Tag Archives: Activism

The Marseille Kiss. Women Kissing = Best Political Action Ever

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The best way to han­dle big­ots is to show them love, com­pas­sion, and a juicy round of Tongue War.

Dur­ing French protests of a law that would legal­ize gay mar­riage and adop­tion by gay cou­ples, AFP pho­tog­ra­pher Gérard Julien cap­tured a case of “killing them with love.”

The image, now referred to as the Mar­seille Kiss after the French city it was taken in, went viral on Wednes­day, get­ting an insane amount of Retweets and Likes. The point is, peo­ple love this photo because it com­mu­ni­cates a very real, very uni­ver­sal idea: LGBT peo­ple need to be treated as equals in the eyes of the law.

This photo should be in future text­books. When kids read about how in 2012 the world still couldn’t fig­ure out that thing called “equal­ity,” I want this photo of two women kiss­ing to appear with a cap­tion like, “Even in coun­tries like France, gays and les­bians were denied basic civil rights and treated as ‘oth­ers’ for years.”

The two girls, 17-year-old Julia and 19-year-old Auri­ane — who are not in fact gay — later told French LGBT web­site Têtu that it was, “a ges­ture of sol­i­dar­ity, pure and simple.”

Thanks, ladies!


Fuck GEMA!

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If you live in Ger­many, prob­a­bly you hate GEMA as much as the next John in his right mind. For those who don’t know, GEMA (Gesellschaft für musikalis­che Auf­führungs– und mech­a­nis­che Vervielfäl­ti­gungsrechte. Eng­lish: Soci­ety for musi­cal per­form­ing and mechan­i­cal repro­duc­tion rights) is a per­for­mance rights orga­ni­za­tion from Germany.

Its pur­pose is to col­lect roy­alty fees from the organ­is­ers of pub­lic events where music pro­tected by GEMA is played as well as media man­u­fac­tur­ers and pub­lish­ers and broad­cast­ing stations.

GEMA are also the fuck­ers respon­si­ble for block­ing the videos in youtube, as Wiki says:

Music videos for major label artists on YouTube, as well as many videos con­tain­ing back­ground music, have been unavail­able in Ger­many since the end of March 2009 as GEMA sought to raise its fee charged to YouTube to 12 euro cents per streamed video., a fee a YouTube spokesman described as “pro­hib­i­tive”. The issue is set to be taken up by a Cal­i­for­nia court.

GEMA is also from next year increas­ing in grants, nine times more, the roy­al­ties they col­lect from clubs and bars all over Berlin. Which will end up in many venues hav­ing to close down.

FAIR Play is orginiz­ing a mas­sive Demo out­side Frannz Club (this Mon­day, 25.06. 18:00–22:00) where GEMA are hav­ing a member’s meeting.

Check also the On-line Peti­tion.