Naked Boys Reading Love Letters

In time for Valentines Day the next Naked Boys Event will be Reading Love Letters on February 13th in Brighton (UK). The boys will strip down and do the best they can to sketch a portrait of love, one-sided, fraught and desirous. From the cocaine laced love letters of Freud to his fiancé to the string of buzzes from incoming sexts, they promise to share their love with all.

Naked Boys Reading is a literary salon featuring in-the-buff readings by local beefcakes, bears, twinks, otters, butch femmes, sissy sluts, boys next door with an exhibitionist streak and lovers of naturism with a well-endowed library. Produced by the Haus of Husbands, began in 2012 at Vogue Fabrics Dalston.  It has since grown to an international touring performance with three resident sites.

                     all photographs by  Zbigniew Tomasz Kotkiewicz

For further information and tickets click here.

Cilla Black No 1 at Christmas?

The Brits are this week re-releasing  the hit single of Cilla Black singing "You're My World" in the fervent hope it will be the Christmas No 1 Song this year which has always a traditional highlight for the music business in the UK.   

Cilla, a discovery of her fellow Liverpudlians The Beatles, recorded this in 1964 and it stayed at the Top of The Charts in the UK for four weeks, and was the first single of hers to be released in the US where it peaked at no 46 in the Billboard Charts.

After her career in pop music faded Cilla went on to become the most successful and highly paid  TV host in the 1980's and 1990's and parlayed her way into being one of the UK's most best-loved national show-business stars, and something of a gay icon too.  She died tragically earlier this year at the age of 71 and the nation went into deep mourning.

#MulberryMiracle

On December 25th the miracle birth in this household was not the Baby Jesus but in fact a brand new Mulberry Handbag although it attracted the same worshippers as the Messiah did himself.  This very tongue-in-check new television advertisement is causing all sorts of merriment back in the UK, but we wonder if the Evangelical Christians in the US would see the funny side of it too if it was played on their TV screens.  Asides from the fact that if truth be known they probably would not be rushing to buy the bag themselves as it is priced at a mere $1500 .....which is probably the same as gold, frankincense and Myrah put together these days.

Queer Story Showcase : I Love The Nightlife

The Queer Media folk up at the University of Salford in the UK are presenting a Queer Story Showcase under the banner 'I Love The Nightlife' ....which is inspired by the song from the cult classic drag queen movie Priscilla Queen Of The Desert.  The event on Thursday 24th September 2015 will consist of a selection of LGBT short movies preceding the screening of the fabulous new documentary 'Dressed As A Girl' : a queerguru top pick as you can see from the full review from our sister site queertiques.com.

The organizers promise a safe queer space where people can join in the film experience, have conversations, relax and during the networking break make connections with filmmakers. Tickets are just £4/£5 from Eventbrite.

Further Information from Queer Media UK

Sportsmen Sam Stanley Comes Out

Two weeks after Keegan Hirst became the first British professional Rugby League player to come out publicly as gay,  23 year old Sam Stanley a professional Rugby Union player has come out as gay in an interview in today's 'Sunday Times' in the UK. (queerguru will not even attempt to try and explain the difference  between Rugby Union and Rugby League to avoid upsetting sports purists, so we have attached an explanatory video below,)

Stanley who played for England Sevens at five tournaments and is a member of one of the most famous rugby families in the sport, spoke out that he  hopes that telling the world he is gay will give others the courage to come out too.  In the interview he talked of his  painful journey to get this  point and says he considered suicide because he was scared that telling the world  he was gay would ruin his rugby career. 

Born in Essex to an English mother and a father of Samoan descent and his brother, Michael, is in the Samoa squad for the World Cup. Stanley also added that he had also gone to great pains to cover up his relationship with Laurence, his partner of five years, although he is obviously not that worried about covering up his body according to these naked photos he posted on himself on Instagram.

POUTfest TOUR 2015

Our love of this particular Film Festival starts with its name. The Organisers probably chose it for their own reasons, but in our dictionary 'pout' means 'to purse your lips to look petulant or sexy' and these are both very suitable reactions to whenever you watch edgy queer cinema. Hopefully with the selection that they have curated this year, it will be more of the latter, and maybe bursting into a big grin too.

The second reason why we keep this Festival on our radar is that it just doesn’t stay in London but tours the UK and takes brand new LGBT films all over the country from Edinburgh in the north to Brighton in the south and Cardiff in the west.  

The progamme, supplied by film distributors Peccadillo Pictures and part funded by BFI & the National Lottery includes such goodies as '52 Tuesdays', 'Soft Lad', 'A Girl at My Door,' 'Dressed As A Girl' and 'Futuro Beach' as well as one of the best anthology of shorts we have seen for some time called 'Trick & Treat' (most of them are reviewed on www.queertiques.com.)

The whole Festival rolls out all most immediately and full details of it's schedule and where you can buy tickets can be found at http://poutfest.co.uk/the-tour/.

If you can only get to see just one of these  movies then our number one tip has to be 'Dressed As A Girl' : it's a joyous and fascinating documentary on how the extraordinary performance artist Jonny Woo and his outrageous crew of performers have created a stunning alternative drag culture that has made London's East End THE place to go for the best queer entertainment today.