The GLBT and GSA Thread

[Falcon Horus]

Koala's fall out of tree's because they are stoned

*has visual of stoned Koala*

LOL's even harder!

[Who Knows]

[Falcon Horus]

https://i.imgur.com/Vwmiw1A.jpg?1

[LtColCarter]

Major Networks Fail in Coverage of Anti-LGBT Hate Crimes
By Trudy Ring
March 01 2018 9:00 AM EST

Major broadcast and television networks are failing when it comes to coverage of anti- LGBT violence, says a new Media Matters study.

The seven outlets studied discussed anti-LGBT hate crimes just 22 times and for a total of 40 minutes in 2017, even though it was the deadliest year for LGBT Americans since at least 2012, according to the study, released today.

The media watchdog group analyzed cable TV news coverage between 6 a.m. and midnight on CNN, Fox News Channel, and MSNBC, and broadcast TV news coverage on the morning shows, flagship evening news programs, and Sunday political talk shows on ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox.

More than half of the coverage, both in number of discussions and time spent, focused on two stories: the killing by police of Georgia Tech Pride president Scout Schultz and Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s decision to send a Justice Department lawyer to aid Iowa officials prosecuting the man charged with murdering gender-fluid teen Kedarie Johnson in 2016. The trial ended late last year, with Jorge Sanders-Galvez being convicted of first-degree murder.

Fox News Channel spent the most time covering anti-LGBT violence, more than 10 minutes, but seven and a half minutes of that came from one segment in which disgraced former Los Angeles police officer Mark Fuhrman defended the officer who shot Schultz. Furhman was a witness for the prosecution during the O.J. Simpson murder trial in 1995, and he ended up being charged with perjury for lying under oath about having used racial slurs, a charge to which he pleaded no contest.

This lack of coverage came despite a rise in anti-LGBT violence, the study notes, adding that “speakers contextualized their subjects as part of an overall trend of increasing violence against the LGBTQ community in only seven of the 22 discussions.”

The National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs found that anti-LGBTQ murders were up by 86 percent in 2017 over the previous year, and the latest FBI data found an increase in anti-LGBTQ hate crimes in 2016. NCAVP reported that the number of victims grew from 28 in 2016 to 52 in 2017, and more than half of the victims were transgender, mostly women of color. Overall, people of color made up 71 percent of anti-LGBT hate homicide victims in 2017, and 67 percent of the total victims were under the age of 35. Some print and online media outlets, including The Washington Post, Newsweek, and The Daily Beast, did run stories contextualizing the violence, Media Matters reports.

Read the full study at MediaMatters.org.

[LtColCarter]

Hmmm...I'm not sure I fully agree with this. Back in the day, there was a show called Boy Meets Boy. It was a Bachelor style gay dating show. It was ok, and there was a twist. Some of the contestants were straight. So, the single guy had to wade through a pool of gay and straight candidates. If I remember correctly, if the guy the single guy selected was straight then he would loose. However, he did select a gay guy at the end of the series.

Please, Never Make an LGBT ‘Bachelor’
There are calls for ABC’s dating show to feature LGBT contestants. But this ignores what makes the show such a delicious watch in the first place—its hyper-heterosexuality.
Samantha Allen
03.09.18 10:27 PM ET

There should never be a gay “Bachelor.”

And there probably never will be, because only straight people seem to be weird enough to participate in The Bachelor en masse, year in and year out.

Sure, we’ve seen attempts to make reality dating a queerer endeavor before, but they’ve been short-lived: most notably, A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila, which ran for two seasons on MTV in the late aughts, and Logo’s Finding Prince Charming, which debuted and died in 2016.

But it’s predominantly straight people of either the aspiring Instagram star or gullible fairytale dreamer variety who will keep The Bachelor franchise going well into its golden years.

So that’s why, every time another writer calls for an LGBT Bachelor or Bachelorette, it induces a smirk. This year, it’s Insider writer Louis Baragona who, commenting on the declining ratings for Arie Luyendyk Jr.’s season, came to the conclusion that the Bachelor franchise going queer would bring about “much-needed change in the best interests of both the network and the viewers.”

Let The Bachelor grow old and die with delightful indignity. Although Arie’s season may have been boring in the beginning, the ratings for the dramatic two-part finale proved that this old dog still has some life left in it.

Why would I never want to see myself or my fellow LGBT people represented on what is perhaps—if I’m honest at the expense of my self-respect—my favorite television show?

For one, it would ruin what I and most of my queer friends enjoy the most about the reality series: watching straight people be as straight as they can possibly be.

Baragona argued—and rightly so—that “queer people deserve to see themselves and their relationships accurately, honorably portrayed on screen.” Like many LGBT commentators, I have argued passionately for LGBT representation in Hollywood over the years. But The Bachelor is my sole exception: I’m not watching it for representation; I’m watching it because it’s a theatrical display of hyper-heterosexuality.

For me, The Bachelor is a show about straightness that happens to include dating more than it is a show about dating that happens to feature straight people.

And it takes a special kind of straightness to make The Bachelor franchise tick. How strange are some of the folks who sign up to be sequestered in a mansion without internet for weeks on end so that they can potentially get engaged to someone after two dates? Very.

Britt, who appeared on Chris Soules’ thuddingly dull season, slept in a full face of makeup so she could look flawless first thing in the morning. J.P., who won Ashley’s season disclosed to Yahoo that he “probably worked out six to seven days each week,” which is pretty much the maximum amount a human should work out, if it’s not too much already.

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So many of these contestants look identical, too: The women have long hair in loose waves, the men keep it short on the sides, long on the top. They are a clone army of competitive daters, and that is precisely their appeal. The Bachelor gives us heterosexuality distilled to an essence—one that I want to inject straight into my veins.

But apart from The Bachelor potentially losing its entertainment value through queer inclusion, an LGBT incarnation of the show just wouldn’t work, no matter which direction—or directions—it swings.

There is, as my Daily Beast colleague Kevin Fallon noted in his review of Finding Prince Charming, the obvious and famously parodied problem “that the contestants would start falling in love with—or at least start hooking up with—each other instead of the suitor” if the Bachelor or Bachelorette were gay or lesbian and the contestants were all of the same gender.

Although Fallon argues that this would “make the show all the more entertaining”—there’s nothing producers on these shows love more than drama—the show-runners still need to be able to craft a cohesive storyline out of the chaos.

If you believe former Finding Prince Charming contestant Robby LaRiviere, the short-lived Logo series largely avoided hook-ups between the all-male contestants because “it was a house full of bottoms,” meaning, for the uninitiated reader, less dominant romantic partners. That’s what LaRiviere told Vulture last October but, even then, he claims that two men on the show “hooked up on the first night” and then, on the second night, one of those same two contestants “was making the move on” a different man.

A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila had a bisexual lead in Miss Tequila, but cast straight men and lesbian women as two separate cohorts of contestants. I wasn’t yet addicted to reality television back in 2008, but according to BuddyTV writer John Kubicek, the premiere of season two ended with Tequila throwing out two of the women for making out with each other. (“Surely the best choice for each of [the lesbians] is not Tila,” Kubicek wryly mused. “Why should they deny a stronger connection if they find it?”)

The girls on ABC’s Bachelor already engage in some pretty intense homosocial bonding as it is. The most recent “After the Final Rose” special was proof of that, what with five girls all cuddling up around newly crowned Bachelorette Becca Kufrin on one love seat, sitting on each other’s laps, holding each other’s hands.

This is powerful, “frexting”-level closeness, and it’s probably only indulged in so flagrantly because the women can rest assured in each other’s straightness.

In a house full of queer, bisexual, and lesbian women, that hand-holding would take on a different dimension. In fact, the Australian version of The Bachelor has already unintentionally produced one same-sex relationship between former contestants Megan and Tiffany, although the pair have since split, and Australian Bachelor winner Alex Nation split up with the man who proposed to her and is now engaged to a woman.

Imagine all the relationships that could potentially form on an all-queer Bachelor—it’d be fun to watch for an episode, sure, but would it be able to tell a single overarching tale in the way that seems necessary to sustain viewer interest over the course of a few months?

The producers of the American version have gone so far as to allow an openly bisexual contestant, Jaimi King, to appear in the franchise, and King has said that the show is “dabbling” with diversity— but “dabble” is all the producers of The Bachelor would likely do when it comes to LGBT issues, lest the show get out of their control.

We shouldn’t rule out the possibility that some TV executive somewhere could devise a winning format for an LGBT-themed reality dating series—or that, if done right, it’d provide some much-needed representation in a medium that seems to prefer killing off queer people to showing them alive and in love.

But The Bachelor franchise works because of its over-produced rigidity—because it forces contestants to stay in boxes: straight women (or men) over here, one straight man (or woman) over there. And if there’s one thing queer people don’t like, it’s being boxed in. The Bachelor has found a winning formula and people who lead un-formulaic lives don’t really fit into it, nor would many of us want to.

That’s why I’m happy to keep watching the straight Bachelor and Bachelorette shows. I’ll take another couple decades of reliable Monday night entertainment over a risky queer reboot.

Back in 2014, when asked about the idea of showing same-sex love on The Bachelor, Chris Harrison told The New York Times Magazine: “Look, it you’ve been making pizzas for 12 years and you’ve made millions of dollars and everybody loves your pizzas and someone comes and says, ‘Hey, you should make hamburgers.’ Why? I have a great business model, and I don’t know if hamburgers are going to sell.”

I love hamburgers. I think, according to Harrison’s analogy, I am a hamburger. But please, let me watch my pizzas in peace. If we’re looking for more LGBT representation on TV, there are better rows to hoe than The Bachelor.

[Annoyed]

There should never be a gay “Bachelor.”

And there probably never will be, because only straight people seem to be weird enough to participate in The Bachelor en masse, year in and year out.

LOL. I don't think orientation has anything to do with it. Only idiots and exhibitionists go on Bachelor/Bachelorette type shows.

[LtColCarter]

LOL. I don't think orientation has anything to do with it. Only idiots and exhibitionists go on Bachelor/Bachelorette type shows.

I don't follow the series. I've seen an episode or two. One thing that I found weird (which I looked up before finishing this reply) is that some of the couples from previous seasons of The Bachelor/Bachelorette are still together and some are even married. So, I guess...for some it works.

I dunno...I'm a one-on-one dating type of person. I have never been able to date multiple people at once. I know some people can do it, but I can't. Even if I could date multiple people at once, I don't want my love life aired on TV for the world to see. Plus, I've been single for 9 1/2 years, and I don't see that ending any time soon. And if it does end...it won't be because I'm on a TV show. However, for others, I don't think an LGBT season of The Bachelor or The Bachelorette would necessarily be a bad thing!

[Annoyed]

I haven't seen that much of it. It butts up against a show I do watch, so I tune the channel and go make popcorn waiting for Grey's Anatomy, I think it is.

As I said, orientation has nothing do do with it. The dating/mate selection process is deeply intimate and personal. And making the wrong choice can turn your life into a train wreck. Doing this on a game show just seems stupid to me, for more reasons than I have time to sit here and list.

[Falcon Horus]

I'm just surprised, The Bachelor is still running...

Then again, we're having a similar program running in which couples are formed by who they are and what match could work, so two strangers are wed without ever having seen one another, but were matched on paper and then they get 3 months to figure out whether their union would work. If it doesn't, they get an anulment, if it does they stay married.

The sanctity of marriage at its finest...

++++ Oh, and spoiler for SGO (which is probably the only spoiler I didn't mind getting thrown in my face):

Spoiler:

There's a gay kiss in the last episode between a main character and some other character.

[LtColCarter]

Cool about SGO...I've not seen any of the episodes.

Yeah...I agree...these dating shows (no matter the orientation) are idiocy at its finest. It just feeds the prevailing trend of narcissism in the world. I'm surprised at how much trash people air on social media, etc.

[Annoyed]

Cool about SGO...I've not seen any of the episodes.

Yeah...I agree...these dating shows (no matter the orientation) are idiocy at its finest. It just feeds the prevailing trend of narcissism in the world. I'm surprised at how much trash people air on social media, etc.

Although being a narcissist is probably a requirement to even consider this, I think the bigger driving force for this type of show is the media's exploitation of the human impulse to watch a catastrophe; it's why people are so intent on watching car/train/plane or almost any kind of wreck or disaster. This is not new by any stretch.

[LtColCarter]

For LGBT immigrants, the DACA fight means coming out of two closets

Wow, just wow! The current season of The Fosters is addressing this issue. One of the secondary characters is dealing with DACA issues, and she is also a lesbian.

[Falcon Horus]

Although being a narcissist is probably a requirement to even consider this, I think the bigger driving force for this type of show is the media's exploitation of the human impulse to watch a catastrophe; it's why people are so intent on watching car/train/plane or almost any kind of wreck or disaster. This is not new by any stretch.

And the best part, a study has shown that while the programs such as The Bachelor/rette and Temptation Island are of a relevant quailty, it's higher educated people who watch these shows the most.

Cool about SGO...I've not seen any of the episodes.

Neither have I.

[Gatefan1976]

Well educated people use trash as an escape. poorly educated people see them an ideal.

[Annoyed]

And the best part, a study has shown that while the programs such as The Bachelor/rette and Temptation Island are of a relevant quailty, it's higher educated people who watch these shows the most.

Just a theory.. maybe this is because the younger folks are in general are "more highly educated" at least as far as college transcripts go, and the younger generation is far more narcissistic than prior generations?