in an unmarked house two Pakistani brothers have discovered a more liberal and lucrative use for the scourge: the $3 billion fetish and bondage industry in the West.

Their mom-and-pop-style garment business, AQTH, earns more than $1 million a year manufacturing 2,000 fetish and bondage products, including the Mistress Flogger, and exporting them to the United States and Europe.
…
It helps that the dozens of veiled and uneducated female laborers who assemble the handmade items — gag balls, lime-green corsets, thonged spanking skirts — have no idea what the items are used for. Even the owners’ wives, and their conservative Muslim mother, have not been informed.

“If our mom knew, she would disown us,” said Adnan, seated on a leopard-print fabric covering his desk chair.
“Due to cultural barriers and religion, people don’t discuss these things openly,” Rizwan said. “We have to hide this information.”
Even customs officials were perplexed at how to tax the items, not quite sure what they were, they said.

Recently, when a curious employee inquired about the purpose of the sleep sack, a sleeping bag-like product used in certain kinds of bondage, she was told it was a body bag for the American military in Iraq.

Adnan Ahmed, a former air traffic controller who is now AQTH’s chief operating officer, said the items were undergarments. When asked if he considered a red-hot puppy mask an undergarment, he had a straightforward, but honest reply: “No. It’s just for joking.”

Still, word of the business has at times escaped. Last year four “powerful guys” from a conservative Muslim group threatened to burn down the factory if it was not closed within a week. The brothers calmly explained that it was merely a business, and that the items were not used in Pakistan. The next day they bribed a local Islamic political organization to ensure their safety.

These days, the gravest danger is Pakistan’s crumbling economy. The brothers idolize former President Pervez Musharraf, crediting their success to his industry friendly policies, like not requiring export licenses and banning trade unions. When Mr. Musharraf resigned last year, the brothers “didn’t eat for three days,” Adnan Qadeer said.
Since President Asif Ali Zardari took office, Adnan said, trade unions have been legalized and prices of some raw materials, including leather, have shot up, as have interest rates. The result: a 15 percent dip in AQTH’s profits.

Echoing the pervasive fears of entrepreneurs across the country, the brothers are considering relocating to East Asia if Pakistan becomes more unstable — or if they receive another threat.

The shoddy factory seems like an ode to their humble upbringing. Adnan’s executive bathroom has no toilet paper. Rizwan has no office. And their preferred lunch is Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Their inspiration for success came from their father, a civil servant who supported a family of six with a $150 monthly salary. While other children were forced into labor, or played aimlessly, the Qadeer brothers had to study.

In 2001, after the brothers graduated from a university, their father lent them $800, enough to purchase their first computer and to cover several months of rent on a studio apartment. There, the brothers searched the Internet day and night for a high-value garment product that was not widely available.

They experimented with basic leather goods, like jackets and pants. Adnan slept at mosquito-infested stitching factories to oversee sample runs that, in the end, proved more costly than their Chinese competitors.
Read more and watch video
(Submitted by a reader)

By Shaheryar Ali

The problem of LGBT [Lesbians, Gays, Bisexual, Transgender] rights in Pakistan becomes especially complex taking into account, the “combined and uneven development” of the Islamic Republic , the conflicting influences of westernization, and Islamisation, the post-modern conditions and the “queer” turn of the “world Wide LGBT movement” itself.
Despite all the hurdles Pakistan has seen an unprecedented explosion of “Queer Culture”. There has been a mushrooming of Urban Gay life style in larger cities of Pakistan. There has been an increase in “gay consciousness” in the media. There has been going on a slow transformation of “gender roles” especially visible in urban Pakistani male, described as the “rise of meterosexuality in Urban Pakistan” in the contemporary fashion discourse. An analysis of meterosexualiy reveals it’s nothing but “liberalization” of gender identities and roles. The things considered to be “taboos’ for “masculinity” have gained acceptance in increasingly larger number of males. The “attire” once considered to be “identification” for homosexuals has now become mainstream urban male fashion. The low waist jeans, bright and exotic colors, chokers, bracelets, rings,waxing, all could be traced to “attire” of an underground “homo” of the 60s in London.
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“Collective grief” of Tamil community paralyzes Ottawa
by Stuart Neatby

Demonstrators wave the flag of the Tamil Tigers in the midst of a snowstorm in downtown Ottawa, Tuesday, April 7. Photo: Stuart Neatby

OTTAWA–Canada’s 300,000-strong Tamil community, the largest Tamil diaspora on earth, has been mobilizing for months in major cities in Canada to draw attention to the dire situation in Sri Lanka.

“There is a collective grief amongst the Tamil community in Canada right now,” says David Poopalapillai, national spokesperson for the Canadian Tamil Congress (CTC). In recent months this “collective grief” has brought sections of at least two Canadian cities to a standstill.

Since Sri Lanka’s military captured the port city of Kilinochchi, a stronghold of the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in the country’s northern region, the death toll within the mostly Tamil region has risen to alarming levels.

In response, Tamil-Canadians have organized fasts, parliamentary meetings, vigils, protests, and acts of non-violent civil disobedience to draw attention to what many see as a campaign of deliberate killings of Tamil civilians by the Sri Lankan government. This campaign included a march of more than 45,000 through downtown Toronto on January 30, the biggest march in Canada against an international conflict since Israel’s bombardment of Lebanon during the summer of 2006.

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Earbuds can pipe audio directly from a portable player to the ear. But did you ever imagine that eyeglasses or contact lenses could deliver digital images directly from a smartphone to the retina?

Several companies are developing prototypes for digital devices that look like stylish eyewear but may one day offer such capabilities to consumers. The glasses are called heads-up displays because the wearer can always look through them and see the real world — like the sidewalk just ahead — but can also see, on an overlay image, virtual information like an electronic map or an arrow showing the correct way to a destination. The glasses may also help the wearer remember the name of a long-lost friend she sees on the street.

SBG Labs, an optical technology company in Sunnyvale, Calif., is among the businesses that are developing the devices. The glasses are only slightly larger than many chic pairs of wraparounds, but instead of bearing rhinestones or designer initials, they hold a tiny projector and optics — tucked away in the side of the frame.
Such devices may have considerable appeal for consumers, so long as the glasses are attractive and lightweight, said Henry Fuchs, a professor of computer science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Professor Fuchs is a pioneer in the creation of precursors to these glasses: large, head-mounted display systems — worn, for example, by soldiers who use them to see information like a map reflected on the visor of a helmet. These displays, though, are typically quite heavy to wear.

“People who work on head-mounted displays are hungering for something that people would be willing to wear for more than an hour,” he said, “something that would go in one’s eyeglasses and not be too much clunkier than regular eyeglasses.”

No price has been set for the SBG eyeglasses, which are still in the prototype stage, said Jonathan Waldern, the company’s founder and chief technology officer. SBG is concentrating on military and avionics applications, with consumer uses to follow.

Contact lenses are also being developed for mobile displays. Babak A. Parviz, an associate professor of electrical engineering, with his team at the University of Washington in Seattle, has created a biocompatible contact lens that has miniaturized electronics and optoelectronics integrated into the lens.

Dr. Parviz says he is moving a step at a time in testing the lenses. Rabbits have worn them for 20 minutes without ill effects, he said. “The display has not yet been turned on while the rabbits are wearing the lenses,” he said. “But we have turned on the lenses while holding them with tweezers, and they work well.”
A group led by Desney S. Tan, a researcher at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Wash., is working with Dr. Parviz.

“Our role is to come up with some of the applications for the technology,” Dr. Tan said, applications that are part of a research field he called augmented reality: the combining of digital and physical worlds, in which virtual information is layered onto a person’s view of the real world.

In one possible application, the eyewear could serve as the wearer’s personal whisperer at conferences and cocktail parties. “What if every time I passed by a person, I had their name come up on the display?” Dr. Tan asked. “We could even add information on the last time I saw them and what we chatted about.”

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