“I feel that there is a lack of seriousness. Perhaps world leaders do not realize the urgency of the situation. We have a lot of ideas, but as someone said, ‘ideas without funding is mere hallucination,'” – Imran Khan
Category Archives: Blogs
BL Chronicles: The Birth of a Genre and Intellectual Claims
“So you can like girls, but I can’t like boys? Is your love bigger than the love I give? Tell me, what’s the difference between your love and mine? Help me go to hell then.”
– Your Name Engraved Herein, Taiwan
Phobia: Spike in Confirmed Mpox Cases Risks a Repeat of COVID Period Social Panic
“Really, however, it is doubtful if this could be called a victory. All that could be said was that the disease seemed to be leaving us as unaccountably as it had come. Our strategy had not changed, but whereas yesterday it had obviously failed, today it seemed triumphant. Indeed one’s chief impression was that the epidemic had called a retreat after reaching all its objectives; it had, so to speak, achieved its purpose.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague
All Press is Good Press: Prominent Asian Public Figures and Their Impact on Queer Discourse
“In these our cowardly times, we deny the grandeur of the Universal, and assert and glorify our local Bigotries, and so we cannot agree on much. In these our degenerate times, men bent on nothing but vainglory and personal gain- hollow, bombastic men for whom nothing is off-limits if it advances their petty cause- will claim to be great leaders and benefactors, acting in the common good, and calling all who oppose them liars, envious, little people, stupid people, stiff, and, in a precise reversal of the truth, dishonest and corrupt.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Golden House
Unity in Diversity: Gay Games to Make Asian Debut in Hong Kong
“It is not about striving to be more – it is about caring for yourself as you are. This, in turn, will always lead to greater resilience and happiness.”
― Tom Daley, Coming Up for Air
Art of Authenticity: Indian Painter and Photographer Shares His Coming Out Journey and Artistic Inspiration
In the Christian West, homosexuality traditionally has been
viewed as a sin. This breeds a kind of religious homophobia
that cannot be dealt with by simple worldly tools. The
Vatican’s homophobia goes to such an extent that, as pointed
out earlier, it once stated that the world had to be saved from
homosexuality, just as its rain forests needed to be saved:
failure to save the world from either the one or the other
would lead to its destruction. A sin must be atoned for, or
expiated, without which the sinner remains guilty for life, and
upon death goes to hell. This is how the culture of the West
becomes a ‘guilt culture’. The orthodox are shocked by the fact
that the world has become so ‘degenerate’ today that it argues
for same-sex marriage and upholds homosexuality even in
its most perverse forms. – R. Raj Rao
A Step Backward: What the Shariat Ruling Means for Pakistan’s Trans Community
A vicious misinformation campaign conflating the rights of transgender people with homosexuality has created a permissive
environment for the challenges to the legislation. In a bid to justify the inclusion of a medical board to “approve” of the
person’s gender , speaking to the media, 17 Mushtaq Ahmed Khan claims that a person should not be able to choose their
gender and must adhere to the gender assigned at birth.18 He went on to claim that instead, these people should seek
“psychological help” – Amnesty International
Slow Start: Japan’s Watered-down LGBTQ Understanding Bill a Step in the Right Direction
“Why do people have to be this lonely? What’s the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?”
― Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart
So, Uhm…: Voicing the Crushing Silence of Depression
“If you know someone who’s depressed, please resolve never to ask them why. Depression isn’t a straightforward response to a bad situation; depression just is, like the weather.
Try to understand the blackness, lethargy, hopelessness, and loneliness they’re going through. Be there for them when they come through the other side. It’s hard to be a friend to someone who’s depressed, but it is one of the kindest, noblest, and best things you will ever do.”
― Stephen Fry
Brick by Brick – Scholar Dismantling Misconcemtpions about Queer China
The story of Queer Comrades brings together several interrelated issues
central to this book: community media, queer activism and an increasingly politicized queer identity, represented by the term tongzhi used in the Chinese name of the webcast. Literally ‘comrade’, tongzhi is one of the most popular terms to refer to sexual minorities in China today. Despite the numerous other terms that circulate in China, including tongxinglian (homosexual) and ku’er (queer), tongzhi is the most widely accepted term for self-identification by queer people in early 21st century China. – Queer Comrades: Gay Identity and Tongzhi Activism
in Postsocialist China – Dr. Hongwei Bao
Unraveled – Death of S.A Teacher Highlights Casual Racism in China’s Medical Industry
“If one really wishes to know how justice is administered in a country, one does not question the policemen, the lawyers, the judges, or the protected members of the middle class. One goes to the unprotected – those, precisely, who need the law’s protection most! – and listens to their testimony.”
– No Name on the Street, James Baldwin
Foreign & Feared – Chinese CDC’s Monkeypox Advice Sparks Xenophobia and Homophobia
“Our love of lockstep is our greatest curse, the source of all that bedevils us. It is the source of homophobia, xenophobia, racism, sexism, terrorism, bigotry of every variety and hue, because it tells us there is one right way to do things, to look, to behave, to feel, when the only right way is to feel your heart hammering inside you and to listen to what its timpani is saying.”
― Anna Quindlen
Phoenix Rising – Sri Lanka’s Queer Community Anticipates Penal Code Change
“I was able to leave the constraints of myself and ascend into another, more brilliant, more beautiful self, a self to whom this day was dedicated, and around whom the world, represented by my cousins putting flowers in my hair, draping the palu, seemed to revolve. It was a self magnified, like the goddesses of the Sinhalese and Tamil cinema, larger than life; and like them, like the Malini Fonsekas and the Geetha Kumarasinghes, I was an icon, a graceful, benevolent, perfect being upon whom the adoring eyes of the world rested.”
― Shyam Selvadurai, Funny Boy
Colorsplained – The Struggle of Being Mixed-Race in China’s Queer Dating Market
“Intimacy lies in the body and the soul, in scent, in touch and taste and sound. A man whose name you don’t know can tell you a tale to move you to tears, just by filling and emptying his lungs, by moving his tongue and lips, his fingers. Even after, you might never know him.”
― Indra Das, The Devourers
In the Weeds: Finding Community in Times of Crisis
“Most people think the closet is a small room. They think you can touch the walls, touch the door, turn the handle, and walk free. But when you’re inside it, the closet is vast. No walls, no door, just empty darkness stretching the length of the world.”
― S.J. Sindu, Marriage of a Thousand Lies
Measured Hope: India & Nepal’s Long, Similar Journeys to LGBTQIA+ Equality
Four years after officially scrapping Section 377 which criminalized homosexual sex acts from the Penal Code, India’s Supreme Court has seen yet another landmark ruling in favor of LGBTQIA+ members of Indian society. In a Supreme Court ruling issued on August 28, justices DY Chandrachud and AS Bopanna ruled that “non-traditional families” including those formedContinue reading “Measured Hope: India & Nepal’s Long, Similar Journeys to LGBTQIA+ Equality”
Silent Scream: Conversations Rarely Had About Suicide & One Activist’s Mission
“It’s my experience that people are a lot more sympathetic if they can see you hurting, and for the millionth time in my life I wish for measles or smallpox or some other easily understood disease just to make it easier on me and also on them.”
― Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places
Fake-cation – Tracing Illusions of Black, Queer Luxury in China
“To subject to scrutiny the mechanisms which render life painful, even untenable, is not to neutralize them; to bring to light contradictions is not to resolve them. But, as skeptical as one might be about the efficacy of the sociological message, we cannot dismiss the effect it can have by allowing sufferers to discover the possible social causes of their suffering and, thus, to be relieved of blame.”
― Pierre Bourdieu, The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society
Queer Sexual Economics: Color Theory and the Dark Side of the Moon
“And then he thought, profoundly, how there was something grand about living in hope, but also something terribly unreal and incomplete about it, because when you were hoping, you were not doing or living or experiencing the Now,”
― Larry Kramer, Faggots
Queer Sexual Economics: Tracing Shame and other Fun Activities
“What we have invented, Hans, is a new religion. Oh, not the moralistic and old-fashioned theological kind with that God who does not want us, but one with brutal splendours, magnificent contemporary rites and rituals, scenes, gestures, sacrifices, humiliations, terrors, tremblings, mortifications, degradations, phantasmagoric transfigurations into other realms of feeling, new realisations that will come from this cleansing purge, and then transcendencies unto a New World of our own making, with our own new rules and rewards and justifications.”
― Larry Kramer, Faggots
Piquing Duck 