Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender & Intersex Tv
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender & Intersex Short Films, Movies, Videos
In a society where heterosexuals are persecuted and abortion is forbidden, two teens are forced to hide.
Brandon Tyler Harris, Thomas Roberts, Cole Johnston, Adam Jepsen, Sandy York, Shawn Parr, and Riley Suter, confronts the issues of bullying, LGBTI equality, and abortion / reproductive rights.
Winner: Best Short Film (Big Apple Film Festival)
Date: 2015-06-22 21:15:07
Duration: 00:17:35
If you haven’t seen the series, Girl/Girl Scene, you have time to catch up on season one episodes before the season two release in July. Girl/Girl Scene premiered their first 45 minute episode in June 2010 and quickly garnered the attention of the LGBT community, gaining instant fans.
Tucky Williams is the creator, writer and lead actress of the series. She started in the industry after auditioning for the indie horror film, Shadows Light where she not only landed her first role but also was cast as the female lead. Unfortunately, a common story among actresses emerged; she was not getting parts she related to or wanted to play. That’s when executive producer and friend Nick Brown stepped in and encouraged her to write. She wrote the first episode the night they spoke and he helped her to its fruition. “We had just made the first episode and I was surprised it even got made, and we put it out online and all my wildest dreams came true and people loved it, and embraced it, and watched it; and I still can’t believe that it happened to me; that I got so lucky; to find that success so quickly,” said Williams.
The show is shot guerilla-style in her home state of Kentucky and has no budget or affiliation to a studio or TV network. “I’m really lucky to have the talented cast and crew that we have,” Williams said. “We have very limited amounts of money. The show is very low budget and I watched the dailies and they’re beautiful. We have this amazing talent; we do have this tiny budget and it looks like we have a huge budget; so we’d love to have more money to put into it but … we’ve done so much with so little,” Williams continued.
Most recently, Williams caught the eye of producers from Showtime’s The Real L Word. They mic’d her during a New York engagement and during her hosting gig at The Dinah in Palm Springs this year. “I don’t think I was cast, it was more like I was there, and I wasn’t going to be a dick and say no you can’t mic me and you can’t put me on camera,” said Williams. The impromptu appearance on the show seemed to confuse the members of The Real L Word, that hadn’t seen Girl/Girl Scene. They looked on quizzically as her fans approached her for pictures and hugs. She imagined they thought she was someone’s girlfriend.
The Dinah event in Palm Springs also lead to the casting of American pornographic actress and lobbyist for the adult entertainment industry, Kayden Kross. “I met Tucky on one of the red carpets at the Dinah last year. I was hosting the special for Here! TV and she was walking it and we kinda met mouth first. There’s YouTube footage,” said Kross. “Her producer emailed me out of the blue and asked if I’d be interested. I figured it would be fun and had the free time.” In comparison to her day job, Kross found some similarities and differences, “The mood seemed very similar though. For the most part it’s relaxed and there is a cohesiveness in the group effort involved in getting wrapped on time. The difference is we don’t wrap on time on porn sets,” said Kross.
Another new member to the cast is Abisha Uhl from the band Sick of Sarah. “The first time I met her she ran up to me and gave me a hug; she was just really sweet and so I asked her to be on the show in episode eight, and we flew her out here and she did one scene and I was like, ‘Oh My God’ because she was amazing, and so then she became a cast member in season two, because she was that good; she’s hilarious,” said Williams.
That one episode has Uhl’s music fans eager for more; so much so that a promo photo of Uhl and Williams kissing spread like wildfire on Tumblr and viewership instantly increased. “Well, they haven’t even seen much yet, but so far the response has been great! I’m thinking they like seeing me kiss girls. My character really develops more this next season. I’m excited for the response,” said Uhl. With acting experience under her belt and touring with her band, expect to see more of Uhl. “I would love to do both. My band is my main thing, but acting is something I’ve always wanted to explore,” Uhl added.
“I think we’re just taking it up a level and it’s the same show and at the same time it’s more fun, more engaging, but we still take it to those dark places plus we got some really really awesome new cast members for season two” says Williams, enthusiastically. One of the themes that will be explored in season two is epilepsy which she hopes more public figures will speak out about. “So many people are in the closet about having it and it makes me crazy because [there’s] just such a stigma over it,” explains Williams.
As the anticipation for the new season grows there are two things to learn from Williams, Uhl and Kross. One, if you want to be on Girl/Girl Scene make sure to give Williams a kiss and/or hug when you see her and two, if you want something, go for it, live your dreams and if you’re good, the fans will follow.
You can watch Girl/Girl Scene on blip.tv, girlgirlscene.blip.tv and/or on GGS’ official Web site, girlgirlscene.com. For more about Tucky Williams go to tuckywilliams.com.
For more information about Kayden Kross go to clubkayden.com and/or follow her on Twitter @kayden_kross.
For more information about Abisha Uhl and her band, Sick of Sarah, go to sickofsarah.com.
Short URL: http://lgbtweekly.com/?p=24847
The struggles normally associated with making an independent documentary are largely associated with costs; the cost of paying for equipment and rentals, the cost of paying the actors and crew and keeping them fed, the costs associated with marketing and promoting the film. But for openly gay Muslim, Parvez Sharma, the costs associated with making his documentary A Sinner in Mecca included the very real threats to his life. “For a gay filmmaker, filming in Saudi Arabia presents two serious challenges: filming is forbidden in the country and homosexuality is punishable by death.”
The documentary, which filmed, among other things, the mass pilgrimage to Mecca by Muslims – known as the “Hajj” – with two smuggled cameras and iPhone, put the Indian-born filmmaker in constant fear for his safety. But, as he told the Indian portal Scroll.in recently: “As a filmmaker and an activist intent on reforming Islam, it was important for me to challenge Saudi authority ‒ this is the most corrupt and secretive regime in Islam and they have an insidious and longstanding project to export their version of an 18th century Islam called Wahabi Islam, which is an Islam of fear. It is an Islam that reserves the death penalty for openly gay Muslims like me.”
And according to OpposingViews.com, which picked up on the story, the film also explores “the brash commercialization of the five-day Hajj experience, the harsh treatment of Shia Muslims by Sunni Muslims and the filthy conditions created by the mass overcrowding for the event, which Muslims are expected to attend at least once in their lives.”
Meanwhile, The Hot Docs Canadian International Film Festival has implemented strict security measures for next week’s world premiere of A Sinner in Mecca. Hot Docs Communications Director Jonathan Da Silva told The Hollywood Reporter about hiring personal security for Sharma, “Hot Docs strives to ensure that all guests feel safe and secure while attending the festival, and out of an abundance of caution we felt this measure was appropriate.”
Short URL: http://lgbtweekly.com/?p=59632
A crowdsourcing campaign has been launched after CJ Palmer — the HIV-positive transgender sex worker arrested in Sydney recently after a client made an HIV transmission allegation — was denied bail and detained in a male prison in Perth.
Managed by peer-led advocacy group People for Sex Worker Rights in Western Australia, the online appeal aims to raise $7,000 so that Palmer’s family (who live overseas) can be flown to WA to support her. A report for the Guardian describes Palmer as being “very distressed” amid fears she may be put in solitary confinement.
While Sex Worker Rights WA cannot comment on a case before the courts, its president, Rebecca Davies, said: “We have continually seen, both within Australia and globally, that prosecuting people for cases of this nature result in poorer public health outcomes, and a reduction in people going in for sexual health testing.”
Davies also criticised the media reporting of the Palmer case. “It has been extremely disappointing to see the media actively encouraging stigma towards people living with HIV, transgender women and sex workers,” she said. “Such reporting only serves to create fear and misinformation, when it should highlight the need for drastic improvement in public health sex education.”
Gay Star Network AU
LGBTI Web site, Gay Star News announced today that former BP CEO Lord Browne of Madingley has become a shareholder in the business, taking a 12.5% stake.
Seven years after his resignation as CEO of BP, Lord Browne wrote The Glass Closet, a book about the acceptance and inclusion of LGBT people in business. He has since become a high profile advocate for greater openness in the corporate world.
Lord Browne said: ‘When I wrote The Glass Closet, I always hoped that it would grow into something more than just a book. Gay Star News provides the perfect platform for that growth.
‘I am looking forward to bringing the messages of The Glass Closet to a wider audience, supporting Gay Star News in its next phase of development, and improving the environment for LGBT people in business around the world.’
Tris Reid Smith, editor and co-founder of Gay Star News which is headquartered in London said: ‘I am immensely proud we have a business leader of the international standing of Lord Browne joining our team of shareholders.
‘This is a milestone in the development of Gay Star News – coming after a January in which we celebrated our third anniversary and saw over 5 million readers visit the site.
‘Lord Browne’s involvement will help us offer even more to readers, clients and stakeholders.’
Short URL: http://lgbtweekly.com/?p=56409
Japanese transgender couple promise and reality of country’s LGBT community
Step by seemingly immeasurable step, Japan is beginning to acknowledge its country’s sexual minorities, an act at once both radical and surprisingly belated. And no one seems to represent those conflicted cultural strains more emblematically than 26-year-old Kazuki Osawa and his partner Shoi Osawa, a childhood friend. What makes this relationship so different is that Kazuki was born a girl and given the birth name Yumiko Higuchi.
“As a teenager, it gradually dawned on me that I was not normal. And the idea that I would have to live the rest of my life pretending to be the person I’m not, in conformity with others, tore me apart,” said Osawa.
But in a country known for its relative stability, any act of non-conformity is considered subversive. And nothing appears quite as subversive as declaring oneself a member of the LGBT community. So much so that TV shows routinely humiliate the LGBT community by depicting men as swishy eccentrics and lesbians and tool-toting, hyper-aggressive women. It’s a message that goes unchallenged in a nation unaccustomed to challenging well-established societal boundaries. And to drive that point home, the message is pervasive, not only in the lack of any meaningful civil protections for the LGBT community but that fact that bullying and intimidation are understood to be a consequence for going against the grain.
“In Japan, once you’re branded abnormal, it’s almost impossible to start over again,” he said, noting the nation’s conformist culture often makes sexual minorities balk at coming out for fear of discrimination.
But things are changing. According to JapanTimes.co.jp, an increasing number of companies and municipalities are open to greater diversity and [becoming] more tolerant toward members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender population. Thursday, Shibuya Ward, Tokyo (which has one of the highest concentrations of Japanese LGBT members), unveiled its as yet unapproved proposal to issue certificates declaring relationships of its same-sex couples being “equivalent to marriage,” an unprecedented move that, if realized, is expected to make life significantly easier for LGBT ward residents. (Many believe it will be approved. No vocal opposition has been mounted or is expected.)
But while this may seem like a historic first step, the realities are far less encouraging, the paper notes: “Equality Forum, a Philadelphia-based nongovernmental organization seeking to enhance the civil rights of LGBT ranks, reported in 2012 that a record 484, or 96.8 percent, of the top 500 companies ranked by Fortune magazine included sexual orientation in their employment nondiscrimination policies. In contrast, a 2014 survey on corporate social responsibility conducted by Japanese business magazine Toyo Keizai showed that 114, or just 18.7 out of 607 major listed companies in Japan, make efforts to protect their LGBT employees.”
Meanwhile, Kazuki and Shoi are taking the route many same-sex couples take who cannot have their relationships recognized by the state. They are adopting a child. As a result, they can register with the koseki family registry unit. This allows them to be treated as immediate family if one of them should be hospitalized. (The koseki family registry is required by Japanese law. All households are legally bound to report births, acknowledgements of paternity, adoptions, disruptions of adoptions, deaths, marriages and divorces of Japanese citizens to their local authority.)
“Some people dismiss same-sex marriage as meaningless because we wouldn’t be able to make babies,” Shoi said. “But a lot of opposite-sex couples in Japan opt not to have kids and are still allowed to marry. It’s unfair that we’re not.”
Short URL: http://lgbtweekly.com/?p=56466
Selfridges, one of the U.K.’s top department stores in London’s Oxford Street is going gender neutral the Huffington Post reports.
The high-end store is removing its separate men and women’s departments and will instead have three floors of unisex clothing, according to The Daily Mail. Some of the brands featured will include KTZ, Trapstar and Hood By Air.
According to Selfridges management the move comes in response to the large number of women buying men’s clothing.
Selfridges isn’t stopping at clothing. The store will also say farewell to its current mannequins and revamp its beauty products and accessories.
“We want to take our customers on a journey where they can shop and dress without limitations or stereotypes,” Selfridges told The Times Of London. “A space where clothing is no longer imbued with directive gender values, enabling fashion to exist as a purer expression of ‘self.”’
In what is believed to be the first of its kind, ChinaPost.com.tw is reporting that a man, known pseudonymously as Mu Yi, has filed a 50,000 yuan (US$8,000) gay discrimination lawsuit against a former employer after a video he was in went viral revealing his sexual orientation. “We’re very optimistic,” Liu Xiaohu, a lawyer for the plaintiff, told Agency France Presse (AFP), adding that the case “will definitely have an impact” on views of gay rights in China.
Mu, who is gay, was filmed by police in October arguing with another gay man on a Shenzhen street. The video went viral soon after it was posted online, with some users making their own videos playing on a speech made by the other participant in the dispute, who was wearing a “little red hat.” A week later, Mu was fired from his job as a designer.
Currently, there are no workplace protections for the Chinese LGBT community. Furthermore, despite growing acceptance in the larger metropolitan cities, this still deeply conservative nation frowns upon homosexuality.
For their part, the employer, who was not identified in the report, maintains that Mu’s firing was not linked to his sexual orientation, and says it dismissed him for reasons including his “poor service attitude” and improper attire.
In a study in 2010 by Tom Mountford entitled, “China: The Legal Position and Status of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender People in the People’s Republic of China,” he noted that: “the Chinese government has remained largely silent on the issue of homosexuality. That silence has had two main effects. First, it has stalled any further developments in removing legal discrimination against LGBT people in China. Secondly, it means that the legal status and position of LGBT people is unclear, with varying official treatment across different parts of China.”
The ‘Little Red Hat’ case is expected to be decided in the next three months and could have enormous repercussions.
It wasn’t supposed to begin like this. But exactly 14 months to the day after the Euromaidan protests, the Ukraine, unburdened by the heavy-handed influence of Russia, has seen a rise in homophobia and a willingness by the country’s relatively liberal gay community to squash equally revolutionary tactics for wider acceptance.
In a thought-provoking piece on ForeignPolicy.com, Dimiter Kenarov retraces the steps leading up to a cultural, political and economic war against the Ukrainian LGBT community that was supposed to be anything but.
As the narrative goes, the Ukraine, in a bloody, often times lopsided military campaign, unshackled itself from the wizened Cold War grip of once-mother-country Russia. The plan was for the Ukraine to turn to the West, not only to gain acceptance in the European Union, but to prove that the country was an economically viable country to do business with.
But even the pessimists among the LGBT community could not have anticipated the levels of hate that rose from the ashes of a new Ukraine. There was the grenade bombing of Kiev’s Zhovten (October) theater, the oldest in the city where Les Nuits d’Été (Summer Nights) was playing as part of Ukraine’s annual Molodist film festival, which included a selection of queer-themed features, and many in the audience — about a hundred people in all — belonged to Kiev’s LGBT community. The ensuing fire destroyed the roof of this iconic theater and rendered it useless. No one was injured.
Two days after, a dozen or so men branding the insignia of the ultranationalistic group Right Sector attempted to shut down a screening of another gay film. It was, in their world view, “amoral.” But according to the article, “[When] asked at the recent Eurocities Conference how he would support human rights after the Zhovten homophobic attacks, Maidan’s hero and current Kiev mayor Vitali Klitschko said he considered human rights a good thing, but would “not stand up for gays and lesbians.”
Lovely.
But is it really surprising in a fundamentally conservative society that we should see a rise in nationalistic sentiment? Kenarov reports: Although it was decriminalized after Ukraine became independent in 1991, negative social attitudes persist to this day. According to a 2013 poll conducted by GfK Group, almost 80 percent of Ukrainians say they oppose any sexual relations between people of the same sex. In another poll, by the Ukrainian Gay Alliance and Ukrainian State Sociological Institute, 63 percent labeled homosexuality “a perversion” and “a mental disease.” That same year, a survey within the LGBT community carried out by Nash Mir Center found that 65 percent of respondents faced infringements of their rights due to sexual discrimination. The list included verbal abuse, intimidation and loss of employment or direct physical violence. Few of these cases (about 15 percent) ever get reported to the police authorities because of the victims’ fear of further reprisals and humiliation. There have been other cases of arson, too, long before the one at the Zhovten theater: In 2009, the Kiev art gallery Ya was set on fire after the presentation of a gay literary anthology.
Worse, after liberal and conservatives fought bravely together to push back at Russia’s own geopolitical land grabs, the LGBT community acquiesced to calls for restraint in public demonstrations, realizing fully that in the current political climate, displays of rainbow flags or public displays of same-sex affection were “huge liabilities.”
As it stands now, certain parts of eastern Ukraine have criminalized homosexuality, using Vladimir Putin’s own directives against LGBT ‘propaganda’ as both a legal and moral template. In the Crimea, newly installed Prime Minister Sergei Aksyonov has bluntly stated that they “do not need such people.”
And, for right now, Ukraine’s push westward is a blessing and a curse, a time of new beginnings masking a fearful nation undergoing profound social and economic change. And caught in the middle of the storm? An LGBT community equally frightened but for an entirely different set of reasons.
Short URL: http://lgbtweekly.com/?p=55549
Russia is set to introduce new rules for film screenings which could impact the showing of LGBT movies.
The new rules for obtaining exhibition licenses impose harsh new regulations, making it harder for exhibitors to obtain licenses, reports PinkNews. Under the new rules films that ” defile the national culture or pose a threat to national unity or undermine the foundations of the constitutional order” could be refused licenses.
Director Andrei Proshkin told Interfax: “Who is going to decide that the culture has been besmeared? The ministry? The public? A court? And on the basis of what?
“How do you determine legally that the culture has been besmeared? And what can besmear a culture more in the 21st century than such laws?”
The legislation is currently going through the government’s review process.
Short URL: http://lgbtweekly.com/?p=55512
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