Joe from the Telegraph took my words out of context and misrepresented what I said.

I was contacted by Joe at the Daily Telegraph about my blog. How he found it so soon, when I only started it a few weeks ago makes the mind wander off to a scary place indeed. Joe at his sticky keyboard googling anything with the word gay hoping to find someone he could publicly embarrass, so that his boss might not fire him for being a crappy blogger? After all, he does work for News Limited, what else do they have to do over there? Surely reporters have no need to write about any of these, what do you call it….news things?

I’m really grateful that Joe superimposed my picture over the tent scene. It makes me look fantastic, and scary. Here is the before and after:

I almost feel like I was in the tent with the thespians, pretending to have gay sex. I wonder if Joe considered putting a moustache on my picture too? Another time perhaps, when he is home alone.

It’s worth mentioning, I did send another picture to Joe but he chose not to use it. I think I look much better in this one:

It’s better if your Gay activists look mean, so, he picked the one he could work with, even if it did involve drawing in an imaginary jaw line where the white light managed to wash me out. What better way to make your Gay activists look bad than to cut out their pictures and superimpose them over a dark background with big angry white text. (For the record, I’m not your mate Joe, or Telstras for that matter).

I looked for a picture of Joe to see if I could return the favour, but sadly, there are only two, and they’re bad enough on there own. Here’s the best of them; I like to call him, baby Joe, cause this is as big as it gets, possibly in more ways than one.
Say hello baby joe :

He would say hello back, but he doesn’t have anything nice to say.

Now that my vanity can be swept aside, onto the issue at hand.

My blog was designed to point out the discrepancies I encountered with our Governement, specifically surrounding Government Policy on same sex marriage in Australia. I encountered a discrepancy when I attempted to make a complaint about a homophobic Telstra Commercial. I did not alert the press about my intention to complain to HREOC, and I was not after media attention. I was just wanting to complain that the ad offended me.

But I received this lovely email from Joe this morning, which made me (believe it or not) think that someone might actually care. I asked him how he found my site, he was shady on the details; “Oh, I don’t know, someone forwarded it to me.”

Here’s the email:

Joe seemed nice right? I called him, and he was lovely on the phone. He wanted to know what upset me about the Telstra Commercial, and I told him that, “What upset me is, we are only led to believe that the two men in the tent are gay because they are afraid when they get caught by their other buddies. The look of fear on their face is the reason we assume they are gay not that we saw shadowy sex through the tent. What’s worse, the characters in the ad are redeemed in the end, much to the audiences releif, when we find out that they are in fact not gay, but rather, watching sport on their cell phone.”
How funny. Sorry Graeme Innes, Commissioner of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, I still don’t get it, unless I try to think like the kind of idiot who’d want to watch anything on a mobile phone whilst paying for Telstra’s ridiculous data rates.

Joe said that my encounter with HREOC would make an interesting story, and it would be one that hopefully sparks some debate. Little did I know, that Joe would be on the opposite side of the debate, batting for the other team,as it were.

Then Joe went on his photo rant, demanding I allow a Telagraph photographer to catpure me in the moment. “We want to take a picture of you looking angry in front of a computer or something.” I explained that I could not take time off work and have my picture taken in my work uniform. I offered to send him whatever pictures I had on my computer. I did, I wish I hadn’t.

Two important Facts, that are sadly lost amongst Joe’s witless rant and my scary picture

• I did not complain to Commissioner Graeme Innes of the HREOC about the Telstra Commercial, (which as hard as I try, I still cannot find funny.)

• I complained to the HREOC that when I had attempted to complain to them about the Telstra Commercial, I was given no opportunity to complain as being gay allows me to only complain if I’m discriminated against in employment. Sexual Preference is a category of discrimination not severe enough to warrant the attention of the HREOC (unless its because you get sacked). Sexual Preference is a category of discrimination equal only to discrimination against convicted criminals, political extremists, and religious fanatics.
  Here are the options you get: (click for larger version)
  

  

Now, I have to give Joe a tiny bit of credit. He did manage to pretend to be nice through an email and an entire phone call. Good Job Joe!

What did I learn, apart from the fact that News Limited continues to hire people who are both bad writers who are only good at twisting other people’s words to try to milk a story out of nothing?

I learned that these are the people who make it harder for me to gain equality and hopefully one day get married. These people are the ones who make it harder for teens coping with homosexuality to accept who they are.

I don’t want special Treatment. I just want to get bloody Married.

I woke up this morning and logged in to www.smh.com.au to read the news. Telstra pays a fortune to advertise on fairfax, and in their most recent campaign for Next Gen Mobile coverage they try to be funny in a homophobic and utterly stupid way.

Here is the ad (click the speaker to enable sound, although I don’t recommend it)

It shows people in tents at night in a camping ground. One of the men in the tent looks at his phone and then asks his tent mate ‘Gibbo’ what he’s doing. He replies and says he is doing nothing. The first man asks Gibbo what Barry is doing, and Gibbo says he does not know. We see an empty tent. Inside it, Barry is no where to be found. We then see another tent with shadows moving inside it in a way that suggests more than one person is inside it. We then see inside the tent that has two people moving around, and two men look up as though they have been caught doing something untoward. They look very worried they have been caught doing something their friends would dislike.  It then turns out they are watching football on a mobile phone.

This ad implies that Barry is gay, and he has been caught having homosexual sex in a tent. Gay men who do choose to have sex in a tent should not have to be afraid of getting ‘caught’ by their friends. The ad implies that being gay, or having homosexual sex is something to be ashamed of. The look on Barry’s face and his friends face when they realise they have been caught is the reason we assume they are gay. They are scared, and ashamed. This was the intention of the advertiser. The audience see’s that they are scared and ashamed and is led to believe they have been having sex with each other, the audience is then supposed to be relieved when they realise Barry is not in fact having gay sex with his friend, but instead they are watching football on their mobile phone together. The men and their reputations are saved. This is blatantly homophobic and very offensive.

So I went to www.humanrights.gov.au to make a discrimination complaint. But it turns out that the Australian Federal Government Department tasked with eradicating discrimination, is itself, discriminating against gay people.

They only deal with sexual preference discrimination if it is to do with some kind of employment issue. If you’re being discriminated against by a company who offers a service, or by any other organisation, they will not assist you. Your complaint is void. Here is the options you get to choose from:

As you can see, pregnancy, marital status, race, disability, age, sex, gender are all issues that you can make a complaint about. But if it is sexual preference, you are on your own.

So I decided to lodge a complaint with humanrights.gov.au about humanrights.gov.au.

Here is a copy of my lodged complaint:

We will see what they say.