Last Word - Paul Patrick

This afternoon, Last Word, BBC Radio 4's weekly obituaries programme, will remember Paul with an interview of Sue Sanders (Paul's sister in arms) by Matthew Bannister.

Last Word
BBC Radio 4
Friday 16:00-16:30
Sunday 20:30-21:00 (rpt)
also available on Listen Again for a week.

A full obituary of Paul, complete with pictures and links to audio files and some of his writings, can be found here.

Norway Legalises Gay Marriage

This week, Norway became the sixth country in the world (after Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, South Africa and Canada) to grant gay people full marriage rights. The new law, which passed by 84 votes to 41, will make marriage gender neutral.

The law also also extends parenting rights for gay and lesbian couples. The new law will amend the definition of civil marriage in Norway to make it gender neutral.

Norway legalises gay marriage
Norway's gay marriage law also grants new parental rights

Brokeback Mountain, The Opera

The American composer Charles Wuorinen has been commissioned by the New York City Opera to compose an opera based on Annie Proulx’s renowned short story Brokeback Mountain. The story made into a popular and controversial award winning film by Taiwanese director Ang Lee in 2005, famously tracks the complex relationship of ranch hand Ennis del Mar and rodeo cowboy Jack Twist, over 20 years after the two young men meet and fall in love on the fictional Brokeback Mountain in Wyoming in 1963.

Currently slated to premiere during City Opera’s 2013 spring season, this work will mark Wuorinen’s second world premiere at City Opera; his Haroun and the Sea of Stories, an adaptation of Salman Rushdie’s colorful novel, had its world premiere at New York City Opera on October 4, 2004.

Wuorinen said, “Ever since encountering Annie Proulx’s extraordinary story I have wanted to make an opera on it, and it gives me great joy that Gerard Mortier and New York City Opera have given me the opportunity to do so.”

Wuorinen, who celebrated his 70th birthday this week, is a native New Yorker, who has been a major presence on the American contemporary music scene for more than four decades. His many honors include a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, and a Pulitzer Prize, for his electronic work Time's Encomium in 1970, when he became the youngest composer ever to receive this award.

Wuorinen's compositions encompass every form and medium, including works for orchestra, band, chamber ensemble, chorus, keyboard, percussion, and electronics, as well as ballets and operas. He has been described as a "maximalist," writing music luxuriant with events, lyrical and expressive, strikingly dramatic. His works are characterized by powerful harmonies and elegant craftsmanship, offering at once a link to the music of the past and a vision of a rich musical future.

Brokeback Mountain on Wikipedia
New York City Opera

LGBT London Network

A new web-based network has been set up to bring together LGBT voluntary and community groups around London.

Earlier this year the "Linking London" project, bringing together the LGBT Forums in the various London Boroughs, was wound up as the funding had ceased. At the final Linking London meeting, facilitated by Ben Gooch, it was agreed to look into ways of continuing to link the forums together, by means of a web presence.

The LGBT London Directory gives details of non-commercial LGBT organisations throughout London. The LGBT London network also offers a calendar of forthcoming events and a forum to which members can contribute freely. Members can also create personal blogs.

The Network is open to anyone to look at but only members can post material to it. Anyone can join, subject to confirmation by an administrator. Members can be individuals or organisations. Additionally there is the possibility of creating one or more private special-interest subgroups.

lgbtlondon.ning.com

Fédéric Mitterand Named Director of the Villa Medici

Rome's newly elected right-wing mayor, former neo-fascist Gianni Alemanno, will probably not be best pleased by the French Président's nomination, last week, of an openly gay man at the head of the prestigious French Academy in Rome. "I respect homosexual people, I know a few and I am not saying this out of discrimination but I fear that Gay Pride is something else, an act of sexual exhibition, and I am opposed to all form of exhibition, homosexual or heterosexual," said Alemanno, adding that the city would make sure the event did not offend anybody.

Frédéric Mitterand, 60, nephew of former French Président François Mitterand, a former History, Geography and Economics teacher and a well known author, director and broadcaster in France, has been chosen by Nicolas Sarkozy from a shortlist of three candidates to become the latest name in a prestigious list of artistes going back to 1666 when the Academy was founded by Louis XIV.

Mitterand is perhaps most famous for his series of television programmes where he explored the lives of iconic cinema stars with trade-mark lyrical sentences delivered in the languid and monotonous tones of his unmistakable acidic voice. He is a former broadcast director for TV5 and a presenter on the French gay TV channel Pink TV. He is a Chevalier de la Légion D'Honneur, one of the highest civil honours in France.

The Academy represented until the 19th century the culmination of their studies for select French artists who, having won the prestigious Prix de Rome (Rome Prize, which was discontinued in 1968), were honoured with a 3, 4 or 5-year scholarship (depending on the art discipline they specialised in) in the Eternal City for the purpose of studying its art and architecture.

The Academy was housed in the Palazzo Capranica until 1737, and then in the Palazzo Mancini until 1793. In 1803 Napoleon Bonaparte moved it to the Villa Medici, its current home.

Since the 1970's, the boarders no longer belong solely to the traditional disciplines (painting, sculpture, architecture, medal-engraving, precious-stone engraving, musical composition) but also to new or previously neglected artistic fields (art history, archaeology, literature, stagecraft, photography, movies, video, restoration, writing and even cookery). The artists are no longer recruited by a competition but by application, and their stays vary from six to eighteen months and even, more rarely, one or two years. The Villa present exhibitions and shows created by its boarders.

LGBT Related Radio and TV Programmes, 7th – 13th June

We seek them out so you don't have to. This is our weekly non-exhaustive round up of upcoming LGBT programmes on the radio and television. Inclusion of a programme is not a recommendation.
Enjoy!

Some of the radio programmes listed below can be listened to again via the Listen Again facility of the BBC's website while some of the television programmes will remain available also for a week on the BBC's iplayer.

Radio
Saturday 7th
BBC Radio 4 - 10.30am: Sex, Telly and Britain. Miranda Sawyer and others question the truth of the 1960s sexual revolution (pt 2)
BBC Radio 4 - 12.30pm: News Quiz. Sandi Toksvig presents.
BBC Radio 4 - 11pm: Counterpoint. Music quiz with Paul Gambaccini
6 Music - 12noon: BBC introducing with Tom Robinson

Sunday 8th
BBC Radio 2 - 2.30pm: Pick of the Pops. 1968 and ‘77 charts with Dale Winton
BBC Radio 7 - 10pm: News Quiz presented by Sandi Toksvig (archive)

Monday 9th
6 Music - 1am: New Music with Tom Robinson
BBC Radio 4 - 1.30pm: Counterpoint. Music quiz presented by Paul Gambaccini

Tuesday 10th
BBC Radio 4 - 10.45am & 7.45pm: Paid Servant. Woman’s Hour drama. In 1958 London, E R Braithawaite struggles to care for a mixed race boy who has been involved in the sex trade

Thursday 12th
BBC Radio 4 - 10am: Woman's Hour - Lesbians in India
BBC Radio 4 - 11.30am: Bette in Britain. Susan George narrates a programme that examines Bette Davis’ feelings about the UK, focusing on her visits and statements.

Friday 13th
BBC Radio 4 - 6.30pm: The News Quiz. Sandi Toksvig presents. Su Perkins guests
6 Music - 7pm: New Music with Tom Robinson

Television

Films and drama
Saturday 7th
Film4 - 4.45pm: The Madness of King George. Nigel Hawthorne in adaptation of Alan Bennett work

Sunday 6th
Film4 - 12.40am: The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys. Jodie Foster as a radical nun
Sky Movies Indie - 6.35pm: Transamerica

Friday 13th
Sky Movies Indie - 11.25am & 5.20pm: All about My Mother Almodóvar directs.

Entertainment and documentaries
Saturday 7th
BBC1 - 7pm: Dr Who. Part 2 of a two parter
BBC2 - 6.35pm: The Supersizers Go. Sue Perkins tries to survive the Victorian era with Giles Coren (rpt)
BBC3 - 7.45pm: Dr Who Confidential. With Russell T. Davies
Living - 10pm: Hotel Babylon

Sunday 8th
ITV - 10.45pm: The South Bank Show - Sarah Waters
BBC2 - 11pm: The Graham Norton Show (rpt)

Monday 9th
BBC2 - 6.30pm: A Taste of my Life. Nigel Slater takes Jo Brand on a culinary journey
C4 - 9pm: The Victorian Sex Explorer. Rupert Everett follows the footsteps ofBritish Empire explorer and sex tourist Richard Burton on a pan-sexual adventure. Undoubtedly the best offer this week.
C4 - 11.05pm: Derren Brown: The System. Something to do with racing
UKTV Gold - 11pm: Gimme Gimme Gimme

Tuesday 10th
BBC2 - 6.30pm: A Taste of My Life
BBC2 - 9pm: The Supersizers Go. Sue Perkins tries to survive the 1970s with Giles Coren
UKTV Gold - 11pm: Gimme Gimme Gimme

Wednesday 11th
BBC2 - 6.30pm: A Taste of My Life
BBC HD - 11pm: Torchwood
UKTV Gold - 10.55pm: Gimme Gimme Gimme
Sky Arts - 9pm: What the Dickens? Sandi Toksvig presents a cultural quiz.

Thursday 12th
BBC2 - 6.30pm: A Taste of My Life
BBC2 - 9.45pm: The Graham Norton Show
BBC4 - 9pm: Margaret Thatcher: The Long Walk to Finchley.
C4 - 11pm: Derren Brown: Trick or Treat? (rpt)
C5 - 10pm: Grey’s Anatomy
UKTV Gold - 7.40pm: The Thin Blue Line
UKTV Gold - 11pm: Gimme Gimme Gimme

Friday 13th
BBC2 - 6.30pm: A Taste of My Life
BBC2 - 10pm: QI. Stephen Fry (rpt)
UKTV Gold - 7.40pm: The Thin Blue Line
UKTV Gold - 11pm: Gimme Gimme Gimme

Paul Patrick's Obituary

The Guardian has now published an obituary of Paul by Carole Woddis.

Paul Patrick, who has died aged 57 from a lung condition, was passionate, voluble, big-hearted and an inspired and inspiring teacher. In the 1970s he became almost certainly the first openly gay teacher in Britain to not only keep his job, but to get promoted. In 1986 he produced, for the Inner London Education Authority (Ilea), the first video to go into schools highlighting homophobia, A Different Story: The Lives and Experiences of a Group of Young Lesbians and Gay Men. In the 1990s he was one of the first single gay men to become the foster parent of a young male heterosexual - recounting the experience on John Peel's Home Truths programme on Radio 4.

The full article can be found here.

Click here to leave your thoughts and condolencies on Paul's memorial page.

Third Transfabulous Festival

The third Transfabulous Festival will be taking place in London on 13, 14 and 15th June featuring performances and art by a varied group of trans artists, workshops and a picnic.

Find out more by clicking on the picture above.

Gay Singer Tells of 'Nightmare'

Singer Ian 'H' Watkins' has told of the "complete nightmare" of growing up gay in the south Wales valleys. The former Steps singer, who is from the Rhondda, filmed a personal account for BBC Wales' Week In Week Out. In the programme, he also looked at schools' treatment of gay issues and admitted he was bullied "relentlessly".

Read the full BBC News article here.

Ian Watkins on wikipedia

Yves Saint Laurent Dies

Yves Saint Laurent
1936 - 2008

Yves Saint Laurent was considered one the greatest fashion designers of the 20th century. He had retired in 2002 but was still involved in the foundation he had created with his former partner Pierre Bergé, a businessman and philanthropist gay rights activit. He died following a long illness.