My kissing project, part 4

I generally do not like to talk about myself, it's a kind of narcissism I try to stay away from. Yet at other times, out of my own activism, I do things that make myself the subject of the news. 

This presents a problem. 

If I don't write about it, I'm avoiding something that may be important to cover. If I talk about it, someone somewhere will read it as self-promotion. This circle is very hard to square. 

After news got out that the Media Development Authority refused a licence for the photo exhibition 'Kissing', Associated Press got to me the following day. I talked to the reporter on the phone, and she sent a photographer over barely 3 hours later.

I didn't issue any press release, since my "Plan B" didn't involve one. The reporter was monitoring the Indignation and Yawning Bread websites; that's how she could move as fast as she did.

(The same thing happened today with Ng Yi-Sheng's Lee Low Tar. Within 12 hours of my uploading his story onto this site, another news agency was onto the story.)

The next morning, the first email that I clicked open was from an old friend on the other side of the world. He wrote, "You just made the newspapers here in the USA. And, you have exposed that awful government for what it is. I hope they find that censorship is wrong someday, but I doubt it."

People in government need to ask themselves what good they do behaving they way they do, when this kind of news travels. Here are six screenshots that I could find from a quick websearch.

 
The International Herald Tribune, a highly regarded newspaper, widely read by business executives and expatriates from Paris to Tokyo, was probably the first to carry the story - 1 August 2007 [1]

 
Amazingly, the same newspaper carried a second account the following day [2]. I'm not too flattered by the picture, but I must say AP's photographer really knows how to get the point of the story into a single frame.

 
The AP story (i.e. as published in the IHT on 1 August 2007) got into The Advocate immediately.

 
The New York Daily News came up with a catchy headline and opening sentence:

 
The story also got into the San Francisco Chronicle, whose online edition is called SFgate:

 
Down south, to the West Australian:

 
And up north, to the Guardian in the UK:

Another search found blogs from Florida to Canada picking up the story and commenting on it, including the widely-read Towleroad. I really don't need to say more.

© Yawning Bread 

Footnotes

1. The text of the first IHT news story is archived here.
   Return to where you left off

2. The text of the second IHT story is archived here.
   Return to where you left off

Addenda

None