Eerie Queerie is a manga written by Shuri Shiozu. It puts a twist on the typical high-school yaoi plot (boy has strange feelings for another boy, the two by chance become lovers, etc.). The main character is Mitsuo Shiozu, who has a body that can be occupied by dead spirits. Another young man, Hasunuma, catches on to these supernatural shenanigans. After a freak incident in which a school-girl spirit possesses Mitsuo and confesses her love to Hasunuma, Mitsuo and Hasunuma become a gay couple, under the intense eyes of classmates. However, the two hit it off, while subject to the usual zany antics by spirits.

Although I don't for a minute doubt the validity of this statement I'd like to offer my own slant on this particular peculiarity.

Firstly I'm not sure that guys particularly find lesbians per se a huge turn on, I believe it's more to do with the willing suspension of disbelief that men seem to be capable of when watching pornography coupled with the fact that lesbian acts in porn are rarely performed by genuine lesbians - I'll elaborate.

Men are turned on by pornography in general more than women as they are more prone to graphic visual stimulus than the fairer sex (ie: we're all pervs). Secondly the male pornography viewer is capable of allowing themselves to think the the women involved are actually enjoying themselves when in reality the female protagonists are, by and large, heterosexual. The fact that they are heterosexual and are usually seen later on in said porno copulating with a man can allow the male viewer to beleive (or at least fantasize) that he might at some point in his life be lucky enough to indulge in a similar menage a trois.

Conversely, male actors in gay movies are usually homosexual due in no small part to the disgust (largely nutured by society) instilled in a heterosexual male at the thought of indulging in sexual acts with another male.

The fact that the protagonists in a gay male movie are usually gay doesn't leave the female viewer with much of an option to imagine herself joining in.

I doubt very much that if a guy was to see two genuine lesbians 'getting it on' that he would be as excited about the idea as if he knew that they might really be interested in men.

Footnote: I conceed to girlotron that I am generalising somewhat (if only for the sake of brevity) but I still contest that the majority of female porn protagonists are straight, and to quote Phoebe from 'Friends' "And then there are bisexuals, but some just say they're kidding themselves".

Tom Robinson, British musician and gay icon, was born on 1st June 1950. His musical background during his childhood was confined to singing as a boy soprano in local choirs until his voice broke – and this sign of adolescence was swiftly followed by an awareness that he was gay. That's a troublesome realisation, even today, in 1960's Britain, at a Quaker boarding school, it was devastating.

At the time, homosexuality was still a crime, and punishable by prison – the sexual revolution was only just finding its feet and hadn't got as far as embracing acceptance of non-standard sexuality. Gays were unnatural, sinful, objects of hatred – so Tom, took that hatred on board and applied it to himself. Hopelessly and unrequitedly in love with a schoolmate, he attempted suicide by taking an overdose of pills at the age of 16.

Luckily for him, the Friends School at Saffron Waldon was run by an understanding and tolerant headmaster, Kenneth Nicholson. So, instead of being expelled in disgrace, he was transferred to Finchden Manor in Kent, a therapeutic community in a rambling Elizabethan house run for "disturbed adolescents", by what Tom describes as "a formidable 75-year-old" called George Lyward. There he was, at least, amongst people who shared his sense of alienation, and he stayed for 6 years. Therapy consisted simply of communal living – fifty boys and ten staff - chores and so on, and boys stayed until they were ready to leave and face the outside world. During his time there, blues singer Alexis Korner, himself a Finchden old boy, visited to perform an 'unplugged' set for the residents. It proved to be an inspirational performance for Tom – it's what he puts his own decision to pursue a career in music down to.

Together with two friends, Hereward Kaye and Raphael Doyle, he formed an acoustic band called Café Society in the early 70's in London, and became part of the emerging gay scene. The band was discovered by Ray Davies of the Kinks who produced their self-titled first album, which sold an abysmal 600 or so copies. The trio didn't last much longer, but Tom wasn't disheartened – he was too busy finding love and getting involved with campaigning movements for gay rights and various other left-wing causes concerned with equality and social justice.

In 1977, he formed the Tom Robinson Band (Tom on vocals and bass, Danny Kustow on guitar, Mark Ambler on keyboards and Dolphin Tayor on drums), an overtly political group, that hit the scene just at the right time – amongst the anger and rebellion of punk. His first hit 2-4-6-8 Motorway was an apolitical rock track, a stomping kind of thing that appears on CDs of music to drive to, but he followed it up with Glad to be Gay, which the BBC banned instantly, and which equally instantly became an anthem for the gay rights movement, as the music press latched onto it with fervour.

It's a bitter, biting and occasionally humorous number, which is incredibly singable and remains THE Tom Robinson song – indeed, it has evolved constantly, starting as a commentary on police, press and public attitudes to homosexuals, and, over time, covering celebrated prosecutions, AIDS, in-fighting within the gay community, police entrapment of politicians and celebrities, press treatment of protesters at Greenham Common, paranoia about paedophilia and the internet, The Matthew Shepherd case, the gay community's attacks on Tom personally – of which more later – and often included a triumphant statement of position "We're lesbian women, we're men who are gay/We're here and we're human and... won't go away". It incidentally also made him the first musician in the UK to openly 'come out'.

The band's 1978 debut album Power In The Darkness was a massive success, going gold, but the follow up, 1979's TRB2 failed to impress, the members of TRB started fighting, and the band fell apart.

In the early 80's, Tom formed Sector 27 with Jo Burt, and released an eponymous album produced by Steve Lillywhite (one-time husband of singer Kirsty MacColl) which was received well by critics, but only got a lukewarm reception from the buying public, although the band played to enthusiastic audiences in America, on a tour which included a gig at Madison Square Gardens on the same bill as The Police. Immediately afterwards, however, Robinson and Burt went their separate ways, leaving Tom pretty much broke.

After spending time living in a friend's spare room in Hamburg , where he says he had a nervous breakdown, he returned to the UK, and the Top Ten, in 1983 with the single War Baby, from the album North by Northwest. and in 1984, he was offered a show as a broadcaster on the BBC World Service, following in Alexis Korner's footsteps.

He soon moved to the BBC proper, working on Radio One occasionally, before becoming an increasingly regular contributor to Radio Four, where he fronted his own show The Locker Room" between 1992 and 1995, a kind of antithesis to those shows for women that pushed the envelope and let them voice concerns for things outside the emotional and nurturing – this was a show for and by men, which allowed them to explore their emotions and personal issues openly; it caused something of a stir.

Also for Radio Four, he produced a Sony Award winning history of gay music, called You've Got to Hide Your Love Away. There's a certain sweet irony to that, given the BBC's ban of Glad to be Gay two decades earlier.

While all this was going on, however, Tom's personal life was developing. He'd struck up a friendship with a person he'd met and been attracted to at a 1982 Gay Switchboard benefit, friendship had developed into love, the pair had become lovers and moved in together. These things happen, of course – but not usually between a gay man and a woman. The British tabloids Robinson had pillioried so often loved it – they had a positive field day when his partner (whose name has never been revealed to protect her privacy) had their first child. There were rumours of a marriage, that Robinson had "turned heterosexual", and the gay establishment were quick to attack him and call him a traitor – hence that verse from Glad to be Gay I mentioned earlier. It goes:

For 21 years now I've fought for the right
For people to love just whoever they like
But the right-on and righteous are out for my blood
Now I live with my kid and a woman I love
Well if gay liberation means freedom for all
A label is no liberation at all
I'm here and I'm queer and I do what I do
And I'm not gonna wear... a straightjacket for you

Because, despite his love for his partner, Robinson still calls himself gay – not bisexual. It's men he likes, he says, and the fact that he has fallen in love and sleeps with a single specific woman doesn't change his natural orientation. There's no reason to doubt him either, given the number of men who lived so called "normal family lives" for years before coming out; the main difference between them and Tom Robinson is that his partner already knows he's gay.

The experience of loving a woman did lead to Tom exploring the subject of bisexuality more in his work, with a 1990's album entitled Having it Both Ways , and the song Blood Brothers in 1998 which took the awards for Best Song and Best Male Artist at the Gay & Lesbian American Music Awards in New York.

He is still an active campaigner for many of the causes he's embraced all his life, including Amnesty International, anti-racist groups and The Samaritans, has a four-nightly show every week on the BBC digital network 6 Music, and runs numerous creative workshops for adults and teenagers, when he isn't writing or performing – he also keeps tabs on the doings of his brother, TV producer and poet Matthew Robinson, and records them on his website at www.tomrobinson.com, where he also keeps his blog, and where the majority of the material for this biography was sourced.

Discography – Albums

CAFE SOCIETY
Cafe Society
TOM ROBINSON BAND
Power in the Darkness 1978 Reissued 1994
TRB TWO1979 Reissued 1994
Tom Robinson Band 1981 (Compilation)
The Winter Of 89 1992
Rising Free: very best of TRB

SECTOR 27
Sector 27 1980
Sector 27 Complete 1996

TOM ROBINSON
North by Northwest 1982 - Released on CD 1987
Cabaret 79 1982
Hope and Glory 1984
Still Loving You 1986
The Collection1987 (Compilation)
Back in the Old Country 1989 (Compilation UK Only)
Living in a Boom Time 1992
Love Over Rage1994
Having it Both ways 1996
The Undiscovered Tom Robinson 1998
Tom Robinson - the Gold Collection
Home From Home 1999 (+ Band)
Smelling Dogs 2001 A collection of poems, letters, rants, advice and incidental music

TOM ROBINSON & CREW
Midnight at the Fringe 1987

TOM ROBINSON & JAKKO JAKSZYK
We Never Had It So Good 1990

I have been reading many nodes on homosexuality today. Nodes about being proud of it, nodes defending it, nodes ranting about the homophobes. The disturbing issue here is that in nearly all the nodes I read, and I read at least 30, the heterosexual noders who wrote amazing nodes, I mean succinct, intelligent, well written nodes, all had to write: "I'm not a homosexual" or "I'm a heterosexual".
Why is this? Who cares what your preference is? You just finished noding that you didn't care, that you were cool with being called a faggot, a homo etc. By telling us all that you in fact are not homosexual in a homosexual node, is quite indicative of not really being okay with the whole thing. Your sexual preference was not an issue; it had no relevance to the node.
This of course pertains only to the nodes I read but! I think the magic to a well written node is to keep people wondering at least a bit, and when it comes to debates some may say that because the person was a heterosexual speaking strongly about homosexuality it may or may not have had more worth. Not so, the strength comes from not saying whether you are or not, because it does not matter. That is exactly what the node was trying to prove and that is exactly what you have proven by not saying either way.
Sexual preference has no weight in measuring a person's self worth, so why tell us you are or are not?

Etymology

The first definite use of the term gay to mean homosexual came in 1929, a double entendre sung by dandies in Noel Coward's operetta Bitter Sweet:

Pretty boys, witty boys, You may sneer
At our disintegration.
Haughty boys, naughty boys,
Dear, dear, dear!
Swooning with affectation...
And as we are the reason
For the "Nineties" being gay,
We all wear a green carnation.

(Green Carnation is the name of the song, and an Oscar Wilde reference; he was famous for wearing them.)

The term was probably used this way for some time before, though, and had had a sexual connotation since at least the 1800s, when it meant promiscuous (a gay house was a brothel). By the turn of the century (the plot thickens) a geycat was a young hobo, perhaps in an implicitly sexual relationship with his older charge.

Gay-meaning-homosexual began to be used by non-gays only beginning in the late 1960s, concurrently with an acknowledgement of the existence of homosexuality and, in parts of the counterculture, a relative acceptance of it.

Ghey

Throughout the last few decades, of course, gay was also a general-purpose perjorative (more common as fag or faggot). Being homosexual was taboo until very recently, and its undesirability axiomatic to most people; calling someone gay was often less a serious accusation than a more potent equivalent to you're stinky!. (In my early-'90s elementary school, jinx was accompanied by the admonition, "if you talk, you're gay!")

Fag, like its racial equivalent, is dropping from general usage, but the perjorative gay remains (though mostly not in reference to someone). In parts of the U.S., it's the predominant usage, ubiquitous among young people.

And so we're faced with a dilemna. Most of these kids, raised in an era of increasing tolerance toward gays, don't intend bigotry. Some have gone so far as to type the word out as ghey to further detatch it from former usage. The "language evolves, deal with it" crowd paints the evolution of the term simply --

1. happy
2. homosexual (with regard to a person)
3. lame (with regard to a mode of thinking, style, computer game, etc.)

-- but of course, it's not simple.

• Gay, to non-gays, always meant both "homosexual" and "all manner of ungood"; the two were equivalent.
• The non-negative, homosexual gay can also be used to refer to non-persons -- a hairstyle, maybe, or a Wilde-eqsue worldview. (I'm ambivalent about assigning meaning this way, but people certainly do it. There are many traits overrepresented among gay people that have nothing to do with being attracted to members of the same sex.)
• What happens if the perjorative gay colonizes all the available mental terrain as the homosexual gay did before it, permanently monopolizing the word? Homosexual can't be fallen back on; to many gays, "gay" is not just a less-formal synonym.
• The specific meaning of the modern kid-used "gay" also bears examination: it has exactly the connotations of typical homophobic stereotype: spectacularly uncool, totally lacking in self-awareness.