Gay City News - July 5, 2018

A Look Back at a Month of Pride: The Color, The Dazzling Diversity, The Controversies

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SERVING

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LESBIAN,

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AND

TRANSGENDER

NEW

YORK

AFTER JUSTICE KENNEDY:

LGBTQ RIGHTS ON HOSTILE TURF Page 04 MARCOS RAMOS

© GAY CITY NEWS 2018 | NYC COMMUNITY MEDIA, LLC, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

FREE | VOLUME SEVENTEEN, ISSUE FOURTEEN | JULY 5 – JULY 18, 2018

In This Issue COVER STORY After Justice Kennedy: LGBTQ rights on hostile turf 04

REMEMBRANCE Dick Leitsch, gay pioneer, correspondent from the front 24

Defying gravity in “Skintight” 34

MUSIC PRIDE Routes, wristbands Uneasy listening & beauty from Lotic & size limits 36 05-07, 12-13 For dykes, resistance is not enough 14 Dazzling diversity in full color 16-19

Years & Years sanctify gay sex 36 THEATER Jewelle Gomez on James Baldwin 44

MAKE THE CITY YOUR CL ASSRO OM

(212) 220-1265 www.bmcc.cuny.edu/cng 2

July 5 – July 18, 2018 | GayCityNews.nyc

O C C A B TO XIC IS TO

S I H T S I E LIF N O N C I X TO

GayCityNews.nyc | July 5 – July 18, 2018

3

COVER STORY

Anthony Kennedy: LGBTQ Community’s Accidental Gift Obergefell’s scope, nondiscrimination, religious opt-outs, abortion rights key issues in new court

BY PAUL SCHINDLER

J

ustice Anthony M. Kennedy, who has served on the Supreme Court longer than any of his colleagues and authored the majority opinion in all four major gay rights victories there, was a thirdchoice pick by President Ronald Reagan in late 1987. In that sense, he was something of an accidental gift to the LGBTQ community.

Reagan’s first choice, Robert Bork — a judge on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals and a leading intellectual architect of the originalist legal doctrine holding that the US Constitution should be interpreted according to the understanding of its framers in the 1780s — was rejected by the Senate in large part due to Massachusetts Democrat Ted Kennedy’s success in mobilizing pro-choice groups to the threat he posed to abortion rights.

Second-choice Douglas Ginsburg, who now has senior judge status on the DC Circuit, bailed on his nomination over controversy about marijuana use when he was a younger man.

By comparison to Bork, who was a darling among conservative judicial activists, Kennedy was harder to read, but his nomination did not immediately seem promising for LGBTQ rights advocates. In a speech he had made the year before, which was read into the record during his confirmation hearings, he had championed judicial restraint — a favorite theme on the right — in arguing that whether Georgia’s sodomy law criminalizing gay sex, which the high court upheld in 1986, was right or wrong, it was a matter to be resolved through the political process. He lumped private sexual activity in with “matters not specifically controlled by the Constitution.”

On the other hand, in response to a question from Senator Joe Biden, Kennedy seemed to embrace a “spacious” notion of individual liberty that could include a “right to privacy” — a notion inimical to conservatives — in saying, “There is a zone of liberty, a zone of protection, a line that’s drawn where the individual can tell the government, ‘Beyond this line you may not go.’”

Throughout his 30 years on the court, Kennedy — on most issues — proved himself the sort of reliable conservative Reagan would have appreciated. In December 2000, he joined the 5-4 majority in Bush v. Gore, which halted the Florida election recount and handed the presidency to George W. Bush, a decision derided by its critics as the most partisan decision in US history. In 2008, he was again part of a 5-4 majority in DC v. Heller, where the court made clear for the first time that the Second Amendment protects the individual’s right to bear

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US SUPREME COURT

Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement on June 27.

DONNA ACETO

The ACLU’s James Esseks.

arms. Two years later, he joined the 5-4 majority in McDonald v. City of Chicago, strengthening the Heller ruling.

In 2009, Kennedy wrote for the 5-4 majority in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the opinion for which he was probably most pilloried by progressives. There, the court held that the First Amendment prohibits caps on campaign spending by for-profit and nonprofit entities that are independent of candidate campaigns and political parties — a ruling that has flooded elections with special-interest spending in the years since.

In a 2013 ruling in Shelby County v. Holder, again in a 5-4 vote, Kennedy sided with the majority in gutting key provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that required state and local governments with histories of discriminatory voting practices from receiving pre-clearance in changing their voting guidelines.

And, in 2014, in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, Kennedy was part of the 5-4 majority that recognized at least a limited right for closely-held for-

profit companies to claim a religious exemption from laws and regulations at odds with their owners’ faith. The case involved the contraception coverage requirement put on employers by President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, but it raised broader concerns about religious opt-outs from discrimination protections for the LGBTQ community.

That record would seem sufficient to please judicial conservatives, but in fact Kennedy was a lightning rod — and, among his more conservative colleagues, at times an object of ridicule — for his gay rights decisions.

In 1996, the court took up Colorado’s Amendment 2, a voter initiative that forbade the state or its local governments from enacting gay rights protections. In his majority opinion in Romer v. Evans, decided on a 6-3 basis, in writing that “the amendment seems inexplicable by anything but animus toward the class that it affects; it lacks a rational relationship to legitimate state interests,” Kennedy articulated a critical principle: that moral disapproval of homosexuality cannot be the basis of laws and regulations disadvantaging gays and lesbians.

“One century ago, the first Justice Harlan admonished this court that the Constitution ‘neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens,’” he wrote. “Unheeded then, those words now are understood to state a commitment to the law’s neutrality where the rights of persons are at stake.”

Kennedy, concluding that Colorado’s voters had essentially disenfranchised their gay and lesbian neighbors from exercising their political rights, wrote, “We must conclude that Amendment 2 classifies homosexuals not to further a proper legislative end but to make them unequal to everyone else. This Colorado cannot do. A state cannot so deem a class of persons a stranger to its laws.”

Kennedy’s conclusions here would prove critical to the sodomy and marriage rulings that followed.

In the 2003 sodomy ruling in Lawrence v.

Texas, Kennedy wrote for five members of the court, with Justice Sandra Day O’Connor concurring using a different rationale. Kennedy did not refer to any right to privacy per se, but wrote, “Liberty protects the person from unwarranted government intrusions into a dwelling or other private places,” and then, in striking language, added, “Liberty presumes an autonomy of self that includes freedom of thought, belief, expression, and certain intimate contact. The instant case involves liberty of the person both in its spatial and more transcendent dimensions.”

Finding, as in the Colorado case, that Texas

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ANTHONY KENNEDY, continued on p.48

July 5 – July 18, 2018 | GayCityNews.nyc

PRIDE

Despite New Route, Parade Topped Nine Hours Again Critics say change was a fail, but Pride exhibited its customary exuberance

DONNA ACETO DONNA ACETO

This year, the Resistance contingent stepped off at roughly 5 p.m. in a parade that began at noon.

Gays Against Guns, formed in the wake of the 2016 deadly shootings at Orlando’s Pulse nightclub, marched as part of the Resistance.

DUNCAN OSBORNE

DONNA ACETO

The GAG contingent staged a die-in on Christopher Street near the Stonewall Inn.

BY DUNCAN OSBORNE

A

controversial Pride Parade route that was intended to reduce the time the annual event takes to complete shaved just 24 minutes off the march compared to last year’s march and it was still longer than the 2016 and 2015 parades.

“I have to say that the rationale for the route was an insidious collusion between the organizers of the Pride Parade and the NYPD,” said Natalie James, who led the organizing for a Resistance contingent in this year’s parade. “I think it’s very much an idea of crowd control from the NYPD.” This year’s route was staged in Chelsea then headed south on Seventh Avenue then east on Christopher and Eighth Streets then north GayCityNews.nyc | July 5 – July 18, 2018

David Steeil and Anthony Ginexi, who have watched the parade in the West Village for the past five years, said the contingents had more vigor this year from their vantage point because they had only recently started their trek.

The No Wristband contingent threw barricades onto the sidewalk at 17th Street and Eighth Avenue in order to access the parade without the required wristbands.

on Fifth Avenue to end at 29th Street.

Heritage of Pride (HOP), the group that organizes the annual parade and related events, offered various explanations for the new route, which was roundly opposed

by LGBTQ activists. Among those reasons was the need to reduce the parade’s duration. The parade steps off at noon.

This year, Gay City News first briefly followed some of the early groups on Seventh Avenue, then the Resistance contingent for the entire length of the route, and then returned to follow the final group in the parade. That last group, YAI, which works with people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, arrived at the parade’s end at 29th Street at 9:14 p.m.

The 2017 parade, which went from Midtown to the West Village,

ended at 9:38 p.m. The 2016 and 2015 parades took eight hours to complete.

HOP has said that this year’s route was a test in anticipation of the expected larger crowds for the 2019 march, which will mark the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots that mark the start of the modern LGBTQ rights movement.

New York will also play host at the same time next year to World Pride.

Since the first march in 1970, the parade routes have traveled from the West Village to Central Park for a rally or from Midtown to the West Village. The sole exception was the 1994 march, which marked the 25th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, that traveled on First Avenue past the United Nations building. Because it ended at a location with no particular sig-

DUNCAN OSBORNE DUNCAN OSBORNE

A man who appeared to be an undercover police officer followed the No Wristband group from where they gathered to the staging area.

nificance in queer community history, the 2018 route was derided as a march to nowhere.

“For all the bad blood and tension and unnecessary time waiting that Heritage of Pride caused each of our community groups with wristbands and fretting about a march route that went nowhere, the fact that we saved 24 minutes is shocking,” said Ken Kidd, who led the organizing for a Resistance contingent in 2017.

As always, the June 24 parade was an exuberant and colorful event that showcased the LGBTQ community’s diversity and its political views and successes. Gay City News interviewed an entirely unscientific sample of viewers. They mostly approved of the new route though they consistently reported

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NINE HOURS AGAIN, continued on p.6

5

PRIDE

Corporations, Sponsors Allowed Larger Pride Contingents Heritage of Pride offered 13 exceptions to its size limitations on groups marching June 24

MICHAEL LUONGO

Kiehl’s Since 1851 and its parent company, L’Oreal USA, were among the 13 groups, most of them forprofit organizations, allowed to exceed the 200-member limit on the size of Pride Parade contingents.

BY DUNCAN OSBORNE

A 䉴

fter saying repeatedly in public meetings that all contingents in New York City’s LGBTQ Pride Pa-

NINE HOURS AGAIN, from p.5

learning about it only recently, with some saying that they found a place to view on Seventh Avenue by following the crowd.

“The problem was even the cops couldn’t tell us where to stand,” said Shirley McKinley as she watched with friends.

Judging by the crowd size on Seventh Avenue, it appears that the late notification to the LGBTQ community about the change did not affect turnout. It certainly did not affect the cheering by the crowd.

David Steeil and Anthony Ginexi, who were recently married, have watched the parade together in the West Village for five years.

Typically, the contingents were less spirited by the time they arrived, they said.

“We always stand around this area so we always see it last,” said Steeil as they watched the first groups go by on Seventh Avenue.

“I like it,” said Ashley Marchlinski as she stood on Fifth Avenue.

“It makes no difference at all. I’m just happy to be here.”

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MICHAEL LUONGO

A sign held aloft in the June 24 LGBTQ Pride Parade.

rade would be limited to no more than 200 marchers, the group that produces the annual march and related events allowed 13 organizations, including 11 of its sponsors, to field contingents that had more

than 200 marchers.

“We were told that the necessity of having wristbands was to limit the numbers in corporate contingents,” said Ken Kidd, who led the organizing for a Resistance contin-

gent in the 2017 Pride Parade. “To hear that, in fact, corporations were the only contingents that were allowed to have significantly more

A few said they were reserving judgment on the route. Some opposed it.

“I don’t like it,” said Steve Henaghan, who has attended the Pride Parade since 1976. “It’s too short and it doesn’t end in the West Village or Central Park… It has no reason to end [at 29th Street].”

HOP first began discussing the new route in December 2016. It engaged with further discussion with city agencies, including the NYPD, starting in August 2017 with the NYPD, which issues the permits for marches. Choosing from among six choices offered by HOP, the NYPD selected the route on January 22, 2018. The LGBTQ community was informed much later, with many attendees saying they learned about the route the day of the parade.

In 2010, the NYPD sought to reduce the cost of policing parades and required all parades to last five hours or less. While the Pride Parade may have lasted that long in its early years, it has not been close to five hours long in years.

The Pride Parade is among the four largest events that the NYPD polices and it is the only one of

the four that is organized by a non-profit. The other three — New Year’s Eve, the 4th of July, and the Thanksgiving Day Parade — are commercial ventures. It is not clear that the NYPD actually cares about the Pride Parade’s time.

“This is one of the largest parades in New York City,” said James Kehoe, the executive officer in the Patrol Borough Manhattan South, during a June 22 press event at NYPD headquarters. “It is one of the largest street events that we do… If it goes long, it goes long.”

Asked if the NYPD’s position was that the Pride Parade was not required to last five hours, Kehoe said, “I would say that is not the position. We want to make sure that it is a successful event. We would like the parade to mirror those of the other parades, but we understand it is a large event.”

Activists, who were organized as the Reclaim Pride Coalition, also demanded that HOP rescind its requirement that all parade contingents have 200 members or fewer and that all marchers wear HOPissued wristbands. The Coalition also wanted the policing to be re-

strained and that the use of police barricades be reduced.

A faction in the Resistance contingent, which formed last year as a response to Donald Trump winning the White House, protested the wristbands policy by showing up at 17th Street and Eighth Avenue, where the Resistance was staged, without wristbands and demanding to be allowed on the block. The group was followed by a man who appeared to be an undercover police officer from where protesters first gathered to the staging block. After a physical struggle over the barricades on the block between HOP volunteers and the protestors, that faction removed them and tossed them aside. Later, at Fifth Avenue and Eighth Street that group tore up a large mock-up of an HOP wristband and chains made of wristbands and threw them at the judges on the reviewing stand there.

Conflicts over the march and rally have been a common feature of the annual events since the earliest days of the movement.

HOP did not respond to a request for comment.

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LARGER CONTINGENTS, continued on p.7

July 5 – July 18, 2018 | GayCityNews.nyc

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LARGER CONTINGENTS, from p.6

than the 200 limit is exasperating and infuriating. It would be surprising if we were talking about any organization other than Heritage of Pride. They play fast and loose with the truth and the rules that they themselves set and the messaging and communication they have with the community.”

PVH, the apparel company, had 800 marchers, according to the line of march published by Heritage of Pride (HOP). L’Oreal USA and Kiehl’s Since 1851, a L’Oreal brand, were listed as having 400 marchers each, though it is possible those contingents, which shared one float, shared 400 marchers. Chris Salgardo, previously the Kiehl’s chief executive, was known for his prolific fundraising for LGBTQ causes.

Citibank had 400 marchers as did cable giant Comcast-NBCUniversal. WNBC, an NBCUniversal local TV station, was a sponsor. Delta, the airline, had 300. Deutsche Bank and HSBC, a bank, each had 250 marchers. The NBA had 220 marchers. T-Mobile had 300

marchers.

Four non-profits were also allowed to exceed the 200-marcher limit. Only two of the four were sponsors.

NYU Langone Health, a medical center and school, was permitted 400 marchers as was the State University of New York (SUNY).

Both were sponsors.

God’s Love We Deliver, which delivers meals to home-bound people, was allowed 250 marchers. God’s Love was not a HOP sponsor, but it did hold a joint fundraiser with HOP on June 21. The God’s Love contingent was co-branded with Whole Foods, which was a sponsor, and Dr. Praeger’s, also a food company.

The Gender and Family Project of the Ackerman Institute for the Family was co-branded with the Bank of America. They were allowed 250 marchers. Neither the Project nor the bank was a sponsor.

HOP, which has produced the city’s annual Pride events since 1984, told activists and the broader community in public meetings this spring that parade contingents would be limited to 200 marchers.

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To enforce that limit, HOP distributed wristbands, which were controversial, to all contingents and required marchers to wear them.

The number of wristbands given to a contingent was based on the attendance predicted by contingent organizers.

The limitation on marchers was part of an effort this year to shorten the time the march takes to finish.

HOP had fewer floats and vehicles in the 2018 parade compared to last year. It reversed the route so that it began in Chelsea, headed south on Seventh Avenue, east on Christopher and Eighth Streets, then north on Fifth Avenue to end at 29th Street. Ultimately, the parade ended at 9:14 p.m., which was 24 minutes shorter than the 2017 parade. The 2016 and 2015 parades were each roughly eight hours long.

The annual events commemorate the 1969 Stonewall riots, which mark the start of the modern LGBTQ rights movement. HOP is expecting a far larger crowd in 2019, the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, and the changes this year were a test to see if they might reduce the impact of next

500

year’s events.

A group of activists organized as the Reclaim Pride Coalition made a number of demands on HOP this year, including eliminating the use of wristbands and reducing the size of corporate contingents in the parade. One explanation offered by HOP in defense of the 200-marcher limit was that it would reduce the footprint of corporate contingents.

Activists could not recall HOP ever saying that there would be exceptions to that rule.

“I never received any formal communications in regard to that,” said Natalie James, who did much of the organizing of the Coalition and this year’s resistance contingent. “This just goes to their unrelenting lack of communication with the community. I’m not surprised that HOP has completely gone back on its stated rules for the march.”

Activists “demanded no limits on community and activist groups,” James said. That corporate groups were favored “goes against the very nature of what we believe the day should be about,” she added.

HOP did not respond to a request for comment.

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GayCityNews.nyc | July 5 – July 18, 2018

7

CIVIL RIGHTS

SCOTUS Sends Florist Case Back to Washington State Court Citing recent Masterpiece Cakeshop decision, Supremes order “further consideration”

BY ARTHUR S. LEONARD

O

n June 25, the Supreme Court finally acted on a petition by an anti-gay litigation group that sought review of a unanimous Washington State Supreme Court decision affirming a lower court ruling that found a florist had unlawfully discriminated in refusing to sell wedding flowers to a same-sex couple.

The high court granted the petition and vacated the State Supreme Court ruling, sending the case back there for “further consideration” in light of the June 4 decision in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. State of Colorado.

The Washington Supreme Court’s ruling had unanimously affirmed the Benton County Superior Court’s decision that Arlene’s Flowers and its proprietor, Barronelle Stutzman, had violated the state’s Law Against Discrimination and its Consumer Protection Act. Representing the business and its owner, Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) petitioned the US Supreme Court last July.

Because the high court had granted review in Masterpiece Cakeshop shortly before that, it did not put the Arlene’s Flowers case on the agenda in any of its conferences before issuing its Masterpiece ruling.

Shortly after Washington State began issuing same-sex marriage licenses, Robert Ingersoll and Curt Freed went to Arlene’s Flowers to order floral decorations for what they expected to be a big wedding. Ingersoll had been a frequent customer of Arlene’s and gotten to know Stutzman. When he asked her to provide flowers for his wedding, however, she told him that she could not design flowers for his wedding because of her relationship with Jesus Christ.

She gave him the names of three other florists and claims he said he understood her decision and “they hugged before he left.” But Ingersoll and Freed talked about their experience at Arlene’s with others, generating news reports that spurred the state’s attorney general to take action.

Around the same time that the state’s lawsuit was filed, Ingersoll and Freed, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, filed their own suit, and the two cases were consolidated for trial. The Washington courts found the defendant had violated the statutes and was not entitled to any First Amendment defense.

Several days after the Masterpiece ruling, ADF filed a supplementary brief in the Supreme Court on behalf of Arlene’s Flowers and Stutzman urging the court to grant review, vacate the state court ruling, and send it back there for consideration in light of Masterpiece.

The State of Washington and Ingersoll and

GayCityNews.nyc | July 5 – July 18, 2018

ACLU OF WASHINGTON

The US Supreme Court sent the victory by Robert Ingersoll and Curt Freed in their discrimination suit against Arlene’s Flowers and its owner, Barronelle Stutzman, back to the Washington State Supreme Court for “further consideration.”

Freed quickly filed responding briefs, arguing that ADF’s petition should be denied because there was nothing in this case’s history suggesting anything like the grounds on which Masterpiece had been decided.

In its supplementary brief, however, ADF mounted several arguments contending that Masterpiece could require a reversal in this case because of “hostility” to religion by the State of Washington.

First, ADF argued, the attorney general’s action in filing suit against Stutzman in both her professional and personal capacities, reacting to news reports and without the same-sex couple having filed their own discrimination claim, demonstrated hostility to religion.

Second, ADF argued, the trial court’s reliance on and quotation from a case the attorney general cited involving a retail store that refused on religious grounds to serve African Americans amounted to comparing Stutzman to the “racist” owner of the store, further evincing “hostility” to her religion.

“The State, in short, has treated Barronelle with neither tolerance nor respect,” ADF argued, quoting Justice Anthony Kennedy’s phrase from Masterpiece.

ADF also pointed to the state’s failure to initiate litigation against a Seattle coffee shop owner who, according to a radio talk show, had “profanely berated and discriminated against Christian customers,” apparently aiming to draw an analogy to a situation described by Kennedy in Masterpiece where the Colorado Civil Rights Commission dismissed charges against three bakers who had refused to bake anti-gay cakes in the wake of the Commission’s ruling against

Masterpiece Cakeshop.

The State of Washington and the ACLU quickly filed responsive briefs, disputing the accuracy and relevance of ADF’s brief.

For one thing, unlike Masterpiece Cakeshop, Arlene’s Flowers did not raise any issue in its original petition to the US Supreme Court about the state’s “hostility to religion” and so could not now introduce that issue into the case.

They also pointed out that a party to litigation citing a case that supports its legal position cannot be considered “hostility to religion.” After all, Justice Kennedy cited a similar federal case involving a restaurant that refused to serve African Americans in his opinion in Masterpiece to support the point that it is well established that there is no general free exercise exemption from complying with public accommodations laws. This doesn’t show hostility to religion by the court.

And, the attorney general argued, his filing a discrimination complaint, in itself, is no evidence of animus or hostility, but rather merely an indication he is doing his job. He “played no adjudicatory role in the process of deciding this case,” his brief noted.

What Masterpiece required was that the forum not be hostile to religion. Here, the forum is the state court, not the parties to the case, including Washington’s attorney general.

The brief from the AG pointed out that there was doubt about the accuracy of the talk radio report of anti-religious bias cited by ADF, but even though nobody filed a discrimination claim against the coffee shop owner in question, the chair of the Washington Human Rights Commission “publicly announced that she would send a letter to the business owner explaining Washington law,” and the owner subsequently announced, unlike Barronelle Stutzman, that “he will no longer refuse service to the customers he initially turned away.”

In contrast, in Masterpiece, Justice Kennedy counted as evidence of hostility that the Colorado Commission had rejected discrimination claims against three bakers who declined to make anti-gay cakes while ruling against Jack Phillips for refusing to make a same-sex wedding cake. (To be clear, Justice Stephen Breyer, in his concurring opinion joined by Justice Elena Kagan, challenged Kennedy for ascribing hostility to the different ways the Commission handled the two situations, finding them clearly distinguishable.)

A strong argument can be made that there is no basis for ordering “further consideration” of Arlene’s Flowers in light of Masterpiece. The Supreme Court will often follow up on a deci-

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ARLENE’S FLOWERS, continued on p.13

11

PRIDE

No-Wristbanders Resist Pride Regimentation Hundreds entered parade in defiance of Heritage of Pride’s registration requirement

ANDY HUMM DONNA ACETO

The Wristband Resisters in the parade.

Staci Smith, Emmaia Gelman, and their kids (foreground).

ANDY HUMM

Jeremiah Johnson (second from left) with Jim Stewart, Jay W. Walker, and Philip Shubin.

BY ANDY HUMM

T

he theme of this year’s LGBTQ Pride Parade was “Defiantly Different,” but when activists from Reclaim Pride, a group I’ve participated in, organized Wristband Resisters to challenge the requirement from the parade organizers, Heritage of Pride (HOP), that all marchers register and obtain wristbands from them, the organizers pushed back, sought the aid of the NYPD in keeping bandless people out, and ultimately surrendered to hundreds of bandless people who wanted to march in the Resistance contingents to commemorate the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion.

About 50 rebels gathered on West 23rd Street and marched to the entry for the Resistance contingents on Eighth Avenue and 17th Street.

Mark Milano, the lead organizer, said, “Almost 40 years ago, the first act I took as a then-closeted gay man was to spontaneously join the Gay Pride Parade. That same thing has been done by thousands of others and now it can no longer happen because we are required to wear wristbands and stay behind barricades. Pride is supposed to be all about inclusion, not exclusion.”

Emmaia Gelman of Irish Queers, there with her wife, activist Staci Smith, and their kids, expressed frustration at the refusal of parade organizers to “respond to queers that are made to feel unsafe” by the presence of uniformed police in the parade. She said organiz-

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ANDY HUMM

Hawk Newsome (right) with Carl Stubbs.

DUNCAN OSBORNE

The contingent ripped up a giant ring of connected wristbands in front of the judges’ reviewing stand at Fifth Avenue and Eighth Street.

ers “are supposed to hold this [the honoring of the Rebellion] in stewardship and they fuck it up.” She called for boycotting HOP’s event next year and leaving it to the corporations that overwhelmed this year’s event, joining many others in calling for an LGBTQ civil rights march next year with no floats or corporations.

When the Wristband Resisters arrived at the checkpoint, Heritage of Pride was prepared to let the 50 in, but the Resisters launched a successful effort to remove the barricades altogether from the entrance to the street, allowing hundreds of others who didn’t have wristbands to enter 17th Street and join the parade. Heritage of Pride representatives on hand called upon the NYPD to assist them in keeping people out, but the police

relented as well.

Jeremiah Johnson of Reclaim Pride voiced concern about the collusion between NYC Pride and the NYPD, “but there were no arrests and that’s positive,” he said. “Having to fight to get people inside is ridiculous and demoralizing.”

Randi Weingarten, the out lesbian president of the American Federation of Teachers, was at the head of 17th Street welcoming the new marchers.

“This is a pride parade and a civil rights march, and they need to make sure that groups engaged in civil rights issues” are given more prominence, she said.

Waiting to step out with the Resistance was Hawk Newsome, president of Black Lives Matter of Greater New York who called the police presence “oppressive.”

“The fact that they are enforcing the wristband thing is indicative of the way they treat marginalized groups,” Newsome said.

“White groups and mainstream groups are given unlimited freedom,” he said, citing parades such as St. Patrick’s, “but at the Puerto Rican Day Parade the police presence is intrusive.”

Some marchers reported that HOP enforcers tried to remove some participants who did not have wristbands on.

The parade kicked off at noon, led by the Sirens on motorcycles and followed by the grand marshals, but Heritage of Pride lets elected officials step out right behind them, hogging prime slots.

In the early post-Stonewall Pride Marches that culminated in rallies, elected officials were forbidden

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NO-WRISTBANDERS, continued on p.13

July 5 – July 18, 2018 | GayCityNews.nyc

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NO-WRISTBANDERS, from p.12

to speak.

As in past years, HOP failed to efficiently run the parade on anything remotely like an on-time schedule. While Resistance contingents were positioned near the front last year in the wake of the Donald Trump’s election, they were shoved toward the back this year — told to assemble at 3 p.m. for a 3:30 step-off. These contingents did not get out onto Seventh Avenue until past 5 p.m. and did not finish the short march, now restricted to Chelsea and the Village and trailing off in the Flatiron District, until well after 7 p.m.

Waiting to step off, Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum from Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, who is married to the AFT’s Weingarten, said her synagogue was founded in 1973, “one of the oldest LGBT groups in the city. And it’s 4:15 and we’re still waiting to march.�

When the Wristband Resisters arrived at the HOP reviewing stand on Fifth Avenue at Eighth Street, they threw chains of plastic wristbands at the feet of the organizers

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ARLENE’S FLOWERS, from p.11

sion by mopping up similar cases that had been on hold and sending them to the lower courts to determine whether its recent decision would require a different result.

However, if the lower court ruling is clearly consistent with the new decision, it is not uncommon for the high court to simply deny the petition for review.

Here, the court’s action may be a reaction to ADF’s assertion there is evidence of hostility to religion in the Washington court proceedings. And, it is a common practice on the court to send cases back for reconsideration even if only a single member is troubled about possible inconsistency.

On the other hand, the court’s action on Arlene’s Flowers may signal some ambiguity about exactly what it was holding in Masterpiece. The Supreme Court’s decision to vacate the Washington Supreme Court’s ruling is certainly cause for concern, since the Arlene’s Flowers ruling is totally consistent with what Kennedy said about the free exercise and free GayCityNews.nyc | July 5 – July 18, 2018

to protest the new restrictions. “I’m angry at being barricaded in and over-policed,� Milano said. “It’s dissipating my real message today, which is against the horrible Trump administration.�

Allen Roskoff, who — with the Gay Activists Alliance that included the late Jim Owles — participated in organizing the first Christopher Street Liberation Day March in 1970, kept his Jim Owles Liberal Democratic Club out of the event this year and did not march himself. “With Donald Trump in the White House, having a parade is uncalled for,� he said. “It needed to be a march. There’s really nothing to celebrate or dance about.�

Reclaim Pride is determined that Stonewall 50 will not be a repeat of this year’s parade. Open community meetings will hash out a strategy. “Let’s ensure that World Pride in NYC next June shows the world that we are still fighting for our rights and those of all oppressed people, not simply offering corporate America a marketing platform,� a flyer from the group read.

speech arguments ADF advanced in Masterpiece. A careful reading of Kennedy’s opinion there shows that the court did not back away, at least overtly, from its prior precedents holding that there is no free exercise exemption from complying with laws banning discrimination in public accommodations.

Time will tell whether a firm majority of the Court is actually ready to reassert that position on the merits in an appropriate case — especially given Kennedy’s departure from the court days after this ruling. It could be that the court wants to consider the underlying legal questions on the merits only in a case without any complications involving the nature of the lower court proceedings.

Meanwhile, opponents of religious exemptions can take some comfort from the actions by the Arizona Court of Appeals and the Oregon Supreme Court — the latter of which refused to review a court of appeals ruling that found impermissible anti-gay discrimination in another wedding cake case — in the weeks following the Masterpiece ruling.

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DYKES SAY RESISTANCE NOT ENOUGH

The Dyke March heading down Fifth Avenue on June 23, with marshals Jackie Rudin and Yetta Kurland out front.

PHOTO ESSAY BY DONNA ACETO

A

s thousands of lesbians and allied women gathered on Saturday afternoon, June 23, there message was clear: resistance is not sufficient to meet the demands of the perilous political climate. According to many of the participants at the 26th annual Dyke March, people should be revolting.

That word has gained particular resonance in recent months as Revolting Lesbians have staged a number of high profile actions aimed at Rebekah Mercer, a mem-

Anne Maguire and Jo Macellaro of Revolting Lesbians.

ber of the rich, high profile rightwing family that funds Breitbart News and a host of other alt-right usual suspects to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. Revolting Lesbians have put a particular focus on Mercer’s role as a board member at the American Museum of Natural History, despite her deep-pocket support for notorious climate change deniers.

The Dyke March, which traveled from Bryant Park down Fifth Avenue to Washington Square, also pushed back against President Donald Trump’s recent harsh, “zero tolerance” crackdown on immigrant families entering the US.

The Lesbian and Gay Big Apple Corps Band lent its voice to the afternoon.

14

July 5 – July 18, 2018 | GayCityNews.nyc

ON PRIDE’S EVE, DEFIANCE AND PAGEANTRY Trans Day of Action for Social and Economic Justice PHOTO ESSAY BY DONNA ACETO

F

riday, June 22 saw three major events on the eve of Pride Weekend in Manhattan. In the afternoon, transgender and gender non-conforming New Yorkers and their allies

gathered at the Hudson River piers for Trans Day of Action for Social and Economic Justice. Later, the annual Pride Rally took place at Christopher Park, site of the Stonewall National Monument, and as dusk appeared the Drag March reached Sheridan Square from the East Village.

The Pride Ralley

Intersex Flemington, New Jersey, Borough Councilmember Betsy Driver.

Kenita Placide, the Caribbean advisor for OutRight Action International, director of the Eastern Caribbean Alliance for Diversity and Equality, and one of the grand marshals of the LGBTQ Pride Parade.

The Resistance Revival Chorus.

The crowd at the rally near Christopher Park.

16

Former State Senator Tom Duane.

July 5 – July 18, 2018 | GayCityNews.nyc

The Drag March

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17

DAZZLING COLORS, DIVERSITY

DONNA ACETO

DONNA ACETO

DONNA ACETO

DONNA ACETO

MICHASEL LUONGO

PHOTO ESSAY BY DONNA ACETO & MICHAEL LUONGO

O

DONNA ACETO

n a brilliant early summer Sunday, tens of thousands of New Yorkers turned out to march in the annual LGBTQ Pride Parade — controversy over the new route, contingent size limitations, wristband requirements, and all — with untold numbers watching from the sidewalks. Governor Andrew Cuomo was on hand, as were his rival Cynthia Nixon (marching with Lea

MICHASEL LUONGO

18

DeLaria), Mayor Bill de Blasio and his wife Chirlane McCray, State Senator Brad Hoylman spied kissing husband David Sigal, with their young daughter in tow, and a contingent of city councilmembers led by a dancing Speaker Corey Johnson. Grand marshal Billie Jean King had a brilliant rainbow umbrella, the Front Runners jogged the route, a large contingent from NYU marched as did the Gay Officers Action League, and EMT professonals Tayreen Bonilla and Trudy Bermudez also shared a smooch.

MICHASEL LUONGO

MICHASEL LUONGO

July 5 – July 18, 2018 | GayCityNews.nyc

ON DISPLAY ON PRIDE SUNDAY

MICHASEL LUONGO

MICHAEL LUONGO

MICHAEL LUONGO

MICHASEL LUONGO

GayCityNews.nyc | July 5 – July 18, 2018

DONNA ACETO

DONNA ACETO

DONNA ACETO

DONNA ACETO

DONNA ACETO

DONNA ACETO

DONNA ACETO

19

PRIDE

Cuomo Unveils Monument, Trans Protections Hours before marching in parade, governor responds to Trump health care rollbacks

DONNA ACETO DONNA ACETO

The LGBT Memorial unveiled on June 22 in Hudson River Park.

An inscription on the Memorial quotes the late poet and writer Audre Lorde.

BY PAUL SCHINDLER

O

n the morning of Sunday, June 24, before he marched in the annual LGBTQ Pride Parade in Manhattan, Governor Andrew Cuomo made two stops — in the West Village and in Chelsea — to unveil a memorial to LGBTQ victims of violence and hatred and to announce strengthened health and nondiscrimination protections for the state’s LGBTQ community.

At 10 a.m. that morning, the governor was in Hudson River Park at West 12th Street to publicly present the LGBT Memorial, which he called for on June 26, 2016, two weeks after a deadly gun attack took the lives of 49 people at Pulse, a Latinx LGBTQ club in Orlando, Florida. Cuomo’s directive at that time called for a memorial to “stand as an international symbol against ignorance, hate, bigotry, and gun violence.”

The Memorial, designed by artist Anthony Goicolea, consists of boulders, some bisected by laminated glass that acts as prisms to create subtle rainbow patterns on the surrounding lawn within the park.

With the aid of professional art and architecture consultants, the Goicolea design was chosen last year by the governor from a list of three recommendations — culled from 40 entries — made by 10 LGBTQ community commissioners the governor appointed.

Later in the morning, Cuomo, at a Pride breakfast at the Dream Downtown Hotel on West 16th

GayCityNews.nyc | July 5 – July 18, 2018

DONNA ACETO

Broadway actor and singer Billy Porter at the Memorial opening.

Judith Kasen-Windsor, the surviving spouse of Edie Windsor, Hetrick-Martin Institute CEO Thomas Krever, longtime trans activist Melissa Sklarz, who is seeking a State Assembly seat in Queens, and artist Anthony Goicolea, the memorial’s designer.

Street, announced a series of measures that he explained would provide protections for transgender health care access in anticipation of rollbacks to former President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act that the Trump administration has put forward.

The Trump administration has announced plans to repeal language in the regulations under which the ACA was implemented that make clear that the law’s sex nondiscrimination provisions include protections based on gender identity. According to a release from the governor’s office, that change would put more than 90,000 transgender New Yorkers at risk for discrimination in accessing health care.

Transgender New Yorkers are not protected by statute from nondiscrimination in the state because of Republican intransigence in the State Senate, but in late 2015 Cuomo directed the Division of Human

Rights (DHR) to adopt regulations recognizing sex nondiscrimination provisions of the Human Rights Law to protect individuals from discrimination based on their gender identity. Those regulations, however, did not specifically apply to policy oversight under the purview of the State Health Department.

The governor’s action will lead to Health Department regulations requiring all hospitals to explicitly prohibit discrimination against transgender patients, strengthening the protections already provided under the 2015 DHR changes.

The State Department of Financial Services (DFS) will also broaden the protections given transgender New Yorkers in accessing health insurance. Last year, that department made clear that the existing protections provided under the federal ACA would be preserved in the state regardless of any action taken by the Trump administration. The DFS will now broaden the scope of

DONNA ACETO

DONNA ACETO

Governor Andrew Cuomo at the Memorial unveiling.

those protections.

The DHR has also issued a public fact sheet spelling out the nondiscrimination protections transgender New Yorkers have enjoyed since Cuomo first acted in 2015.

In a written statement, the governor said, “New York was founded upon the principles of fairness and equality and we won’t stand idly by while Washington seeks to claw back hard-earned rights and protections. For every step the Trump administration takes backwards, New York will take two steps forward, and these regulations will guarantee and expand protections for transgender New Yorkers to help ensure every resident has equal access to health care.”

Kiara St. James, executive director of the New York Transgender Advocacy Group, said, “This latest action ensures that basic and critical health care services will be provided to everyone, regardless of gender identity. I commend Governor Cuomo for proposing regulations that will deter intolerable and discriminatory business practices by insurance companies in the Empire State.”

Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said, “These measures are an important step to ensure that all New Yorkers can access the health care they need, regardless of gender identity. As the Trump administration continues its attack on the dignity and health of trans people, New York is once again stepping up, as it must, to protect all New Yorkers.”

23

REMEMBRANCE

Dick Leitsch: Gay Before People Were Gay Pre-Stonewall pioneering activist, correspondent from the front was 83

ANDY HUMM

Dick Leitsch in the 2017 LGBTQ Pride Parade in Manhattan.

ANDY HUMM

Matt Bomer (with glasses on), currently appearing in “The Boys in the Band” on Broadway, at the reception at Julius’ after Dick Leitsch’s funeral and interment.

COURTESY OF MATT ALLISON

Dick Leitsch as a young man.

BY ANDY HUMM

D

ick Leitsch, who as president of the Mattachine Society, a preStonewall gay group, participated in the first act of gay civil disobedience in 1966, worked to end entrapment of gay men by the police, and wrote the first eye-

witness report on the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion, died June 22 in Manhattan after a year-long battle with cancer. He was 83.

On April 22, 1966, Leitsch, Randy Wicker, Craig Rodwell, and John Timmons set out to challenge the ban on serving alcohol to gay people in bars in New York by staging “Sip-Ins” at several watering holes — identifying themselves as homosexual and asking to be served. The Ukrainian-American restaurant in the East Village, notorious for not serving gay people, closed after getting wind that they were on their way. The bartenders at Howard Johnson’s and another

joint named Waikiki frustrated their effort, serving them despite their declaration.

It was at the West Village’s Julius’ — at the time a “raided premises” (due to the recent arrest of a gay man there) and fearful of losing its liquor license — that the men were denied service in view of the media, despite the establishment’s history of being a quasi-gay bar since the 1950s. While LGBTQ people had demonstrated and even rioted before this, the Sip-In was the first act of targeted gay civil disobedience and it was successful. The State Liquor Authority dropped its holding that serving gay people made an

COURTESY OF MATT ALLISON

A letter that former President Barack Obama sent to Dick Leitsch in March.

establishment a “disorderly premises” — and, in fact, denied such a regulation ever existed.

The New York Times report on this historic action was headlined “3 DEVIATES INVITE EXCLUSION

BY BARS.” That same year, Mattachine, led by Leitsch, worked with the new administration of Mayor John Lindsay, a Republican-Liberal who had been backed by progressives, to end police entrapment of gay men and stop police harassment of and raids on gay bars.

Mattachine made progress on

䉴

DICK LEITSCH, continued on p.32

Young Friends Offered Late-Life Renaissance Gay men in their 20s offered Dick Leitsch support, camaraderie in recent years

BY ANDY HUMM

F

or the past several years, Dick Leitsch was befriended by a group of gay men in their 20s who socialized with him at his West 72nd Street home and at Julius’ in the West Village. They were with him as he died in hospice care at the Mary Manning Walsh Home on the East Side on June 22. They gave

24

Leitsch “a late-life renaissance,” according to Tom Bernardin, the historian of Julius’.

Paul Havern, 28, assistant director of admissions at Cooper Union, was friends with Leitsch for three years and said, “For a lot of us, Dick was sort of a bridge into a world that was really lost to an entire generation. For many of us he really provided us insight not only into how far our community has

come, but also to how similar we all were despite our differences.”

Havern added. “He really was very humble about all of his actions. He continued to work at St. Mary’s [the Midtown Episcopal Church to which he belonged] until he could not leave his apartment.”

When asked why he kept up his volunteer work, Havern recalled, “Dick said, ‘Well if I don’t do it, who will?’”

That seems to have been the spirit that drove Leitsch in his preStonewall activism as well.

Laurence Frommer, another friend of Leitsch’s, said, “Paul Haven, Ricardo Guadarrama, Matt Allison, and Alden Peters were all with him when he died.”

And they were all there for his funeral on June 28 at “Smokey

䉴

YOUNG FRIENDS, continued on p.46

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July 5 – July 18, 2018 | GayCityNews.nyc

CRIME

Quarter Century Later, Conviction in James Hawkins’ Murder Gordon Francis’ claim third man was on scene rejected by jury in gay man’s slaying

BY DUNCAN OSBORNE

N

early six years after he was arrested in the case, a Manhattan jury convicted Gordon Francis on a single count of second-degree murder in the 1993 killing of James Hawkins. “Cold cases should never become forgotten cases,� Cyrus Vance, Jr., the Manhattan district attorney, said in a June 28 statement. “As forensic science accelerates forward, law enforcement has new opportunities to ensure that previously unresolved cases are examined with the same care and technology as newer cases. I thank our prosecutors and partners in law enforcement for their years-long commitment to obtain justice for Mr. Hawkins and his family.�

Hawkins, who was 54 at his death, had been stabbed 25 times in the brutal killing when he was found on August 15, 1993 in his fourthfloor apartment on West 20th Street. Francis, now 60, left a trail of his own blood down the stairs and on the inside of an inner door at the building’s entrance.

With his blood and DNA found at the scene,

James Hawkins was brutally murdered in his Chelsea apartment in 1993.

Francis could not argue that he was not there.

He took the stand in his own defense and testified that a third man entered the Chelsea apartment as he and Hawkins were smoking crack. That third man cut Francis’ hand, he

said on the stand, and he then fled the apartment. Hawkins was alive when he left, Francis said.

In an effective cross-examination, Coleen Balbert — the assistant district who prosecuted the case along with Annie Siegel, also an assistant district attorney — showed that Francis had specific and detailed memories of what occurred on August 15, 1993, but could not recall much if anything at all about his relationship with Hawkins before the murder or what took place following the murder. Francis testified that he was a male escort in 1993 and Hawkins was a regular client.

Jurors heard testimony from a Rikers Island inmate who said that Francis confessed to the killing and from a neighbor who heard the struggle in Hawkins’ apartment and then heard one person exit the building. Only Francis’ and Hawkins’ blood was found at the scene.

Francis made statements to police following his 2012 arrest and to his wife in a phone call that could be interpreted as an admission of guilt. Prosecutors also presented testimony

䉴

MURDER CONVICTION, continued on p.51

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29

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30

Fewer Problems with Same-Sex Parents; Fewer Worries from Josh Barro

BY ED SIKOV

“C

hildren are not fussed if their parents are gay, lesbian, or straight according to a new study, and those with same-sex parents are actually more emotionally stable,” write Ben Geldblum and Laura Sharman of The London Economic. “Researchers found a child’s well-being to be linked to how well the family functions rather than parents’ sexuality. Youngsters with same-sex parents reported less family difficulties and proved to be more emotionally stable than those with different-sex parents, according to the study published in The Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Paediatrics.”

I take issue with this: it should be “fewer family difficulties,” and I don’t particularly care for the distorted British spelling of pediatrics.

The study took place online in Italy, Geldblum and Sharman tell us, and included three groups of parents: “Seventy gay fathers who had children through surrogacy, 125 lesbian mothers through donor insemination, and 195 heterosexual couples” who had kids through what the writers amusingly call “spontaneous conception,” which conjures an image of couples sitting in their living rooms drinking fine Super Tuscans when suddenly, out of nowhere, the startled women cry, “Oh, penso di aver improvvisamente preso dei ciambelle nel forno!”* “The families were matched for their child’s characteristics, aged three to 11, and assessed on their parenting skills, how often they agreed with their partner, family functioning, and their child’s strengths and difficulties.”

Well, guess what, Focus on the Family? Professor Roberto Baiocco of the University of Rome, who conducted the research, said, “Our findings suggested that children with samesex parents fare well, both in terms of psychological adjustment and prosocial behaviour [there go those Brits again!]. Overall, children of samesex parents had fewer reported difficulties than children of different-sex parents.”

Gay fathers came out on top in the “best functioning families” contest, a finding Baiocco attributed to “the high level of commitment needed for homosexual men to become parents via surrogacy.”

Also, gay fathers were notably older, more economically secure, and better educated, and — this is a surprise — they had more stable relationships than lesbian mothers and straight couples. In addition, “parents who felt less competent as parents and were less satisfied in their relationships reported more problems in their children.” As far as the kids were concerned, according to the survey, “Girls from all three family types were found to have less external problems such as aggressive behaviour and were ‘more prosocial,’ meaning they were more likely to help, cooperate, and share with others.”

It should be fewer problems, not less problems. And let’s not even speak about behaviour.

Josh Barro offers some sane advice in his article “Some practical thoughts on gay marriage after Anthony Kennedy’s retirement.” Frankly, my first reaction to the news of Kennedy’s departure from the Supreme Court was an intense feeling that I was about to throw up. Barro’s piece eased my mind and stomach — a little bit.

He correctly points out that Chief Justice John Roberts likes precedent: Roberts seems committed to maintaining the court’s “institutional caution.”

Second, Barro urges us all to start preparing for the fight: “Previewing possible consequences of a post-Kennedy court,” Barro writes, “the Washington Examiner editorial board says if Obergefell were overturned, ‘the most likely outcome is that a few states might stop allowing new marriages.’ This is incorrect.

The effects of overturning Obergefell would be much broader.”

Now before you, too, feel the vomit surging, hear Barro out.

“There are 30 state constitutions that already contain prohibitions on same-sex marriage. Currently, these provisions are dead letter; they exist, but they can’t be enforced because of

Obergefell. But if that decision were overturned, at least some of them would become good law again. The exact number would depend on the exact terms of a decision overturning Obergefell and how it would affect same-sex marriage bans that were struck down in cases other than Obergefell. But most likely, same-sex marriage would be instantly prohibited in something like half the country. Some of these bans would be in blue states that would have likely repealed their state constitutional bans on gay marriage if not for Obergefell rendering them moot — think Oregon, Colorado, and Virginia. Because marriage equality has two-thirds support nationally and rising, some states would likely proceed swiftly to repeal their reinstated bans. But they could only move so swiftly — in most states, repeal would involve gathering ballot signatures and then waiting for at least one general election.”

Evan Wolfson may have to start thinking about re-opening his organization, Freedom to Marry, which he deemed obsolete when same-sex marriage became the law of the land in 2015.

“So,” Barro continues, “reversing Obergefell wouldn’t just restore the option for states to ban gay marriage.

It would impose such bans, often in places where they would be very much unwanted by the public. And the Supreme Court would take the blame. That overturning Obergefell would cause such a mess is a reason to think the conventional wisdom is right: The court is unlikely to do so.”

If you think that Barro is being overly optimistic about Roberts’ respect for precedent, keep reading: “Roberts’ votes to keep the Affordable Care Act in place, which drew the ire of so many conservatives, were widely interpreted as a protective move to save the court from the backlash that would have come from intervening in a policy area it didn’t absolutely need to.

“His recent dissent in Wayfair vs.

South Dakota was a paean to the virtue of stare decisis, or leaving old decisions in place, even in an area where he admitted the court had

䉴

PROBLEMS & WORRIES, continued on p.45

July 5 – July 18, 2018 | GayCityNews.nyc

FAMILY

Second Chance For Ex-Partner’s Parenting Claim Manhattan appeals court open to argument regarding adoption after a breakup

BY ARTHUR S. LEONARD

I

n just the latest in a series of cases dating back more than a quarter century grappling with questions about parental standing within unmarried same-sex couples, a New York State appellate court has revived a lawsuit by Kelly Gunn, who is seeking joint custody of a child adopted by her former partner, Circe Hamilton.

On June 26, a five-judge panel of the Appellate Division’s Manhattan-based First Department reversed an April dismissal of the case

by Supreme Court Justice Frank Nervo, who had found that that despite her close relationship with the child, Gunn was not a “parent” under New York’s Domestic Relations Law and so lacked “standing” to sue for custody or visitation.

The unanimous appellate panel, in an opinion by Justice Judith J. Gische, found that Gunn should have another chance to call on the court’s “equitable powers” to recognize her relationship with the child.

Some background on New York courts’ treatment of same-sex parent issues is in order. In 1991, the state’s highest bench, the Court of Appeals, in Alison D. v. Virginia M., established an unfortunate precedent that only a person related to the child by blood or adoption has standing to seek custody or court-ordered visitation. In the years that followed, the New York courts repeatedly confronted cases of same-sex couples raising a child together but then breaking up, with the birth or adoptive parent resisting their former partner’s attempt to continue in a parental role. The former partners in those cases found no relief from the state’s courts.

In her dissent in that case, then-Chief Judge Judith Kaye argued the decision failed to take account of the reality of non-traditional families, including those headed by LGBTQ couples, and would ultimately be harmful to the best interests of the children.

That shortcoming in addressing same-sex parenting issues was finally addressed by the Court of Appeals in August 2016, in its decision in Brooke S.B. v. Elizabeth A. C. C, where it focused on a written agreement between two women who had a child through donor insemination and shared parenting responsibilities until the couple split up. There, the high court determined that the second parent should have standing to seek custody or visitation so the court could make a determination based on the child’s best interests.

The court’s opinion in Brooke S.B., written by the late Judge Sheila Abdus-Salaam, was narrow and cautious, tailored to the facts of that case, and leaving open what other theories secGayCityNews.nyc | July 5 – July 18, 2018

NYCOURTS.GOV

Appelllate Division Associate Justice Judith J. Gische.

ond parents could pursue to have their standing recognized.

In one case decided shortly after Brooke S.B., the court accepted what is called a “judicial estoppel” theory, because the birth mother had originally sued her former partner for child support, alleging she had a parental obligation, but later sought to deny the other woman standing to assert parental rights. The birth mother was not allowed to take those two inconsistent positions. In that case, the two women had not made a formal written agreement, but the former partner’s standing was recognized.

Gunn and Hamilton, together beginning in 2004, agreed in 2007 to pursue an international adoption and raise a child together as a family. The plan was for Hamilton to adopt overseas and bring the child home to New York, and that Gunn would then complete a “second parent” adoption. The women’s romantic relationship ended in December 2009, before any adoption had taken place. The following year, Gunn and Hamilton, with the assistance of lawyers, signed a separation agreement dividing up their assets.

Despite this breakup, the women remained friends, and Hamilton continued to pursue an adoption, with Gunn’s encouragement. In the summer of 2011, Hamilton adopted a child, and Gunn, in Europe on business, met Hamilton and the child in London and the three returned to New York together.

Hamilton allowed Gunn frequent contact with the child, with whom Gunn formed an attachment. In August 2016, just as the Court of Appeals was overruling the Alison D. decision in the Brooke S.B. case, Hamilton, a British native, announced she was moving back to Eng-

land with the child. Gunn quickly sprang into action, filing her lawsuit and seeking a temporary order requiring Hamilton to remain in New York with the child while the case was litigated.

Gunn claimed that under Brooke S.B., she had standing to seek joint custody and visitation rights based on the women’s 2007 agreement.

Justice Nervo did not dismiss the case outright and there was a temporary order placed on Hamilton, but after a lengthy trial — during which he reviewed the extensive record of communications between the two women in the period immediately preceding the adoption — he determined that the 2007 agreement had not survived their breakup. By the time Hamilton adopted the child, he found, she was acting on her own. Nervo concluded that Gunn was a friend who had formed an attachment with the child, but not a “parent” within the meaning of the Domestic Relations Law. The decision proved controversial from the moment it was announced, particularly in light of the judicial estoppel finding the Court of Appeals made in the post-Brooke S.B. case discussed above. Even in the absence of an express agreement, a court could recognize parental standing, according to the state’s highest bench. Gunn argued that this was such a case.

Writing for the Appellate Division, Judge Gische found that this may be the kind of case where equitable estoppel — based on whether Gunn had assumed a sufficiently parental role toward the child, with the consent or at least acquiescence of Hamilton — is appropriate. While agreeing with Nervo that the couple’s breakup meant the case did not come squarely within the holding of Brooke S.B., the appellate panel found that both sides should have the opportunity to present evidence about whether equitable estoppel applies here.

Should Nervo conclude that Gunn has standing to sue using an equitable estoppel theory, he would then have to consider the child’s best interests. A “guardian ad litem” could be appointed to represent the child’s interests.

Gunn asked to have the case assigned to a different judge, but the Appellate Division declined to do so, without explanation.

Gunn is represented by Robbie Kaplan and her law firm, Kaplan & Company, as well as lawyers from Morrison Cohen and Chemtob Moss & Forman. Hamilton is represented by lawyers from Cohen Rabin Stine Schumann. The LGBT Law Association Foundation of Greater New York submitted an amicus brief to the court, with pro bono assistance from Latham & Watkins, not taking sides between the parties but discussing possible routes for applying the Brooke S.B. case to this new situation

31

䉴

DICK LEITSCH, from p.24

these issues, but obviously didn’t prevent the mother of all gay bar raids at the Stonewall in the wee hours of June 28, 1969. Leitsch heard about it on the radio and hopped in a cab to get down there from his Upper West Side apartment, writing that night the first report on the Rebellion for the NY Mattachine Newsletter, later reprinted in the Advocate.

He wrote, “The police behaved, as is usually the case when they deal with homosexuals, with bad grace, and were reproached by ‘straight’ onlookers. Pennies were thrown at the cops by the crowd, then beer cans, rocks, and even parking meters. The cops retreated inside the bar, which was set afire by the crowd. A hose from the bar was employed by the trapped cops to douse the flames, and reinforcements were summoned. A melee ensued, with nearly a thousand persons participating, as well as several hundred cops. Nearly two hours later the cops had ‘secured’ the area,” though the Rebellion was to go on for five more nights.

“One middle-aged lady with her husband told a cop that he should be ashamed of himself. ‘Don’t you know that these people have no place to go and need a place like that bar?’ she shouted.”

Leitsch wrote that at first, “The crowds were orderly, and limited themselves to singing and shouting slogans such as ‘Gay Power,’ ‘We Want Freedom Now,’ and ‘Equality for Homosexuals.’”

His account got more vivid, writing that a police car “bearing a fat, gouty-looking cop with many pounds of gilt braid chauffeured by a cute young cop, came through.

The fat cop looked for all the world like a slave-owner surveying the plantation, and someone tossed a sack of wet garbage through the car window and right on his face.

The bag broke and soggy coffee grounds dripped down the lined face, which never lost its ‘screw you’ look.” A “concrete block” landed on another police car.

After the cops seized and beat “a boy who had been doing nothing,” Leitsch wrote, “50 or more homosexuals who would have been described as ‘nelly’ rushed the cops and took the boy back into the crowd. They then formed a solid

32

front and refused to let the cops into the crowd to regain their prisoner, letting the cops hit them with their sticks, rather than let them through.”

Leitsch’s final paragraph captured the confusion of police at the rebellion of a community they looked on with pity and contempt: “One of the most frightening comments was made by one cop to another, and overheard by a [Mattachine] member being held in detention. One said he’d enjoyed the fracas. ‘Them queers have a good sense of humor, and really had a good time,’ he said. His ‘buddy’ protested, ‘Aw, they’re sick. I like nigger riots better because there’s more action, but you can’t beat up a fairy. They ain’t mean like blacks; they’re sick. But you can’t hit a sick man.’”

When Lindsay called Leitsch to stop the Stonewall Rebellion, Leitsch told him, “Even if I could, I wouldn’t. I’ve been trying for years to get something like this to happen.”

Historian and activist David Carter — whose 2004 book “Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution” is the definitive account of the ‘69 Rebellion — said that Leitsch’s activism effectively legalized gay bars and created the expectation on the part of LGBTQ people that they would be legally served.

“Without Dick Leitsch, there would have been no Stonewall,” he told Gay City News.

The Stonewall Rebellion accelerated the movement exponentially.

Its historic significance is not just the fight back — which had happened before — but the way in which it led to immediate and ongoing activism. Leitsch told me — with only slight irony — “Before Stonewall I was the only gay person who was a leader. After Stonewall everyone was a gay leader.”

Richard Valentine Leitsch was born May 11, 1935 in Louisville, Kentucky.

“I always knew I was gay,” he said in an interview with Gay City News months before he died. He went to his first gay bar at age 18 — in 1953 — and “got picked up by this awful, awful queen” who had sex with him and then sent him a box of roses with a note declaring his love, he told the magazine Sexual Behavior in 1971. His mother “in-

tercepted” the flowers, asked him if he was homosexual, and he said, “Yes” — very rare for those times.

He had a priest cousin who had earlier told Leitsch’s parents that he thought their boy was gay, so they had read up on it. “They were very attuned and never made me feel guilty about it,” he recalled, though he did go to a doctor because he had heard “homosexuals were sick.”

“I kept looking in the mirror to see if my face was breaking out,” he said.

The psychiatrist, in the thenbenighted profession when it came to gay people, attacked Leitsch’s parents and told him he could be “cured” but that it would take many years. Leitsch said his mother started screaming at the doctor, “How dare you try to make me feel guilty, make him feel guilty! How dare you try to ruin this boy’s life by giving him all this crap!”

Leitsch left Louisville for Cincinnati and made it to New York in 1959. He told author Eric Marcus, “I wanted to get the hell out of Louisville and go someplace civilized.

Because on Saturday mornings everybody would go to the movies and all the other kids wanted to be cowboys and firemen and whatever, space people. And I wanted to go to New York and smoke cigarettes and drink cocktails like Bette Davis. And goddamn it, I did it and they’re still not cowboys.”

You could say Leitsch was drawn into activism at Mattachine by love — by a desire to spend more time with his then-boyfriend Craig Rodwell, later the founder of the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop in the Village and the lead instigator of the first Christopher Street Liberation Day March in 1970 to commemorate Stonewall. Leitsch was at first reluctant to go to Mattachine because he had attended a meeting in 1962 only to be subjected to a lecture by psychotherapist Albert Ellis on how sick gay people were — a presentation that earned Ellis a standing ovation from the then mostly self-hating group.

In his ‘71 interview, Leitsch said that in the 1950s, “When you joined [Mattachine], you had to sign a pledge saying you wouldn’t swish, act sissy or ‘camp’ in public, and you wouldn’t have sex in public places. You had to promise to dress nicely and respect all racial and

religious minorities. I think they were trying to make homosexuals super-good so we could be acceptable… It didn’t work too well.”

Mattachine was founded by the legendary Harry Hay in Los Angeles in 1950 and in Washington was headed by Frank Kameny, who had been engaging in unapologetic gay activism since the late 1950s. A militant Kameny speech in New York — urging gay people to fight for our rights the way African Americans were waging the Civil Rights Movement — inspired Leitsch to run for vice president of Mattachine/NY with Julian Hodges as president in 1965. Hodges, however, resigned within the year and Leitsch became the reluctant president — but he threw himself into the work.

“We thought we had to be more aggressive,” he told Sexual Behavior. “First of all, we had to admit we were homosexuals. Previously, everyone used a pseudonym — and they were all Greek… That just irked the hell out of me. If you’re a queer, say it.”

Leitsch said in ‘71, “I think the main goal of the movement is to help people get over the guilt inflicted on homosexuals… We do need sophisticated organizations to deal with job discrimination, tax inequities, sodomy law reform, etc.”

Leitsch was pre-deceased by Timothy Scoffield, his partner of 17 years, who died of AIDS in 1989.

He is survived by his brother, Jack, and sister Joanne Williams, both of Louisville, numerous nieces and nephews, a host of friends and comrades, and admirers who include former President Barack Obama, who recently wrote him, “Our journey as a nation depends, as it always has, on the collective and persistent efforts of people like you.”

Leitsch’s funeral at St. Mary the Virgin on June 28, the 49th anniversary of Stonewall, was presided over by the church’s rector, Reverend Stephen Gerth, who said that Leitsch, an active member of the parish, embodied the dictum “If people don’t like you for who you are, they won’t like you for pretending to be what you’re not.”

Denny Meyer, a gay veteran activist, was at Leitsch’s funeral. He wrote on his blog that he worked up the courage to call Mattachine

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DICK LEITSCH, continued on p.46

July 5 – July 18, 2018 | GayCityNews.nyc

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33

THEATER

Defying Gravity Idina Menzel shines in biting comedy about family, beauty, and fighting aging

BY DAVID KENNERLEY n 2015 Joshua Harmon charmed audiences with “Significant Other,” a comic appraisal of a covetous gay man being stuck and single while his straight pals couple off and move forward. The Roundabout Theatre production resonated so forcefully that it made the leap to Broadway.

And now he’s back at the Roundabout with “Skintight,” another wry look at friction between loved ones, but this time it’s about the vagaries of family, beauty, and desire. And the protagonist, Jodi Isaac, is a straight woman who envies what her not-so-straight family members have.

Lucky for us, this woman is portrayed by none other than Idina Menzel, who is giving her vocal

SKINTIGHT

I

Roundabout Theatre Company Laura Pels Theatre 111 W. 46th St. Through Aug. 26 Tue.-Sat. at 7:30 p.m.

Wed & Sat. at 2 p.m.

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Eli Gelb, Idina Menzel, and Will Brittain in Joshua Harmon’s “Skintight,” directed by Daniel Aukin, at the Laura Pels Theatre through August 26.

cords a rest with a rare turn in a non-musical. She’s so captivating, however, that she might as well be

singing.

Fortysomething Jodi has a problem — a thicket of problems, actu-

ally. Her husband dumped her for a much younger, shapelier woman and they’re having a large engagement party. So she flees LA to seek solace from her father (Jack Wetherall), a super-rich, iconic clothing designer named Elliot Isaac (think

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SKINGIGHT, continued on p.35

Made to Measure Two shows about the cost of getting what we want

BY CHRISTOPHER BYRNE hakespeare was an inveterate plot stealer, and if turnabout is fair play the creators of the rollicking Off-Broadway musical “Desperate Measures,” with book and lyrics by Peter Kellogg and music by David Friedman, have paid suitable homage to the Bard. The plot-lifting of “Measure for Measure,” however, is about as far as it goes.

That said, there is something inherently cynical about creating a boot-scooting, over-the-top, Wild West romp out of a story about a government official using his power to coerce sex from a less powerful woman — a nun, no less — in order for her to get something she wants… and then, when he thinks she has complied, reneging on the deal. The only way that the nun is able to save her soul, as she sees

DESPERATE MEASURES

S

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CAROL ROSEGG

Sarah Parnicky, Peter Saide, and Connor Ryan in Peter Kellogg and David Friedman’s “Desperate Measures.”

it, is to cook up a trick where a woman who is essentially a sex worker slips into the bed at the last moment. Yet one of the questions

Shakespeare raises is whether in even agreeing to the deception, the nun is already compromised in her virtue. The titular desperate mea-

sure becomes, then, a question of relative morality, one that has kept scholars talking for centuries. The essential question remains: how far will one go and how malleable are one’s beliefs?

That perhaps is why “Desperate Measures” is set in the mythic American West. The show’s cre-

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MADE TO MEASURE, continued on p.35

July 5 – July 18, 2018 | GayCityNews.nyc

䉴

SKINTIGHT, from p.34

Calvin Klein) who lives in a sleek townhouse in Manhattan’s West Village.

Using her father’s 70th birthday as a pretext for a surprise visit, Jodi is crestfallen when he receives her coolly. Turns out he’s got Trey (Will Brittain), a ripped, 20-yearold boytoy, living with him and isn’t ready to put his life on hold for his needy daughter. Or her spoiled son, Benjamin (a droll Eli Gelb), who is studying queer theory abroad and also shows up unannounced.

The fact that her father’s “partner” is the same age as Benjamin unnerves poor Jodi to the extreme.

Under the direction of Daniel

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MADE TO MEASURE, from p.34

ators place the tale in a time and place with its own rules, as the myth goes. In search of a good time, they ask us not to look too closely at a plot that strikes a particularly dull chord in the contemporary environment or at the hegemonic masculinity that is part of the myth of the American West, prevalent throughout Shakespeare and also clung onto by two many men today.

The show itself is classic OffBroadway fare — broad, campy, juvenile. Director Bill Castellino plays for yucks, rather than laughs, putting a veneer of vaudeville over the entire proceeding. Kellogg’s book is written in rhyming couplets. Some of them are funny, others land with a thud. Friedman’s music is catchy, though formulaic, and his lyrics are often clever. So, if you can get past the politics and have a penchant for hokey silliness, the show may be pleasant enough, if not remotely memorable.

As so often happens in these types of shows, the performers are so much better than the material. In particular, Peter Saide as the Sheriff has a great voice and big presence that makes him a dominating presence on the small stage. Lauren Molina, who has a magnificent voice, gets to play very broadly as Bella Rose, the saloon dancer who agrees to impersonate the nun in the sheets. Sarah Parnicky as Sister Mary Jo is really delightful as a pure ingenue with a spectacular voice. The rest of the company — GayCityNews.nyc | July 5 – July 18, 2018

Aukin (he also helmed “Bad Jews,” Harmon’s breakout play), the entire cast is quite good. Menzel displays vicious comic chops, lending a frantic desperation to Jodi that burns ever more intensely throughout the proceedings.

The gorgeously muscled Brittain is a stunner, and not only in the looks department. His Trey reveals surprising emotional elasticity, musing about his hardscrabble boyhood in Oklahoma, the wonders of the Uffizi, and how relationships are hard work. And while some might argue his invasion of the living room wearing nothing but a jockstrap (emblazoned with the Elliot Isaac logo, natch) and exposing his “juicy ass” to a shocked Jodi

and Benjamin is a tad contrived, it is in keeping with his cocksure character. Not to mention fertile ground for comedy.

Cynthia Mace and Stephen Carrasco, as the dutiful housekeeping staff, make big impressions in tiny roles. Their brilliantly timed sight gags involving suitcases, flowers, and ice packs are laugh-out-loud funny.

Not that there’s much of a plot or solid through-line. The looming question of “Will the birthday party that Jodi insists on throwing against her father’s wishes go off without a hitch?” is far from a nail-biter. We already know the unhappy answer.

Harmon has spiked the dialogue

with copious jokes about Botox, gay porn, and massive penises. Other questions, such as whether, in our youth obsessed culture, outward “hotness” always wins over inner beauty, are worth considering.

When Benjamin, who is gay, presses Trey about his sexuality, he replies, in his good ol’ boy Southern twang, “I don’t do labels, man… I’m just Trey. I just care about the person inside.”

Of course, that’s easy for a hunk like him to say. The fact that we aren’t sure we can believe him and have no clear-cut answer to the inner-versus-outer beauty debate is one of the many elements that make this “Skintight” so irresistibly alluring.

Nick Wyman as the lecherous governor, Gary Marachek in a variety of small roles, and Conor Ryan as Bella’s love interest and the brother Sister Mary Jo wants to save from death are all good in limited parts.

For every sublime Shakespeare musical adaptation like “West Side Story,” “Kiss Me Kate,” and “The Boys from Syracuse,” there are those that fall way short. “Rockabye Hamlet” and “Oh, Brother” come to mind. “Desperate Measures” isn’t the worst of these, but it’s nowhere near the best. Had the creators dug a little beneath the surface of “Measure for Measure,” the result might have been quite compelling and seemed, well, less desperate.

and take full advantage of the benefits of money. That, sadly, might seem prosaic today, but there’s a play afoot because Kevin comes up against Cara Russo, a local teacher who believes in education, merit, and hard work to achieve goals. Kevin and Cara are at odds over a ballot measure in their community that would combine a rich and a poor school district. It’s not a challenge to guess who is on which side. When Kevin promises to invest for Cara and produces strong results, her virtue is in jeopardy when she sees how she personally gains even when others don’t have

that opportunity — a provocative challenge to her belief system.

Playwright Anthony Giardina does offer a fair fight for both sides of the issues and makes no pronouncements about which is right.

He cleverly expands the theme by looking at how the parents’ choices affect their teenage kids. Conor, Kevin’s son, is a conventional, spoiled white guy; Cara’s daughter Angela is more realistic about her chances with or without the money Kevin ultimately offers her.

Conor has never known life with-

䉴

MADE TO MEASURE, continued on p.47

Morality in the 17th century was a lot less malleable than it is in 2018. Today, morality is often situational, defined by the individual in the moment. That’s one of the themes that runs through “Dan Cody’s Yacht,” from Manhattan Theater Club, which just closed at City Center. The title is an obscure reference to “The Great Gatsby,” where a young Gatsby is transported into a world of wealth he aches to enter and decides to do whatever it takes to get there. That it doesn’t end well for Gatsby — or for his fellow striver and literary brother Clyde Griffiths in Dreiser’s “An American Tragedy” — is not the subject here. Rather, the ethos of Kevin O’Neill, a rich man who has achieved his riches through manipulating money, is to grab what you can, never apologize,

35

MUSIC

Uneasy Listening With unsettling aggression and beauty, Lotic takes on racism, transphobia

BY STEVE ERICKSON ove and Light,” the opening track on transfemme singer/ producer Lotic’s debut album “Power,” takes a blissful music box-style melody played on bright, trebly synthesizers that could’ve come off a New Age record and develops it by layering much noisier sounds on top of it.

The title track returns to a similar motif, but two minutes in moves on to synthesizer and percussion sounds closer to digital hardcore than Yanni. If “Love and Light” and “Power” did nothing but repeat their original melodies and tones, they would sound like the cheesiest sort of ambient music.

But Lotic is fascinated with play-

LOTIC

“L

“Power” Tri Angle Records Drops Jul. 13 tri-anglerecords.com

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Lotic’s debut album, “Power,” will be released on July 13.

ing with those sounds to subvert them.

This is quite clear from the way they follow “Love and Light” with “Hunted,” which begins with them whispering “brown skin, missed

the frame/ head’s a target/ actin’ real feminine/ make ‘em vomit.”

That chant continues through the whole song but gets buried by its music most of the time. Lotic makes the kind of “electronic dance music” one can’t really dance to, with drum machines scattering in all directions and time signatures.

Their first two EPs were entirely instrumental, but here they use their own vocals and singer Moro duets with them on “Heart.” But

Lotic’s voice functions more as an instrument than a delivery system for words. I wildly misunderstood the lyrics to “Hunted,” which I only realized when I noticed the album’s press release included them.

The combination of pretty and ugly sounds recurs throughout the album. “Distribution of Care” layers a synthesized string section that would sound gorgeous in another context over beats that sound like a snare drum exploding. “Resilience” might not embody everyone’s idea of that concept: it too combines an attractive melody with booming and harsh percussion. The 87-second long “The Warp and the Weft” is harsh enough to recall the confrontation-

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LOTIC, continued on p.38

The Sanctity of Gay Sex Years & Years look for dance floor redemption

BY STEVE ERICKSON ears & Years are huge stars in the UK, with their 2015 album “Communion” and single “King” hitting #1 there, but so far their success in the US has been far more limited, with “Communion” peaking at #47 here.

Although they play a very accessible style of dance-oriented pop, the fact that singer/ keyboardist Oily Alexander is openly gay is implicit in the lyrics of “Sanctify,” the first single and opening song of their second album, “Palo Santo.”

He has said that the song is about his experiences having sex with men who identify as heterosexual but are nevertheless drawn to sex with men. It addresses religious guilt very openly, in a way that comes across as an update of the Pet Shop Boys’ “It’s A Sin.” However, Alexander takes the perspective

YEARS & YEARS

Y

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“Palo Santo” Polydor Records Drops Jul. 6 yearsandyears.com

YEARSANDYEARS.COM

“Palo Santo” from Years & Years will be released on July 6.

of a clergy offering the possibility of healing to a troubled man. The song has been released in several remixes, including one by New Order guitarist Bernard Sumner that improves on the original version.

Alexander has cited Britney Spears’ collaboration with production team the Neptunes on her songs “I’m A Slave 4 U” and “Tox-

ic” as the inspiration for “Sanctify,” and one can hear this both in Years & Years’ choice of drum sounds and the overtones of kinky sex in its video. Beyonce’s “visual album” for “Lemonade” may have kickstarted this trend, but in 2018, Drake, Childish Gambino, and minimalist indie rapper Tierra Whack have released music whose full meaning is only evident when one watches its accompanying videos.

Years & Years’ “Sanctify” video offers up imaginative queer futurism, depicting a world where humans are toys of an alien spe-

cies. In it, Alexander is placed in a collar, then freed to dance for a stationary audience of aristocratic aliens. If his movements suggest liberation and joy, it’s a false and temporary one.

This theme is continued in the album’s second video, “If You’re Over Me.” By this point, “human cabarets” have become institutionalized, and Alexander performs the same routine, halfway between burlesque and ballet, endlessly, as the video cuts between dance and backstage scenes with other people. These videos use science fiction to address the fact that minority artists often wind up commodifying their pain for audiences that don’t share their experiences and consume it as mere entertainment.

There’s a current tendency in mainstream pop to aim for a com-

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YEARS & YEARS, continued on p.51

July 5 – July 18, 2018 | GayCityNews.nyc

Pics 2018 B63 E7<<7<5 3<B@G

Thanks to all who entered!

Below are some of the submissions we received.

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37

FILM

Dystopia Spiked With Wit Boots Riley’s careening satire about race and class in America

BY STEVE ERICKSON olitics and silliness are supposed to be enemies. In fact, the way the alt-right rose by its hiding its true hatefulness beneath a veneer of irony and politically incorrect humor has soured some people on the whole idea of comedy.

Boots Riley’s “Sorry To Bother You” reminds us that satire can bring politics and silliness together with truly radical results. The debut fi lm by the rapper who masterminded the Coup, who recorded six albums from 1993 to 2012, it suggests a shotgun marriage among Mike Judge, Spike Lee, Michel Gondry (who gets an explicit homage onscreen in the form of a video directed by “Michel Dongry”), and the FX TV show “Atlanta.”

Riley’s lyrics for the Coup took continual aim at corporate power (“5 Million Ways To Kill A CEO”), gentrification (“Fat Cats And Bigga Fish”), faux liberals (“You Are Not A Riot”), and double standards in race and class (“Your Parents’ Cocaine,” which gets played during this film) while having the sarcastic wit to name two of the Coup’s albums “Genocide & Juice” (riffing on Snoop Dogg’s hit “Gin & Juice”) and “Steal This Album.” Unfortunately, the group had the bad luck to sign to three record labels in a row that went out of business, and they’re better known for the fact that the original artwork for their 2001 album “Party Music” predicted the World Trade Center’s destruction and had to be changed quickly than for anything approaching mainstream success.

Cassius (Lakeith Stanfield) starts off owing four months’ rent. His uncle and landlord (Terry Crews) is about to evict him and his girlfriend Detroit (Tessa Thompson), who has a collection of hilarious earrings. They live in a version of Oakland whose differences from our world seem minimal at first but grow as the plot takes so many twists that the fi lm’s press release asks critics not to reveal them.

Cassius gets hired at a telemarketing company and starts to rise there when he develops

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al noise experiments of Throbbing Gristle and early Cabaret Voltaire.

Rather than aiming for the nightclub, Lotic programs their drum machine toward glitch and industrial sounds.

While Lotic now lives in Berlin, they were born in Houston and explore their roots on “Nerve,” where

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Directed by Boots Riley Annapurna Pictures Opens Jul. 5 tickets.sorrytobotheryou.movie

ANNAPURNA PICTURES

Lakeith Stanfield and Tessa Thompson in Boots Riley’s “Sorry to Bother You.”

a “white voice” (he is dubbed here by David Cross, and another black character’s “white voice” is dubbed by Patton Oswalt.) Meanwhile, the film lays out the dystopian reality of the world around its characters: the activist group Left Eye is fighting against the corporate power of Worry Free Living, which has reintroduced slavery as a form of temp work.

As Cassius climbs the corporate ladder, attracting the attention of a sleazy CEO (Armie Hammer), his friends start a union and go on strike at that exact moment. He is forced to choose which side he’s on.

“Sorry To Bother You” plows through a long list of topical subjects: the necessity of unions, the fact that well-paying full-time labor has mostly dried up in the US, racist expectations that require constant code switching from middle-class blacks. Its view of the media is straight out of “Idiocracy” with a dash of Paul Verhoeven, especially in positing a wildly popular TV show called “I Got the Shit Kicked Out of Me.” But it ultimately comes off as a psychedelic lark as well. Spike Lee can get quite strange both in visual and narrative terms, but there’s a preachy and heavy-handed tendency to his films (his 2015 “Chi-raq” literally let a priest sermonize for an uninterrupted 10-minute stretch). Riley is far more

they rap “H-Town in this bitch” and their music suggests “cloud rap” producers like Clams Casino.

The song might be more successful if it lasted more than two and a half minutes; it comes across as a fragmentary goof. The lyrics and Lotic and Mono’s interwoven vocals on “Heart” evoke a kind of tenderness. Still, that mood feels awfully hard-won since it rests over a

interested in spinning his ideas into further weirdness.

As Cassius gets wealthier, his apartment transforms, in a single shot that must be heavily assisted by CGI but seems quite virtuoso nevertheless. This is a fi lm about a man torn between materialism and a nascent political conscience. If it’s obvious from what I’ve written about Riley’s background that Cassius will choose the latter, “Sorry To Bother You” still makes time for silliness, like a character whose last name is “DeBauchery” (pronounced “devo-cherry”) and is willing to admit that political art can often be a ludicrous failure (like Detroit’s performance art piece where audience members throw balloons fi lled with sheep blood at her near-nude body as she recites dialogue from the film “The Last Dragon”).

Hammer is introduced late in the film, snorting a foot-long line of coke, after being glimpsed via TV clips, but he clearly had a great time chewing the scenery. “Sorry To Bother You” spends its last third twisting itself into one odd metaphor after another about corporate power and the damage America’s classism and racism wreaks. If the film starts to lose its footing in the final 20 minutes and goes from being laser-guided and consistently entertaining to gratuitously weird, it still feels far more together than superficially similar cult films like Richard Kelly’s “The Southland Tales.” Alex Cox’s “Repo Man” became a hit among ‘80s punks for offering the same basic sensibility and politics. Here’s the equivalent for a generation whose dominant genre is hiphop.

constantly changing tempo, which speeds up to some extremely fast sections.

The aesthetic of “Power” has a clear point, even if Lotic isn’t writing obvious protest songs. The alienation of being African-American and transfemme has inspired their music as long as they’ve been recording; their first release was a 2015 EP called “Heterocentric.”

When Lotic repeats the musical conceit of beauty drowned out by bursts of noise, it expresses a sense of anxiety and unease.

Much of “Power” is instrumental, and the rest isn’t oriented toward making its lyrics easy to understand without work from the listener. That’s a statement in itself:

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July 5 – July 18, 2018 | GayCityNews.nyc

FILM

Body Work Denis Côté investigates six Canadian strongmen in their element

BY GARY M. KRAMER Skin So Soft” is Denis Côté’s hypnotic observational documentary about six Canadian bodybuilders. The men, identified slowly throughout the film, are introduced doing mundane things in their daily lives — eating, brushing their teeth, even moisturizing.

They are also seen working out, flexing, and, in the case of Maxim, using his body strength — and a harness around his chest — to pull a large truck across a parking lot.

The film both objectifies and humanizes these men. They are admired for their physiques, but they are hyper-conscious of what it takes to create and maintain their impressive bodies.

As one subject acknowledges, “The body doesn’t lie.” Meaning: it will do what it is asked but will also indicate if or when that is too much.

Côté emphasizes this principle as the men reveal their strengths and limitations. Jean-Francois explains to a photographer why he doesn’t smile when he poses; his white teeth provide a stark contrast against his thick dark beard.

Ronald, the film’s Asian bodybuilder, tells his family that his chest is perfect but he needs to work on his back. Alex, the youngest subject, struggles to get his girlfriend to be as motivated as he is to work out and train. These episodes subtly suggest why these men, each of whom seems shy, quiet, and reserved, got into bodybuilding: it gives them a goal, a sense of purpose, and, by extension, a feeling of self-worth.

There are no interview scenes to establish any kind of a background on the men.

Some of the film’s most interesting scenes feature Benoit, a former bodybuilder who is now a trainer and life coach. Episodes of him coaching a woman on her feelings and attitudes and meeting a bodybuilder in a hotel room to critique his posing are fascinating, helping viewers understand how he helps them achieve their goals.

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“Power” calls for active attention from its audience.

The press release for “Power” calls it “an expansive exploration of the many ways in which power can be expressed and experienced” and says it was inspired by the writing of the brilliant African-American social critic Ta-Nehisi Coates. And GayCityNews.nyc | July 5 – July 18, 2018

Directed by Denis Côté In French with English subtitles Breaking Glass Pictures Opens Jul. 6 Anthology Film Archives 32 Second Ave. at Second St. anthologyfilmarchives.org

BREAKING GLASS PICTURES

Bodybuilder Cedric in Denis Côté’s “A Skin So Soft.”

In contrast, Max, the strongman, is seen moving giant tires and working out with his wife. Their relationship comes into sharper focus when she questions his grumpiness at the breakfast table and he responds with silence.

An extended sequence in which Max, who is also a wrestler, gets in the ring for a rematch with a tag team that had previously beat him, is even more revealing, emphasizing the intense concentration he brings to his work.

The film’s most intriguing, if enigmatic subject is Cedric, a handsome man who is first seen at his breakfast table watching a video that prompts him to cry. This moment may indicate this tough guy has a sensitive side. Equally ambiguous is a later scene of Cedric working out at the gym while another attractive bodybuilder eyes his routine. The two men might look like they are ogling or cruising each other — especially when they are in the locker room together — but more likely, they are sizing each other up as competition.

Côté may play up the homoeroticism of the sport, but the closest thing to intimacy or touching any of these guys get is when Cedric endures a painful body massage, Jean-Francois undergoes a skin treatment, and Max employs a wrestling move on another guy.

It’s amusing to see these big, buff, brawny hemen get spray tanned, have makeup applied to

while Lotic doesn’t have much realworld power — doing remixes for Björk and opening for her in Berlin is the highest they’ve risen — they exercise a certain manipulation over this album’s listeners by creating a seductive surface and then opening up a world of aggression underneath it. Sound like the society we live in?

When making political music,

their faces, and endure depilatory procedures to get their skin so smooth. “A Skin So Soft” walks a tightrope in how it presents the vanity of these guys, practically fetishizing them and asking viewers what makes these six men beautiful, erotic, or perhaps even grotesque.

Côté never directly investigates how the subjects feel about the success they have achieved — or hope to. That may be part of his point — to look at these guys who are working on their bodies to be looked at. But this raises the question: why do we watch?

It is certainly deliberate that these men are presented as somewhat inscrutable. The dialogue in the film is kept to an absolute minimum; it is almost jarring when a brief conversation takes place. Côté’s approach might frustrate viewers who want to know more about his subjects: How did they get on this career path, and what do they make of their lives? Why did they agree to appear in this film, and what was the director’s criteria for selecting them? Perhaps none of this matters.

The last 20 minutes of “A Skin So Soft” brings the six guys together for a camping trip in the country. They bond over swimming and posing for each other on a makeshift dais. They sit around a fire, where Jean-Francois plays a guitar. This may be the only sequence in this transfi xing film where the men all appear relaxed and happy. Their camaraderie is affectionate and endearing.

many artists think that means they must write lyrics directly attacking current social problems.

While this has led to some great music, it also has a tendency to steer them toward preachiness and an aesthetic that can only speak to the converted. Lotic’s views are embodied by their beats at least as much as their lyrics, but it’s unmistakable that they have a great

deal to say about racist and transphobic alienation. “Power” is uneasy listening par excellence, and the angst it expresses could hardly be more pointed. But the beauty it also expresses suggests the very tentative possibility of hope under grim conditions, even if the production and arrangements of Lotic’s songs repeatedly depict it getting stomped on.

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OPERA

Triumphant Tetralogy San Francisco Opera revives Francesca Zambello’s “Ring”

CORY WEAVER/ SAN FRANCISCO OPERA

CORY WEAVER/ SAN FRANCISCO OPERA

Iréne Theorin in Francesca Zambello’s production of Wagner’s “Walkuere” at San Francisco Opera.

BY DAVID SHENGOLD his year for its annual June Festival — which makes a great add-on to Frameline’s LGBTQ film festival and the Bay Area’s other Pride events — San Francisco Opera really delivered “festival goods.” The company revived Francesca Zambello’s “Ring” cycle for three traversals, developed and honed over the years locally and at Washington National Opera. New Yorkers dreading the prospect of seeing Robert Lepage’s reductive, unilluminating “Machine” staging during the next Met season can only envy those who had access to Zambello’s thoughtful, image-rich reading of this epic work. (Worry not, conductor Philippe Jordan and singers Christine Goerke, Jamie Barton, Karen Cargill, and Guenther Groissboeck promise high distinction.) SFO’s production wasn’t perfect — what production of this behemoth is? — but it has a point of view, addressing real social and political issues and not just flashy technological logistics.

From its roots as a so-spun

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”American ‘Ring,’” with Alberich as a Gold Rush prospector and the Rhinemaidens as camp followers, the staging has morphed into what it’s hard not to call ecofeminist turf, setting the plot’s social and familial cataclysms on a visual background illustrating Nature’s defilement under Late Capitalism. Mime’s hut for example, is an ancient camper set among oil derricks and power wires. The sense of what was lost and what replaced it emerges most powerfully in deft, provocative videos by S. Katy Tucker and Jan Hartley and Mark McCullough’s impressive LED-enhanced lighting.

The male characters in the cycle exhibit a host of overweening abusive patriarchal behavior, and touches evoked a #MeToo awareness. More skillfully and movingly even than the last time around, not just Bruennhilde but Gutrune, the Rhinemaidens, and the women’s chorus jointly redeem and reset the world. Wonderful moments in the staging include the “Walkuere” Act II curtain rising on Wotan’s Gotham City-view Art Deco office and the next act’s parachuting in

Brandon Jovanovich in “Walkuere.”

by (doubled) Valkyries carrying heroes’ pictures.

There were some problems. Already notable in the prologue evening was a superabundance of extra-musical — indeed unmusical — guffaws, chortles, and mirthless laughter emitted after a character’s own lines, as if in a bad provincial Noël Coward revival. It didn’t stop with “Rheingold” — which felt pretty trivial save for Stefan Margita’s assured, idiomatic Loge and Ronnita Miller’s puissant Erda, who came up through the floor dressed like a gospel singer — the added noises proved equally annoying and ineffective throughout.

Opera is not about aural realism, and deploying this kind of bad cable series sound effects — extending to parlando shouting of climactic words — will make it no more effective or palatable to new viewers. I question the wisdom of having the Woodbird — very well sung by Stacey Tappan, also a sonorous Woglinde — appear as a kind of hippie chick. Having Siegfried encounter a woman at this point reduces the shock he must feel as he removes the sleeping

Bruennhilde’s armor. Occasionally, the tweaked surtitles raised questions, as in Wotan’s curiously inappositely Christian reference to “all creation.”

The company and audiences dodged a bullet when experienced Swedish soprano Iréne Theorin jumped in at very short notice as Bruennhilde for Evelyn Herlitzius.

The German artist is a riveting singing actress but — on recent evidence — just not up to the role’s vocal demands. Theorin lacks expansiveness in her lower voice but came through pretty thrillingly in every other way: energetic, involved, handsome onstage, completely credible dramatically as immortal and lover both, with a youthful, well-projected, and shining soprano that reveled in the high C’s. Brava Diva!

Karita Mattila (Sieglinde), looking maybe half her age, brought star presence. Very weak in the lower register and more than a little pitchy, she still shone in the middle and upper middle; the few peaks were decently surmounted.

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I’ve heard good work elsewhere from Greer Grimsley (Wotan/ Wanderer) but for the first two operas he seemed essentially a placeholder: decent but uninspiring, with a tense voice only rarely in focus or sufficiently dominant.

In “Siegfried,” Grimsley found a more individual character and improved noticeably in tonal clarity.

Alberich was a substantial singing actor, Falk Struckmann; his dark voice now has more sap in its lower end and he was particularly chortly, but his was the only native German — most welcome — and he nailed his cameo dreambound appearance in “Goetterdaemmerung,” among the cycle’s greatest scenes.

This was my third time seeing Daniel Brenna’s Siegfried and, although he is slightly more nuanced and in better physical shape this time around, he strikes me as a not very interesting or sophisticated singer whose vocal endowments suit better the second-line German houses where he developed. But one has heard much worse; it’s a dislikable role, impossible to cast. Brenna has relative youth and energy on his side, and he made it through the double marathon — both “Siegfried” and “Goetterdaemmerung” in one weekend — though with a weak start the first night and some signs of tiring in both operas’ third acts.

With David Cangelosi’s professional but whiny-toned Mime hamming it up, Act One of “Siegfried” seemed very long indeed, bear-costumed extra or not.

Brandon Jovanovich made Siegmund sexy, sympathetic, and credibly heroic: his timbre is very good rather than “great” or particularly individual, but he shapes phrases very well and gives a complete operatic performance. He was far and away the best Froh I’ve seen or heard in decades of hearing “Rheingold”: a preening, inept minor member of a powerful family who keeps falling on his face — evoking a Trump son. And here Jovanovich’s voice shone. Opposite his precise characterization, Brian Mulligan emerged kind of unformed as Donner, but in Gunther’s ungrateful music he sounded just lovely — he might graduate to the “Rheingold” Wotan at some point.

Out mezzo Barton didn’t deliver the goods as the “Rheingold” Fricka that we heard at he New York Phil last year, but she sounded excellent as the marriage goddess in “Walkuere” and also as Second Norn and Waltraute in the final opera.

Melissa Citro has strengthened the top of her soprano, so that she can nail Helmwige high C’s in the famed “Ride.” Between them, Citro and Zambello create the most detailed Gutrune imaginable, at once zanily ditzy and deeply touching. Some festival should star Citro — a born comedienne with the requisite great looks and command of German — in Strauss’ “Intermezzo.”

Renee Tatum made a strikingly rich-voiced Flosshilde. Miller (First Norn) and the very GayCityNews.nyc | July 5 – July 18, 2018

promising Sarah Cambidge (Third Norn) also offered a high vocal standard.

The flies in the ointment were the fussy, selfadmiring Cangelosi and bass Andrea Silvestrelli (Fasolt, Hagen), whose career divides opinion.

Tall and ursine, at ease onstage, he has a huge instrument that wows many people. I hear a growly, pitched-challenged, meat grindery noise, intensely unpleasant. But he garnered ovations from many.

With Zambello and Theorin, the heroes of this “Ring” were conductor Donald Runnicles and the orchestra. The audience seemed thrilled to have their former music director back in the pit.

He led with dispatch but total command, and

(save for a few brass glitches) the orchestra — not usually the equal of the Met’s or Lyric Opera of Chicago’s — went all out to shine. Particular credit redounds to the trumpet, harps, and the magnificent anvils marking the border of Nibelheim. Runnicles and the orchestra won huge applause.

Next June, SFO presents “Carmen” (J’nai Bridges, Matthew Polenzani, Kyle Ketelsen), “Orlando” (Sasha Cooke, Heidi Stober, David Daniels), and “Rusalka” (Rachel Willis-Sorensen, Jovanovich, Barton, Ferruccio Furlanetto).

David Shengold (shengold@yahoo.com) writes about opera for many venues.

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Beat the Heat, Cinematically Gotham’s choicest film fests provide the perfect refuge FRED AND GINGER: A COMPLETE RETROSPECTIVE

THE NEW YORK WOMAN Quad Cinema 34 W. 13th St. Through Jul. 19 quadcinema.com

Film Society of Lincoln Center Walter Reade Theater Jul. 13-15 165 W. 65th St. filmlinc.org RKO/ KOBAL/ REX / SHUTTERSTOCK VIA FILMLINC.ORG

Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in “The Gay Divorcee,” from 1934.

BY DAVID NOH he dog days of summer are already here, with wilting heat that makes escaping into an aircooled moviehouse a highly sensible thing to do.

The greatest movie dance team is being celebrated by Film Society of Lincoln Center with a complete retrospective, “Fred and Ginger.”

The series kicks off on July 13, a Friday but lucky this time, because no admission will be charged to see their 1933 debut film, the ultradiverting “Flying Down to Rio.” The couple began in the movies as more comic-and-dance relief to this film’s official stars, two contrasting beauties: platinum blonde Gene Raymond and the darkly exotic Dolores Del Río, who, after Garbo, was considered the most beautiful woman in Hollywood. She wears a fabulous wardrobe, one of the first by the great screen couturiere Irene, and the film is a crazy-quilt pre-Code stew of lilting Vincent Youmans songs, Brazilian local color, dances that range from seriously orchidaceous tangos to the lively, branded “Carioca,” in which couples swing, pressing foreheads together with a certain erotic intensity, all of it culminating in the surreal title song number in which amazingly brave chorines are strapped to the wings of planes and borne aloft.

In their first starring vehicle which followed, in 1934, “The Gay Divorcee,” Astaire and Rogers graduated from hero’s antic sidekick and wisecracking band songstress to star-crossed lovers, and their

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romance found its first brilliant efflorescence in the “Night and Day” number, the single Cole Porter ditty retained from the Broadway musical, Astaire’s stage swan song. No dance possessing such suavely elegant grace and fervent emotional commitment had ever been seen on screen before, and it’s one of two terpsichorean highlights that make up for an idiotically contrived, low camp script that involves a lot of vehement and vehemently unfunny camping by series stalwarts fruity character men Edward Everett Horton and Eric Blore (with that hamstress Alice Brady thrown in, always given so little screen opportunity to really show her greatness as an actress who, indeed, was cast as Lavinia in O’Neill’s “Mourning Becomes Electra,” opposite no less than Nazimova).

The other highlight is, of course, a dance, and that would be the follow-up to the popular “Carioca,” “The Continental.” This catchy but throwaway song won the first Best Song Oscar, which is insane, because it was chosen over far superior ones that year: “Cocktails for Two,” “I Only Have Eyes for You,” and “I’ll String Along with You” — the latter two written by the superbly prolific team of Harry Warren and Al Dubin. There was also “Nasty Man,” “Here’s the Key to My Heart,” “An Earful of Music,” and “The Animal in Me,” none of which was nominated, proving yet again that the Oscars are artistically worthless.

With this film, the stars really hit their stride, with Astaire’s dancing becoming, if anything, even more stupefyingly flawless, complex, and inventive. And Rogers really blossomed, honing her delicious comic

Edie Sedgwick in Andy Warhol’s 1965 “Poor Little Rich Girl.”

timing to match her musical sense of rhythm, and becoming sleeker and supremely glamorous as she twirled in gowns permanently imprinted on the minds of true fashionistas by the gifted likes of Irene, Howard Greer, and, especially Bernard Newman (responsible for the “Top Hat” feathered gown and the beaded, fur trimmed sheath for “Let’s Face the Music and Dance” in “Follow the Fleet,” later recreated for Bernadette Peters in the “Pennies from Heaven” homage to that number). Schiaparelli called Rogers the perfect American woman, and I confess to always watching her — so charismatically undulating and riveting — much more than Astaire, when they dance.

The Quad Cinema is presenting “The New York Woman,” through July 19, and quite marvelously curated with a mix of familiar titles and juicy rarities.

Now that legit porno theaters are a thing of our city’s pre-Disneyfied past, I think it will be a gas to catch Radley Metzger’s 1974 X-rated “The Private Afternoons of Pamela Mann,” starring hunky Eric Edwards, with what is likely to be the most meta Manhattan audience ever. Lizzie Borden’s prize-winning, rarely seen “Working Girls” (1986) focuses on a day in the life of a bunch of Upper East Side prostitutes, including an over-educated lesbian played by Louise Smith, who was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award. Gay German filmmaker Rosa von Praunheim’s doc “Tally Brown” (1979) focuses on the 1970s Warhol star who hung

with Taylor Mead, Holly Woodlawn, and Divine. Warhol himself directed “Poor Little Rich Girl” (1965), starring tragic It Girl Edie Sedgwick, just a few years from her 15 minutes being over. Von Praunheim’s “Survival in New York” (1989), about — horrors! — immigrants from Germany tackling our then dirtier city, is also being shown. Photographer Nan Goldin makes an acting appearance in Bette Gordon’s “Variety” (1983), about a cashier in a Times Square porno house. Frederick Wiseman’s “Model” (1981), shot on location in the fabled Zoli agency, is a must-see, which this fashionista never has.

Joan Crawford’s most delicate and intelligent performance is showcased in Otto Preminger’s smart and satisfying “Daisy Kenyon,” which features fabulous Greenwich Village locations, like her Bohemian dream apartment and the old Greenwich Theater, and a subplot that features her rich, ruthless, highly appealing lover (an excellent Dana Andrews) as a lawyer caught up in reparation for Japanese internment victims. Another, more demure Gotham era is captured by the fun “The Best of Everything,” from Rona Jaffe’s best-seller about 1950s secretaries in the publishing world. One of them, tragic Gregg, is played by supermodel Suzy Parker, who slaves for one Amanda Farrow, a dragon lady of an editor, played by none other than Crawford again, much less sympathetic here, but in full, awesome star command.

Preminger is also represented by “Such Good Friends” (1971), from his later, much less tasteful period, starring Dyan Cannon as a wife who discovers that her dying husband has schtupped all her friends.

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SUMMER FILMS, from p.42

And howâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s this for a cast: Laurence Luckinbill, Nina Foch, Rita Gam, Jennifer Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Neill, James Coco, Burgess Meredith, Doris Roberts, Louise Lasser, and penned by no less than Elaine May under the pseudonym Esther Dale, also the name of a beloved character actress always playing sage maids to the stars.

By some wondrous curatorial serendipity, a handful of films are included that happen to be among my top personal favorites. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Mixed Bloodâ&#x20AC;? is Paul Morrisseyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s masterpiece, sick, wrong, and wondrous, with a posse of Lower East Side Brazilian and white trash trade (including Morrissey discovery, the beautiful, doomed Rodney Harvey, who worked with Coppola, Madonna, Bruce Weber, Gus Van Sant, Calvin Klein, and David Lynch, only to OD on heroin at age 30).

The magnificent MarĂ­lia PĂŞra gives one of the funniest, scariest, greatest performances in all cinema.

William Wellmanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s â&#x20AC;&#x153;Baby Faceâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; (1933) has by now become everybodyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s go-to pre-Code salacious treat, but itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s always welcome, especially for its prominent inclusion of black actress Theresa Harris, as, to quote one character, â&#x20AC;&#x153;that fantastic colored girl,â&#x20AC;? who would inspire Lynn Nottageâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s play â&#x20AC;&#x153;By the Way, Meet Vera Stark.â&#x20AC;? Harris was a civil rights activist very early on and once said, â&#x20AC;&#x153;I never had the chance to rise above the role of maid in Hollywood movies. My color was against me anyway you looked at it. The fact that I was not â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;hotâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; stamped me either as uppity or relegated me to the eternal role of stooge or servant. I can sing but so can hundreds of other girls. Hollywood had no parts for me.â&#x20AC;? In support of an African-American film production company, she said in 1937, â&#x20AC;&#x153;We have tolerated so many rotten pictures made in Hollywood by whites, I do not see why our own people cannot be tolerant in the pioneering stages of this company.â&#x20AC;?

Two beloved movies of mine are set in my neighborhood, the West Village. Nicole Holofcenerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s â&#x20AC;&#x153;Walking and Talkingâ&#x20AC;? (1996) remains her most winning work for me, really capturing the nabe at its summer sultriest, and sparked by deeply lovable performances by Anne Heche, Liev Schreiber, Kevin Corrigan, Todd Field, and the directorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s GayCityNews.nyc | July 5 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; July 18, 2018

special muse, the always special Catherine Keener, who could possibly be the most New York woman onscreen ever. This is the kind of best friend movie thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ideal for watching with that friend or facsimile or a very special date. â&#x20AC;&#x153;The Seventh Victimâ&#x20AC;? (1943) is the most fascinating film to come from the remarkable intelligent horror team of producer Val Lewton and director Mark Robson (his debut!), from a script by gay writer DeWitt Bodeen, about a girl (Kim Hunter) who comes to the Village to try to find her missing sister (haunting Jean Brooks). From its eerie opening and closing quotations from John Donne, and its moody wander through menacing nighttime subway rides, cafĂŠs with murals of Dante and Beatrice, enigmatic cosmetic companies bearing names like La Sagesse employing faintly predatory lesbians, culminating in a flat full of Satanists, this utterly unique film casts a febrile, everunsettling spell. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Girls About Townâ&#x20AC;? (1931) should be as well-known as â&#x20AC;&#x153;Baby Face,â&#x20AC;? another golddigger comedy and the film in which a young George Cukor really hit his wittily elegant stride, from a scintillatingly urbane script by hustler-gal specialist, the too-little-known Zoe Akins, also responsible for the verbal sophistication of the directorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s masterly â&#x20AC;&#x153;Camille.â&#x20AC;? It has a terrific opening line â&#x20AC;&#x201D; â&#x20AC;&#x153;Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s been an evil night,â&#x20AC;? muttered, while skulking in a nightclub powder room, by delicious, husky-voiced comedienne Lilyan Tashman, the Kim Cattrall of her day, and herself a pre-Code work of art, who tragically died of cancer in 1934, the year the Hays Code began, making her specific type seriously endangered. A feline Deco blonde, who had, according to Cecil Beaton, Hollywoodâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s best figure, she was both the best-dressed and horniest gal in town. Innocent females were seriously warned about going into the powder room with this ex-Follies Travis Bantonclad libertine, who, according to my friend actress Dorothy Mackaill, â&#x20AC;&#x153;wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t really beautiful, but it didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t matter.â&#x20AC;?

For more of Daivd Nohâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s tips for the Quadâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s â&#x20AC;&#x153;The New York Womanâ&#x20AC;? series, go to the online version of this feature at gaycitynews.nyc/nohsummer-film.

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43

THEATER

Interrogating Jimmy Jewelle Gomez discovered James Baldwin by learning of his anxieties about “Giovanni’s Room”

BY KATHLEEN WARNOCK ewelle Gomez is coming back to New York City.

The award-winning writer and activist arrives next week for the New York premiere of her new play, “Waiting for Giovanni,” written with Harry Waters, Jr. “Waiting for Giovanni,” inspired

by James Baldwin writing the novel “Giovanni’s Room,” directed by Mark Finley, and presented by TOSOS, begins previews July 12 and opens July 17 at The Flea.

“I feel very lucky,” said Gomez, who lives in San Francisco and whose latest honor was being named Lifetime Achievement Grand Marshal of San Francisco Pride.

Her play premiered at New Conservatory Theatre Center in San Francisco in 2011, and Gomez has been looking for a New York production. TOSOS read the play in its Robert Chesley/ Jane Chambers Playwrights Project and asked if it could open its season at The Flea with “Giovanni.”

Gomez came to New York for auditions, but has not been at rehearsals and said she’s “very, very excited” to see a “new” play — she revised it for the New York premiere.

“From the auditions, I had distinct impressions of the actors,” she said. “I could hear their voices in my head as I was cutting, and I felt like I was giving the actors more to play with.”

She ended up cutting as she revised.

“I tightened the play I’m hoping by about 15 minutes,” she said.

“You know what they say: if there are scenes you think are so juicy you can’t bear to get rid of them, you should start cutting with them. I started with two particular scenes I liked a lot. Without these two, the play feels firmer. I was happy with it.”

The cast of “Waiting for Giovanni” features Jonathan Dewberry as

WAITING FOR GIOVANNI

J

44

The Flea Theater 20 Thomas St., btwn.

Broadway & Church St. Jul. 12-14, 17-21, Jul. 25-28, Aug. 1-4 7 p.m. $30; theflea.org/shows/ tosos-waiting-for-giovanni/

COURTESY OF JEWELLE GOMEZ & DRUNKEN CAREENING WRITERS

With her “Waiting for Giovanni,” Jewelle Gomez is coming back to New York.

Jimmy, Joy Sudduth as Lorraine Hansberry, Neil Dawson, Jordan J. Adams, Robert Walker Jeffrey, Ken Simon, and Michael Striano.

“I’m very excited to see how the play stands out in the world on its own and how another director is able to shape it with his vision,” Gomez said.

“Baldwin is enjoying a rediscovery at the moment,” director Finley noted. “Not only, I think, because of his work’s eloquence but because of its stark relevance 50 years later.

“The thing I’m looking for most is a radical reinterpretation of the work,” Gomez said.

“Waiting for Giovanni” began as a monologue and led to a long-term project for Gomez, who is in the midst of writing a trilogy about the lives of queer artists of color at a specific time in the 20th century.

“Giovanni” began when Waters (an actor and director who played the role of Belize in the original production of “Angels in America”), said to Gomez, “Write me something about James Baldwin.”

“Baldwin had always been one of my favorite writers,” Gomez said. “I first read him when I was about 14.

I don’t think I understood about half of what I read! So I wrote a monologue, and Harry read it and

said, ‘Where’s the rest of it? I want a play!’”

Gomez said she had trouble figuring out an entry point for the play, then had the sort of lucky coincidence that can spark a new work. At a dinner she’d accompanied her friend Dorothy Allison to, she got into a conversation with another guest who had been an editor of Baldwin’s. They had a long conversation, and Gomez found her way into the play.

“He said two important things: One is that he could never figure out when Baldwin wrote, because he was always socializing. And that Baldwin was very hurt by some of the grief he was given by people who didn’t think he should publish ‘Giovanni’s Room.’ And that’s how I started writing the play: those were the elements that humanized him for me. I was no longer writing a play about the great, famous James Baldwin, I was writing about a young writer, Jimmy, who is terrified of what is this book going to mean in the world.”

As she researched and wrote, Gomez said that one of the things that she was trying to convey was the sense of the writer’s community, surrounded by brilliant talent.

“One of the amazing things about the writers is their sense

of hope,” Gomez said. “It was very clear, if they could do the work they needed to do, there was hope for our future in this country. That level of hope felt palpable to me. I felt like there was a certain shift somewhere in the ‘60s where people had less hope.”

Gomez pointed to the losses sustained by the African-American community in the 1960s.

“This started earlier, once it was pointed out to African-Americans just how hateful the rest of the country was, and just how far it would go, starting with killing Martin Luther King,” she said.

“Hope seemed to diminish, and you started getting things like instead of trying to change the country’s attitude, young black men wanted to emulate the capitalist oppressors, wearing gold dollar signs, wearing grills in their mouths, and calling their sisters ‘bitches’ in emulation of capitalist pigs, as opposed to changing the culture that was oppressing us.”

Gomez said she was interested in finding out more and writing about the period when hope “still felt like it was happening.”

As she worked, Gomez realized that she wanted to write a trilogy.

She has since written “Leaving the Blues,” a play with music about singer Alberta Hunter, which was produced at the New Conservatory Theatre Centre in 2017. She’s currently working on “Unpacking in Ptown,” which is set to be produced in 2020 by NCTC.

䉴

JEWELLE GOMEZ, continued on p.45

July 5 – July 18, 2018 | GayCityNews.nyc

䉴

PROBLEMS & WORRIES, from p.30

erred in its preceding decisions.”

(The case is actually called South Dakota v. Wayfair. It’s the one that ruled that states could impose a sales tax on companies that don’t have a physical presence in those states — like every Internet-based retail operation, for instance.)

Barro continues, “If Obergefell remains in effect, repealing these bans won’t actually change public policy. But a national campaign to do so would serve four purposes: • Allow states to ensure that

䉴

JEWELLE GOMEZ, from p.44

In addition to performances of “Waiting for Giovanni,” there will

marriage equality is not vulnerable to changes in the composition of the Supreme Court, which could become even more conservative if Trump is able to replace a liberal justice and Roberts is not the swing vote.

• Send a public message that states and their residents affirmatively support marriage equality and are not just abiding by a federal edict.

politicians on the wrong side of a wedge issue.

• Raise the salience of judicial nominations for Democratic voters, with a powerful and ongoing reminder that it matters who sits on the Supreme Court, because key rights can be placed at risk when the court’s composition changes.”

• Energize Democratic voters to turn out to vote for a pro-equality measure, while placing Republican

Barro summarizes his position with this wrap-up: “A favorable court decision isn’t a reason to stop worrying about public opinion.

Rising public support for gay rights and LGBT people is as important

be a post-show panel about Baldwin on July 14, featuring Gomez, writer Kaylie Jones, a family friend of Baldwin’s, and Baldwin scholar

Rich Blint.

There will also be a celebration of what would have been Baldwin’s 94th birthday following the perfor-

as court protections in improving our daily treatment in America, because policy isn’t everything and non-discrimination law (even if it existed in all 50 states) can’t govern every harmful action that might happen. Winning hearts and minds is important, we’ve done it, and we should capitalize on that fact.”

So, Mr. Barro, now will you please unblock me from your Twitter feed? *“Oh, I suddenly think I have buns in the oven!” Follow @EdSikov on Twitter and Facebook.

mance on August 2, with a cake and champagne reception.

No doubt James Baldwin, that social butterfly, would approve.

For more news & events happening now visit www.GayCityNews.nyc

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GayCityNews.nyc | July 5 – July 18, 2018

45

ANDY HUMM COURTESY OF PAUL HAVERN

Paul Havern with Dick Leitsch.

䉴

YOUNG FRIENDS, from p.24

Mary’s” — St. Mary the Virgin, an Episcopal church on West 46th Street, where most of the heads were gray.

Guadarrama, 27, Havern’s husband, said, “Dick always gave me hope,” even during his dying days.

“It was inspiring for me, especially in this difficult time [in our country] to see someone who was positive and laughing” despite his illness.

“He was not afraid to be who he was,” Allison said after the service.

Allison, 29, an activist and senior campaigner at Purpose, a social impact agency, wrote, “During his life, Dick took many risks and made many sacrifices in the service of LGBTQ people to secure and advance our rights amidst

䉴

DICK LEITSCH, from p.32

when he was 15 in 1964 and Leitsch, “who was used to calls from confused teenagers,” answered. Meyer went from Long Island to their offices “five floors above Herald Square in a dowdy old office building.” Leitsch, Meyer wrote, “greeted me in a kindly voice, knowing exactly why I was there without my having said a word. He turned me over to their ‘youth counselor’ Craig Rodwell who at age 26 was expert at calming young gay teens frightened of who they were. At the time, Rodwell had an older lover, in his 30s, named Harvey Milk, a downtown stockbroker whom no one had ever heard of at the time.”

Also mourning Leitsch last week

46

Paul Havern, Matt Allison, Derek McCormack, Alden Peters, and Ricardo Guadarrama in the garden of St. Luke in the Fields where Dick Leitsch was interred.

incredible oppression. From an early age, Dick knew he was gay and never sought validation from straight people and society; he always knew deep down that being gay is perfectly natural and not something to hide, change, or ever be ashamed of. It was this deep, inner understanding that rooted Dick and guided his activism.”

Peters, a 28-year-old filmmaker, wrote in an email, “His charm was disarming, even at the end of his life. When I spoke with him on the phone after his terminal cancer diagnosis, he spoke about his life and perspective on dying. He said he’s older than dirt, nothing is new anymore, he feels ready, and that if he knew so many people would be calling and giving him attention, he would have died sooner. ‘If I knew dying was this fun, I would have done it years ago!’ Then he

gave his unmistakable laugh you could recognize from across a crowded bar.”

Leitsch was dispensing his wisdom to the last, according to Peters, who wrote, “I told him that was an inspiring perspective to have. I had been so nervous to call him but his positivity made me, and everyone around him, comfortable with his inevitable departure. He guided us through the end of his life with the same joy and care that he lived his life with. When I told him he was inspiring, he apologized. ‘I didn’t mean to be. I’m just talking.’

“In that same phone call, Dick told me the most important part of life is to keep friends close. Lovers come and go, but friends stick around through the years. ‘What’s the secret to keeping those friendships for so long?’ I asked. ‘Well, we all threatened to sleep with each

other, but none of us ever did.’”

“Dick Leitsch is the kind of person you don’t meet anymore,” Peters wrote. “He’s humble and witty.

He makes you feel like you’re the only person in the room when you speak to him. But it goes deeper than that. Speaking with him makes you feel like your relationship with Dick is unique. So many of us felt so close to him because all of us thought, ‘Dick and I have something special that others don’t have.’ That something special was Dick Leitsch himself.”

Allison wrote, “I feel blessed to have been with him and surrounded by other members of his chosen family when he passed. As we held him in the final moment of his passing, it felt as if he had passed his life and legacy on to us to remember, gain strength and knowledge from, and carry forward.”

was Steve Helfer, 71, who said, “He was the first gay man that I ever saw that was masculine. He was on a TV show that I saw when I was 14 or 15. I lived on Queens Boulevard and I was scared to death. I saw someone I wanted to model myself after.”

After his funeral and interment at St. Luke in the Fields where he will rest next to Christopher Street, a reception was held at Julius’, the site of the historic Sip-In and a 50th anniversary observance in 2016 that Leitsch and Wicker attended. Cheryl Williams, Leitsch’s niece, said that on a trip home to Louisville, she accompanied her uncle to the LGBT Center at the University of Louisville where Katy Garrison, the program coordina-

tor, was introduced to him and, when told about his accomplishments, said, “‘We always knew we were standing on the shoulders of greatness.” That day, Leitsch spent a half hour talking to an entering gay freshman who has gone on to become a gay activist himself, Williams said, inspired by Leitsch’s example.

Randy Wicker, 80, the longest surviving veteran of the Mattachine, said, “Dick kept Mattachine alive. I left around ‘64, ‘65 after having gotten involved in ‘58.” He said he put Leitsch on a $100 retainer to supplement his meager income “because I felt guilty leaving him alone.” Leitsch had told me, “I had shitty jobs, but I mostly had a good time.”

Leitsch was asked in his 1971 interview what he felt about the line in “The Boys in the Band,” “You show me a happy homosexual and I’ll show you a gay corpse.” “That’s the old 1930s guilt,” he said. “Gay life is like any other life — it’s what you make of it.”

In May of this year, Leitsch saw the current Broadway production of “The Boys in the Band” with its allstar out gay cast and was invited backstage to meet with them. Matt Bomer, who plays Donald, came to the reception at Julius’.

“On behalf of our show,” Bomer told Gay City News, “it was an honor to spend some time with him and that he was able to attend.

We’re all eternally grateful for what he did.”

July 5 – July 18, 2018 | GayCityNews.nyc

A PROUD EVENING AT GRACIE MANSION DONNA ACETO

DONNA ACETO

First Lady Chirlane McCray presents Javier Muñoz the mayoral proclamation of “Javier Muñoz Day.”

PHOTO ESSAY BY DONNA ACETO

E

ven with Mayor Bill de Blasio a no-show at his annual Pride Celebration at Gracie Mansion — the crisis precipitated by Presi-

䉴

MADE TO MEASURE, from p.35

out money. Angela is seduced by the idea but has a colder eye towards the way life really is. The play is overwritten in some scenes and the characters veer towards

DONNA ACETO

David Hansell, the commissioner of the city Administration for Children’s Services, and his partner Rob Cimino.

Tyler Clementi Foundation board member Kevin Carroll, Joe Soranno, Tyler’s mother Jane Clementi, and Matt Dolloff.

dent Donald Trump at the southern border took him to Texas — the June 21 event remained festive, with First Lady Chirlane McCray stepping up to host.

A highlight of summer’s first night was a mayoral proclamation

of June 21 as “Javier Muñoz Day,” in honor of the out gay, HIV-positive Broadway actor who for 18 months until early this year was the lead actor in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “Hamilton,” after the show’s creator left the role.

stereotypes, but the dramatic exploration of economic disparities is consistently engaging.

Director Doug Hughes mined the material for some real human moments, especially from Kristen Bush as Cara and Casey Whyland

as Angela. Perhaps playwright Giardina does have a dog in this race after all.

In the end, Cara makes what she claims is a moral choice. What drove that? Was it her objection to the way the money was made or

DONNA ACETO

Javier Muñoz.

fear that she could lose the money she had made so far? If anything after her foray into the stock market, she learned about situational morality… and that, despite how she likes to think of herself, even she is corruptible.

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47

䉴

ANTHONY KENNEDY, from p.4

provided no legitimate state interest for its law, but only animus, Kennedy wrote that the two men arrested “are entitled to respect for their private lives. The state cannot demean their existence or control their destiny by making their private sexual conduct a crime.”

Kennedy’s opinion for the 5-4 majority in Edie Windsor’s 2013 challenge to the Defense of Marriage, like his rulings in Romer and Lawrence, found that the 1996 federal law was based in no legitimate purpose but rather to “disparage” couples in same-sex marriages.

Noting the autonomy states have traditionally enjoyed in authorizing marriage, he wrote, “The federal statute is invalid, for no legitimate purpose overcomes the purpose and effect to disparage and to injure those whom the state, by its marriage laws, sought to protect in personhood and dignity… DOMA’s principal effect is to identify a subset of state-sanctioned marriages and make them unequal. The principal purpose is to impose inequality, not for other reasons like governmental efficiency… it tells those couples, and all the world, that their otherwise valid marriages are unworthy of federal recognition. This places same-sex couples in an unstable position of being in a second-tier marriage. The differentiation demeans the couple, whose moral and sexual choices the Constitution protects… and whose relationship the state has sought to dignify. And it humiliates tens of thousands of children now being raised by same-sex couples.”

Just two years later, in his opinion for the 5-4 majority in Obergefell v. Hodges, Kennedy, identifying marriage as a “fundamental right,” wrote that state bans on marriage by samesex couples “burden the liberty of same-sex couples, and it must be further acknowledged that they abridge central precepts of equality.

Especially against a long history of disapproval of their relationships, this denial to same-sex couples of the right to marry works a grave and continuing harm.”

At the conclusion of his opinion, Kennedy wrote, “No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family… [The marriage plaintiffs] ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.”

Commenting on Kennedy’s gay rights legacy, James Esseks, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s LGBT & HIV Project, said, “Those four opinions — talk about transforming the lives of lesbian and gay people. Taking us from being criminals to being able to marry, he was at the center of all of those cases.”

Then alluding to Kennedy’s more conservative votes on the court, Esseks added, “A deeply complicated figure in the law, Kennedy still did that for LGBT people apparently because he was on a journey of personal discovery based on friendships he had, and that’s pretty amazing.”

48

DONNA ACETO

Lambda Legal CEO Rachel Tiven at the June 22 LGBTQ Pride Rally.

In a conference call hosted by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, Rachel B. Tiven, CEO of Lambda Legal, while praising Kennedy, also noted Kennedy’s “bittersweet” farewell decision on gay rights — his opinion for a 5-4 majority in the June 4 Masterpiece Cakeshop decision. There, while reaffirming the right of the states to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation by businesses that sell goods and services to the public, the court found that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission that heard the complaint against baker Jack Phillips had shown “hostility” toward his religious beliefs that ran afoul of the government’s responsibility to be a neutral arbiter of such disputes.

Tiven charged that Kennedy’s “hedge” on his legacy invited “endless litigation” from antiLGBTQ activists eager to water down nondiscrimination protections with spurious claims of religious freedom exemptions.

Esseks echoed the saliency of the religious opt-out threat — made tangible in the 2014 Hobby Lobby ruling that Kennedy joined — saying, “Our community needs to wake up to the fact that there is a very concerted campaign to use religion as an excuse to discriminate against LGBTQ people and others.” He said a similar line of attack has already made significant inroads against women’s right to choose.

Asked whether he thought the Obergefell marriage decision itself was at risk in a postKennedy court, Esseks responded, “Not really. I think marriage is a settled matter both of constitutional law and the culture of the country.

Overturning Obergefell is definitely part of our opponents’ agenda, but it is unlikely to get to the court quickly. And the polling is very good, with up toward 70 percent approval nationwide, and with majority support in every state except Alabama.”

He conceded, however, that anti-LGBTQ activists are likely to try to nibble away at the scope of Obergefell. They lost such an effort last year, in a 6-3 Supreme Court case involving birth certificates in Arkansas, though fresh-

man Justice Neil Gorsuch offered a disquieting dissent. Anti-gay forces have been pushing an effort to have the Texas Supreme Court rule that the city of Houston can treat married same-sex couples differently than different-sex couples for employee benefits purposes.

“There is a whole list of protections, federal and state,” Esseks noted. “And questions could be raised in a whole variety of contexts. The Houston case could well make it to the Supreme Court.”

Esseks also talked about the numerous cases in which LGBTQ advocates seek to establish that sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination should be covered under provisions barring sex discrimination. Two petitions on the sexual orientation question are currently before the high court, and one regarding gender identity is likely to go the court in August.

Should one or more of these cases be taken up by a post-Kennedy court, “That’s a very big deal moment for LGBT community,” he said.

“The country as a whole already believes we are protected and would be shocked to learn that we’re not,” Esseks said, adding, “But the court may say we’re not.”

Donald Trump’s nominee to fill Kennedy’s seat, he said, should be asked for their views about discrimination, religious op-outs, and the scope and permanence of Obergefell. Senators are unlikely to get answers, but the questions may help swing members decide that “this person is going to take America in a direction I don’t want to see us go,” Esseks said.

In that vein, opponents of any Trump nominee will undoubtedly underscore the threat to a woman’s right to choose, which the president pledged to overturn in his 2016 campaign.

Others besides Tiven on the Leadership Conference press call — including the National Women’s Law Center, the Human Rights Campaign, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and People For the American Way — even as they noted Kennedy’s votes in the past week to uphold Trump’s Muslim ban and Ohio’s aggressive efforts to purge its voter rolls and to deny public sector employees at least some contribution from all workers they represent, whether members or not, also pointed to numerous cases where he was “an important moderating voice”: including on federal fair housing requirements, on affirmative action, and on abortion cases, most recently a critical challenge to women’s access in Texas.

But more than anything, the participants on the call emphasized one key message: that the Senate should observe what they called the “McConnell rule” — that no Supreme Court nominee be considered by the Senate until after voters have had their say in the November midterms. After all, that was the rule that gave Neil Gorsuch a Supreme Court seat, instead of Merrick Garland. With Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell the umpire here, however, that strategy seems like a Hail Mary.

July 5 – July 18, 2018 | GayCityNews.nyc

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49

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July 5 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; July 18, 2018 | GayCityNews.nyc

䉴

YEARS & YEARS, from p.36

pressed sound that avoids extreme low and high ends and sounds loud on cheap computer speakers and headphones.

“Palo Santo” fits into this, with production that is extremely slick and trebly. The ballad “Hypnotised” aims for something different: airy sound, with reverb on both vocals and piano, to the point where the latter sounds somewhat blown-out. The album’s final song, “Here,” is another ballad, which says its piece in 92 seconds and relies on overdubbed vocals with no other instrumentation, coming across like a synthesis of Justin Timberlake’s “Cry Me a River” and the Beach Boys. (On the album’s deluxe version, it’s meant to be an interlude leading into three bonus tracks.) “All For You” is an extended kiss-off to a greedy and selfish lover.

Years & Years’ aesthetic is strewn with religious imagery, as one can tell from the title of their first album and song titles here like “Sanctify,” “Karma,” and “Preacher.”

Heartbreak and the difficulties of love are not exactly innovative subjects for pop music, but just as Swedish singer Robyn brought a feminist context to them, Years & Years brings queer politics to them. “Preacher” says, “Just imagine just how good I could look on your shoulder…

I’m trying but you knock me down/ I want to love you, but you’re hiding/ You should come on out/ He’s a preach-

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MURDER CONVICTION, from p.29

from seven experts.

In 1993, Francis did seek medical attention for his hand, but in the Bronx where he lived. He did not go to the 10th precinct, which is directly across the street from Hawkins’ building, after being attacked. In 1993, Francis was told by a friend days after the killing that Hawkins had been murdered and GayCityNews.nyc | July 5 – July 18, 2018

er, but he’s preaching lies/ I could be your salvation.”

Without using the word “gay,” the entire song is about the influence of organized religion on homophobia, the danger of the closet, and even the difficulty of public displays of affection for gay men. “Lucky Escape” celebrates leaving a relationship with a manipulative man.

I have to say that the artificial mid-range loudness of “Palo Santo,” while it’s common enough to define 2018 pop music, gets very grating.

While their lyrics give Years & Years a bite that Timberlake or Justin Bieber doesn’t have, the production on this album often works to detract from their impact. I have a feeling that remixes of later singles will end up improving on the originals.

There’s a strain of mainstream dance music that acknowledges the darkness people turn to the dance floor to escape: the Pet Shop Boys, Robyn’s 2010 classic “Body Talk,” Charli XCX’s 2017 mixtape “Number One Angel” and recent single “5 In the Morning,” which describes a night of clubbing with an irritating would-be lover and wonders, “Would you stick around for the comedown?” At best, “Palo Santo” gestures toward that and expresses some of the difficulties of living out gay male sexuality right now. It succeeds about half the time, especially on “Sanctify” and “Preacher,” and succumbs to pleasant blandness the other half.

he did not go to police then.

“I don’t like investigations or the police or snitching,” he said when cross-examined.

Francis insisted that police and the prosecutor were conspiring against him with the Rikers Island inmate.

Francis first trial in 2014 ended in a mistrial. He is scheduled to be sentenced on July 18. He faces a maximum sentence of 25-to-life in prison.

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July 5 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; July 18, 2018 | GayCityNews.nyc