Gay City News, August 29 by Schneps Media

FREE VOLUME ELEVEN, ISSUE EIGHTEEN AUGUST 29 - SEPTEMBER 11, 2012

How to Be Gay!?! 21 Edgard Mercado’s Killer Sentenced 9 State Senate Primary Debate 5 Gilbert & Sullivan Revived 10

August 29, 2012 | www.gaycitynews.com

THEATER Heart wrenched in Sam Shepard’s latest

Long Speeches, Funny Hats & Things That Matter 04

23 Cover Illustration by Michael Shirey

ALBANY Senate Primary Divides Advocates 06

ENDORSEMENT

PERSPECTIVE

Brad Hoylman for State Senate 12

Gay Ugandans: Loud and Proud 14

FILM Ira Sachs’ personal take on love’s grip 20

| August 29, 2012

MEDIA

Gay Voices Reach Readers Who Often Are Not Noah Michelson, self-styled radical, commands mainstream attention on queer issues BY PAUL SCHINDLER

ay Voices, the LGBT “vertical” at Huffington Post, hit the ground running when it launched last O c t o b e r. A c c o r d i n g t o i t s e d i t o r, Noah Michelson, within a month it had become the number one queer -focused site on the web. It averages, he said, roughly three million unique visitors each month, though traffic can vary widely from day to day based on the vagaries of what’s hot in the world of news and online chatter. Michelson shared a host of statistics demonstrating not only the reach but also the growth of the page. Average daily visits grew about 80 per cent from October 2011 to this June; comments rose about 50 percent and social interactions based on Gay Voices content increased more than 100 percent. The vertical’s Twitter feed, which has more than 30,000 followers, increased by about 8,000 in the two weeks prior to Michelson sitting down with Gay City News on August 7. The surge in Twitter followers can likely be explained by extraordinary attention to the controversy surrounding inflammatory anti-gay comments made by Chick-fil-A president Dan Cathy, the response of the LGBT community and its allies, and the right-wing backlash against that response. An August 1 story in which the restaurant chain’s gay employees spoke out, written by Gay Voices reporter Lila Shapiro, received about 30,000 comments in just the first six days — the tally as of August 28 stands at nearly 38,000. “I’ve never seen anything like the Chick-fil-A story,” said Michelson — who oversaw web content for Out magazine prior to moving over to the Huffington Post — of the fire the controversy ignited on the web. Gay Voices brought considerable corporate strengths to its foray into the LGBT online world. Housed in the tech-world-chic of fices of AOLHuf fington Post near Cooper Square — where the opportunities for employee R&R, not to mention caffeine and munchies, provide the perfect incentives for long hours — Gay Voices is the only LGBT -specific site in the mega-blog world in which HuffPo plays. The overall site, with more than two million Twitter followers, provides a ready-made audience for Voices verticals that also target blacks, Latinos, women, teens, college students, and people of faith. “We’re able to take stories that would not get wide attention and then blow them up into so much more,” Michelson said. Though Shapiro is currently his only dedicated reporter, journalists who report on other parts of the website contribute content relevant to Gay Voices. Michelson estimated that 20 percent of the vertical’s content is original Huffington Post reporting, with another 50 percent aggregated from other sources. The remainder comes from blog posts by a universe of contributors who Michelson said “constantly surprise” him in their diversity. In several interviews, he has pointed to a post from Le T igre bandmember J.D. Samson, who

Noah Michelson is continually surprised by the voices his vertical pulls onto the Huffington Post.

wrote with what Michelson termed “brutal honesty” about the trouble she has paying her rent despite her fame in the music industry. He also spoke with particular pride about an anonymous blogger named Amelia, who writes about her seven-year-old son who already identifies as gay. The opportunity for verticals like Gay Voices to draw readers from across the Huffington Post platform has led Michelson to a surprising conclusion about its visitors. There is no way to measure the sexual orientation or gender identity of Gay Voices readers, but he suspects the majority are straight. “Our issues are becoming more mainstream,” he said, explaining that his conclusion about his readership is “based on the integration of all our verticals. There are clickthroughs to Gay Voices that lure people, and once they get there they stick around.” Not all of those who stick ar ound ar e well intentioned, Michelson said. Stories on transgender issues, in particular, he said, have generated “some terrible comments.” For most readers, however, the site’s queer stories, he said, often point up either “despi-

cable behavior” on the part of anti-gay forces or “inspiring” messages about LGBT empowerment. Both sorts of posts, he said, have a big potential “to go viral.” Overseeing an LGBT web resource — the majority of whose readers are likely straight — on a huge mainstream site represents a profound leap for the 34-year -old Michelson from his days as a student at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. “I fancied myself a radical,” he recalled about his time in the Twin Cities, where he stayed for a while after graduating. Minneapolis, he said, is one of America’s queerest cities, and there, harking back to pioneering activists a generation and more older than himself, he came to see “sexual liberation as the cornerstone of gay liberation.” Nine years ago, Michelson moved to New York, settling in Chinatown, which nobody has ever described as an up and coming gay neighborhood — though he’s not really that far from the booming Lower East Side scene. He came to the city to earn an MFA in poetry at NYU, with the hope of teaching afterward as he pursued his art. Though he has enjoyed success as a published poet — in venues from literary magazines to the New Republic — poetry teaching posts are few and far between. At 29, Michelson embarked on what he termed a “humbling experience” — working as an unpaid inter n at Out magazine. The most important things he learn at the outset were that he was “hungry” and that he had a good nose for the topics that drove the cultural moment. Soon going on paid staff, he rose in the ranks at Out, with the aid of “a boss who let me write what I wanted.” When recruited by the Huffington Post late last summer, he was a senior editor at Out. As he sat discussing Gay Voices in the HuffPo offices, Michelson’s T -shirt showed off his heavily tattooed arms, and his eager enthusiasm for explaining his mission could lead one to mistake him for a man even younger than 34. At the same time he embarked on his new project with the Huffington Post, he began seeing his first boyfriend in a decade; the two have now been dating for a year. Asked how important the marriage equality issue is for him, Michelson was momentari-

“As we get more rights, I think people get more squeamish. I think people also forget what things used to be like.” ly caught off guard, betraying the ambivalence, even embarrassment some sexual liberationists feel about the community’s embrace of society’s most traditional institution. “I think everyone should have the right to marry,” he responded dutifully, before adding,

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MICHELSON, continued on p.7

August 29, 2012 | www.gaycitynews.com

Long Speeches, Funny Hats & Things That Matter BY PAUL SCHINDLER

s the Republican convention convenes in Tampa this week, speculation centers on whether the party’s presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, can forge the personal connection with American voters he will need if they are to give him the fair hearing he believes his economic message deserves. Wi t h P r e s i d e n t B a r a c k O b a m a outstripping him handily in polling on measures of trust, empathy, and likeability, pundits have focused on the GOP’s need to close its yawning gap relative to Democrats with women voters and to persuade seniors and others concerned about their future health needs that vice presidential candidate Paul R yan’s proposal on Medicare does not represent a wrenching breach of a longstanding social compact. But Republicans also face an age problem, with their views on social issues — particularly LGBT rights — increasingly out of step with the attitudes of younger voters. The Log Cabin Republicans,

NON-DISCRIMINATION PROTECTIONS We consider discrimination based on sex, race, age, religion, creed, disability, or national origin unacceptable and immoral. (page 9) BACKSTORY • The GOP continues to omit sexual orientation and gender identity from its nondiscrimination plank, while Democrats favor an employment bill providing protections for those categories. • There has been no political traction in either party on broader federal nondiscrimination protections in housing, public accommodations, or credit. • President Barack Obama declined to move forward this year on an executive order barring anti-LGBT discrimination by federal contractors.

MARRIAGE EQUALITY The GOP platform takes up gay marriage in three of its six chapters. A serious threat to our country’s constitutional order, perhaps even more dangerous than presidential malfeasance, is an activist judiciary, in which some judges usurp the powers reserved

while lamenting that the final platform, agreed on in hearings last week, is “marred by outdated social conservative ideology,” were nevertheless at pains to emphasize “the significant debate” that took place during the document’s drafting. The group hailed minor victories, like the removal of any direct reference to Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and the incorporation of language “recognizing that all Americans have the right to be treated with dignity and respect.” With the Yo u n g R e p u b l i c a n s f o r t h e F r e e dom to Marry, Log Cabin is taking out a full-page ad in the August 29 Tampa Tribune calling on the GOP to support the freedom to marry. “This may well be the last time a platfor m will cater to the likes of the Family Research Council on marriage, and the fact is, platforms rarely influence policy,” Log Cabin executive director R. Clarke Cooper said in a written statement aimed at putting the best face on the proceedings in Tampa. The following outlines and analyzes major provisions of the Republican platform related to LGBT and women’s rights and health.

to other branches of government. A blatant example has been the court-ordered redefinition of marriage in several States. This is more than a matter of warring legal concepts and ideals. It is an assault on the foundations of our society, challenging the institution which, for thousands of years in virtually every civilization, has been entrusted with the rearing of children and the transmission of cultural values. That is why Congressional Republicans took the lead in enacting the Defense of Marriage Act, affirming the right of States and the federal government not to recognize same-sex relationships licensed in other jurisdictions. The current Administration’s open defiance of this constitutional principle — in its handling of immigration cases, in federal personnel benefits, in allowing a same-sex marriage at a military base, and in refusing to defend DOMA in the courts — makes a mockery of the President’s inaugural oath… We reaffirm our support for a Constitutional amendment defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman. We applaud the citizens of the majority of States which have enshrined in their constitutions the traditional concept of marriage, and we support the campaigns underway in several other States to do so. (page 10) This theme is reiterated on page 25 in a section entitled “Judicial Activism: A Threat to the U.S. Constitution,” and again in a section titled “Preserving and Protecting Traditional Marriage”:

The institution of marriage is the foundation of civil society. Its success as an institution will determine our success as a nation. It has been proven by both experience and endless social science studies that traditional marriage is best for children. Children raised in intact married families are more likely to attend college, are physically and emotionally healthier, are less likely to use drugs or alcohol, engage in crime, or get pregnant outside of marriage. The success of marriage directly impacts the economic well-being of individuals. Furthermore, the future of marriage affects freedom. The lack of family formation not only leads to more government costs, but also to more government control over the lives of its citizens in all aspects… We embrace the principle that all Americans should be treated with respect and dignity. (page 31) BACKSTORY • The Obama administration has stopped defending the Defense of Marriage Act in federal court, but the GOP House leadership has stepped into the breach. • The administration supports repeal of DOMA and federal recognition of valid same-sex marriages. In May, the president endorsed full marriage equality. • The final sentence above regarding “respect and dignity” was a consolation prize to Log Cabin Republicans who were fighting to remove any reference to DOMA or to have the party endorse civil unions.

WOMEN’S RIGHT TO CHOOSE We assert the sanctity of human life and affirm that the unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed. We support a human life amendment to the Constitution and endorse legislation to make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections apply to unborn children. (page 13) BACKSTORY • Recent media reports have emphasized that the plank calling for this extension of the Fourteenth Amendment not only aims to overturn Roe v. Wade but also makes no provision for rape and incest exceptions, but this is essentially the same language the GOP adopted in 2008. The renewed focus on this plank resulted from Missouri Republican Senate candidate Todd Akin’s recent controversial rape comments and the fact that Akin and vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan jointly supported a bill limiting government funding for abortion to cases of “forcible rape,” a phrase that seemed to many an effort to limit the definition of rape. • Mitt Romney has said he supports a ban on abortion, but with exceptions for rape, incest, and the life and health of a pregnant woman.

SEX EDUCATION We renew our call for replacing “family planning” programs for teens with abstinence education which teaches abstinence until marriage as the responsible and respected standard of behavior. (page 36) BACKSTORY While Obama administration policy has aimed at curbing spending on abstinence-only education, which is at odds with HIV prevention, Republicans have been successful in preserving some of that funding.

RELIGIOUS EXEMPTIONS The most offensive instance of this war on religion has been the current Administration’s attempt to compel faith-related institutions, as well as believing individuals, to contravene their deeply held religious, moral, or ethical beliefs regarding health services, traditional marriage, or abortion. This forcible secularization of religious and religiously affiliated organizations, including faith-based hospitals and colleges, has been in tandem with the current Administration’s audacity in declaring which faith-related activities are, or are not, protected by the First Amendment… We oppose government discrimination against businesses due to religious views. We support the First Amendment right of freedom of association of the Boy Scouts of America and other service organizations whose values are under assault and condemn the State blacklisting of religious groups which decline to arrange adoptions by same-sex couples. We condemn the hate campaigns, threats of violence, and vandalism by proponents of same-sex marriage against advocates of traditional marriage and call for a federal investigation into attempts to deny religious believers their civil rights. (page 12) BACKSTORY • Recent media reports on religious exemptions have focused on mandated employer coverage of contraceptive health costs, but “religious freedom” arguments have long been used to evade civil rights protections and equal healthcare guarantees for the LGBT community. Here, the GOP ties the two issues together explicitly. • Mitt Romney has repeatedly misstated the reason that Catholic Charities got out of the adoption business in Massachusetts. The Church was responding not to the enactment of marriage equality there, but rather to its obligations under public accommodations requirements of state human rights law. A board member active with Catholic Charities told Gay City News earlier this year that the group was responsible for five percent or less of all adoptions in Massachusetts, not 50 percent as Romney has repeatedly stated.

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CONVENTIONAL POLITICS, continued on p.8

| August 29, 2012

POLITICS

In Debate, Hoylman Longest on Specifics, Repeatedly a Target Three candidates to succeed Tom Duane in State Senate spend 90 minutes in broad agreement BY DUNCAN OSBORNE

GAY CITY NEWS

here were moments at the August 20 debate among the three candidates for the State Senate seat currently held by Thomas Duane when it looked like a debate might break out. “I don’t fill shoes,” said Tom Greco, the straight owner of the Ritz Bar and Lounge, a popular Hell’s Kitchen gay bar. “I wear my own.” Moments before, Brad Hoylman, the presumptive front runner in the race, told a crowd of roughly 100 that had gathered at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center, “A lot of people tell me that Tom Duane is a hard act to follow.” For the past 14 years, Duane, who is openly gay, has represented the district that runs from 72nd Street to the West Village and from river to river in its Lower Manhattan portion. He is a legendary liberal Democrat. Hoylman, the one gay candidate in the race, never fails to salute Duane when he campaigns. The fact that

Tom Greco, Brad Hoylman, and Tanika Inlaw at an August 20 State Senate Democratic primary debate.

Hoylman appears to have been selected as the incumbent’s heir was an issue. “How are you supposed to get new ideas?” said Greco. “You need new ideas, fresh ideas, fresh people.”

The 90-minute debate, which was sponsored by Citizens Union, a nonpartisan civic group, and NYC Community Media, the parent of Gay City News, the Villager, Chelsea Now, and

Downtown Express, did showcase Hoylman’s better grasp on solutions to problems facing the district, New York City, and the state, but it also demonstrated the extent to which the candidates agree. Tanika Inlaw, a public school teacher, identified her top three priorities if elected as defending and improving public education, building and protecting affordable housing, and campaign finance reform. Hoylman and Greco certainly support those goals. All three agreed that hydrofracking must be stopped, that public pensions must be sustained, and that the police practice of stop and frisk must end. Ultimately, the winner of the September 13 Democratic primary (held on a Thursday in deference to the September 11 anniversary), which will decide who takes the seat, may be determined by more practical matters. Hoylman has far more money and far more political infrastructure behind him. In his most recent filing with the

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DEBATE, continued on p.11

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August 29, 2012 | www.gaycitynews.com

POLITICS

Marriage Equality Supporter’s State Senate Primary Divides Advocates Some LGBT reform Dems opt for pro-gay challenger to Martin Malavé Dilan, Brooklyn machine’s choice in 2010 following his conviction on

tions, $10,000 –– or nearly one out of every four dollars raised –– came from Neighborhood Preservation, a political action committee representing the real estate industry. According to Michael McKee, the treasurer of Tenants Political Action Committee, Dilan has been unreliable on protecting the city’s rent stabilization law since 1994, when as a member of the City Council he joined a narrow majority forged by then-Speaker Peter Vallone in making vacancy decontrol –– established temporarily the year before at the behest of the Republican State Senate –– permanent. In the ensuing 18 years, McKee estimated, 300,000 rental units have been removed from rent regulation. In 2010, when the Democrats last controlled the State Senate, their majority failed to enact a package of rent protections, including the repeal of vacancy decontrol, when eight of their members joined nearly every Republican in voting to kill the effort. Dilan was prepared to side with those who opposed the Democratic major ity’s bills, McKee said, but was per suaded by colleagues to instead leave the chamber and simply not vote. Allen Roskof f, pr esident of the Jim Owles club, termed Dilan’s posture on tenants’ issues “unbelievable,” adding, “That alone makes him unqualified for office.” He said the club plans to spend “several thousand dollars” in a direct mail piece going to voters in the Senate district. For LID’s McMorrow, a bigger issue was Dilan’s efforts in 2011 to use the controversial US Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United to challenge provisions of the New York City campaign finance law capping donations to political candidates by those who have business before the city and barring corporate contributions. The suit, which Dilan brought with former Queens Republican City Councilman Tom Ognibene, was thrown out last December by a federal appeals court panel, which ruled that Citizens United addressed only spending independent of political candidates, not limits on direct contributions. McMorrow pointed to the impact the Citizens United ruling is having on Super-PAC spending in the presidential race, nearly all of it on behalf of the Republican side, and said Dilan’s motives in mounting the litigation were “self-serving,” noting that his political fortunes as well as those of others

NYSENATE.GOV

north Brooklyn State Senate primary that pits a ten-year Democratic incumbent, who twice voted for New York’s marriage equality law, against a pro-gay challenger has divided LGBT advocacy groups in the city, with two political clubs backing the insurgent, one staying with the veteran lawmaker, and the Empire State Pride Agenda (ESPA) remaining on the sidelines. The September 13 election, in which State Senator Martin Malavé Dilan faces off against Jason Otaño, an attorney who formerly served as general counsel to Borough President Marty Markowitz, is also just the latest bout in a bigger struggle between Assemblyman Vito Lopez, who has run the Brooklyn Democratic organization for the past six years, and Congresswoman Nydia Velázquez, a 20-year House veteran. Lopez was the major force behind the unsuccessful bid by Dilan’s son, City Councilman Erik Martin Dilan, to unseat Velázquez in the June congressional primary. Velázquez is now championing a number of anti-Lopez candidates in Brooklyn, with the backing of Democratic reformers in the borough and beyond. The Senate district runs from G r e e n p o i n t a n d Wi l l i a m s b u r g t o Cypress Hills and East New York and includes Bushwick, Lopez’s political base. Lopez’s August 24 censure by his Assembly colleagues (in which Speaker Sheldon Silver stripped him of his committee chairmanship) after being accused of sexually harassing two women who worked in his district office has weakened his position in Brooklyn and placed allies of his machine into a bind. Out lesbian City Council Speaker Christine Quinn promptly called on Lopez to resign from the Assembly, and on Sunday a spokesman for Governor Andrew Cuomo said that if the allegations prove true, he should go. Like Quinn, Otaño immediately called for Lopez’s departure from the Assembly and from his party post, while Dilan has so far remained silent. Alan Fleishman, an out gay former Democratic leader and state committeeman from Park Slope who has long been active with the Lambda Independent Democrats (LID), the bor ough’s LGBT club, after saying Otaño

i s “ e ner geti c, sm ar t, [ a nd ] ca r es deeply about his neighbors and constituents in the district,” added that the challenger “is not part of the tired Vito Lopez machine. Martin Dilan and his son Erik and their other family members on the public payroll are old-time political hacks.” LID and the Jim Owles Liberal Democratic Club, another LGBT group, have endorsed Otaño. In contrast, the Stonewall Democratic Club of New York City voted in July to stick with Dilan, after hearing presentations from both candidates. “Martin Dilan has consistently been a voice of support for the LGBT community,” said Melissa Sklarz, Stonewall’s pr esident, citing the incumbent’s 2009 and 2011 votes in favor of marriage equality. “It is important that people like that get our support. It would seem hypocritical for an LGBT club not to endorse him.” Gay City News spoke to Sklarz three days after the Lopez censure came down, but she did not shy away from either Dilan’s or the club’s relationship with the Brooklyn machine. “We have had a relationship with Vito Lopez,” she said, noting that the Brooklyn boss attended Stonewall’s Christmas party last year and earlier made a presentation to the club. “We have seen ourselves as a progressive club, but also working with the Democratic organization there.” She said the county Democratic organization has been helpful in the efforts to establish a permanent LGBT community center in Brooklyn. Stating that “sexual harassment by elected officials is horrendous” and that “the Assembly verdict was very, very clear,” Sklarz added, “I think it is going to take a lot more than an ethics violation to get a party leader to step down. I think they will simply move on in Brooklyn.” Asked whether she hoped to see Dilan speak out on the Lopez matter as other elected officials have done, Sklarz laughed, before responding. “I don’t think we’re going to hear much from the Brooklyn electeds on this one.” Matthew McMorrow, the co-president of LID, said, “We are still waiting for Dilan to speak out on Lopez and he has been silent, when everyone from the governor on down has called on him to resign.” McMorrow pointed out that Dilan was among just a handful of senators who voted against the expulsion of Queens Democrat Hiram Monserrate

Senator Martin Malavé Dilan and his primary challenger, attorney Jason Otaño (below).

JASONOTANO.COM

BY PAUL SCHINDLER

domestic violence charges. “He’s shown no leadership on women’s issues,” the LID president said of Dilan. Reformers have been gunning for Lopez since long before any sexual harassment charges arose, and supporters of Otaño have a bill of particulars against Dilan that goes beyond his ties to the now-disgraced county leader. One issue that r efor mers fault Dilan on is his failure to advocate for adequate tenant protections, especially given that he represents a district in which so many residents struggle to make their monthly rent. In his most recent campaign finance filing, of roughly $42,000 in contribu-

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DILAN, continued on p.30

| August 29, 2012

POLITICS

US, Swedish Pressure Vs. Kill-the-Gays Bill Led to Ugandan Capitulation Wikileaks Cable documents significant State Department interest, suggests Vatican indifference, at best

HIV/ AIDS prevention strategy for Uganda,” read a December 8, 2009 cable. “The diplomat said the antihomosexuality legislation constitutes a tipping point as Sweden is increasingly concerned about Uganda’s apparent unwillingness to seriously address health sector corruption.” Jerry P. Lanier, then the US ambassador to Uganda, discussed the legislation with Sam Kutesa, Uganda’s foreign minister, on January 21, 2010. “It appears that the Ugandan government is finally moving in the right direction — albeit largely for the wrong reasons — on the anti-homosexuality legislation and we believe that it is now important to limit our public statements on this issue to give Ugandan leaders some time to resolve this problem internally,” a January 28, 2010 cable on that meeting read. While Bahati has been seen as the bill’s leading champion, a December 24, 2009 cable reveals that Nsaba Buturo, then the ethics minister in Museveni’s cabinet, was also a leading proponent. “Bahati, Buturo, and particularly [Pastor Martin] Ssempa’s ability to channel popular anger over Uganda’s sociopolitical failings into violent hatred of a previously unpopular but tolerated minority is chilling,” the cable read. It was Buturo who raised the bill in

the January 20, 2010 cabinet meeting that became a “free for all,” according to the January 28 cable. “Kutesa confirmed local media reports that Ethics Minister Nsaba Buturo raised the bill in Cabinet on January 20, and that some Cabinet members recommended scrapping the legislation while others advocated for a watered down version,” the State Department cable read. “Kutesa reported that Cabinet decided to form a sub-committee chaired by the Attorney General to review the bill and formulate a government position. Kutesa said he believes Cabinet will ultimately let the bill ‘die a natural death’ in Parliament.” Other cables reveal more about other players. While a December 10, 2009 position paper from the Vatican that was read at the United Nations was interpreted by some in the gay community as commenting on the Ugandan bill when it opposed “all forms of violence and unjust discrimination against homosexual persons, including discriminatory penal legislation,” a December 16, 2009 cable suggests the Vatican’s position on the Uganda bill was unclear, at best. That cable describes a meeting on that date between Miguel H. Diaz, the US ambassador to the Vatican, and Archbishop Dominique Mamberti, the Holy See’s secretary for Relations with States.

Diaz asked “the Vatican to weigh in with the Ugandan Episcopal Conference.” Mamberti took note of the US concerns, “but did not commit to contacting the Ugandan bishops about it. He said, however, that he was certain the bishops would not remain silent for long on such an important moral issue,” the cable read. A story this past June in the Daily Monitor, a Ugandan newspaper, reported that the Uganda Joint Christian Council, an ecumenical body that includes Anglican, Roman Catholic, and Orthodox Church members, asked that the legislation be passed. The December 24, 2009 cable suggests that the Anglican Church of Uganda may have played a larger role in promoting the legislation than previously known. The cable describes a meeting on December 15 between Bahati and unidentified US Embassy political officers that was held, at Bahati’s request, at the Anglican Church’s offices “where Bahati said he was reviewing the legislation with Anglican Church leaders,” the cable read. Embassy staff reported that upon their arrival, “A passing glimpse of the Church conference room revealed Archbishop Henry Luke Orombi and his AmCit international relations assistant, Alison Barfoot.” Orombi was the head of the Anglican Church in Uganda at the time. Reverend Canon Barfoot is an American (AmCit) conservative who assisted him, and she remains active in the church there. Emails asking about the Bahati meeting that were sent to Orombi’s Facebook page did not get a response. In an email, Barfoot wrote, “I have checked my notes, but I don’t have any information from that meeting or recall specifics. I’m not aware that any substantive conversation even took place.” Contradicting the June report in the Daily Monitor, she continued, “The position of the Church of Uganda is well known. The Church of Uganda has been sympathetic to the concerns behind the bill, but did not support the bill.”

creating content that is likely more difficult to find a home for in glossy print publications. The diversity Michelson works t o c r e a t e o n G a y Vo i c e s p o i n t s up a tension in the LGBT community between the “messaging” that established leadership tries to maintain in the media and the messy coloring outside the lines that inevitably results from the democratization in the online world. He noted that “there is a str ong ‘don’t r ock the boat’ atti-

tude” on the part of leading advocacy groups, shared by many in the community, pointing out that when the Chick-fil-A controversy led to calls for kiss-ins at franchises around the country, Gay Voices received a lot of comments to the effect of “don’t put it in their faces.” “As we get mor e rights, I think people get more squeamish,” Michelson said. “I think people also forget what things used to be like.” He acknowledged that he and edi-

tor -at-large Michelangelo Signorile, a longtime jour nalist and activist who has a daily program on SiriusXM radio, do not oversee a site based on total anarchy. On any given day, the two work “to steer the conversation,” to act, in a sense, as curators. Still, “no directives are handed down from on high” at HuffPo, Michelson said. “We’re doing our job if the page, or the vertical as well call it, is a snapshot of the LGBT community at any given time,” he said.

BY DUNCAN OSBORNE

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MICHELSON, from p.3

“But I don’t know if I will ever get married.” Stories about the numerous mar riage battlefr onts ar e, of course, important to any LGBT website, but Michelson acknowledged the issue “can be a distraction” from other community concerns. He said he works hard to keep the site as “sex-positive” as possible, noting that porn stars and promoters have been among those posting,

STATEHOUSE.GO.UG

ables from the US Department of State that were recently published on Wikileaks suggest that the Ugandan government quickly capitulated to pressure from foreign governments and promised to let the “kill-the-gays” bill die in legislative committee. “Asking his note takers to leave subsequent statements out of the Ministry’s official record, [Ugandan State Minister for International Affairs Henry Okello Oryem] assured…[US Under Secretary for Democracy and Global Affairs Maria Otero] that Cabinet is moving to quietly shelve the bill without agitating core members of the [National Resistance Movement] caucus,” a February 4, 2010 cable said in describing a January 29 meeting between the two diplomats. “He described the January 20 Cabinet meeting on the bill… as a ‘free for all’ that revealed the previously unknown positions of several Cabinet members. ‘Now we know who is who,’ said Oryem, ‘and how to deal with it. It will be worked out.’” The Anti-Homosexuality Bill, or the “kill-the-gays” bill as it came to be known, was introduced in the Ugandan National Assembly in October of 2009 by David Bahati, a member of the Assembly. Like Yoweri Museveni, Uganda’s president, Bahati is a member of the National Resistance Movement party, which holds 263 seats in the 375-seat body. The legislation included harsh criminal penalties, including the death penalty, for homosexual acts. The cables show that senior US diplomats repeatedly raised objections to the legislation with the Ugandan government. Sweden publicly threatened to cut off $50 million in aid if the bill became law and specifically informed the US of that warning. “On December 3, a Swedish diplomat told [a US political officer] that Sweden will likely sever its assistance, stating that the bill would undercut Sweden’s

US State Department documents released by Wikileaks show how the government of Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni responded to pressure from the US and Sweden in its handling of the proposed “kill-the-gays” legislation.

August 29, 2012 | www.gaycitynews.com

POLITICS

DC Shooting Spawns Right-Wing Victimization Cries Family Research Council, Maggie Gallagher call attack on building guard hate crime, domestic terrorism BY DUNCAN OSBORNE

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CONVENTIONAL POLITICS, from p.4

MILITARY SERVICE We reject the use of the military as a platform for social experimentation and will not accept attempts to undermine military priorities and mission readiness… We support rights of conscience and religious freedom for military chaplains and people of faith… We will enforce and defend in court the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in the Armed Forces as well as in the civilian world…. We oppose anything which might divide or weaken team cohesion, including intramilitary special inter-

MARRIAGEDEBATE.COM

ne week after Floyd Corkins walked into the Washington, DC offices of the Family Research Council (FRC) and wounded a security guard there by firing a single bullet into the guard’s arm, Maggie Gallagher called for Corkins to be prosecuted under the district’s hate crimes statute. “Why has the DC police refused to prosecute as a potential hate crime what the FBI is investigating as an act of domestic terrorism?” the conservative pundit and longtime opponent of queer community goals asked in an August 22 column. Corkins, 28, who traveled from his Virginia home to commit the crime, was indicted on three charges — a federal violation for the interstate transportation of a firearm, assault with intent to kill, and possessing a firearm while committing a violent crime. The last two are violations of district law. A federal grand jury did not see the attack at the right-wing group’s headquarters as hate-motivated or an act of terrorism, though a US Department of Justice spokesman said the “investigation is continuing.” There is great irony in Gallagher asking for the assault to be labeled a hate crime. She opposed federal hate crime legislation as early as 1999 in a mocking column on a bill that included sexual orientation as a protected class. Right wingers offer only rare condemnations of anti-gay violence, but their intensity in those statements never approaches the emotion they exhibit when condemning gay people. Their claims that they are now being victimized by the gay community, assertions they have been making for years, reached a crescendo following Corkins’ actions. “Corkins was given a license to shoot an unarmed man by organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) that have been reckless in labeling organizations hate groups because they disagree with them on public policy,” Tony Perkins, FRC’s president, told the Associated Press. The center listed FRC as a hate group for its “demonizing claims that gay people are child molesters and worse,” Mark Potok, a senior fellow at SPLC said in that article. An affidavit filed in the case by Garrett Nabors,

Maggie Gallagher, founder of the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy, is demanding harsher prosecution of Floyd Corkins, accused of shooting a building security guard in the arm at the offices of the Family Research Council.

a special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said Corkins “stated words to the effect of ‘I don’t like your politics’” before the shooting. He was carrying Chick-fil-A sandwiches in his knapsack, and Nabors linked those to the controversy that erupted when Dan Cathy, the restaurant chain’s chief executive, recently opposed same-sex mar riage. “This announcement received substantial publicity,” Nabors wrote. “I further know that the Family Research Council is a Christian conservative policy organization which supports traditional marriage.” There simply is no parity between any abuse conservatives may suffer and what the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community endures year in and year out.

est demonstrations. We will support an objective and open-minded review of the current Administration’s management of military personnel policies and will correct problems with appropriate administrative, legal, or legislative action. (page 42) BACKSTORY • This language is an advance over the 2008 platform, which stated, “We affirm… the incompatibility of homosexuality with military service.” • Language about the “conscience and religious freedom of military chaplains” seems aimed at instances of same-sex union ceremonies on base and active duty service members march-

In their most recent findings, the 16 member groups in the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (NCAVP) reported that 2,092 community members experienced bias incidents in 2011 and 32 percent of them, or 670, required medical attention. Thirty “hate violence murders” were reported to the coalition in 2011, the highest number to date. Not all anti-queer violence in the country is reported to the coalition. And what Perkins did not admit as he accused SPLC of complicity in Corkins’ attack was that if the center is responsible for Corkins’ actions, then FRC must bear some responsibility for NCAVP’s statistics. “I do think that they do, because what they’re doing is tapping into broader cultural scripts about gender and sexuality,” Dr. Karen Franklin, a forensic psychologist, told Gay City News. Franklin was the first researcher to interview perpetrators of anti-gay violence. Her 2000 study detailing her results described four motivations — self-defense, ideology, thrill-seeking, and peer dynamics. Those who are moved by ideology see themselves “as social norm enforcers who are punishing moral transgressions,” the study read. That view is entirely in line with FRC’s arguments that same-sex marriage and the LGBT community more broadly are threats to the wider society. Just as FRC says it is defending marriage or children, perpetrators who are motivated by ideology say “they’re defending their community and family and way of life,” Franklin said. “They feel completely justified in that case,” she said. “It’s almost like fighting a war... Soldiers typically feel that they are fighting for a righteous cause.” SPLC and gay community groups are not making the same argument when they attack FRC or other conservatives. “Nobody is saying that the Family Research Council or Christian conservatives are a lesser type of person who should be discriminated against,” Franklin said. “Nobody is trying to discriminate against them, nobody is saying they are secondclass citizens... I don’t think anybody can accuse the Southern Poverty Law Center or any of these groups of advocating violence.”

ing in uniform in pride celebrations. • The overall tone of this section clearly does not preclude the party from pushing to reinstate Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

GLOBAL LGBT RIGHTS The effectiveness of our foreign aid has been limited by the cultural agenda of the current Administration, attempting to impose on foreign countries, especially the peoples of Africa, legalized abortion and the homosexual rights agenda. At the same time, faith-based groups — the sector that has had the best track record in promoting lasting development — have been excluded from grants because

they will not conform to the administration’s social agenda. (page 45) BACKSTORY • This section takes direct aim at Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s remarkable speech last December on global LGBT rights and the president’s accompanying foreign policy directives. • As with domestic abstinence-only funding, the administration, hobbled by GOP opposition, has achieved only partial success in its efforts to remove morality clauses — such as promoting abstinence and denying funds to groups that serve sex workers — in its global AIDS efforts.

| August 29, 2012

CRIME

Davawn Robinson, Edgard Mercado’s Killer, Gets Four-to-15 Years Convicted of manslaughter, defense argued at sentencing about victim’s “involvement” in his own death BY DUNCAN OSBORNE

The convicted killer of Edgard Mercado could serve as much as 15 years in prison after a Manhattan judge sentenced him to a term of four-to-15 years in the 2009 strangling death. “I am going to sentence you to the maximum, but the minimum will be four years,” said Judge Bruce Allen at the August 15 sentencing of Davawn Robinson, now 25. In 2009, Robinson and Mercado, who was 39 at his death, met at Chi Chiz, a West Village gay bar since closed. They had drinks, purchased cocaine, and traveled by cab to Mercado’s East Village apartment. Once at the apartment, they used the cocaine and drank wine. What happened next was the central dispute at trial. The prosecution, which was handled by John A. McConnell and Leila Kermani, two assistant district attor neys, charged that Robinson strangled Mercado to death as part

of a robbery. Defense attorneys from the Legal Aid Society argued that Robinson accidentally killed Mercado during consensual sex that included erotic asphyxiation. Jurors had to decide if Robinson was guilty of second-degree m u r d e r, w h i c h w o u l d m e a n he intended Mercado’s death, s e c o n d - d e g r e e m a n s l a u g h t e r, meaning he acted recklessly, or criminally negligent homicide. Jurors convicted Robinson on the manslaughter charge. His first trial ended in a mistrial after jurors could not reach a verdict. At the sentencing hearing, Allen told Robinson that he saw the act as “very close to intentional homicide.” “I don’t know what happened obviously, but you could have turned back at some point,” Allen said. “I believe that you are remorseful, but we have to live with our acts.” Mercado’s sister wept uncontrollably as she read her statement and one from their parents.

“Why did this person have to take my brother’s life?” the sister asked. Robinson spoke, saying he felt “immeasurable guilt and extreme remorse” over the killing. “To the family, I’ve been waiting for almost three years to be able to say that I’m sorry,” Robinson said. Immediately following the killing, Robinson told police that he acted in self-defense when he killed Mercado. The claim that the death came during sex emerged at the trial. Police found no bondage toys or porn in Mercado’s apartment, and the rope that was used to kill him was a belt from a dance uniform he used for a class. When Robinson left the apartment, he took Mercado’s computer and cell phone. The sentence means that Robinson will be eligible for parole after serving four years. He has been in jail since the killing and that time counts toward his prison sentence. He gets a parole hearing every two years while serving his sentence. If he has no serious infractions and cooperates in

prison, he will receive a conditional release after serving two-thirds, or 10 years, of the sentence. The trial arguments continued in statements the prosecution and defense made at the sentencing hearing. “The defendant did this in one of the most brutal ways one human being can kill another,” Ker mani said. “The defendant showed Edgard no mercy. He chose to keep going, he chose to keep on pulling even after Edgard was unconscious.” Stephanie Kaplan, one of two attorneys who represented Robinson, read a long statement in which she twice called the killing a “sexual accident” and asked for minimum prison time. “We must consider both parties’ involvement,” Kaplan said. “ We c a n n o t s i m p l y i g n o r e t h e consensual nature of the acts that led to Mr. Mercado’s death… The consensual nature of the risky conduct drastically reduces Davawn’s culpability.”

August 29, 2012 | www.gaycitynews.com

BOOKS

How Gilbert & Sullivan Begat the Oscar Wilde Persona Carolyn Williams restores inimitable duo to their essential place in culture, musical comedy, social criticism

f William S. Gilbert is remembered today, for many people it is thanks to the two musical biopics about his collaboration with the composer Sir Arthur Sullivan — a 1954 version starring the rotund British queen Robert Morley as Gilbert and 1999’s Academy Award-winning “Topsy-Turvy,” by director Mike Leigh, featuring the talented AngloIrish character actor Jim Broadbent as Gilbert and openly gay Allan Corduner as Sullivan.

GILBERT & SULLIVAN: Gender, Genre, Parody By Carolyn Williams Columbia University Press $25.95, paperback; 454 pages

If the first film is musically superior to the second — featuring as it did members of the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company, formed to produce the collaborations between Gilbert and Sullivan — the second movie is the more amusing in cinematic terms. Neither, however, captures the importance of Gilbert as he deserved to be remembered. And it is one of the great values of Carolyn Williams’ “Gilbert & Sullivan: Gender, Genre, Parody,” just reissued in paperback by Columbia University Press, that it restores the duo’s comic operettas to their rightful place as the precursors of modern musical comedy and brings back to the fore Gilbert’s consider able talents as a profound social critic of the stodgy hypocrisies of the Victorian era. The prolific Gilbert was already established as a dramatist, drama critic, and social satirist well before he and Sullivan scored their first mutual triumph with their hit musical “Trial by Jury” in 1875. He was the author of 75 plays, much admired by both George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde. Indeed, Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest” was directly inspired by a Gilbert play, “Engaged.” (The word “earnest” was late Victorian homosexual code for “queer,” being a creative corruption of the word “urnings,” the name given to same-sexers by the pioneer German homosexual liberationist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs.) Wilde and Gilbert not only knew each other well and maintained a considerable correspondence — some of which is cited in Williams’ book — but the Gilbertian libretto for the G& S musical “Patience, or Bunthorne’s Bride” helped to create and shape the public image Wilde would adopt. The Art for Art’s Sake aesthetic movement with which Wilde became so identified after its launch by the influential queer critic Walter Pater “was familiar (and even hackneyed) in England” when “Patience” was first produced in 1881, the same year that Wilde’s first book of poems was published. It has often been said that Wilde was the model for Bunthorne, the somewhat effeminate, lily-bearing aesthete in “Patience.” But Williams, in her

scrupulously researched book, demonstrates that just the opposite was true. Although the G&S operettas were transatlantic hits in America as well as Britain — indeed, there were many pirated versions offered on American stages throughout the country as well as the Carteproduced official ones on Broadway — Pater’s aesthetic movement had not taken hold in America as it had in England. Therefore, Carte reasoned, the phenomenon had to be initiated here so that its parody might be recognized in “Patience” when the operetta was scheduled for its American tour. Thus, writes Williams, “With his usual entrepreneurial acumen, Carte hired Wilde to conduct his now-famous lecture tour of North America, specifically so that regional groups of the American public would be exposed to an aesthete, before the touring production of ‘Patience’ reached their nearest theater.” As another historian cited by Williams tells us, “Recognizing Wilde’s potential as an aesthetic poster boy… D’Oyly Carte paid Wilde to tour North America posing as the poseur he was supposed to be in order that the parody poseurs of ‘Patience’ should pay off.” Bunthorne was the model that Wilde attempted both to imitate and to prefigure on his American tour, Williams explains: “Wilde acted as Bunthorne’s avatar: in cultural history, ‘Wilde’ was a spin-off product… Bunthorne represents a jumbled-up and generalized stereotype that had been popularized primarily through the middlebrow, journalistic reaction against it. Wilde inhabited that stereotype, attempting to turn it to his own advantage.” Wilde arrived in New York amid a great flurry of advance publicity and then appeared in several cities wearing his aesthetic garb — a double-breasted velvet jacket with a wide collar, velvet knee breeches, and silk stockings. This outfit, inscrutably both avant-garde and retro, was inspired by Bunthorne’s costume in “Patience,” which was designed by Gilbert. As Williams puts it, “Wilde’s costume now resonates with the deep pile of historical texture, looking luxurious and venerable under the retrospective light provided by decades of gay studies and queer theory. Immortalized in the studio photograph by Napoleon Sarony, the costume bespeaks Wilde’s extravagantly brilliant nose-thumbing at bourgeois respectability, his strength, and his beauty.” If the American press, spurred on by Carte’s manipulations, caught on to the fact that Wilde was to be treated as an oddity, it did not always tie his appearance back to the Bunthornean effeminate type presented in “Patience.” For example, the New York Tribune emphasized Wilde’s manliness: “The most striking thing about the poet’s appear ance is his height, which is several inches over six feet.” The report went on to describe other aspects of his appearance, noting that his eyes were not “dreamy,” but “quick,” and his hands not delicate, “only fit to caress a lily,” but rather powerful, for “his fingers are long and when doubled up would form a fist that would hit a hard knock.” Still, the figure of Bunthor ne, whom he was

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

BY DOUG IRELAND

paid to represent, went far toward establishing the Wilde persona that the world would come to know. During his lecture tour in America he made a special side trip to Camden, New Jersey to meet his hero, Walt Whitman. As Neil McKenna tells us in his essential revisionist biography, “The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde” — which restored him to us as a precursor of gay liberation — Wilde wrote to his friend John Addington Symonds, the homosexual liberationist who’d been unable to extract from Whitman, in extensive correspondence, the admission of his affinities that his queer British admirers longed for, exclaiming, “I can still feel his kiss upon my lips.” In his American tour, Williams notes, “We see an early Wilde flirting brilliantly with the aesthetic stereotype as his fan, daring to inhabit a conventionally ridiculed type and to re-create it with the force of his character.” Thus, the G&S operetta “informed the public figure of Wilde more than the figure of Wilde informed ‘Patience.’ In a real sense, Gilbert emerged as Wilde’s dresser on the world historical stage. Oscar Wilde emerged into the public spotlight with the figure of Reginald Bunthorne behind him.” This is just one of the many invaluable insights provided by Williams’ brilliant and thoughtful book, not the least of which is Gilbert’s role, in his musical libretti, as a critic of Victorian women’s oppression and the double-standard straightjacket to which they were condemned. This richly rewarding read will be appreciated by any serious student of theater — not just G&S fans — who will find confirmation of homosexual themes at many places in the Gilbert and Sullivan oeuvre. This book is indeed a remarkable achievement.

| August 29, 2012

COMMUNITY

Spring Street Gay History Site Denied Landmark Status Activists question city commission’s “integrity,” “respect” for community BY DUNCAN OSBORNE

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DEBATE, from p.5

state Board of Elections, Hoylman had an opening balance of roughly $171,000. He raised more than $80,000 since his previous filing just weeks before and had $209,416.45 in cash on hand. His money has come from the gay community, unions, Wall Street, and real estate interests. Greco had an opening balance of $13,600. He raised $8,775 since the earlier report and had $16,875 in cash on hand. Inlaw, who has filed one campaign finance r eport but not the most recently required follow-up, has loaned her campaign $1,403 and

GAY CITY NEWS

fter the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) refused to landmark a Spring Street building that was home to early gay rights leaders in New York City, openly gay elected officials and longtime LGBT activists gathered outside the building to denounce the decision. “I question their integrity and their lack of respect for our history,” said Allen Roskoff, the president of the Jim Owles Liberal Democratic Club, at an August 22 press conference held outside 186 Spring Street. Beginning in the early 1970s and into the early ‘80s, the building, constructed in 1824, was, at various times, home to Jim Owles, who was Roskoff’s partner, as well as to Arnie Kantrowitz and Bruce Voeller. Other leading gay political figures are known to have spent time in the building. Owles, who died in 1993, was a founder of the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA), an early political group, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), and the Gay & Lesbian Independent Democrats, a political club. His 1973 run for City Council made him the first openly gay candidate to run for political office in New York. Kantrowitz, now 71, was a GAA officer and a GLAAD founder. Voeller, who died in 1994, was a founder of what is now the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF). He ran the group from 1973 to 1978. He was also in the leadership of the community’s response to AIDS. “This is a history that we should be honoring,” said Andrew Berman, executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, who has led the fight to save the building. “This is a history we should be protecting.” In 2006, the GVSHP asked that a large part of the South Village be designated an historic district. The building is within that proposed district. On August 15, the LPC wrote to Berman saying that “although the events and figures associated with 186 Spring Street are historically significant, the building lacks the requisite architectural integrity to warrant recommending 186 Spring Street to the full commission for consideration as an individual landmark.” Nordica Development, a private concern, wants to

Councilman Daniel Dromm, GVSHP’s Andrew Berman, Senator Thomas Duane, and activists Allen Roskoff, Steve Ashkinazy, and Yetta Kurland at an August 22 press conference.

build “luxury loft-style condominiums” on the site and that will require that 186 Spring Street be demolished. “It was an integral part of the gay rights movement,” said Thomas Duane, an openly gay state senator who represents a Manhattan district that runs from Canal Street to the Upper West Side and comes within a block of the Spring Street building. “There would be no Tom Duane elected to anything if not for the people who lived in this building.” Duane was the first openly gay person elected to the City Council and to the State Senate. A host of other elected officials and gay groups have written the LPC asking it to preserve the building. Openly gay City Councilman Daniel Dromm, who represents part of Queens, said that too many people in the queer community did not know their own community’s history or its early leaders. “Most people in the LGBT movement don’t even know who they are,” Dromm said. “That’s why we must preserve this building.” The Firehouse, the GAA’s Wooster Street headquar-

received a single donation of $150. She has debts, including her loan, of $2,748. As of July 17, she had $353 in cash on hand. Like Greco, Inlaw took a poke at Hoylman’s backers. “Unlike my opponent, I don’t have any special interests groups behind me,” she said. “I’m a public school teacher, I’m an ordinary American.” Hoylman’s 12 years at the Partnership for New York City, a major business lobby, also came up. William C. Rudin, the chief executive officer of the real estate firm Rudin Management Company, is affiliated with the partnership and with New York University. The Rudin company is taking over

ters, was roughly two blocks away so it was not uncommon for GAA members to stop by the Spring Street building after political or social events at the Firehouse. “It was here… that all of the early leaders resided,” said Steve Ashkinazy, a member of the Stonewall Democratic Club of New York City, who spent time in the house. The city has not noted or protected any building or other location because of its place in queer community history, according to Berman. “In the entire City of New York, there is not a single site that the city has recognized because of its importance to LGBT history,” he said. The Stonewall bar on Christopher Street, the site of the 1969 riots seen as launching the modern gay rights movement, is a state and federal landmark, but New York City has not protected it. The LPC confirmed Berman’s assertion that no individual site had been landmarked for its connection to the gay rights movement. Reached by phone, Stéphane Boivin, Nordica’s president, said he was occupied and could not speak to Gay City News.

the St. Vincent’s Hospital and Medical Center property in the West Village to turn it into condominiums. The university just won city permission for a major expansion. Both plans are very controversial. Hoylman said, “Absolutely” when Greco asked him if he had done everything he could to save the hospital “given your day job.” Hoylman added, “St. Vincent’s closed partly because of mismanagement. This was its second bankruptcy.” Hoylman differentiated himself by pressing for specific solutions. Rather than cutting in the face of expected multi-billion state budget gaps, he wants new revenue sources. He noted

that 20 percent of New York City residents are living in poverty. “It’s this growing gap between the rich and the poor that really under mines our society,” he said. “We need a real millionaires’ tax. The governor cut our millionaires’ tax in half.” When discussing funding for the Hudson River Park T rust, the agency that administers the West Side’s Hudson River Park, Hoylman suggested using money from lawsuit settlements won by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation or from a state bank regulator that just collected $340 million. “We need to identify more revenue sources,” Hoylman said.

August 29, 2012 | www.gaycitynews.com

ENDORSEMENT

Brad Hoylman for State Senate

PUBLISHER JENNIFER GOODSTEIN

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After 14 years of Democrat Tom Duane’s service as the State Senate’s only out gay member, voters in what is now designated the 27th District find themselves deciding September 13 who next will represent a major swath of Manhattan from the Village and Lower East Side up the West Side. Duane, of course, has been a leader on LGBT and AIDS issues in Albany; during his tenure, New York enacted a hate crimes law, a gay civil rights statute, school anti-bullying protections for categories including sexual orientation and gender expression, and, last year, marriage equality. Maintaining an out LGBT voice at the table in the State Senate is an important consideration in choosing among the candidates, but our endorsement of Brad Hoylman, the only gay contender in the Democratic primary that will decide the race, is not based on that factor alone. In the 11 years since Hoylman, who is 46, made his first run for office in a hard-fought 2001 City Council primary in Lower Manhattan, he has played a high profile leader ship role on the West Side. As the three-time chair of Commu-

tion package for employees of companies receiving city subsidies; Hoylman supported the measure. He also publicly disagreed with Lower Manhattan’s most powerful Democrat, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, over the recently approved NYU expansion plan, and has stated his support for a paid sick leave bill that Quinn continues to resist. The fact of Hoylman being gay was not determinative in this endorsement, but neither was it incidental. Hoylman and his longtime partner, David Sigal, have a 21-month-old daughter who was carried by a California surrogate. As the first gay parent in the New York State Legislature, he would be uniquely qualified to lead the charge on ending the odd anomaly of New York being one of only four states to bar surrogacy altogether. He is also wellsituated to bring thoughtful attention to the need for passage of the long stymied Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act, for identification of revenue streams to support housing and services for homeless youth, and for enactment of the rent relief for HIV/ AIDS Services Administration clients living in private housing for which Duane fought so hard over the past half-dozen years. Gay City News recommends a vote for Brad Hoylman on Thursday, September 13.

nity Board 2, he has successfully pushed for two new public schools, supported historic preservation, and helped build consensus for an AIDS Memorial in a new park planned near the former St. Vincent’s Hospital campus and for renovation of Washington Square Park. His civic engagement has also included work with anti-poverty and tenants’ rights organizations, on the board at the Empire State Pride Agenda, and as president of the Gay & Lesbian Independent Democrats. Hoylman’s opponents charge he was essentially hand-picked by Duane and other West Side Democrats and point out that his employer of 12 years, the Partnership for New York City, a businessfriendly non-profit group where he served most recently as general counsel, often champions policy positions at odds with the progressive profile he now presents to voters. These are fair issues to debate. Duane threw in the towel late in lead-up to the primary process and virtually endorsed Hoylman at his retirement press conference; Hoylman acknowledged the two discussed the incumbent’s likely

departure weeks in advance of that. It’s not surprising that voters would like to see a genuine choice in what is the first primary contest for the State Senate seat in decades. Hoylman’s opponents, however –– Ritz Bar and Lounge owner Tom Greco and educator Tanika Inlaw –– have not made the case that their community engagement and command of local and state issues have prepared them sufficiently for the seat they are seeking. In their August 20 debate at the LGBT Community Center, the two made valid arguments about the importance of political independence, but failed to thread the needle by explaining how their outsider status would inform their efforts in Albany. Legislative newcomers unprepared to hit the ground running on day one have little chance of posing a credible challenge to the better -organized political status quo. It’s also important to note that Hoylman has demonstrated his own record of independence. The Partnership for New York City this past spring balked at supporting the living wage bill that that will establish a minimum compensa-

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REMEMBERING VIDAL IN MEMORY OF August 22, 2012 PETE FISHER

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LETTERS TO THE EDITOR STEVE PIGEON & ROY COHN August 16, 2012 To the Editor: Our local Roy Cohn in Wester n New York, Steve Pigeon, is once again putting his evil fingers in the pie (“Tough Keeping Bedfellows Straight in Buffalo Dem, GOP Senate Primaries,” by Andy Humm, Aug. 15-28). I cannot believe the Senate Democrats. Wasn't the last time Steve Pigeon and the curious crew he gathered around him to hold the State Senate hostage enough for them? The man made a laughing stock of New York State's legislature nationwide, and these imbeciles ar e coming back for more. Bruce Kogan Buffalo

August 25, 2012 To the Editor: Thanks so much for what was my favorite review written about my play, “Pieces,” which completed its run at FringeNYC on August 19 (“The Best of Queer Fringe,” by David Kennerley, Aug. 15-28). Your review felt as rough and unsentimental as I hope the play feels to audiences. I couldn't have wished for a better write-up to perfectly capture the tone of our production. We will be coming back for six performances in the Fringe Encore Series at SoHo Playhouse in September, so if you feel like spending another two hours with all these messed-up homos, we'd love to have you. Chris Phillips Playwright, “Pieces” New York City

To the Editor: Having lived thr ough the eight years preceding Mr. Vidal's groundbreaking novel, “The City and The Pillar” (1948), I can attest to the fact that it was a vital and much needed connection to a world that like-thinking people thought they were entirely alone in (“The Legacy of Gore Vidal,” by Doug Ireland, Aug. 15-28). I believe this writer has captured the essence of Vidal's contribution to the understanding of man's basic instincts. Gore Vidal will be sadly missed, but it's up to the rest of us to continue to add to the public's knowledge through our own writings from personal experience. Thank you, Gore Vidal. I'll always love and admire you! Perley J. Thibodeau Manhattan

August 16, 2012 To the Editor: Thank you, Andy, for this really moving tribute to Pete ( “ P e t e F i s h e r, P i o n e e r i n g Author of ‘The Gay Mystique,’ Dead at 68,” by Andy Humm, Aug. 15-28). It was hard to read it without tearing up, not just for Pete — and I am so saddened by the depression that haunted him in the later part of his life — but for a period that seems now too long ago. I hope we get some of that spirit back, some of that indomitable spirit. Perry Brass The Bronx

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LETTERS, continued on p.30

| August 29, 2012

PERSPECTIVE

Disturbing Western Tepidness on Saudi Homophobia BY BENJAMIN WEINTHAL When Saudi Arabia informed the international body responsible for approving Internet domain name suffixes that it opposed the creation of a .gay category, the kingdom’s pervasive controls on the media and the anti-gay violence sanctioned by its influential clerics were once again underscored. Given the Saudi record on these fronts, its protest was hardly surprising. The response from important voices in Europe’s LGBT community and from the international media, however, should sound alarm bells. According to a BBC report, a spokeswoman for the UK’s Lesbian and Gay Foundation said, “Sites under .gay would be carefully regulated and would not ‘promote homosexuality’ but offer crucial support.” In other words, the foundation

was not only abandoning cherished notions of free speech on the worldwide web, but also appears to be running scared from its mission –– namely, to promote LGBT rights and sexual freedom. Europe being Europe, there is unfortunate precedent for the capitulation to the Saudi kingdom’s dictates. Germany’s out gay foreign minister, Guido Westerwelle, after all, defended his decision to not bring his husband Michael Mronz to Saudi Arabia in 2010, saying, “We want to encourage the idea of tolerance around the world, but we don’t want to achieve the opposite either by acting imprudently.” Has a form of soggy cultural relativism –– where reluctance to challenge non-Western cultural practices at times controls the posture taken on human rights –– blinded some European LGBT communities and publications? Let’s be clear about what’s at stake.

The Saudi regime has responded to homosexual conduct with harsh violence, including the death penalty. When Ali Ahmad Asseri, a gay man working at the Saudi Consulate in Los Angeles, applied for political asylum in the US in 2010, he told immigration officials that he feared execution if he were returned to his homeland. In 2005, the Guar dian’s Brian Whitaker wrote, “Dozens of Saudi men caught dancing and ‘behaving like women’ at a party have been sentenced to a total of 14,200 lashes, after a trial held behind closed doors and without defense lawyers. The men were also given jail sentences of up to two years.” A Saudi newspaper ter med the party in the city of Jeddah on the Saudi Red Sea coast a “gay wedding,” a characterization used repeatedly throughout the Middle East and Africa to stoke anti-gay fears. According to Whitaker and other

Paid Sick Leave Proposal Risks Jobs, Bad For Everyone BY JON GILBERT & NANCY PLOEGER The City Council’s paid-sick-days bill is well intentioned, but we have heard from many LGBT small business owners who are extremely concerned about this legislation and the unintended consequences of this proposed measure. And they are right to be concerned. We have heard from owners who offer three paid sick days because that is what they can afford; from owners who have 21 employees and would face an additional $33,000 annual payroll cost under the new law; and from owners who note that proponents of the measure are trotting out people claiming they were “fired for calling in sick” but have never asked the business owner their side of the story, for example that the employee had other personnel issues. There is no consensus on the impact this bill will have on New York City’s LGBT small businesses and all small businesses. What we do know is the entire cost of this legislation will be borne by the employer. To absorb the cost, employers will have to raise

prices, delay hiring, cut other benefits, or, worse, finally pack up and leave for nearby counties or states where they can still take advantage of the New York market and not be subject to such costly mandates. The bill also creates a disincentive to hire. There are three tiers of companies based on the number of workers — five or fewer employees, six to 19, and more than 20. Why should company size affect the number of sick days? Moreover, why grant five to nine paid sick days depending on company size when the national average for sick days taken by workers with paid sick leave is four days? An LGBT restaurant owner wrote to City Council Speaker Christine Quinn: “The small business service industry is too random for paid sick leave with staffers working differ ent shifts, swapping and averaging four shifts a week, so there is plenty of opportunity to be home when sick and still make up your time. The large majority of all their income is in tips, which would not be compensated by this law anyway.” Finally, this bill is a litigator’s

dream come true, as it provides a three-year private right of action for any claim against an employer. It can also interfere with existing policies, such as those that allow leave for reasons different from the ones described in this bill. Proponents argue that this bill has passed in other cities “without adversely affecting small businesses.” But Connecticut exempts businesses with less than 50 employees and Washington DC exempts seven categories of workers — part-timers, tipped employees, and a host of other workers from their bills. And despite what the proponents say about San Francisco’s law having no effect, the fact is that the mandate did cost jobs in San Francisco. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, quickservice restaurants in San Francisco employed an average of 15.2 workers per establishment in 2006, before the paid sick leave ordinance went into effect. By 2010, quick-service restaurants employed only 14 workers per establishment. In comparison, quickservice restaurants in the five sur rounding counties employed 2.5 per-

sources, the most recent documented executions for homosexuality in Saudi Arabia occurred in 2002. A news dispatch on the UK’s Pink News website was headlined “Saudi government objects to ‘.gay’ domain name endings,” but made no refer ence to the kingdom’s history of lethal homophobia and torture. (Full disclosure: I have written news dispatches for Pink News). A CNN report — on the same day the Pink News article appeared — ran the headline “Saudi Arabia objects to .gay and .islam domain names,” but like the British gay newspaper provided no context on Saudi Arabia’s reactionary anti-LGBT policies. CNN and Pink News seemed to take at face value the cynical Saudi reasoning behind its opposition to .gay domain names. Both news organizations quoted the kingdom’s assertion that such domain names could be used to host pornographic websites and that “pornography undermines gender equality and threatens public morals.” The fact that these news organizations made no effort to critically examine the laughable assertion that Saudi Arabia has any regard for

䉴

WEINTHAL, continued on p.30

cent more workers per establishment during the same period. In a National Restaurant Association survey in March, 55 percent of respondents said they would reduce employees as a result of a paid sick leave mandate. Proponents are also discussing unpaid sick leave for businesses with less than five employees and one year’s grace period for new businesses. But if they are saying that this bill does not adversely affect businesses in the other cities where passed then why create these exemptions? Are you not then admitting then that there is an adverse effect? A growing number of LGBT and all employers in this city are small startups. These are today’s job creators — the ones that will be hurt the most by the extra costs associated with a paidsick-leave mandate. City government should not be taking actions that discourage entrepreneurs and small businesses in a struggling economy. We all support the laudatory intentions behind paid sick leave, but this remains the “wrong approach, the wrong time, and the wrong bill.” Speaker Quinn is right to withhold the measure from a full City Council vote. Jon Gilbert is the co-chair of the Manhattan Chamber of Commerce LGBT Committee. Nancy Ploeger is the president of the Manhattan Chamber of Commerce.

August 29, 2012 | www.gaycitynews.com

PERSPECTIVE

BY VAL KALENDE About ten years ago, when I first came out to my guardian and, later, to my closest colleagues at the Daily Monitor newspaper in Uganda, I was nothing short of terrified of losing both family and friends. As I had anticipated, declaring my love for fellow women got me my own share of homelessness, verbal abuse, and alienation, even fr om people I trusted the most. Abandoned as a teenager and forced into maturity at a tender age, I always believed in the transformative power of truth, because the truth, as they say, sets us free. My “coming out” story as a Pentecostalraised Ugandan lesbian woman is no different from the story of the activists who marched at the first-ever LGBT Pride parade in Uganda on August 4. When I learned that my colleagues were organizing Pride, I was more concer ned about what Pride means to us as Africans than replicating what we have witnessed at Pride parades

elsewhere. When I saw my colleagues marching on a muddy road, some walking barefoot with the national flag held high, not only was I reminded of our Africanness, but I felt close to home. And then I thought of our fallen comrade David Kato, who has constantly been on my mind since I saw the film “Call Me Kuchu” and whose life was cut short before we could experience this moment. I got teary. I believe the concept of Pride anywhere it is celebrated is not just a moment, it is a precursor for change. I believe that like the 1963 March on Wa s h i n g t o n i n t h e U n i t e d S t a t e s , which sparked a revolution that sent ripples of change as far as Africa, what happened in Uganda a few days ago will change the politics of local organizing among LGBT movements in Africa. At the Inter national Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC), I research how African LGBT movements organize and how inter national NGOs such as IGLHRC can support their work. In every country

INTERNATIONAL GAY AND LESBIAN HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION

Gay Ugandans: Loud and Proud

In case you haven’t been paying attention, the platform that the GOP is presenting this week at the Republican National Convention is more “conservative” than any in the modern history of the party. Don’t be misled by that word “conservative.” The Republicans are not conserving anything. Not liberty, not freedom, not equality. They’re committed to radical retreat, and not even to the glory days of Ronald Reagan, but to some time around the Salem witch trials, when upstanding male citizens could bur n up anybody they didn’t like the looks of. In this case, they want to keep people of color perpetually on guard, replicating Arizona policy where Hispanic citizens risk being deported to places they’ve never been if they forget to carry driver’s licenses and birth cer tificates. Women aren’t full citizens either. Republicans want to remove the

choice of abortion altogether, even in cases of rape or incest. And if abortion is allowed, to force women to get ultrasounds and submit to invasive procedures. Forget the morning-after pill or anything that gives females control of their own wombs or acknowledges status superior to cows. In the military, women would also be banned again from combat roles, while the GOP opposition to "anything which might divide or weaken team cohesion, including intramilitary special interest demonstrations," seems like a coded promise to reinstate Don't Ask Don't Tell. Which would only be the beginning of their attacks on LGBT people. The GOP platform commits them to ending same-sex marriage everywhere and banning civil marriages between same-sex couples. Why? Because these “counter feit marriages” might start giving us the idea that we are “normal”. When I see delegates applauding this kind of crap, I try to breathe deep

䉴

Ugandan lesbian and human rights activist Val Kalende.

The Republicans and the Commissars BY KELLY JEAN COGSWELL

there’s a unique strategy for organizing that is directly related to how each movement started. In Uganda, organizing an LGBT movement was partly prompted by President Yoweri Museveni’s denial that there were any LGBT people in Uganda. On a r ecent visit home I made a statement I knew wasn’t going to get me too many friends, even among fellow activists. I said our struggle must move away from the victimization nar rative and begin to focus on positive stories. It doesn’t help us when foreign journalists, bloggers, and allies present our struggle as “desperate” and come to Uganda simply to write about what is wrong with our country while ignoring our success stories. While the “ desperate” narrative puts us in the international spotlight and does hold our leaders accountable, it also pits us against our fellow nationals. A balance of both narratives will bring the change we all need. I have been involved with LGBT community organizing in Uganda long enough to observe how far we have come and what we have managed to achieve amidst very difficult circumstances. For instance, there was a time when

and think of the long term. There are cycles in history. Things repeat themselves, like Phillip Glass with slight v a r i a t i o n s . T h e y a t t a c k . We p u s h back. We make a gain. They try to unravel it.

KALENDE, continued on p.15

us to not only breathe, but thrive. And that whatever we won could be locked in somehow. Instead, you can put in a whole lifetime, and 20 years later you have the new Pat Buchanan declaring the same old Culture War where the tar gets are still women and queers, immigrants (all illegal), and racial and ethnic minorities (which all feel sorry for themselves and want handouts). Russia is apparently on the same wave length; they’r e r olling things back, not only past inconvenient democracy but past the commies and the commissars, right back to the Tsars, when breaking religious laws could land you in jail. On August 17, three members of the all-girl Russian punk band Pussy Riot got sentenced to two years in a prison camp — prison camp! — for doing a quick “punk prayer” in February in Moscow’s main Orthodox cathedral asking the virgin to “chase Putin” from power. They had been in jail since then awaiting their trial. Two others are in hiding. They scoffed when their lawyers wanted them to ask for a presidential

How great it would be if we could put in two or three years of work and at the end of it, we have the same civil rights as anybody else. But patience isn’t part of my makeup as an activist. Everybody that steps into the streets is going for the win. Sometimes I dream of how great it would be if each queer in the universe could put in two or three years of work and at the end of it, we have the same civil rights as anybody else and the culture has shifted enough for

䉴

COGSWELL, continued on p.15

| August 29, 2012

ä&#x2030;´

KALENDE, from p.14

Ugandan LGBT activist and Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG) founder Victor Mukasa was the lone visible face of our struggle. It is because activists like Mukasa tirelessly knocked on the doors of consular offices â&#x20AC;&#x201C;â&#x20AC;&#x201C; even if those doors sometimes didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t open â&#x20AC;&#x201C;â&#x20AC;&#x201C; that U.S. and other world leaders care about LGBT people outside their borders. Today, world leaders like Ban Ki-moon and Hillary Clinton listen and are committed to taking action.

Internet. Police anywhere in the world are mandated to enforce the law, not to break it. In my country, they are breaking it. State security officials have unlawfully raided three LGBT gatherings in the past six months. While the AntiHomosexuality Bill is still being debated for passage, it should be made clear that it is still proposed legislation. Enforcing a not-yet-passed bill as law is not only unlawful, it is a gross violation of human rights. Similarly, the growing trend of labeling any gathering of LGBT people a â&#x20AC;&#x153;gay weddingâ&#x20AC;? is an affront to human rights and a red herring informed by utter ignorance and speculative fear of the unknown. While religious fundament a l i s t s i n t h e We s t a r e n o w clutching at straws as laws against same-sex marriage are repealed, they are exporting their homophobic values to Africa. We have learned enough from Christian missionaries, such as Holocaust revisionist Scott Lively, to know that w h e n We s t e r n c o n s e r v a t i v e n a r r a tives are exported to Africa, African politicians see an opportunity to fur ther criminalize same-sex persons. As we proudly and loudly showed up at the Beach Pride parade last week at the Botanical Gardens in Entebbe, we were simply demanding our right to peaceful assembly, expression, and association â&#x20AC;&#x201C;â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the same rights enjoyed by all other Ugandan citizens.

Our struggle must move away from the victimization narrative and begin to focus on positive stories. On balancing both the negative and positive, it is important that we acknowledge that the first Uganda Pride was a success and at the same time condemn state-sponsored harassment of LGBT activists. Three transgender women and professional dancers, while running away from the scene after police raided the event, were handcuffed, arrested, and harassed. One transgender woman, Beyonde, was reportedly beaten by a policeman for resisting arrest. It has become a trend for Ugandan police to arrest, harass, humiliate, and in some cases shoot at unarmed civilians. Two months ago, a video of an ar med and unifor med policeman half-undressing and squeezing the breast of a prominent female politician was making the rounds on the

ä&#x2030;´

COGSWELL, from p.14

pardon. In fact, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova said Putin should ask her par don. She, Maria Alyokhina, and Yekaterina Samutsevich intend to appeal on purely legal grounds. After all, Russiaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s supposed to be a secular state and a democracy, with free speech and everything. The judge who sentenced them, though, had a clear religious bias, characterizing their prayer as â&#x20AC;&#x153;sacrilegious, blasphemous, and against church rules.â&#x20AC;? And allowing witnesses against them who declared the grrrrls were â&#x20AC;&#x153;evil forces,â&#x20AC;? engaging in â&#x20AC;&#x153;diabolical leg movements.â&#x20AC;? Pussy Riot marked their conviction on â&#x20AC;&#x153;hooliganism motivated by religious hatredâ&#x20AC;? by releasing their first single, called â&#x20AC;&#x153;Putin Lights Up the Fir es,â&#x20AC;? welcoming even more jail time â&#x20AC;&#x201D; and envisioning a protest movement taking to the streets and led by feminists. Go Grrrrls! The same day, in a decision that

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Val Kalende is a fellow at the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission and a doctoral student at the University of British Columbia.

passed almost unnoticed in the midst of the international frenzy over Pussy Riot, another Russian court upheld a 100-year ban on Moscow gay pride parades â&#x20AC;&#x153;to prevent public disor d e r, a n d b e c a u s e m o s t M o s c o v i t e s donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t want them.â&#x20AC;? Of course, plenty of Moscovites donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t want Putin either, but thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a minor detail. Last year, St. Petersburg banned â&#x20AC;&#x153;homosexual propagandaâ&#x20AC;? that includes any neutral or positive statement about lesbians and gay men. I can only imagine the Republicans looking with envy and awe at the Great Bear and wishing they had as sweet a deal as Putin â&#x20AC;&#x201D; prison camps for bigmouthed female pr otestors, courts banning displays of queer pride for a hundred years. Poor Republicans. All they have is the jail that the Tampa police chief emptied out for protesters. Hereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s hoping we follow the example of Pussy Riot, push back against the bigots and demagogues, and fill the thing to the top.

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August 29, 2012 | www.gaycitynews.com

| August 29, 2012

August 29, 2012 | www.gaycitynews.com

IMPORTANT PATIENT INFORMATION PREZISTA (pre-ZIS-ta) (darunavir) Oral Suspension PREZISTA (pre-ZIS-ta) (darunavir) Tablets Read this Patient Information before you start taking PREZISTA and each time you get a refill. There may be new information. This information does not take the place of talking to your healthcare provider about your medical condition or your treatment. Also read the Patient Information leaflet for NORVIRÂŽ (ritonavir). What is the most important information I should know about PREZISTA? t P REZISTA can interact with other medicines and cause serious side effects. It is important to know the medicines that should not be taken with PREZISTA. See the section â&#x20AC;&#x153;Who should not take PREZISTA?â&#x20AC;? t P REZISTA may cause liver problems. Some people taking PREZISTA in combination with NORVIRÂŽ (ritonavir) have developed liver problems which may be life-threatening. Your healthcare provider should do blood tests before and during your combination treatment with PREZISTA. If you have chronic hepatitis B or C infection, your healthcare provider should check your blood tests more often because you have an increased chance of developing liver problems. t 5FMM ZPVS IFBMUIDBSF QSPWJEFS JG ZPV IBWF BOZ PG UIF CFMPX TJHOT BOE symptoms of liver problems. t %BSL UFB DPMPSFE VSJOF t ZFMMPXJOH PG ZPVS TLJO PS XIJUFT PG ZPVS FZFT t QBMF DPMPSFE TUPPMT CPXFM NPWFNFOUT

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| August 29, 2012

August 29, 2012 | www.gaycitynews.com

FILM

A Welcome Loosening of the Glove Ira Sachs offers personal, passionate take on toxic love’s iron grip BY GARY M. KRAMER n an empty hotel bar on a summer Sunday morning, openly gay filmmaker Ira Sachs spoke about his award-winning new film “Keep the Lights On.” This searing drama about Eric (Thure Lindhardt), a filmmaker whose lover Paul (Zachary Booth) is a drug addict, is based on the filmmaker’s experiences in a toxic, co-dependent relationship.

KEEP THE LIGHTS ON

Thure Lindhardt and Zachary Booth as Eric and Paul in Ira Sachs’ “Keep the Lights On.”

JEAN-CHRISTOPHE HUSSON

In hushed, almost confessional tones that suited his thoughtful answers, Sachs demurred at the suggestion that making this film was a way of exorcising his demons. “I don’t begin to write a film until I have both the intimacy of the experience but also the distance to view the story as a storyteller,” he said. “The analytic distance is as important as the emotional intimacy for me. I feel this film is a rebirth for me. I think that in the wake of the experiences on which this film is based, I’ve become more comfortable with myself, and that’s shifted my work and the openness of my filmmaking. I think this is my freest film.” “Keep the Lights On” is certainly Sachs’ most personal project since his extraordinary first feature, “The Delta,” back in 1996. That film concerned a closeted 18-year-old in Memphis who begins a clandestine affair with a man from a mixed Vietnamese and AfricanAmerican background. “Keep the Lights On” is also Sachs’ first queer-themed feature since that debut. Sachs’s new film is his most passionate — not just in its eroticism, but also because it is so heartfelt. The characters’ despair and desire are palpable. “As a filmmaker, I’m always mining my own experience — because it is what I know best,” he explained. “I try to make films about things I know more about than anyone else. But I never sense that privileges my story over others.” “Keep the Lights On” is a strong, extremely well crafted story that has universal appeal. While it will resonate with

JEAN-CHRISTOPHE HUSSON

Directed by Ira Sachs Music Box Films Opens Sep. 7 Angelika Film Center 18 W. Houston St. at Mercer St. angelikafilmcenter.com Chelsea Clearview Cinemas 260 W. 23rd St. clearviewcinemas.com Walter Reade Theater 165 W. 65th St. filmlinc.com

Filmmaker Ira Sachs (r.) on the set with Thure Lindhardt.

anyone who has been in a relationship with an addict, the film will also speak to viewers fascinated by the intricacies of human nature and behavior. Eric and Paul each keep secrets as they find ways of coping with the corrosive nature of their relationship. How they each fare by the end of the film is telling. Sachs described his drama as a “tabula rasa”; most people who have

offered him their reaction to it, he said, have focused on their own relationships. Some have told him they don’t consider it a “gay” film. A psychologist in his 80s said it was “not a film about love or addiction, but about obsession.” “That was very clarifying to me,” Sachs said. “I think what happens for a lot of people — and this can be through other individuals, it can be through sex, it can

be through drugs — is that by narrowing the range of what compels you to another person, you kind of silence the loud noises that are surrounding you. Obsession is a very comfortable place to be.” After a pause, he said, “Addiction stays on tight like a glove,” quoting from the Emmylou Harris song “Where Will I Be.” He continued, “I thought about that often in my life. I think addiction can be to a person as much as a drug.” Sachs said that Al-Anon helped him learn what he could from his experiences –– “how my behavior was cyclical and unenlightened in terms of the role that I played within the dynamic of this relationship.” The 12-Step sister to Alcoholics Anonymous, he added, also served as “research” in formulating the content of his film. Following the lead, Sachs said, of Martin Scorsese in “Goodfellas” –– of all films ––he aimed to “depict bad behavior, but not judge that behavior or shy away from the consequence of what we do in our lives. I attempted to make a film about shame, but to do so shamelessly. I wanted to look, without judgment, at the behavior and the actions of these characters.” Viewers will likely empathize with Eric’s struggle to help Paul through his addiction and downward spiral. His commitment to maintain hope for the relationship is evident even at his lover’s lowest moments. “Keep the Lights On” unfolds over ten years, with episodes occurring within a single day and over longer stretches of time. The narrative gathers force as the relationship between Eric and Paul shifts from warm and caring to cold and contentious, but always retains some element of love. “The script is like a diary,” Sachs said. “If you think about diaries and journals, they are made up of events and ellipses. You write in your journal when something bothers you. So the film is like all the high points.” In one incredibly tense moment, Eric places a call to see if he has contracted HIV. A seductive scene has Eric being offered drugs, which he warily tries, perhaps in an effort to understand what Paul finds so alluring about crack and crystal meth. Thure Lindhardt’s revelatory performance as Eric is a key strength of “Keep the Lights On.” Sachs, a Jewish guy from Memphis, explained it was liberating to cast against type in his choice of a Danish actor as his alter ego. “I was free from any attachment from

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IRA SACHS, continued on p.26

| August 29, 2012

BOOKS

Dear Guys who like guys,

What Ever Happened to Bette Davis? Jargon trumps wit in probe of culture gays built, now voyage away from

Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness began with me.

BY TIM TEEMAN reat, you think, a book for all gays — the newbies coming out, the deep-in-the-closets, the out-and-prouders — about getting the most from one’s homosexuality. The title and cover with male nude model suggest an ingenious self-help book. How should one “be” gay? Are you a hipster homo, two suburban dads ferrying offspring to Little League, an urban single puzzled by your flirty straight neighbor, a bear in a world where beards are ironic? It’s exhausting.

your P.S. get your history straight and nightlife gay. HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

HOW TO BE GAY

The right wing thought that University of Michigan academic David Halperin was running a nefarious recruiting class when his course “How To Be Gay: Male Homosexuality and Initiation” began in 2000. Halperin may like to castigate his gay and straight critics for overreaction (some gays claimed he was giving us “a bad name”), but the course and book title were clearly chosen to be provocative. Everyone relax. This densely argued tome restates its title, slicing it a hundred different ways from a cultural studies perspective, interrogating — like the course — how certain cultural artifacts came to be seen as “gay” and how “being gay” came to be about knowing them. Much is made of scenes from “Mildred Pierce” (when daughter Veda slaps Mildred) and “Mommie Dearest (the coat hanger scene), as well as opera, drag, interior design… but no “Dynasty.” No Alexis. My formative ‘80s gay identity imperiled! But then Halperin says, “Being gay gives you no automatic intellectual advantage when it comes to appreciating, understanding or analyzing gay culture” — straight men and women did better than gay students in class. Of course they did! They were trying too hard; the gays were rolling their eyes at being told what to like and how to like it. Still, lucky dev-

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

By David Halperin Harvard University Press $35; 560 pages

David Harper, a University of Michigan professor, wrote “How to Be Gay” based on his decade-old course.

ils, they acted out scenes from “The Golden Girls” and “Steel Magnolias.” What could be a fascinating book, however, is muf fled by Halperin’s impenetrable language. His book analyzes, he says, “the exact logic by which gay male subjects resist the summons to experience the world in heterosexual and heteronormative

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HOW TO BE GAY, continued on p.22

COMING SOON Radio City 212-582-8244 Seaport 646-572-2337 Times Sq. 646-366-0235 Union Square West 212-645-3400 Empire State Building 212-563-3433 HB Burger 212-575-5848 Midtown W. 646-214-1000 heartlandbrewery.com

August 29, 2012 | www.gaycitynews.com

THEATER POLITICS

Careful the Tale You Tell “Into the Woods” revival in the park strays from the path and gets lost BY CHRISTOPHER BYRNE n its 50th season, Shakespeare in the Park, in a not-so subtle nod to itself, took on two pieces that deal with natur e’s transformative power. The journey to the woods is a classic trope of self-discovery where, removed from what is familiar, one learns deeper truths about life and love — an apt metaphor for the Public Theater’s annual gift to the city for the past half century. This year, the shimmering “As You Like It” at the beginning of the summer has given way to the darker and more psychologically complex “Into the Woods.”

INTO THE WOODS

Under the direction of T imothy Sheader, who originally directed this production in London, the path through this “Woods” is meandering and plagued with wrong turns. From the beginning, Sheader chooses to reframe the production as a child’s dream, adding a stultifying recorded prologue in which the child has run away from home after a fight with his father and finds himself in the woods. He drops his backpack, takes out a collection of toys, and begins to play out the story as it comes to life behind him. The problem, of course, is that the emotional, sexual, and intellectual sophistication in James Lapine’s book is so far beyond the understanding of a child eight

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HOW TO BE GAY, from p.21

ways.” Like many academics in his field, Halperin believes cultural studies buzzwords are preferable to plain English. Mine isn’t an argument against intellectualism, just one for lucid language. Halperin rightly notes that many in today’s young gay generation don’t care about the regal, damaged icons of yor e — Joan, Bette, and Judy. They care even less about gay history. (One 25-year -old teacher I met recently asked what the Stonewall Riots were.) Emerging into a world of relative openness, they can watch actual gays on TV, not merely the ones channeled through ciphers. But as Halperin says, gay teens are still being bullied, some kill themselves. As long as they’re brought up in a “heteronormative” world, they will look for “gay culture.” Surely they would benefit from a much more basic “Gay 101”

JOAN MARCUS

Delacorte Theater, Central Park Enter at W. 80th St. & Central Pk. W. Aug. 29-31, Sep. 1 at 8 p.m. Free, but tickets required ShakespeareinthePark.org

Donna Murphy (l.) with Tess Soltau in the Shakespeare in the Park production of “Into the Woods,” running through September 1.

years old or so, particularly in the second act when things get out of control, that the device feels like a gimmick. And, by framing the whole piece as a dream, Sheader undermines what makes this show so

— W h i t m a n , Wi l d e , k e y d a t e s i n our historical timeline — alongside the apparently vital study of Joan Crawford’s shadow against louvered blinds. Gay male culture is both “routinely acknowledged as a fact” and “just as routinely denied as a truth,” Halperin claims perceptively. But his notion of “being gay” becomes confusing. He writes, initially, that it is about more than same-sex attraction, but rather “a mode of perception, an attitude, an ethos… a practice.” Later, he decries those who have de-sexed “gay.” Later still, he says “being gay is a social experience in the same way [as] being American, or middle class, or Chicano,” rather than “a natural condition or individual peculiarity. White flag! How about we go for “attracted to members of same sex” and “cries uncontrollably when watching ‘Beaches’ totally sober?” Halperin is, unsurprisingly, an advocate of “queer theory,” which dis-

inherently bittersweet — our recognition that life does not go on happily every after, but that we must take life on its own terms, even when

avows firm boundaries, definitions, and identities. For example, gay male desire “comprises a kaleidoscopic range of queer longings — of wishes and sensations and pleasures and emotions.” Everything, then. He says, correctly, that the gay rights movement, so focused on showing gays to be like everyone else, sidelines thornier issues around rejection, alienation, and the “nonsexual dimensions gay people are unsure or nervous about.” He writes powerfully about gay male fears of the feminine and why younger gay men treat Garland, Streisand, and the “pre-sexual realities” enshrined in Broadway musicals “with phobic rejection, avoidance, repudiation.” Well, some do, some don’t. If, as he argues, “gay culture” isn’t monolithic, neither are “gay men today.” Halperin lights some great theoretical firecrackers. Sketching how gay men find humor in tragedy, he quotes an obituary headline: “Moody

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INTO THE WOODS, continued on p.23

Bitch Dies of AIDS.” In elegant riffs on melodrama and camp, he ponders why gay men react to women like Mildred Pierce “losing it” and why camp “undoes the solemnity with which heterosexual society regards tragedy, but camp doesn’t evade the reality of the suf fering that gives rise to tragedy. If anything, camp is a tribute to its intensity.” He shows how “camp cuts beauty down to size,” taking “revenge on beauty for beauty’s power over gay men”. But these bursts of zesty writing are hobbled by boggy detours into “heteronormative” this and “decoding, recoding” that. There is much rigorous study and entertaining analysis here, but it’s couched in such opaque, baf fling language it makes me think if I took his course it would bore me straight. Tim Teeman (tim.teeman@thetimes. co.uk) is US correspondent of the Times of London.

| August 29, 2012

THEATER

Heart Wrenched Sam Shepard offers a demented, dour view of the human condition

The challenge for director Daniel Aukin and the ensemble, it would seem, is to locate just enough color and richness in those shadows to craft a stimulating, satisfying drama. And for the most part, they deliver. Without a doubt, “Heartless” is fraught with mystifying dark spaces, despite being set mostly outdoors in Los Angeles. In place of a coherent plot, we see fragments from a few hours in the life of a particularly strange and unhappy family. Mable Murphy (Lois Smith) is the fractious mother who is heavily medicated and bound to a wheelchair due to a nasty fall from a tree. Her unmarried, depressive daughters, Sally (Julianne Nicholson)

and Lucy (Jenny Bacon), still live with her — more from lack of ambition than from love. Mabel requires so much care they’ve engaged Liz (Betty Gilpin), a pretty nurse who may be pretending she’s mute. Roscoe (Gary Cole), who has recently taken up with Sally, promises some hope. A handsome drifter in his 60s who left his wife and kids for a fresh start, he is an authority on Cervantes and Don Quixote. He makes them coffee and brings jelly donuts. Presumably Roscoe is based on the playwright himself, knocked off kilter after his split with longtime partner, Jessica Lange. During the course of this two-hour play, mysteries deepen and reality is

tested. A central question — how did Sally get an enormous scar down the center of her torso? — is answered (she had a heart transplant when she was ten), only to spark more questions. This being Shepard, characters are hopelessly lost inside themselves. There are festering schisms among suffocating family members, highlighted by sporadic breaks in the action. Aukin, one of the most in-demand directors in New York, is a master at drawing out these quiet pauses so they richly resonate. Are these silences painfully awkward? Absolutely. That’s the point. If that weren’t disconcerting enough, “Heartless” treads into Ionesco territory,

where the banal takes center stage and negative, raw emotion shoves aside conventional reality. We are all born to die. Existence is meaningless. Life always disappoints. “I didn’t see it coming,” says Roscoe. “In a moment everything comes unraveled… it’s devastating.” Shepard’s characterizations are puzzlingly complex. Occasionally, Sally breaks into song about staying alive or whips out her movie camera to make a documentary about Roscoe’s life and career. She imagines Liz as the girl whose heart saved her life. The first-rate cast is up to the task of this delicately explosive material. Smith lends the bossy mother a disturbing air of menace. Nicholson is mesmerizing as the haunted sister who wonders if having a murdered stranger’s heart put inside her was a mistake. “I should be dead,” Sally declares. While somewhat too young for the part, Cole is persuasive as the rootless soul fighting to find his place in the world, dreaming the impossible dream. In tune with this savagely introspective, surreal piece, Eugene Lee has invented a bleak, stylized landscape punctuated by two single beds, generic patio furniture, and two of the ugliest palm trees you ever saw. Surrounding the property is a steep slope leading up to a cliff overlooking a black void –– the valley of Los Angeles and the Pacific beyond. Or, as Sally sees it, “The whole nasty panorama in one gasping breath.”

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essential questions that per meate all of Sondheim’s work remain — will I be alone and how will I make it through? From “Being Alive” in “Company” to “By the Sea” in “Sweeney Todd” to “Send in the Clowns” in “A Little Night Music,” the nearly desperate longing to have someone to count on is his constant theme. “No One is Alone” at the end of “Into the Woods” would seem to be the answer to all of those other songs, and sung to a child — and a manchild — it is the balm all the char acters have sought. For this simple idea to be credible, however, it must come in the wake of conflict; it cannot, as Puck says in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” be “no more yielding than a dream.” As a dream, there’s nothing at stake for the characters on the journey. This could be Sheader’s misreading of the show or a desire to pander to a contemporary audience and avoid the existential pain that

makes this a show for grown-ups. Either way, the production feels facile, cartoonish, and unfocused. If the conflict is ephemeral, there can be no catharsis. If there’s no catharsis, there’s neither acceptance nor healing. When the Witch sings to the Baker at the end, “careful the tale you tell, that is the spell,” it should move us. In this production, it’s a platitude too easily dismissed. Still, given the material, it’s hard for any production to be a total loss. The sets by John Lee Beatty and Soutra Gilmour are wonderful. There’s a great deal of visual creativity in the puppets by Rachael Canning, especially the expressive cow Milky White. Donna Murphy as the Witch is sublime. She plays the conflict and the anger beautifully, and she is heart-wrenching when she realizes that she got her wish, but it made her ordinary. Jessie Mueller is a suitably complex Cinderella, with a

balance of pluck, vulnerability, and neurosis that’s always interesting. Sarah Stiles is sharp as Little Red Riding Hood. Gideon Glick as Jack is also appealing. Less successful are Denis O’Hare as the Baker — he never finds the center of the role and wanders aimlessly most of the night — and Amy Adams, bland as his wife. Adams’ singing was consistently flat the night I saw it, and she just missed the “can’t miss” “Moments in the Woods,” a powerful meditation after her tryst with the Prince. Ivan Her nandez as Cinderella’s Prince and the Wolf was out of control, playing for easy laughs, not for anything darker or truer. In taking us through this “Woods,” director Sheader has misled us, trying to tell us that there is perhaps an easier, softer way to get through. Anyone who has made the jour ney knows that that is a fairly tale.

BY DAVID KENNERLEY clue to Sam Shepard’s latest play, “Heartless,” can be found in the Playbill under the cast list. It’s a carefully chosen quote from absurdist playwright Eugene Ionesco, lamenting that the world is an anguishing “desert of fading shadows.”

Irene Diamond Stage Signature Theatre Company 480 W. 42nd St. Through Sep. 30 Tue.-Fri at 7:30 p.m.; Sat. at 8 p.m. Wed., Sat., Sun. at 2 p.m. $25; signaturetheatre.org Or 212-244-7529

INTO THE WOODS, from p.22

tragic, without any magical inter ventions. The brilliance of “Into the Woods” was not in assuring us that “it’s just a dream,” but rather in employing classic fairy tales to tell us to grow up. The first act melds “Cinderella,” “Jack and the Beanstalk,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” and the story of a childless Baker and his wife. The storylines cross as the Baker and his wife try to get the Witch to reverse the curse that has left them childless. We arrive at happily ever after by the end of the first act, but second act deconstructs that idea. Cinderella finds being a princess not so wonder ful, and Jack faces the consequences of stealing from the giant at the top of the beanstalk. Suddenly, the characters ar e all thrown together with a common enemy. At the end of the battle, the

JOAN MARCUS

HEARTLESS

Lois Smith and Julianne Nicholson in Sam Shepard’s “Heartless,” directed by Daniel Aukin, running through September 30.

August 29, 2012 | www.gaycitynews.com

BOOKS

Gay Wind Beneath Gospel’s Wings Anthony Heilbut unburdens himself on church closets and much more BY ANDY HUMM o major gospel singer dies without a quote in the New York Times from award-winning author and record producer Anthony Heilbut. Just recently, he told the newspaper that Willa Ward, 91, of the Ward Singers was “the best gospel group in the golden era” –– the subject of his definitive 1971 book on the genre, “The Gospel Sound: Good News and Bad Times.”

THE FAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH: Aretha Franklin, the Rise of the Soap Opera, Children of the Gospel Church, and Other Meditations By Anthony Heilbut Alfred A. Knopf $30; 354 pages anthonyheilbut.com

Heilbut shared a story about how she died told to him by Ward’s daughter: “She just lay down and said, ‘I’m leaving.’” Anthony Heilbut isn’t leaving without telling what he knows. In his new book of essays, “The Fan Who Knew Too Much,” which has been showered with the best reviews of his life, Heilbut is redefining gospel as music that would be nothing without the contributions of gays and lesbians. His thesis is unassailable, making it all the more disconcerting to a swath of increasingly reactionary black pastors. Gays in gospel is just one of the topics of his wide-ranging new book, which also takes on homosexuality in the white evangelical church, the history and social significance of radio soap operas, Aretha Franklin, the “curse of survival” among blues singers, the male soprano, the nature of fandom, and German émigrés to the US, from Einstein to his

beloved parents, to whom the book is dedicated. The young hot critic John Jeremiah Sullivan wrote, “I finished ‘Fan’ wondering how, without it, I’d ever understood a thing about the 20th century.” The Wall Street Journal called Heilbut’s essay on Aretha “the most incisive and illuminating portrait yet drawn.” Louis Bayard of the Washington Post wrote, “Without breaking a sweat, he swings from the plight of modern academia to the enduring values of the daytime radio serial.” And cultural critic James Wolcott recently tweeted that “Fan” is “my kinda brain food.” How to define Heilbut? From his couch in his high-ceilinged Central Park West apartment amidst a fine collection of African and pre-Columbian art, he said, “I like to joke about my paradoxes. I am an atheist who loves gospel music, a homosexual with strong heterosexual inclinations, and a leftie who fears the

plebs.” Of the latter, he said, “One reason I fear them is because of gospel.” Heilbut, now 71, has produced more than 50 albums, including those of Kennedy Center honoree and MacArthur genius Marion Williams. His 1973 “Precious Lord: The Gospel Songs of Thomas A. Dorsey” was on the list of the first 50 discs included in the Library of Congress National Registry. Heilbut is a passionate man of the American left, “very political from an early age.” He was drawn to gospel at 14 by “the music and the politics” around race. When the teenage Heilbut met Malcolm X, Anthony asked him, “Why can’t we be friends?” Malcolm replied, “Not now.” His living heroes are “Nelson Mandela, Harry Belafonte, Noam Chomsky, and Peter Tatchell,” the great UK gay and human rights activist who, he notes in

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GOSPEL, continued on p.25

OPERA

Broadway Goes Opera, And Vice Versa A hundred and ten trombones outshine Weill’s Pollyanna misfire at Glimmerglass BY ELI JACOBSON

ince taking over the Glimmerglass Festival last year, Francesca Zambello has scheduled a classic Broadway musical each season with opera stars performing the ori ginal score unamplified. This summer, she chose Meredith Willson’s “The Music Man” (1957), starring Cooperstown native Dwayne Croft as the fast-talking confidence man Harold Hill and opera’s eternal ingénue Elizabeth Futral as Marian the Librarian. Both displayed a natural flair for the genre despite being rather mature for their roles and vocally overqualified. Director and choreographer Marcia Milgrom Dodge shifted the time setting from 1912 to 1946. This made nonsense of period-specific references to “traps,” “the Wells Fargo wagon,” and “ladies corset covers,” but small-town mores remained unchanged over the three decades and eventually you forgot the anachronisms. Croft’s relaxed, vulpine stage presence and unaffected diction reminded me that one of his best operatic roles is another quick-thinking schemer with a line in fast patter –– Rossini’s Figaro. Futral’s Marian was initially a plain Jane in a snood and hornrimmed cat glasses –– a dead-ringer for Lily Tomlin’s telephone operator Ernestine. By the second act, Futral’s Marian had transformed into her usual winsome charming self. Futral’s delivery of the dialogue was worthy of a Broadway veteran, but a few sung lyrics got lost in her upper register.

reproduction of Grant Wood’s 1930 landscape painting “Stone City, Iowa” as a fixed backdrop fronted by mobile set pieces and flying scenery that kept the show moving seamlessly. Dodge’s direction had no other innovations outside of switching eras, but her spirited choreography flowed easily in and out of the action. John DeMain’s fast tempos stressed the brassy march elements of Willson’s score. KARLI CADEL/ THE GLIMMERGLASS FESTIVAL

Josh Walden and Dwayne Croft in a lively moment in the Glimmerglass Festival's production of Meredith Willson’s “The Music Man.”

Jake Gardner’s Mayor Shinn was all befuddled bluster, while Cindy Gold as Mrs. Paroo was delightfully meddling and warm-hearted. Ernestine Jackson missed many comedic opportunities as Eulalie Mackecknie Shinn (no one can match Hermione Gingold’s delivery of the word “Balzac!” in the movie). Josh Walden was an old-school vaudevillian scenestealer as Marcellus Washburn –– his high-stepping “Shipoopi” number was a highlight. James Noone’s set design utilized a blown-up

Glimmerglass alternated this family-friendly standard with Kurt Weill’s seldom performed Broadway folk opera “Lost in the Stars” (1949), an ambitious, high-minded failure. Weill’s last completed work is modeled on “Porgy and Bess,” with a preachy social message. Maxwell Anderson’s poetic libretto reduces the characters of Alan Paton’s novel “Cry the Beloved Country” to flat, simplistic symbols rather than fullyrounded complex human beings. The story is set in South Africa where black priest Reverend Stephen Kumalo searches for his wayward son Absalom in the poverty-stricken slums of Johannesburg. Kumalo eventually finds Absalom in prison after he was arrested for the shooting murder of an unarmed white man during a botched robbery attempt. Absalom is condemned to death, while his shattered father struggles with his faith. Weill and Anderson are using the apartheid setting to comment on the racial oppression that drove Weill out of Nazi Germany in

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OPERA, continued on p.25

| August 29, 2012

his book, “was raised in a working class Pentecostal church in Sydney.” In between “Gospel Sound” and “Fan,” Heilbut wrote his 1983 “Exiled in Paradise: German Refugee Artists and Intellectuals from 1930 to the Present” (a theme to which he returns in a new essay) and “Thomas Mann: Eros and Literature” (1996), which illuminated –– among other things –– Mann’s homosexuality more sharply than any work before or since. These books may be relatively few, but Heilbut packs more ideas into a paragraph than most writers do in a chapter or even a whole book. He recognizes that “my subjects are not popular ones,” but his success as a record producer pursuing his passion for music allowed him to take the time to write his books, each of which proved definitive. Heilbut’s parents were refugees from Hitler’s Berlin and he is a son of New York, growing up in Forest Hills in the 1940s and ‘50s bullied and isolated. “The architect of my grief,” he said, “turned out to be a famous right-wing editor” whom he declined to name on the record. “It made me sensitive to the gospel sense of paranoia –– that you couldn’t trust anybody and lived in a world of threats. There’s a line in an Inez Andrews song, ‘If trouble don’t come today, it will surely come tomorrow.’” Gospel became a passion of his from his first exposure at the Apollo at 14. And when he decided to write a book about it in his late 20s, he had the

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STEPHEN LADNER

GOSPEL, from p.24

Anthony Heilbut is a universally acclaimed critic and scholar of gospel music.

ALFRED A. KNOPF

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good fortune of meeting Maya Angelou through a professor of his from Queens College. “She recommended me to [Random House’s] Robert Loomis and though his house rejected it, he forwarded it to Michael Korda, who did publish it at Simon & Schuster.” Heilbut alluded to the gay nature of gospel in his 1971 book –– which made it, he was told, the most stolen book from the Chicago Public Library. Now he completely blows the door off of gospel’s closet in his lead essay, “The Children and Their Secret Closet,” illuminating the complex reasons why gays and lesbians have given and continue to give so much to churches

OPERA, from p.24

the 1930s as well as on the burgeoning US civil rights movement of the ‘40s. The title song, “Lost in the Stars,” which is the only standard from the show, comes at the end of Act I when Kumalo has learned that his son is a murderer. Its theme of how we are all lost in the universe and ignorant of God’s plan rings emotionally false in the dramatic context. The philosophical and reflective tone seems removed from the shock and anger Kumalo is feeling at that moment. The other pieces are genre numbers for secondary characters, flat choral sections, and torch songs for Absalom’s pregnant fiancée Irina. Absalom and the white characters don’t sing at all. Act II deals with Absalom’s trial and execution, and here the music should reach operatic heights, but the score thins out. On the day of his son’s execution, when Kumalo vows to leave his ministry he is only given a brief reprise of the title song’s introduction. The final scene is a tearjerker. James Jarvis, the stiffly bigoted father of the murder victim, enters Kumalo’s church with a changed heart, tells the griefstricken Kumalo they have both lost sons, and offers his friendship. In just the previous scene, however, this character advised his grandson not to speak to black children. Where this wildly unmotivated 11th hour conversion comes from is left to the audience’s imagination. At this point, the white and black congregations come together in song. The authors’ liberal

that almost never affirm their sexuality and more often condemn them. Gospel singer Brother Walter Stewart, he said, “told me, ‘Baby, don’t you know gay folks like being ’buked and scorned?’” But Heilbut said that the attraction of LGBT black people to a homophobic church is not different from gay Jews going to Orthodox synagogues or many of his generation who went to anti-gay therapists. “But without gay people,” he said, “religion, art, and music might shrivel up. Just think: no Sistine Chapel, no ‘Ave Maria,’ possibly no ‘Hallelujah Chorus,’ no ‘America the Beautiful,’ no Mormon Tabernacle Choir.” For all his truth telling, he has gotten no pushback from the black press and, “if anything, endorsement” of his analysis, he said. But some of his friends in the business

ideals sweep aside social history and the realities of apartheid. It is a credit to the performers and the director Tazewell Thompson that during this final reconciliation of races, all around me I heard audience members sobbing. Eric Owens’ Kumalo was totally crushed by devastation and loss, while Wynn Harmon as the elder Jarvis had a quiet restraint that held bathos at bay. Owens, Glimmerglass artist-in-residence for the 2012 season, sang with a deeply burnished voice like a church organ and acted with simple truth that made this modest man seem like a giant. He seemed to be

fear retribution from the pews or pulpit. One old singer told him, “Tony, they’re going to put a contract out on you.” Heilbut is spilling the beans now partly because many of his gospel sources are either dead or have given him leave to testify because they are old beyond caring. He is also angry about the response of gospel churches to the AIDS crisis –– “a grievous combination of ignorance and contempt,” he said, for the very people who were the soul of the church. He is weary of modern gospel singers such as Donnie McClurkin who calls himself “delivered from the curse of homosexualiteh” and furious about pastors such as Chicago’s James T. Meeks –– one of President Barack Obama’s major spiritual advisers –– who has been reported to refer to gay people as “sissies” and “punks” and to have condemned “Hollywood Jews for bringing us ‘Brokeback Mountain.’” “People have asked me whether Obama coming out for same-sex marriage and Frank Ocean coming out as bisexual and even the publication of my book can change things,” Heilbut said. “I fear not in a church whose establishment has gone so right-wing and is so much a reflection of white Pentecostalism, with its emphasis on the prosperity gospel, combined with its attacks on abortion rights and gay people.” While angry at church hypocrisy, Heilbut is abiding in his devotion to gospel from the golden age and to the singers he produced and worked with. Singer Paul Simon said, “I know of no one who has the love and depth of knowledge of this extraordinary author.”

performing in a different, greater musical work. This was a co-production with Cape Town Opera Company, and many South African singers took supporting roles. Conductor John DeMain made the best case he could for Weill’s patchy score. Thompson’s production was stark and placed the emphasis on the performers –– the sets were earth-toned corrugated metal walls suggesting the desperate poverty and harsh landscapes that shape the characters’ fates. All this production needed was music that fleshed these characters out and a book that gave them reality, depth, and grit.

August 29, 2012 | www.gaycitynews.com

FILM

Our Motown Future Rachel Ewing, Heidi Grady investigate the fastest shrinking city once the fastest growing

a group of Detroit residents –– restaurant owner Tommy Stevens, video blogger Crystal Starr, the head of the Detroit Opera House. As it follows them around the city, which is full of vacant lots and abandoned and burned-out homes, the film offers up some depressing statistics. In 1930, Detroit was the fastest growing city in the world. Now, it’s the fastest shrinking city. Ewing and Grady’s images serve as eloquent testimony to the city’s decay, as they take in union meetings at a factory about to be closed and a public discussion about a controversial plan to move all the city’s residents into its most densely populated areas. More than any other recent American documentary, “Detropia” recalls “The Wire.” There’s one crucial difference –– none of its subjects is a criminal. Still, it offers the same kind of panoramic view of a decaying urban landscape. The film keeps switching focus from one person to another, observing one area of Detroit at a time. While it seems most interested

in poor and working-class Detroiters, it also depicts the mayor. For all its narrative innovations, “The Wire” lacked visual pizzazz. In contrast, Ewing and Grady open “Detropia” with a beautiful montage sequence tying together Detroit street scenes and a preacher’s sermon. While they don’t shoot the entire film in this impressionistic style, they utilize expressive cinematography throughout. They’re alert to moments when the city’s grating ugliness fades, as when a man sings opera arias in an abandoned, graffiti-covered train station. Repeatedly, “Detropia” makes the case that Detroit’s fate is likely to become America’s. In an interview, Ewing says, “Is this the end of our empire or a new phase of the American empire? Maybe Detroit's fallen further faster, but there are lessons here for the rest of us. Detroit is the canary in the coal mine that is the United States.” On a trip to a car fair, restaurateur

Stevens investigates the options available for electric cars and learns that a Chinese-made model costs half the price of a Detroit-made car. Angry at outsourcing, he sees little hope for the future of American manufacturing. Just when the film threatens to become unbearably grim, it introduces a pair of white artists who find freedom in the low rents of downtown Detroit. “Detropia” never makes a big deal out of race, but the vast majority of Ewing and Grady’s subjects are African-American. (The main exceptions are two guys who collect scrap metal for a living, evoking Detroit rapper Danny Brown’s harrowing “Scrap or Die.”) One would have to be blind not to see that white flight has played its role in Detroit’s problems. The film ends by suggesting the beginnings of gentrification but refrains from pointing out the downside of this process. Maybe Ewing and Grady saw a reflection of their own project in these artists’ enthusiasm for their newfound home. “Detropia” is not exactly a conventional piece of investigative journalism. It leaves out a lot that a more prosaic documentary would spend time on. There’s little mention, for example, of the effects of violent crime. Nevertheless, the film has a clear perspective: Detroit as a microcosm of the impact of global capitalism. Ewing and Grady, as well as many of their subjects, view the city as a laboratory of a world in which corporations have no loyalty to communities or countries. “Detropia” has no solutions to the problems created by this mentality, but at least it knows that they’re central to the future –– and not just in Detroit, or even in the US.

Sachs remarked that his film is part of today’s “new queer cinema,” which focuses more on relationships and less on coming out stories. This film, he said, examines “the nocturnal world of gay life.” Sachs was emphatic about the void he hopes “Keep the Lights On” will help fill. “I think we have to recognize that there are still so few images of what gay life looks like, particularly around sex and drugs,” he said. “We as individuals and as a community have re-closeted ourselves. We’ve created a safe space where we can have certain kinds of experiences, and then we’ve stopped talking about them and stopped looking at them. There’s very, very little about gay life as I know it on film.” The film’s title, Sachs explained, is a call to arms for the audience. “It’s a direct address for people in the cinema to not live in the darkness,” he said. “I think as gay people, we have

learned — out of need — to live with secrets. This film, in a way, is a testament to the destruction those secrets can create. The film is very, very open about two men who keep everything closed.” “Keep the Lights On,” Sachs insisted, is not an “anti-drug film,” but he said people need to talk about the issue, especially the role of crystal meth in the gay community. Likening the impact of meth on gay sexuality to the introduction of crack in the African-American community a quarter century ago, he said, “It was a fuel that set off a huge fire, and I think we are in the middle of that. But there is a way of ending it — and that’s to admit it. I think it’s another closet. We’re very used to creating closets and staying in them.” Sachs can get angry when he discusses these issues, but overall he displayed

a calm demeanor based on the happy place he has reached in his life today. Sachs and his partner, the Ecuadorian artist Boris Torres — whose beautiful and sexy artwork is seen under the film’s opening credits — have been together for five years. “I feel like I came out at 40 in a lot of ways,” the 46-year-old Sachs said. “I live a very different way now. This relationship I’m in now is the first honest relationship I’ve been in.” The couple recently had twins — a boy and a girl — and the proud father showed off photos of two adorable, smiling babies. Sachs cooed about the infants and said, “I tried to start keeping a journal when we had kids. Because I found it complex to be a parent — and fascinating and wonderful.” Then acknowledging the journal effort sputtered, he mused, “Maybe it’s too wonderful to write about it.”

BY STEVE ERICKSON

he surprise arthouse hit “Beasts of the Southern Wild” is one of the few recent American films to depict poverty and do so without the protection of neo-realism. In this, it finds common ground with the

Directed by Rachel Ewing and Heidi Grady Loki Films Opens Sep. 7 IFC Center 323 Sixth Ave. at W. Third St. ifccenter.com

documentary “Detropia.” “Beasts of the Southern Wild” has been criticized –– justly, I think –– for romanticizing poverty in the service of a libertarian political agenda. One frustrated –– and pseudonymous –– Twitter user, however, recently pointed out that the film goes no further in aestheticizing poverty than a critically lauded European film like Pedro Costa’s “Colossal Youth.” Like both “Colossal Youth” and “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” “Detropia” finds beauty in slums. Directors Rachel Ewing and Heidi Grady offer up impeccably framed shots of birds resting on landfills. They fill the film with doppelgangers of themselves. While not exactly insiders in the present-day Detroit they depict, they honor the considerable frustration their subjects have with the city and the fleeting moments of pleasure and grace it offers them. “Detropia” introduces the audience to

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IRA SACHS, from p.20

the past,” he said, going on to offer high praise for Lindhardt. “I didn’t set out to cast a Danish guy,” he said. “I heard Thure was the bravest actor in Denmark — and one of the best. I sent him the script, and he auditioned by doing a few scenes from the film on his cell phone. He chose all the scenes he could do alone — which meant a lot of masturbation scenes. There was a fearlessness — even in the audition — that was apparent, as well as an extraordinarily vibrant energy.” Sachs revealed that the film’s explicit queer sexuality made it difficult to cast in the US. “Believe it or not,” he said, “I sent the material to an agency in Los Angeles that I always send new work to, and I got the response, ‘No one in our agency will be available for this film.’”

TONY HARDMON

DETROPIA

One of Detroit’s scrappers, among the few whites seen in Rachel Ewing and Heidi Grady’s “Detropia.”

| August 29, 2012

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IN THE NOH

Dazzling Domingo One busy star, Baby Peggy Returns, classic gags BY DAVID NOH

frankly don’t think there’s a busier guy in show business right now than Colman Domingo. He’s directing the one-man show “No Parole,” written and performed by Carlo D’Amore for the All For One Theater Festival. It’s the real life account of a gay man who acts as accomplice to his con artist mother, who adopts a myriad of poses — professor, daycare worker, immigration attorney. (Sep. 16, 7 p.m.; Sep. 29, 4:30 p.m.; Cherry Lane Theatre, 28 Commerce St., btwn. Bedford & Barrow Sts.; afofest.org.) In the fall, the Public Theater will be host to Domingo’s new play, “Wild with Happy,” in which he stars as Gil, a gay man bent on scattering his dead mother’s ashes in the place she was most happy, Disneyland. Robert O’Hara directs a cast that also includes Korey Jackson, Maurice McRae, and Sharon Washington. (Oct. 9-Nov. 11; 425 Lafayette St., btwn. E. Fourth St. & Astor Pl.; publictheater.org.) As if that weren’t enough, Domingo has more movies coming out than Samuel L. Jackson, which is really saying something. He spoke to me from the New Orleans set of “The Butler” — Lee Daniels’ latest project — which is the true story of Eugene Allen (Forest Whitaker), the White House servant

COLMANDOMINGO.COM

Colman Domingo, perhaps the busiest actor around today, is directing Carlo D’Amore’s “No Parole” and is set to star in “Wild With Happy” at the Public Theater in October.

who served eight American presidents, lived through the civil rights movement, and was brought out of retirement to witness Obama’s inauguration. “I play one of the other butlers, and Oprah Winfrey’s also in this,” Domingo said. “I haven’t met her yet but I had a sighting of her yesterday, going into the makeup trailer! Lee Daniels is amazing and I feel blessed to be working with him.” Domingo then rattled off the amazing list of his other movies for me. The recently released “Red Hook Summer”: “This was my third time working with Spike Lee, and I think the third time is the charm. Although he does make mistakes, he’s really a good guy and we are kindred spirits. We were shooting in Brooklyn for 19 days last summer. In it, I play a key character named Blessing Rowe, who comes in late and I can’t really describe, because he’s the plot spoiler.” “Lincoln”: “I finished shooting that with Spielberg, from a script by Tony Kushner. I play a soldier, Private Harold Green, who has some wonderful moments with the president [Daniel Day Lewis]. Working with Spielberg was just a beautiful experience, and he’s so humble and generous, as was Daniel Day Lewis.” “Lucky Dog”: “That’s with Paul Rudd, Paul Giamatti, and Sally Hawkins. In it, I have my very first

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IN THE NOH, continued on p.29

| August 29, 2012 IN THE NOH, from p.28

screen kiss — with Paul Rudd! It’s funny, hysterical, like one of the ‘Weekend with Bernie’ films, very silly.” “’42”: “It’s the life story of Jackie Robinson, played by Chadwick Boseman, shot in Georgia, and I play a New York restaurateur, Lawson Bowman, who owned a Harlem steakhouse where he and Robinson had a great relationship. “Ther e’s also ‘Hair Brain’ with Parker Posey and Brendan Fraser, and something called ‘Newlyweeds,’ with ‘Langston’ also coming up. That makes about nine films coming out thr ough next year, which is very exciting.” Domingo was nominated for a Tony for “The Scottsboro Boys,” which, with its minstrel show theme, caused quite a stir. “My first reaction to the material was ‘Wow! I’ve never read anything like this or seen anything like this, and I would absolutely love to be a part of this!,’” he recalled. “Just for the calibre of people I was working with alone — Kander & Ebb, Susan Stroman. I never had so much fun being so evil as that character. Had the time of my life!” The show was picketed by African Americans who found it distasteful, but Domingo said, “It was heavy, but I’m very outspoken and thought nothing of going up to them and speaking. Actually, there was just a handful of protesters, maybe 16 tops, maybe twice. It was no Million Man March like the press would have you believe. But I would go up to the front of the line and ask if they had seen the show. They said, ‘No,’ and I would invite them to see it, and said, ‘I would love to buy you a ticket and then set up a talkback afterwards you can par ticipate in.’ But they didn’t want to, because they would rather detach themselves from it. I do think there were some problems with the marketing, because we were represented as a minstrel show as opposed to when we were at the Guthrie Theater [in Minneapolis], where the words ‘minstrel show’ were never mentioned. “I did speak to the Amster dam News, a paper I will never read again for the way they treated us. This writer called me up and didn’t do her research. She asked, ‘So you’re white, right? And the whole cast is white, right?’ So, in her mind, we were a

BAMCINÉMATEK/ PHOTOFEST

䉴

Steve Martin in Carl Reiner’s 1983 “The Man With Two Brains,” screeing at BAM on September 7 at 4:30 and 9:15 p.m.

group of white actors doing a minstrel show. That’s what we had to deal with.” I expressed my admiration for Domingo’s always being out and proud, especially growing up at a time when acceptance of gays was far rarer than it is today, and he said, “It’s funny, because I went to speak at the University of Wisconsin six months ago, and this old black queen stood up and said, ‘I want you to acknowledge what you are and what you’re doing and how it hasn’t really ever been done on the level that you’re doing it!’ “For me, I’ve just been working my way along my journey. I’ve never had to come out. I’ve always been out. It’s never been an issue, from the time of my doing Athol Fugard’s ‘Blood Knot,’ in which I played this hot-blooded guy always talking about sex with women. Whatever my sexuality may be, possibly I am able to transcend all that.”

The Museum of Modern Art will have a very special guest on September 5, when Diana Serra Cary will introduce Vera Iwerebor’s documentary about her life, “Baby Peggy: The Elephant in the Room” (6:30 p.m.; 11 W. 53rd St.; moma.org). As the beyond-adorable Baby Peggy, Cary, born in 1918, was the Shirley Temple of her day, after Jackie Coogan, the biggest child

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star of the silent era, pulling in $1.5 million a year. She was the first child star to be a corporation and massmarketed, with lines of Baby Peggy dolls, clothing, and sheet music, and she was the mascot of the 1924 Democratic Convention in New York, photographed alongside Franklin Roosevelt. She made her debut at 18 months, but by the age of nine was washed up — after her father fought over her salary, leading to the cancellation of her contract and her being blacklisted in the industry. Her father continued to blight her life, financially, even blowing the money she ear ned by per forming live in vaudeville after her film career ended. Returning to Hollywood as a young adult, she could only find work as an extra. T oday, Cary is almost as ador able, a tirelessly upbeat survivor and grandmother, who overcame her dysfunctional family to find a happy married life and motherhood. She also overcame her lack of any for mal education — she was always too

busy working under scandalously unmonitored childhood conditions — to author two important books of film history. She makes personal appearances for worshipful movie fans and researches her own past and career now, having come to terms with her ambivalence toward it. Only 12 of the 56 short films she made in her heyday survive, most of them discovered in Europe, and this wonderfully warm and affectionate documentary shows her being fêted at a theater that was hosting an all-day retrospective of her work. For Cary, insanity was, for a long time, her normal state; she herself wryly confesses, “I used to look at my little boy playing with such anger. Why isn’t he working, like I was at his age? And then I realized what I was saying!”

Brooklyn Academy o f M u s i c ’s f i l m s e r i e s, “American Gagsters: Great Comedy Teams” has already begun (through Sep. 17; 30 Lafayette Ave. at Ashland Pl.; bam.org), but you can still catch a slew of films with memorably hilarious moments. There’s Kim Novak at her most charismatically somnambulistic, decked out in spiffy red and black Jean Louis ensembles, as a witch in a snowy Greenwich Village fantasy world, creating havoc for snotty rival Janice Rule in “Bell, B o o k a n d C a n d l e ” ; G e n e Wi l d e r brilliantly having conniptions over his security blanket in “The Producers”; the song “Under the Bamboo Tree” and how it’s used in “The Man with Two Brains”; Diane Keaton and Wo o d y A l l e n d o i n g “ A S t r e e t c a r Named Desire” in the middle of “Sleeper.” And then there are my absolute two favorites — the Ethel Merman sequence in “Airplane!” and every fucking thing Cloris Leachman d o e s a s F r a u B l ü c h e r i n “ Yo u n g Frankenstein” (whinny!). Contact David Noh at Inthenoh@aol. com and check out his blog at http:// nohway.wordpress.com/.

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August 29, 2012 | www.gaycitynews.com

DILAN, from p.6

in his family and in the Lopez machine’s orbit stood to benefit from relaxed restrictions on giving by their corporate and political action committee supporters. LID’s endorsement of Otaño, he said, came when “we were fresh off the “Nydia Velázquez campaign where we had lots of boots on the ground.” Velázquez has one of the strongest pro-LGBT records in Congress, having joined just six of her Democratic colleagues in 2007 in voting against the federal Employment Non-Discrimination Act to protest the lack of protections based on gender identity and expression included in the version House leaders put up for a vote that year. Some Otaño supporters noted that Stonewall failed to endorse Velázquez against the challenge from Dilan’s son, a sign they said of the club’s overly cozy relationship with Lopez’s Brooklyn orga-

䉴

WEINTHAL, from p.13

gender equality fails even the most basic standards of journalistic practice. A recent study by two of my Foundation for Defense of Democracies

䉴

LETTERS, from p.12

SHORTCHANGING STATE SENATE CANDIDATES August 23, 2012 To the Editor: I do not think that the Gay City News did justice to Brad’s debate win (“Hoylman Longest on Specifics, Repeatedly a Target in Debate With Broad Agreement,” by Duncan Osbor ne, posted online, Aug. 21). Brad demonstrated a clear under standing of both local community and state issues. He was the first one to bring up the budget, stating his support for raising the millionaires’ tax and for the living wage and sick pay bills. He helped to get Community Board 2 and the Village Independent Democrats to pass resolutions in support of the living wage bill, and as a district leader joined in a unanimous vote for the resolution at the Manhattan Democratic County Committee. Brad's two opponents were nowhere to be found on this issue. Brad has been front and center on pushing for new schools in the district. He knows the parent leaders and they have endorsed him. It is a good sound bite to say you are for education, but I have never seen the other two candidates at a school meeting or a Community Education Council District 2 meeting fighting for more schools. As Chair of CB 2, Brad has a good grassroots understanding of the complexities of Pier 40. Two key players on the issue — Assemblymembers

nization. Sklarz, however, attributed its lack of involvement in that primary to the difficulty, for a citywide Democratic club, of “reach[ing] out to all the contests in all the boroughs.” Using votes on marriage equality as a litmus test for endorsements has proved tricky for Stonewall this year. If its loyalty to Dilan has separated the club from its customary reform allies, Stonewall’s endorsement of a Bronx Assembly candidate who does not support marriage equality also caused it problems. An August 1 story in the New York Post about the club’s support for Luis Sepulveda, an ally of State Senator Ruben Diaz, Sr., an ardent foe of gay rights, quoted Cathy Marino-Thomas, the board co-president of Marriage Equality USA, saying, “I think it’s outrageous that an organization that holds itself out as a gay advocacy group would ask voters to support an anti-marriage equality candidate.” In the wake of that dust-up, the club posted on

colleagues rigorously documented the gender discrimination and antigay bigotry of the kingdom. According to FDD’s Dr. Jonathan Schanzer and Steven L. Miller, “The Permanent Committee for Research and Ifta, one of the kingdom’s highest religious bod-

Richard Gottfried and Deborah Glick — have both endorsed Brad. John R Scott Democratic District Leader 66th Assembly District, Part B

August 26, 2012 To the Editor: If you are going to sponsor a debate, please try to be neutral. It was obvious that you favored Brad Hoylman by asking him three or four-part questions. The other candidates were only asked single questions. You did not ask challenging or probing questions. The audience and voters deserved more. The community would have been better served if someone else was asking the questions. Why wasn't there a female moderator? Citizens Union didn't do much better with their questions, and only three questions were allowed from the audience and they were asked in abbreviated versions. As I was leaving, two audience members summed up the evening, “It was boring.” Carol Demech Manhattan

EDITOR'S NOTE “A Young Mind and Body Seized” (by Duncan Osborne, Aug. 15-28) incorrectly identified Judge Shlomo S. Hagler as Judge Paul Wooten. WRITE US! Send letters to the editor, of 250 words or less, to editor@gaycitynews.com or to 515 Canal St., Suite 1C, New York, NY 10013. We reserve the right to edit letters for space or legal considerations.

its homepage an extraordinary letter from Sepulveda in which the candidate wrote that he sees marriage equality as “a settled matter, one that I do not look to chip at in any capacity as a state legislator.” Responding to a query from Gay City News, ESPA –– which has made protecting legislators who voted with the community on marriage equality a top priority in the 2012 elections –– responded, “Senator Dilan has not submitted a current candidate questionnaire in this cycle yet. However, as in years past, the Pride Agenda's endorsement process is rolling, keeping in mind there are hundreds of races across the state. Our PAC plans to release further endorsements as election season proceeds.” The group’s spokesman, George Simpson, did not reply to follow-up questions about whether Otaño had answered its questionnaire or if additional endorsements were expected in the 16 days left before the primary.

ies, suggested in December 2011 that repealing the Saudi ban on female driving could ‘provoke a surge in prostitution, pornography, homosexuality, and divorce,’ predicting that in ten years, there would be ‘no more virgins.” Schanzer and Miller, working over a six-month period with ConStrat, a Washington-based web technology and analytics company, “collected and analyzed more than 40,000 social media entries in both English and Arabic” posted by Saudi clerics and their followers. The eye-popping result: “Alarmingly, of the thousands of messages ConStrat scored, 75 percent could be described as xenophobic, bigoted, or openly hateful.” The study also noted that Saudi high school textbooks “call for homosexuals to be put to death because they pose a danger to society.” Bruce Bawer, a bestselling American gay author, has been scathing in his indictments of homophobia in majority-Muslim countries and, noting the fact that most 9/11 terrorist were Saudis, pointed to the “bipartisan disgrace” of US leaders who “have bent over backwards to send out the message that the Saudis are our friends.” Still, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’ s speech last December to the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in Geneva, the strongest American assertion to date that LGBT rights are human rights, offered hope for a shift in the US posture. “Being gay is not a Western invention; it is a human reality,” Clinton said. “And protecting the human rights of all people, gay or straight, is not something that only Western governments do.” Sadly, a little more than six months after Clinton spoke, Omar Shalaby, Egypt’s top diplomat to the UNHRC, said, “Finally, concerning the highly controversial notion of sexual orientation, we can only reiterate that it is not part of the universally recognized

human rights.” He continued, “We call on Mr. [Maina] Kiai [the UN’s special rapporteur on freedom of peaceful assembly and association] not to undermine the credibility and legitimacy of his important work in the eyes of real people who actually need it, especially in regions where such concepts are rejected by both its Christian and Muslim inhabitants like the Middle East.” It is sad, indeed, that more than a year after Cairo’s Arab Spring, an Egyptian diplomat would so faithfully mirror Saudi Arabia’s virulent homophobia. Sadder still was the fact that a UNHRC spokesman could not muster the wherewithal to unambiguously condemn Shalaby’s remarks, telling Pink News simply, “The Human Rights Council is an intergovernmental body which provides a space for a wide range of views from states, NGOs, civil society, and other participants. The comments made by the Egyptian delegate on 21 June during a discussion on a report of the special rapporteur on peaceful assembly, Maina Kiai, expressed the views of the Egyptian delegation, and should certainly not be interpreted as an endorsement by the Council as a whole.” Like the recent reactions from the UK’s Lesbian and Gay Foundation and media outlets worldwide to the unembarrassed Saudi attack on Internet freedom and LGBT self-expression, this sort of statement from a UN human rights spokesman is shockingly weak-kneed. For those who care about the rights and protections of queer people across the globe, all this should come as a rude wake-up call for dramatic change. B e n j a m i n We i n t h a l i s a B e r l i n based journalist who reports on LGBT issues in Europe and the Middle East for the Jerusalem Post and is a fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

| August 29, 2012

SUN.SEP.2

COMEDY A Labor of Laugh

Brad Loekle yucks it up on the summer’s last long weekend at “The Electroshock Therapy Comedy Hour,” along with guests Naomi Ekperigin, Sean Wherley, and Graham Nolan. Therapy Bar, 348 W. 52nd St. Sep. 2, 10 p.m. No cover charge, and $7 cosmos all night long.

TUE.SEP.4

CABARET Feinstein & Maye

Michael Feinstein, the Ambassador of the Great American Songbook, is joined by Marilyn Maye, whose performances the New York Times’ Stephen Holden recently mentioned in the same breath (sentence, actually) as Judy Garland’s triumphant 1961 Carnegie Hall appearance, in a month-long engagement at Feinstein’s at Loews Regency, 540 Park Ave. at 61st St. Sep. 4-22, Tue-Sat. 8 p.m.; Fri.Sat., 10:30 p.m. also. (Feinstein performs solo on Sep. 18). Cover charge is $60, with no minimum, at 212-339-4095 or Feinsteinsatloewsregency.com.

SEPTEMBER 14. Jersey Fabulous at Six Flags

WED.SEP.5

THU.AUG.30

NIGHTLIFE Witti Repartee to Benefit Brooklyn Queer Youth

“P*rno Bingo” guest host Witti Repartee presents a groovy evening of fundraising for GLOBE, Gays and Lesbian of Bushwick, Bed-Stuy, and Brownsville Empowered, the Brooklyn-based LGBTQ Justice Project of Make the Road New York. The group’s programs include No Homophobia or Transphobia in Our Communities, the Transgender and Gender NonConforming Employment Discrimination Campaign, a Safe Schools for All Campaign, and a Police Accountability Campaign. Singer Vicky Modica and Ron B as Tina Turner entertain an evening of bingo with XXX prizes. The Ritz, 369 W. 46th St. Aug. 30, 7-9 p.m.

THEATER Been There! Really, Really Done That! “Methtacular!” is Brooklyn-born, Jersey-raised Steven Strafford’s hilarious and harrowing account of his three-year run as a crystal meth addict in Chicago. With stories, songs, and “Facts of Life” references, Strafford plumbs the depths of his drugaddled, sex-crazed descent. Adam Fitzgerald directs, with musical arrangements by John McDaniel. The Playroom Theater, 151 W. 46th St. Aug. 30-Sep. 23, Thu.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 5 p.m. Tickets are $19 at methtacular.com.

FRI.AUG.31 THEATER High-Pitched Fun The Fire Island Arts Project presents William Finn and James Lapine’s 1992 Tony-winning musical “Falsettos,” a seamless pairing of “March of the Falsettos” and “Falsettoland.” Marvin leaves his wife Trina and young son Jason to live with Whizzer Brown. Sound familiar? Marvin’s psychiatrist Mendel thinks so. FIPAP promises to bring a special Pines sensibility to this revival. Whyte Hall, Brandon Fradd Theatre. Aug. 31-Sep. 2, 8 p.m. Tickets are $60 at fipap.org or in the Pines Harbor 10 a.m.-1 p.m. on Sep. 1-2.

SAT.SEP.1

PERFORMANCE Risqué End of Summer

In “Gotham Burlesque,” World Famous *Bob* welcomes Angie Pontani, Dirty Martini, Peekaboo Point, Bettina May, Nasty Canasta, magician Albert Cadabra, dance sensation Medianoche, hula-hoop artist Pinkie Special, and stage kitten extraordinaire Dangrrr Doll. Triad Theater, 158 W. 72nd St. Sep. 1, 10 p.m. Tickets are $35-$45 at gothamburleque.com.

The Fabulous Baker Girl

GALLERY Gender & Masculine/ Feminine Ideals

In Cheryl Howard’s “The Sensational Josephine Baker,” the playwright portrays the Jazz Age legend who, over a half-century career, traveled from being a childhood performer in St. Louis to an international star. The musical portrait, directed by Ian Streicher, begins at the end –– at Baker’s 1975 comeback performance in Paris just months before her death. Beckett Theatre, 410 W. 42nd St., Aug. 30-31, Sep. 1, 4, 6-8 at 7 p.m., Sep. 1, 5, 8 at 2 p.m.; Sep. 2 at 3 p.m. Tickets are $68.25 at telecharge.com.

“In-Between & Outside” is a series of portraits by Sara Swaty exploring gender identity and the human form across a broad spectrum of individuals. The works, curated by Cora Lambert, were created with an interest in how cultural preconceptions about gender have created unattainable ideals about masculinity and femininity. The Leslie-Lohman Museum Window Gallery, 26 Wooster St., btwn. Grand & Canal Sts. The exhibition is visible from the street and on view 24 hours a day. Through Oct. 8. Closing reception is Oct. 5, 6-8 p.m.

COMEDY Ragu, Just for the Laughs

Tom Ragu hosts an every other Wednesday comedy show, this week featuring Ellen Karis, Lori Sommer, Mick Diflo, Vicky Kuperman, and Helene Angley. Greenwich Village Comedy Club, 99 MacDougal St., btwn. Bleecker & W. Third Sts. Sep. 5, 6 p.m. Admission is $5, with a one-drink minimum.

LOLGBT Lea DeLaria headlines a “Homo Comicus” lineup that also includes Jim David, Chicago's Sapna Kumar, and the singing duo Mel & El. Bob Montgomery hosts. Gotham Comedy Club, 208 W. 23rd St. Sep. 5, 8:30 p.m. Cover charge is $20, with a two-drink minimum. Reservations at 212-367-9000.

THU.SEP.6 NIGHTLIFE Xs, Os, and Spokes Will Clark welcomes Rock N Rawhide singer Kylie Edmond and porn star Stephen Forest for an evening of “P*rno Bingo” benefiting Braking the Cycle, a late September, Boston-to-New York fundraiser for the AIDS services group Housing Works. The evening includes erotic prizes, cheap booze, and even cheaper men. The Ritz, 369 W. 46th St. Sep. 6, 7-9 p.m. Clark’s weekly party has raised nearly $190,000 for LGBT community organizations over the past eight years.

SAT.SEP.8

COMMUNITY Celebrating Herstory’s Inventory

Park Slope’s Lesbian Herstory Archives toasts the closing day of the Brooklyn Museum’s exhibition “Herstory Inventory: 100 Feminist Drawings by 100 Artists,” the idea for which first took shape at the archives. 484 14th St., btwn. Eighth Ave. & Prospect Pk. W. Sep. 8, 6-8 p.m. Admission is free, and light refreshments will be served. More information

at lesbianherstoryarchives.org or 718-768-3953. To catch the exhibition before it closes up, the museum is located a ten-minute walk away at 200 Eastern Pkwy., between Grand Army Plaza & Washington Ave. Sat. hours, 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Admission is $20; $11 for students & seniors.

AT THE BEACH Gladiator A-Go-Go Daniel Nardicio takes over the clothing-optional Cherry Grove Belvedere Hotel for the evening to host a Spartacus-themed event, replete with gladiator go-go, open Stoli, Bulldog Gin, and a Perrier bar. At 11 p.m., contestants vie for a $300 prize in the first ever Mr. Nude Belvedere Contest. DJ Johnny Dynell spins. Mainwalk, Cherry Grove. Sep. 8, 7-11 p.m. Admission is $35 at dworld.us or $50 at the door. A portion of proceeds benefit the rebuilding of the Cherry Grove Community House.

MON.SEP.10

COMMUNITY Honoring Gay City News Co-Founder John Sutter

The Independence Plaza North Tenants Association honors John Sutter, the publisher emeritus of NYC Community Media (parent company of Gay City News) and former Community Board 1 chair Julie Menin with 2012 Tribeca Citizen of the Year Awards. Gaetana’s Restaurant, 143 Christopher St. at Greenwich St. Sep. 10, 6-9 p.m. Admission, which includes dinner and two drinks, is $80 at jscott2709@aol.com; $100 at the door. The evening benefits the IPNTA Legal Defense Fund.

TUE.SEP.11

CABARET Both Sides Now

Believe it or not, Judy Collins' career has now spanned more than 50 years. In a three-week engagement, she features songs from her recent album “Bohemian,” including “Pure Imagination,” from “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,” Woody Guthrie’s “Pastures of Plenty,” Jimmy Webb’s “Campo De Encino,” and her own song written in tribute to her mother, “In The Twilight.” Café Carlyle, 35 E. 76th St. at the Carlyle Hotel. Sep. 11-29, Tue.-Sat., 8:45 p.m. Cover charge is $75$110; $85-$135 on Fri. & Sat. For information, visit thecarlysle.com.

FRI.SEP.14

NIGHTLIFE Jersey Fabulous at Six Flags

Fairgrounds VIIII, better known as Gay and Lesbian Day at Six Flags, promises to be the largest private LGBT event in the nation. This year’s theme celebrates the fabulousness of fist pumping Jersey, with appearances by Melissa Gorga, Joe Gorga, and Greg Bennett from Bravo’s “The Real Housewives of New Jersey.” Gorga performs her dance hits “On Display” and “Rockstar.” Reichen Lehmkuhl, of “The Amazing Race” fame, and recording artist Dina Delicious also appear, and DJs Steve Sidewalk, Seth Gold, and DJ Barney of Philly spin. Six Flags, Jackson, New Jersey, ten miles east of NJ Turnpike exit 7A on I-195. Sep. 14, from 6 p.m. Tickets begin at $48 at gaysixflags.com. A portion of proceeds benefit the LGBT Community Center, the Imperial Court, and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.

August 29, 2012 | www.gaycitynews.com