Ari Gold, the charismatic queer musician who was mentored by RuPaul, opened for Chaka Khan and sung with pop-soul titan Diana Ross, has died. He was 47.
Performing since he was just five years old, Gold went from voicing the squeaky Cabbage Patch Kids and recording catchy jingles to touring the world with Cyndi Lauper and modelling for Boy George.
Born in 1974, Gold quickly seized the house music scene as an openly gay musician in New York City, US, in the early 2000s. Living up to his surname, Gold spun up award-winning and chart-topping hits such as “See Through Me” and “Where the Music Takes You”.
The Bronx native’s music, equal parts finger-snapping and lyrically powerful, often explored spirituality and sexuality. They were even featured on NBC’s Scrubs and ABC’s Cougar Town.
Friends described Gold as a world-wise and ambitious record producer who paved the way for future queer talent – he sang of same-sex love in Manhattan music clubs and honky-tonks years before mainstream artists would feel comfortable doing the same.
“Until we meet again, dear friend,” wrote RuPaul on Twitter Sunday (14 February) in a series of touching tributes, describing the songwriter as a “lovely, gentle man”.
They had first met in 2002 and remained close ever since, with Gold appearing in the queen of drag’s 2007 film, Starrbooty.
Fifty Bandz, a 21-year-old Black trans woman, has become the latest victim of a wave of violence against trans people in the US that activists and physicians have dubbed an “epidemic”.
Bandz was shot to death in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on 28 January by her former partner, Michael Joshua Brooks, 20, according to The Advocate.×
Brooks told law enforcement that he pulled the trigger during an argument at the 5000 block of McClelland Drive in the Brookstown neighbourhood.
The pair had been in a one-year-long relationship, Baton Rouge Police Department detectives said, but began seeing one another again only days before the victim’s death. Brooks has since been arrested.
Witnesses described their relationship as “very volatile”. He “was not open or forthcoming” about dating Bandz, which “caused personal problems” for them both.
Bandz met Brooks in Brookstown to hand him a mobile phone, detectives said. But he became rattled when she made the delivery in from of his girlfriend and brother, witnesses alleged, and then began arguing over the phone.
She borrowed a vehicle and told witnesses she was heading back to grab the phone from Brooks. During the drive there, she dialled a friend and told them what had happened – she then placed the pal on hold, noting Brooks had rung her.
But Bandz never returned the call. She was found dead inside a vehicle at 11pm, suffering from several gunshot wounds that Brooks had fired during a heated exchange, he admitted.
Friends, family and other loved ones released balloons in Bandz’s honour 1 February.
“In just one month, multiple transgender or gender non-conforming people have been killed, four of whom were Black trans women,” Tori Cooper, HRC director of community engagement for the Transgender Justice Initiative, said in a statement.
“This level of violence is infuriating and heartbreaking. This is an epidemic of violence that must be stopped.
An Ontario, Canada, court has ruled that a trans woman must pay the travel costs for her two children to move in with their mother in Washington, US.
Increasingly isolated from her family, the upshot of a legal custody battle has seen Darcy feel she is drifting from her children after her former spouse divorced her in 2017.
Her ex is now remarried to a man who works for Microsoft, theOttawa Sunreported. Darcy and her family were then plunged into a custody battle that sowed division and fear, she said, as her former partner wished to relocate to Washington as her new husband’s job is there.
In the judgment released last month, justices ruled that Darcy’s youngest children can move some 4,000 kilometres away to stay with their mother, step-father and half-sibling.
“I’m in shock, just shock,” the 37-year-old told the outlet.
“They’re moving my kids to a place I can’t go and the idea that I somehow should pay their costs to take my children away seems kind of unfair.”
Ontario Superior Court justice David Broad considered that while a joint custody agreement would be in the best interests of the children, they need to be allowed to move with their mother.
It’s a decision that has left Darcy reeling, weary of both the rampaging coronavirus keeping country borders shut as well as a US she feels is unwelcoming of trans folk.
“The likelihood of me seeing my kids now is just so low because of COVID,” she explained, finding little respite in the virtual access judges granted her alongside extended long weekends, four weeks in the summer and a week over Christmas vacation.
To her list of woes, she added that as a trans person she “doesn’t feel comfortable” in the US. “I used to travel there for work and I won’t anymore,” she added, worrying that her children would be exposed to transphobia if raised there.
But Broad disagreed. Writing in his judgement: “It was clear from her testimony that the applicant’s concerns respecting these issues are sincere and strongly held.
“However, no expert evidence was led that would suggest that living in the State of Washington, with exposure to the local culture, would adversely affect the children’s development and best interest.”
Bella Pugh, a Black gender non-confirming teen, was shot to death after a Christmas party erupted into a night of violence earlier this month.
The 19-year-old was slain at a residence in Rosedale Avenue in Prichard, Alabama on 13 December.
Reports suggest that after Pugh was shot, party-goers waited 20 minutes before calling emergency services. Some did nothing, others took out their mobile phones and recorded.
Pugh’s mother Tiffany told Fox10 News that it was their rainbow-coloured jumpsuit that led to their murder, saying: “If [they] wasn’t wearing that dress [they] would still be alive.”
At least two other people attending the party were also injured, according to the Prichard City Police Department.
Officers added that a suspect, James Lee James Jr, turned himself in for questioning 16 December, NBC15 News reported.
He was later charged with murder and two counts of second-degree assault – however, authorities said that they are not investigating Pugh’s death as a hate crime. Their family disagree with the decision.
Tiffany believes Pugh “was killed because of what [they] was wearing, not because of who [they] was or what [they] did.”
“I loved [them] with everything in me, that’s why [they] could shine like [they] did. Everything I had I poured into [Bella].”
Pugh’s father Antonio Ruggs reflected: “Love your kids for who they
“Because you know one day they could be here, the next day they can be gone,” he added, according to MyNBC15.
With each year, the number of trans people murdered rises.
Pugh’s death is yet to be officially counted by monitoring group Human Rights Campaign, which has tracked a record number of murders of trans people in 2020.
With days left until the year ends, HRC’s count stands at 41 trans and gender non-conforming people murdered, more than any other on record.
Rising higher and higher each year, 2020 surpassed last year’s total in August.https://lockerdome.com/lad/13296932562903654?pubid=ld-5883-3439&pubo=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.pinknews.co.uk&rid=www.pinknews.co.uk&width=572
Activists say these numbers almost certainly fail to grasp the true scale of the problem. Local officials are not required to report killings to a centralised database, and the police and press often misgender trans and gender non-conforming victims.
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Donald Trump-appointed judges reverved a vital ban on therapists offering conversion therapy – a denounced and debunked pseudosicenfitic practise – Friday (November 20), branding the ban “unconstititional”.
Also called reparative therapy, medical organisations across the world have widely rejected the treatment as traumatising and psychologically scarring, especially to minors.
In fact, the American Academy of Paediatrics warned against it as early as 1993. They said it reinforced anxiety and shame.
But in a tightly divided court in Florida, the 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals sided with two therapists who sought to argue that bans in the city of Boca Raton and Palm Beach County violated their free speech rights.
As NBC Newsreported, judges voted 2-1 against the conversion therapy ban. Both judges are appointed by Trump and are members of the conservative Federalist Society.
While Obama-appointed circuit Judge Barbara Martin dissented from the conservative majority, instead stressed the importance of protecting LGBT+ youth from a “harmful theraputic pratcise.”
In contrast, circuit Judge Britt Grant said that as much as enjoining the laws would allow “speech that many find concerning, even dangerous”, the First Amendment “does not allow communities to determine how their neighbors may be counseled about matters of sexual orientation or gender.”
As a result, the courts favoured conversion therapists Robert Otto and Julie Hamilton in a ruling that effectively dissolves the some 21 bans on the practice across cities and counties in Florida. Both said their clients often had “sincerely held religious beliefs conflicting with homosexuality.”
Also called reparative therapy, medical organisations across the world have widely debunked and rejected the treatment as traumatising and psychologically scarring, especially to minors.
In fact, the American Academy of Paediatrics warned against it as early as 1993. They said it reinforced anxiety and shame.
The practise, which has been around more than a century, has many techniques. Most commonly, talking therapy.
However, some physicians who practise the therapy are known to use shock treatments and induce associative nausea in patients, according to a 2018 study by the Williams Institute of the School of Law at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Despite such denouncement and discrediting, the ‘therapy’ has remained common in patches of the US.
Though, the impact of the practise is immeasurable, an estimated 698,000 LGBTI+ adults in the US have received conversion therapy, according to research.
It took just one day for Target to pull a screening U-turn Friday (13 November) after it removed a transphobic book off its digital shelves, prompting anti-trans users to pelt the American retail giant into submission.
Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughter, which is currently rated just two-and-a-half stars on Target’s website, has been fiercely upbraided by LGBT+ rights activists since its July 2020 release.×
Penned by renowned anti-trans journalist Abigail Shrier, a firebrand Wall Street Journal writer who has obsessively written about vastly debunked anti-trans theories, the book trumpets that being trans is a “contagion”, a “craze” and an “epidemic”.
While Target initially said it would remove the text, a torrent of anti-trans Twitter accounts, including Shrier, criticised the company for doing so, promoting Target to walk back and relist the book.
Twitter users sought to sound the alarm as to why Target was stocking a book that rails against a so-called “transgender epidemic sweeping the country”. The company, amid backlash, tweeted on Thursday (12 November): “Thank you so much for bringing this to our attention.
“We have removed this book from our assortment.”
Author Shrier quickly took aim at Target, tweeting that the company had made her “book disappear”, igniting countless anti-trans users to send incensed tweets and emails to Target.
Does it bother anyone that woke activists and spineless corporations now determine what Americans are allowed to read?” she added.
Target later tepidly responded to a tweet by a user with less than 1,000 followers and whose display picture is of a painting by Alex Grey. The user called on Target not to “submit to Stalinist thought policing”.
“We want to offer a broad assortment for our guests and are adding this book back to Target.com. We apologise for any confusion.”
Trans people in the US have themselves been reduced to political targets with increasing temerity by the Trump administration in the last four years, where the president’s officials have peeled back a roster of legal protections across countless federal departments and programs – defence, housing, health and education.
All the while, an actual epidemic – one of violence against trans people – continues to rip across the States, with 2020, monitoring groups warn, being the deadliest year for trans people since records began with 34 trans people murdered at the time of writing.
Pope Francis’ endorsement of same-sex civil unions was taken out of context, Vatican officials have claimed as they sought to clarify that the church does not support LGBT+ rights.
The Pope’s comments featured in the documentary Francescodid not signal a change in church doctrine, neither did they support a wider endorsement of marriage equality, according to guidance issued to apologetic ambassadors by the Vatican secretariat of state.
Vatican nuncio to Mexico, Franco Coppola, posted on Facebook Friday (October 31) unsigned guidance which claims that the pontiff’s remarks were “edited” and lacked “proper contextualisation”.
In the guidance, the Vatican says that the Pope was referring to his position in 2010 when he was archbishop of Buenos Aires.
They said that the quote itself was not recent and was taken from a May 2019 interview that was never broadcast. The church claimed two of Francis’ answers were spliced together in Francesco.
More than a year ago, during an interview, Pope Francis answered two different questions at two different times that, in the aforementioned documentary, were edited and published as a single answer without proper contextualisation, which has led to confusion,” the guidance said.
Pope Francis praised for endorsing same-sex civil unions. Not quite, the Vatican clarifies.
Francesco made global headlines when it released an interview with the Pope in which he endorsed same-sex civil unions. The remarks were hailed by LGBT+ advocates but startled many religious leaders, prompting furious attempts to undermine them.
“Homosexual people have the right to be in a family,” Pope Francis said in the interview. “They are children of God and have a right to a family.
“Nobody should be thrown out or be made miserable over it.”
According to the Vatican guidance, Francis was referring to parents with queer children and the need not to kick them out or discriminate against them.
The second part of his remarks – “What we have to create is a civil union law, that way they are legally covered, I stood up for that” – was again skewed, the guidance claimed.
It was him reiterating his position from nine years ago, as archbishop of Buenos Aires, the Vatican claimed.
“It is clear that Pope Francis was referring to certain state provisions and certainly not the doctrine of the church, which he has reaffirmed numerous times over the years,” the guidance said.
It had already emerged that the Pope’s comments were cherry-picked from a 2019 interview with Mexican television station Televisa.
The number of LGBT+ people who voted for Donald Trump in the 2020 US presidential election more than double compared to four years ago,exit polls suggest.
With a bitter and strained electoral battle unfolding and an anxious nation awaiting a winner, a patchwork of exit polls have begun to show the numbers that will shape debate for months to come – who voted for who.×
And according to exit polls conducted by Edison Research for the National Election Pool, the sturdy trend that LGBT+ people vote Democratic has remained, but more voted for Trump this time around than in 2016.
Come 2020, and that figure has doubled to 28 per cent who voted for the Trump-Pence ticket – even despite the absolute onslaught of anti-queer attacks by the administration.
Around 61 per cent of LGBT+ voters went for Biden at the ballots. The study found that of the 15,590 voters interviewed, around seven per cent were LGBT+.
As much as Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden has netted an, albeit, slim majority of the queer male vote, securing 51 per cent, it signalled to pollsters how the president’s brand of bullish showmanship has roiled the political landscape.
Indeed, the LGBT+ voting bloc has long been reliably Democratic. The poll conducted by queer dating app Hornet found that, overall among its users, around 66 per cent prefer Biden while 34 per cent support Trump.
But for queer Americans, pollsters said, the statistics were far tighter together. Just less than half of queer men said they do not support Trump, and a slither of just 11 per cent said they generally disagree with his stances.
Trump and his campaign team increasingly looked towards LGBT+ people as a way to buttress support amid the president’s cratering polls.
Among some of the Republican’s core voting blocs, such as white evangelicals, many do at least generally support LGBT+ rights, according to a 2019 survey.
But the president’s track record has seen him harshly erode many pre-existing LGBT+ rights. Trans rights, in particular, have been taken to with a buzz saw by the Trump administration, across countless federal departments and programs – defence, housing, health and education.
Freelance journalist Alan has been subjected to a sinister and coordinated campaign of sexual assault and threats on his life for years, perpetrated by an underground chemsex ‘mafia’.
Based between France and Northern Ireland, Alan’s life slipped into mayhem and the macabre when a hook-up that turned into assault dragged him a years-long “vendetta” that has placed his own life, as well as the lives of his children, on the line.×
Members of a “Satanic” chemsex sexual assault ring, who frequently use the “social networking website” NastyKinkPigs, first conspired to deliberately infect Alan with HIV – or “poz him up” – back in 2011, he alleges.
Several years later, one of these same men rammed a knife inside of him. After both incidents were reported to the police, Alan sent out an alert to Grindr users in the Crumlin area to warn of these sexual predators.
Days later, he was informed he had been singled out to become the subject of a vendetta, simply because he had warned others, which would start two years down the line so he would not be able to link who was behind it.
An onslaught of perforation attempts, sexual assaults and even robberies tallying at least 21 in total has unfolded in the years since the vendetta began against the now 52-year-old.
In the last two years especially, members have dialled-up their apparent deluge of attacks: inserting drugs without his consent anally, live-streaming sessions without his consent and injuring him with various household tools, nail files, lemonade bottles pushed into his colon, toothbrushes, sharpened dowelling rods, often disguised as innocuous objects, such as pencils or mountaineering equipment.
“It’s a national scandal that the queer community lives in fear of sex predators and feel they cannot speak up,” Alan told PinkNews.
“It’s been difficult to live through, but I’ve had to see these injustices as tasks to report on. I’ve had to speak out to make this useful for everyone else.
“I’ve avoided injury by refusing drugs and sometimes due to the receipt of insider information from other members of NKP,” he said, adding that he would alert PinkNews of any further incidents.
Some of the UK’s top police inspectors and probation officers told PinkNewsthat the criminal underbody of chemsex is vast. A drive for “power” emboldens those with sinister intentions to manipulate those they deem “vulnerable” by “weaponising” drugs and dating websites.
Chemsex consumes the lives of many, police said, and victims are left “traumatised, their lives changed forever” by not only sexual violence but also “robbery, theft, actual bodily harm, grievous bodily harm”.
These attacks are rarely carried out in isolation and single offences often impact as many as 70 people at once.
A chemsex ‘mafia’ has targeted Alan – injuring him, stalking him, threatening his family – for years.
Throughout the alleged attacks, which have occurred in both Northern Ireland and England, where he lived from December 2018 to April 2019, Alan described uncovering a dense web of assaulters all connected to one another and whose members litter the UK.
attacks as they are live-streamed – while scores of users on kink websites wait to watch the impending violence.
Comparing the ring to a “mafia”, Alan described how he experienced a torrent of targeted plots of sexual abuse – many of which occurred while he was incapacitated on drugs he had not consented to during chemsex sessions – which have, on several occasions, curdled into plots to rip his insides or murder him, as well as threats against his family if he were to ever speak out.
The victim claimed that many of the alleged attacks were live-streamed. (Stock photograph via Elements Envato)
Alan showed PinkNews dozens of chat logs with various online members allegedly involved in the ring, as well as tip-offs, hundreds of texts and WhatsApp threads, video footage of him being drugged during sessions, photographs of the tools allegedly used to injure him as well as email reports filed with law enforcement over several years.
All forming a patchwork of a depraved network that wields the at-times crooked playbook of chemsex – typically male sex parties fuelled and facilitated by a cocktail of drugs – as a smokescreen of sorts for malicious people to stream the now vulnerable without their consent.
Viewers, he said, cheer the perpetrators on, jockeying with one another for their twisted way to harm the victim to be carried out.
In speaking out, Alan hopes to expose the fault lines of a certain criminalised subsection of chemsex in making their playbook public and encourage more victims of chemsex-related violence to speak out. “Queer men up and down the county are living under intimidation and I’ve uncovered the network.”
He has been told by members he was targeted, in part, for raising awareness of a sex predator as well as a drug dealer being raided, and because he has high-functioning autism, “and those with a disability are seen as easier prey,” he said.
To transmit HIV to someone is to ‘score a win’ in the ring, victim says.
“I had been married for more than 20 years,” he said, “and after my marriage ended, I thought I would explore [my sexuality]. I was never a regular drug user, but was supplied at these venues purely to incapacitate me”
In his explorations, he soon had his first encounter with the group – a man in Crumlin, a small town in Northern Ireland, he said, who was a member of NastyKinkPigs.
The sounds of nearby rivers babbling while joggers ran down the spindly trails that lace around the leafy town, Alan travelled to meet him in a red-brick apartment complex.
The man, alongside a friend, drugged and pinned Alan down. “He removed his protection that I had insisted on and ejaculated inside me,” Alan said, “and his friend, use a needle to abrade my insides in order to potentially infect me with HIV.”
Months later, Alan met Steve (not his real name), from a nearby village, who asked to be his boyfriend. While in a “drugged stupor”, Steve revealed he knew of the assault – the two men were his friends who “knew exactly what they were doing”.
He admitted that to intentionally transmit HIV to someone – a criminal offence in the UK – is to “score a win” in the group. “These men keep a logbook of the number of people they transmit HIV, hepatitis C and syphilis,” Steve told Alan, “he told me they were part of a web-based community hosted on NastyKinkPigs where the spreading of diseases is considered, by some, to be a kink.”
Following another attack by the man based in Crumlin several years later, in which he rammed a knife inside him causing him to be hospitalised, Alan, in consultation with the police after filing a report, took to Grindr to warn locals of the assailant’s actions. The message was vetted by police in Antrim, Northern Ireland, he said. Alan says reporting the attack would lead to two drug dealers in Glengormley to be raided by authorities.
A few days later, Steve would go on to tell him that he had been “singled out for what he called an ‘NKP vendetta’.”
One of the ringleaders of the attacks, Alan alleged, is someone whom he met around this time, Eric (not his real name).
“The greatest rush he gets is from tearing someone’s insides,” Alan explained of Eric, a healthcare worker who “loves to see the dark red blood gush”.
Eric met with Alan while he was on a business trip to Belfast. He tried to inject Alan with “legal highs” and then said he had eviscerated five men during sessions in London, his “kink”, he said.
After another man entered the room during the session. Alan managed to escape but Eric stole from him in the process. After two attempts to get his possessions back, Alan informed Eric’s employer of his actions.
Alan worked with the Police Service of Northern Ireland to warn local queer men of one of his attackers. (Charles McQuillan/Getty Images)
Since then, Alan says, these men appeared to have launched a vicious volley of violence against him, ranging from allegedly planting drugs in his vehicle to inserting “plastic bricks” into his colon to cause torsion and necrosis.
While he himself did not carry out the attacks directly, Eric has been connected in various ways to many of them, often with the assailants informing Alan of this, or his name appearing as a viewer during streams, or messaging the alleged assailants to thank them for their work.
Such as when Alan narrowly escaped a streamed maiming and murder attempt in Newry, a city in southeast Northern Ireland, in May 2020 – “Thanks for doing this to Alan,” Eric reportedly texted the attacker, which came alongside around 150 emails from viewers, including the man from Crumlin and one of the drug dealers raided in Glengormley, thanking him too.
In December 2018, Alan was contacted on NastyKinkPigs by David (not his real name), a dealer and key figure in Bedfordshire’s drug scene.
David has a “passion for tearing people’s insides”, Alan was informed, and would “rip open” men while hosting sessions. During an email discussion with a different NKP user seen by PinkNews, the user claimed David had done exactly that to “two of his friends”, leading to one being hospitalised.
Details of various sex predators were “shared to Met Police intelligence”, a Police Service of Northern Ireland staffer confirmed to Alan in an email.
The staffer stressed that the Metropolitan Police, a law enforcement agency in London, was “made aware” of Eric and others.
Ring member showed victim years-worth of personal data people had scraped together.
Moreover, an attack in Wisbech, a market town in Cambridgeshire, England, that same year left Alan hospitalised. It saw Chris (not his real name) “cut away a piece of my rectal lining with surgical scissors” while it was streamed to viewers as he was assaulted six times while he was incapacitated on a cocktail of drugs.
Alan was injected with ketamine, an anaesthetic, against his consent, and had a glass bottle inserted “deep inside” while being streamed to around eight viewers, he alleged.
In another attack, Paul (not his real name) in Sunbury, on the north bank of the River Thames, England, planned to disembowel Alan – he also placed plastic bricks inside his colon to cause torsion and necrosis in February 2019.
Several hours’ worth of the incident was streamed through concealed cameras placed on a bookshelf and various other places around the room, photographs showed.
Paul had a MacBook Pro delivered to the house stuffed with “blackmail albums” of Alan and four other targets. The laptop, Alan said, may act as a roving device for the ring.
His own album was crammed with swathes of personal information and even a photograph of a handwritten envelope addressed to his employer which allegedly contained explicit materials.
“He showed me my album and albums on others,” Alan described, “there was video footage of me on his living room floor and a spreadsheet of around fives years’ worth of my previous profiles that I had used on different social websites, such as Grindr, and the passwords to each.”
He added said that Paul “threatened” his children’s lives and told him never to say anything about violence perpetrated by the ring-members – he even mentioned he knew what had happened between Alan and Eric.
Photographs Alan later obtained show Paul shirtless with a perpetrator from another alleged incident who was there to learn how to push “a 12-inch dowelling rod through all the folds and curves of my colon”, he said.
Alan has been assaulted with screwdrivers, bottles dowelling rods and more.
The “vendetta”, Alan said, involves the collation of someone’s personal information, often stretched across years so that the victim never quite links the scattered attacks together. Photographs of the victim’s personal IT equipment may be taken, and their SIM card of the mobile phone replicated as well.
In “teaching” the target a lesson, the group aim to erode their links to their family, potentially having them jailed or maimed, and engulf them in financial and emotional hardship. “The victim’s suicide is the ‘big win’,” he said.
The flashpoint comes in an orchestrated wave of brutality in which the target, he said, is routinely assaulted, often sexually, by attackers who live-stream the attacks across various online channels, such as on Zoom or RingCentral. Some of these include comment sections where streamers have suggested ways to harm the victim.
One person, Alan claimed, suggested his intestines be “ripped”.
These recorded attacks, as well as accounts in the victim’s name made on snuff and deep web pornography websites, are used to hold the victim to ransom. These sequestered videos will be released all at the same time to cause “maximum distress” at a moment’s notice while the long-standing threat of sextortion and blackmail mutes the victim into silence, members of the ring have allegedly informed him.
After many of the fully-streamed ambushes, Alan said visits to his profile on the various websites – which he has continued to use to gather more information – rocket, often sparking splurges of users who demand to know his address and other personal details of his life.
Others give veiled, browbeating messages that warn he should stay “vigilant” or give him useful information and tip-offs. Some trade experiences of sexual assault with him. Users have even stalked him and tried to extract information from him.
Recently, Alan has been stalked and his house egged, and a man shouted through his window that he will be beaten up due to the raid on the Glengormley drug dealers, as the onslaught continues throughout 2020.
Chemsex criminals ‘weaponise’ drugs and dating websites to commit violence, says top police inspector.
Chemsex has surged in recent years, law enforcement, prosecutors and criminologists say, often played out by some users as a sort of balm for thegradual erosion of queer spaces and venues across the UK. A symptom of the deepening loss of such spaces that afford queer men a more collective kind of intimacy.
The debate over chemsex often runs in proxy to debates around the regulation of private lives, the use of illegal substances in sex, and other combustible issues, with the most common drugs used in sessions being crystal methamphetamine, GHB (Gamma hydroxybutyrate) and mephedrone, Metropolitan Police inspector Allen Davis told PinkNews.
GHB, in particular, is “how perpetrators use it to stupefy, overpower and even murder participants”.
Chemsex, investigators say, typically involves crystal methamphetamine, GHB (Gamma hydroxybutyrate) and mephedrone. (Stock photograph via Elements Envato)
He said the force is “fully aware” of the effects of such drugs in a chemsex context, especially with GHB, and the ways in which long-term use has “significant impact on people’s mental health” and the “chaotic state it’s going to leave for long-term drug users”.
“So, if you are in the scene, be aware of the very significant risk,” Davis stressed.
Chemsex, in one way, provides something of an oasis to many lonely men who have sex with men, Richard Unwin, a sexual offence investigation-trained police officer, said. Such men engage in chemsex for a myriad of reasons, and said not all experiences of chemsex are the same.
“There are common factors [with chemsex],” he said, speaking of a set of recurrent drugs and geosocial applications or websites that are generally used in the scene, but chemsex is a complex and varied practice and culture.
“We see what [chemsex] has in common with a lot of generic crime in other groups of the population is the crime often has an element of risk-taking by its very nature. And for some people, it creates quite a lot of excitement and thrill,” he said, adding that this “stimulation” and sense of “power” are prominent motivators.
Chemsex engulfs people, Unwin said: “What we see in many of the men is that involvement in chemsex has become their life.
“But you see a whole process whereby ordinary function in wider things in life and other connections have, over time, just fallen away. So that it’s almost like they exist in a chemsex bubble.”
Victims of chemsex crimes do not ‘sit in isolation’. Neither do abusers, says probation officer.
Indeed, Unwin said certain forms of violence in chemsex contexts have been reported to the police, which offers blueprints for the authorities to deal with them.
Such violence can be “difficult and traumatic” for the victim, and not only includes sexual violence but “robbery, theft, actual bodily harm and grievous bodily harm”, he said.
“If you try and simplify it, some perpetrators identify a section of society as vulnerable, for whatever reason, and may weaponise geosocial networking and the actual use of the drugs in order to commit an offence.”
Unwin explained that the authorities do not “judge” those who engage in chemsex, and urged: “The message we’re trying to give for anyone who wants to talk to us or disclose to us is that we are aware of what it is.
“Don’t think that should be a barrier to stop you disclosing information to the police.”
Stephen Morris, chemsex crime lead for the HM Prison and Probation Service, described how people involved in chemsex with more nefarious intents act as “predators” who use online sexual offences, and both the cache of the act as well as being able to “trade” illicit materials with other abusers, to “recruit” more people.
He stressed that those engaging in some websites to exercise caution. “You’re not going to notice someone that that may be gradually eroding your boundaries and drawing you into something that, really, you’ve no idea about,” he warned.
Many victims of such abuse “do not sit in isolation, and neither does the offender sit in isolation, that they are connected one way or another to many other lives, either personal family or professional.
“We will often work with a man who has committed an offence and look at the ripple effect of his offending,
“On average, we usually identify at least 70-odd other people that have been impacted, one way or another, by just a single offence. So when we’re talking about harm, it is much, much bigger than just the victim.
“And if you think that some people in this context will have many victims, and so the number of people have affected is immense, really, and some of those will be affected very seriously – people will be traumatised, their lives will be changed forever.”
A representative of the Metropolitan Police was unable to comment, and said they were aware of Alan’s allegations and that it is an “ongoing investigation”.
An unofficial Atlanta Pride party ended in tragedy as a man lost consciousness and died.
The man died while attending a party at BJ Roosters, a gay bar on Cheshire Bridge Road, that stretched into the early hours of Sunday morning (October 11).
He was pronounced dead 8am at Piedmont Hospital, Atlanta Police told theWXIA-TV network.
After consuming ecstasy, the man was found in the club’s basement unconscious. The force found no signs of foul play, but an investigation is ongoing.
While a party-goer told the Advocate that the event was “packed” and “overcapacity at times”, Atlanta Pride organisers sought to stress that the club night was not an official Pride event, and that it had only approved virtual events.
Witness laments ‘tragic’ death of man at unofficial Atlanta Pride party.
The industrial bar heaved with party-goers, footage of the event shared on social media showed, for Xion, a gay circuit party thrown by Ga Boy Events.
The group had organised a roster of unofficial events during the Atlanta Pride weekend, including one at a shopping mall and another at District Atlanta – a club which held a made headlines after an August event which saw similarly packed scenes.
A Xion attendee told the Advocate that pandemic guidelines were not enforced by business owners or staffers at the event. He claimed the victim – a Black man in his mid to late 30s – fell to the ground at around 6:30am.
There were no emergency medical technicians at Xion, the witness claimed, with it taking more than 30 minutes for first-responders to arrive to the scene. “And I’m being generous,” he said.
Bar staff seemed “unprepared” to handle the medical emergency and it took some time for the music to be switched off. “It was tragic,” the witness added.
“I’ve been to parties all over the world, I have never been to one without EMTs. In my opinion, this could have been avoided.”
The death of the victim, who has not yet been named, came as footage of the gathering prompted sharp criticism from social media users.
