The Best Ever Christmas Song? Featuring Darren Hayes, Clementine the Living Fashion Doll and the Polari team

‘Tis the season, and so I asked Polari writers, and superstars Darren Hayes and Clementine the Living Fashion Doll, to tell me what their favourite seasonal song is and why. Yes, I called it Christmas in the title. I was brought up as an atheist – which made two old women from the local church look at me with pity and sadness when they came to my door to talk about the Lord – but I like the word. So to Christmas, the Winter Solstice, Hannukah, Chrismukkah, Surfing Season … alright, I made that last one up. Anyway …

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Steve Ronsenthal: painting with Gaydar profile pictures

Steve Rosenthal was given the Passion for Freedom Visitor’s Choice Award in October 2011 for his series, We do not have homosexuals like in your country. In our country we do not have this. In Iran this phenomenon does not exist. This work tells the story of two teenage boys, Mahmoud Asgari and Ayaz Marhoni, from northeastern Iran, who were executed for committing homosexual acts. The pictures themselves are, remarkably, constructed from the profile pictures from Gaydar profiles. Polari met Steve to talk about his work, and conducted the interview stood in front of a picture of the boys just moments before they were hanged.

CB: When did you start out using Gaydar profile pictures in your work?

SR: I was quite a late joiner to the world of Gaydar. It wasn’t until January 2007.

When I set up a profile I wanted to create a log of every person who visited my profile, but I didn’t really know why. And so I started to build a catalogue of the images and strap-line text.

Then I was introduced to the program I use to make the pictures. At the time I had about 15,000 images, but the quality wasn’t that good. As the archive grew the quality of the images got better and better. So I had my Gaydar profile on all the time, and I was logged into as many chat rooms as possible, as I found that way you’d get more hits. It was on 24/7 really.

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My Passion for Gay’s the Word, by Uli Lenart

Gay’s the Word for me is a mission… that and a lesson in human kindness.

For the past seven years it has been my task to take that unique and special institution, Gay’s the Word, and help steer it through some fairly rocky times. I remember when the shop was in the grips of its financial crisis in 2007 and the local authority landlord decided to increase the rent dramatically. It was a really lean time – there was this sort of precarious lingering tension. The empty jaws of closure loomed. There was even some uncertainty as to whether the bookstore had served its purpose and it was just time to simply shut-up-shop. It looked like I might be getting a front row seat to the last days of the last British lesbian and gay bookshop.

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Polari Podcast 001

#001 Polari Podcast: Sabrina Chap & Jonathan Kemp talk songs and sex, and Clementine pops in for a brief ‘moment’…

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Introducing Noah Stewart, by Little Bastard

What do we expect from a boy from Harlem? Well, in 2011, absolutely anything! Ten years ago, if someone had told me I’d be standing in a church in Marylebone listening to a young man from Harlem singing ‘Without A Song’ from the 1920′s musical Great Day I would have struggled to believe them! But here I am, listening to Noah Stewart, the worlds next big p’opera star.

A decade ago we were in the throws of Nu Metal, a subgenre of heavy metal - spawned by a generation who had grown up on Metallica and wanted their own revolution. And there was Nu Soul via the Bristol Trip Hop and the American Hip Hop scenes, we witnessed Generation X’s take on the classic soul formula.

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Polari 3.0

The terrible twos are over. At last! I thought they’d never end. Polari Magazine turned 3 on December 3, 2011, and to mark this, the website has been rebuilt and reconceived. There are new sections to be explored, and old sections that have been opened up for new content. It’s the most dynamic, and the most exciting version we’ve built to date.

Polari’s home is the incredible city of London, and in 3.0 this is the starting place from which it looks out onto the world. As well as writers from the city and the British Isles, there are writers from the United States, Australia, and South Africa.

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