Protesters Demand US Gay Rights [BBC]

Apparently the organizers had had a hard time keeping creepy dudes out of the Pinkalicious dances - now the sole women-only party Down Under. Says one company owner, "In my experience feminine lesbians are often the target of heterosexual male fantasy, and therefore subject to more intrusive attention from them...It is a major concern that heterosexual males will attend the Pinkalicious event in the hope they can achieve their desire for a sexual experience with multiple women."

There's been a backlash - particularly because only last month the Attorney General demanded that Australia's elite men's clubs open up to women. Says Sue Price, director of the Men's Rights Agency, the ruling represents a double standard, and Pinkalicious is receiving special treatment.

But gay men's bars have long had the right to ban women in Australia - and we can see far more compelling reasons for the Pinkalicious ban. After all, at the end of the day, this becomes a safety issue: the intention is to provide an environment for a group who don't have many other venues in which to feel totally secure and drink cocktails with very large pieces of watermelon in them. Or, as the head of the Human Rights Commission puts it, Pinkalicious events are important because "they offer a disadvantaged group the chance to experience supportive social occasions, feel safe in public spaces and build a sense of belonging." And let's face it: the guys who'd want to crash said event are a self-selecting population, to put it mildly, and I'm guessing it won't pose much of a problem for the non-creeps of Australia. That said, Stephen Horner is obviously going to be furious.

The hot new craze in romance novels (which, as any economist/pundit/chart-wonk can tell you, is the barometer for mapping cultural/political/economic change) is "m/m romance": dude love, for women, by women. (Although writing under studiously gender-neutral names.) According to the Baltimore City Paper, publishers warmed up to this notion when they saw the popularity of Brokeback Mountain with female audiences, and, always looking for a new sub-genre, started encouraging these less traditional story lines.

Although these romances deal in standard love tropes, by necessity (especially in historicals) they tend to involve more realistic situations and setbacks. Here's the description of Trangressions:

1642, England David Caverly's strict father has brought home the quiet, puritanical Jonathan Graie to help his dreamer of a son work the family forge. With war brewing in Parliament, the demand for metal work increases as armies are raised. The indolent and deceitful David Caverly is bored by his father's farm and longs to escape, maybe to join the King's Army, mustering at Nottingham. David finds himself drawn to Jonathan, and after a passing cavalry trooper seduces the beautiful David and reveals his true nature, he determines to teach Jonathan what he's learned. When David is forced to leave the farm, and the boys are separated by mistrust and war, they learn the meaning of love and truth as they fight their way across a war-torn country, never thinking they'll ever see each other again.

Then there is theBrokeback-like genre of straight-living men - often friends, seemingly often police officers - struggling with their sexuality and forbidden love. These are not, as a rule, light stories, even when the subject would seem to be standard historical fodder. In Alex Beercroft's False Colors (no relation to the u-including Georgette Heyer romp of the almost-same name), the aforementioned naval romance, there's more anguish than romping, blouse-ripping and shanties. Says the City Paper,

The pivotal points in the story are markedly different from an m/f romance. First, Alfie admits his attraction to John, who hasn't yet faced his own orientation, and John is embarrassed and demonstrably repulsed. Fifty pages later, John has his first homosexual experience; it is anonymous and disturbing for John, more realistic than romantic. As the climax of the book builds, John is asked to choose between his career and Alfie. It's 1762, and John can either become the captain of his own ship or he can risk the gallows by unsuccessfully defending Alfie against sodomy charges.

Is it too "real" for the mass market? Borders and Barnes & Noble both shelved the novel in the less-trafficked GLBT section, and had Amazon (trying to re-group from its whole 'not rating LGBT titles' fail) not given it a boost, it might have faded away. Instead, it became a bestseller. One can only imagine that in time the genre will evolve to include lighter romances, in which the "issue" of same-sex love doesn't need to serve as a dramatic lynch-pin to the same extent, and the authors can simply have fun with characters who happen to be of the same sex.

But then, as the article's author points out, the genre may appeal because it deals with classic "forbidden love": romances depend on tension and conflict - see the popularity of the societal restrictions in Regency-set novels - and we've pretty much exhausted the boss-marries-secretary-for-convenience trope. Beercroft also says she welcomes a chance to play with traditional gender roles: "Unlike f/f which has the same advantage of equality, m/m allows the writer to use characters who are not mired in feminine gender roles either. So it has a big element of escapism to it, plus the advantage of two gorgeous heroes for the price of one."But maybe there's more to it than that: I have several (straight, female) friends who prefer gay male porn to the kind "aimed" at them; it's quite possible that authors like Beercroft are onto something. The book's popularity would suggest as much. And despite some people's surprise at women writing on the subject for women, there's a funny symmetry to it: it's an open secret that there's long tradition of gay men writing traditional romance under pseudonyms. As one friend (who's done just this) wrote me, "why should we have to categorize who can write what? A good writer can find readers, period - and why should this subject be "niche?" At the end of the day, it's just a romance."

Zipper Rippers [Baltimore City Paper]

The six people involved included: a lipstick lesbian, a butch lesbian, a "masculine" gay man, a "feminine" gay man, a drag queen, and bisexual man (their own self-identified labels, not mine). As with similar social experiments on Tyra, the participants were placed in a "kingdom" and were asked to assign roles within that kingdom (queen, king, pauper, jester, etc.), to create a sort of pecking order that would mirror that within the LGBT community. The purpose of all that was to facilitate a discourse about how some gay people feel that they're above, or better than, other gay people, based solely on their individual sexualities (example: none of the participants thought too highly of the bisexual guy, because he hasn't picked a side, or the drag queen, whom they viewed more as a clown than entertainer).

It was definitely interesting to hear their honest opinions, but I found it strange that — even in regular life, outside of this fictional kingdom — a group of people who don't fit into societal norms, are prone to categorizing people, and using labels/assigning meanings to them. Even weirder was the lack of humor involved, and that the title of "queen" went to the lipstick lesbian, and not the drag queen.

For those of you who spent Easter Sunday with your families instead of the Internet (and what is wrong with you?), the scandal began to break when writer Mark Probst posted that he found that his book The Filly, a teen gay romance, had been stripped of its sales rank by Amazon. This de-ranking can have serious effects for a book and its author — some de-ranked books don't even show up in searches. An Amazon customer service rep explained that "we exclude "adult" material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature." Users then began to hunt for books that Amazon considered "adult," and came up with some pretty weird results, including Heather Has Two Mommies, Ellen DeGeneres: A Biography, and James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room. Now, according to Publisher's Weekly, Amazon claims the de-ranking does not represent new policy and is in fact a mistake they're working to fix. Oopsie!

Not buying this explanation is, oh, the whole Internet. Salon's Broadsheet asks why Probst got the "adult material" explanation if this was just a mistake, and why another author, Craig Seymour, noticed that his book was de-ranked back in February. Dear Author notices that all the de-ranked books have certain category tags in common (like "gay," "lesbian," or "sex"), and wonders if either a hacker or a clumsily-implemented Amazon filter simply stripped rank based on the tags. Livejournal blogger tehdely speculates that a group of vigilante users may have gotten a number of books tagged as adult simply by repeatedly complaining about them, in a grassroots effort he dubs "Bantown." This is certainly possible — we wouldn't put it past an Amazon customer service rep to glance at a book's category and dash off an email calling it "adult," without checking how it got that way.

In fact, someone calling himself "brutal honesty" is now claiming that he used a relatively simple hack, and a team of helpers, to mass-report gay and lesbian books as "inappropriate," all because he was mad that Craigslist wouldn't let him advertise for "chicks to do heroin with." Once the books in question received enough complaints, Amazon would de-rank them. His tactics sound plausible, but his anonymous claim could well be a hoax (and at least one livejournal user says it is). And of course, Amazon would still have to cooperate by stripping sales rankings from "inappropriate" books, so even a brutal-honesty hack wouldn't leave them blameless.

So is Amazon really fixing the problem? Sort of. Take that notorious "adult" title Heather Has Two Mommies. Last night, when I typed the search term "two mommies" (at 11:14 PM Central Time, according to my chat history), I got (and here I quote myself) "random stuff, including a different book about lesbian moms." Searching for "heather has two mommies" got me some out-of-print and/or unavailable versions of the book — it looked like Amazon just didn't carry it. This morning, Heather is back, along with its sales rank. Still unranked, as of 10:10 AM Central Time, are Ellen Degeneres: A Biography, James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, Full Frontal Feminism, and Helen Gurley Brown's Sex and the Single Girl.

Many of these books, it's worth noting, still don't show up in a front-page search (a front-page search for Ellen's book at 10:16 AM, for instance, yielded this as its first hit, as opposed to the standard edition of the book) — for the less-committed Amazon customer, it's like they don't exist. Whether or not Amazon intended to keep us from buying evil gay propaganda, the debacle does reveal something disturbing about our reliance on online bookstores. At least in books-and-mortar stores you have to actually burn the books to keep them away from people — on Amazon, you can just make them invisible.

On the flipside, though, the interwebs give defenders of literature and gay rights new tools, like, say, Amazon user tags. Firedoglake's La Figa reports that Amazon visitors are fighting back, adding user-generated tags like "bdsm" and "big homo propaganda" to "non-adult" books like A Parent's Guide to Preventing Homosexuality. And when I visited the page for Ellen Degeneres: A Biography at 10:26 AM, it had just one user-generated tag: "amazonfail."

Amazon Says Glitch to Blame for "New" Adult Policy [Publisher's Weekly]
Amazon Follies [Mark R. Probst]
Why did gay books disappear from Amazon? [Broadsheet]
On Amazon Failure, Meta-Trolls, and Bantown [tehdely]
This Is Not A Glitch, #amazonfail [Lilith Saintcrow]
Amazon Using Category MetaData to Filter Rankings [Dear Author]
Cheney and Lesbians!?: Tag Teaming Amazon in Response to Sales Ranking Censorship [La Figa]

Earlier: Why Is Amazon Removing The Sales Rankings From Gay, Lesbian Books?
Amazon Stripped Sales Rank Listings Updated
Amazon Fail: The Pictures Say It All

It's kind of hard to find an LGBT cause — or women's cause, for that matter — in which Del Martin wasn't a pioneer. In addition to the Daughters of Bilitis, which hosted public forums, provided support to individual women, and published a magazine called The Ladder, Martin also helped found the Lesbian Mother's Union and America's first gay political club, the Alice B. Toklas Democratic Club. She campaigned to get the American Psychological Association to remove homsexuality from its list of mental illnesses, and she co-founded several advocacy groups for battered women. She also wrote the 1976 book Battered Wives, which the Midwest Book Review calls "the first (and still the best) general introduction to the problem of abuse." In its first chapter, Martin wrote,

The isolation of the battered wife is the result of our society's almost tangible contempt for female victims of violence. Until very recently, rape victims were believed to be guilty of precipitating the crime against them until proven innocent in a court of law. The rapist had been tantalized, led on, teased, played with until — who could blame him, the argument went — he lost control and forcibly took his temptress. Thanks to efforts growing out of the women's movement, these attitudes are being slowly chipped away. Hopefully, all rapists will soon be looked upon as sex offenders rather than victims of seductive women.

Martin's words still ring disturbingly true today, and rapists are still sometimes viewed as "victims of seductive women" — a powerful argument for the need to respect and remember Martin's legacy.

She also wrote that "nothing was ever accomplished by hiding in a dark corner," and asked, "why not discard the hermitage for the heritage that awaits any red-blooded American woman who dares to claim it?" This heritage continues in the hundreds of lesbian couples who married after Martin, and in Phyllis Lyon, who says of her partner's death, "I am devastated, but I take some solace in knowing we were able to enjoy the ultimate rite of love and commitment before she passed." The two had been together since 1953. In a 2003 interview, Lyon said, "If we had a secret, we would have written a book and made a million dollars. We love each other, we have similar interests. Our lives were very similar even before we met." Finishing her partner's sentence as was reportedly her wont, Martin added "And we're both losing our memories at the same time." Martin was a groundbreaking advocate for lesbians, for abuse victims, and for women as a whole — here's hoping we never lose our memories of her.

Del Martin, 87; Longtime Leader In Gay Rights Movement [LA Times]
Del Martin, Lesbian Activist, Dies at 87 [NY Times]
Lesbian Pioneer Dies Months After California Wedding [Reuters]

Related: Lesbian Pioneers Wed At San Francisco City Hall [CNN]
Del Martin And Phyllis Lyon: Partners in Love and Activism [Noe Valley Voice]
Battered Wives [Google]