Now in its 8th year, The GLORIAs are an annual event hosted by Penny Sharpe MLC to shine a light on the most Outrageous, Ridiculous and Ignorant comments directed at the LGBTI community.
With almost 500 people voting, and a 100 people attending the 2017 Awards Night on Wednesday evening, Ramzan Kadyrov, head of the Chechen Government was awarded the Golden GLORIA by a seriously raucous boo-off for “deciding that gay men should be rounded up and arrested, then herded into concentration camps and eliminated.”
The winners of each individual category were:
International:
Ramzan Kadyrov – head of the Chechen Government, for deciding that gay men should be rounded up and arrested, then herded into concentration camps and eliminated.
Media:
Cartoonist Larry Pickering for telling a Q Society dinner that, while he doesn’t like Muslims: “They’re not all bad, they do chuck pillow-biters off buildings.
Religion:
Lyle Shelton – director of the Australian Christian Lobby, for equating same sex marriage with Nazi atrocities: “The cowardice and weakness of Australia’s ‘gatekeepers’ is causing unthinkable things to happen, just as unthinkable things happened in Germany in the 1930s.”
Sport:
Straight journalist Nico Hines from the Daily Beast for setting up a Grindr profile in order to bait male athletes at the Olympic village in Rio, and then wrote an article about it called ‘I Got Three Grindr Dates in an Hour in the Olympic Village’ – including using identifying details about athletes who come from homophobic countries.
Silliest comment made from within the LGBTI community:
The ‘Gays for Trump’ campaign for defending Trump’s announcement that he supports anti-trans laws in North Carolina, which rolled back anti-discrimination protections for LGBT people and introduced regulations to ban transgender women from using the female bathroom on purported ‘safety’ grounds.
Politics:
Liberal Senator Eric Abetz for saying that flying a rainbow flag in the lobby of a government building represented support for a hostile nation that had declared war on Australia.
The GLORIAs are an annual event hosted by Penny Sharpe MLC. This year, the evening featured special guest host, Kirsty Webeck, and special guest performer, Barbra Blacksheep. For more information, and to view full list of nominees for 2017, visit: www.theglorias.com.au for details.
Image: Ramzan Kadyrov