Two months following Pride Toronto’s decision to apply for charitable status, questions remain about the benefits and drawbacks of a successful application. Pride Toronto, currently a not-for-profit, is responsible for the city’s annual Pride celebrations and for the World Pride 2014, which will take place in Toronto.

Charities are exempt from income and property taxes — and crucially, their donors are exempt from paying income tax on donations.

“Most nonprofits believe being charitable enhances their ability to raise money from the public,” explains Doug Kerr, a member of the executive committee for the Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Trans Giving Network. “Some sources of funding like foundations can only make grants to charities — organizations like community foundations and the United Way.”

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Hysterical artistic power on stage at Hysteria

his month sees the return of Hysteria, Buddies in Bad Times’ biennial celebration of female artists. The 10-day festival, now in its fifth outing, features dance, film, music, theatre, spoken word and visual art. Named by festival director Moynan King after what was once considered a peculiarly female affliction, Hysteria reclaims female artistic power.

“In a way the hysterics were performers,” says King, referring to a 19th-century series of photographs taken by doctors at a hospital in Paris of women in the throes of hysteria. Women posed for the photos in an attempt to buy their way out of the institution. “There’s no way these photographs could be authentic, because photography was a long, painstaking process,” says King, “so the hysterics of all of our ideas are performance artists.”

This year’s festival features an international lineup of performers, including two queer artists based in New York — poet and novelist Staceyann Chin and drag performer milDred. Other highlights include: a retrospective by queer comedian Shawna Dempsey of her collaborations with Lorri Millan; Spin, an evening of bicycle-themed entertainment written by Evalyn Parry; and Mass Hysteria, a cabaret of five-minute performances opened by singer Sharron Matthews.

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In a case before the Ontario Superior Court this month, an Ottawa man is challenging the ban on blood donation by gay men. Currently, any man who has had sex with another man since 1977 is “indefinitely deferred” from giving blood. Not only is this ban unnecessarily broad, it does a disservice to the very people it is supposed to protect.

The reasoning behind the ban is that gay men in Canada account for 60 percent of HIV-positive people, and for nearly half of new infections. All blood collected by Canadian Blood Services is screened for HIV, but the justification for the indefinite deferral of gay men is that the virus is not immediately detectable after infection—it can be several weeks before it shows up on a blood test. Clearly, these are compelling arguments for caution.

Toronto sexual health clinics deal with the issue of detection by waiting three months after a risky sexual encounter to confirm a negative result. Blood agencies in some countries subject gay men and other high-risk groups to a six- or twelve-month deferral period after last sexual contact to make sure the results of screenings are accurate. So why have CBS and Health Canada refused to rethink the total ban?

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In yesterday’s blog post The Troubling Case of Roman Polanski, Steven W. Beattie called Roman Polanski “criminally, if not morally culpable” for drugging and sodomizing a 13-year-old girl. Then he asked other writers to empathize, not with his victim, but with Polanski himself.

Let’s be clear. This is not only a case of unlawful sex. This is about a particular category of unlawful sex: rape. The rape was pled down to unlawful sex with a minor in court, which is not unusual, but we cannot plead down reality, as Beattie seems willing to do.

The most offensive portion of Beattie’s defense of Polanski is his preoccupation with whether Polanski’s 13-year-old victim was a child. Beattie says she was not, in disagreement with Kate Harding, the Merriam-Webster dictionary, and the American legal system. A 13-year-old is not an adult, and to argue otherwise in order to make Polanski’s crime understandable goes beyond empathy and into justification.

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A provision governing hate speech in Canada is under the microscope this week, after a tribunal of the Canadian Human Rights Commission concluded that it violates the right to freedom of expression guaranteed in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. This body doesn’t have the power to strike down Section 13(1) of the Human Rights Act, but the tribunal’s reluctance to apply the section against freedomsite.org webmaster Marc Lemire has set an interesting precedent and kicked up renewed debate over the right to free speech.

Queer people being one of the groups that anti-hate speech laws are supposed to protect, the outcome of this debate could have consequences for LGBT advocacy organizations. Queer activists are divided on the subject of hate speech. Some believe that the kind of homophobic and racist rhetoric that appears on websites like Marc Lemire’s contributes to an unsafe environment for the groups it targets, and should be proscribed. Others, wary of censorship, are willing to let the haters say whatever they like and hope that in the process they expose themselves as irrational and crazy.

This has tended to be the approach of LGBT equality campaigners Egale Canada. In 2005, they refused to endorse a complaint before the Alberta Human Rights Commission against conservative pastor Stephen Boissoin, the author of a letter to the Red Deer Advocate newspaper denouncing the “homosexual agenda.” Egale’s Executive Director said at the time that the organization wanted Boissoin’s assertions “aired, debated and subjected to public scrutiny.”

On the face of it, the director’s statement sits a little uneasily with Egale’s ongoing campaign against “Murder Music,” Jamaican dancehall music that features violently homophobic lyrics. A letter Egale sent to HMV and iTunes asking them to cease sales of music by particular dancehall artists last year made specific reference to the Section 13 provision against hate speech.

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Several people were injured in Rome yesterday when two letter bombs were thrown into a gay neighbourhood bar. The attack wasn’t an isolated incident, but part of a pattern of escalating violence against gay people in Italy which some speculate has been fuelled by the election of Rome Mayor Gianni Alemanno, a member of the post-fascist National Alliance party.

It is hard to see these attacks as anything short of terrorism. Something pre-meditated like a letter bomb attack is in a different category from spontaneous acts of street violence. The intention behind it is to make gay people in the region feel under siege.

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Along with apples and sweet potatoes, September brings with it a crop of new television, including the return of campy small-town soap opera Paradise Falls. Now in its third season on Showcase, Paradise Falls is packed with queer characters such as gay B&B operator Sacha Martinelli, played by Salvatore Antonio, and bisexual goth Trish Simpkin, played by Michelle Latimer. It’s arguably the gayest Canadian drama on TV.

Paradise Falls is a tiny town in an unnamed province, the exteriors of which are filmed in scenic Muskoka. It’s a place where, as Antonio says, “anything can happen and anything does happen.” But small-town life has its drawbacks, especially for the show’s queer characters. The new season starts out well for Sacha with his wedding to boyfriend Nick (Cameron Graham). But things aren’t always so easy for Trish, who Latimer describes as “kind of an outcast in town.”

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The other day I stumbled across a petition asking that the British government apologize to Alan Turing for “the tragic consequences of prejudice that ended [his] life and career,” and formally acknowledge the significance of his work.

Here’s some background. Alan Turing is most readily associated with the Turing Test, which sought to demonstrate whether a machine could think. The test, basically, involves a text-based conversation a human conducts with another human and with a machine. If he can’t tell whether he’s conversing with a human or computer, the machine passes the test.

The 1950s paper in which Turing laid out the test, and the conception of intelligence that it embodied, became one of the most influential in philosophical literature. It is still essential to most philosophical discussion of artificial intelligence and the essence of human consciousness.

Even more significantly, Turing was a codebreaker during the Second World War, ultimately devising a machine that could decipher the Germans’ Enigma Code. The Enigma Machine was so useful that some historians claim the information it intercepted hastened the end of the war by as much as two years.

Turing was also gay, a crime for which he was criminally prosecuted and chemically castrated. The conviction ended his career, and at the age of 41 he committed suicide.

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Gay men must be suffering an image crisis this summer. First the spandex disaster that was Brüno assaulted our movie theatres, now Perez Hilton is on the front cover of The Advocate. How embarrassing.

I haven’t seen Brüno, because I’m trying to pretend it doesn’t exist—an attitude which seems to have caught on, judging by the film’s box office nosedive. Perez Hilton, however, just refuses to disappear.

For those of you blessed with selective memory, Hilton made a minor splash at this year’s MuchMusic Awards after getting punched in the face by the Black Eyed Peas’ manager—it turned out, because Hilton called the manager “a faggot.” Add this incident to Hilton’s habit of drawing semen and penises on the faces of male celebrities pictured on his blog, and he’s made a career out of being a 12-year-old boy.

Hilton is not just incidentally homophobic—I think it’s part of his success.

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There’s only so much homophobia the media can get away with these days without having to issue a hasty apology. But when it comes to reporting on trans issues, stories about ’sex swaps’ and ‘pregnant men’ are still depressingly mainstream. What effect does this kind of attention have on a minority that is already contending with higher than average rates of violence, unemployment and street harassment?

If you haven’t had a long wait at the dentist lately, you might have missed a story in tabloid magazine Closer from June 2009 titled ‘Sex Swap Shock: “I was a hunky Becks lookalike but I starved to become Posh”’.

The article describes 29 year-old Chrisie Edkins’ transition from male to female, and the title sets the tone for what follows. Edkins is referred to throughout by male pronouns and by her male birth name, which she no longer goes by.

“They said, ‘We think before you looked a bit like Beckham and now you’re a bit like Posh, and we’d like to get some photos and have you tell your heartwarming story,’” says Edkins, who agreed to be interviewed for the piece because she hoped her story would inspire to other trans women.

“But they’ve insulted me every three lines and made me look like an idiot and like Victoria Beckham is my idol.”

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