The only obvious connection I can make from the pictures is that there is a “male” on the left and a “female” on the right (and even that is a dubious conclusion since the ape has no obvious gender). How many ways can you pose two people? Oh wait, he’s black and she’s white (I think, though I’ve never heard either self-identify). OMG maybe they’re right, he has his arm around her and she’s obviously happy (wait again, that means subjugation…cough cough).

What I find more amazing is the inherent racism of finding similarities between the two. Homophobia is not the only thing that can be internalized. Is it possible that people can pose for a magazine and have it mean anything other than what it appears? Have the people in question been asked their views of the shoot? The truly bigoted presumption is that the people involved had no choice, and that they couldn’t possibly think for themselves.

Strangely (or not so much) I’m reminded of a song by The Ark…

Are you tired of being an object
Or did you never get the chance
To be one,
And now you wanna make sure
There´s no fun
You´ve been missing
Are you tired of being an object
Or are you just jealous
That you ain´t one,
Now you realized that those objects
Do all the kissing

Well don´t project you spleen
On the girl on the magazine
You never know,
Maybe she´s feeling quite comfortable
The only human right for which I´m
Gonna fight
Is everybody´s right to sometimes feel
Irresistible

Uh-oh, maybe it´s you who need
Confidence
Maybe it´s you who need real freinds
Well she doesn´t need your voice
`Cause she´s already got one

And though she doesn´t push
With as much force
It can even be stronger than yours
When she uses it
In a sensi-sensi-sensual whisper

Well, don´t project your bore
On the girl on the dance floor
She doesn´t at all find
The men´s looks abusive
She doesn´t want your shield
Maybe she´s the one who´s free
Maybe sometimes getting fucked
Can be amusing

http://technology.timesonline......192554.ece

It was a simple photo shoot and as always controversy sells if this was the intention of VOGUE magazine.
This is “poppycock” The ad that got me was last year when they had all of these track runners with dark, and beautiful bodies on their knees with a white guy standing in front of them like their master, or something. And I forgot what the ad was for. However, it didn’t really connect with the advertising of the product.

Folks just take one and BREATHE!

“We” are very ignorant of history.

It gets really tiresome how the gay communities complain of being treated like second-class citizens, while being so willfully indifferent towards racial injustice.

What Leibovitz has done is deliberate and inexcusable.

But … this doesn’t even seem remotely related to those. That’s where I get stuck. I cannot think of one negative image of black man that this refers to. Point to one, I’ll apologize. And no monkeys or chimps, ok? The scientist in me wants King Kong, or a mountain or lowland gorilla. Orang-hutans don’t count either. Until then, it’s a tenuous thread.

Test: Go to Manhunt. Or Adam4Adam. Or Gaydar. Search for variations on ” King Kong” as a screen name. A lot of people are using that image, worldwide, and of all races. You better let them know how offensive they’re being. I don’t think they know.

http://jezebel.com/368655/is-v.....-offensive

Susan Sontag and a Case of Curious Silence

by Patrick Moore

On Dec. 29, 2004, major gay and lesbian news organizations announced that “lesbian writer Susan Sontag” had died. In its obituary of Sontag, the New York Daily News wrote, “Famed photographer Annie Leibovitz had been her longtime companion.”

On Dec. 29, 2004, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times reported Sontag’s death on their front pages, with more stories inside. Yet neither paper mentioned Sontag’s relationships with Leibovitz and other women.

It seems that editors at what are, arguably, the nation’s most respected (and liberal) newspapers believe that one personal detail cannot be mentioned in even the most complete biographies–being a lesbian.

In a 1995 New Yorker profile, Sontag outed herself as bisexual, familiar code for “gay.” Yet she remained quasi-closeted, speaking to interviewers in detail about her ex-husband without mentioning her long liaisons with some of America’s most fascinating female artists.

An unauthorized biography written by Carl Rollyson and Lisa Paddock and published by W.W. Norton in 2000, reports that Sontag was, for seven years, the companion of the great American playwright Maria Irene Fornes (in Sontag’s introduction to the collected works of Fornes, she writes about them living together). She also had a relationship with the renowned choreographer Lucinda Childs. And, most recently, Sontag lived, on and off, with Leibovitz.

Sontag’s reticence is surely part of why the two Timeses neglected this part of her life. But she didn’t deny these relationships. And given that obituaries typically cite their subjects’ important relationships, shouldn’t the two best newspapers in the country have reported at least her most recent one, with Leibovitz, as well as her marriage, which ended in 1958?

Some will ask why revealing Sontag’s sexuality is relevant. As Charles McGrath wrote in his appreciation of Sontag in the New York Times, “Part of her appeal was her own glamour–the black outfits, the sultry voice, the trademark white stripe parting her long dark hair.” Sontag was well aware of herself as a sexual being and used her image to transform herself from just another intellectual into a cultural icon. She may well have felt that her true sexuality would limit her impact in the male-dominated intellectual elite, while an omnisexual charisma opened doors.

More important, though, Sontag’s lesbian relationships surely affected her work and our understanding of it. Two of Sontag’s most famous essays dealt with issues associated with homosexuality: “Notes on Camp” and “AIDS and Its Metaphors.”

The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times found ample room to discuss Sontag’s cancer and subsequent mastectomy, which were not seen as lurid details but as necessary information in understanding the work of the author of “Illness as Metaphor.” The papers also included extensive discussions of Sontag’s schooling, her early family life, how she met her ex-husband, even her thoughts on driving in Los Angeles. However, her relationships with women and how they shaped her thoughts on gay culture and the larger world of outsiders and outlaws (a Sontag fascination) were omitted.

There is, of course, a larger issue here: Continued silence about lesbians in American culture amounts to bias. Gay men seem to have settled into the role of finger-snapping designer/decorator/entertainers in the mass media. Meanwhile, most lesbians who achieve widespread fame–Ellen DeGeneres, Melissa Etheridge and Rosie O’Donnell–have to remain in the closet until they have gained enough power to weather the coming-out storm. This model victimizes those who are out and proud from the very beginning.

The obituaries, remembrances and appreciations in New York and Los Angeles do anything but honor Sontag. They form a record that is, at best, incomplete and, at worst, knowingly false. But don’t look for corrections, clarifications or apologies.

The New York writer and activist Sarah Schulman has been, ironically, described as “the lesbian Susan Sontag.” Schulman told me recently that Sontag “never applied her massive intellectual gifts toward understanding her own condition as a lesbian, because to do so publicly would have subjected her to marginalization and dismissal.”

Susan Sontag was a brilliant, provocative writer who had vital, loving relationships with some of the most fascinating and creative women of her day. I believe that her intellectual accomplishments are even more compelling when one understands how her sexuality informed them.

Sontag was often quoted as saying, “Be serious, be passionate, wake up!” Let’s hope that America’s leading newspapers follow her advice.

Patrick Moore is the author of “Beyond Shame: Reclaiming the Abandoned History of Radical Gay Sexuality” (Beacon Press, 2004).

© 2005 Los Angeles Times

###

M Shane: You are a fucking idiot.

This doesn’t even come from the same *place* as the historical racist images where black men were made to look like monkeys (not, I should add, like King Kong). Those other images emphasized stupidity & ignorance (i.e., equating black men with dumb monkeys). This image is all about sex and power. And sex (stops to wipe his brow). There’s a whole lot of sex in that picture (catch me if I swoon).

I don’t see violence. I don’t see ignorance. I don’t see “let’s make LeBron look subhuman.”

I definitely think that some are projecting their own internalized racism onto the photo. Like Cord Jefferson.

http://www.slate.com/id/2186553

And, by the way, exactly how are we jumping to the conclusion that King Kong was supposed to be a black man anyway. Let’s see . . . 1933 . . . America . . . KKK more popular than Neo Conservatism was in 1996 . . . bigger than life, powerful, black man as ape metaphor makes off with hot blond white woman in the first half hour of movie . . . forget New York, ape metaphor must die immediately . . . movie is over before the intermission.

I think if Kong represents anything, it is Jung’s wild man archetype of the deeply masculine aspects of our nature: Big, hairy, and naked, the Wild Man is totally liberated from the trappings of modern civilization, he still possesses almost magical powers over the forces of nature and his animal brethren.

Ain’t that the pot calling the kettle black. If supposed racist imagery or words hurts your delicate little sensibiliyies than maybe you should practice as what preach.
Oh wait by sayinf preach, am i implying that you’re southern Baptist which inturn maybe black?
I’m sorry I didn’;t mean to us such words, How dare I!