January 2008

Hello Sweet Readers.  How was your week? I know I promised you an article about drag queens this week and I am kind of keeping that promise. I am writing to you about a little history and on a very notorious female impersonator. I’m sure most of you have heard about, or seen, either the opera itself or the movie called Madame Butterfly and know the tragic story. In the story a U.S. Naval officer named Pinkerton meets and becomes infatuated by a beautiful 15 year old geisha named Cio-Cio San. Their love affair produces a son and when Pinkerton is sent home to the U.S. he comes and takes the child back with him. Leaving Butterfly alone and heartbroken. The only thing she believes she has left to do is to commit Hara Kiri, and so in the closing scene of the opera she does just that, thus ending her tragic story. In 1988 a man named David Henry Hwang wrote a play inspired by the opera, Madame Butterfly, by Giacomo Puccini. While being inspired by Madame Butterfly, Hwang’s play entitled M Butterfly is actually based on a real life story. One that hollywood itself couldn’t top for love and drama and espionage and intrege.  The real life characters of the story are Bernard Boursicot, a french diplomat sent to China in 1964, to work as an accountant in the embassy. He soon meets Shi Pei-Pu, a Peking opera singer (unaware that in the Peking opera that there aren’t any female performers and that all female parts are played by a dan) and a romance begins. As the story progresses and their affair continues, Shi convinces Bernard that her life is in danger and he agrees to pass her certain secrets in order to protect her. In 1965, Shi even claimed to become pregnant with Bernard’s child and did indeed produce a son (whom she has bought from a doctor in the Xinjiang region) and they named him Betrand. In 1979, Bernard returned to Paris and lost contact with Shi until 1982, when he was able to bring Shi and Betrand to France. They lived as a family although doing so to the raised eyebrows of the French counterespionage services. Bernard was taken in and later confessed to passing at least 150 classified documents to Shi, but claimed he only did so to protect her life. They were both arrested and during their trial, in 1983, the prosecution introduced evidence revealing that Shi was indeed a man. Bernard was so traumatized by the news that he attempted to commit suicide in his jail cell. Shi was deported back to China after serving her sentence. If you are interested in the rest of the story you will find it at the following site: http://www.answers.com/topic/bernard-boursicot  Also, while doing my reasearch, I have found a very interesting fact:  female impersonators are nothing new, at least as far as theatre and old world are concerned. Since in early theatre, females were not permitted to act, males performed the roles of both men and women. These types of performances can be traced back as far as 200 B.C. to 219 A.D. Bet none of you realized that female impersonators were actually part of our history that long ago did you? Now that I have laid the groundwork for the subject of drag queens, you can look forward to other articles about them at a later date. I would also like to extend a sincere heartfelt thank you to sextoys and hereinpburg for all their help in the research of this article. Thank You both darlins, your suggestions were of great help! *HUGS* 

Until next week Dear Ones, Love and Hugz! Leeza

sweetcinnyluvsu@yahoo.com

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Hello Sweet Readers! In a prefect world, everyone would be accepted for who they are or what they believe or how they chose to live their lives. But let’s face the facts, we don’t live in a perfect world. The differences we have make us each unique and nobody out there is just the same as you, that is a truly wonderful thing.

     It upsets me that we can’t all accept each other’s differences and learn to live on this earth in harmony. God created us all and he didn’t say that one person is better or has more favor than any other. Ok, you might say, but he chose the nation of Israel as his people, but you must also know that he punished them when they turned from him and that he also made a way for everybody to be saved and we must remember we are all the same in his eyes.

     But I am not here to preach to you or to say that what you believe is wrong, that definitely is not my place. I truly believe what Jesus said when he told the people, “before you try to take the splinter out of your neighbor’s eye, be sure you have removed the log from your own” . In other words, don’t judge others when there are things in your life that make you less than perfect. As my uncle used to always say, there was only one perfect man who walked on this earth and they nailed him to a cross.

     I do have a purpose for this rambling and I am going to tell you what it is right now. It is hard enough for gays to live in this world with all the people who want to tell you that you are wrong or you are going to Hell or you are sinners. You do not need to be judging and showing prejudice against one another. I keep hearing unity in the community, yet when I am in the chat room sometimes I do not see much unity when I watch the way you talk to each other.

     Come on people, of all the people on this earth you should be able to accept and understand each other. Not everybody in these chat rooms has a loving understanding family to support them. Some of them are all alone in the world except for the people they reach out to online in the chat rooms. Some of them live in fear of being found out and not accepted or even physically harmed for the way they have chose to live. When they come in the chat room and reach out to the one group of people that they think will accept them, they find themselves being judged, mocked, and belittled. If your fellow gays cannot feel welcome in their own community, where are they supposed to go?

     Please, let’s try harder to be more accepting of each other and to reach out to those who are alone and struggling with their feelings! Truly you do need to find unity in the Community!

     Until next week Dear Ones, Love and Many Hugs! Leeza
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Hello Sweet Readers! For my first article of the new year I have chosen a very hard subject to cover. Here in the United States we have so many organizations and magazines and television programs and even movies that are totally gay oriented and openly discuss the subject of gay life and the ups and downs of being gay.

 All of us know who Matthew Shepherd was and about The Stonewall in NYC and the gay rights riots there. We have read or been told about a gay individual who has been beaten up or verbally assaulted because of their lifestyle and their choice of sexual partners.

I will agree that gays and lesbians are treated badly, but, if you have been assaulted in America you can go to the police and you will find help and support and the person will be prosecuted if they are caught. While researching this article, I came across a place where if you are found to be homosexual you could be executed. Iran.

            The president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has some very outspoken and controversial beliefs on people’s rights, gays, and even the Holocaust. He claims that Iranian woman have “the highest levels of freedom”, freedom of what? To breathe?  They don’t have many other freedoms and are generally treated as possessions. When asked about the Holocaust he called it a myth and said that the Jews act like they are better than God and religion and that they made up the whole thing. He even said that they should move the whole nation of Israel to somewhere in Europe, Canada, or the United States. When asked about gays in Iran he replied, ““We don’t have homosexuals like in your country. We don’t have that in our country. We don’t have this phenomenon; I don’t know who’s told you we have it.” Truth is…they are there, just not openly. Anyone who thinks that gays don’t exist everywhere in the world must be living in a bubble somewhere and totally oblivious to all human nature. Gays have existed throughout time and will continue to exist until the end of time. How we choose to treat them is a different story.

            In Iran you can be beaten, tortured, hanged or worse. You ask what can be worse than being hanged? Well, if you are found guilty under Sharia Law of the crime of lavat; defined basically as penetrative or non-penetrative sexual relations between two men, the punishment is  lashes for the first three offenses and death for the fourth. A segment of Islamic punishment code is listed at this link: http://www.pglo.net/IRQO/English/islamicpunishment.htm 

            This whole article is the result of me finding a story about two young men, Tayab and Yazdan, who are awaiting execution for the kidnapping, rape, and murder of two young college students who’s gender is not specified but the form of their execution is one that is reserved primarily for people who have been convicted of lavat. For any of you who feel that American laws are harsh and that some forms of punishment are inhumane and that conditions are bad in our prisons, how about in Iran. The punishment for these two young men is that they will be tied in a sack and thrown off a cliff into a ravine, if they survive, they will be hanged. Other punishments are just as severe and deplorable. If you are caught stealing for example, you will lose the four fingers of your right hand upon conviction of your first offense. A second offense carried the punishment of half of your left foot, the third time is life in prison and if you steal while in prison you are executed. Adultery is still punishable by stoning. I think we need to be very thankful for our laws and forms of punishment, I bet there are many Iranians who wish they could be punished under our laws instead.

 

            The following clip is of a documentary made by CBC News about the gay world in Iran. It follows a young man named Mani Zaniar who was the leader of an organization in Iran called PGLO (Persian Gay & Lesbian Organization). He takes the reporter into a coffee house where gays and lesbians meet each other and to a park where they hang out. He also introduces you to a young gay man who became a prostitute and how he was treated by the police when he reported being gang raped. You will also meet a young transsexual who tells about being told by her parents to just sit in her room until she dies. The video is 22 minutes long but well worth watching, very eye opening. http://www.cbc.ca/sunday/2007/03/030407_1.html 

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Hello Sweet Readers! This week my article is short because I only have a few comments and then I’ll let the video speak for itself. It is never right to kill anyone just to kill them, there is self defense, but that is totally different than killing someone just for the fun of it. It is never right to kill someone because of their religion or their race or even their sex or sexuality.

All over the world people are being tortured and abused and killed for being a certain way, just because some factions of the population are afraid of them and that fear turns to hate. It is alright to hate something that someone does or a belief they stand for, but it is never alright to take their life for that belief.

I was given the link to this video by a good friend and was unable to watch it the first time all the way through without tears and part way through it the second time, I had to just turn it off and couldn’t finish because it dealt with the murder of a three year old child, because his father thought he acted gay.

Some people in this world are just plain SICK! Murdering a defenseless child is above evil, it is some level deeper than deplorable; below inhuman, no words can describe this horrible gut wrenching feeling I get when I hear of a child being abused or murdered.

 I dealt for two years with the emotional trauma of an angel who had been told all his young life that he was such a bad boy that God had decided to punish him by giving him AIDS. Who had been kicked and beaten and made to perform sexual acts on his own brother by this same father, who, thank God, is in prison for child abuse, but not before he scared both his sons for the remainder of their lives.

This little angel was Mikey, but I am getting off the subject here, I am sorry, it’s one of those days for me. I would love to hear your feedback on this video. I dare any of you to watch it and still have dry eyes at the end, I don’t think even the toughest of you can manage that feat.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mw9zJq0QGl0 

 

Until Next Week, Dear Ones, Love & Hugz! Leeza