This video of a couple of guys who make a wedding proposal to each other has gone viral and viewed over 17.6 million times, and it might just be the most romantic thing we’ve ever seen.
In the video, one guy kisses his boyfriend before kneeling, with a ring box in hand, to ask if he wanted to get married.
With a look of shock on his face, the boyfriend put his hand to his mouth before walking away and crouching down before pulling out his own ring box out of his bag.
The onlooking crowd begins to cheer as the two embrace and kiss.
That “harsher” sentence actually equates to SIX months (note the capital letters). Which a tiny proportion of those who commit an actual offence will actually receive. And remember six months, will never, in reality, be six months – more like three.
The new sentencing policy is set against the news that hate crimes reports against trans people have risen by 37 per cent to 2333 reports while crimes reported against lesbian, gay and bisexual people has risen by 25 per cent to 14,500 reported crimes.
The Daily Mail decided to frame the news with a title that read,”Now trans and gay hate crime will mean SIX months in jail after judges are ordered to crack down with harsher sentence” and then used domestic burglaries as a benchmark to drive a point that the sentences are longer – for crimes against the person rather than property. Surely that’s what it should be?
Well within hours of the piece, written by Steve Doughty for The Daily Mail, there were numerous remarks in the infamous comment section of the website, most of which were decrying the news.
“mac.attack” hailing from New Zealand, seemed concerned that a misconstrued joke could end up with us all on a slippery slope. God knows where, but we praise the liberal use of lube.
Your profile picture is the first thing that other members will see of you, so take some time to get it right. We’ve put together some tips on what works and what doesn’t work for the perfect profile picture.
It goes without saying that your profile picture should be of you. We’re not fond of catfishing, fraud or just pictures of cartoon characters. You’re a real person, so a real picture of you is best.
Remember what they say first impressions can last a lifetime so make sure, when you’re choosing yours, that it reflects exactly how you want to portray yourself.
So here are our top tips:
Recent photos
Make sure your profile picture is recent. We’ve all heard the stories of people turning up to dates only to discover that the person they meet is a good ten years older than their profile photo. It’s a bit like trades description. People want to know who they are meeting – a trustworthy and honest person will have an up-to-date, recent picture of themselves. It’ll also help identify you if you guys actually meet in real life.
Just you and only you
Don’t crowd the picture with other people. We can assume that you have friends. You don’t need to show us – after all, we’re interested in meeting just you, to begin with… not your friends. If you want to add pictures with family, friends, pets etc add them to your private galleries.
It can happen over the most seemingly innocuous thoughts and actions and can be incredibly distressing and sickening if you happen to be at the centre of people’s fury on social media.
Twittersphere can be one mean place if you, in the eyes of some of its users, get things wrong. Being at the centre of a Twitterstorm or a pile on can be a horrible experience lasting over a 24 to 48 hour period.
So here’s what you should do if you ever find yourself in a twitter backlash.
Delete the tweet
Although this might seem like curtailing your speech or what you want to say, removing the “offending” tweet means that it can’t be retweeted or quoted – leading directly to your account.
It’s the quickest way to stop a pile on in its tracks. Yes, some people will have screenshotted the tweet and they will continue to tweet it or may even tweet it at you, but its reach will be far less felt than if you were to leave it on your timeline.
Just turn it off
Turn off Twitter, in fact, delete the app for a few days, so you don’t feel the need to keep on checking what’s going on or what’s been said about you. Ride it out and try not to let your imagination run wild.
A Twitter pile on can last from 24 hours to 48 hours and will then, most likely fade away as people move on. You may get a few tweets after this, but mostly people will have moved on.
Just remember, people’s memories can be short on social media and there’s always someone else to distract and attract a Twitterstorm away from you.
Make a decision on whether to apologise or not
If you come to the conclusion on whether what you’ve tweeted is offensive and Twittersphere has a point, then apologise.
Recently social media star Trisha Paytas found herself in the middle of an epic Twitterstorm after coming out as a “transgender gay man”. The tweet, which actually led people to a YouTube video was immediately met with scorn and derision.
The tweet became quickly ratio’d meaning that the comments outranked the number of Retweets and likes, meaning that in Twitter world you’ve usually done something very very wrong.
Trisha made an apology video within 48 hours and the pile on continued on with that Tweet, receiving over 700 comments and only 49 retweets, which meant that her apology wasn’t widely shared, so only a fraction of those aware of the story actually heard her apology.
Meanwhile, her original “I Am Transgender” tweet continued to grow and was even picked up by the editorial team at Twitters’ moments, boosting the Tweet even further.
If you do make an apology tweet, post or video- make it heartfelt and true and don’t use phrases like “I’m sorry you were offended”. These often PR managed tweets are met with even more backlash because people don’t and won’t believe it – and can even serve to elongate the storm.
If you don’t feel you need to apologise – don’t. There’s nothing worse than someone apologising for something they’re not sorry for.
The tweet saw thousands of people complaining about the article’s content. The magazine’s official Twitter account – which usually sees an interaction rate of 1 to 2 retweets or likes per post and rarely ever any comments, suddenly had over 7,000 retweets and thousands of comments.
Dozens of people took to Cosmopolitan‘s timeline to say they had reported the tweet for hate speech, yet the magazine stood resolute, did not delete, did not apologise – basically it didn’t acknowledge the storm that it had created.
Seek legal advice
If you’ve tweeted something you shouldn’t have, like a high court’s super injuction or something that’s libelous or slanderous you might need to seek legal advice.
You may also want to take legal advice or action if people are tweeting something about you that is factually incorrect, libellous or slanderous, as journalist Jack Monroe did against Katy Hopkins. The fallout from which saw the former TV star, journalist and radio presenter left with a huge legal bill after she lost.
There’s a lot to take away from Michael Moore’s brand new documentary Fahrenheit 11/9 from the Flint Water Crisis, school gun violence the rise of Trump and how maybe the democrats aren’t as people-friendly as you might hope.
It’s the day after watching Fahrenheit 11/9 and my mind is still whirling. Michael asks (of Trump’s presidency) at the beginning of the film, “How the fuck did we get here?” and it’s a question many are asking.
But Moore’s troubling documentary takes us through history lessons and finds a way to link a number of big button issues and it doesn’t quite work, but you’ll be left with an uneasy feeling in the pit of your stomach.
In the two hour and a bit film, Moore manages to squeeze in the water crisis in Flint Michigan, the Parkland School shooting, the Bernie Sander’s vote scandal, the teachers’ strike, President Obama’s undermining of US citizens, Bill Clinton’s republicifcation, The New York Times‘ political bubble and of course, the rise and rise of Donald Trump.
It’s pretty full-on and you may be left with a sense of foreboding for the future of civilisation, but Moore doesn’t disappoint with the breadth of research undertaken for this documentary.
Here in the UK, we take a lot of content for granted. It’s not our fault, most of us have been brought up on a diet of free, advert-free, tv, radio and news, thanks to the BBC. But we have to change this.
As one wise puppet once said, “The internet is for porn” and he was right, it’s everywhere. It’s all over social media and there are millions of sites across the web, devoted to one of the nation’s favourite pastimes. Porn. But what is keeping this industry afloat?
There was a time when if you wanted to look at nude people doing it, (and you weren’t able to tune into Eurotrash on Channel 4) you’d have to buy a magazine, then there was the birth of the VHS and then the DVD, which revolutionised the industry and made it very successful, but like the music and magazine industry, porn’s physical products have been supplanted by the digital revolution. An entity that has turned all our passions, from music to film into bytes that no one has really managed to monetise successfully, when compared to the physical product world.
Getting access to porn is ridiculously easy and for the most part free to view and for most of us is as easy as logging on to social media.
There are plenty of free sites that offer HD videos of people going at it – and that’s great but when the end user isn’t paying for it, what happens to the creators of the content we enjoy?
People need to be paid for their performances. Editors need to be paid for their art, the photographers, the directors and all the people involved need to earn their living – and if that happens to be inside the porn industry, we should be supporting that.
For something that is pretty much in all our lives is it too much to ask that you set aside £10 a month for a subscription of your favourite studio or even star on their own OnlyFans channel?
In an exclusive poll by THEGAYUK, lots of people say they just want to hear the truth…
CREDIT: GaudiLab/bigstock
What do you do when someone you’re not interested in, messages you on a hookup app like Grindr? Do you ignore, block or tell them truthfully that you’re just not into them? Trouble is, it’s quite difficult to be truthful to someone about your lack of attraction to them, without coming off rude.
Well according to our research users of dating apps would prefer that you told them directly that they aren’t your type. In fact, overwhelmingly, 68 per cent of us would, apparently prefer to know the truth.
Twenty-five per cent would prefer to just be ignored and the other seven per cent said that they’d be happy to just be blocked.
How do we actually react?
However, in contrast, when asked how people actually react when someone they don’t fancy hits them up on a dating app, most people admitted that they just tend to ignore or just block. Only around 44 per cent of guys say they are actually truthful and tell the other person that they’re not interested.
What’s the best way to tell someone you’re not interested?
CREDIT: Ryazan / BIGSTOCK
We asked our readership on Facebook what the best way of letting someone down. Jonathan told us, ” Imagine that it is you who is being rejected. Speak to them as you would like to be spoken to”
Whereas, Robert kept it nice and simple saying “Not my type, sorry fella”.
Gaz revealed that he’d write, “Hi, thanks for dropping me a message. Great profile but don’t think we are a match. Gaz”
Billy suggest that typing, “Politely say sorry I’m not interested we are looking for different things” might be the politest way of letting someone down gently.
Let me tell you about my own gender expression before we go on. I don’t think of myself as a “man” because I don’t really fit into what society expects of men. When I was a child all I wanted to do was be called a girl, wear high heels, my mum’s dresses and sing Petula Clark’s ‘Downtown’ on repeat.
I was a Grade A queer/trans kid. As an adult I couldn’t admit that to anyone outside my immediate family. I was so shamed by this behaviour – and bullied mercilessly at school when I chose to wear the white, patterned “girls’” socks instead of the regulation grey socks for boys.
Nowadays, I dress in typically masculine clothes, I have a boyfriend, I have short hair and people assume that I’m a man and a gay one at that. I respec the privileges that, for the most part, that assumed identity affords me. But, it never really feels right when someone refers to me in that way.
That said, I don’t mind if people use the pronouns him/his or he when they refer to me.
Although it does jar me if someone calls me a man.
Weird? Right?
I also don’t mind it if I’m referred to with female pronouns.
I’m pretty relaxed about the pronouns that are used to describe me.
But for some, words really matter. So here’s some advice to help us all become better allies to our non-binary, gender non-conforming siblings.
It seems that we’ve all got our lives set to transmit only. We need more receiving in our lives. So when someone is telling you something about them, listen.
Someone once wisely told me, “Assumptions are the mother of all fuck-ups” – and they were completely right. How often have you assumed something about a situation only to find that nothing was as you imagined? Pretty often, right?
Your assumptions are based on your own life experience. It doesn’t take into account other people’s experience. So leave your assumptions at the door and again, open your mind.
If a person tells you what their preferred pronoun is, accept it don’t fight it. It’s what they’ve asked you to call them. The decision is effectively out of your hands. It’s the same as when someone tells you their name. You accept it and it becomes part of their identity. Well, pronouns are the same.
Some non-binary, gender fluid and gender non-conforming folks use a number of different pronouns. Some popular ones are: Zim/Zer and Ze, they/them and theirs or even thon, which was actually added to the dictionary in 1964. They as a singular pronoun has been used for centuries.It’s not particularly new, it’s not trend based, it’s just getting a lot of media attention at the moment.
Blue for boys, Pink for girls… gender stereotyping is all so the 1950s and really doesn’t work for today’s society. No one likes living in a predefined box and we don’t live in a black and white world. There’s a whole rainbow out there.
Gender norms and stereotypes, when adhered to, just keeps society attached to a patriarchal system that’s almost impossible to climb and doesn’t work for all of us, particularly LGBT+ people. So lets bin it shall we?
Normalise the conversation surrounding pronouns. Write your preferred pronouns in your social media profiles. As @thalestral says on Twitter, “normalise that shit”.
Also on twitter, stop assuming people’s pronouns based on their profile pic and your binary stereotypes.
Read their profile. Check their pronouns. Don’t assume.
And while you’re there, put your own pronouns in your profile.
Speaking on LBC today, Boris Johnson said that pupils across the UK should be taught “about the world as it is”.
Tory leader and Prime Minister hopeful, Boris Johnson fielded a call today, while on LBC with Nick Ferrari, from an organiser of Shetland LGBTQ, who asked the candidate whether children should be taught about LGBT+ relationships and acceptance in schools across the entire UK.
Answering the question, Mr Johnson said that he believed that, “People should be able to love whomever they chose” and said that the country was “all the greater” for that right.
He told Nick Ferrari, “People should be able to love whomever they chose and that’s the way we live our lives in the UK. Our country is all the greater for it. I do think it’s important that kids are taught about the world as it is.
He added that he believed that teachers and schools have “a responsibility to teach kids about the world as it is”.
When pushed further about whether the parents were right or wrong to take their children out of classes in schools in Birmingham, Mr Johnson continued, “I don’t think kids should unreasonably be taken out of school”
Pride season is well underway here in the UK – and you’ll notice that street peddlers are selling rainbow merch, but before you buy anything from them, here’s why you shouldn’t
More often than not the street peddlers (not the sellers inside the pride event) don’t support the pride events at which they are selling at. None of that money they take goes back into supporting the pride or local LGBT+ charities. Not a penny. They pay an incredibly small sum of money to the government for a license which allows them to pop up all over the country. None of that money goes back into Pride.
Pride stalls pay the prides
Sellers and organisations who are at pride events officially pay the pride to be there. This means that their pitch fee has gone into helping maintain that pride. It’s a vital revenue raiser for pride. Let’s support the official retailers and sellers, rather than those who are just profiteering off the pride movement.
Over priced
At one pride we heard that street peddlers were selling Rainbow pride flags for £10 to £20 (in London!)- which is a complete rip-off, especially when inside the Pride stalls area you’re likely to find rainbow flags going on sale much less than that.
Don’t pay their over inflated prices! Better still why not go online first and get yourself a bargain! You can order all sorts of pride flags from our retail partner, THEPRIDESHOP.co.uk.
It’s all rainbow – and as pretty as that is if you don’t see your identity represented there’s the issue of erasure. Bisexuals, pansexuals, trans, asexual and non-binary people matter too. So check out inside the pride for a proper LGBT+ stall that will sell the full range of LGBT+ flags.
Not members of the LGBT+ community
Whilst we’re at it, wouldn’t it be great if Pride was a time to support LGBT+ and queer companies. The corporate world is on full jump on the pride bandwagon at the moment, which on one hand is a positive step, but don’t forget to support your queer business family. Those gift and merchandise sellers inside pride parks and event spaces are usually owned and operated by LGBT+ people. Show them your love this pride season.
