Nude farmers creating stir in Sweden

A calendar featuring nude farmers armed with pitchforks, shovels and wheelbarrows is creating a stir in Swedish agriculture circles.</p>

A national farming organization, which presented a similar, hugely successful, calendar last year, is worried that the new version made by a local group of farmers could defeat the purpose of the original calendar.

“They’re surfing on our wave of success,” said Ann Linden, one of the creators of the national 2002 calendar.

Linden said the first version, featuring waist-up, black-and-white photographs of nude, young farmers in farm settings, was designed to change the image of Swedish farmers as “grumpy old men with hats.”

Linden said her poster boys were “attractive guys about 25-30 years old, who breed chickens, cattle or work in forestry.” </blockquote>

New Tom Tomorrow

From the IHT:

When Antonio Garullo and Mario Ottocento got married last Saturday in The Hague, they crowned a long-standing dream, and began what promises to be an even longer judicial nightmare.</p>

The gay couple chose to marry in the Netherlands because it is currently the only European Union country that grants heterosexual and homosexual unions equal legal standing. Garullo and Ottocento were the first foreigners to be married in the country and they are the first gay Italians to legally wed.</blockquote>

The Art Newspaper has an interesting article on two books dealing with homosexual themes in art.

A Hidden Love: Art and Homosexuality is a newer one that I haven’t seen in person yet – it should appear in the USA this month.

Mr Fernandez begins with something of a Gay Eden, or Olympus—a Greece where man-boy love was a crucial part of an instructional passage from youth to manhood, hence its regular depiction in sculpture and on vases. As cultures proscribed homosexuality, works of art reflected its enduring presence. The author savours biblical examples from Rembrandt, Orazio Gentileschi, and others. The broad range of Mr Fernandez’s enterprise calls to mind the discipline of systematic theology, from St Sebastian to St Genet.

I had the honor of meeting Paul Cadmus in person in June 1999, at the opening of a show at the Aldrich Museum. He was a beautiful, gentle, man (he was 95 at the time). I felt like I was meeting a saint, and in a way I was.

I love that the Navy’s web site has a page on The Fleet’s In.

Nice obit of Bill Blass from PlanetOut. I never met him, but I have a friend who was close to him, and another who worked for him for years.

In New York, Blass is also remembered as a generous and influential supporter of AIDS treatment services since the late 1980s.</p>

“He was a major donor to Gay Men’s Health Crisis at a time when prominent people were silent about AIDS,” said Ronald Johnson, associate executive director at GMHC, a New York-based agency that serves people with AIDS. “His visibility was important in raising consciousness about HIV/AIDS.”

…

Jonathan Jacobs, executive director of the AIDS Care Center at New York Presbyterian Hospital, remembered that Blass first visited when the center was a “threadbare clinic” in 1988, and he became a major fund-raiser thereafter.

“He understood the spirit of what we were trying to do,” Jacobs told the Gay.com/PlanetOut.com Network. He also praised Blass’ attention to detail, noting that Blass quietly made sure there were beautiful flower arrangements in the center’s waiting area each week for the past 14 years.

“We never had to ask him,” Jacobs said. “He was always there for us.”</blockquote>

Tom the Dancing Bug – Bush insists “Up is down”

Doug Marlette

Under Mayor Giuliani, municipal workers were forbidden to talk to the press without permission. Not surprisingly, the city lost a lawsuit over this. Now that we have a mayor who has heard of the Bill of Rights, the city won’t appeal the decision.

I’m not writing much on the blog, as I have an icky sinus thing and the drugs are making me incoherent. Here are two recent posts on other blogs that I’ve enjoyed:

Choire

mr. trinity

As I’ve heard Ann Northrop say more than once, “How do they sleep at night?”.

Bob Barr, Georgia Republican and the House impeachment manager during the Clinton impeachment travesty, is suing Clinton, James Carville and Larry Flint for $30 million, claiming “loss of reputation and emotional distress”. (This is a Salon Premium article, so unless you’re a subscriber you’ll only see the beginning.)

Barr has quietly filed a suit against Clinton, Carville and Flynt for “participating in a common scheme and unlawful on-going conspiracy to attempt to intimidate, impede and/or retaliate against [Barr]” for his role as an impeachment manager in 1999.

At the same time, he’s championing a bill that would limit non-economic medical damages to $250,000, saying “a national liability insurance crisis is ravaging the nation’s healthcare system.”

There’s a mention of the lawsuit in the Washington Post, but not the bill limiting damages.

Speaking of Bob Barr… here is a nice little anecdote that was reported on the local NBC affiliate, plus the Alanta Journal and Constitution, about him calling an airport guard an “idiot little nigger”.

Matthew Engel of The Guardian, on Fifty ways to love America.