No person wears pink

Reaction to a news item on police forcing taggers to wear pink vests with the word "tagger" emblazoned on it when they are cleaning up their graffiti:

The Wellington community police constable who is making taggers wear pink vests as punishment has prompted alarm from the youth group OUT THERE.
“Wearing pink tagger vests draws on homophobic fears of wearing pink, and the whole concept of embarrassing young people rather than strengthening them is appalling.” said Nathan Brown, National Coordinator of OUT THERE, a youth development organisation for non-heterosexual and transgender youth.
“The homophobic part is what is said about the jackets by both taggers and the Police rather than the jackets themselves. They need to be careful presenting them in schools so that they are not playing on fears of not being seen as a real man.”

The reaction is as predictable as it is misguided. Wearing pink should not be done by anyone over the age of 3 as it is such a fashion faux pas. Yves Saint Laurent isn't even buried yet but he will be spinning! Why anyone would confuse wearing pink with being gay is really beyond me. Have you ever seen, met, spoken to, slept with a homosexual who wears pink? Where they get this correlation from is a mystery.
But back to the punishment issue. The regime that should be adopted is of course to have those guys scrub off their tags in the buff. If we're going to indulge in public humiliation it might as well have some return for my tax dollars by saving on penalty clothing.

John Waters's axiom rings true again

"All men look better under arrest" has rarely been illustrated so accurately than in the North Shore courtroom this week, when one of the accused of a vicious assault on two couples stood before the judge with his prison boiler suit stripped down to the waist.
I don't know whether this show was a result of a do-or-dare concocted by the remand prisoners, or a particularly blatant advertisement for his body by Jonathon "Jono" Paul Wilson. In any case, if I were a jailbird I'd be licking my chops in anticipation of what may be coming my way as a cell mate for what will undoubtedly Mr Wilson's best years of his life. Prison isn't usually kind on lithe adolescent bodies, as they frequently come out overweight and adorned with fight marks and home made tattoos. He'll be a blank canvas to work on, if the judge allows it.

Picture from the NZ Herald

Swedish skinheads angry over heavy metal band Eurovision win

Via GayNZ.com:

The leader of a neo-Nazi group in southern Sweden has been jailed for three months for an attack on the local headquarters of gay rights group RFSL in Kristianstad.
Simon Lindberg, 23, leader of the National Socialist Front (NSF) in Skåne was convicted of being an accessory to assault. A 28-year-old friend of Lindberg's was given a six-month sentence for offences including assault.
The incident happened on the 20th May last year, when members of RFSL and their friends had gathered at the organization's headquarters to watch the Eurovision Song Contest on television. Lindberg and his friend came to the building, both of them drunk. An initial verbal argument quickly became physical.

Now what were those white heterosexual Swedish boneheads doing wanting to watch that pinnacle of a gayboy's cultural calendar, the Eurovision Song Contest? Was the habitual campness of that annual event finally getting to them? Were they so incensed by the Finnish heavy metal band's win, confirming that heavy metal culture is just one of those obscure gay sub-tribes? Couldn't they just have popped over to border to Copenhagen and gotten a room at SLM where they could have dealt with their anger issues in a caring environment with like-minded men? I'm hoping to in a few weeks' time!

Bad boy alert

"All men look better under arrest" - John Waters

Homosexual panic defence

Is this a rerun of the McNee case? Rentboys thinking they can get away with killing queens because they feared they were going to be raped/have fingers inserted up their straight holes? Nicking their victims' cars seems to be a theme too.
In my book, using the "gay panic defence" should carry a stigma of being considered less than heterosexual (no straight man fears an old queen, surely!), and should add a few years to their sentences.
UPDATE: the little shit was found guilty of murder, as it should be. Hopefully he'll be sentenced to allow access to all areas in prison.

Low life update

Ageing rentboy who manslaughtered ageing queen loses appeal. Again: may he be the butt of all inmates in gaol.

Ageing rentboy manslaughters ageing queen

A jury of his peers(!) have delivered a verdict of manslaughter on the accused Phillip Edwards in the David McNee murder case.
Sorry, it's not a murder case. My apologies for the sloppy legal language. In New Zealand, "homosexual panic" is a lawful and accepted form of defence against a charge of murder if you find yourself, as a self-professed heterosexual, with a dead gay body on your hands. Or you have been indulging in some innocent puppetry-of-the-penis man-to-man play and suddenly you realise that if you want to get into his booze cabinet and his black Audi, you better start working fast and having his finger up your arse just cramps your style. And you don't want your buddy jailbirds to know you had a finger up your arse cos otherwise the cons will use your arse nightly, and that would be, like, really humiliating.
Now the world knows that killing a gay man in New Zealand in effect will never carry a conviction for murder, unless you have a really bad lawyer. How many classes of citizens does that create? And why not get rid of "manslaughter" too, because that implies the victim was a "real man", which obviously he was not, and call it "fag slaughter" or "Christian mercy killing" instead, with the appropriate leniency of the law attached?
Time to abolish the panic defence, methinks too.
And time for Edwards to rot in jail, but don't hold your breath.
Anyone wants to bet he will make a guest appearance at some rightwing political party conference, claiming he either turned his life around or found God inside, following those great lights of prison rehab, Soulan Pownceby and the ex-Parnell Panther?