Band of Thebes

Vanishing Gay Culture: Logo TV and Fabulis Go Straight

Ad Age posts a long article asking, "Is gay too mainstream for its own media?" The main focus is Logo TV, the lgbt channel that recently announced it is giving up on gays moving beyond lgbt programming. A corporate mouthpiece named Lisa Sherman explains they're dropping gay-centric shows in order "to grow our gay base...we've always been about focusing on our core [gay] audience. We need to show them programming that speaks to their interests and sensibilities if we're going to stay relevant to them."

Just a few of the new shows they've created for your gay interests, to stay relevant to you:

"Eden Wood's World," a show about a real-life toddler beauty pagent star [above] who now, at age six, is embarking on a singing career.

"Scandalicious," frivilous countdown of the week's trashiest "news" stories.

"Design My Dog," canine makeovers.

"Wiseguys," a straight mafia princess and her husband move to Los Angeles.

The Ad Age essay also discusses the failed social networking site, Fabulis, which attracted only 100,000 users when it was lgbt-centric but soared to 2.5 million users when it reinvented itself as a site for daily design deals. One of the co-founders said, "We could have carried on, trying to make it work, but we're not stupid guys. Gay people just didn't need [Fabulis], because this generation didn't want to live separately."

U.S., Pakistan, Amtrak Screwing with Censorship

Last week, the Pakistan Telecommunications Agency issued this list of 1,695 words to the nation's mobile phone companies, giving them one week to block users from texting the "obscene" terms. You've already guessed it includes  gay, gay pride, homosexual, queer, lesbain, lesbayn, lesbian, lesbin, lesbo, lez, lezbo, dike (but not dyke), and ass clown... yet even you with your decades of linguistical depravity won't have guessed the crime of texting: athlete's foot, black out, harder, showtime, kmart, glazed donut, headlights, sixty nine, robber, oui, lowlife, limy, kill, killer, killing, hostage, honkey, hell no, hell yes, deeper, fatso, idiot, stupid, retard, creamy, drunk, jesus christ, or got jesus. The online banking industry won't like the block on "deposit," either. After widespread outcry and international mockery, PTA spokesman Mohammad Younis said the list was never intended to be made public and a final, shorter list will be released later. Chances are, gay terms will stay forbidden.

Filters are no joke. Even Amtrak's wifi blocks users from accessing gay news sites.

Meanwhile, Congress debates the awful, awful SOPA [Stop Online Piracy Act], which would allow any copyright-holding company unfettered power to kill any website it believes infringes upon or is perceived to help users to infringe upon its IP and to cut off advertising revenue and payments to any site thought to be "rogue" -- all without needing a judge's approval. Understated Google testified that they have "a lot of concerns the bill sweeps in legitimate sites." Overstated Register of Copyrights Maria Pallante testified the US system of copyright would "fail" without this bill. Earlier, Silicon Valley Democrat Rep. Zoe Lofgren said the terrible House proposal, courtesy of a Texas Republican, “would mean the end of the internet as we know it.” Time reports, "the chances it’ll pass are excellent, because it’s backed by powerful business lobbies and has bipartisan majority support in both the House and Senate." But Rep. Darrell Issa told The Hill it has "no chance" of passage in its current form.

Obama Admin Fails To Get Veto Power over Domain Suffixes Like .gay

In the worst kind of government overreaching, the Obama administration earlier this month asked ICANN for new requirements that would allow governments to reject proposed new web suffixes "for any reason." The U.S. sought mandatory review of new domain suffixes by an ICANN advisory panel of representatives from 100 nations. These draconian measures were prompted by a current application from Scott Seitz, a bicoastal businessman seeking to create .gay. (Seven years ago the Bush administration sidelined the .xxx suffix.) Today Cnet reports from ICANN that a group of nations has rejected the Obama proposal, deciding instead that nations may offer "nonbiding advice" about domain suffixes.

Bookvideos.tv: You'd Rather Be Reading

At first I thought something was very, very wrong when a search for anything gay on Bookvideos.tv yielded zero results. After all, the site launched nearly a year ago with lots of hoopla (that a lot of publishers seem to have swallowed) that the way to get Americans to read again is to get them to watch more tv-like clips on the web. But then I realized the problem is much larger: The site still only has 47 entries in Fiction and a mere nine in Literary Fiction, some of which are absurdly misplaced, such as Jodi Picoult's 19 Minutes. In Non-Fiction they claim to have 46, but the actual number is smaller because many titles are loaded more than once. (As for gay books, they ought to have tagged Marc Acito's new novel and Marianne Wiggins' The Shadow Catcher.)
    In any event, these clips aren't going to sell books. On YouTube, the Bookvideos.tv channel gets relatively little traffic, with even a major bestselling author like Philippa Gregory promoting a movie tie edition garnering only 7,800 views, and I would wager most of those are people who have already read the book. Many of the other titles' videos have a couple hundred views after 10 months. These book trailers mainly succeed at reducing the amount of time readers spend reading. On Monday, HarperCollins announced the formation of an in-house production department that annually will create 500 book videos, most in a Q&A format with the writer. In an age of fewer and fewer book reviews, author videos will be the new way people who have neither read nor bought the book can talk about them knowingly.