Equality Philippines

Book Review on Canadian English Professor Michael Cobb's book "God Hates Fags". This post was written by RBP team member line of flight from Sampaloc Toc . I want to start off this review by unequivocally stating that I do not recommend buying or reading this book . I hesitated writing this review at first, but I decided I wanted to tell you what was so disappointing and my expectations for research into the discourse of anti-gay right-wing Christian fundamentalism. Michael Cobb is an English Professor at the University of Toronto and is a very angry gay man. I picked this book up with the idea that it would be an update to Didi Herman's The Anti-Gay Agenda with a focus on the upsurge in media attention to Fred Phelps "God Hates Fags" church. The book does provide a little bit of research into the history of Fred Phelps church of hate. However, I'd recommend Ryan Jones' documentary Fall from Grace -- which includes unprecedented access to Fred Ph...

Movie Review on American independent gay film "Rock Haven"(available at the Malaysian blog Filem Gay ). This post was written by RBP team member line of flight from Sampaloc Toc . First of all, I want to give a shout out to the Malaysian site, Filem Gay , for helping to catablog international gay cinema. I have watched many many gay films in my life and with the recent advances in editing technology and its greater accessibility to the middle class, I have to say that I have been unable to be aware of every gay film that has come out in the last ten years (there is just too many). I was roaming through Filem Gay's blog and stumbled onto Rock Haven . Filem Gay summarized: The coastal California community of Rock Haven is the perfect place for cute eighteen-year-old Brady and his loving mother to begin a fresh start. Their mission: to spread the word of the Lord. But while roaming the beach one day, Brady meets Clifford, a young man who is the complete opposite of him: ou...

Book Review on Anthropologist and Gender Studies Professor Gayatri Reddy's book "With Respect to Sex". This post was written by RBP team member line of flight from Sampaloc Toc . Gayatri Reddy is an Indian-American anthropologist and gender studies professor. Reddy's book is an ethnography of the transgender hijra of the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. Reddy carefully recounts the tensions in life for the hijra that are specific to the cultural context like the road from rural life to urban hijra identity in Hyderabad and some of the more seemingly universal aspects of transgender collective identity regarding how the hijra form into hierarchical adopted families that enforce norms for the hijra identity with an "old-timer" at the apex of the hierarchical family. Her discussion of the negotiation between Hindu and Muslim identification is fascinating. (Hyderabad was a Muslim sultanate until after independence and if you ever go there, you can see i...

Book Review on American Anthropology Professor Tanya Erzen's 2006 book "Straight to Jesus". This post was written by RBP team member line of flight from Sampaloc Toc . Tanya Erzen is an American anthropologist and professor and identified herself as a "straight woman." She interviews and observes an ex-gay community south of San Francisco, California over the course of a year and does a bit of historical research of ex-gay faith communities, the media and political movements. In the late 1990s, the religious right in the U.S. began heavily promoting ex-gays as a political maneuver to deny LGBT claims for anti-discrimination laws or equal protection under the law. The LGBT community responded with an attack on ex-gays -- the 1999 movie But I'm a Cheerleader is a classic example. Yet, Enzer doesn't focus on either of these two opposing movements, the LGBT political movement or the religious right's political movement. Instead, she focuses on the suff...