Sunday again.

Papers are quite dull, no sneaky revelations as to the identity of the 'super injunction' footballers in the Sunday Papers - shame.

There is an article in the Observer about women doctors hitting the glass ceiling, probably an episode of casualty in there somewhere...

The Guardian are running an award to find the smuttiest ( unintentional, of course ) book title..

And there is a depressing article about the amount of junk, crap, shite and rubbish floating about in space.

The article that most caught my eye is in the Observer - a reasonable well thought through piece on the depressing fact that gay people still suffer isolation, depression and dependent behaviour.  There is nothing new in here - It's stuff that's either fairly obvious or easy to work out for yourself. I read somewhere that the highest incidence of Schitzophrenia in the UK ( and specifically metropolitain areas ) is from the West Indies / Carribean community - generally in young males aged 18 - 22. Research suggests that the cause is not clinical - but social. This is the age when they are leaving homes, generally close knit, supportive and encouraging - and go out into a world where suddenly their colour and ethnicity become a bar to everything they aspire to or have assumed is open to them. This can trigger a range of mental and social issues - as it would in anyone.

This article makes a number of quite interesting but depressing points - there is a mythology that a gay lifestyle is now perfectly achievable and respectable, it's still a ghetto but with better furnishings - and it's far more polarised now than ever, I can understand why so may young men and women go 'a bit mad' for a few years - but what happens then? There was a really interesting article on the radio a few weeks ago about an Old Aged Persons home set up specifically for gay and lesbian penisioners. Many of our aged GLBT community live miserable lives in retirement and care homes where they have to go back into the closet because they are unable to communicate honestly with the people they are closetted * with ( *see what I did there!!!! ). The world is a wonderful place if you are young, pretty and nicely dressed - but what happens next?


"The current word for bad in British schools is 'gay', and children internalise this stuff very easily, they think in terms of good and bad. So by the age of 10 kids have understood that bad people are gay – then they discover they are one of them. They enter a dreadful stage of secrecy which can last 20 minutes or 50 years. Even when you make contact with the adult world, it can be a very sexualised one.
"Imagine if we expected a young heterosexual girl to get her first lesson about relationships in a singles bar. All this is traumatic and has an impact on mental health. It's certainly a far bigger issue than something like HIV and a greater health inequality. A key failure is that mainstream health providers are not assessing this huge need. In effect, you have a system that is blind to a particular type of person."

If there is one thing that really pisses me off it's the word 'gay - It's not even ironic. A good reference point is the image used to illustrate the article ( unless they read my email and changed it ). A typical scene from London Pride, dragged up revelers cavorting with plackards reading 'get it on' and a gym bodied, drugged up loon dressed as one of the village people. If you look closely - you will also see posters for the THT - an ever present reminder of the shadow of AIDS and a nice road sign in the background - which you can read as either - 'no bending, no turning'  or 'no erections here'.


...and it's going to piss down all day.