App-off: The battle of the best lesbian phone app is on!

The battle for the killer phone application aimed at lesbians has commenced as big mobile brands pull off their best tricks to make us tick.

Little gadgets that will enhance our phones and make our lives complete with the latest applications to rock our L world.

From queer news, to lesbian entertainment sites or second life games-these apps do the hard work so that we have it all in a click of a finger.

Most importantly these gadgets want to raise issues surrounding lesbian and gay rights such as Factory Games’ Valet Hustle for iPhone.

The main characters are Ren and Akira, a lesbian and a gay man, who get thrown out of school after kissing another girl/boy respectively.

The story is set in San Francisco which comes off as a total slap in the face after the Californian Marriage Protection Act banned same-sex marriages in 2008.

The game has been so successful on the iTunes App Store that Factory Games has already announced new additional chapters that will include a wedding.

And just to top it up part of the money raised from the game will be donated to the Human Rights Campaign.

The application frenzy continues with the arrival of The Rachel Maddow Show in the Apple App Store. Yes, that’s right, Rachel is all yours and, what makes it even better, all her content is for free.

If politics is not your thing, then you can always challenge Ellen DeGeneres in a dance off battle where going crazy on top of coffee tables earns you points.

Ouch, but be aware that this is only for fast-paced fingers. Do you still wanna challenge Ellen?

If after all these crazed-up dance routines you feel like you need a fashion fix just turn to Shane McCutcheon for style advice.

That’s right, The L Word’s favourite hairdresser has got her own application to create your perfect very Shane look.

Now grab your phone and get the latest mobile apps. You won’t get enough of them!

Kathryn Bigelow's Oscar victory isn't all that, says Maria Tadeo

The 82^nd Academy Award ceremony may have seemed the ultimate celebration of female talent but Uncle Oscar still played it safe in a predictable night with few surprises.

Women may have ruled the Oscar ceremony as Kathryn Bigelow made history as the first woman to win an Academy award for best director. But the night was all about the All American flicks that took conservative Hollywood by storm.

Bigelow’s Oscar winning picture The Hurt Locker proved yet again that nothing works better than a bit of war drama where American heroes are presented as heroes to make the members of the academy tick.

The Hurt Locker is based on the lives on explosive disposal experts as they struggle to accomplish their lethal missions across a bomb-infested Iraq.

However the film tells us very little about the political implications of the Iraq and the ordinary life of both soldiers and civilians after seven years of heavy combat that has turned Iraq into a ghost nation.

The other big winners of the night included Sandra Bullock and Jeff Bridges for their leading performances in The Blind Side and Crazy Heart respectively.

Both critically acclaimed dramas where Bullock plays a caring mother who rescues a black kid from a miserable life and leads him to success as an American football player.

Jeff Bridge’s Crazy Heart is all about redemption as he plays an alcoholic country singer who tries to turn his life around when he meets a young journalist played by Maggie Gyllenhaal.

Hollywood can’t help but love a good old story about forgiveness and atonement where the leads become better people sobbing their sins away.

It may have been a night to remember for women but the Academy played by its own rules under conservative choices and turned its back yet again on Hollywood’s gay film industry as Tom Ford’s A Single Man left the Kodak Theatre empty-handed.

A critically acclaimed drama centred on the life of a gay English professor who struggles to cope with death and loss after his lifelong partner passes that was barely noticed by the US critics.

So too was Colin Firth’s performance as the film’s leading man that won him the Volpi Coup for best actor at the Venice International Film last year.

It may have seemed a glorious night for female talent reaching the top in the generally male-dominated categories. But it’s all always good to scratch the surface beneath the Hollywood razzle-dazzle.

Italian Big Brother: Veronica's lady love makes Italians swoon

By Franca Torrano

Since emerging from the week’s confinement on Monday night Veronica Ciardi, still not quite in the world of reality as we know it, has received a slightly different welcome from the one she was dreading. Her biggest fear, she revealed, was a hostile reaction from the Italian press and public who have been following her string of tempestuous affairs and fiery arguments over the last four months. When you throw in her sultry good looks and the growing relationship with Sarah Nile, it’s not difficult to see why she has become the most hotly discussed contestant of the Italian Big Brother’s tenth season. Hotly discussed does not necessarily mean popular but as she stepped out in front of the studio audience for the live show she was greeted with a loud and rapturous welcome. Her fans had turned out to support the twenty four year old Ciardi on what could turn out to be a difficult night.

Taking her solitary seat in the centre of the arena she looked nervous. Sarah, watching protectively from the front row blew Veronica a kiss of encouragement that made thousands of hearts miss a collective beat. Then one by one, each of Veronica’s difficult affairs in the house was paraded across the big screen. Not looking good. A sizeable part of this audience could go either way tonight. Then Sarah herself appeared on the screen and on seeing some of their infamous kisses Veronica’s expression changed. Her uncertainty fell away and she proceeded to defend herself against accusations of profligate behaviour in a performance worthy of a fellow Roman, Julius Caesar himself. She denounced ‘e tu, e tu, e tu’, the male contestants who would have had her if they could but trashed her as a whore and a porn star when they couldn’t. And in an implicitly wider attack on all those out there who think the same way she defended passionately her right to live her life from the heart and not be judged by the double standards applied to the sexual behaviour of women.

With that behind her the focus has since shifted to the nature of her relationship with Sarah. The media coverage has been intense but strangely disjointed as it caters to the tolerance levels of different audiences. The hosts of the daytime TV circuit continue to sideline Sarah and quiz Veronica instead about the future of a relationship, long over, with one particular male contestant. The interviews that all the BB contestants have to endure on exit from the house have all included the question, ‘Is this a lesbian relationship?’ And while the grandees of the national media muse on whether the new ‘star’ couple will get engaged and make a life together, the gossip magazines have been falling over themselves to get the hot new cover out, questions of sexuality somewhat secondary in the frenzy to increase circulation figures.

With Sarah now permanently at her side, Veronica continues ever more openly to declare her love for the cool Neapolitan who stole her heart in the BB house. She is fearless and on TV she rates Sarah the tops in the kissing stakes and declares theirs a love that will last forever. But - and for many followers this is a big but - it is not sexual. And they are heterosexual. On both these (their oft repeated) statements, the jury is still out but the fundamental truth is apparent. These two individuals as a couple, breathe new life into the word amore as they describe the meeting of mind, soul and body that transcends anything they have previously experienced. To witness their intense physical affection for each other, and to see that they expect nothing less than total acceptance from a potentially hostile public, is to receive a maximum strength oxygen boost that lasts the day.

The media love this story right now and they are running hard with it while the two are newly reunited and interest in BB is still in the air. Sarah and Veronica. Unless you’ve been locked away in some other BB household yourself for the last 128 days, you know who and what they’re talking about. This is the celebrity couple of the moment in Italy and the Sapphic twist is more a matter for curiosity than a prurient focus. Their beauty and wit will ensure them publicity for a while at least but for their growing band of supporters the dream is that their love, this special love, will continue to flourish and delight.

A special thanks to the fans on the canale di Mari.

Italian Big Brother: Will Sarah and Veronica's love survive the media circus, asks Franca Torrano?

The words ‘big’ and ‘brother’, normally send me running but recently I stumbled across the growing and very public love affair between Sarah Nile and Veronica Ciardi on Italian Big Brother. On the face of it they are the usual publicity seeking, attention demanding BB types, behaving badly and melodramatically as they strut their beautiful stuff across the vapid scene of yet another third rate BB drama. No doubt both girls came on to the show to further their glamour careers. Superficially, their image and behaviour puts them firmly in the arena for male consumption - Sarah is a model and Playboy cover girl; Veronica leads the ‘dual life’ of a nightclub dancer and nursery teacher. But since their first public kiss on New Year’s Eve something intriguing has developed that has attracted the attention of fans and enemies alike and has taken both contestants somewhat by surprise. They have fallen in love. And via 24 hour live feeds and You Tube downloads they have played out a love story that fascinates supporters and enrages bigots in unequal measure. The growing band of fans, Italian and worldwide, has followed, 24-7, in a state of hyper anticipation for each and every next moment of Il Sogno – the dream, a living soap opera that teeters on a fine line between celebrity spectacle and grand romance.


The -large- sector of Italian society that is influenced by the triumvirate of the Vatican, the Berlusconi dominated media and the right has struggled to find its feet on this one. Used to keeping the likes of Sarah in their place, amongst the scantily clad dancers that form the background to most Italian TV, and happy to condemn the likes of Vero as loose, sexually wanton and a danger to their sons, they have battled to find the most appropriate voice for their attack. Homophobia or misogyny? A real threat to society or just another shallow Grande Fratello story that they have foolishly (and once more) allowed into their lives?

The inevitable outlet has been the daytime TV show. Against the cacophony of the audience, Sarah, evicted on 25 January, has been given the insidious opportunity to declare her sexuality and the nature of the relationship. C’mon girl, we are in Italy after all. Amore is amore, is it not? She has played it cool so far and denied them the opportunity for outright homophobia but at the same time has frustrated fans with only elusive references to a ‘a different kind of love’. In pressing the issue the (mainly female) daytime TV hosts have increasingly found themselves competing to be the first to be cool with this love between women. This unwitting and amusing outcome should perhaps not be underestimated.

On Monday, Veronica was evicted. The live transmission showed nothing of her departure once beyond the red door and she was apparently whisked away to the now standard week’s confinement to which GF subjects its torn asunder couples. By all accounts Sarah threw a true Neapolitan fit on not being allowed to see her beloved and anticipation is running high at the prospect of their first meeting on next Monday’s live show. How will GF choose to present this? Mediaset, the Italian television company behind the show, has been accused by some followers of cutting the more risqué live feeds as a form of censorship against their relationship so it is believed that they will force them to downplay the romantic nature of their love. Others believe that the producers have acted protectively towards them by preventing their more intimate scenes from being made public. The fans’ distrust of Mediaset results partly from a legal action taken against YouTube, who are now forced to pull the unstoppable downloads on a daily basis. Confusingly though, it emerges that Mediaset was involved in Viola di Mare, a film based on the (true) love story between two women in nineteenth century Sicily. So the public face of Saronica in the short term, at least for as long as the girls remain under contract, seems to be at the will of Mediaset. How this will pan out when both girls are in each other’s presence is anyone’s guess as they have reassured each other more than once that non se ne fregano, they don’t give a damn about what people think.

Given the Big Brother context of this it’s difficult to avoid cynicism. Are the girls playing the game with one eye on the mirror and the other fixed on the glamorous whirl of interviews and celebrity appearances that will follow the show? Or are their declarations of amore true, at least for now? There’s no denying that it has been fun to watch the interactions between this contrasting pair. Sarah, controlled and cool and game savvy, using her rapier wit to keep the gagging males at bay as she subtly seduces and claims for her own the sultry, fiery Veronica. And then Veronica, Vero the true, who wears her heart on her sleeve and her tattoos over her vulnerabilities and declares her love for Sarah at any and every opportunity.

The question now is can the sogno survive outside this Truman show for the senses or will it shatter beyond the protective confines of the red door? And more importantly, if the dream becomes reality will GF’s tenth season have helped remove a little bit of bigotry in the world? The fans call themselves sognatori, dreamers in support of the love between Sarah and Veronica. In this world, our world, where reality can be truly harsh for transgressors, there is still surely a vital place for dreaming.

BBC newsreader comes out. Or does she?

I bet you’d never think that if you filled in a few words about your home life for an interview in your work’s newsletter you’d be splattered over whole-page spreads in every paper on the racks by New Year.

You might have thought the five little words “FAMILY: lives with partner Sara” buried in a three-hundred-odd word article about working on Christmas day, which was published in mid-December, would have had very little impact, since all your colleagues knew all that anyway.

So, pity Jane Hill, then, who did precisely this and made the journey from BBC newsreader to tabloid sensation (“Male Fans of BBC Newsreader Jane Hill, Brace Yourself For Disappointment” as she “admits” and “reveals” and “outs herself”) in the news-barren week between Christmas and New Year.

I did actually read the actual article in Ariel, the BBC in-house magazine, in the week it was published, because my own partner, who also works for Auntie, tossed the paper at me one evening after work and said “See - I said.” I did see. It did say. But it didn’t say very much, just those exact words above, along with a whole lot of other stuff about mince pies and breaking news. I didn’t text or tweet or Facebook; it said so little that it wasn’t really worth passing on.

The papers, though, were a different matter. The holiday period is a notoriously barren time for news, so they really went to town, squeezing the Ariel article like a toothpaste tube to ease out every last droplet – Jane is an Archers fan, likes the gym and has a dog called Mavis. She found the Madeleine McCann story hard to do - and faking sensation from a single matter-of-fact statement.

The Daily Mail, usually a purveyor of the finest ‘why-oh-why-do-homosexuals-believe-we-need-to-know-the-details-of-their-private-lives line’ was exercised enough to wring out not one but two articles from it - in the same edition.

Several hundred members of the message board community were so unbothered by the news that they felt it necessary to commit the fact that they didn’t care to writing. You should read some of the comments, though, treading as they do that delicate line between uproariously funny and grimly depressing. I have harvested some of the best ones:

“Why do we all have to tell the world what our sexuality is! I thought that was private between two people!!”

“I am really annoyed!”

“WHY oh why do we need to know what people get up to sexually or who they kiss and so forth????? Because that's what it comes to by saying I am a virgin or gay or blah blah blah ...”

“i dont mean to be cynical but why is it some gay people seem to need to parade their sexuality around. there is a certain conceit and smugness about the whole thing. 'look at me - im gay' . well im pleased she is happy. but to be honest. most of us dont care.”

“who cares. Did i mention, i'm NOT gay? Just thought i'd mention it as i'm sure people want to know what i do behind closed doors.”


“Women and men are not GAY they are lesbians and ****sexuals. Why have they taken over one of the best words in the English Language?”


“Why does ANYONE think the NATION needs to know that they prefer Brand X entertainment in the BEDROOM!!!???”

The most unfair thing is that the excessive exclamation mark-using sections of society pour its ire on Hill for broadcasting her bedroom antics to the nation, when she did no such thing. She talked to her employer’s newsletter but it’s papers like the Mail (hellfire! I’ll single it out for criticism because it deserves it!) that manufacture sensation because they employ people to rake through in-house publications looking for something they can flag up as tittle-tattle to fill a couple of pages in the slack news week after Christmas.

It must have been difficult to know what to do in the circumstances, because there’s a whole world of difference between being out to everyone around you in your everyday life and having “BBC NEWSGIRL: I’M GAY” staring back at you when you open the morning papers.

There was not an entirely dissimilar issue in my household several years ago, at a time when my girlfriend was the newsreader for a particular larger-than-life DJ whose star was in the ascendant. Because he knew that this newsgirl was gay, he would make sideways remarks about lack of boyfriends and stuff about how badly dressed she was. Now, she can give as good as she gets (example: she called him a “fat twat” on air), but I thought that she should just say it outright in a programme and pop his little bubble of innuendo. She didn’t, though, not least because she’d only just come out to her parents and didn’t think it would be a good time to have it splashed all over the papers. Which it probably wouldn’t have been. Unless it was a particularly slow news week and the Daily Mail was looking for a couple of pages to fill.

Also, there is another issue at stake: that the general public can behave, sometimes, a little oddly. If you’re in the public eye at any level whatsoever, people can feel like they have some kind of share in you. At one end of the scale there are the people who post on internet sites, outraged in their mistaken belief that Jane Hill had done some kind of exposé on her sex life, and at the other end there is Jodie Foster. I used to be all Michelangelo Signorile about her and think she was a wuss for not coming out, but now I kind of understand that if a stranger shoots the President of the USA in the belief that it will make you love him, you might not actually want anyone to know anything at all about your private life.

And people remember the oddest personal details, as my girlfriend discovered just the other day when she read about herself on a website. A fact-fan with a microscopic eye for detail had written, in the last couple of months, the precise date (in 2001!) that she’d left a particular job. “I didn’t even know that, and I’m me,” she said, slightly unnerved.

It’s a shame, but perhaps not a surprise, given what happened to Hill over the last couple of weeks, that the other lesbian journalists on the telly and radio aren’t more vocally out. There are a few, for sure. I’m not even sure if they’re even in, but I’m not going to say who they are here. After all, it just might be a weak week for news.

Kim Renfrew

Coming out of the neverending closet

I’ve come out of the closet at least seven times this week. To my newsagent, to my friend’s mum, to the Wood Green Cineworld ticket attendant, to you… The list goes on.

I thought when I finally spat it out four years ago that that was that. I was OUT. How wrong I was. Every time you meet a new acquaintance who doesn’t have inbuilt gaydar, and can’t instantly pinpoint you as a homosexual from 500 paces, you have to announce yourself AGAIN. If I gathered up everyone I’d ever come out to and laid them end to end, they’d reach from here to Hebden Bridge.

The intricate coming out process never gets any easier. There inevitably comes a stress-inducing point in a conversation with a new person where you feel the absolute necessity to reveal your status at that very second, like you’re keeping a great secret and can’t conceal it any longer. It’s like Year 11 all over again. This will unavoidably lead to you dropping in the fact of your gayness at totally inopportune moments, strategically mentioning your girlfriend at the earliest opportunity, or confessing that you’re currently reading Sarah Waters. Anything to get over that coming out hurdle.

I personally would have thought that my short back ‘n’ sides would be a dead giveaway, along with my decidedly non-flouncy attire. Not so, it seems. The fact is, I’ll have to come out on an almost daily basis until the sacred day, the long awaited day when all our awkward come-outs will cease: the day Blackberry finally come up with their newest application: the Lez Detector.

My so-called life as an intern

So Caster Semenya is indeed female, but, according to the BBC, one with three times as much testosterone as the average woman. Nature or nurture? Her coach, Dr Ekkart Arbeit, head of the South African team, was notorious for his doping techniques during the 1970s and 1980s, but insists that his coaching methods are now clean. As I watched coverage about Semenya's return to an ecstatic South Africa, I wondered what would happen if it was discovered that she *had* cheated, or, like several athletes before her was found to be genetically male. There is something about the cautiousness with which the British media has approached this issue that intrigues me: on the one hand I think it's great that she is given the benefit of the doubt. On the other, I don't think her controversy has led to a mainstream discussion of gender; rather it has led to heated debates about privacy, sensitivity and racism.

Being a mere intern, I do not claim to have any special knowledge about gender, but I have been called 'sir' enough times to empathise with Semenya's coolness about the whole thing: despite being 5'4, having a B cup and hair fast approaching my shoulders, I am mistaken for a guy at least two or three times a month - usually by security staff, washroom attendants and the elderly. I don't see anything wrong with it and sometimes I enjoy the fact that a hulking security guard is showing (inadvertent) deference to the fact that I am, admittedly, a bit of a lady-boy. But the more I read about Semenya, the more I wonder about how society might look if it were organised around different criteria; why male and female in a sports competition? If characteristics over-lap, why not have groups according to how much testosterone you have? It would be akin to the paralympics, which is grouped according to the severity of the athlete's disability.

That said, here in the DIVA offices we discovered the folly of attempting to organise society into arbitrary halves; what if there was the intelligent and unintelligent toilet? Or the ugly / beautiful changing rooms? What if a plane was divided up according to Dog people and Cat people, instead of first, business and economy?

Oh, what then.

In other news: climate camp in London. Well done to the campaigners in Blackheath who are out-smarting the police. I happen to have two friends who will be joining the camp and they've encouraged me to visit. But oh how I will boil in my own hypocrisy; I fly, I use plastic bags, I eat terrible things like palm oil and tuna. Can you imagine?

"Intern, why are you here at Climate Camp today?"

"To abate my crippling sense of moral worthlessness."

Saying that, there was a mini poll this morning about how everyone had got to work; most of us had taken some combination of foot, bike and bus. One staff member, however, gave a suspicious description of her 'bike'; apparently she had to touch in with her oyster card before getting on...