Brighton council is trying to ban anti-gay music in clubs yet is loaning CDs from its libraries of artists who have penned homophobic lyrics.

Pubs and clubs which play or allow artists to perform songs inciting homophobic acts face having their licence taken away in Brighton and Hove.

But it has emerged that work by Buju Banton, who recorded a song called Boom Bye Bye which advocates the shooting of gay men, and an album of songs by rapper Eminem, which includes homophobic lyrics, are available for loan at Brighton and Hove City Council libraries.

The CDs were initially withdrawn yesterday after The Argus contacted the council but tonight a spokesman for the authority said: We've not banned any acts from nightclubs and it's not our role to provide artistic taste police in our cultural facilities either.

The council last week voted to tackle so-called "murder music" with a new section to its licensing policy. Although the new council policy cannot legally ban any form of music, it was specifically designed to discourage murder music acts and allows licences to be reviewed if performances include incitement to violence.

The council spokesman said: A small section in the council's new licensing policy is aimed at preventing crime and antisocial behaviour in licensed premises. There is no ban or censorship on any particular artist or song and this section of the policy is not there to prevent people being offended - its sole purpose is to prevent crime and disorder.

This is a separate issue to the library service, which also does not aim to censor material which is legally available to the public. The library service sets out to maintain a balanced stock of material, offering a wide range of materials reflecting a broad spectrum of views and opinions. The Eminem Marshall Mathers LP was released over seven years ago, the lyrics are controversial and the CD is labelled with an explicit content warning."

BBC Radio 1 has bowed to mounting pressure to play the uncensored version of Fairytale of New York after a flood of complaints from listeners and the mother of the singer Kirsty MacColl.

Andy Parfitt, the station controller, admitted that the decision to bleep the word “faggot” from the iconic Christmas song had been “wrong” and said the uncut version would from now on be broadcast. He backed down, saying that the singers did not use the word with any “negative intent”.

The station’s head of music, George Ergatoudis, had ordered the word to be removed from the single, which is in the running to be this year’s Christmas number one, for fear of upsetting homosexuals.

MacColl’s mother, Jean, had dismissed the move as “pathetic and ridiculous”, saying that some of the world’s most famous writers used bawdy language: Shane has written the most beautiful song and these characters live, they really live, and you have such sympathy for them.

Radio 1 listeners also inundated the station’s website with complaints about the decision. Even gay rights campaigners had criticised the decision as “misguided”.

Andrew Gilliver, spokesman for the Lesbian and Gay Foundation, said: I have spent hours ringing around and trawling the internet and I can’t find anyone in the gay community who is offended by this song, in fact it is well loved.

A Roman Catholic Cardinal has suggested that gay people should be banned from political office.

Latvia's Prime Minister Aigars Kalvitis resigned last week and the Archbishop of Riga Janis Pujats warned new candidates not to support LGBT related issues.

He asked that all candidates running for the post of Prime Minister state whether they intended to defend the Latvian nation against the invasion of homosexuality in public life. Anyone who is not a stern advocate of the people's moral values, must neither run nor be nominated for prime minister, he said, urging candidates to give a public answer on the issue, as he said people were entitled to it.

Fairytale of New York, by The Pogues featuring Kirsty MacColl, has been re-released for the festive period and is a contender for the coveted Christmas number one slot.

It tells the story of two lovers who trade insults on Christmas Eve and one verse ends with the memorable line: You scumbag, you maggot you cheap lousy faggot, Happy Christmas your arse I pray God It's our last.

Radio 1 bosses have bleeped out the word faggot from the song, for fear it will offend homosexuals, but have provoked the ire of one of their own leading DJs as well as listeners.

The decision was criticised as "ridiculous" by Chris Moyles, the Radio 1 DJ, who is leading a campaign to make the 1987 song the Christmas number one.

The BBC said: This is not a blanket ban but a station by station decision.

Despite gay marriage and other actions, Canadian customs officers have been quietly but systematically blocking U.S.-made erotica. Their actions have had the effect of severely limiting free speech. Lest you think this is only about curtailing the masturbatory options of law-abiding Canadians and wreaking havoc on the profit margin of of the sex-industry, it is, in fact, a broad assault on civil liberties that should worry people on both sides of the extensive border.

Bound only by vague, randomly implemented policies and consumed with targeting material created to engage, educate and, yes, titillate the local LGBT community, the Canadian customs service (a.k.a. the Canadian Border Services Agency, or CBSA) regularly impounds whole shipments to adult bookstores. Despite a landmark 2000 decision by the Supreme Court of Canada, the CBSA continues to seize material which it deems obscene.

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Toyota's US attorney has sent a cease-and-desist letter to EBoys Studio, based in Switzerland, telling the company to "immediately and permanently cease all use of the name Lexus" in its gay-themed adult films, including DVDs, and the EboysStudio.com Web site, or face legal action.

EBoys president Daniel Grangier, quoted by the GayWired news service, says the performer chose to be called "Lexus" because it is "the name of a Greek god," not because of the cars. Grangier said his company's own attorney is "now in negotiation with Toyota's legal team" and will resist demands for a worldwide recall of two films starring the controversially named actor.

Comment: Porsche Lynn

16th December 2007

Thanks to Alan

Fascinating! I wonder whether they've also considered clapping a writ on the American film star called Lexus Locklear. What about Porsche Lynn?

Moving away from silly stage names, m'learned friends ought to be able to sue a few vintage erotica sites over images of Alana Ford. I'm sure that Spanish and Latin American pornographers must engage the servces of ladies called Mercedes. And no doubt some "AV idols" serving as bukkake targets are surnamed Honda or Suzuki.....

Nicaragua’s sodomy ban is history. A rewrite of the nation’s Penal Code, which takes effect in March, simply left the ban out. We are not wanting to moralize, explained José Pallaís, president of the National Assembly’s Justice and Legal Issues Committee. The state should not be regulating conduct or giving moral indicators of how citizens should behave.

We are not making a code of the Catholic Church here, he said. We are making a democratic code under modern principles and principles of legality.

Old Penal Code Article 204 stated: Anyone who induces, promotes, propagandizes or practices in scandalous form sexual intercourse between persons of the same sex commits the crime of sodomy [and] will incur a penalty of one to three years in prison.

At least three nations in Central or South America continue to ban gay sex — Belize, Guyana and Panama — along with several Caribbean islands, including Barbados, Dominica, Grenada, Jamaica, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, and Trinidad and Tobago.

Homophobic rap music has been banned in Brighton in case it offends the city's large gay population.

Music venues in the city have been ordered not to play certain tracks by artists such as Eminem and 50 Cent.

If pubs and clubs flout the ban, they can be stripped of their licence and closed down.

All music - whether played live or from a recording - that "incites hatred towards minorities" on religious, racial or sexuality grounds is affected.

The move follows an outcry last year over a scheduled performance by the notorious Jamaican artist Buju Banton.

Brighton and Hove's head of licensing, Dee Simson, said: We have a good record on equality and we felt it was important to include this in the licensing policy.

But Trevor Madison, production co-ordinator at Concorde 2, said: Who knows where these things are going?

Gay rights campaigners have clashed with Belfast's Rape Crisis Centre over plans to lower the age of sexual consent to 16. The British government has published proposals to bring Northern Ireland's legal process, under which it is illegal for 16-year-olds to have sex, into line with the rest of the UK.

The centre has joined a loose nutter alliance with the Catholic church, evangelical Protestant churches and Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionist Party to oppose the proposed change from 17 to 16. Ranged against them are organisations representing the gay community.

Gay and Lesbian Youth Northern Ireland (Glyni) said it was 'illogical' to argue that there was a huge gap between someone at 17 and another at 16. Along with the Rainbow Project, a charity supporting gays, Glyni has welcomed the introduction of the Sexual Offences (Northern Ireland) Order 2007, reducing the age of consent to 16.

Liam Larmour, Glyni's spokesman, said both organisations were concerned that young people were being criminalised in the eyes of the law. To many young people, having sex at 16 is no different than having sex at 17, and is their choice of what to do with their own bodies. After all, you can get married at 16 with parental consent, you can smoke, choose your GP and buy your own fireworks, and for the moment can leave school too, he said.

Whitehall faces an uphill struggle to create parity in the age of consent law across the UK. The DUP has vowed to resist any changes, though Northern Ireland Office Minister Paul Goggins does have reserve powers to impose reforms.

Goggins will also face fierce resistance from the Catholic church and most Protestant churches. At the next monthly conference of the Irish Catholic bishops, a statement will be issued denouncing the lowering of the age of consent and pledging a broad-based campaign against the change.

The curtain went down on Ronnie Larsen's play, Making Porn, only shortly after it opened over the March 11 weekend at SPOT, 4146 Manchester Street.

According to a press release by SPOT owner Thomas Long, St. Louis police halted the show during its second performance on Saturday night. The show is a comedy about the pornographic industry that does contain on-stage nudity, Long said in the release. That nudity allegedly broke the ordinance, according the city. It is unclear whether the nudity in Making Porn or its gay-themed subject matter was the catalyst for this action compared to other shows.

Long pointed out that Making Porn was being produced at SPOT by a California-based production company who had leased the space for a three-week run. The show has been produced in numerous other cities in the United States and internationally.

Western documentary makers should think twice about making films about Islam because they do not understand the issues as well as their Muslim counterparts, a leading Muslim film-maker has said.

Parvez Sharma, whose documentary about what it means to be gay and Muslim had its European premiere at the Sheffield International Documentary Festival recently, said Western non-Muslim film makers were jumping on the "Islamic bandwagon": Post 11 September, [Islam] is suddenly very hot, and he cited the "plane-loads" of documentary makers who flew from New York to Afghanistan after the terrorist attacks of 9/11.

For many documentary film-makers there's very little understanding of the complexities. Everyone has been jumping on the Islamic bandwagon. Very few of those films do justice [to Islam]. They suffer from a lack of comprehension. There's this need to cash in on the Islamic theme.

Sharma, whose documentary, A Jihad For Love includes emotional interviews with gay Muslims from around the world, torn between their homosexuality and their faith, said there was a "paucity" of Muslim film-makers and called on Islamic documentary producers to make their own voices heard to combat Islamaphobia. His Jihad, filmed over six years, reveals the often shocking treatment meted out to homosexuals in Islamic states such as Iran, where one of the men featured was flogged for attending a gay party, and in Egypt, where another interviewee was thrown into prison, where he was raped, then fled to France.

For Sharma, a gay Muslim from the north of India who now lives in the US, making the film was an intensely personal experience. It was very important for me as a Muslim film-maker not to deal with Islam as a problematic monolith, which is how many people in the west see Islam, he said.

Homosexuals deserve to be executed or tortured and possibly both, an Iranian leader told British MPs during a private meeting at a peace conference.

Mohsen Yahyavi is the highest-ranked politician to admit that Iran believes in the death penalty for homosexuality after a spate of reports that gay youths were being hanged.

President Ahmadinejad, questioned by students in New York two months ago about the executions, dodged the issue by suggesting that there were no gays in his country.

Britain regularly challenges Iran about its gay hangings, stonings and executions of adulterers and perceived moral criminals, Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) papers show.

The latest row involves a woman hanged this June in the town of Gorgan after becoming pregnant by her brother. He was absolved after expressing his remorse. Britain said that this demonstrated the unequal treatment of men and women in law and breached Iran’s pledge to restrict the death penalty to the most serious crimes.

Under the Freedom of Information Act, the FCO released papers to The Times about the death penalty being used in Iran for homosexuality, adultery and sex outside marriage.

Minutes taken by an official describe a meeting between British and Iranian MPs at the Inter-Parliamentary Union, a peace body, in May. When the Britons raised the hangings of Asqari and Marhouni, the leader of the Iranian delegation, Yahyavi, a member of his parliament’s energy committee, was unflinching. He explained that according to Islam gays and lesbianism were not permitted, the record states. He said that if homosexual activity is in private there is no problem, but those in overt activity should be executed [he initially said tortured but changed it to executed]. He argued that homosexuality is against human nature and that humans are here to reproduce. Homosexuals do not reproduce.

A Briton has been remanded in custody in Ghana for having sex with another man, the Foreign Office confirmed yesterday.

The man appeared at Accra circuit court charged with "unnatural carnal knowledge" and possession of obscene pictures. Gay sex is outlawed in the west African country.

The photographer was arrested at an airport when police searching him for drugs found a CD with images of him having sexual intercourse with a 19-year-old Ghanaian.

The man has pleaded guilty to "unnatural carnal knowledge". He has been given the option of a six-month jail term or a fine of about £320, according to a Foreign Office spokesman. He was remanded in custody after he was unable to pay a £2,500 bail surety for the charge of possessing obscene images, which he denies.

The Foreign Office said the high commission in Accra was giving the man consular support.

A Christian website editor who was sentenced to two months in prison for inciting hatred against homosexuals has been cleared by the Supreme Court in Sweden.

Leif Liljeström, who had already had his sentence cut to one month by the Court of Appeal, was cleared after the court ruled that he may not have been aware that anti-gay comments posted by visitors to his website, Bibeltemplet or The Bible Temple, consituted incitement to hatred.

Liljeström said: I actually had a feeling that it would turn out like this. I did what Christians do and asked God. I then got a feeling that it was going to work out well.

Liljeström told the court that he had thought long and hard about removing the offending posts before eventually allowing them to remain on the site where they could serve to generate further discussion.

One of the more extreme comments was posted by a visitor to a discussion forum thread entitled "Sodomy". The commenter stated that men who cannot summon up the energy to abstain from intercourse with other men should be sentenced to death and hanged from posts in the town square. Although he did not remove it, Leifström did in fact criticise this statement and several others on the site's discussion forum.

According to the first court to hear the case, Stenungsund District Court, as website administrator he was guilty of incitement against a group of people for statements he himself had written, and for crime against the law on electronic bulletin boards for guest-messages which he neglected to delete.