Year in Review, pt. 1: Esteban Arce keeps his job, the man formerly known as Luke Sissyfag riles NOM's nerves...

I don't think I've ever done one these before. It doesn't mean I can't do one. So there.

January: Mexican television show host Esteban Arce got himself into trouble early this year when a clip of a show he did in December was posted on YouTube and went viral on Twitter earlier this year.  The reason?  Elsie Reyes, a well-known "sexologist" and author of a well known syndicated relationship advice column, had been invited to the show to discuss the topic of 'sexual orientation'.  It all runs pretty smoothly at first until Arce repeatedly demands to know if homosexuality is "normal" or "natural".  When he doesn't get the answers he wants, the interview quickly goes downhill.

The furor elicited by the clip on Twitter was like nothing I'd seen before in Latin America when it comes homophobia in media which, to be sincere, surprised me considering that it was not the first time something like this had been aired on Mexican television.  The clip even had its own hashtag on Twitter promoted by people who were calling for Arce's ouster from the airwaves (#EstebanArceFueraDelAire). And mainstream Mexican media, facing a slow news period in January, ran with the story for days on end.

Arce and his show were suspended for a few days by the Televisa network but was back on the air a month later. Top Mexican newspaper Milenio calls it one of the top 10 TV moments of the year and takes Televisa to task for doing nothing.

February: Valentine's Day brought same-sex kiss-in demonstrations and equal partnership rights rallies in Peru, Argentina, Chile and Mexico. Expect similar demos come February of 2011.

Oh, and there was a big fire two blocks away from my apartment building.

Also in February: Luke Montgomery (formerly known as Luke Sissyfag) and his boyfriend Nate Guidas launched Cause Commandos to raise funds to help survivors of the massive January 12th earthquake that hit Haiti.

Although I haven't specifically written about it, Luke has been in the news again recently as the mind behind the FCKH8 campaign (that's him giving people the finger in the site's webpage).

I've been promoting their 2011 calendar (STR8 AGAINST H8) on my blog this month but this week this particular video drew the ire of homophobic bigots (OH.MY.GOD. I haven't done this many hyperlinks since I began the blog when I naively thought being hyperlink crazy was the way to go!).

Anyway, blooper reel!!

Next up: Latino pop singers come out of the closet, my friend Hiram, soccer players in love and how eating chicken can turn men gay...

Loving this: Ay Haiti

So I am on Shakira's Twitter feed (don't ask, and certainly, don't tell) and this came through a few minutes ago. I clicked through and found myself moved by a new musician-led effort to raise funds for disaster relief in Haiti following the devastating January 12th earthquake.

The song, featuring some of the best singers from Spain as well as a few worldwide superstars, has been playing on the radio since March 27th but the video was just launched today.  It features superstars Shakira, Miguel Bosé, Alejandro Sanz and Juanes. Other participants include actress Paz Vega, soccer players Kaká, Andrés Iniesta, "Kun" Agüero, Diego Forlán and Sergio Ramos and singers Bebe, La Oreja de Van Gogh, Aleks Syntek, Anni B. Sweet, Macaco, La Mala Rodriguez, Belinda, OBK, Hombres G, Daddy Jean, Wally López, Zahara, Sandra Carrasco, José Mercé, David Otero, Enrique Iglesias, Marta Sánchez and Najwa Nimiri. 

In a Madrid press conference yesterday to launch the video, producer David Summers - who also is the lead singer of Hombres G - said that the artists had hoped to be able to sell the song through iTunes but charged that Apple insisted on charging a 30% commission on sales instead of waving the fee and allowing all funds raised through the sale of the single to go towards the effort.

I'm not sure if there is an international fundraising effort through the sale of the song but all proceeds will go to Intermón OxFam. If you like the song, you might want to make a donation here.

In my humble opinion, this rocks! It beats those awful English-language and Spanish-language "We Are The World" remakes anytime (ok, the only thing all three share in lameness is the rap interludes and, if one thing jumps out from this new effort, it's just how white the pool of artists is. I mean, the rapper wearing black gloves? Huh?). Anyway, some of the lyrics are beautiful:

There are lands that don't have any dreams
There are lands that tremble in fear
There are lands that want peace
Haiti only wants to be normal

There is still time to be reborn
Of horse-riding above the hunger and the iron
There is a time to give out love
To erase the hunger and the destruction

CHORUS:
There is love, there is you, and in my voice, there's Haiti
There is love, there is you, and in my voice, there's Haiti

A life comes to a stop, desolation behind his back
It's a child with a lost view
Who, from the dust, illuminates with his own light

Seriously, it made me tear up. Oh, and I simply love Bebe (she is the one with the ring through her lower lip). And Alejandro Sanz? That voice! *melts* Damn! Enjoy. And donate.

Related: The "making of" video here

Cause Commandos to the rescue in Haiti

Each week I get a fair amount of promotional e-mails and press releases from people promoting something or other they think I might write about on this blog. Most times you wonder if the promoters sending those press releases have even seen the blog since the stuff they are promoting clearly doesn't fit within the topics I address (no, I will not write about your latest neon red Valentine's Day dildo). At other times, they are clearly product placement pitches which makes you wonder why the company simply doesn't take an ad on the blog (no, I'm certainly not going to write about the latest hair product being used by Eva Longoria). And then, there's those few promotional e-mails that actually do fit in with the blog, some of which also go by the side particularly if I haven't been blogging consistently during a period of time.

And then, well, your mouth just drops when you get something like this.

Meet Cause Commandos! From the press release:

When disaster struck the impoverished island nation of Haiti, it also struck close to the hearts of boyfriends Luke Montgomery and Nate Gudias. Having lived in Haiti and founded an AIDS orphanage in the coastal town of Jacmel, Montgomery feared the worst when no word was received from the orphanage. Within 48 hours the couple raised over $10,000 from family and friends in the gay community and were on a plane bound for the Dominican Republic which borders Haiti. When news reached them that children in the AIDS orphanage were unhurt but that the local hospital had collapsed on its patients the couple says they were transformed into "cause commandos" with a mission to get medicine and medical supplies to survivors.

Now, a month after the catastrophic 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck the island nation, Montgomery and Guidas have decided to expand their personal mission and go public with their efforts through the launch of causecommandos.com and a series of YouTube clips showing their work. Their goal? To rally support from the LGBT community for Haitian relief causes and to allow site visitors to "directly buy medicine, food & tents".

"We're on a mission to help as many people as we can with medicine, food and tents for shelter. We're buying the supplies across the border in the Dominican Republic and running them by boat into the parts of Haiti that aid is still slow to get to. When a country is as poor as Haiti was before the quake, even the biggest relief effort is not enough. So we're stepping up to the plate and hoping that the gay community can join us," says Montgomery.

Their efforts are not the first time that gays in the United States have stepped up for Haiti. The Red Cross launched an LGBT Haiti Relief Fund that has raised more than $150,000; a small LGBT foundation based in San Francisco with previous work in Haiti called the Rainbow World Fund also launched one of the most immediate LGBT-specific responses to the earthquake; and the good men of Onyx, a "brotherhood of Men of Color in the Leather lifestyle" raised $1,200 for Haiti at a fundraising party. Olivia, Atlantis and RSVP, the leading travel cruise ship companies in the LGBT community, also called for the LGBT community to donate money in collaboration with the Red Cross. But I was first taken aback and then actually amused by the "Amazing Race" feel of Cause Commandos site and video.

I mean, my first reaction was actually that it trivialized the suffering going on in Haiti by adopting some of the 'reality show' elements in promoting assistance for Haiti and featuring yourself as the lead super-heros in the midst of all of it. But then those feelings actually subsided - I do tend to criticize everything - and began to see it for what it was. Two guys with a personal past commitment to Haiti who actually lived there before the earthquake using the internet to call others to do good. The "give now" button on their site takes you to their Paypal account so I can't voucher for how donations might be accounted for. But I also don't see any reason to think that the guys are anything but genuine in their intention. They do say that 100% of proceeds will go towards helping people in Haiti. And, looking again at the video, I actually have come around to think it's a pretty smart idea to engage certain segment of the LGBT community.

An aside: Something else caught my attention. At the bottom of the release there is also a little blurb that reads "Luke Montgomery is a former AIDS and gay rights activist best known for his highly-publicised interruption of President Clinton's 1993 World AIDS Day speech and legal name change to 'Luke Sissyfag' in the 1990's."

Yup. Luke Montgomery is Luke Sissyfag reborn. In 1995, Montgomery told The Advocate "I wish people would forget about the person named Luke Sissyfag and move on, I have. It's not part of me anymore".

It would be tough to outrun that past so I guess Montgomery has learned to live with it. He probably knows that putting that blurb there will probably get Cause Commandos more attention. For those of you who have no idea who Sissyfag is, I won't bore you with details. Let's say he was incredibly polarizing and, in some ways, Montgomery might still be. But last year I was purging my files, news clippings, and old magazines, and ran into a couple of articles I had saved about him. I'd actually nearly forgotten about him but I was shocked by the charge I felt in looking at clippings from that time. Whether he likes it or not today, he was a shock to the system, and I might have disagreed with a few of the things he did and said. I was equally shocked when blogger and friend Michael Petrelis ran this post in May of last year.

It's fascinating to me to see a man who was such a public figure go into media hibernation and emerge years later as a different person. In that sense, good bye Luke Sissyfag, welcome back Luke Montgomery.

For more information:

• Cause Commandos official web page here
• Cause Commandos YouTube page here
• Cause Commandos Twitter feed here

Related:

• Luke Sissyfag's Haitian Relief Effort For Quake Survivors Needs Funds (Michael Petrelis)
• Boyfriends Luke Montgomery & Nate Gudias are on a 2-man mission to rescue Haiti (Queerty)
• Gay Commandos lend aid in Haiti (The Advocate)
• 'Cause Commando' couple comes to rescue in rural Haiti (The Huffington Post)
• Gays to the rescue: Same-sex couple run emergency supplies to survivors in Haiti (Steve Rothhaus / Miami Herald)
  

Dominican Republic: Is it possible to live with gays and Haitians?

The ongoing screenwriter's strike might not be affecting television shows in the Dominican Republic, but the island's main television station (aptly named Supercanal) is certainly banking on reality shows to attract big ratings as well - just like the big networks in the US.

The newest entry into the DR reality show universe is called "The Guagua is My Home" (guagua being a word used in the Caribbean for bus). The premise? Well, take a big bus, plant it in the middle of a public street, let ten contestants go in and, um, watch them sit inside the bus and bicker for the next 45 days as viewers eliminate them one by one based on popularity. The winner gets a million pesos (U$30K). Talk about excitement! Not to mention the big production values! (unfortunately, this is for real and not a smart send-up of Dominican television in the vein of that infamous Belky's Salon ad).

Jan de Bont's "Speed" it ain't so you need to throw in a couple of curveballs as well: According to a Nov. 13 article published in 7 Dias "There are no serious data that proves that a person with a different sexual option or who belongs to another race or nationality can be 'contagious' to others if they share a living space for some time - unless they suffer leprosy."

That's the 7 Dias journalist's classy intro to the news that the producers of "Guagua" (pronounced 'gwah-gwah') decided to include a Haitian man and a "gay" among the ten participants to demonstrate that Dominicans are not racist and can live with a homosexual (it might surprise some people but for an island that is shared by both countries, there is some deep antagonism and racism among lots of Dominicans and Haitians).

The 'gay' actually turned out to be 19 year old drag queen performer Alfonso a/k/a Dominic Figueroa who doesn't quite call himself transgender but says that he also has "another me" who is feminine and calls herself Pocahontas (his casting tape is available on YouTube).

Also among the list of contestants was New York City radio personality Ramón Sierra (a/k/a Papalote from where else but "El Vacilón de la Mañana" on La Mega) who was rumored to have felt up the legs of Pocahontas and another woman on one of the nights he spent in the bus in the hour-long recap I saw Thursday morning on Time Warner cable (which carries Supercanal here in New York).

OK, let's say the set up isn't as homophobic and racist as it seems to me. The presence of Pocahontas in the reality show actually drew a Dominican transgender rights group called Trans Siempre Amigas (or TRANSSA) to the site of the taping to do some HIV and STD prevention demonstrations and they were actually featured on the Nov. 23rd live show demonstrating to the Dominican public how to properly use a condom according to their blog.

As for whether Dominicans can live in close quarters with Haitians and gays, in the re-cap show that I saw this week Pocahontas tried to scratch the Haitians face in an altercation and by week's end they had been both eliminated from the show as well as Papalote according to today's Diario Libre.

I swear, sometimes you can't even make all this sh*t up! Can't wait for the US version.