The Australian :: "The Americans used prostitutes as tools in their interrogations," he said. "They'd say to detainees 'If you co-operate with us, we'll let you at this woman for the night'. And if they wouldn't agree they'd use them in other ways." He said detainees held at the base with Habib reported that a prostitute was told to stand over him and menstruate on him. "One of the prostitutes stood over him naked while he was strapped to the floor and menstruated on him," he said.

Daily Picayune :: Photographer Missy Graham will direct and photograph a series of fetish-themed tableaux (foot fetish, food fetish, cross-dressing, bondage, etc.) with live models at Space Gallery from 8 p.m. to midnight on Saturday. Audience members will observe the digital photography process and help select the images used to produce Graham's photo series titled "21st Century Pin Ups."

Screen Daily :: The Sydney Film Festival has approached both the State and Federal Government in the hope that Ken Park can be shown twice next week as scheduled, despite the Classification Review Board upholding the Office of Film and Literature Classification's refusal to classify the film. Australian film festivals do not ordinarily have to seek classification for their programmes, although the Classification Office has the right to ban a film. It was the little-known Queensland-based video distributor Independent Pictures which submitted the film for classification and the result means it cannot now be legally sold, hired or exhibited in Australia. The Classification Board believes "the film deals with matters of sex in such a way that they offend against the standards of morality, decency and propriety generally accepted by reasonable adults to the extent that it should be refused classification".

The Age :: Secretary is a film about perversion. As it opens, we see Maggie Gyllenhaal's character Lee walking the ornately papered offices of E. Edward Grey, a Florida solicitor played by James Spader in full southern gentlemanly style, collecting faxes and making her boss a coffee. She is impeccably groomed and wears the half-smile of the happily obliging helpmeet. Her hands, meanwhile, are tied. Literally tied, to a rod that sits across her shoulders, with regulation S&M black leather. Clearly, this is no ordinary office.

Washington Post :: The John Robinson case bequeathed to investigators a new designation for a new class of murderer -- the cyberserial killer. Imagine how the jurors in Robinson's Kansas City trial learned about the S&M subculture where Robinson stalked his prey. They heard about Gorean chat rooms. ("Gorean had no safe words and no rules; submission to the dominant was total. The Gorean concept had been laid out in twenty-five science fiction novels about the planet Gor, written by a philosophy professor named John Norman. On Gor, all the women were slaves to men and had to satisfy their every sexual desire.") They watched a 39-minute videotape of John Robinson in flagrante delicto with one of his eventual murder victims. And yet another irony: " . . . as the video neared its end and the sex finally stopped, everyone saw a fragment of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory pop up on the screen. Nothing could have underscored Robinson's double life, as doting grandfather and sexual predator, any better."

ChronWatch :: For some reason, when it comes to the opening of a Hooters restaurant at Fisherman?s Wharf, the famously libertine residents of San Francisco have suddenly becoming puritans.  What else can explain the continuing brouhaha over a restaurant because it employs buxom waitresses in tank tops?  But the real reason why Hooters gets so many San Franciscans? panties in a bunch, probably has less to do with sex, than it does with heterosexual sex. Readers may recall the similar fuss that ensued prior to the opening of Larry Flynt?s Hustler Club not long ago.  Some residents of the city were up in arms because one more strip club was going to be added to the repertoire.  San Franciscans pride themselves on being ''sex positive'' but the truth is that their ''tolerance'' is selective.  If it?s got ''transgender,'' ''S&M,'' or ''guy-on-guy'' in the title, it?s a shoo-in, but when it comes down to plain old ''vanilla sex'' (as it?s labeled in SF), you can forget about it.

Seattle Post Intelligencer :: The religious and civil officials are swishy. At every turn they flounce and flare their wide floor-length coattails. The torture and killing of Jesus are played as a sort of S&M dungeon party. The prolonged scourging is effected with raucous relish. The walk to Golgotha is accompanied by a trio of mocking go-go dancers in red vinyl mini dresses. Pilate looks like a Nazi colonel.

Mainichi Daily News :: As far as sexuality goes, until just a few years ago it was common for Japanese women to act as sweet and demure as their reputation. But, then, suddenly, something changed and women's sexuality underwent a paradigm shift. Almost overnight, the Japanese woman's norm changed from the dainty little Geisha girl to a randy and rambunctious gal who went out for it whenever she wanted it.

Japan Today :: TOKYO - The Supreme Court has rejected a request filed by a female-born transsexual to allow him to alter his gender in his official family registry, upholding lower court rulings, sources close the plaintiff said Sunday.

Chicago Sun-Times :: Following all the stories about ''Matrix'' co-creator Larry Wachowski allegedly taking hormones to prep for an upcoming sex change operation come reports from sources that say distributor Warner Bros. may be doing an alteration that will take a lot less work. For the upcoming third ''Matrix'' film (due in November), it seems the writing and directing credits for Chicago native Larry and his brother and partner, Andy Wachowski, will merely be listed as ''The Wachowskis.

Front Page :: Rutgers English professor Michael Warner, a leading queer theorist, observes that categories like ?heterosexual? and ?homosexual? are part of ?the regime of the normal? that queer theory wants to explode. ?What identity,? he writes, ?encompasses queer girls who f*&k queer boys with strap-ons, or FTMs (female-to-male transsexuals) who think of themselves as queer, FTMs who think of themselves as straights, or FTMs for whom life is a project of transition and screw the categories anyway?? To overturn the old dichotomies of hetero/homo and even male/female, Warner encourages continuous sexual experimentation.

NY Daily News :: At the time, The Vault - then on 10th Ave. and Little W. 12th St. - was a kinky mecca. Some nights the club held "slave auctions" run by a dominatrix. There were "Tie Me Up" nights and "Over the Knee Spanking Tuesdays."

Telegraph ::
In recent years, Ruff has enlarged photographs he has found on pornographic sites on the internet. Because he slightly blurs the photos, the resulting art works are not particularly provocative. But that, I think, is the point. This is the first time in history when the things men and women actually do to each other sexually is easily available for everyone to see. You might think that seeing pictures of the most intimate acts of which human beings are capable would tell us something about who we are. But the exact opposite is the case. When Ruff shows us S&M sessions, lesbian and gay couplings and group sex, we learn precisely nothing.

Guardian :: To complain about this would be to berate advertising for being itself: it always idealises, but what is telling is the change in the ideal. "Social" advertising has achieved a gender revolution before the fact, creating an implicitly post-feminist world in which women are powerful and men compliant (or, if not, about to get their comeuppance). It is a depiction of gender relations that fuels sexism, while banishing it: the portrayal of contemporary society as female-dominated generates powerful sexist feelings which, however, cannot "innocently" be expressed in this imaginary present.

So they become channelled on the one hand into what I call retro-sexist imagery, where sexism operates freely within the frame of a period style; and, on the other, into increasingly fetishistic sexual imagery, which depicts power relations as about S&M sex rather than who washes up or chairs the board.

People :: THE lusting husband of shotgun killer Rena Salmon is having a secret relationship with a kinky dancer - behind the back of his beautiful new girlfriend. Paul Salmon, 42, started sending sexually explicit messages to sado-masochist enthusiast Maria Pike just two months after his wife blasted his pregnant lover Lorna Stewart to death.

Denver Post :: For three days in mid-July, up to 1,000 people from across the country will gather at the Holiday Inn-Denver International Airport to learn, practice and enjoy bondage, dominance and sadomasochistic sex. The national leather event July 11-13, called Thunder in the Mountains, will offer speakers on alternative sex techniques, demonstrations, dungeon play parties, Ouchy the Clown, and a Saturday morning guided meditation service.

Admonton Journal :: Dracula is Maddin's most exquisite homage yet to the antique style of silent cinema, especially the works of German expressionists like F.W. Murnau (Nosferatu, Sunrise) and Fritz Lang (Metropolis).

Shot with a variety of formats and film stock, his imagery manages to weave together the strange commonality of ballet and silent film -- dynamic visual motion set to music, in this case Gustav Mahler's first and second symphonies. Mark Godden's original choreography is captured with verve although some dance purists carp that the ballet sequences have been shot from wrong angles and worse, submerged by the overpowering style of the film.

Advocate :: Gay and lesbian students at the University of Oregon staged a "love-in" Wednesday in response to an antigay opinion piece that ran in the student newspaper. The event drew almost 70 people to a school amphitheater. It was planned by members of the school's Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer Alliance to counter what they felt was hate speech in a commentary published May 9 in the Oregon Daily Emerald.

Vincent Martorano, a political science major, wrote that he had seen gay men "making out" on campus on several occasions and called the sight "an absolutely disturbing display." He also called homosexuality a disgrace to society. "I long for the days when homosexuality was viewed by society as an illness and gays opted to remain in the closet," he wrote. The paper received numerous letters protesting the comments, and the student editor wrote an editorial defending his decision to run Martorano's piece.

Sydney Morning Herald :: The film Secretary has caused a big stir since its first screening at last year's Sundance Film Festival. Not because it is a sweet, romantic fairytale, but because it opens with the 25-year-old Maggie Gyllenhaal performing secretarial duties with her arms locked in a crucifix position by an iron contraption fastened around her neck. Flash back six months and her character, Lee Holloway, is seen coming out of a mental institution, cutting or burning herself when life outside proves too much to handle. She eventually discovers her sense of self-worth when she takes a low-grade job as a typist. Her boss, played by James Spader, instructs her to bend over his desk and accept punishment for her spelling mistakes.

Engaging in S&M brings both characters out of their shells. Yet the film, directed by Steven Shainberg, doesn't show more than it needs to, and never views the relationship crudely or salaciously. This is largely down to Gyllenhaal, who spent a month with Shainberg analysing every scene, every line.

"I trusted the script implicitly," she says.