hai5!

gottacatchemall:

[ライチュウ]

lulubonanza:

Things that bug me about Scott by ~FarfetchedLogan

alexorue:

Bangladesh: Gays, The Invisible Minority 

Rainer Ebert, from Pink News, writes a brilliant column describing the social circumstances that LGBTs have to endure in Bangladesh. Here’s an extract of it:

Homosexuality and bisexuality have been part of every society and every culture, at every point in human history, and have also been found in a wide range of non-human animal species. Different surveys around the world have found that between one and ten out of one hundred people are sexually or romantically attracted to members of the same sex.
Using the lower end of this range, we find that a minimum of 15 lakh (1.5m) people in Bangladesh are homosexual or bisexual. Despite this large number – which is roughly equivalent to the entire population of Qatar and could actually be up to ten times as high – LGB people are an invisible minority. Many face discrimination at school, university and their workplace, are denied access to health care and justice and, being torn between fear, confusion and guilt, find little support from family members and friends.
Section 377 of the Bangladesh Penal Code makes same-sex intercourse a crime punishable by imprisonment for life. Consequently, only few are open about their sexual orientation, while most are forced to live a life of secrecy and lies, conformed to bigotry, misguided notions of honor and caricatures of justice and morality. With heterosexual marriage still being considered a woman’s nirvana, the level of tolerance for lesbian women is particularly low – they are doubly marginalized.
In 2002, the Bandhu Social Welfare Society (BSWS), the largest association working with men who have sex with men (MSM) in Bangladesh, surveyed 124 self-identified kothis, feminine homosexual or bisexual men and arguably the most visual part of the local LGB community. One in two respondents stated that he had been the victim of harassment at school or college. Three in four respondents who told their relatives about their sexual orientation stated that “their family had reacted negatively with beatings, forced marriage, disinheritance, throwing [them] […] out of the house, [or] taking them to doctors for curing them of homosexuality […].”
Many had been sexually abused, raped or harassed by law enforcement agents, mastaans (local thugs), friends or family. Twenty-nine of the 80 respondents who reported harassment by law enforcement agents told BSWS that police officers had sexually assaulted or raped them. The others talked about beatings, extortion of money, obstruction of movement, threats and blackmail. Men in “Mymensingh, Dhaka, and Sylhet reported […] [that they had been] rounded up, […] taken either to police barracks or the police post and raped by groups of policemen. Such forced sex was always reported as being unsafe […] and often results in serious physical injury like a ruptured rectum, internal hemorrhage, etc.” A 2003 Human Rights Watch (HRW) report shows that these incidences are not unusual but follow a pattern of violence against LGB people in Bangladesh.
The endemic homophobia in Bangladesh also has a negative impact on the mental health and well-being of LGB people. A recent study of 102 homosexual men conducted by University of Dhaka professor Muhammad Kamruzzaman Mozumder et al. found that 32% of these men had a history of suicide attempt, while 47% reported that they had considered committing suicide at least once.

makes you feel like shit for complaining about boys, doesn’t it?