The Wheel and Axle

Out Tongan Olympic swimmer Amini Fonua rightfully gave The Daily Beast the #burn.

There is absolutely no excuse to The Daily Beast’s stunt of an “article” – an article that ultimately served no true journalistic purpose.

Their faux-journalist – a straight white privileged male named Nico Hines – wrote an article that was, as The Slate perfectly put it, “sleazy, dangerous, and wildly unethical.” In it, Hines wrote about going on Tinder and Grindr as he wandered through the Olympic Village in Rio; he zero’ed in on Grindr (because, you know, gays are more promiscuous), then proceeded to out several gay athletes he met through the dating app.

Oh, he didn’t name them directly. No, that would be wrong. He only proceeded to describe them in detail, including their statistics, their events, and their goddamn nationalities. Because, you know, Google doesn’t exist, and no one would ever figure out who these people are.

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Photo credits: Gay Times

Thank you, Gay Times, for this wonderful feature on LGBT athletes heading over to Rio for the 2016 Olympics. This year, we apparently have a record number of LGBT participants in the event.

Or perhaps, this might just be a year where we have a record number of out and proud participants, for I cannot imagine all prior events have had no (secretly) LGBTs amongst the athletes.

And so this year still marks a pretty good milestone for our community – for now we are diving headfirst into the pool outly and proudly without qualms.

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Just as I wrote recently, certain sectors have begun (and continue) to ignore the inherent hate crime slash homophobic nature of last weekend’s horrific Orland massacre. These people have chosen instead to insist that this attack was purely terroristic, motivated by religious extremism, and that choosing to target an entire club full of queers was completely and totally random and not at all deliberate.

Hey, keep that homophobia checked in, why don’t you? And instead, let’s intensify your chosen hate du jour, which in this case would be Islamophobia and xenophobia.

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Photos: http://attitude.co.uk

… and not just mere statistics.

So many lives lost, and we will remember them all.

Our hearts go to the families, friends, and loved ones that they left behind.

And because of their inspiration and sacrifice:

We will not be silenced by fear.

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Less than a week after I wrote about IDAHOT and the continued struggle of the LGBT community around the world against hatred and violence, Omar Mateen massacred fifty people and injured fifty-three others when he stormed the Pulse gay club in Orlando, Florida. It is now the worst mass shooting in the history of the United States and their deadliest terrorist attack since 9/11.

And make no mistake about it: this was a terrorist attack. Omar Mateen had pledged allegiance to ISIS during the attack itself.

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I won’t lie and say that there are no closet cases that irritate me. I’m not perfect, and there are certain types I hold in disdain. They fall into two categories:

• The closet cases who compensate for it by being homophobic and are assholes towards other gay people. These closet cases, in my opinion, deserve a lot of rightful shaming for being vile hypocrites.
• The closet cases who use unsuspecting women as beards in order to give off the illusion that they are straight. Often, this type of relationship results in major pain for the woman involved, and in some cases, can also lead to abuse. (I’m 50/50 on closet cases who date women who know the truth and are willing parties in order to help cover up for the guy; I guess that depends on the situation.)

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