Gay City News - July 19, 2018

Donald Trump Must Be Removed from Office 14

The Right Answers in Helsinki 12

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QUEER BRAZIL ON FILM MUSEUM OF THE MOVING IMAGE’S WEEKEND OF RICHES Page 18-19 COURTESY OF MUSEUM OF THE MOVING IMAGE

Daniel Nolasco’s short “Sr. Raposo.”

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

FREE | VOLUME SEVENTEEN, ISSUE FIFTEEN | JULY 19 – AUGUST 1, 2018

In This Issue COVER STORY Queer Brazil on film 18-19

HEALTH De Blasio lags state health commish on legal pot 10-11

POLITICS With Kavanaugh, progressives fear right’s agenda 04

Comprehensive health care critical to equality fight 15

Archives show early NYPD gay surveillance 06

FILM Nico, nuanced this time 21

CRIME 25-to-life in gay man’s ‘93 murder 05

A proper portrait of Alexander McQueen 25

Midsummer madness at Caramoor 23

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July 19 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; August 1, 2018 | GayCityNews.nyc

GayCityNews.nyc | July 19 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; August 1, 2018

3

POLITICS

With Kavanaugh Pick, Progressives Fear Right’s Agenda Trump takes care of his base, court balance shifts more conservative

BY DUNCAN OSBORNE

W

hile Donald Trump nominated a conservative to fill the seat on the US Supreme Court left vacant by Justice Anthony Kennedy’s announcement just 12 days earlier that he would retire, he selected a federal appeals court judge who is less of a firebrand and more of a longtime functionary in official Washington.

“Throughout legal circles, he is considered a judge’s judge,” Trump said during the July 9 primetime broadcast announcing he was nominating Brett Kavanaugh to replace Kennedy. “There is no one in America more qualified for this position and more deserving.”

The 53-year-old Kavanaugh has served on the US Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia since 2006 and previously served in the White House during George W. Bush’s presidency. Bush first nominated Kavanaugh for a federal judgeship in 2003, but Kavanaugh’s service under Ken Starr, the independent counsel who aggressively advocated for President Bill Clinton’s impeachment for lying about an affair he had with a White House intern, stalled his nomination and it was eventually withdrawn. He was nominated again in 2005 and approved in a 57 to 36 vote. Kavanaugh took a poke at his critics at his 2006 swearing-in that was held in the White House Rose Garden.

“I’ve benefited as a lawyer and as a person from my work for Judge Starr, who has always combined devotion to the rule of law with great personal decency,” the Washington Post quoted him saying during the ceremony.

Starr’s status as an upright prosecutor was ended during his tenure as chancellor at Baylor University when it was revealed he had ignored rape allegations and convictions and assault charges brought against several university football players. Starr was forced to end his relationship with Baylor in 2016.

4

WH.GOV

Judge Brett Kavanaugh at the White House on July 9, flanked by his wife Ashley, their two daughters, and President Donald Trump.

In his 2010 book, “The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs.

Starr,” author Ken Gormley describes Kavanaugh as one of the prosecutors in Starr’s office who most wanted to publicly humiliate Clinton with sexually explicit questions about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky, the intern.

Gormley wrote that Kavanaugh “pushed hardest to confront Clinton with some of the dirtiest facts linked to his sexual indiscretions with Lewinsky.”

A 1998 article in the Washingtonian magazine on up and coming DC lawyers has Kavanaugh, who earned his undergraduate and law degrees at Yale, first working for Starr when Starr was the US solicitor general under President George H.W. Bush. Kavanaugh then clerked for Kennedy and was going to follow Starr to Kirkland & Ellis, a law firm, but instead took the job in the independent counsel’s office under Starr.

Kavanaugh joined the Bush administration in its first year and served under Alberto Gonzalez, the White House counsel, where he was tasked with identifying suitable nominees for the US Supreme Court.

“At the beginning of the Bush administration in 2001, I tasked Brett Kavanaugh, one of the Associate Counsels in the White House Counsel’s Office, to coordinate the initial formal vetting of potential Supreme Court nominees,” Gon-

DESIGN BY MARCOS RAMOS

zales wrote in a 2014 article in the William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal.

While working in the Bush White House, Kavanaugh was one of three staffers who met with some 200 gay Republicans in 2003 in advance of the 2004 presidential election.

“If we were completely satisfied that the Republican Party was as inclusive as we wished, we would cease to exist,” Patrick Guerriero, then the head of the Log Cabin Republicans, told the Associated Press in 2003. “It’s obvious that the issue of inclusiveness in the Republican Party is going to be a major issue.”

Bush eventually endorsed an amendment to the US Constitution that would ban same-sex marriage and the Log Cabin Republicans declined to endorse him

in 2004.

The Washingtonian reported that Kavanaugh, who was born in the nation’s capital and raised in nearby Bethesda, Maryland, is the son of a Maryland state judge and a cosmetics industry lobbyist.

Kavanaugh is a Roman Catholic and attended Catholic schools before college. He lives in Maryland with his wife, Ashley, and their two daughters. The couple met while working in the Bush White House.

LGBTQ and other progressive groups were already concerned about the four people who were on Trump’s short list to replace Kennedy, seeing Roe v. Wade, the 1973 US Supreme Court ruling that struck down laws banning abortion, and the 2015 ruling from that court that required states to issue marriage licenses to samesex couples as at risk of being reversed.

Kennedy was the swing vote on four important wins for the LGBTQ community at the US Supreme Court. Though a Republican, he was seen as a moderating influence on the far right judges on the court. With Kavanaugh, Trump may have shifted the balance on the court to empower a consistently conservative voting bloc.

“Brett Kavanaugh may bring the requisite experience, but given Donald Trump’s promise to overturn Roe v. Wade, the decision that recognized the right to an abortion, and efforts to reverse progress on civil rights and civil liberties, that’s not enough,” David Cole, the legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), said in a written statement. “It’s incumbent on Congress to determine whether Kavanaugh’s legal views are compatible with the powerful role he will play for generations.”

The ACLU does not endorse or support presidential nominees.

The National LGBTQ Task Force called Kavanaugh’s nomination an “executive power grab” in a written statement.

“There hasn’t been a nominee

䉴

KAVANAUGH, continued on p.13

July 19 – August 1, 2018 | GayCityNews.nyc

CRIME

Gordon Francis Gets 25-to-Life for Gay Man’s Murder Free for 19 years after James Hawkins ’93 slaying, convict receives maximum sentence tim’s lungs, his liver, and the sac that surrounds the heart. There were three to four liters of liquid and coagulated blood in Hawkins’ chest, indicating that he was alive for some time after the stabbing.

Francis cut his hand during the attack and left a trail of his blood in the building’s stairway and on the inside of a door in the lobby.

The prosecution relied on the blood and DNA evidence, which unambiguously placed Francis in the building, the testimony of a neighbor who heard the struggle in Hawkins’ apartment and then heard one person exit the building, a Rikers Island inmate who said that Francis confessed to the killing, seven expert witnesses, and a statement he gave to police that was ambiguous, but could be understood to be a confession.

Francis’s first trial in 2014 end-

BY DUNCAN OSBORNE

T

he convicted killer of James Hawkins was sentenced to 25-yearsto-life in the 1993 murder, with the judge in the case telling him that the extreme violence used in the killing warranted a maximum sentence.

“I find that the extensive brutality… leaves me no other option than to sentence you to the maximum, 25-years-to-life,” said Judge Melissa Jackson in Manhattan Supreme Court as a stoic Gordon Francis sat handcuffed in prison garb next to Eric Sears, his defense attorney.

Francis, 61, was working as an escort in 1993 and Hawkins was a regular client. He visited Hawkins’ West 20th Street apartment in Chelsea on August 15, 1993, where he stabbed Hawkins 25 times, with wounds to the vic-

James Hawkins was murdered in his Chelsea home in 1993 by James Hawkins, who eluded arrest for 19 years.

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1993 MURDER, continued on p.17

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GayCityNews.nyc | July 19 – August 1, 2018

5

POLITICS

City Archives Show Early Surveillance of Gays NYPD records dating back to late 1950s document police keeping tabs

ANDY HUMM

NICK BLUMENTHAL/ COURTESY OF CALLEN-LORDE COMMUNIT Y HEALTH CENTER

Author Perry Brass was a member of the post-Stonewall Gay Liberation Front, which was a frequent target of NYPD surveillance in the 1970s.

BY DUNCAN OSBORNE

W

hile the NYPD certainly spent more time and effort spying on groups outside of the queer community, its surveillance of LGBTQ organizations began early and lasted for years.

“Mr. Wicker confined his talk primarily to the homosexual’s position and the many disadvantages imposed upon him by society,” Detective Raymond Clarke wrote in a report on Randy Wicker’s appearance at the WBAI Club at City College of New York in October 1963. “Mr. Wicker claimed that federal and state agencies have been conducting ‘witch-hunts’ in seeking and oustering [sic] homosexuals from their jobs.”

At the time, Wicker, an early LGBTQ rights activist, was the public relations director for the Homosexual League of New York. Wicker continued his engagement in community politics for decades. The campus newspaper announced Wicker’s speech, which drew 400 students, writing, “In the short space of time since he began his movement in the spring of 1962, Mr. Wicker has been called everything from ‘an earnest young crusader for the rights of homosexuals’ to an ‘arrogant card-carrying swish.’”

Clarke wrote that the PO Box for the League had been opened by Charles Hayden in May 1962 and Wicker’s name was added later.

Hayden was “listed in CONFIDENTIAL un-

6

In a police report on a New York contingent traveling to the Annual Reminder Day for gay rights in Philadelphia in 1965, Detective Frank Bianco noted that the Mattachine Society’s New York chapter president Dick Leitsch, who died last month and is seen here in the 2017 LGBTQ Pride Parade, was involved.

dercover report 58-164,” Clarke wrote. “Postal Inspectors are conducting an investigation on this box,” he added.

But surveillance of Wicker’s group was not the earliest police investigation into organized LGBTQ political efforts. NYPD records show that detectives were attending Mattachine Society of New York meetings as early as 1959.

A hostile American society, the complete lack of legal protections, and a police force that was far more likely to arrest LGBTQ people than help them were not the sole concerns that faced the community in 1963. There were other obstacles that made using basic organizing tools difficult to impossible.

“Mr. Wicker stated that his group has been stifled by the refusal of newspaper stands and book stores to carry their writings as well as printing concerns refusing to even print their materials,” Clarke wrote.

The records of the NYPD spying on hundreds of groups are held by the city’s Department of Records and Information Services and can be reviewed at the Municipal Archives on Chambers Street in Manhattan.

The Archives have 750 cubic feet of police records that show the department’s “Italian’s squad,” which was shorthand for anarchists, spying on suspects in 1904 and then many other groups over decades. The squad became the Bureau of Special Services and Investiga-

DAVD/ COURTESY OF WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

The late Frank Kameny, a Washington activist seen here in the 2010 LGBTQ Pride Parade in that city, was noted as being at a 1971 demonstration outside a New York City jail on Centre Street.

tions and then the Special Services Division, which was the “most prolific” surveillance unit in the NYPD. The police department’s photo unit contributed 250 cubic feet, with pictures taken from 1897 to 1975. The records on the LGBTQ groups are a small, but significant part of the collection. To date, the Archives have records through the early ‘70s.

Another detective, John Murphy, reported on an August 1966 meeting of the Mattachine Society of New York, one of several chapters in that early LGBTQ group’s history. Murphy reported that 130 people attended, including 30 women. They heard from an attorney who was representing a gay man in a deportation proceeding.

In May 1966, Detective Frank Bianco reported that two buses would be leaving for Philadelphia on July 4 from 26th Street and Broadway for the Annual Reminder Day, a protest held at Independence Hall that had gay men and lesbians dressed in business attire to show they were loyal Americans and employable. It was a reaction to the McCarthy era, which is typically represented as consisting of attacks on suspected Communists and their sympathizers, but mostly featured purges of LGBTQ people from government and private industry.

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SURVEILLANCE, continued on p.32

July 19 – August 1, 2018 | GayCityNews.nyc

EDUCATION

Decisive Win for Pennsylvania Trans Students Federal appeals court decisively rejects claims by cisgender youth and their parents

BY ARTHUR S. LEONARD

I

n a lengthy June 18 opinion, a unanimous three-judge panel of the Philadelphiabased Third Circuit Court of Appeals explained its decision the previous month rejecting a key part of the legal challenge by some students and parents to the Boyertown Area School Districtâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s policy of letting transgender students use facilities consistent with their gender identity.

Written by Circuit Judge Theodore McKee, the opinion is a total victory for the school district and its transgender students, upholding the trial courtâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s refusal to halt the districtâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s trans-friendly policies while the case is being litigated.

The lawsuit was originally filed in March 2017 by Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a Christian law firm specializing in opposing LGBTQ rights, which represents some students at the Boyertown, Pennsylvania, schools who objected to sharing facilities with transgender students. Some of the studentsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; parents are also plaintiffs.

Citing an incident where one of the plaintiffs encountered a transgender student in a restroom, they claim the districtâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s policy creates a â&#x20AC;&#x153;hostile environmentâ&#x20AC;? for nontransgender students, violating their rights under Title IX of the federal Education Amendments of 1972, the US Constitution, and Pennsylvaniaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s common law right of privacy.

Title IX provides that students at schools receiving federal financial assistance may not be deprived of equal educational opportunity on account of their sex. The 14th Amendment has, as well, been interpreted to forbid sex discrimination by public institutions, as well as to protect the privacy rights of individual citizens from invasion by the government. Pennsylvaniaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s common law recognizes unreasonable intrusion on another personâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s seclusion as a wrongful invasion of privacy.

The plaintiffs brought their suit despite renovations the district made in school bathrooms and GayCityNews.nyc | July 19 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; August 1, 2018

SPDUFFY527/ COURTESY OF WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

Circuit Judge Theodore McKee wrote the Third Circuitâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s decisive ruling allowing the Boyertown, Pennsylvania, schools to continue their trans-friendly facilities policy.

locker rooms to increase individual privacy, including installing several single-user bathrooms to accommodate students uncomfortable using shared facilities.

Last August, US District Judge Edward G. Smith denied the plaintiffs a preliminary injunction to block the schoolâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s policy while the case was litigated, finding they were unlikely to succeed on the merits of their claim and that halting the districtâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s policy would create harm to transgender students greater than any benefits the plaintiffs would enjoy.

Acknowledging past cases holding that â&#x20AC;&#x153;a person has a constitutionally protected privacy interest in his or her partially clothed body,â&#x20AC;?

McKee wrote, â&#x20AC;&#x153;the constitutional right to privacy is not absolute. It must be weighed against important competing governmental interests. Only unjustified invasions of privacy by the government are actionable.â&#x20AC;?

Here, Smith found, the school districtâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s policy served â&#x20AC;&#x153;a compelling state interest in not discriminating against transgender students,â&#x20AC;? and that its was â&#x20AC;&#x153;narrowly tailored to that interest.â&#x20AC;?

The Third Circuit panel agreed with this conclusion.

The court found that â&#x20AC;&#x153;transgender students face extraordinary

social, psychological, and medical risks and the School District clearly had a compelling state interest

in shielding them from discrimination.â&#x20AC;? Noting expert testimony about the â&#x20AC;&#x153;substantial clinical distressâ&#x20AC;? students could suffer as a result of gender dysphoria, the court found, â&#x20AC;&#x153;The Supreme Court has regularly held that the state has a compelling interest in protecting the physical and psychological wellbeing of minors. When transgender students face discrimination in schools, the risk to their wellbeing cannot be overstated â&#x20AC;&#x201C;â&#x20AC;&#x201D;indeed, it can be life threatening.â&#x20AC;?

McKee also observed that the districtâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s policy â&#x20AC;&#x153;fosters an environment of inclusivity, acceptance, and tolerance,â&#x20AC;? and specifically noted the amicus brief filed by the National Education Association, explaining how â&#x20AC;&#x153;these values serve an important educational function for both transgender and cisgender students.â&#x20AC;?

ä&#x2030;´

TRANS STUDENTS, continued on p.32

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7

HEALTH

Medicaid Must Fund Sex Reassignment Surgery in Iowa Trial judge rejects 1995 ban as scientifically outmoded policy that discriminates, denies equal protection

BY ARTHUR S. LEONARD

A

n Iowa trial judge has ruled that a state regulation prohibiting Medicaid coverage for sex reassignment surgery violates the state’s Civil Rights Act as well as the State Constitution’s equal protection requirement.

Ruling on June 6 on appeals by two transgender women denied preclearance for the procedures, Polk County District Judge Arthur E. Gamble in Des Moines rejected the state’s argument that the public accommodations law is inapplicable.

Iowa has a long history with this issue. In the 1970s, a transgender woman appealed a denial of benefits for sex reassignment surgery in federal court, winning a ruling from a district court and, in 1980, from the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, which found that under the federal Medicaid statute, as then written, such surgery was covered as medically necessary inpatient hospital services.

The federal Medicaid program subsequently adopted policy provisions disavowing the Eighth Circuit’s approach, relieving state Medicaid programs from any obligation to cover sex reassignment procedures. During the Obama administration, the agency backed away from that position, taking a neutral stance on the requirement facings states. The Affordable Care Act, however, which prohibits sex discrimination by health care providers, might be construed to require such coverage. But the Trump administration, contrary to findings by federal agencies during the Obama years, takes the position that gender identity discrimination is not covered under provisions barring sex discrimination.

Meanwhile in Iowa, the state Department of Human Services (DHS), ruling in 1991 on a similar claim, held that the state’s Medicaid regulations required coverage. That finding prompted the state to take steps to change the language of those regulations. In 1995, DHS adopted language explicitly excluding from coverage “procedures related to transsexualism, hermaphroditism, gender identity disorders, or body dysmorphic disorders.” Also excluded were “breast augmentation mammoplasty, surgical insertion of prosthetic testicles, penile implant procedures, and surgeries for the purpose of sex reassignment.” All of this was included as part of a general ban on cosmetic procedures “performed primarily for psychological reasons or as a result of the aging process.”

DHS’ position in 1995, reiterated in this lawsuit, is that gender identity is entirely a psycho-

8

ACLU OF IOWA

EerieAnna Good.

ACLU OF IOWA

Carol Ann Beal.

logical issue. The state has never modified that approach to take account of the changing medical consensus on gender identity and the role of sex reassignment procedures in treating gender dysphoria.

When EerieAnna Good, and Carol Ann Beal appealed the denial of pre-clearance for their procedures, their attorneys, Rita Bettis, legal

director at the ACLU of Iowa, and Seth Horvath from Nixon Peabody’s Chicago office, retained the services of a distinguished expert, Dr. Randi Ettner, an author of several books on gender identity issues, who testified in detail about the current medical consensus about gender identity and the appropriate health care for those diagnosed with gender dysphoria. That consensus goes well beyond psychology in identifying gender identity as a deeply rooted trait, largely impervious to change, with a biological basis and involving fetal development, hormones, and genes. This perspective is reflected in more upto-date standard medical reference sources.

DHS did not produce an expert witness, instead resting on its quarter-century-old sources.

Judge Gamble was not convinced by the state’s argument, finding Ettner’s testimony convincing and consistent with the medical literature. The state agency, he found, has failed to keep up with the times and the basis of its 1995 regulations no longer enjoys professional acceptance.

The state tried to argue that the Iowa Civil Rights Act, which was amended several years ago to add “gender identity” to the list of forbidden grounds of discrimination in public accommodations, did not apply. Medicaid, argued the state, is not a “public accommodation.”

Gamble decided the state was mischaracterizing that issue. Medicaid is a service, overseen

by DHS and provided in Iowa through contracts with private managed care organizations. DHS, as a “unit of government,” he found, is clearly a “public accommodation,” as are the private contractors working with the agency. By refusing to authorize the procedures Good and Beal sought under Medicaid, DHS, a public accommodation, was denying a service to Good and Beal. That denial, the court concluded, was based on their gender identity, with Gamble noting how the 1995 regulations explicitly targeted transgender people for discrimination.

The plaintiffs had also claimed sex discrimination, but Gamble said that an exiting State Supreme Court ruling precluded him from treating a gender identity discrimination claim as a sex discrimination claim, though he acknowledged that many federal courts of appeals have now agreed that gender identity claims are covered by laws banning sex discrimination.

In evaluating the plaintiffs’ state constitutional equal protection claims, Gamble had to determine the level of judicial scrutiny warranted by gender identity discrimination claims

䉴

SEX REASSIGNMENT, continued on p.32

July 19 – August 1, 2018 | GayCityNews.nyc

CIVIL RIGHTS

Federal Court Rejects Foster Care Discrimination District judge sides with Philadelphia in barring Catholic agency’s religious test

BY PAUL SCHINDLER

A

federal district judge has ruled that the city of Philadelphia can require foster care agencies with which it contracts to abide by its municipal nondiscrimination ordinance that forbids discrimination based on sexual orientation.

According to the American Civil Liberties Union, the July 13 ruling

by District Court Judge Petrese B. Tucker represents the first time a federal court has found that child welfare agencies with government contracts do not have the right to exclude same-sex couples from fostering children based on the agency’s religious tests.

In March of this year, the city learned that two foster care providers with government contracts refused to license same-sex couples as foster parents, and Philadelphia stopped referring children to those

GayCityNews.nyc | July 19 – August 1, 2018

AMERICAN CIVIL LIBERTIES UNION OF PENNSYLVANIA

Reggie Shuford, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania.

agencies.

In response, Catholic Social Ser-

vices and four of its foster parents sued the city in US district court

asking the court to order the city to renew its contract. (The other agency penalized, Bethany Christian Services, came to terms with the city.) The plaintiffs argued that the city’s decision infringed on their rights to free exercise of religion and free speech. They made no argument about the qualifications of same-sex couples to care for children.

The plaintiffs were represented by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which also served as counsel to the plaintiffs in the 2014 Hobby Lobby case, where the Supreme Court made the extraordinary finding that a closely-held for-profit company could assert a claim for a religious exemption from the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that employer-provided healthcare plans provide contraception coverage.

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RELIGIOUS TESTS, continued on p.35

9

NEWS ANALYSIS

De Blasio Dithers on Marijuana Mayor’s supposed “advance” will still lead to arrests

BY NATHAN RILEY

P

ublic officials in the city and state should suspend marijuana enforcement until Albany resolves the pressing question of legalization.

A new consensus is gaining momentum that the risks of marijuana can be controlled by public health measures. At its recent State Convention, New York State Democrats supported legal adult sales of recreational marijuana, declaring that weed is “is less harmful than alcohol and tobacco.”

Meanwhile, top health officials in New York City and New York State have endorsed a tax and regulate model for adult recreational use. It is a new era where health issues need no longer hinder legalization, and the debate centers on how to implement a new approach to marijuana.

In a report to Governor Andrew Cuomo made public last week (see related story on page 11), Dr. Howard Zucker, the state health commissioner, said he doesn’t subscribe to the theory that marijuana represents a gateway to harder

10

drugs. Zucker’s conclusion has been widely held by other public health officials for years. The National Institute of Drug Abuse points to some rodent studies that indicate early use of marijuana could make the brain susceptible to an appetite for other drugs.

Studies like this agree with epidemiological data that show that use of drugs in early adolescents is correlated with abuse as adults.

But then there is a big qualifier here: “the majority of people who use marijuana do not go on to use other, ‘harder’ substances.”

Moreover, NIDA notes “crosssensitization is not unique to marijuana. Alcohol and nicotine also prime the brain for a heightened response to other drugs.” This trio of drug are “typically used before a person progresses to other, more harmful substances.”

Given this pattern, NIDA offers “an alternative to the gatewaydrug hypothesis.” Drug users “are simply more likely to start with readily available substances such as marijuana, tobacco, or alcohol, and their subsequent social interactions with others who use drugs increases their chances of trying

DONNA ACETO

Democratic officials and drug reform advocates denounced Mayor Bill de Blasio’s modifications on marijuana law enforcement.

other drugs.” You choose friends you are comfortable with and, in turn, you have shared activities.

From this perspective, the longstanding war on pot is not justified; use of marijuana may have a link to other drug use later in life, but it doesn’t necessarily cause it.

Arrests are unwarranted, particularly given the high likelihood that legalization is on its way, but Mayor Bill de Blasio remains stubbornly resistant to this new reality.

With a great flourish, he recently announced that smoking in public would be greeted with a summons not arrests, arguing he was making a real concession. But other member of the Democratic Party and advocates blasted his proposal.

The chairs of two criminal justice committees in the City Council joined advocates June 20 on the steps of City Hall attacking the mayor’s plan. Their critique burst de Blasio’s hopes of appearing progressive; the plan, they said, represented only the smallest of steps forward.

Queens Councilmember Rory Lancman, who heads up the Committee on the Justice System, blasted the mayor’s plan on the steps of City Hall and in a statement, saying, “No one should be arrested for smoking marijuana, period.” Calling the new plan a sham, he noted that a speeding

ticket is a civil summons, but that de Blasio’s action on marijuana involves a criminal summons.

“The mayor’s policy does not attempt to reduce criminal summonses at all, still allows arrests in circumstances that cannot be justified by public safety,” Lancman said.

Then, in a thrust that must hurt a mayor whose political persona is defined by opposition to all forms of discrimination, Lancman predicted the plan “will likely make marijuana policing even more discriminatory toward people of color, continues to expose noncitizens to deportation, and takes no steps to eliminate the collateral consequences which are in the city’s control.”

Joining him was another Queens councilmember, Donovan Richards, who chairs the Committee on Public Safety that oversees the NYPD, as well as Brooklyn Councilmembers Antonio Reynoso and Jumaane Williams, the latter of whom is challenging Lieutenant Governor Kathy Hochul in the September Democratic primary and is aligned with Cynthia Nixon’s gubernatorial bid.

City Comptroller Scott Stringer, a likely candidate for mayor in 2021, joined the demonstrators, saying “too many live have been ruined, too many people of color have been targeted.” As he left the speaker’s podium, he reminded everyone that he is “the money guy. If you will legalize, you will actually create a $3 billion dollar industry” and tens of thousand new jobs.

With more revenue, he said, “you will have an opportunity to invest more in the community.”

Kassandra Frederique, state director of the Drug Policy Alliance, called for a “clear-cut policy saying no arrests, no justification for putting people into the criminal system — period.”

Public defenders, organizations representing minority youth like Make the Road New York, and drug reformers like VOCAL-NY also stressed that New York must

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DE BLASIO DITHERS, continued on p.13

July 19 – August 1, 2018 | GayCityNews.nyc

HEALTH

State Health Commish Gives Pot a Go

FAMILY

Dr. Howard Zuckerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s report ďŹ nds improved health outcomes, economic beneďŹ ts

PRIDE

NYS DEPARTEMENT OF HEALTH

A report from Dr. Howard Zucker, the state health commissioner, has blessed the legalization of marijuana.

BY NATHAN RILEY

I

n a report that will be read by public health officials across the country, the New York State Health Department has declared that legalizing marijuana would bring positive benefits; the â&#x20AC;&#x153;pros outweigh the cons,â&#x20AC;? opined Dr. Howard Zucker, the state health commissioner.

The report, which went public last week, makes it clear that legalization will improve health outcomes.

After reading the report, it would be easy to conclude pot smokers are no different from the rest of the population. The report emphasizes that consumer safety will improve with laboratory-tested pot, its potency carefully labeled and customers able to pick the plant that brings the most satisfaction. Here health and pleasure form a useful synergy, and regulations reduce risks.

The risk that an emancipation effect will spur a sudden surge in use is low. By age 18, 52 percent of New Yorkers have tried marijuana.

Under the current system, there is no shortage of supply, and the report suggests that limiting sales to licensed stores will make it more difficult for those under 21 to find pot.

GayCityNews.nyc | July 19 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; August 1, 2018

Current law fails to restrict supply, and that means arresting users and suppliers accomplishes little. The report implies pot busts are cruel and pointless.

Sustaining these penalties are scare stories about marijuana that create fear but lack merit. A big lie is enshrined in federal law; it declares marijuana is a Schedule 1 drug with â&#x20AC;&#x153;no medical useâ&#x20AC;? and a high potential for abuse. The problem of abuse can better be addressed after legalization when its use will be regulated. The report expresses the hope that legalizing pot will reduce the use of opioids.

Some studies have indicated that in places with medical marijuana there are fewer opioid overdose deaths. New York State has seen a 180 percent increase in overdose death between 2010 and 2016 to more than 3,000 a year, and every year more people die than the year before.

Occasionally a dry wit is displayed in Zuckerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s report. During a discussion about marijuana causing a loss of motivation, it is described as a â&#x20AC;&#x153;temporary transient state,â&#x20AC;? not a permanent condition. Findings like these lead to the

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LEGAL POT, continued on p.35

11

THE RIGHT ANSWERS IN HELSINKI

BY PAUL SCHINDLER

O

12

n July 15, the eve of the summit meeting between Donald Trump and Vladimir

Putin at the Presidential Palace in Helsinki, the Human Rights Campaign projected giant images on the building’s façade demanding that the two leaders discuss the immediate end of the ongo-

ing anti-LGBTQ crimes against humanity occurring in the Russian republic of Chechnya. The Trump administration has failed to publicly condemn a campaign of systematic torture, abuse, and

murder of queer people in Chechnya that has led to as many as 20 murders and at least 100 being rounded up and tortured. Photos are courtesy of the Human Rights Campaign.

July 19 – August 1, 2018 | GayCityNews.nyc

䉴

DE BLASIO DITHERS, from p.10

stop relying on criminal penalties.

Under the mayor’s plan, anybody stopped for marijuana who is not carrying identification can be arrested and fingerprinted and that could lead ICE to identify them for deportation, Legal Aid Society lawyers argued.

According to de Blasio, his plan will make things better because there will be fewer arrests.

But he avoids a basic ethical question. If marijuana will be legal in eight or nine months, how can enforcement be justified now? Campaigners for legal marijuana are eager to avoid any arrests for a drug that is less harmful than alcohol or tobacco. Keeping young people’s records clean means they can can qualify for better jobs and increase their earning potential — a factor particularly salient in low income neighborhoods and communities of color. This is one piece of the argument that legalization will be good for the state’s economy.

The case against arrests is implicit in the Democratic Party’s recent resolution. “Marijuana laws have not had a significant impact on marijuana availability,” the statement reads.

If the law fails to curb use, then no individuals, much less poor black and brown youth, should be criminally punished in a futile exercise. That is why enforcement should be suspended and the Legislature be given time to create a new policy.

The mayor’s “advance,” meanwhile, continues major injustices. As Gothamist headlined its story about de Blasio’s announcement: “NYPD Will Stop Arresting SOME People For Smoking Pot.” Among those who will be arrested are parolees. It is hard to think of a crueler outcome for getting high than going back to prison after enjoying freedom. In fact, according to the Daily

䉴

News, some federal judges are refusing to play along with this. Judge Jack Weinstein, a liberal lion on the federal bench in Brooklyn, made the news with “a remarkable 42-page ruling explaining why he would not send 22-year-old Tyran Trotter back to prison for three years — longer than his original sentence! — for smoking pot, a technical violation of his post-release terms,” according to the Daily News.”

In his years as mayor, de Blasio has displayed an uncanny talent for isolating himself politically. His ties to the drug reform movement were already frayed by his long delay in supporting safer consumption spaces that offer medical support to drug users during their

time of greatest peril in the minutes after they inject. His months-long stall on the issue is now being followed by Cuomo’s own foot-dragging in giving the state’s go-ahead.

If de Blasio were to advocate for complete suspension of marijuana law enforcement pending action in Albany, he would become a leader with a national constituency and polish his fading progressive image. Instead, he is allied with the police, which will always show more loyalty to Cuomo than to him in any event. At a time when the mayor needs allies and a chance to reignite the initial enthusiasm he stirred, he is increasing his troubles by standing pat rather than making a bold move forward.

KAVANAUGH, from p.4

for the Supreme Court this extreme since Robert Bork,” Rea Carey, the executive director of the Task Force, said in the statement, referring to a Ronald Reagan nominee forced to withdraw and eventually replaced by Justice Kennedy. “Kavanaugh is a clear choice for Trump to expand his own power and escape the Mueller investigation.”

The Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest LGBTQ lobby, is calling on the US Senate to reject Kavanaugh.

“Donald Trump’s nomination of Brett Kavanaugh is irresponsible and dangerous. He will undermine LGBTQ equality, women’s reproductive rights, and affordable healthcare,” said Sarah Warbelow, the group’s legal director, in a written statement. “This is not the fairminded constitutionalist worthy of replacing Justice Kennedy. The US Senate needs to exercise its constitutional responsibility and reject this nominee.”

GayCityNews.nyc | July 19 – August 1, 2018

13

LET TER FROM THE EDITOR PUBLISHER JENNIFER GOODSTEIN

Time’s Up for Donald Trump

jgoodstein@cnglocal.com FOUNDING EDITOR IN-CHIEF & ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER PAUL SCHINDLER

editor@gaycitynews.com ASSOCIATE EDITOR DUNCAN OSBORNE

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Gay City News is a registered trademark of NYC Community Media, LLC. Jennifer Goodstein, CEO Fax: 212.229.2790; E-mail: jgoodstein@cnglocal.com

© 2018 Gay City News.

All rights reserved.

FOUNDING MEMBER

BY PAUL SCHINDLER

A

fter President Donald Trump’s abysmal and shocking performance in a post-summit press conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin this week in Helsinki, there is no doubt left but that he must be removed from office.

Before going any further, I want to acknowledge three points obvious to anyone reading these words.

First, the Helsinki calamity was by no means the first indication of Trump’s manifest unfitness for the office he holds. With no meaningful experience in public life, he came to widespread political attention with his outrageous and racist questioning of President Barack Obama’s American birth. His campaign was fueled by xenophobic, religious, and racial bigotry, incitements to violence, threats to have his opponent jailed if he won, the undermining of trust in the integrity of our elections, a refusal to release his tax returns, and his belittling of credible women who accused him of sexual harassment and worse.

Since taking office, he has moved to bar Muslim immigrants; carried out a draconian border control program that cages young children separated from their parents without clear guarantees they will ever be reunited; worked to repeal and, failing that, undermine Obama’s Affordable Care Act and so threaten a critical health safety net for tens of millions; reversed protections for transgender school students and the Executive Branch’s expansive view of civil rights protections owed LGBTQ Americans, while trying to undo Obama’s decision to open up military service to trans people; gutted environmental and climate change safeguards that may already have been too little too late; delivered a deficit–ballooning tax break for the wealthiest; co-signed the legitimacy of neo-Nazis in our midst, while stirring up racial animosities on a host of issues; packed the federal courts with blatantly unqualified appointments, while handing out pardons to heroes of the far right; insulted

and threatened America’s most sacred institutions and traditions and its strongest and most reliable allies, while cozying up to strongmen like Russia’s Putin, North Korea’s Kim, Turkey’s Erdogan, and the Philippines’ Duterte; and fought to make the Justice Department and FBI instruments of his will while undermining the work of Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

Second, I am fully aware that — barring some event dramatically more destabilizing than even Helsinki — Congress, even should Democrats eke out majorities in both chambers in November, will not impeach and convict this president, with Republicans providing cover, today in both houses and even next year at least as a Senate firewall in any trial of the president.

I am making this argument now because I think it’s time for Americans to speak honestly about what we should do, even if it is not what we will do. Even if we won’t do the right thing, we should at least know and say what that is.

And that takes me to my third acknowledgement: Trump’s removal from office would mean a President Mike Pence. On so many of the knocks against Trump, Pence is every bit as guilty — in some cases, like his extreme fundamentalist opposition to LGBTQ rights and women’s reproductive freedom, even more guilty, for on those issues he’s a true believer, something the president really isn’t about anything but his own interests. Pence also has his head in the sand over climate change; he has shown no enlightenment on immigration policy; his tax and spending priorities were clearly reflected in the Republican bill that became law; and he would not pull back on the ongoing GOP attacks on Obamacare but also wouldn’t offer any humane alternative in its place.

Perhaps, most damning about Pence is how he has defended the very worst in Trump — supporting the horrors that ICE has unleashed in recent months, stunt-walking out of an Indiana Colts game to bolster the president’s attack on AfricanAmerican football players, and — in-

credibly — saying this week, “What the world saw, what the American people saw, is that President Donald Trump will always put the prosperity and security of America first.”

Mike Pence is not a man of great character or courage. If he were president, the LGBTQ community and progressive Americans generally would still have a daunting and seminal fight on our hands.

But could it be any worse than it is now? On LGBTQ issues, Trump doesn’t seem to have discernible views. He’s largely farmed out those issues — and, for that matter, judicial nominations — to a far right coterie that includes Pence, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and the leaders of the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, and even more extreme groups. In fact, on issue after issue, Trump has already empowered the players most hostile to any progressive vision for America.

Could a President Pence really find advisors any more disreputable to bring into the White House circle?

Meanwhile, there’s what we all witnessed in Helsinki. The president takes an oath to “preserve, protect, and defend” this country. That he did not do while standing next to Putin. Some, including former CIA chief John Brennan, have called his behavior treason. What is indisputable is that his behavior was due to one or both of two factors: either his naïveté and narcissism make him believe he’s the dealmaker he is not or Putin has something on him. Collusion in 2016? The infamous golden showers tape from the Steele dossier? Financial corruption at the heart of his global real estate empire, which would explain his tax returns obstinance?

Maybe Mueller can answer that question. If anyone can, the special counsel will.

But even without that verdict in, the jury has come back on the existential threat Trump poses to this nation. He is a dangerously, pathetically unstable man and every day he serves keeps this nation and the world in peril. We all need to keep reminding our fellow Americans of that inescapable truth.

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July 19 – August 1, 2018 | GayCityNews.nyc

PERSPECTIVE: Health Care Is A Right

Comprehensive Health Care Critical to Fight for Equality

BY KIMBERLEIGH SMITH AND WINN PERIYASAMY

T

ruly universal comprehensive health care is critical to the goal of equity for all and should be a primary objective today’s LGBTQ agenda.

Like many marginalized communities, LGBTQ people still face major gaps in insurance access, with the Center on American Progress finding that at least 15 percent still lack insurance post-Affordable Care Act (ACA) implementation.

However, health issues impacting this community cannot be managed without proper access to care. Barriers to accessing health care, especially for the treatment of chronic health conditions, can prevent timely treatment and result in ultimately worsened health.

While the ACA expanded access to care and provided discrimination protections for LGBTQ communities, coverage is not universal and stigma still exists. LGBTQ patients continue to experience discrimination when accessing health services and, if denied treatment, often have trouble finding alternative services.

In a recent Center on American Progress survey, among patients

discussing experiences of visiting health care providers, nearly 10 percent of LGBQ and nearly 30 percent of transgender patients reported being refused care because of their actual or perceived sexual orientation or gender identity. Such interactions can prevent patients from receiving treatment, with more than one if five transgender patients reporting they avoided or postponed needed treatment due to discrimination.

Recent anti-health care efforts at the federal level pose a further threat to LGBTQ individuals. However, this threat provides an opportunity for transformative advocacy.

Support for single payer health care, which would replace the countless available health insurance options with one governmentrun plan, grows daily. And, the ACA and marriage equality have demonstrated that state level innovations can lay the groundwork for national policy change.

New York State has a single payer bill: the New York Health Act (NYHA). Passing this bill could position New York as a health care pioneer, making single payer a reality for the first time in America.

It’s an unprecedented opportunity to disrupt a health system fueling

inequities based on race, gender, income, geography, gender identity, and sexual orientation.

NYHA would provide universal comprehensive health coverage for every New Yorker. Using a progressive tax model based on ability to pay, NYHA would cover all medically-necessary services without premiums, deductibles, or co-pays.

The bill has popular support; it’s passed in the State Assembly the last four years and has near majority support in the Senate.

With no administrative or health care provider costs associated with insurance, NYHA would save billions and promote a more equitable New York. Employer-based health insurance is failing to adequately insure employees. Health care costs are growing faster than worker incomes and most employers lack the staff and expertise to bargain in today’s intricate health care markets, forcing employees to pay more.

Single payer could change that, and, in the process, strengthen non-profits to focus on the important work that drives their mission rather than seeing precious resources siphoned into covering their employees’ health care costs. For example, Callen-Lorde Community Health Center, which sees 18,000 primarily LGBTQ patients annually and pays 100 percent of its employee health care costs, estimates that a single payer health system would save them more than $3.5 million dollars annually, thanks to

the lower costs of employee health benefits and the lack of administrative patient costs. This is money Callen-Lorde could reinvest in staff and patients. More than 5,700 currently uninsured Callen-Lorde patients would have the same access to quality care as our state legislators. And, Callen-Lorde could reclaim possibly thousands of hours spent fighting insurance plan denials for gender affirming care and chasing claims. More people will have a stronger health system with the same — or better — care as they do now.

Health equity gives everyone the chance to live healthier lives. Those committed to health equity for LGBTQ New Yorkers — and all vulnerable populations — must fight for truly universal health care. We have everything we need to manifest health justice in our state and further LGBTQ liberation. We can make that happen by passing the New York Health Act. The time to mobilize is now.

Kimberleigh Smith is senior director for community health planning and policy at Callen-Lorde Community Health Center, which provides sensitive, quality health care targeted to New York’s LGBTQ communities regardless of ability to pay.

Winn Periyasamy is a health policy analyst, whose expertise includes AIDS/ HIV and single-payer health care, at FPWA, a New York-based anti-poverty advocacy nonprofit.

PERSPECTIVE: Media Circus

Bad News in Indonesia; Potential Good News in India

BY ED SIKOV

H

ere’s a lovely story out of Aceh, Indonesia: “Fifteen people, including five women, were punished with public caning Friday for violating Sharia law in Indonesia’s conservative Aceh province. Two men accused of being gay received 87 lashes each for gay sex, while nine others were sentenced up to 26 lashes for adultery. Four people were caned for being drunk, including one woman who received 27 lashes.”

As reported by Euan McKirdy on CNN.com, “The flogging was attended by hundreds of specta-

GayCityNews.nyc | July 19 – August 1, 2018

tors, including children, outside the Baiturrahim Mosque in Banda Aceh, the provincial capital. In video of the punishment seen by CNN, people can be heard jeering as the detainees, who are wearing white, traditional koko shirts, are brought up to the scaffold in front of the mosque.”

Lest you think Aceh is a totally backward place, “[Onlookers] took cellphone video of the punishment being administered by a hooded man while a voice counts the strokes over a loudspeaker.”

Some background: Aceh is the only province in Indonesia that has been permitted to implement Sharia law; it is the most conser-

vative — read: reactionary fundamentalist — province in the nation. All sexual activity outside of marriage is strictly forbidden and punishable by public whipping.

Naturally, gay sex is a lot worse than simple adulterous straight sex — hence the greater number of lashes. And this is not the first public whipping of gay Indonesians; according to McKirdy, “Last May two men were lashed 83 times for the same offense.”

Human Rights Watch is on the case, according to McKirdy: “HRW states that LGBT people in the state ‘live in a spiraling climate of fear... [and] face ever-present harassment, arbitrary arrests and

detention by Sharia (Islamic law) and municipal police, and threats of torture.’

“Muhammad Hidayat, the Sharia police chief, said that homosexuality was widely reviled in the deeply religious state, and that his police force would carry out the prosecution of violations of Sharia equally, without favoring officials.”

Well that’s a relief.

In other news, gay rights may be coming to India. According to Adam Withnall of The Independent, “India stands on the brink

䉴

INDIA, continued on p.17

15

PERSPECTIVE: Insider Trading

The Enemies of Progressive Change Within

BY ALLEN ROSKOFF

T

here he goes again.

For those of us brave enough to challenge the status quo, one Richard Socarides keeps popping up to scare us, while promoting his own self-interest. As some of you know, Socarides worked in the Clinton White House as special assistant; in 1996 he wrote talking points that the president and his team used when Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act. Instead of resigning in protest, Socarides chose to continue garnering favor with a sitting president at the expense of the LGBTQ community.

Socarides is back at it. Last month, he released a statement condemning out lesbian gubernatorial candidate Cynthia Nixon for appearing on nominating petitions with an African-American candidate for lieutenant governor, Jumaane Williams, a Brooklyn city councilmember.

Socarides wrote, “It’s shocking to me that especially after all we’ve been through a year and a half with Donald Trump and with Pride Month, an openly gay candidate would align herself with someone whose personal views are at odds with the state of New York.”

For Socarides to accuse Cynthia Nixon of selling-out the LGBTQ community is hypocrisy of the highest order. It’s also hypocritical for someone with Socarides’ politics to carry on like he’s leading the Resistance movement against Donald Trump.

It’s true that Jumaane Williams, in the past, expressed reservations about marriage equality.

But then so did one of Socarides’ chief patrons, Hillary Clinton.

Like Hillary, Jumaane has evolved politically as a compassionate human being to embrace full rights for the LGBTQ community. Many, many other New York Democrats traveled down the same road.

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Williams is a respected councilmember and one of our city’s most vociferous fighters for racial equality and reform of the criminal justice system.

Recently I had a meeting with Jumaane, and had numerous conversations thereafter, and have the sincere belief that his positions are unequivocally for LGBTQ rights and for a woman’s right to choose. Jumaane’s record in the City Council proves that to be the case — in spite of a foolish and unnecessary abstention on an important bill pertaining to the transgender community, for which he later apologized.

Here are the facts about Jumaane’s record on LGBTQ equality and other progressive causes: On the floor of the City Council, Williams praised the 2015 Supreme Court decision in favor of marriage equality. As a councilmember, he co-sponsored gender-neutral bathroom legislation, and as chair of the Committee on Housing and Buildings, he helped shepherd the bill to passage. Jumaane has also co-sponsored legislation with Councilmember Carlos Menchaca urging the State Legislature to bar the use of condoms as evidence in prostitution arrests — a practice police officers often use to harass transgender women and LGBTQ youth. He has also spoken out in favor of Planned Parenthood, posed for pictures in support of the group, and taken an unequivocally pro stance on abortion rights.

The bridges formed between the white LGBTQ community and people of color can only be hurt by the tactics currently being employed by overeager and tone-deaf surrogates for Governor Andrew Cuomo’s campaign. It’s worth noting that Socarides was once a leading critic of Barack Obama, not only when he was running against Clinton in 2008 but during his presidency, as well.

For years, I have questioned former State Senator Tom Duane about his friendship with anti-abortion and anti-gay Reverend Ruben Diaz, Sr., now a city councilmember, and Duane’s an-

swer about his former Senate colleague — and antagonist — invariably has been that the good reverend “cares about the poor.”

How then to explain Diaz’s failure to support Fair Fares for approximately 800,000 low income New Yorkers? The new program will provide half price transit to low income New Yorkers. Last time I checked, only Steve Matteo and Joe Borelli, two Trump-loving Staten Island Republicans, joined Diaz in withholding their support.

What a champion of the poor.

Tom Connor, the 86-year-old gay man who was threatened by a fellow member of Manhattan’s Community Board 2, which includes the Village, the home of Stonewall, has finally been reinstated by chair Teri Cude to an influential committee dealing with liquor licenses. Despite criticism from Councilmember Margaret Chin over Connor’s being threatened and then removed from the committee, Borough President Gale Brewer had no issue reappointing Cude. Can you imagine Brewer behaving in such a manner if it were a woman who reported being threatened by a man and there were six witnesses?

Speaking of CB2, according to a recent study, it turns out that the board shoots down more than 25 percent of liquor license applications. That’s compared to only four percent in neighboring CB4, which covers Chelsea and Hell’s Kitchen. In response to the negative press, Cude has formed a phony-baloney committee to explore economic development within the board’s boundaries. Perhaps this committee’s first action will be to stop forcing small business owners to agree to ridiculous stipulations that force them to close at 11 p.m. But just between you and me, I’m not holding my breath, folks.

Meanwhile, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced the appointment of NIMBY crusader and longtime nightlife hater Susan Stetzer, the CB3 district manager, to the newly constituted Nightlife Advisory Board. Picking Stetzer to a

䉴

INSIDER TRADING, continued on p.17

July 19 – August 1, 2018 | GayCityNews.nyc

䉴

INDIA, from p.15

of the greatest breakthrough for gay rights since the country’s independence, activists say, as the Supreme Court prepares to rule on whether homosexuality is illegal. While the LGBT+ rights movement has progressed in leaps and bounds across the Western world in recent decades, India remains one of a large minority of countries — around 40 per cent — that still criminalises [sic — there go those Brits again with their wacky spelling] consensual same-sex relations between adults. A decision to decriminalise gay sex would have wide and far-reaching implications, not just for the status of the LGBT+ minority in India, but also for other countries across the Commonwealth that still enshrine this element of 150-year-old Victorian morality in their laws.”

Not only are the Brits responsible for quaint spelling, but they’re also the reason gay sex in India was turned into a criminal offense to begin with.

“The Supreme Court began its hearing this week to decide whether to uphold a law commonly known as Section 377, a statute imposed on India and many Com-

䉴

1993 MURDER, from p.5

ed in a mistrial after jury selection had begun, but before the trial itself began.

Francis took the stand in his own defense and said that a third person entered the apartment while he was there and stabbed him in the hand. When he fled the apartment, Hawkins was still alive and talking with the third man, Francis said.

On cross-examination by Coleen Balbert, the assistant district who prosecuted the case along with Annie Siegel, also an assistant district attorney, Fran-

䉴

INSIDER TRADING, from p.16

committee charged with helping rescue the city’s nightlife industry is a travesty. Her appointment came at the insistence of Bor-

reality are they,’ said Catholic League President, Bill Donahue [sic], in an editorial. He called the changes ‘deeply disturbing.’ “‘The Advisory Committee sets anchor with the gay rights agenda by denying human nature,’ continued Donahue [sic]. ‘It says individual identity will be described as “sex assigned at birth, gender identity (includes transgender), gender role, and sexual orientation (includes heterosexual, bisexual, and homosexual).’ “‘Currently, students in the Fairfax County school district learn that abstinence is the one and only 100 percent effective method of preventing sexually transmitted diseases,’ said the Catholic League President. ‘The proposed change says abstinence is the “most effective” method. There is no new scientific research that merits the change. Indeed, it is being done for purely ideological reasons: to conform to the gay agenda, the Advisory Committee wants to include drugs alongside abstinence.’”

It’s an outrage! It’s a travesty of a mockery of a sham! It’s... it’s…

[Snore.]

monwealth nations by their British colonisers that prohibits ‘carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal,’” The Independent writes.

“Police and judges have widely interpreted this as referring to homosexual sex.”

It’s only natural that they would jump to that interpretation. My taste runs toward our bovine friends. There’s nothing wilder than a romp in the hay with a randy cow. Because I’m a gay man, I initially put the moves on a bull. Big mistake. Those horns, you know. Still, I don’t think he was being hostile. Maybe he just wasn’t that into me.

“Hopes are high for a ruling in favour of decriminalisation, after the central government of Narendra Modi declared it would not oppose the matter and leave it ‘to the wisdom’ of the apex court,” The Independent continues. “And during a hearing on Thursday, Justice Indu Malhotra gave an early inkling of the court’s views when she declared that homosexuality ‘is not an aberration, but a variation.’” Malhotra continued, “Because of family pressures and societal pressures, they are forced to marry the opposite sex and it

leads to bi-sexuality and other mental trauma.”

Um, maybe you’d better quit while your ahead, sister.

cis could not explain why he did not go to the 10th precinct, which was directly across the street from Hawkins’ apartment building, why he sought medical attention in the Bronx where he was living instead of at a facility closer to Hawkins’ apartment, and why he had specific memories of that 1993 evening, but little else involving the case.

Balbert asked for the maximum sentence at the July 18 proceeding, saying that Francis had spent the 19 years prior to his 2012 arrest as a free man.

“He has absolutely no remorse for what he has done,” she said.

Balbert also called Francis’ trial

testimony perjured.

“There was not a scintilla of evidence to support that anybody else was present,” Balbert said.

Only Francis’ and Hawkins’ blood was found at the crime scene.

Balbert read a letter to the court from Hawkins’ brother.

“I hope that God has mercy on your soul,” it read. “What you did to my brother was horrible.”

As he did during the trial, Francis maintained that he was an innocent man at his sentencing.

“I didn’t know him too long, but he was a good person,” Francis said. “I did not harm him… [The

neighbor] saw the killer, I was not the killer… I’m innocent, the district attorney knows I’m innocent.”

The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office was confronted with several obstacles in bringing this cold case to trial. The original investigative file at the 10th precinct was lost. Several pieces of physical evidence were stored in an NYPD warehouse that was flooded

by Hurricane Sandy. Police and federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) rules barred police from handling that evidence because it is tainted by toxic chemicals.

ough President Brewer, who has a long history of opposing nightlife in Manhattan in what were once districts friendly to gay venues. As beep, Brewer has abetted their demise through ghastly community

board picks and constant letters to the State Liquor Authority opposing license applications or demanding stipulations making it prohibitive for venues to open. The result is that discos have largely

disappeared from the heart of New York’s once-fabled nightscape.

I can’t help myself — I am completely unable to resist a Bill Dohohue story. This one’s pretty choice, especially given that those quoting him admiringly just can’t seem to spell his name right. As Doug Mainwaring, a contributor to LifeSiteNews.com, breathlessly reports, “A school board in an elite suburb of Washington, DC, attracted national attention when it was disclosed that it intended to remove ‘Clergy’ from its list of trusted adults. A parental uproar ensued in Virginia’s Fairfax County when Catholic Bishop Michael Burbidge penned a letter to the editor of a local paper, saying, ‘What a great insult to our clergy who give their lives in service to God’s people, to God’s young people (helping) them to do what is good and right.’ The school board relented on that one point, but went ahead and voted to enact other controversial changes to its students’ Family Life Education (FLE) curriculum. “‘The list of changes reads like a page out of the gay rights agenda, so thoroughly out of touch with

Follow @Sikov on Twitter and Facebook.

Next column: Not all is good for us with the Bronx Democratic leadership.

For more news & events happening now visit www.GayCityNews.nyc GayCityNews.nyc | July 19 – August 1, 2018

17

FILM

Queer Brazil on Film Astoria’s Museum of the Moving Image presents weekend of features, shorts

COURTESY OF MUSEUM OF THE MOVING IMAGE

Mauro Soares (pink hair) in Tavinho Teixeira’s “Sol Alegria.”

COURTESY OF MUSEUM OF THE MOVING IMAGE

Edilson Silva in “The Daytime Doorman.”

BY GARY M. KRAMER program of six shorts and five features depicting LGBTQ life in Brazil — all of them New York City premieres — will screen in the Bartos Screening Room at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, July 28-29. A full rundown of the weekend’s program, co-presented with Cinema Tropical and presented in Portuguese with English subtitles, follows.

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JULY 28 AT 2 P.M. The short film “Terremoto Santo” is a mini-musical about a handful of impassioned performers singing about God and the power of worship. One sequence involves a Joseph-like young man, who sings about jealousy and his coat, while a woman sings about the holy tremor of God that gives this film its title.

Note: “Terremoto Santo” is the series’ one offering without overt queer content.

“Music for When the Lights Go Out” is Ismael Caneppele’s experimental documentary/ fiction hybrid. Emelyn (Emelyn Fischer) is a teenager coming to terms with her lesbianism by creating a fictional story as “Bernardo” for a filmmaker (Júlia Lemmertz). Episodic and impressionistic, the film eschews narrative for mood. Many scenes

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feature characters illuminated at night, often kissing or just hanging out. There is little dialogue, but Caneppelle communicates emotion through his strong visuals, such as a couple in silhouette embracing in a field.

JULY 28 AT 4:30P.M. In Fábio Leal’s erotic gay romance “The Daytime Doorman,” Marcelo (Carlos Eduardo Ferraz) is attracted to his building’s married-with-child doorman, Márcio (Edilson Silva).

As the men share an incredibly intimate bike ride, the film builds its sexual tension. The relationship between the men plays out after they engage in a passionate encounter, generating much of the film’s dramatic tension. This excellent short speaks volumes about race, class, and sexuality.

The feature “Sweet Amianto,” directed by Uirá dos Reis and Guto Parente, opens with the trans title character (Deynne Augusto) rejected by her boyfriend (Dario Oliveira). She retreats home to revel in her despair, seeking advice from Blanche/ Carlos Wellington Mendes (dos Reis), a ghost. Blanche reassures Amianto she will find love, and a series of vignettes signifying dreams and fantasies unfold. In one, Amianto has an out-of-body experience. In another, Blanche tells the story of how Carlos died that involves him waking up one

LGBTQ BRAZIL Museum of the Moving Image 36-01 35th Ave. at 36th St. Astoria Jul. 28-29 movingimage.us morning completely green and covered in large blue spots, an obvious AIDS metaphor. A third has Amianto meeting Herbbie (Rodrigo Fernandes), who may become the love of her life. The episodes are each unusual and have interest, but even at 70 minutes “Sweet Amianto” feels slight and underdeveloped.

JULY 28 AT 7 P.M. The short “Vando Vulgo Vedita” starts out in a carefree fashion as a dozen-plus youths dye their hair blonde and head out for a day of frolicking at the beach. However, the group is soon missing their friend Vando. The sobering reason for his disappearance is presented in this haunting film about homophobic violence.

In contrast, “Sol Alegria” is an anarchic comedy — at times stylish, sexy, and political. The loosely-plotted story involves a father (director Tavinho Teixeira), his wife (Joana Medeiros), their son (Mauro Soares) who sports pink hair, and their daughter (Mariah Teixeira) parachuting into the country’s interior after dealing with a corrupt pastor.

They meet up with nuns who enjoy an anal penetration device. (They

insist the father try it, and he does).

There is a musical number in which topless nuns brandishing guns sing about weed. The family also has an encounter with arrow-wielding Native people before participating in a carnival-esque performance.

“Sol Alegrio” is a collection of wild, earthy scenes, from an erotic sequence featuring the son being fellated by one man while another guy asphyxiates him to a comic bit involving the son and daughter sitting on top of their moving car and shitting onto a cop car following them. The film is outrageous and outlandish, and at times amusing, but it doesn’t always make much sense.

JULY 29 AT 3 P.M. “Sr. Raposo” is Daniel Nolasco’s hypnotic short about his partner, Acacio (Geovaldo Souza), who is living with HIV. The film is full of striking imagery, from a handsome man sexually sucking on a gun to an erotic montage of various guys masturbating and an unusual sequence of Acacio being pursued in a forest by two hunky dudes carrying an ax. As anecdotes, fears, and dreams are recounted in voiceover, the strange rhythms of Acacio’s life come into focus.

“The Passion of JL” is a compelling documentary feature about Brazilian artist José Leonilson, who created more than 4,000 works of art before he died at age 36 from

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QUEER BRAZIL, continued on p.19

July 19 – August 1, 2018 | GayCityNews.nyc

FILM

Blood Will Out Brazilian werewolf fable explores the struggles of keeping up appearances

BY GARY M. KRAMER ood Manners” is a strange and wondrous fable. A Brazilian fantasy and stinging social commentary, it features motherhood, lesbian passions, and werewolf instincts, plus a few musical numbers thrown in for good measure. The film is the brainchild of co-writers/ directors Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra, the latter whose boyfriend John Trengove directed last year’s “The Wound.”

In São Paulo, Clara, an Afro-Brazilian woman, applies for a job as a nanny for Ana, who is pregnant with her first child. The interview is a bit awkward, but when Ana experiences some pangs, Clara manipulates her body and soothes her, prompting Ana to hire her.

Clara soon learns that Ana may be rich but she is also bored and lonely. She keeps a gun in the house, exercises, drinks beer, and maxes out a credit card on expensive shoes. Ana tells Clara what she learned about etiquette at finishing school, but also how her father threw her out of the house after she got pregnant and why she ditched her fiancé. When Ana explains the backstory of Ana’s baby daddy, Rojas and Dutra present the episode in a series of vividly illustrated panels depicting their strange sexual encounter. It is not much of a spoiler to say that the man who impregnated her was a werewolf.

That revelation explains why Ana sleepwalks barefoot through the city at night, feeding on an animal she kills. Clara, understanding her employer’s strange behavior,

GOOD MANNERS

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AIDS. In 1990, he started taping audio diaries on cassettes, and the film is a playback of his recordings with artwork and film clips illustrating his thoughts and emotions.

GayCityNews.nyc | July 19 – August 1, 2018

Directed by Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra In Portuguese, with English subtitles Distrib Films US Opens Jul. 27 IFC Center 323 Sixth Ave. at W. Third St. ifccenter.com

DISTRIB FILMS US

Isabél Zuaa in Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra’s “Good Manners.”

cuts herself to add blood to a pasta dish she prepares for Ana, satisfying the bloodthirsty pregnant woman’s cravings. (Ana’s doctor had told her not to eat meat.) Ana also has sexual designs on Clara; during a full moon, she hungrily devours her employee, kissing her, biting her, and engaging in some very passionate sex.

Power shifts between Ana and Clara in unexpected ways, and it’s not clear if their relationship is built on love, codependence, or convenience. Or something sinister. Despite the film’s fantastical elements, “Good Manners” plays most of the dramatic action at face value, even if the city, with its tony mall and empty streets, and Ana’s chic apartment seem otherworldly.

The story doesn’t really go full throttle into wild and crazy until its midpoint, when Ana unexpectedly gives birth in an unusual and violent way. The scene is shocking and funny and unsettling — and sets up the film’s critical second act. The birth scene is wisely fol-

lowed by one of the film’s musical numbers, giving viewers a chance to catch their breath after a Grand Guignol moment.

It’s not surprising that Ana’s baby prefers blood over milk when breastfeeding. Clara, raising the child, Joel (Miguel Lobo), works to keep his identity as a wolf-boy a secret — especially during the full moon. She creates a “little bedroom” for him to stay in, chained to the wall, so his transformation to beast won’t be a threat to anyone. Of course, it is only a matter of time before Joel’s true identity is discovered.

Joel’s secret double life, which the child at first only senses without really understanding, will certainly resonate with queer viewers.

But his relationship with caregiver Clara, while important, does not have the same tension as the one between Clara and Ana. That may be why the film flags a bit in its second half, as viewers wait for Joel to break bad.

The “action” scenes, when they occur, are discreetly filmed — per-

He describes his breakup with his partner and his loneliness. He cries watching Madonna frolicking in the ocean in her video for “Cherish,” and at the opening sequence from “Paris, Texas” featuring Harry Dean Stanton wandering in the

desert. In response, several pieces of Leonilson’s artwork juxtapose the ocean and the desert.

Leonilson confesses his anxiety about his relationship with his parents, his fear of contracting AIDS, and his musings about a potential

haps because children are involved — and this deliberately stylized approach may prompt chuckles from viewers who find the situations darkly funny. Rojas and Dutra moralize here, as the unfolding horrors spur a mob mentality against what Joel has become.

But are the filmmakers being too polite by not having “Good Manners” go for the jugular once it reveals its hairy hand? Perhaps.

But this is a minor drawback in an incredibly well made film.

As Clara, Isabél Zuaa maintains an air of mystery about her that makes her intriguing to watch throughout. A scene in a bar where she meets a woman who is attracted to her and tries to size her up is particularly satisfying in how she maintains her composure. Zuaa impressively conveys Clara being under control through most of the first act, while trying to be in control thereafter.

In support, Miguel Lobo is superb as Joel, a timid boy whose fears about everything are apparent in his facial expressions and body language, and Marjorie Estiano makes the complicated Ana more sympathetic than unlikeable. Like everything else in this fine film, Ana is not what she appears to be.

new boyfriend. When José does test positive for HIV, he re-evaluates his life and relationships and continues to create art. “The Passion of JL” is a poignant, moving commemora-

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FILM

Walking Away From It All Redemption tale leaves unanswered questions

BY STEVE ERICKSON

GENERATION WEALTH

irector Lauren Greenfield’s film “Generation Wealth” is the third version of her dystopian take on contemporary American culture sharing that name, following a collection of photos printed in a monograph and shown in New York at the International Center of Photography last year.

But the medium of film allows us to hear her voice directly. Greenfield implicates herself in the story she tells about rich kids in LA wrecking themselves in a world where Kim Kardashian has more influence than any novelist or painter.

Chris Hedges offers commentary throughout, but his moralistic scolding about “sexual hedonism” and “mass culture, especially TV, as an instrument of violence” suggests he lives at a monastic, pleasure-free remove from American life. Greenfield has worked for glossy magazines and directed advertising, while theoretically critiquing the way pop culture commodifies women’s bodies and encourages everyone to think they can become rich and famous.

Greenfield started out with a background in anthropology, but depicting other cultures didn’t interest her. (She became fascinated by Russia and China when they abandoned communist asceticism and dived headfirst into consumerism along with us.) After reading Bret Easton Ellis’ novel “Less Than Zero,” she began to see the wealthy LA teenagers she grew up among in ethnographic terms. This led to a series of photos of jaded 13-year-olds waving $100-bills while name-dropping Kate Hudson and saying “money ruins kids.” She shot a picture of the teenage son of REO Speedwagon’s singer partying in a Jacuzzi. More than 20 years later, she returns to the subjects of her earlier work, now in their late 30s or early 40s, to see how they’re doing and examine her own life.

The problem with “Generation Wealth” is that it tries for three different narrative arcs: illustrating the dying empire amused to death by the excess Hedges attacks on a macro level, then making points with individual stories of many individuals — a self-destructive adult film star who had a brush with more mainstream fame via Charlie Sheen, a crooked businessman who was a Harvard classmate of Greenfield’s, a wom-

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tion of this artist lost to AIDS and his legacy.

JULY 29 AT 6 P.M. The short “Heaven,” by Luiz Roque, opens with a news report

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Directed by Lauren Greenfield Amazon Studios Opens Jul. 20 Angelika Film Center 18 W. Houston St. at Mercer St. angelikafilmcenter.com/nyc Film Society of Lincoln Center Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center 144 W. 65th St. Filmlinc.org LAUREN GREENFIELD/ COURTESY OF AMAZON STUDIOS

Ilona (not Ivanka) at home with her daughter, Michelle, 4, in Moscow, 2012.

an whose desire for plastic surgery after pregnancy changed her body led to crippling debt — and exploring Greenfield’s own life. Around the hour mark of this 106-minute film, Greenfield says that chronicling her subjects’ many obsessions led her to realize she’s addicted to work in ways that have meant neglecting her family.

Her teenage sons confirm this.

While “Generation Wealth” is heavily reliant on talking-head interviews, it also uses a lot of the director’s photos. With one exception, she never pretends to speak for poor people. Adult film star Kacey Jordan (who uses three names during the period Greenfield chronicled her life) started out barely able to afford 89-cent fast food at Taco Bell but was able to send money to family members within a year of her debut in porn.

Greenfield’s film suffers from a heavy-handed structure. She repeatedly uses the device of montages of several people saying variations on the same thing.

The themes of “Generation Wealth” are predictable: American pop culture’s emphasis on beauty, as defined fairly narrowly, has a huge and negative impact on women and the pursuit of money over everything else is dangerous.

These ideas are certainly true. But when its final 20 minutes ends with the people Greenfield had earlier depicted pursuing wealth, fame, and beauty being satisfied living without owning a TV set and going from banking to fishing, it feels facile. Greenfield herself obviously finds

of a virus, spread by saliva, having high rates of infection among the trans community. The film makes salient points about how government ignores the needs of marginalized communities and it features some stylized visuals, but Roque also shoehorns in vignettes of sex,

the world she depicts simultaneously alienating and fascinating; if her work has become an addiction, it seems to be because she finds it fulfilling, not because she works 100 hours a week in pursuit of millions. She’s also avoided damaging her body the way so many of the women in “Generation Wealth” have. Engaging with a difficult world while acknowledging one’s complicity with it the way that she has seems a better response than going off the grid.

Paris, the neglected child of REO Speedwagon’s singer, survived his drug abuse and is now a clean and sober family man. Another subject of her early photos, “G-Mo,” gave up his dreams of being a rapper (who is shown in ludicrously materialistic videos) and now uses his real name, Cliff, and concentrates on raising his teenage kids to value education over money.

But what if one wants to have a career as a filmmaker, instead of giving up their ambitions and settling down?

Greenfield’s excellent last feature, “The Queen of Versailles,” was a cautionary tale about the rise and fall of a couple of rich vulgarians, but it eventually aired on the hyper-capitalist CNBC cable network. In 2018, America does not have a lot of room for artists who want to be able to make a living off their work without engaging in branding themselves or becoming careerists — one of our best independent directors, Kelly Reichardt, gets by working as a teacher, not through her film projects, and even the putatively more mainstream James Gray has admitted he struggles financially. That’s not the story “Generation Wealth” tells, but it’s a worthy subject for another film.

music, and club scenes that dilute his important message.

Another short, “We Are All Here,” chronicles the experiences of Rosa Lux, a 17-year-old trans woman who has been thrown out of her house. As she tries to build a shack in a swamp area where

the poor live, she considers issues of prostitution, poverty, education, and housing. Her hardscrabble life includes abuse, such as kids calling her “tranny,” and a lack of governmental support for her community.

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July 19 – August 1, 2018 | GayCityNews.nyc

FILM

Nico, Nuanced This Time Velvet Underground, Warhol hol alum survived, su then died young

BY STEVE ERICKSON 1995 documentary about German-born singer Nico, whose real name was Christa Päffgen, is titled “Nico Icon.” Italian director Susanna Nicchiarelli’s narrative film “Nico, 1988” pulls her off that pedestal and turns her back into a human being. Nico’s 15-year period of heroin addiction and status as a beautiful woman who acted in Fellini and Warhol films and sang with the Velvet Underground have both long been romanticized. One of the achievements of “Nico, 1988” is showing that touring clubs holding 200 people for most of the year in order to make a living while having to shoot heroin into one’s foot is a major bore.

Danish actress Trine Dyrholm plays Nico, doing her own singing. Living in Manchester in 1986, her new manager Richard (John Gordon Sinclair) gets her to tour Europe to promote her album “Camera Obscura,” released the previous year. She agrees, playing with a pickup band whose guitarist’s own drug habit causes problems. Along the way, she tries to resurrect her connection with her son Ari (Sandor Funtek), of whom she lost custody. The title refers to the year of Nico’s death; the film fills in her final two years and six months of life.

Nico had enough talent and charisma that the Velvet Underground’s 1967 debut album is named “The Velvet Underground and Nico” even though she only sings three of its songs. She began the 1960s with a brief appearance in Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita” and acted in several Warhol films, with him devoting an entire reel of “Chelsea Girls” to her.

She returned the favor by nam-

NICO, 1988

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In the face of all this, she remains resilient and inspiring.

The feature documentary “Bixa Travesty” aka “Tranny Fag,” is a bold film about the unabashed MC Linn da Quebrada, a transgender GayCityNews.nyc | July 19 – August 1, 2018

Directed by Susanna Nicchiarelli Magnolia Pictures Opens Aug. 1 Film Forum 34 W. 13th St. filmforum.com

ing her debut solo album after the film; however, it pursued a heavily orchestrated pop style (with the exception of the feedback-driven “It Was A Pleasure Then,” which sounds like a Velvet Underground outtake) that she would never again show interest in.

Starting with her next album, “The Marble Index,” Nico abandoned conventional pop and rock music in favor of intense dirges driven by her harmonium playing and accented monotone voice.

She became addicted to heroin in the early 1970s, in the company of filmmaker Philippe Garrel — her album “Desertshore” supplies the soundtrack to his best film, “The Inner Scar” — and that wrecked whatever career momentum she had. She lived to be 49 but only recorded six studio albums.

Throughout “Nico, 1988,” she is interviewed by men who ask about the Velvet Underground and the 1960s, while she insists on talking about her current music instead. She couldn’t have known it, but when the film begins in 1986,

she had already released her last studio album. Only one scene, at an illegal show in Prague that gets busted by the military, shows her performing to an appreciative audience. The rest of the film depicts her enjoying playing music, but always in rehearsal settings.

Richard seems very un-rock’n’roll, sporting a graying crew cut, mustache, and blazer, always standing around with a vague look of disapproval.

The one aspect of “Nico, 1988” that really doesn’t work is its use of flashbacks aping various film styles: documentary footage of World War II representing Nico’s childhood and really clumsy copies of 1960s avant-garde films a la Warhol. This film does not use a note of Nico’s actual music; instead, Dyrholm did her own singing backed by the Italian rock band Il Grande Freddo. Dyrholm does not look like the blonde, pretty Nico that most people remember from her appearances in Garrel and Warhol films. In this film, Nico is in her late 40s, and journalists

started noting in the late 1970s that she was beginning to put on substantial weight. Nicchiarelli has written that she wants to embrace Nico’s “fat and ugly” period.

Her approach to female middle age is extremely respectful; however, given the real-life Ari’s claim that Nico introduced him to heroin and reports of racist and anti-Semitic comments and behavior from her, the film’s depiction of her seems sanitized. Here, her guitarist is black and her manager is Jewish.

Given the role drugs play in Nico’s mythology, many people falsely assume that she died of an OD. There are several stories about how she actually died in the summer of 1988, but she apparently either had a heart attack or was hit by a car while riding a bike in Spain.

“Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami” director Sophie Fiennes has expressed anger at the way films about female musicians so often center on their addictions and selfdestruction. As this film depicts, Nico actually entered a methadone program shortly before her death.

Maybe the biggest achievement of “Nico, 1988” is showing a woman struggling to retain her dignity and making a living under difficult but not impossible circumstances, instead of suggesting there was anything cool about Nico’s gradual decline. Paradoxically, this film’s Nico is a survivor who died before her time.

performer, as well as her friends and family. The concert scenes are fantastic, and da Quebrada’s charisma extends off-stage as well.

She is seen co-hosting a radio show with fellow trans performer Jup do Bairro and talking about her life with her mother, her hairdresser,

and others.

“Bixa Travesty” often offers frank declarations, such as, “Before I was a fag, now I’m a tranny,” and indelible images— watch da Quebrada paint her genitals with a tube of lipstick by inserting it into her foreskin. Late in the film, a criti-

cal health issue facing her is introduced. Da Quebrada may be a bit too in-your-face for some viewers, but this film captures her spirit vividly. When she plays a piano and a particular key doesn’t work, it is a potent symbol for a voice that might go silenced.

COURTESY OF MAGNOLIA PICTURES

Trine Dyrholm and Sandor Funtek in Susanna Nicchiarelli’s “Nico, 1988.”

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THEATER

Songs, Socialists, and Saints Three revivals are a mixed blessing

BY CHRISTOPHER BYRNE n A Clear Day You Can See Forever” is a notoriously difficult musical.

With a clumsy book and a very mixed score, were it not for Barbra Streisand in the 1970 movie (also a dud), it might be completely forgotten. The original 1965 production did run 280 performances, though the 2011 revival didn’t even reach one-third that number.

Still, several of the songs have become enduring cabaret favorites, though others are not so great.

So, it seemed like quite the risk for the Irish Repertory Theatre — I still can’t figure out what’s “Irish” about this show — to tackle this particularly problematic piece.

Well, the risk paid off handsomely. Adaptor and director Charlotte Moore has wrestled with the book — and won — cut at least two of the more idiotic songs, and mounted a thoroughly delightful production with a lovely cast and simply glorious singing. She has turned “On A Clear Day” into an intimate chamber musical that fits easily into the small stage at Irish Rep. The plot concerns Daisy Gamble who has ESP and can make flowers grow. When Dr. Mark Bruckner hypnotizes her, to help Daisy stop smoking, he discovers that in the 17th century she was Melinda Wells. Reincarnation is real! And we’re off bouncing back and forth between the centuries. Mark falls in love with Daisy. Daisy thinks Mark only loves Melinda, and the time-traveling triangle becomes messy for a while, but it all works out in the end, of course, because Daisy finds herself as a happily, soon-to-be wife. Hey, don’t judge — it’s a musical. From 1965.

Director Moore and choreographer Barry McNabb keep the show moving. It’s a brisk and breezy two hours. Music director John Bell does a great job with the pared-down orchestrations. The ensemble is sensational. Stephen Bogardus as Dr. Bruckner is excellent, and you should see this for

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CAROL ROSEGG

Stephen Bogardus and Melissa Errico in Charlotte Moore’s adaptation of “On A Clear Day You Can See Forever,” at the Irish Rep through September 6.

ON A CLEAR DAY YOU CAN SEE FOREVER Irish Repertory Theatre 132 W. 22nd St. Through Sep. 6 Wed., Fri.-Sat. at 8 p.m.; Thu. at 7 p.m.

Wed., Sat.-Sun. at 3 p.m. $50-$70; web.ovationtix.com Or 866-811-4111 Two hrs., with intermission no other reason than to hear John Cudia as Edward Montcrief, Melinda’s suitor back in the day. His tenor is sublime. Melissa Errico is Daisy, and she is over-the-top terrific, combining the clear, bell-like soprano of a classic leading lady with outstanding comic chops and impeccable timing. Daisy is a loveable kook in the vein of Gittle Mosca from “Seesaw” or Flora from “Flora, The Red Menace.” In short, she’s a type, but Errico makes her appealing and, yes, loveable.

Moore and her company have done more than just create a delicious production. I’m willing to bet that this will be the version of this show done from now on. That much is clear as day.

Passion and politics go handin-hand in “Conflict,” Miles Malleson’s 1925 play now get-

CONFLICT Mint Theater Company The Beckett Theatre 410 W. 42nd St. Jul. 19-Jul. 21 at 7:30 p.m.

Jul. 21 at 2 p.m. $65; telecharge.com Or 212-239-4200 Two hrs., 10 mins., with intermission

ting a flat-out wonderful revival from the Mint Theater. The play is best described as a drawing room comedy with a sense of purpose, a little lighter than Shaw but no less earnest. Set in London, the plot concerns two school friends who stand for Parliament from the same district. Sir Ronald is a strict conservative, Tory, while his erstwhile chum Tom Smith is a Socialist. Caught between them is Lady Dare Bellingdon.

Dare, as she’s known, never really questioned her politics or her life for that matter. She’s the stereotypical woman between the World Wars, looking to strike out on her own and have an adventure of an indeterminate nature. But when she meets Tom and is exposed to his politics, she finds a voice and a point of view that is new to her and threatening to Ronald and her

THE SAINTLINESS OF MARGERY KEMPE The Duke on 42nd Street 229 W. 42nd St. Through Aug. 26 Tue.-Thu. at 7:30 p.m.

Fri.-Sat. at 8 p.m.; Sun. at 7 p.m.

Sat.-Sun. at 2:30 p.m. $55-$92; tickets.dukeon42.org Or 646-223-3010 Two hrs., 20 mins., with intermission

father, Lord Bellingdon. She may well have found the adventure she is looking for.

The script has plenty of room for political talk, but the characters are so well drawn that it feels natural. We know that this all takes place a very long time ago because one of the key plot points turns on ensuring that the competitors stick to the issues and not descend into personal attacks.

The company is outstanding under the clear-eyed direction of Jenn Thompson. Henry Clarke plays Sir Ronald as a bit of a disconnected prig. He’s quite charming, nonetheless. Jeremy Beck is fiery as Tom, who became a Socialist after experiencing firsthand the privations of being down

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THREE REVIVALS, continued on p.28

July 19 – August 1, 2018 | GayCityNews.nyc

OPERA

Midsummer Madness On Site Operaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s reprises Mozartâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s â&#x20AC;&#x153;The Secret Gardenerâ&#x20AC;? at Caramoor

BY ELI JACOBSON hen Will Crutchfield moved his â&#x20AC;&#x153;Bel Canto at Caramoorâ&#x20AC;? program to SUNY Purchase as the â&#x20AC;&#x153;Teatro Nuovoâ&#x20AC;? festival, Caramoor Festival artistic vice president Kathy Schuman turned to On Site Opera for a replacement operatic presentation.

Caramoor scheduled a revival of On Site Operaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s 2017 production of Mozartâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s â&#x20AC;&#x153;The Secret Gardenerâ&#x20AC;? performed for one-night only on July 13. This English-language adaptation of Mozartâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s youthful opera buffa â&#x20AC;&#x153;La Finta Giardinieraâ&#x20AC;? (1775) premiered a year ago in May, staged outdoors in the West Side Community Garden on West 89th Street.

Translator Kelley Rourke cut down Mozartâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s original sprawling threehour opera to just an hour and a half running time with new English spoken dialogue replacing the Italian recitatives.

At Caramoor, director Eric Einhorn ably restaged the production among the flower beds, sculptured hedges, and ornamental statuary of the Sunken Garden on the lushly landscaped grounds of the Rosen House in Katonah.

Mozartâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s three act Italian opera premiered when the composer was just 18 and the absurd libretto (attributed to Calzabigi) concerns the romantic entanglements of seven would-be lovers. Much of Mozartâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s music foreshadows his later collaborations with Da Ponte, and the characters are early sketches for their more famous counterparts in those mature masterworks: Sandrina is a precursor of Susanna and Pamina; her buffo baritone servant Nardo resembles Leporello and Figaro; the maid Serpetta is a cousin of Despina and Blondchen; the Mayor in his attempted seduction of his garden girl echoes Count Almaviva; the trouser role of Ramiro evokes Idamantes and Cherubino; and the haughty noble lady Arminda is one of Mozartâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s â&#x20AC;&#x153;angry women,â&#x20AC;? mixing the vanity

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GayCityNews.nyc | July 19 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; August 1, 2018

GABE PALACIO

Ashley Kerr and Jorell Williams in On Site Operaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s July 13 production of Mozartâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s â&#x20AC;&#x153;The Secret Gardenerâ&#x20AC;? at Caramoor.

and confusion of Fiordiligi with the temperamental excesses of Donna Elvira, Vitellia, and Elettra.

The muddled libretto underlies the conventional opera buffa plot devices (â&#x20AC;&#x153;A loves B who loves C who is disguised as D, etc.â&#x20AC;?) with elements of dramma giocoso violence and madness. The mixture of comedy and tragedy looks forward to the dramatic ambiguity of â&#x20AC;&#x153;CosĂŹ fan tutte,â&#x20AC;? â&#x20AC;&#x153;Don Giovanni,â&#x20AC;? and â&#x20AC;&#x153;Le Nozze di Figaroâ&#x20AC;? but with a more conventional musical vocabulary. The Countess Violante (here â&#x20AC;&#x153;Lady Violetâ&#x20AC;?), after surviving a violent quarrel with her unstable lover Belfiore, poses as Sandrina, a humble garden girl on the estate of the Mayor of Lagonero. Before the opera begins, the Count Belfiore stabbed Violante in a fit of jealous rage. Act II ends with Sandrina and Belfiore wandering in a wilderness where both simultaneously go mad and dance about distractedly.

On Site Operaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s streamlined edition shifts the emphasis to the comedy and romantic intrigue â&#x20AC;&#x201D; perfect for a light summer entertainment. Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Rourkeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s abridgement jettisoned the homicidal back story and the dual mad scenes â&#x20AC;&#x201D; half of Sandrinaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s mad scene provides a lucid lament while Belfioreâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s delirium is played for comedy as a flight

into romantic fancy. Rourkeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s contemporary English dialogue dis-

penses occasional slangy sitcom jokes while the colloquial lyrics are clear and unpretentious but go flat with repetition.

Einhornâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s direction keeps the singers running around in circles (the opera is played with the audience seated on all four sides of the sunken garden), and he isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t above staging crude visual jokes with bananas, garden shears, and water hoses. Beth Goldenbergâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s fanciful contemporary costumes featured bright floral prints, witty use of accessories, and fun hats.

The audience laughed at the high energy antics. None of the text that was jettisoned was on the level of a Da Ponte libretto, and the loss was offset by a gain in audience comprehension, dramatic conci-

ä&#x2030;´

ON SITE OPERA, continued on p.31

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23

Don’t Walk Away, Renée She’s splitting Beverly Hills — for New York, new show, new life

BY DAVID NOH want confess something right up front: I love this woman. It started back in 1970, when I went to a near-deserted Royal moviehouse in Waikiki to see “Made for Each Other” (1971), one of the greatest romantic misfit comedies ever made written by and starring the unknown-to-me husband and wife team of Renée Taylor and Joseph Bologna. Walking in from the usual Hawaiian sun-and-surf dazzled day, I suddenly became immersed in a strange new world, darker and chillier, but hilariously funny and real, called Manhattan, populated by all these Jews and Italian Catholics who were very neurotic and very, very loud. Ironically, all this was as exotic to me as palm trees and pineapples might have been to mainlanders, and I determined to become a part of it some day, no matter what.

Bologna unfortunately died last year, but his spouse of 53 years, Tayolor, is very much alive and making her much-anticipated New York comeback in her one-woman show, “My Life on a Diet,” at Theater at St. Clement’s through August 19. An interview with her can now be crossed off my bucket list, after she met me — during her rehearsals — one recent sweltering afternoon.

You know when you realize, almost immediately, that you’re in the presence of true greatness?

This made itself felt through her very low-key, deeply and delicately observant, and sharply intelligent presence, with the added bonuses of her being ultra-warm, asking almost as many questions about me as I did of her, as well as the visual, for she was quite a sumptuous sight, clad in a muted gold lame Harlow-ish cocktail dress with decolletage for days, her hands covered with the most intriguing rings I’ve ever seen. To the end of my days, the sound of her emblematic “Oh my God!” and “Oh, yeah?” will echo in my ears and bing a smile to my face.

“Yes,” she began, “this is a memoir of my life. Remember when

RENÉE TAYLOR

I

24

“My Life on a Diet” Theatre at St. Clement’s 423 W. 46th St. Through Aug. 19 Thu.-Sat. at 7 p.m.

Wed., Sat. at 2 p.m.

Sun. at 3 p.m. $65; mylifeonadietplay.com Or 212-239-6200 Ninety-five mins, no intermission

MYLIFEONADIETPLAY.COM

Renée Taylor appears in “My Life on a Diet,” at Theatre at St. Clement’s through August 19.

Nora Ephron remembered her life through what she wore? Well, I remember mine through what I ate.

Literally, something would happen and I’d remember it as when I was on the grapefruit diet. I’ve been on countless diets. I always wanted to be skinny, and was always a little zaftig. After this show, I’m doing one about Mae West and when Hollywood told her she was too heavy, she said, ‘Well, the men like me this way and that’s what I’m gonna do.’”

Born in the Bronx, Taylor moved with her family to FloÉrida at a very young age.

“It was my mother who wanted to be a movie star — Renée Adorée was her favorite. You’re too young, oh, you know ‘The Big Parade?’

She was beautiful, and my Pisces horoscope said I would be a movie star, so she encouraged me. But it’s all in the show! Nothing will be a surprise when you see it. When are you coming anyay?’”

After assuring her I would be at the opening, I pumped her about “Made for Each Other.”

“It was about Joe and me first getting together, with exaggerations. We thought it would be more fun if my character, Panda, wasn’t talented and the guy was more of

a roue. Wasn’t Olympia Dukakis great as his mother [dressed a la 1940 in 1970 and anti-Semitic]?

And her husband, Louis Zorich, also young then, played my father.

They just came in and read for those parts.”

Although its modest budget and intimate scale made it like an early indie film, it was actually produced

by Twentieth Century Fox. “They tried to talk us out of playing our roles, saying Streisand and maybe Midler had expressed interest, but I said, ‘I wanna play it.’ They let us do it because we’d just been Oscar-nominated for our script for ‘Lovers and Other Strangers,’ and this one was a wonderful script.

“We didn’t have much money, so the shoot was very fast. Luckily, we had written it, so we were very familiar with the material. We rehearsed it while we were writing it and also wrote during the filming.

We were very lucky — like my whole career. It was my husband’s very first movie but I had said, ‘Wouldn’t it be better to get Marlon Brando?’

[Laughs.] But he said, ‘No. I wanna be the one who says, “I love you.”’

“I had no idea he wanted to be an actor. He was first a director, then he was a writer, then he was an actor. He was gorgeous — here’s

his picture [on the desk of the set where she’s performing].

“A Jew like me marrying an Italian like him was a big deal back then, now it’s nothing with so many biracial, bi-religious marriages. But back then, people said, ‘I’m not coming to the wedding if you marry an Italian.’”

They got married on “The Merv Griffin Show.”

“I was a young actress who didn’t have any money but he liked me and I was on his show weekly. He said, ‘Let me give you away,’ and then everybody came only because they all wanted to be on TV.” “Made for Each Other” was an artistic but not a commercial success.

“It had no distribution because Fox was taken over by someone who was not behind the movie. After that we wrote for TV a lot, winning an Emmy, doing shows, specials, 22 Broadway plays. We had a good time, 53 years together, a wonderful working partnership.”

When Bologna passed away, “It was like a dream. I woke up this morning and thought, ‘This is like a dream because he was so alive.’

I still hear him, though. I speak to him and he speaks to me. And I don’t have to go to the cemetery like you tell me Mitzi Gaynor does for her husband. He just comes and talks to me. He’s still so present, even in this play we wrote together. In the near future, I will be doing another show, all about him, ‘The Book of Joe.’ Sometimes I am overcome with grief but sometimes overcome with joy about what we had together.

䉴

RENÉE TAYLOR, continued on p.26

July 19 – August 1, 2018 | GayCityNews.nyc

FILM

A Proper Portrait of Alexander McQueen Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui tell intimate story of tragic fashion genius

ANN RAY/ COURTESY OF BLEECKER STREET

Alexander McQueen as seen in Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui’s documentary film of his life and work.

ANN RAY/ COURTESY OF BLEECKER STREET

McQueen intently working.

DAN CHUNG, THE GUARDIAN/ COURTESY OF BLEECKER STREET

Lee McQueen with his beloved Mum, Joyce.

BY DAVID NOH he 1990s and early aughts were a golden age of fashion, largely for the presence of two genius designers, John Galliano and (Lee) Alexander McQueen, who would have been great in any age. Galliano’s brilliance lay in his glorification of romance — and sex — filtered through the prism of couture’s history and its myriad techniques, all of it brought together like the richest of banquets. McQueen was much darker and edgier, always pushing the envelope of good taste and the latest technology, whether it be in his dazzlingly fresh fabrications, the use of robots on his runway, or the butt cleavage visible in his scandalous “bumster” low-riding trousers, which put him on the map.

Like two phoenixes, however, they soared to the heights of dazing achievement and then crashed and burned young: Galliano with a career-killing, drunken, antiSemitic rant caught by a cellphone in a Paris café, and McQueen — beset by addiction and severe, lifelong depression originating in childhood abuse and exacerbated by the poisonous pressures of his career and the deaths of loved ones, including his beloved mother — hanging himself at 40 in 2010.

McQUEEN

T

GayCityNews.nyc | July 19 – August 1, 2018

Directed by Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui Bleecker Street Opens Jul. 20 Anglika Film Center 18 W. Houston St. at Mercer St. anglikafilmcenter.com/nyc Landmark at 57 West 657 W. 57th St. landmarktheatres.com

ANN RAY/ COURTESY OF BLEECKER STREET

McQueen shares a laugh.

“McQueen,” a new documentary

by Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui, tackles the short but densely packed life and career of this true, tortured artist, with immense sensitivity and perception.

Although it’s take is basically a “Behind the Clothes” approach, the film is mercifully free of overt glitz or glib tabloid sensationalism, presenting a really soul-stirring, deeply intimate portrait of a man who was so right — and blindingly innovative — about what to put on one’s back, but so devastatingly wrong about how to live your life, once you are attired so impeccably.

DAVID NOH: First of all I want to thank you for such a sensitive, beautiful and moving portrait of a man whom I, like so many others, idolized. I followed his extraordinary work from the beginning, collected and wore his clothes — pieces I bought over 25 years ago I still wear today and people rave over them. And, like so many others, I was shattered by his death and bewildered by it. Your film gave me so many answers to my questions.

PETER ETTEDGUI: Well, thank you so much for that. It means a lot to us, and I have to say that I knew about McQueen through my father [Joseph Ettedgui], who was in the fashion business, with a chain of stores, including Joseph. He had been introduced to McQueen by Isabella Blow and carried his fashion from the beginning.

I remember all the sensational

tabloid coverage of him and his outrageous shows, and my father would say, “You have to put all that rubbish aside, because this guy is really the most genius craftsman and tailor working today.” And, although I wasn’t in the fashion business at all, there was always this intrigue and interest about him unlike any other designer In the ‘90s and early 2000s, you couldn’t escape him. He was so active in a number of different areas, a cultural phenomenon, and yet we were also so aware of a tragic quality in him, which was why, at the height of his powers, he took his life.

And that was the story that interested us. Although neither of us were interested in the fashion business, we were so passionate about making this film.

NOH: If nothing else, your film is important because of the way it shows so many toxic aspects of this business. I dipped my toe in it once, loving fashion as I did, but ran away from it screaming, very quickly. Everything was so perfectly beautiful on the outside and absolutely hideous on the inside, the ugly, inhumane way people behaved and treated each other. Your wonderful interviews with his close

䉴

ALEXANDER MCQUEEN, continued on p.30

25

䉴

RENÉE TAYLOR, from p.24

“Sure, we fought a lot, but I really don’t understand when people say how tough marriage is. It was very easy for me to be happily married for 53 years. Joe was gorgeous and women threw themselves at him all the time. I’d say, ‘What did you think of that girl that was winking at you?’

“He’d say, ‘What girl?’ He only had eyes for me. I was once in this play with Bea Arthur and I overheard her telling someone on the telephone, ‘You should see the way he looks at her! And when she talks he listens!’

“All of a sudden, I thought, ‘I have to start looking at him when he looks at me, because I really hadn’t noticed it.’ So I would say something, and then look to see if he was looking and listening . And he was!”

Of all her work, Taylor’s personal favorite is the play “It Had to Be You.” “It was just great to to be in that with my husband on Broadway. It took years to write because twocharacter plays are hard — the butler can’t just walk in — it’s just me and him.”

They lived for years in a fabulous 1926 Tudor Revival mansion in Beverly Hills. When she showed it off for the first time to her family, all her aunt said was, “It’s a lot to clean.” They hung with the stars like Streisand, going to a birthday party at which Barbra’s then-lover Jon Peters gave her a diamond ring.

Taylor heard Streisand’s formidable mother asking, “Is that real?”

Streisand answered, “Is that real? You think someone would give me a diamond that wasn’t real?!”

“Beverly Hills was a sleepy town then. I went to the butcher shop and there was Lucille Bll,, fighting with the butcher, “Whaddya mean, lamb chops $1.49 a pound? Are you crazy?!’ I said to my mother, ‘I think she’s the richest woman in the world and she’s fighting like it’s life and death!”

At a dinner party chez Ball, Taylor watched in astonishment as Lucy brought a tub of Kentucky Fried Chicken to the table and threw pieces of it onto her guests’ gold plates.

“I couldn’t believe it, thought it was a joke, but Lucy said, ‘What are you talking about?’ Partially, she

26

OFFICIAL RENÉE TAYLOR FACEBOOK PAGE

Renée Taylor with her late husband and professional partner Joe Bologna in 2013.

OFFICIAL RENÉE TAYLOR FACEBOOK PAGE

Renée Taylor.

was cheap, always thought she’d be back in poverty at any time, and, partially, she loved KFC.” Taylor really knows the 411 about all the Hollywood icons and serves up the deepest dish but I have to honor her request for discretion, ‘Oh my God! You can’t print all of this — I’ll never be able to work or have lunch anywhere again!”

It’s going to be nice to have her back here, as she’s put the Beverly Hills house on the market for $8.5 million — who says writers don’t make money? —and just signed a one-year lease on a Manhattan apartment. I told her the ladies who lunch at the Zabar’s counter — one of my favorite city spots — would be thrilled to see her. She said, “I think I have to go.” Twice.

Taylor is often recognized when out in public, particularly for her appearances as Fran Drescher’s mother on “The Nanny.”

“I just had dinner with Fran last

night,” she said. “She’s doing great, into a million different things. I loved being on her show, so much fun!”

Taylor studied acting with Lee Strasberg and my old teacher, Stella Adler.

“Marilyn Monroe was in my class, and she was really gorgeous, her skin was translucent — you could see through it. When she got up to act she was so frightened and nervous, she actually shook. She’s now got this reputation as being difficult and blah blah blah, but I thought she was great, everything she did, ‘Bus Stop,’ ‘The Misfits!’”

When Taylor said, “You know, I do an impersonation of Stella,” I had to make her do it. She took my arm and gently stroked it, looking deep into my eyes and crooning, “You want so much to be an actor.

That’s wonderful, wonderful! You have wonderful instincts.”

“She was always touching peo-

ple, feeling people. She would touch all the boys in class. From Strasberg, I got inspiration, passion for the theater seeing it through his eyes, passion for actors and acting.

Relaxation and being in the moment, Stanislavski, Boleslawski. I still hear his voice before I go onstage: ‘Relax the shoulders, relax everything. Just let it come out.

You can’t write on a blackboard that’s been written on. You have to erase everything.’”

As for the Method and the dredging up of one’s emotional past for a performance, Taylor said, “That’s great! I love that, and I love actors [especially two she saw on the stage — Brando in “A Streetcar Named Desire” and James Dean as an Arab boy in Gide’s “The Immoralist,” in which he had no lines but just stared at Louis Jourdan and stole the show]. I was in therapy for 22 years and I love dredging things up. But by now everything has been dredged, I think, but I love taking it out and looking at it.

“I cried and carried on, and was in group therapy, did it all. I remember a few years ago, someone said to me, ‘You are the saddest person I’ve ever met.’ And I thought it was a compliment, only years later did I realize that it wasn’t. You said I was kind of Chekhov. I love him and identify with his people — ‘I am in mourning for my life’ — all that. It’s weltschmerz, the joy of suffering.”

Taylor has a son, Gabriel Bologna.

“He’s a writer and director, doing a couple of movies now, one of which, ‘Tango Shalom,’ I’m in.

Here’s the thing: he writes sad things, historical thrillers, never comedy, and I don’t know why.

He did a horror film that I had to walk out of, it was so gruesome.

‘How can you make a horror film?,’ I asked him. He said, ‘They looked at my scripts and said, “Come back when you have a horror movie.”’”

When I remarked that that’s all movies are about today, Tayor said, “It’s all gonna change after Trump goes. People will be going the other way. He’s an implement of change. Look a him! And I I think you should try acting again. The thing you fear most you should always do! I wish I was drinking.

We’d go have a drink now but I can’t because we’re taking pictures tomorrow, but we will do it!”

July 19 – August 1, 2018 | GayCityNews.nyc

GayCityNews.nyc | July 19 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; August 1, 2018

27

ä&#x2030;´

THREE REVIVALS, from p.22

and out in the post-war years. The contrast between Tom and Ronald is both stark and subtle, which allows both men to be sympathetic, though there can be no question that the playwrightâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s sympathies are with Tom. Jessie Shelton gives a bright and heartfelt performance as Dare, and Graeme Malcolm is perfectly cast as the older aristocrat Lord Bellingdon.

The lovely, detailed set is by John McDermott, and the period costumes are by Martha Hally. As always, what the Mint can do with an Off-Broadway budget never ceases to impress.

This is the second Malleson play the Mint has presented. Last year, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Unfaithfully Yoursâ&#x20AC;? approached the then-controversial concept of fidelity and an open marriage.

Mallesonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s forthright takes on sex and politics are rational and well-considered. This is theater for adults â&#x20AC;&#x201D; and the only place youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll see a good, clean political fight these days.

Satire can be an unwieldy

form. Largely rhetorical, it sits somewhere between comedy and social criticism. When itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s done extremely well, you get a Jonathan Swift, Mark Twain, or the comic strip â&#x20AC;&#x153;Doonesbury.â&#x20AC;? Satire is the witâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s favorite tool for poking fun at institutions, belief systems, or the follies of humanity and revels in exaggeration, silliness, and sarcasm. Yet because it trades heavily in implication, satire also has a short shelf life. A contemporary audience, for example, would have no idea which Athenian nobles Aristophanes was lampooning, though his audiences did.

Religion has been a fertile inspiration for satire for centuries, partially because it could deliver indirect attacks on the Church in times when direct questioning could land one in jail, or worse.

Chaucer and his â&#x20AC;&#x153;Canterbury Talesâ&#x20AC;? are still the benchmark for this form. Given the fervor of the Evangelical Church today in the US, criticism can raise the ire of the faithful easily, though a sharp retort on Twitter is nowhere near as lethal as a stint in the Tower. â&#x20AC;&#x153;The Saintliness of Margery

Kempe,â&#x20AC;? now at The Duke, wades into our fractious culture with a biting satire of self-aggrandizement, the quest for celebrity, grasping selfishness, and corrupt belief systems. Though the original play is 60 years old, these themes are, woefully, very relevant. The plot concerns Margery, a bored housewife who yearns to be a star. Given that she lives in the 14th century and has no access to Instagram, her only recourse, as she sees it, is to become a saint, which she sets out to do, in the process wreaking havoc on her family, the traveling companions she forces herself on, and the entire city of Jerusalem, claiming the special privileges that come with being chosen by God. Reason and rationality cannot reach her. Her prevailing sentiment, which has a hauntingly contemporary echo, is that when youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re a saint they let you do it. Indeed they do, as Margery is highly adept at making people fear God, and, despite several setbacks, her quest for the Medieval equivalent of ratings will not be thwarted.

This play also points out satireâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s shortcomings. For one, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s too

long. Plot points are overly labored, undermining the picaresque nature of the plot and blunting its bite. Clocking in at over two hours, the play could lose 30 minutes and the intermission and be more successful. As directed by Austin Pendleton, the characters often lack affect or speak with a contemporary cadence. Listening to actors in period costumes selfconsciously sounding like teens at a modern mall is now so overused itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s become one tired trope.

Andrus Nichols plays Margery as a woman chasing fame with Khardashian-esque ferocity.

Thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s not much nuance in the role or the performance, but Nichols has a wonderful presence and that works well for her in this. The rest of the cast switch roles, sometimes with dizzying speed. Not much is demanded of them, and they deliver.

For this to have worked as satire, though, the audience should be sitting there saying, â&#x20AC;&#x153;I see what you did there. Go get â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;em.â&#x20AC;? Instead, the response was a much more blasĂŠ, â&#x20AC;&#x153;I get it. Can I go home now?â&#x20AC;?

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28

July 19 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; August 1, 2018 | GayCityNews.nyc

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29

䉴

woman in these Philip Treacy hats? But I was much too scared to approach her [role in McQueen’s life].

By a lovely coincidence, it turned out that her widower, Detmar, is now engaged to a filmmaker, Martha Fiennes [Ralph’s sister] I had worked with as a screenwriter, so in a sense, that was our in. We went to stay with him at The Hills [his palatial estate home with Isabella] and had this fantastic night before the day of our interview. I could not stop him from talking and was afraid he’d have nothing left to say in front of the camera, not to mention hungover [laughs].

But there’s no stopping Detmar once he gets going and we got a very human and emotional interview that really evoked that period. Also, he was the first person to really talk to us about mental health in the fashion business. He saw Isabella and Lee take their own lives, but mental health is not really something the industry wants to talk about. They’d like to keep it all under wraps, so we were grateful that he brought that aspect to our film.

ALEXANDER MCQUEEN, from p.25

friends and assistants, like Mira Chai Hyde and Sebastian Pons, were so revealing about all the unbearable pressures and crap people had to go through just to make something beautiful to wear. But I was most impressed by the participation of McQueen’s family! How did you get their involvement? I’m sure there were and are other McQueen projects in the works, if nothing else.

IAN BONHÔTE: Yes, there was another project like ours. It wasn’t easy at first to convince people to participate, and we actually did not try to. What we did was we tried to expose why we wanted to do the film and let them decide for themselves.

In terms of the family, our break came when we met Gary McQueen, his nephew, who worked with him, and through him we met his sister, Janet. We spent a couple of hours, talking to her, and at the end of the interview she said she had a really great time and knew that our film would not focus on all the sensational elements of his life [excessive drug and alcohol abuse, unsavory sexual liaisons, and more].

We never asked her to do the film but we kept in touch and were talking one day when she suddenly asked, “Would you like me to do an interview for your film?” We never pushed it, but always had a very respectful approach to people.

There was a need to use white gloves because of all the tragic dimensions of Lee’s passing. It happened not so long ago, so anyone who would share with us would also be sharing their own lives and memories. We were very humble and aware of our great responsibility to all the people in the film.

NOH: I couldn’t help noticing a dearth of celebrity interviews, like David Bowie (who wore McQueen’s brilliant, distressed Union Jack frock coat on his rock tour), Sarah Jessica Parker (who accompanied him to the Met Gala one year, dressed by him, while he wore a kilt), or his ultimate muse, Kate Moss (immortalized in a jaw-dropping hologram to climax one of his shows).

ETTEDGUI: We were on a tight schedule and when you try to get a list of celebrities, you spend all your days and nights trying to get them. And also we didn’t want to have people you’d expect to be in the film. What we do have — our real stars — are his family and friends, people who worked with him day in and out, who really knew him and not just on the red carpet or at a party.

We wanted to do something very intimate, filled with those who knew him in a practical sense, and once we got on that path we realized that that was the better way to go.

BONHÔTE: Thankfully, we were able to meet these people. Our stars were the ones who knew him themselves. We didn’t need other stars to talk about him.

30

ANN RAY/ COURTESY OF BLEECKER STREET

McQueen dressing a model.

ANN RAY/ COURTESY OF BLEECKER STREET

A McQueen fashion.

NOH: One definite star who also emerges is Isabella Blow, the tragic early muse and supporter of McQueen, who, as an editor, bought his entire graduation collection from Central St. Martin’s College of Art and Design, but was later dropped in the dust by him. Her suicide devastated him and, along with the death of his mother, spurred his own demise according to your film and numerous other sources.

ETTEDGUI: She was indeed a fascinating character and could and should not be undervalued. I’d see her at fashion shows in the ‘90s and wondered who was this extraordinary

NOH: What so impressed me was the amount of rare archival footage — highly personal home movies, images, and recordings — that really bring you into McQueen’s world. How in the world did you find all that?

BONHÔTE: From our 150 to 200 sources, we literally looked everywhere because there are no places or archives you can just go into for fashion investigations like this. We started with the obvious — YouTube — and from there tried to track down things, if we saw pictures or someone holding a camera somewhere, an interviewer, or if we recognized someone looking into a camera.

We wanted to find what hadn’t been seen before, the rushes, so to speak, from that period. None of what we found was digitized, so we had to convince people to trust us and go into their archives, pushing them to look for the best stuff, asking if they had a special memory, a box of stuff, or remembered being filmed. We found things in archives, too, that had been misplaced or mislabeled, and Mira was especially helpful and shared things we could weave into our story.

FYI: It’s really the groundwork of any good documentary, and not many people realize all the endless time and effort this takes, like detective work.

ETTEDGUI: Very much so, but it’s also a lovely part of the process. I can’t tell you when we’d get hold of something rare. Ian was in Los Angeles when he saw what Mira had, and he called me, saying, “You won’t believe what I’m looking at!” So exciting, and we’d be jumping up and down!

BONHÔTE: For a filmmaker, this is key because you know the impact it will have on your audience, even if the bad quality of a video is obvious when blown up to the big screen. But

䉴

ALEXANDER MCQUEEN, continued on p.31

July 19 – August 1, 2018 | GayCityNews.nyc

ä&#x2030;´

ON SITE OPERA, from p.23

sion, and clarity. Mozartâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s youthful music shone brighter in a smaller framework.

The cast was young and energetic with some accomplished singing on the distaff side and characterful work from the men â&#x20AC;&#x201D; the entire cast sang with dramatic point and commitment. Ashley Kerrâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s dark hued lyric soprano brought out the inner confusion and emotional turmoil in Sandrinaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s character â&#x20AC;&#x201C; a few higher phrases would have benefited from a freer vocal production with more tonal float.

Emilie Savoy as the jealous, demanding Arminda also had a rich soprano timbre with a not inappropriate edge befitting her tempestuous character. Her angular soprano voice is filling out and maturing but has retained flexibility and an easy top.

Naturally expressive and intense, mezzo-soprano Kristin Gornsteinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s mournful timbre with a tense quick vibrato captured the ardor and despair of Armindaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s rejected ex-lover Ramiro. Katrina Galkaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s brightly sung Serpetta created a quirky, off-kilter character more interesting than the usual pert soubrette.

Spencer Viatorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s plangent,

ä&#x2030;´

ALEXANDER MCQUEEN, from p.30

itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s not about low lighting or whatever, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s about the emotional impact, and thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s why this film was made, not to disseminate information, but to convey the emotions of his life and get people to respond to our portrayal of it.

ETTEDGUI: Yeah, you get the first impression that McQueen was kind of an abrasive, challenging, bad-ass kind of character. Yet when you see this stuff, thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s this other side of him, what a big kid he really was, incredibly tender and loving, and how much he adored his dogs and Mum. Heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s another person behind the myth.

It was wonderful to show him as a human being and not an icon.

NOH: After that record-breaking McQueen exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum, there was so much additional interest in him. How has your film been received?

BONHĂ&#x201D;TE: Very well and itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s GayCityNews.nyc | July 19 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; August 1, 2018

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warm-toned lyric tenor and puppyish ardor made the treacherous Count Belfiore more palatable on the stage than he is on the printed page. Tenor Michael Kuhn as the lecherous Mayor and baritone Jorell Williams as the bumbling servant Nardo sang and acted their purely comedic roles with such verve and uninhibited energy that occasional vocal lapses could be easily ignored.

Acoustics were compromised when the singers were facing away from sections of the audience but there was excellent ensemble and coordination. Musical director Geoffrey McDonald led the ninepiece Grand Harmonie ensemble in a beautifully lucid chamber reduction of Mozartâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s score.

The audience vastly enjoyed the presentation on a perfect mild summer night. Caramoor will follow up the rare Mozart with a rare Handel opera in concert â&#x20AC;&#x201D; â&#x20AC;&#x153;Atalantaâ&#x20AC;? led by Nicholas McGegan on July 22.

In an online exclusive at gaycitynews.nyc, Eli Jacobson looks at three international coloratura sopranos the Met brought forward this spring in the title role of the Mary Zimmerman production of â&#x20AC;&#x153;Lucia di Lammermoor.â&#x20AC;?

been gratifying, and whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s really touching is that itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s been loved by loads of people from different cultures, genders, sexual orientations, or whatever. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a very great feeling when you realize you have touched people on an emotional level. It makes you feel that as people we are actually all the same. We had people from Poland a few days ago raving about it, and theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re pushing it massively out there in a huge amount of cinemas â&#x20AC;&#x201D; if it was in the US, our distribution would be comparable to it being on thousands of screens, like a blockbuster. It was unexpected to see that in a country like that. They donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t see it as a fashion film, but the portrait of genius and thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s great!

ETTEDGUI: We never set out to make a fashion film, we wanted to reverse that. We want people to come see this film who donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have the slightest interest in fashion, if possible. Because you donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t need to know about fashion to appreciate a portrait of an extraordinary man.

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31

䉴

TRANS STUDENTS, from p.7

The court pointed out that the district had gone out of its way to accommodate the privacy concerns of cisgender students with the bathroom and locker room renovations.

As a result, McKee concluded, even if the district’s policy were held to a stand of “strict scrutiny” given the fundamental privacy rights of cisgender students, it would survive because of the compelling state interest involved and the way the district went about implementing it.

Requiring trans students to use only the single-user facilities would not satisfy the state’s compelling interest, but instead “significantly undermine it” since, as the Chicago-based Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals stated last year in the case of Wisconsin transgender high school student Ash Whitaker, “a school district’s policy that required a transgender student to use single-user facilities ‘actually invited more scrutiny and atten-

䉴

SEX REASSIGNMENT, from p.8

against a state agency, a question never before addressed by the Iowa courts. In 2009, the Iowa Supreme Court unanimously ruled in favor of marriage equality, concluding that discrimination against gay people was subject to heightened scrutiny, placing a significant burden on the state to justify excluding same-sex couples from marriage.

Gamble found many parallels to the analysis of sexual orientation

䉴

SURVEILLANCE, from p.6

“The whole element of homosexuality in the ‘60s, it was constantly conflated with subversion, with people who were mentally unbalanced,” said Perry Brass, a member of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF), an early radical group.

The NYPD shared its records with other law enforcement agencies.

“The Correspondence Unit is being requested to forward details contained in this report to the Intelligence Unit of the Philadelphia Police Department,” Bianco wrote.

For the fi rst Annual Reminder

32

tion from his peers.’” The policy the cisgender students and their parents sought, the court observed, “would very publicly brand all transgender students with a scarlet ‘T,’ and they should not have to endure that as a price of attending their public school.”

The court also noted that “no court has ever” recognized an expansive constitutional right of privacy to the extent demanded by the cisgender the plaintiffs. “School locker rooms and restrooms are spaces where it is not only common to encounter others in various stages of undress, it is expected.”

Even the Supreme Court has commented that “public school locker rooms are not notable for the privacy they afford.”

The Third Circuit panel also endorsed Judge Smith’s conclusion that there was no Title IX violation here. As Smith found, “The School District’s policy treated all students equally and therefore did not discriminate on the basis of sex.”

Smith had also found that the factual allegations did not rise to the

level of a “hostile environment” claim, and the Third Circuit panel agreed. To find a hostile environment, the court would need evidence of “sexual harassment that is so severe, pervasive, or objectively offensive and that ‘so undermines and detracts from the victims’ educational experience that he or she is effectively denied equal access to an institution’s resources and opportunities.’”

McKee pointed out that Title IX regulations do not mandate that schools provide “separate privacy facilities for the sexes,” but rather permissively states that providing separate facilities for male and female students is not a violation as long as the facilities are equal. He observed that the district’s policy “allows all students to use bathrooms and locker rooms that align with their gender identity. It does not discriminate based on sex, and therefore does not offend Title IX.” The court also agreed with Judge Smith’s conclusion that the state common law privacy claims asserted by the plaintiffs were

unlikely to be successful, having found that “the mere presence of a transgender individual in a bathroom or locker room is not the type of conduct that would be highly offensive to a reasonable person,” which is Pennsylvania’s standard.

With the district’s trans-supportive policy now remaining in effect while this case is litigated, the likely next step, if ADF does not slink away in defeat, would be to litigate motions for summary judgment if the two sides agree that there is no need for a trial over disputed facts. ADF, however, is likely to aggressively contest the facts, so it may be that only a trial will resolve this case.

Levin Legal Group of Huntingdon Valley, Pennsylvania, represents the school District. The ACLU of Pennsylvania and the ACLU’s national LGBT & HIV Project, with volunteer attorneys from the law firm Cozen O’Connor, represent the Pennsylvania Youth Congress Foundation, which intervened in the case to protect the interests of Boyertown transgender students.

and gender identity claims, and concluded that heightened scrutiny should apply to Good and Beal’s claims, as well.

Using that standard, Gamble found, the state utterly failed to meet its burden of proof, resting its arguments on an outmoded misunderstanding of gender identity and failing to counter the plaintiffs’ expert testimony. As a hedge against appeals court review, Gamble also examined the issue applying a less demanding stan-

dard, asking whether the state policy had any rational basis, but the state fared no better. The plaintiffs, he found, had “negated every reasonable basis for the classification that might support disparate treatment” of them. Agreeing with Good and Beal, Gamble found that enforcing the state’s policy was an “arbitrary or capricious” administrative action that deprived them of their equal rights.

DHS, Gamble concluded, “acted in the face of evidence upon which

there is no room for difference of opinion among reasonable minds.

The exclusion of coverage was unreasonable, arbitrary, and capricious.”

Gamble also rejected DHS’s plea that it be given time to develop a new regulation and that the court’s order not be immediately binding or have any broader effect.

Iowa’s attorney general did not comment in the immediate aftermath of the ruling, which could be appealed.

Day in 1965, “One bus left from the New York area with thirty persons on board,” the detective wrote adding that 75 people attended that year altogether, with people coming from New York City, Washington, DC, and Philadelphia. Bianco noted that Craig Rodwell was the chair of the Annual Reminder Day Committee and Dick Leitsch was Mattachine New York’s president.

Between 1966 and 1972, the records show police spying on protests mounted by Mattachine, GLF, the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA), and many other groups that joined the protests. Just six of the 19 re-

ports were filed by patrol officers, and detectives filed the rest. Detectives often came to know participants and would speak to them on occasion.

At a February 1971 demonstration held at the city’s jail on Centre Street, Detective Francis Murphy wrote, “The following persons were observed: Mike Gimble and Frank Kameny.” Murphy took down the license plates of cars that discharged passengers who then joined the protest.

At all the protests, police diligently gathered flyers about the event or that announced future meetings of the groups involved in

the actions. They also subscribed to mailings lists and gathered documents that were distributed at meetings they attended.

The NYPD ultimately collected a significant amount of material created by early LGBTQ rights groups and police shot a lot of film and took pictures of those groups.

“It does not shock me,” Brass said. “We constantly during the GLF period alluded to it, that our phones were being tapped and people were infiltrating… I think the reason the police were looking at GLF is the rhetoric was all about the radical overthrow of the government.”

July 19 – August 1, 2018 | GayCityNews.nyc

ADVERTORIAL

TOP DRIVER DISTRACTIONS Using mobile phones Leading the list of the top distractions behind the wheel are mobile phones.

Phones now do more than just place calls, and drivers often cannot pull away from their phones, even when driving. According to the California Department of Motor Vehicles, studies have shown that driving performance is lowered and the level of distraction is higher for drivers who are heavily engaged in cell

phone conversations. The use of a hands-free device does not lower distraction levels. The percentage of vehicle crashes and nearcrashes attributed to dialing is nearly identical to the number associated with talking or listening.

Daydreaming Many people will admit to daydreaming behind the wheel or looking at a person or object outside of the car for too long. Per-

GayCityNews.nyc | July 19 – August 1, 2018

haps they’re checking out a house in a new neighborhood or thought they saw someone they knew on the street corner. It can be easy to veer into the direction your eyes are focused, causing an accident. In addition to trying to stay focused on the road, some drivers prefer the help of lane departure warning systems.

Eating Those who haven’t quite mastered walking and

chewing gum at the same time may want to avoid eating while driving. The majority of foods require a person’s hands to be taken off of the wheel and their eyes to be diverted from the road. Reaching in the back seat to share some French fries with the kids is also distracting.

Try to eat meals before getting in the car. For those who must snack while en route, take a moment to pull over at

a rest area and spend 10 minutes snacking there before resuming the trip.

Reading Glancing at an advertisement, updating a Facebook status or reading a book are all activities that should be avoided when driving. Even pouring over a traffic map or consulting the digital display of a GPS system can be distracting.

33

34

July 19 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; August 1, 2018 | GayCityNews.nyc

䉴

RELIGIOUS TESTS, from p.9

In her ruling, Tucker rejected Catholic Social Services’ argument that it was not a public accommodation subject to the city’s nondiscrimination ordinance. She also noted that the group’s contract with the city specifically incorporated by reference the relevant nondiscrimination provisions of city statute.

In June, the ACLU and the ACLU of Pennsylvania sought to intervene in the case on behalf of the Support Center for Child Advocates, a nonprofit advocating for children in the foster care system, and Philadelphia Family Pride, a nonprofit group of LGBTQ people and their families, including samesex foster parents and prospective foster parents. The ACLU argued that the people represented by the two groups would be harmed by a ruling in favor of Catholic Social Services and asked the court to allow them to participate in the litigation as defendants in order to protect their interests.

Though Tucker had not ruled on that motion, she allowed the ACLU to submit a brief in support of the city’s position and to make argument in court.

In a written statement, Reggie Shuford, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of

䉴

LEGAL POT, from p.11

conclusion that marijuana is less harmful than alcohol or tobacco and undermine the rationale for its prohibition under federal law.

The exaggerated claims about harm from marijuana have been accompanied by a vicious enforcement policy. “Statewide, New York’s marijuana arrest rate of 535 arrests per 100,000 people was the highest of any state in 2010 and double the national average” with 103,698 arrests for possession, according to the report.

“The impact of low level marijuana offenses extends” beyond expenditure of criminal justice resources, the report notes. “Individuals who have a criminal record often face challenges throughout their lives.”

It disproportionately criminalized black and brown residents. In 2017, the problem persisted, the reporting finding that “86 percent of the GayCityNews.nyc | July 19 – August 1, 2018

Pennsylvania, said, “First and foremost, this is a victory for children in Philadelphia who need a loving home and can’t afford to have good families turned away for failing to meet a religious litmus test. We’re proud that the city is committed to ensuring that no qualified family that comes forward to care for a child in need is turned away because of their sexual orientation or other reasons unrelated to the ability to care for a child. And we’re thrilled that the court rejected the claimed constitutional right to discriminate against loving families.”

According to the ACLU’s LGBT and HIV Project, Tucker’s ruling could have repercussions for states that have passed laws permitting agencies to apply such religious tests in foster care and adoption settings.

Leslie Cooper, the Project’s deputy director, in a written statement, said, “When faith-based agencies choose to receive taxpayer dollars to provide public child welfare services, their religious beliefs cannot trump the best interests of the children in their care. The court saw it was not only permissible for the city of Philadelphia to prohibit discrimination by its contract agencies, but that allowing the use of religious screening requirements in the public child welfare system would likely violate the Constitu-

tion.”

Tucker’s ruling came just two days after Republicans on the US House Appropriations Committee voted to give child welfare agencies the right to establish tests based on “sincerely held religious beliefs or moral convictions” for eligible adoptive or foster parents. Under the provision, federal agencies could not deny public funding to such agencies and states doing so would be penalized in their receipt of federal dollars for federal child welfare services.

The provision is an amendment to an omnibus health, education, and labor appropriations bill, though resistance by Republican moderates and Democrats in the House or by Democrats in the Senate can block it from ever becoming law.

The effort is clearly an effort to nationalize a policy that social conservatives have been pushing in Republican-dominated states.

Last week also saw action on a third religious opt-out issue, this time in Hawaii. There, the State Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal of an intermediate level appellate ruling that an owner-occupied bed & breakfast violated the state’s public accommodations law by refusing to rent a room to a lesbian couple from California seeking vacation accommodations.

A February 23 ruling from a three-judge panel had rejected Aloha Bed & Breakfast owner Phyllis Young’s argument that her constitutional rights — including her free exercise of religion — were violated.

The Hawaii court’s action still leaves open Young’s ability to take her case to the US Supreme Court.

In early June, the nation’s high court kicked the question of religious opt-outs from sexual orientation nondiscrimination laws down the road when it ruled in favor ofMasterpiece Cakeshop owner Jack Phillips on the grounds that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission had shown prejudicial “hostility” toward his religious views when it ruled he acted illegally in refusing to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple. The court then punted again, sending a florist’s appeal of a similar public accommodations ruling out of Washington State back to that state’s Supreme Court for further consideration in light of the Masterpiece Cakeshop ruling.

Should Judge Brett Kavanaugh be approved by the Senate for Justice Anthony Kennedy’s vacant Supreme Court seat by the time a potential Hawaii appeal reaches the high court, it could provide critical insight into how the post-Kennedy court will proceed on significant LGBTQ rights questions.

people arrested for marijuana possession in the fifth degree in 2017 were people of color; 48 percent were Black, and 38 percent were Hispanic. Only nine percent were White.” And the black and brown defendants received tougher punishment than whites.

Strikingly, “It is rare that these arrests lead to the discovery of guns or violent crimes,” the report stated.

And arrests have a health impact: Arrests and incarceration disrupt families, hindering access to education and health care, and increasing poverty “particularly in low-income communities of color where arrests are concentrated despite equivalent rates of marijuana use across racial groups,” the report stated. “Incarceration of family members destabilizes families and is considered an adverse childhood experience (ACE).” Incarceration also has “an impact on community

health in many areas (including teenage pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections).”

Legalization will bring improvements in community health for lowincome neighborhoods, the report concluded.

To rectify past harms, the report recommends that “NYS expunge the criminal records of individuals with marijuana-related offenses.”

Meanwhile, developing tests for driving while using marijuana will improve once tax revenues from pot sales can finance this research.

Legalization will create a new industry in New York State. The report estimates that at “an average retail price of $270 per ounce, the market for marijuana is estimated to be approximately $1.7 billion; at $340 per ounce, the market is estimated to be approximately $3.5 billion.” Estimated tax revenues could fall between $248 million and $677 million, but the goal of raising tax-

es conflicts with the public policy imperative of ending the illegal market. The more expensive legal marijuana is, the greater the likelihood that the unregulated market will continue.

Preliminary data from Colorado suggests that legalization did not bring “statistically different” vehicular crash rates — though studies of marijuana impacts on traffic accidents are funded only sporadically and the data is imperfect.

The State Health Department’s “Assessment of the Potential Impact of the Regulated Market in Marijuana for New York State” argues that legalization improves public health and recommends that its licensing be separate from alcohol and tobacco. The details are not spelled out in the report but will be debated during the coming year.

Health is no longer the issue; the hows and wheres are what are left to be decided.

35

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July 19 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; August 1, 2018 | GayCityNews.nyc