Stand Up runs around the country from 4th to 15th April and they’ll be unleashing a number of videos, twibbons and stunts online!

Check out their video from the cast of RTE’s Raw supporting Stand Up!

Irish Actors support BelongTo’s Stand Up!

Check out their facebook page for more information:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Stand-Up-LGBT-Awareness-Week/107986382552515?sk=wall

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Legal eagle reader HunterS sent us this notice for any readers who may need some legal advice:

LGBT Lawyers Association of Ireland in conjunction with FLAC presents a Free Legal Advice Centre for the LGBT Community

This will be held in Outhouse starting 2nd November 2010 and the first Tuesday of every month after from 7.00-8.30pm

These sessions are devoted to clients who have any legal concerns including:

* Employment discrimination
* Cohabitation
* Civil partnerships
* Immigration
* Gender recognition

The Legal Advice Centre is dedicated to offering both a welcoming and confidential environment for members of the LGBT community when seeking free legal advice. It is open during term time only. The Centre operates an drop-in system.Please bring along any documentation or correspondence which might help the advisor to assist you.

It starts tomorrow (Tuesday, 2nd November), readers! Don’t hesitate to pop along if you need any legal advice. : )

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1. Fundraiser for Outhouse
2. Missing Pieces: Immigration & legal procedures
3. Bring down the Outhouse

A lesbian couple in Australia have learned they are expecting a set of quintuplets after using an American sperm donor to conceive. Yikes! Melissa Keevers described her feeling as one of “shock” upon hearing the news: “It took me a long time to get my head around what was happening. But now I’ve come to terms with it, I’m excited.”

While her Irish girlfriend Rosemary Nolan is also delighted: “People don’t know whether to congratulate us or commiserate but we think it’s a miracle and we couldn’t be happier”.

Since one of the members of the couple is an Irish lady they’ll be grand – sure we’re well used to massive families (ask any Irish granny about the 20 children who shared a one bedroom house if you have 4 hours to spare).

Of course the real lesson in all this is to beware of American super-sperm. With a future full of an estimated 70 nappies per day, 5 carseats to buy, 5 cots, a shedload of formula and a specially imported pram, there’s an expensive road ahead of them but I wish them all the luck and happiness in the world. It’s delightful to see a lesbian couple welcoming five little lives into their family with such joy and it’s wonderful to see it so neutrally reported in the news stories so far (even if the original story in Australia’s Women’s Day looks a bit trashy magazine)!

Congratulations to the two ladies and may their offspring be happy, healthy bouncy babies who cry minimal amounts! Perhaps they could form some sort of circus troupe!

If you have any ideas, thoughts, comments or feedback, please do contact us by either commenting or dropping us an email

Related articles by Zemanta

• Lesbians beat 60 million to one odds to have quintuplets (theprovince.com)
• Lesbian couple pregnant with quintuplets without IVF (telegraph.co.uk)
• Lesbian couple expecting five babies (theage.com.au)

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Café Paradiso – Om nom nom

By the end of this article you’ll probably think I’m paid by Café Paradiso to write this, as I genuinely haven’t had such a good experience in an eating establishment ever before. If you’d like a concise review that doesn’t rant and rave, you can skip to the end – I’ve provided a handy one sentence review. I’ve become a frequent visitor to the Cork City restaurant since I started fraternising with a vegetarian lady, but since I moved to the Big Schmoke it’s become that bit more of a trek to dine there. The 2^nd last time I made the visit, we stayed in a hotel nearby as their accommodation was full, this time however, my lovely woman’s birthday was approaching so I had the foresight to book the room right above the restaurant, and book us in for dinner that evening

Now, I am what some might call “awkward” when it comes to dining. It’s not that I’m deliberately awkward – it’s simply that my body and tastebuds have a lifelong disagreement. I’m a coeliac, and have the wonderful misfortune of also  being violently allergic to eggs-not exactly the ideal dining companion. However, I’m a good sport about it all, and will usually try and be nice through gritted teeth to ignorant wait-staff asking me if I can eat cream or offering me bread with my coeliac friendly soup (for the record, it’s just wheat, oats, barley and rye I can’t eat).

In Café Paradiso, no such long winded explanations are necessary. While some restaurants will simply point you in the direction of a dull mixed salad, and others will remove offending items, Denis Cotter and his team at Paradiso  will go out of their way to provide alternatives, and adjust their dishes to suit those with special dietary needs

I ordered deep fried squash flowers with Knockalara sheep’s cheese and capers stuffing covered in a beautiful sauce. I’m unsure as to what sauce ended up on mine as they made a different one to the sauce on the menu, but whatever it was, it was DELISH. The squash flowers were fried in a special corn flour based batter for me, and I have never tasted batter so delightfully light and exquisitely tender. The cheese and caper filling was soft and perfectly cooked, with no unpleasant lumpiness or mismatch of flavours. My girlfriend ordered the roast baby aubergine with chilli, honey and cardamom marinade – I was lucky enough to be able to eat this also, so we mixed and matched our starters. The flavour of this dish was just right, with no overpowering sweetness weighing down the starter.

Our starter portions were perfect, with us left satisfied but still eagerly looking forward to our mains.

For our main course my partner ordered sweet chilli-glazed panfried tofu with asian greens in a coconut & lemongrass broth, soba noodles (just so I couldn’t steal any! – she told me I could leave that in) and a gingered aduki bean wonton, a dish I had enjoyed in a previous visit, for which they replaced the soba noodles with rice noodles and made an alternative wheat-free wonton.

The flavour and texture of the tofu in this dish is unlike anything I’ve ever eaten. I’m not a vegetarian, but if all veggie food tasted like that tofu I would gladly give up meat. It is succulent, and full of flavour. The trick is apparently all in the marinade, and I shall be experimenting myself at home with tofu to try and achieve it. The coconut broth provides a lovely soothing panacea for the searingly spicy tofu, the noodles give a wonderful chewiness and bulk to the dish and the pakchoi offer a freshness of flavour that round out the dish. This is a wonderful meal, and the next time we visit it’ll be my turn to get it!

I ordered the braised chard timbale of roast tomato, haloumi & puy lentils with new potatoes, saffron-hazelnut butter and green beans, after which I scraped the plate clean. The wonderful softness of the timbale and its precious treasure within combined wonderfully with the perfectly cooked potatoes and the gentle sauce drizzed over them. I will add that I usually would never eat puy lentils in a fit. The restaurant has a knack of making you eat food you ordinarily would never enjoy and making you LOVE it. I’ve tried so many vegetables and herbs and types of food in there because I trust them to make the adventure and the risk worth it. The quality and the tenderness shown towards food, and each customers’ needs is extra-ordinary.

For our final course, I was given a dessert not featured on the menu, specially made for my delicate digestive system. I was lucky enough to be given a greengate plum crumble with a dollop of fresh whipped cream. The perfect sweetness of the crumble balanced the slight bitterness of the plums, and once again I almost licked my plate clean. My dessert sceptic ladyfriend ordered a fig cheesecake, and the verdict was a huge thumbs up.

We stayed the night in the café paradiso accommodation just upstairs, and the fact that in previous visits the owners and staff have been very gay friendly and unobtrusive  was a huge factor for me in deciding to stay there. The room was huge, with a double bed, couch, CD player and 3 huge wonderful windows facing out over Washington Street and looking towards the river. This is where one minor disadvantage comes into play. While I could sleep on a clothesline while World War 3 raged around me, my girlfriend found the noise from the street outside a bit of a disturbance. I was notified of this as I booked it, and I genuinely did not find this to be too much of a problem, however very light sleepers may have an issue with it.  Free teas, coffees, water and some chocolates were provided with the only chargeable item in the mini fridge being the wine. We also  received these amazing little spicy cashews nuts which I’m now obsessed with, I literally could eat plates of them. The bathroom was huge, with  double sinks, and showerheads for an invigorating morning wake-up shower.

The breakfast provided for the next morning as part of the package consisted of bread, crackers, natural yoghurt mixed with  sweet strawberries, some hot and sweet pepper jam, bluebell goats cheese and orange juice all presented in a picnic basket brought to the room while we were at dinner. Gluten and egg free alternatives were provided for the bread and crackers. The restaurant is closed on Sundays, so breakfast in the room is provided. Midweek and Saturdays the breakfast is in the restaurant dining area.

Overall the accommodation was comfortable, smartly decorated, very spacious and the staff working there were friendly and chatty while being respectful and allowing privacy both in the accommodation and at dinner.

The staff in the restaurant are well informed and seem to love the food in the restaurant also – when asked for recommendations, they were happy to give them. They’re attentive while not being invasive, and service is quick considering the complexity of the dishes and how full the restaurant always is, especially on weekends.

I simply cannot wait for our next trip there.

In terms of pricing, the restaurant is slightly expensive, but absolutely 100% worth the extra cost for the quality of food.

For the package we received, it was 100 euro each, for dinner, bed and breakfast for one night. There are other packages available and you can find out about these both on their website:

www.cafeparadiso.ie

or by calling them on

021 – 427 7939

In summary: Om nom nom nom zzzzzzzzzz Om nom nom nom nom

No related posts.

Evan Wolfson, from US organisation Freedom to Marry made the point of the journey Argentina has taken, both religiously and politically:

Today’s historic vote shows how far Catholic Argentina has come, from dictatorship to true democratic values, and how far the freedom to marry movement has come as twelve countries on four continents now embrace marriage equality.

Despite a protest organised by evangelical Christians and right wing Catholic groups that drew a whopping 60,000 protestors to a march on Congress the night before the vote, marriage was opened up to same sex couples by a Senate majority of 33-27 this morning.

Same-sex civil unions have been legalised in Uruguay, Buenos Aires and some states in Mexico and Brazil. Mexico City has legalised gay marriage. Colombia’s Constitutional Court granted same-sex couples inheritance rights and allowed them to add their partners to health insurance plans.

Argentina however – firmly supported by its president – has lead the way for the fight for full marriage rights for same-sex couples in South America. The new law broadly declares that “marriage provides for the same requisites and effects independent of whether the contracting parties are of the same or different sex.”

Well done Argentina – I hope our politicians here in Ireland are taking note!

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For those who aren’t aware, frape is the slang term generally used for the scenario when someone uses another person’s facebook account while pretending to be that person eg if I left my laptop unattended and a friend of mine posted up a status about me like”Rebecca loves the penis” or similar then that would be referred to as a “frape”, ie facebook rape.

However, what I said to start the discussion, and what I’d like to see discussed here is this:

Rebecca is uncomfortable with the word frape – I just think the act of rape is joked about and trivialised enough with language that already exists without inventing a new word. What do people think?

Well – what do you think? Am I being oversensitive? Or is my discomfort justified in a society where we don’t take rape seriously even when we should?

No related posts.

As usual, most of the weekend was spent with a vicious hangover, but I put it aside long enough to pop my head into the workshop on the queer women’s flag, where the first international women’s pride flag was envisaged and put together to represent women from all backgrounds who participate in pride. The symbols and colours were heavily discussed, an interesting discussion on the word queer was initiated and teased out.

The colours chosen were purple for dignity, white for integrity and green for growth – values the group wished to place at the centre of a women’s pride movement. I think it’s great and the workshop illustrated for me some of the best aspects of the weekend. The sense of community and the respect for diverse opinions – for example I’m not at all comfortable with use of the word queer, some women however identify quite strongly with it – was overwhelming in that room, and the sometimes bitter squabbling which I have witnessed in previous years at the women’s weekend was not present at all.

Of course that’s not to say there was no vicious fighting – the sumo wrestling tournament was a place for all the dyke drama to spill on to the mat and allowed lovely dykes to wear ridiculous suits and pummel each other to the soundtrack of a other lesbians puking with laughter. The first –hopefully – annual Women’s Weekend Sumo Championship proved to be one of the most hilarious experiences of my life. With a good friend of mine proving victorious in the championship and the holder of the cup until next year, I’m sure we can look forward to more fun and frolics then!

The Silversprings played host to the Saturday night party featuring Lonely and the Moose, The Lounge Lizards, Line dancing and DJ Claude until late – the craic was mighty and the banter was great. While I disagree with the very strict man-ban in place for the events at the weekend, this year I found the space to be very warm and welcoming, and not as aggressive as I’ve witnessed it in previous years.

The full program contained workshops on knitting, creative writing, soccer and tennis tournaments, speed friending and of course the annual fun weekend quiz in Loafers on Sunday afternoon. Food and produce stalls were in the South Parish community centre all day Saturday and tarot card reading was offered also.

Once again the weekend provided fun and entertainment to hundreds of women – I look forward to next year! Well done the committee for putting it together, and I hope everyone else gets the chance to experience the weekend at a point in the future.

Full details on this year’s Cork Women’s Fun Weekend can be found on http://www.corkwomensfunweekend.ie/

No related posts.

Though there is much debate about the need for a women’s weekend, and indeed the necessity for a man-ban at a number of the events, there is no doubt that this weekend will be as enjoyable as ever and a trip to the lesbian subculture that cannot be found at any other time of year.

The line-up follows more or less the same format as every year, but with some wonderful additions. On Thursday evening, the weekend will kick off in loafers with a local singer/songwriter Sarah Horgan, in Loafers, with what the program describes as “upbeat pop songs”.

On Friday, the new event that has everyone talking is showcased as the L.inc choir Mná Mná exhibit the wonders of an Irish lesbian musical about farmers. Yes farmers. The show is on in the Firkin Crane in Shandon. Tickets are €10 (if there’s any left!) and available to book on 021 4507487. I’ve been informed that any tickets left will be available on the door, so hopefully everyone will get to see this groundbreaking new work. Good luck ladies!

Saturday is the main day of events, with an array of workshops and talks lined up. The opening circle is at 11.30am in the South Parish Community Centre on White Street, and the rest of the talks and workshops will happen there for the day also. Angel Workshops, Tarot Card readings and Stress Management classes will all be taking place, but the highlights of the day seem to be the DIY sex toy workshop (…I look forward to seeing how the hygiene aspects are dealt with, if nothing else) and the open forum discussion on marriage. The open forum on marriage entitled Marriage- Not the Nuclear Option features input from Katherine O’ Donnell and Anna McCarthy, both LGBT activists who view the fight for marriage in this country very differently. Is marriage a state institution that we as LGBT people are entitled to be a part of, or is an outdated heterosexual power base that needs to be dismantled and reviewed on the whole? The Wall of History will also be viewable all day in the same venue.

A soccer tournament will start at 2pm in the Mardyke Sports Complex for all you sporting dykes wanting to show off and impress the ladies with your athleticism (I shall be sipping an ice tea on the sidelines and shouting abuse like a lady).

That evening, the Silversprings Hotel will play host to the legendary night-time events of the women’s weekend, starting at 8.30pm. Latino dancing, Claire O’ Mahony (Cork based singer/songwriter) and the wonderful Lounge Lizards will help us party the night away. DJ Claud Cunningham will be supplying the tunes, and I’m sure we’ll all be guaranteed to wake with sore heads on the Sunday morning…
…So what better than a bracing walk for those hangovers? Meeting at 11.30am in the Imperial Hotel, on the South Mall, for a stroll and a vomit around Cork city. Fabulous. Then it’s off to the tennis competition from 1-3pm in the Silversprings; registration is €5.

The mind-bogglingly hard lesbian quiz happens in Loafers at 4pm. Now admittedly, the one and only time I participated in this I was so hungover I couldn’t say my name (The Conservative Young Lesbians Against Fisting were robbed I tells ya!) but this quiz is really, really hard! It is not for the casual observer lesbian, this is for the hardcore, patriarchy bashing, homophobia squashing militant dyke – and it’s great! Hopefully I’ll see you there, I’m sure I’ll be propped up in a corner somewhere. There will be a DJ after this for more dancing and celebration – if you can take it.

On Monday, the last event will be the golf battle for the ‘Loafer’s Cup’ at the Lee Valley Golf Club, Ovens, Co. Cork. First tee time is 11.10am and the cost is €50 pp golf and €70 pp including transport and BBQ. If you’d like to attend this, pre-booking is apparently essential and you can do this by contacting corkwomensweekend@gmail.com
So that’s the line-up, I don’t know about you but I’m looking forward to handing in my last ever college essay and getting ready to party for it! See you at the bar in the Silversprings!

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I’d urge you to send letters to amazon and let them know this type of censorship is unacceptable.

• http://markprobst.livejournal.com/15293.html
• http://www.femmerotic.com/journal/2009/04/12/amazon-my-arse/
• http://booksquare.com/open-letter-to-amazon-regarding-recent-policy-changes/
• http://www.haydenthorne.net/2009/04/why-am-i-not-surprised.html
• http://niurarebooks.blogspot.com/2009/04/amazon-censors-glbt-literature.html

The saga can be followed on twitter as well at: #amazonfail

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26 Douglas St, Cork

Now that I’ve managed to hit middle age at a grand old 22, I have begun to yearn for the nostalgic days of the Cork gay scene, when the perfect night out involved guzzling alcopops in Loafers followed by a sprint to The Other Place club to get in before 11 o clock for free. Loafers provided a safe, welcoming place for me to come out, get drunk and make a tit out of myself aged 18. Friendships were formed, girls were flirted with, girls were gently let down, girls were not so gently let down, drinks were spilled, dances were danced, and everyone had their asses burned against the electric fire. With this in mind, I’ve decided to share the wonder of the homely comfort of Loafers and its inviting charm.

Firmly ensconced in an area affectionately known as “Lesboville” by those in the know, Loafers is a quaint local bar, which happens to be populated by gays. Its simple, cosy decor conjures the feeling of being in a local bar in a quiet town, and while generally frequented by an older, more lesbian crowd than the quasi nightclub Instinct, Loafers has proven itself to be both the perfect place for a quiet get together with old friends as well as a the ideal launch pad for a wild night. The pool table, with its efficient blackboard system of queuing (presumably to prevent some sort of Lesbopocalypse, should an upstart baby dyke attempt to skip the queue) offers up some of those genuinely hilarious drunken moments of pool bravado which lesbians are so prone to. The staff, to their credit, are friendly and approachable, with the real feeling of community and familiarity acting like an old pair of comfy pants on a Sunday night. As someone who doesn’t drink beer I can’t give a firsthand account of the quality of the pints, but I’ve been told they’re fairly mighty, and the prices are standard for Cork, with drink deals available on certain products and on certain evenings (see the bar’s Bebo for details). The beer garden provides a welcome breath of fresh air, or smoky air, depending on your perspective, and its welcoming benches and heat lamps allow for the enjoyment of year round outdoor drinking. If there was to be any criticisms of Loafers, it is that on occasion the feeling of community in the bar can make a newcomer feel like an outsider to the whole thing, but to be fair, that is hardly the fault of the owner or the staff, with manager Rena always doing her best to be a friendly face behind the bar and amongst the customers. Also, the music sometimes tends to wander from the homely to the downright erratic, with pumping dance remixes jarring somewhat with the cosy fire and couches in the corner.

Loafers has been the site of many great conversations and shenanigans during my formative years as a young wee baby dyke, and I’m happy to recommend it to anyone who’d like a nice quiet pint of a night, or as a starter before they move on to crazier venues.

021-497 5529

e-mail: loafers.cork@gmail.com

Bebo: www.bebo.com/loaferscork

Opening Hours:

Monday – Friday: 5pm to close.

Saturday and Sunday: 2pm to close.

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The blogs and gay message boards have been buzzing with talk about Brian McFadden’s recent comments on a New Zealand radio show about the colour pink, and more specifically, its fraught relationship with heterosexuality. Of course, Brian being a fool with an overinflated sense of himself, decided that now was the perfect time to unleash his homophobia and say the following:

“If you are not gay, a man should not be wearing pink. Saying pink is a form of red is the same as saying homosexual is a form of male.”

(Source:http://www.contactmusic.com/news.nsf/article/mcfadden%20outrages%20gay%20radio%20listeners_1077687

Also, listen to the following:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybuPGyx3kPE for the full effect.

What does that even mean? Is he just bit of a thick and completely misarticulated his very basic thoughts? Has he just completed some new groundbreaking research in a lab in his garden shed, and between strumming on his guitar and belting out some ballads he has discovered that gays are actually a type of genderless wood elf? What’s going on Brian?

You know what Brian, you’re cruising for a Slayer shaped boot to the face. The outcry about this has been minimal on our side of the pond, perhaps reflective more of Brian’s rather sickly star status than an apathy towards homophobia. You do have to wonder however, if his comments were a slur upon another minority, would the outcry be much louder?

And I have to wonder in all of this, what does Mark, his former Westlife bandmate and out gay man has to think about this. I’d like to think he rang Brian up and gave him a bollocking, or at least a “what the hell are you talking about??”. I’m sure however, if this is the way Brian carries on, that they’re not talking, but for a multitude of reasons. Bad form Brian. You absolute tosser.

Oh, and what’s this I see? Brian, a full blooded male, wearing pink? Hypocritical, homophobic TOSSER.

No related posts.

In recent times, a lot of noise being around  the issue same-sex couples has concerned the difference and division between gay marriage and civil unions, and which, in theory and in practice, are the gay community’s best options.  There are those who say that civil unions are no different to gay marriage, but in both ideological, legal, constitutional and practical issues, this isn’t in any way true.

The substantial differences between civil unions and civil marriage evolve from the fact that the former is dealt with legislatively, with our rights being laws we are deemed equal enough to receive, while the latter is a constitutionally protected entity with enshrined rights and responsibilities. Civil unions will never be equal to civil marriage, not in the eyes of the law. Our relationships will still be second class.

On a more specific problem, the right to be eligible to adopt as a couple will not be dealt with within the Civil Union bill currently being drafted by the Irish govt. Our families will not be protected, and our children will be marginalised even further.

Immigration(as in, the right for a non Irish/EU partner to live as your partner in Ireland) rights are likely not to be included in this bill also.

On a more idealistic note, heterosexual couples will continue to be “more equal” than gay couples  if we settle for civil unions. I do not believe in incremental justice or equality. Our relationships are either considered valid or they are not. To create a further tier of inequality seems retrograde at best, downright disgraceful at worst.

Civil unions are not equality. I do believe that perhaps there is an argument that civil unions should exist for all couples, regardless of sexuality, who do not wish to enter the institution of marriage, but that should be outside of the availability of marriage to same-sex couples.

Do not accept 2nd class equality, fight for the right to marry now.

UPDATE: Govt publishes Civil Partnership Bill: http://www.justice.ie/en/JELR/Pages/General_Scheme_of_Civil_Partnership_Bill

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