British Pub Refuses To Serve Labour Party LGBT Society, EM Forster Stopped Writing After Losing Virginity, Brooklyn Man In Custody Charged With Hate Crime, Miley Cyrus Gets Gay, Rafael Nadal Wins French Open, Matthew Mitcham Wins FINA World Cup

The BBC says that the Labour Party’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transsexual Society were in the Greencoat Boy pub in Westminster, London, owned by Punch Taverns, a conglomerate, when the duty manager allegedly refused them service and that if he had known they were a gay group he would not have accepted the booking. A spokesperson for Punch Taverns denied the group were refused service and disputes the statement supposedly made regarding accepting the booking. “Punch Taverns seeks to provide welcoming venues to everyone,” said the spokesperson. “We are shocked and saddened that a group of our guests did not experience this and would like to apologise. We would however like to stress that this is an isolated incident and is not representative of our commitment to diversity. We are currently conducting a full investigation of the incident and will report back to the Labour LGBT group with our findings.” James Asser, a member of the LGBT group present at the pub said “everyone involved was shocked and outraged. This attitude is totally unacceptable in this day and age. What century are we living in here?”

The Times of London reports that the releases of EM Forster’s papers from the author’s former residence at Cambridge University that include his “sex diary” reveal the much hypotheses reason stopped writing fiction after the publication of the 1924 work A Passage to India was because the author lost his virginity to a wounded soldier when Forster was 38 years old, and met a long-term lover several years later. Forster writes that he could not continue writing about heterosexual, middle-class themes because he was releasing the repression of his sexuality, albeit privately, and his homosexuality contradicted with the themes Forster felt he was only able to entertain. “I should have a more famous writer if I had written or rather published more, but sex prevented the latter,” Forster wrote. His novel, Maurice, an explicitly gay themed novel written by Forster in 1910 would have outed him, but he chose to repress publication of the work, only released posthumously in 1971. A new biography suggests that Forster’s creativity was in large part fuelled by his sexual repression, an entry in his diary six years prior to his death stating “Now I am 85 how annoyed I am with society for wasting my time by making homosexuality criminal. The subterfuges and the self-consciousnesses that might have been avoided.”

A 43 year old Brooklyn man is in police custody, charged with menacing as a hate crime and criminal possession of a weapon in connection to an incident that occurred Saturday morning. The man, who remains unidentified, approached two 22 year old men around 9:30 am and began to make anti-gay remarks about their clothing. While the two men walked away, the man removed a large knife from his jacket and began yelling anti-gay slurs while threatening them.

Miley Cyrus ended her short European invasion Saturday night with a performance at G-A-Y that was, um, gay, the Hannah Montana star again kissing – or pretending to kiss – one of her female dancers.

Congratulations to 24 year old Rafael Nadal, champion again of the French Open, Nadal needing a little over two hours to defeat Robin Soderling in three straight sets – 6-4, 6-2, 6-4 – to win his fifth French Open. Last year, Nadal was upset by Soderling in the fourth round, the only time Nadal has ever lost at Roland Garros.



Congratulations to Matthew Mitcham, who won gold at the 17th Annual FINA Diving World Cup 2010 in a contest that took place in China, Mitcham coming from behind to take the title with a total of 562.80 points.