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September 2013

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Gay Post

8 disgustingly homophobic tweets about George Smitherman’s missing husband

Because someone’s missing spouse is apparently an opportunity to show off your ignorance.

While George Smitherman has broken down barriers as one of the first openly gay big-name politicians in Toronto and Ontario it is sad to see that so little has changed over the years, namely the media’s inability to cover the story of his husbands two day disappearance without improperly using the term “partner” instead of “husband” and trying to dig out some sort of drama or scandal from the parents of a missing man.

To title a story on any missing person as being about their so-called ‘on-again off-again relationship‘ — which, in the frame of the article, refers to their relationship before getting serious a decade ago — is so utterly tasteless , tabloid, and would most likely not be the case if this story were about a straight couple.

One basic rule to identify news from simple events is to spot the unusual. If a dog bites a man, it isn’t news. If a man bites a dog, however, it is. What is increasingly evident with the coverage surrounding Christopher Peloso’s disappearance is that the media coverage surrounding it from the start was due to the fact that George Smitherman was once the second in command of this province and almost held the top spot in Toronto, but that that continued coverage was due to the news media and the newsreading public having a sick hard on for the drama surrounding the personal lives of a gay family.

The fact that this is a gay couple and a gay family and a gay person missing is what makes the story a ‘man-bites-dog’ and that is totally unacceptable.

To the mainstream media: Trying not to be offensive and failing at it is still offensive.

On top of all that professional incompetence comes the deluge of hate filled tweets directed at a man and his family who, at the time these were posted, were most likely experiencing the most harrowing moment of their lives.

Read on to lose faith in humanity.

 

 

 

 

 

Follow Travis on Twitter at @TravMyers.

 

Check out:

16 slut-shaming tweets about Miley — and 5 more about her inviting rape

Mark Towhey continues to be one of the funniest people on Twitter

5 amazing tweets from the Toronto Public Library

30 disturbing and disgusting tweets about Jason Collins coming out

50 most disgusting responses to Toronto’s male rape victim

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Gay Post

Too far? Drag queens make fun of mentally ill Amanda Bynes in new Blurred Lines parody

Warning: This video features some seriously sexy men in some seriously tight underwear. 

While these girls have a history of making fun of current events with their covers of popular songs have they gone too far this time by making fun of mentally ill Amanda Bynes?

The video, a cover of the already questionable summer hit Blurred Lines, features references to the former child star’s meltdown, Twitter rampages, and arrest that led to her psychiatric evaluation along with images of the three drag queens in straight jackets and suggestions that the actress has been abusing drugs.

What do you think, has this comedy trio gone too far by picking on someone suffering from mental illness?

 

You can follow Travis on Twitter at @TravMyers.

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Love & Sex

WATCH: This TIFF short about Facebook will make you hate your computer

This unique Canadian short film, Noah, explores something we don’t see in too many other movies: just how much our online lives have supplanted our real interactions.

“In a story that plays out entirely on a teenager’s computer screen, Noah follows its eponymous protagonist as his relationship takes a rapid turn for the worse in this fascinating study of behaviour (and romance) in the digital age.”

The film by Walter Woodman and Patrick Cederberg explores the concept of isolation in a world where we are so connected to everyone around us all the time and has the added benefit of making you want to disconnect from Facebook and throw your laptop out the window.

Let us know what you think in the comments below. Is the strange girl on Chat Roulette right to think that Facebook is destroying our lives? Have you ever done the not-so-unthinkable and hacked your significant other’s Facebook account to get dirt on them?

 

Follow Travis on Twitter at @TravMyers.

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Toronto

Christopher Peloso, husband of George Smitherman, is missing

Christopher Peloso, 39, has been missing since Monday afternoon. The husband of George Smitherman, former mayoral candidate, was last seen in the Davenport Road/Bathurst Street area.

Peloso was last seen wearing a dark-blue hooded jacket, tan cargo shorts and blue flip flops. He is 5 foot 8 and 150 pounds, white with brown hair and brown eyes.

Through his website, Smitherman released a statement about his husband’s disappearance.

“I regret to confirm that Christopher Peloso has been missing from our home for almost 24 hours. Michael, Kayla and myself, with the support of family and friends, are hopeful that our husband and father will be home safely soon,” he wrote.

Smitherman and Peloso were married in 2007 and have two adopted children.

Anyone with information is asked to contact police at 416-808-1300, Crime Stoppers at 416-222-8477,  online at 222 Tips, text TOR and your message to CRIMES (274637), or leave a tip on the Toronto Police Service  Facebook page.

 

UPDATE: Peloso has been located. Police tracked his cellphone signal to Dupont and Lansdowne and found him alive and conscious.

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Health & Fitness

My hysterectomy story — Part 2 in a 4 part blog series

Surgery was a success. Dr. Grace Liu performed a laparoscopic partial hysterectomy at Sunnybrook last Tuesday.

I remember being in the operating room and Dr. Liu chatting with me as she held something over my mouth and nose. Then I vaguely remember waking up and asking, “Did she do it laparoscopically?” and touching my belly. The answer given from who I suspect was a nurse, was “Yes.”

The next memory was of being in bed with a nurse asking me a ton of questions and I finally got annoyed and gave up answering. I remember thinking, Why is she asking me so many questions? I can’t even speak…

Five residents came to visit me and asked me the same question asked by the nurses who looked after me for the 30 hours I was in the hospital. “How is your pain?” I was confused. “I have no pain,” I kept answering.

Truthfully, there was no pain. Discomfort in my stomach area when I moved and some cramping, but nothing I would call pain. Perhaps the years of dealing with extreme cramps that would be considered pain to the average person without my condition had made me immune.

When Dr. Liu came to see me the day after surgery, she looked stunned. “Look at you!” she said. “You have colour in your face!”

I thanked her and she shrugged it off. And I thought to myself – such a skilled surgeon who took out an enormous growth of fibroids from my uterus without having to cut me open. It was a procedure I was told was impossible from other medical sources. Her modesty and wonderful bedside manner made the entire experience almost welcoming – as much as surgery can be.

My recovery was not about physical pain but emotional pain. That’s my next blog.

 

My hysterectomy story

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

 

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Health & Fitness

My hysterectomy story — Part 1 in a 4 part blog series

It’s been a while since I posted. I spent a year and a half working on myself and my career and then I was in a place where I could make a long awaited decision. I have decided to have a partial hysterectomy.

I’m blogging about it because it’s a women’s issue and I wanted to share my experiences with other women who may be in a similar situation.

Fifteen years ago, irregular periods, hot flashes (yes, at 30!) and unbearable cramps led me to a specialist where it was determined that I had fibroids. They’re common, I was told. Just leave them alone and if they grow too large, then I’d eventually have to remove the uterus.

I was young and decided I could live with the symptoms because I wanted to keep the chance of having a child.

But the years passed, and the fibroids grew. I dreaded the week every month. The cramps lessened but the flow increased and for three of the days, I was incoherent. I was exhausted and even the simplest tasks took longer than usual. Last year, I knew it was time to make the decision.

Although I don’t have children and after next week, the option to give birth will be gone forever, I haven’t given up the privilege of becoming a mother.

All of my lives I have believed that being a mother to a child doesn’t necessarily mean giving birth. It means loving and caring and mentoring, helping one to grow. There are many children without a home in this world, and if I’m meant to be a mother, I will adopt.

So next week, I will be in the hands of a skilled surgeon who specializes in non-evasive operations. She will go into my uterus through three tiny incisions in my abdomen where a morcellator will dice up the fibroids so they can be removed through the incisions. There is a 30% chance that this procedure may not work, and only then will she opt for a bikini cut.

Am I scared? Yes.

In about nine days I may be able to blog again and let you know how it goes.

Keep reading….

 

 

My hysterectomy story

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

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Toronto

SKYDOME: Should we rename Toronto’s iconic stadium?

To help turn around the Blue Jays losing streak — and to bring back the team’s 1990’s glory years — is to rename the team’s home stadium back to SkyDome, or so a Toronto media design agency says.

Branding for Good has launched a “bring back the dome” campaign, urging the stadium to be called the SkyDome. The campaign’s organizers hope to gather 50,000 signatures in support of the name change. The company said in a statement: “The SkyDome name is not only reminiscent of the team’s early 1990s glory years, it’s also what many fans still call the stadium.”

“The name SkyDome has a strong literal reference to what you see when the roof is fully retracted. It’s what a lot of us grew up knowing, and what a lot of people still call it anyway,” said the company spokesperson.

Bring Back the Dome from Bring Back The Dome on Vimeo.

In 2005, the beloved SkyDome’s name changed to Rogers Centre when bought by Rogers Communications. But  although the stadium’s name changed the sports memories and the many fans who still call it the SkyDome today have not.

The SkyDome/Rogers Centre has a rich heritage — built in 1989, it was the world’s first stadium with a retractable roof and also houses the Toronto Argonauts. The stadium’s 25th anniversary will be next spring.

Canadians are asked to show their support by voting to change the name back to SkyDome.

Will you help bring back the Dome? You can by casting your vote:

The campaign includes a website (bringbackthedome.ca/), Twitter account (@bringbackdome) and a Facebook page (/bringbackthedome).

 

 

 

Follow Women’s Post on Twitter at @WomensPost.

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Toronto

An ode to librarians

This article was originally published in the summer of 2012.

From the beginning of recorded time, librarians have stored and protected knowledge to stave off the plague of ignorance that, like other plagues, doesn’t distinguish between poverty and opulence. I’ve just finished reading Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks. The lead character struggles to understand the world in a time when books and ideas are thwarted by religious belief and superstition. It is a terrific novel about life during the black plague and has me thinking about the amount of knowledge our librarians have collected over the generations and how important this knowledge is to understanding the world.

My family and I are currently visiting Costa Rica where the division between the wealthy and the poor is extreme.  The house we have rented is high up on a mountainside (Del Congo de Uvita) and it looks out over the coastal town of Uvita. The town has a small one-room open-air school; its windows lack glass and the shelves are empty of books. There isn’t a library in the town, but further north Librarians without Borders built an elementary school library in El Hum. Things move much slower here; roads are rough, most of them are unpaved, and in some places knowledge and the advancement it brings haven’t taken hold – there are internet towers and cell phones almost everywhere, but even this technology hasn’t had a huge impact on daily lives in most of the coastal towns.

While there are libraries here in Costa Rica, they are nothing like the public library system we have in Toronto, which has had much more investment, both financially and socially.  The Toronto Public Library system grew out of a campaign by city alderman John Hallam back in the late 1800s. It has become the largest public library system in Canada and has higher circulation per capita than any other public library system in the world.

But as Toronto’s city government reviews all areas to cut spending, this precious and priceless gem of a system could get whittled away by budget cuts so that its true value – not only the books, data, and information, but also the hundreds of librarians that protect and pass on the knowledge we’ve accumulated  – disappears. Too many people now mistake data for knowledge and wrongly assume that the internet can provide all the necessary information society needs. But it is the desire to further ourselves through literacy, and understanding, that our librarians, our custodians over knowledge, work to nurture and feed.

When I ran for mayor of Toronto, I learned quickly that the opposition hires fake writers to post bogus “articles” made to discredit their competition. The internet allows almost anyone to pose as a “journalist,” or to create fake “news” sites that distort the truth. One site went so far as to falesely report that I had suggested privatizing libraries – which goes against my core belief that having a strong public library system is essential to protecting knowledge from being distorted by private enterprise. And it is precisely because the internet enables both truth and misinformation to co-exist that the need to maintain a strong library system is so vitally important to our city.

Libraries must continue to collect and protect knowledge, and, as a society entering the internet age, it is essential that we continue to fund them.  Toronto’s public library system is one of the most important long-term investments our city can make. And it is our librarians who serve as custodians to protect our history and inform our aspirations.

 

 

Follow Sarah on Twitter at @ThomsonTO.

Follow Women’s Post on Twitter at @WomensPost.

 

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Love & Sex

Mourning: Don’t mistake grief for relationship distance

I thought Boyfriend deciding that I shouldn’t join him at the funeral meant he didn’t need me, I thought it meant that he didn’t want me around when he was most vulnerable and that worried me — but that wasn’t the case.

Some people grieve differently, I know that, but as the child of a broken marriage, as a young woman who has zero contact with the majority of her family I cannot understand why you wouldn’t want someone you love holding your hand when you need it most; but Boyfriend has a family and that day he was the one doing the handholding, he was the one acting as the rock for his family. He wasn’t able to be weak when everyone else needed him to be strong. When he did need me was the night before as he lay on my chest quietly talking about his hero, explaining that he didn’t want to go to the visitation and trying his best to share everything that made his grandfather so great with a woman who had only met him once.

There in the darkness on the night before that was when he needed me because that was when he let himself give in and be the one who needed people.

Our relationship isn’t perfect; I’m stubborn, neurotic and afraid to let myself be honest with the people I care about most because losing them isn’t an option he’s intense, silent and dorky but we work together and after this I’m convinced that we can make it through anything. This summer he watched me break down when my Mum got sick, he watched me cry because my Great Uncle is sick and my father kept me away from my Mum’s family for so long that I feel like just as I get to know all the wonderful people in my life they are leaving and he watched me start a new job after losing what I thought was my dream job. Through everything Boyfriend was my rock and this time it was my turn; this time I had to be strong so that he could be sad.

I thought I was losing Boyfriend last week, I worried that not wanting me to be at the funeral meant that he didn’t need me but he really did just want me to meet his family under better conditions and if I was there he would have been able to break when he needed to be strong. Today I know that we can look to the future, stronger for what we’ve been through and for the first time in months looking at happy things on the calendar instead of worrying that tomorrow will bring another disaster.

Today I learned that when you love someone you need to take them at their word, people who love you won’t lie to you in a dire situation they will be heartbreakingly honest with you and if you can take that if you can be with them in the way that they need you’ll have a real partner.

Tomorrow is a new day and there is a lot to look forward to this month, including my first anniversary since the Big Ex.

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