LGBTQ Breaking News Service

The far-right continues to freak out over a cereal released for Pride month, with one pundit bellowing about how the leprechaun from Lucky Charms is gay and Kellogg’s is “forcing our kids to be confused about their gender first thing in the morning with their breakfast.”

“General Mills has, I think General Mills has a gay leprechaun, right?” asked NewsMax host Grant Stinchfield. “Well, my producer Carly asked me, ‘Is that leprechaun really gay?’ I said I don’t know, maybe: he wears high-heeled shoes, prances around in tights, leads me to believe, probably, that little Lucky Charm leprechaun might be gay.”

Related: Is this animated goldfish gay?

He was talking about “Together with Pride” from Kellogg’s, a limited-edition cereal, one of many products corporations sell each year to celebrate LGBTQ Pride Month.

This cereal has stirred controversy already – perhaps more than any other Pride month product this year – and now Stinchfield raging about how it’s “woke cereal.”

“The cereal is Rainbow hearts, covered in edible glitter. How nice,” he sneered. “Give me a break. Here’s the worst part, the cereal slogan, ‘Too amazing to put into a box,’ and then lists a space for kids to write in their own pronouns. Seriously.”

He joked that General Mills beat Kellogg’s to the punch because the Lucky Charms leprechaun is gay. “He wears high-heeled shoes, prances around in tights.”

Immediately after making that joke, Stinchfield was somehow already resentful that people would criticize him for that joke, even though no one was on his show besides him to be mad at him. “For those of you that want to vilify me for those comments right, right there, aren’t you just as offended by the flamboyant rainbow hearts and glitter as a symbol of gayness? See, there are two standards here.”

He did not explain why anyone should be offended that the rainbow is a symbol of LGBTQ people, especially since it’s a symbol that LGBTQ people themselves made and embraced.

“The moral of the story here is: Switch your kids to granola.”

He’s not the only person enraged by the cereal. The SPLC designated hate group Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins is telling his followers that Kellogg’s “donates $3 from every box to an extreme LGBT group, GLAAD, who’s out to recruit and confuse your children.”

In an email blast, he called on people to inundate Kellogg’s with emails to stand up to the cereal company’s “mass deception of our young people.”

“Go woke, go broke,” he wrote.

Perkins and Stinchfield join other far-right activists from 2nd Vote, the Ruth Institute, and the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property (TFP), who were outraged by the cereal last week.

“I am disgusted by your company’s new cereal promoting unnatural sin,” read one petition started to denounce the cereal. “Homosexuality is not something to be promoted or celebrated. Promote purity and virtue, not lust and vice.”

A Perth drag queen used her musical performance at an event for the Tokyo Olympics to protest Japan’s LGBT+ laws.

Scarlet Skylar Rae was performing at the Kansai Music Conference, an international music industry conference based in the city of Osaka, Japan.

The event will be featured within the wider Tokyo Olympics programme.

During her performance, Scarlet highlighted the ongoing campaign to legalise same-sex marriage in Japan prior to the Olympics.

As part of the protest, Scarlet performed an acoustic show of her songs ‘Pride’, ‘Come on you Saints’ and ‘Same old me’ in front of decorated Japanese flags which read “Japan has no gay marriage”, “Japan has no laws against LGBT employment discrimination” and “same-sex couples are not allowed to adopt in Japan”.

In addition to this, Scarlet also taped “LGBT RIGHTS NOW JAPAN” on to her guitar.

Scarlet’s protest follows a recent report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development which rated Japan second last for “laws supporting LGBT inclusiveness” in developed countries.

Her performance was also in protest of the Tokyo Olympics enforcing rule 50: “No kind of demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda is permitted in any Olympic sites, venues or other areas”.

Japan is currently the only G7 nation not to recognise same-sex marriage, and a court in the country recently ruled that the ban was unconstitutional.

A request for damages by three same-sex couples was rejected by the Japanese court, but the overall judgement was seen as a victory for the campaign to change the law.

In the past few months, the Japanese LGBTQ+ movement has had great progress with the Japan Alliance for LGBT Legislation (J-ALL) submitting a petition with over 100,000 signatures to the Japanese Parliament to introduce the ‘LGBT Equality Act’.

However, the new proposed ‘LGBT Equality Act’ is also currently being protested, as after a parliamentary consultation, the reviewed proposal now only requires the government to “promote understanding of LGBT people” and “fails to include protections for LGBT+ people from discrimination”.

Scarlet said: “With the current LGBTQ+ rights situation in Japan, I didn’t want to be silent.

“I feel as a fellow member of the LGBTQ+ community I have a responsibility to use this platform I have been given by being invited to perform at the Kansai Music Conference to call attention to the incredible work the Japanese LGBTQ+ community is doing to protest its governments anti LGBTQ+ Laws.

“With the focus of the world on the Tokyo Olympics, I feel we all need to draw attention to the inequalities that exist within Japan and direct as many people as possible to sign the petitions to gain equal rights and support the Japanese LGBTQ+ community in their struggle.

“I have only highlighted some of the inequalities that exist in Japan and encourage everyone else to do their own research.

“I fully recommend that everyone reads reports from organisations such as Stonewall, Amnesty and the Human Rights Watch.

“I think we all want the Japanese Government to live up to the Olympic Charter which bans ‘discrimination of any kind’, including on grounds of sexual orientation.”

FOR DECADES regimes in the Middle East have alleged that homosexuality is both morally unacceptable and a Western import. Many gay activists disagree on both counts. Homophobia is the Western import, they claim, introduced by puritanical Europeans. “Ban the colonial law,” cried campaigners in Tunisia in December, referring to a law criminalising gay sex written by the French more than a century ago. “All these homophobic laws in the Middle East were brought in by colonialism to undermine Islam’s permissive civilisation,” says Ramy Khouili, a Tunisian activist.

History is complicated, and prejudice has ancient roots. Nonetheless, activists can point to periods of the Islamic past when Arab rulers were more liberal about sex. They relate how the Caliph Amin in ninth-century Baghdad had a male lover and feted gay poets. They read poems from a classical genre called mujun, or hedonistic smut. And they recall that the Ottoman Turks, who ruled most of the Middle East in the 19th century, decriminalised homosexuality a century before America and Britain. Back then, “you could be with a man or a woman,” says the transgender founder of north Africa’s first gay movement, the Abu Nawas Association, named after a great Arab poet, who was gay. “There were men dressed as women and living as women—and it was normal.”

“A Promenade of the Hearts”, a collection of stories and poems compiled by Ahmad al-Tifashi, a 13th-century Arab sexologist, is experiencing a revival in Beirut’s libraries. The penis, he claims, is better shaped for anal than vaginal penetration. While much classical and Ottoman poetry features male lovers, gay groups are discovering lesbian poetry from the past. “How much have we grinded sister, ninety pilgrimages/ More delightful and invisible than the entries of the penis head,” reads a couplet.

Gay poetry is not the only art form undergoing a renaissance. Muhammad Issaoui, who calls himself “a queer dancer”, adapts the traditions of male belly-dancers once common in Cairo and Beirut. He performs in Tunisia’s clubs and theatres clad just in feather boas and underpants. “It was natural for men to express their feminine sides before,” he says. “It was just pleasure and art.”

Some activists are examining old legal texts—and finding contradictions. Classical jurists upheld the Koran’s clear prohibition of sodomy, yet debated how deep the penis must penetrate to be deemed a violation. (Up to the line of circumcision, according to a standard work written by Shia Muslims.) The present-day jihadists of Islamic State throw gay people off rooftops, citing a reported saying of the Prophet endorsing the practice. But scholars have struggled to find historical cases of anyone taking this verse literally.

This gay re-engagement with Islam has its critics. Many feminists are secular and see Muslim clerics as part of the patriarchy they want to topple. Still, most are willing to lend their support to gay people now facing arrest, torture and censorship by Arab rulers. “The problem isn’t Islam,” says Rasha Younes, a Lebanon-based researcher for Human Rights Watch, a monitoring group. “It’s the oppressive regimes who want to control us and the Middle East in its name.”

This article appeared in the Middle East & Africa section of the print edition under the headline “Muslim pride”

An estimated 2.7% of British people aged over 16 defined themselves as LGB in 2019, up from 2.2% a year earlier

By Hugo Greenhalgh

LONDON, May 27 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – More Britons than ever before identify as lesbian, gay or bisexual (LGB), meaning the nation’s gay and bi community grew by more than 15% in a year to reach 1.4 million people, the latest government figures showed on Thursday.

An estimated 2.7% of British people aged over 16 defined themselves as LGB in 2019, up from 2.2% a year earlier, said the Office for National Statistics (ONS), noting increases across different age groups.

Taking into account “don’t know” and “other” responses, the number of adults defining themselves as heterosexual fell by 0.9 percentage points – or almost 500,000 people – to 93.7% of the total adult population of 52-53 million.

The decline marked a continuation of the steady fall in the size of the straight adult population since 2015, the ONS said.

Penelope McClure of the ONS’s population statistics division said the growth in the LGB community was “statistically significant”.

“People aged 16 to 24 continue to be the most likely to identify as LGB, however the proportion of older adults identifying as LGB, while much smaller, is also increasing,” McClure added in a statement.

Men were almost twice as likely as women to describe themselves as gay, the ONS found. According to the data, based on Britain’s Annual Population Survey, 2.1% of adult males said they were gay, but that fell to 1.1% for lesbians.

However, more women than men identified as bisexual, the ONS said, with 1.4% of women saying they were bi compared with 0.8% of men.

The British figures appear relatively low compared with some other Western countries, such as the United States.

In February, a Gallup poll found a record 5.6% of Americans – or 18 million people – were LGBT+, attributing a significant increase to greater social acceptance.

The 2020 survey revealed a 24% rise from the last poll in 2017, when 4.5% of adults identified as LGBT+, largely driven by Generation Z adults – aged 18 to 23 – 15.9% of whom said they were LGBT+.

The British survey focused exclusively on sexuality and no data was collected for those who identify as transgender, or non-binary – people who define themselves as neither male nor female.

Figures are expected to be released soon following the inclusion of the first ever question on gender identity in Britain’s national 2021 census.

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(Reporting by Hugo Greenhalgh @hugo_greenhalgh; Editing by Helen Popper. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers the lives of people around the world who struggle to live freely or fairly. Visit http://news.trust.org)

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