Ditch the diet, put the kettle on and crack open the cake-tin because Bake Off is back with series four of the richest, most comforting TV in the land. 

More than ten thousand people applied this year for the chance to meet Paul Hollywood and Mary Berry in the flesh, and for the first time ever, a baker’s dozen of contestants will be in the running. Or should that be the unlucky 13? 

From the amount of blue sticking plasters and bandages on display as contestants slice and grate their fingers and thumbs they should perhaps start adding injury time into the running order. 

Even though it’s only week one, the pressure is intense – most of it entirely self-inflicted as they’re already going all out to impress with some wildly ambitious cakes. We’ve got chocolate squirrels, a silver bear a sandwich cake in its own paper bag made of icing sugar, and a tower based on the architecture of Gaudi. But there are plenty of mistakes too – including one poor baker who mistakes salt for sugar. Mel and Sue may make light of proceedings, as they dry tears and offer supportive hugs, but inside that tent, this is serious stuff. 

When Paul says of one contestant tonight, “He’s not a scientist: he’s a baker,Browse through thousands of modest 2013 Wholesale Cheap Wedding Dresses to find the right bridal gowns for you.” he means that as a compliment of the highest order. 

There is a gay bias in the dastardly liberal media. But it’s not the one you think. It’s hard to pick up a smart publication these days without some topic along the LGBT rights spectrum being referenced. In most happy-clappy societies, gayness is at a convoluted crossroads. Behind us, for the most part, are years of violent oppression. Ahead, a spaghetti junction of complex issues. 

Within the LGBT community there is a debate about what is being given up in return for being subsumeYou can find quality Wholesale Cheap Designer Prom Dresses Online and evening gowns.d into what is bluntly called “mainstream society”. It’s a privileged position to be in: arguing over the semantics of queerness and gay identity being embraced – though not without spiteful opposition – from its fringe underground to the village fete. Will queer culture be diluted? Are heteronormative structures something to strive for? 

Every social movement is fraught and fractured, but has to project a consensus so the diversity of debate within doesn’t slow down its overall progress. 

The media’s documentation of this process is not its bias. The real bias is a refusal to take the rough with the smooth. What the mainstream media wants is polite progress. Straight, liberal, Irish society wants jokes about how gay men’s wedding lists could save the economy, happy stories about lesbians in matching wedding dresses,Your Cheap Designer Quinceanera gowns is a simple and easy. and colourful photos of same-sex couples kissing at Pride. That’s fantastic. Visibility is vital to eroding ignorance. But it is also a bias. While LGBT lives are finally being acknowledged by the media, harsher struggles are ignored. We need to tell those stories. 

Recently in Dublin, the Gaze LGBT International Film Festival, of which I am a board member, screened a documentary about LGBT lives in Cameroon called Born This Way. A fortnight before the screening, Cameroonian LGBT activist Eric Lembembe, who the director of the film described as “a pillar of the LGBT community”, was tortured and murdered. Before his killing, the headquarters of an NGO providing HIV services was burned down. Human rights lawyers representing gays and lesbians are threatened with death. And Cameroon rarely brought prosecutions against gay people until 2005. 

In South Africa in 2008, Eudy Simelane,One Wholesale Cheap Designer Womens Long cocktail dresses manufacturers China listing. a lesbian who played football for the national team, was raped and murdered,long and Wholesale Cheap Designer Short Evening Dresses in every length from classic ball. stabbed 25 times and dumped in a stream. She was training to be a referee for the 2010 Fifa World Cup. Three years later, another woman, Noxolo Nogwaza, was spotted with a female friend at a bar. That night, she was raped, murdered, her eyes torn from their sockets. 
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