Gay City News - September 27, 2018 by Schneps Media

Danny OÕDonnell Looks at Public AdvocateÕs Race 06

Special Sections: Wedding Pride 32-34

Travel 28-31

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OUTLOOK FOR THE NEW SUPREME COURT TERM Page 04 WHITEHOUSE.GOV

Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh aboard Marine One.

VOLUME SEVENTEEN, ISSUE TWENTY | SEPTEMBER 27 – OCTOBER 10, 2018

In This Issue COVER STORY With empty seat, the outlook for the Supreme’s Court new term 04 CIVIL RIGHTS Passport win for intersex plaintiff 08

MUSIC Christine & the Queens’ boldness 16

When Celebrity Became All 15

THEATER Even middle drawer Tennessee Williams stirs 18

PERSPECTIVE Can puppets only be straight? 12

REMEMBRANCE Broadway mourns Marin Mazzie, musical beacon 20

FILM Leg up for indies at the NYFF 14

WHAT’S DOIN’ IN THE GAY CITY Prime listings 26

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September 27 - October 10, 2018 | GayCityNews.nyc

POLITICS

“Electoral Earthquake” in State Senate Primaries IDC Democrats who caucused with Republicans lost six of their eight members BY PAUL SCHINDLER

t was “an electoral earthquake that reverberated all the way to Syracuse.” That’s how State Senator Brad Holyman, an out gay Democrat who represents Manhattan’s West Side, described the September 13 primary that saw seven Democratic state senators, including six of the eight former members of the controversial Independent Democratic Conference, lose to progressive and aggressive challengers. Since 2011, the IDC has frustrated Democratic efforts to win control of the Senate by caucusing with the Republicans, who through much of that period held a minority of the seats. Though IDC incumbents have successfully faced down challengers in the past, the rise of progressive energy statewide that followed Donald

SAM BLEIBERG

Former City Councilmember Robert Jackson (center), who beat incumbent State Senator Marisol Alcántara in the September 13 primary, with Senators Brad Hoylman (right) and Brian Kavanagh at Jackson’s Washington Heights victory party.

Trump’s 2016 election focused anger on the eight IDC members, who were called Trump Democrats by some of their critics. Sensing their vulnerability in this year’s primaries, the IDC, in April, returned to the Democratic fold in a deal brokered by Governor Andrew Cuomo — who was faulted by many, including his challenger Cynthia Nixon, with facilitating the rump faction’s long abandonment of their Democratic colleagues. Despite the return of the IDC members, Democrats, with 32 of the Senate’s 63 seats, remained unable to take control of the chamber because Democrat Simcha Felder, who represents socially conservative Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn, has also caucused with the GOP, separate from the IDC, since his 2012 election.

➤ EARTHQUAKE, continued on p.6

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GayCityNews.nyc | September 27 - October 10, 2018

CIVIL RIGHTS

Outlook for the New Supreme Court Term With the ninth seat still vacant, major LGBTQ questions loom large published by the Williams Institute at UCLA Law School. “Of those who so identify, roughly 25 percent report experiencing workplace discrimination because their sexual preferences do not match their employers’ expectations. That’s a whole lot of people potentially affected by this issue.”

BY ARTHUR S. LEONARD

ith President Donald Trump’s nomination of Brett Kavanaugh hanging in the balance, the US Supreme Court begins its new term, running through next June, on October 1. This week, this court has been holding its “long conference,” during which the justices consider the extensive list of petitions for review filed since last spring. They are beginning to assemble their docket of cases for argument once those cases granted review late in the term that ended in June are heard. Several petitions involving significant LGBTQ questions are pending before the court, but it is unlikely there will be announcement about any of them until late October or November at the earliest. Three of those petitions raise one of the most hotly contested LGBTQ issues being litigated in the lower federal courts: whether Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits employment discrimination because of an individual’s sex, should be interpreted to extend to claims of discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. One of the three cases also raises the question whether an employer with religious objections to gender transition has a defense against a discrimination claim under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Although many state civil rights laws ban sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination, a majority of states do not, so the question whether federal law applies is particularly significant in the South and Midwest, where state courts cannot redress such discrimination. Even in New York State, gender identity discrimination claims are protected by executive directive, not in state law. When Trump nominated Kavanaugh this summer to replace Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, the Republican leadership in the Senate was confident it could complete

WHITEHOUSE.GOV

Judge Brett Kavanaugh, whose Supreme Court confirmation is now in doubt, with President Donald Trump the evening his nomination was announced in July.

the confirmation process in time to seat a ninth justice for the new term. Now, with the emergence of sexual misconduct accusations against the nominee, the eight justices, four of whom must agree to accept a case for review, are considering cases in their long conference on which they are likely evenly divided without knowing who the ninth justice will be. Cases Where Review Petitions Are Filed In Bostock v. Clayton County Board of Commissioners, a threejudge panel of the Atlanta-based 11th Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a decision by the Northern District of Georgia to dismiss Gerald Lynn Bostock’s Title VII claim alleging employment discrimination because of his sexual orientation. The appeals panel found that it was bound by prior circuit precedent, a 1979 ruling that was reaffirmed last year by a panel of the 11th Circuit in Evans v. Georgia Regional Hospital — involving lesbian Jameka Evans’ job discrimination claim — which was denied review last December by the Supreme Court. Three-judge panels are required to follow circuit precedents, which can be overruled only by an en banc court — including all members of the circuit bench — or the Supreme Court. The 11th Circuit panel also noted that Bostock had “abandoned any challenge” to the district court’s dismissal of his alternative claim of sex discrimination based on gender stereotyping. In 2011, an 11th Circuit panel ruled in Glenn v. Brumby

that a transgender plaintiff could bring a sex discrimination claim under a gender stereotyping theory, relying on a Supreme Court ruling from 1989, in Price Waterhouse v Hopkins, which held that requiring employees to conform to a stereotyped view of how women and men should act and appear was evidence of discrimination based on sex. The Bostock court noted that in the Evans case, a majority of the 11th Circuit panel rejected extending the same theory to uphold a sexual orientation claim. This is also now binding 11th Circuit precedent. Bostock sought en banc reconsideration of the panel decision by the circuit’s full 11-member bench, but he also filed a petition with the Supreme Court on May 25. On July 18, the 11th Circuit, in a 9-2 vote, denied the petition for en banc rehearing. Circuit Judge Robin Rosenbaum, who was the dissenting member of the three-judge Evans panel, released a dissenting opinion, joined by Circuit Judge Jill Pryor. Despite the constraints of precedent on the Evans and Bostock three-judge panels, recent developments persuaded the dissenters that the issue raised in this case “is indisputably en-banc-worthy. Indeed,” continued Rosenbaum, “within the last fifteen months, two of our sister Circuits have found the issue of such extraordinary importance that they have each addressed it en banc…. No wonder. In 2011, about 8 million Americans identified as lesbian, gay or bisexual,” citing a demographic study

The other case pending before the Supreme Court presenting the same question, but this time appealing from the employer’s side, is Altitude Express v. Zarda, from the New York-based Second Circuit. A three-judge panel initially affirmed the district court’s decision to dismiss a Title VII sex discrimination claim by Donald Zarda, a gay sky-diving instructor, who in April 2017 based his claim on alternative assertions of gender stereotyping and sexual orientation discrimination. While the case was pending, Zarda died in a sky-diving accident but his estate stepped in to continue the lawsuit. Second Circuit Chief Judge Robert Katzmann, attached a concurring opinion to the appellate panel ruling, calling for the circuit to reconsider the issue en banc, noting, among a number of developments, a then-recent ruling by the Chicago-based Seventh Circuit in Hively v. Ivy Tech Community College, a favorable ruling for lesbian instructor Kimberly Hively’s employment discrimination claim against an Indiana school. Zarda’s Estate sought and obtained that en banc review, resulting in the Second Circuit’s decisive repudiation of its past precedent on February 26 of this year. Katzmann’s opinion for the en banc court found that discrimination because of sexual orientation is, at least in part, discrimination because of sex, and so falls under Title VII. Altitude Express filed a Supreme Court petition on May 29. Consistent with positions previously announced by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the Trump administration disagrees with the Second

➤ SCOTUS, continued on p.5

September 27 - October 10, 2018 | GayCityNews.nyc

䉴

SCOTUS,, from p.4

Circuit’s en banc ruling and would likely seek to participate in any oral argument in Bostock or Altitude Express. The third pending Title VII petition, in Equal Employment Opportunity Commission v. R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes, Inc., comes from the Cincinnati-based Sixth Circuit, where a three-judge panel ruled on March 7 that the funeral home’s discharge of transgender funeral director Aimee Stephens violated Title VII. The American Civil Liberties Union represents Stephens. The EEOC, the federal agency with oversight for enforcement of Title VII, ruled years ago that it considered discrimination because of gender identity or gender transitioning to be discrimination based on sex, and it initiated the lawsuit in the Eastern District of Michigan. Stephens intervened as a co-plaintiff. Although the district judge accepted the EEOC’s argument that this could be a valid sex discrimination case using the gender stereotyping theory, he concluded that the funeral home had a right under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) to be free of government prosecution, because of the burden it placed on its owner’s religious beliefs. The Sixth Circuit affirmed that ruling in part and reversed it in part. In an opinion by Circuit Judge Karen Nelson Moore, the court agreed with the district judge that gender identity discrimination can be the basis of a Title VII claim, but the court went a step further than prior panel opinions by deciding, as the EEOC had argued, that discrimination “because of sex” inherently includes discrimination against employees who are transgender, without any need to analyze the question of gender stereotyping. The court of appeals reversed the district court’s ruling on the RFRA defense, finding that requiring the owner to continue employing a transgender funeral director would not substantially burden his right to free exercise of religion. The court specifically rejected the owner’s argument that customers’ presumed discomfort with a transgender funeral director is a legitimate

justification for firing Stephens. The Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), the anti-gay religious right litigation group representing the funeral home, is seeking Supreme Court review of the Sixth Circuit ruling, but the US Solicitor General’s Office received several extensions in filing its response in the case, so it was not ready for review in this week’s pre-term long conference by the justices. The solicitor general would likely urge the high court to take the case and reverse the Sixth Circuit. The EEOC, however, is the plaintiff in the case, and the majority of that agency is still not made up of Trump appointees and it continues to view gender identity discrimination as covered by Title VII. Neither the solicitor general nor the EEOC has yet announced who will be filing a response on behalf of the government — and what position the government will take. ADF sent a letter to the Supreme Court on September 13 suggesting that because the three Title VII petitions present common questions of statutory interpretation they should be considered together. The court then removed the Bostock and Altitude Express v. Zarda cases from the agenda for this week’s long conference, which is why we may not hear any word on any of the Title VII cases for several months. It would be very surprising if the court did not grant the petitions in the Altitude Express and Harris Funeral Homes cases, since both appellate rulings extend existing splits in circuit court interpretations of Title VII, the nation’s basic employment discrimination statute, and employ reasoning potentially affecting interpretation of other federal sex discrimination statutes, such as the Fair Housing Act, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, Title IX of the Education Amendments Act, and the Affordable Care Act. But with the Kavanaugh matter unsettled — and the possibility of a protracted even divide on the court between Democratic and Republican appointees — both camps could well shy away from taking on cases where a tie vote would affirm a lower court ruling without establishing a nationwide precedent. There are other controversies brewing in the lower courts that

GayCityNews.nyc | September 27 - October 10, 2018

could result in Supreme Court petitions in the upcoming term. Following its Masterpiece Cakeshop decision on June 4, the Court vacated a decision by the Washington State Supreme Court against a florist who refused to provide decorations for a same-sex wedding, sending the case back for reconsideration in light of Masterpiece. This is one of several pending cases — some in federal courts of appeals or state supreme courts — that raise the question of religious freedom exemptions from complying with anti-discrimination laws. The Supreme Court’s evasion of the underlying issue in Masterpiece means that it will come back to the Supreme Court, possibly this term, especially since some courts — in cases involving wedding cakes, invitations, and videos — have already seized upon Justice Kennedy’s language in his opinion observing that the high court has never recognized a broad religious exercise exemption from complying with anti-discrimination laws. In a different arena, the court recently denied a request by Catholic authorities in Philadelphia to temporarily block that city from suspending referrals of children to a Catholic adoption agency that refuses to deal with same-sex couples. The federal district court upheld the city’s position, as Gay City News previously reported, finding a likely violation of Philadelphia’s public accommodations ordinance that covers sexual orientation and rejecting an exemption for the Catholic adoption agency. Litigation continues over a claim by some Houston Republicans that the city is not obligated to provide equal benefits to the same-sex spouses of Houston employees. The case is pending before a state trial judge after the Texas Supreme Court, in a blatant misinterpretation of the 2015 Obergefell marriage equality decision, held that the US Supreme Court had not necessarily decided the issue, despite the fact that the Obergefell opinion specifically mentioned insurance among a list of the important reasons why same-sex couples had a strong interest in being able to marry, making marriage a fundamental right. Last year, the US Supreme Court specifically quoted from that list in Pavan v. Smith, where it reversed the Arkansas Supreme Court hold-

ing that Obergefell did not decide the question whether same-sex parents had a right to be listed on birth certificates. Before long the high court will probably also take up the question whether transgender public school students have a right under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 and the Equal Protection Clause to use restroom and locker room facilities consistent with their gender identity. The Trump administration backed off the Obama era interpretation that Title IX protects trans students, who continue to assert their rights in lawsuits, while religious litigation groups such as ADF oppose school district policies that honor their students’ gender identities. Another candidate for Supreme Court review is Trump’s transgender military service ban, first tweeted in July 2017. The issue that may bring it up to the court quickly is the government’s refusal to comply with pre-trial discovery orders, in which plaintiffs in the four pending challenges are seeking details about the alleged basis for the ban, noting Trump’s vague reference to having consulted “my generals and military experts” before his tweet, as well as the undisclosed identity of the members of Defense Secretary James Mattis’ task force that produced the policy the president authorized him to implement this past March. Preliminary injunctions from the four district judges have kept the ban from going into effect and required the Defense Department to accept applications from transgender people as of this past January 1. On September 18, District Judge Jesus Bernal in Riverside, California, became the fourth district judge to refuse to dissolve a preliminary injunction against the policy. Seattle District Judge Marsha Pechman’s discovery order is being appealed to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. If any one of these four judges grants the plaintiffs’ motion for summary judgment, of course, the government will appeal and the case may end up in the Supreme Court, perhaps providing the vehicle for the court to determine the extent to which government discrimination against transgender people violates the Fifth Amendment’s equal protection requirement.

POLITICS

Daniel O’Donnell Exploring Run for Public Advocate Marriage equality pioneer, UWS assemblymember looks at succeeding Tish James BY NATHAN RILEY

ith as email blast, Upper West Side State Assemblymember Daniel O’Donnell has announced he will “explore” running for New York City public advocate should Letitia James be elected attorney general in November. Gay City News was the fi rst to report about O’Donnell’s interest in the office, in advance of that Septebmer 17 email. Winning that office will be grueling, requiring three elections. O’Donnell, who is gay, may well run against two other LGBTQ candidates — Ritchie Torres, a Bronx city councilmember, and former Council Speaker Christine Quinn — as well as another former speaker, Melissa MarkViverito. Since leaving office, Quinn has remained close to Governor Andrew Cuomo and is the president of WIN, a non-profit that helps homeless woman and their families. Mark-Viverito has worked hard over the past year in helping Puerto Rico recover from the disastrous Hurricane Maria.

➤ EARTHQUAKE, from p.3 IDC members likely believed that their strategic retreat in April would save them from retribution at the ballot box, but they were sorely mistaken. Their leader, Jeff Klein of the Bronx, was beaten by Alessandra Biaggi; former City Councilmember Robert Johnson bested Marisol Alcántara on Manhattan’s West Side; Queens incumbents Tony Avella and José Peralta were outpolled, respectively, by former City Comptroller John Liu and Jessica Ramos; and in Brooklyn, Jesse Hamilton lost to Zellnor Myrie. In the Syracuse area, IDC Senator David Valesky was defeated by Rachel May. Among the IDC incumbents, only Diane Savino on Staten Island and David Carlucci in Rockland County survived.

GAY CIT Y NEWS

Out gay Upper West Side Assemblymember Daniel O’Donnell.

So far, O’Donnell’s announcement is the most defi nitive of any of the possible candidacies.

The New York Times mentioned nine councilmembers, including two Republicans, who might

A seventh Democratic state senator, Martin Malavé Dilan of Brooklyn, who was not affiliated with the IDC, lost to progressive challenger Julia Salazar, despite high profile accusations in recent weeks that she has not been honest about her background. Asked to assess the significance of the primary results, Hoylman told Gay City News, “I think incumbents have been put on notice that voters want change, particularly when you’re talking about Albany and the intransigence on the part of the Senate when it comes to basic issues like equality, housing, and decent wages.” The Senate has refused to take up reproductive freedom and rent regulation reforms pushed by the Assembly, and Hoylman has been a consistent and harsh critic of the Senate GOP’s refusal to take

up any LGBTQ-related issues since the 2011 enactment of marriage equality. A ban on so-called reparative therapy being used on minors and reform of state law to allow for gestational surrogacy have been stalled in the Senate, which has, for the past 16 years, also declined to allow a floor vote on the Gender Expression NonDiscrimination Act, a transgender civil rights measure. “What struck me wasn’t just the activism that was unleashed by groups like Rise and Resist and No IDC and the number of elected officials who supported the challengers, but also the quality of these candidates,” Hoylman said. “Primary challenges to incumbent legislators are rare in New York. To be challenged by people who are really capable and have deep roots in their communities is even more

become candidates. There is no word yet from Brooklyn Councilmember Jumaane Williams, who received nearly 436,000 votes in the city in his bid for the Democratic lieutenant governor nomination in the September 13 primary election, about his potential interest. Kirsten John Foy, described by the Times as “an activist and a Pentecostal minister who is close to the Reverend Al Sharpton” has said he is close to making a decision. The City Charter imposes a heavy burden on any candidate running for the position should James resign on January 1 to assume the attorney general’s post. The mayor calls a special election that must take place within 45 days. The winner of that special election is the “interim” public advocate, said Jerry Goldfeder, an election lawyer. The interim public advocate must then run again in the regularly scheduled September 2019 Democratic primary and go on to win the November election. Even then, the winner would only hold office for

➤ O’DONNELL, continued on p.9 unusual, and these candidates across the board were very skillful in these areas.” The extraordinary rejection of seven incumbents, he added, will challenge the “status quo” that has long choked Albany. “It’s exciting and, I believe, transformative,” Hoylman said. “As a senator, I find it hopeful that voters are paying attention and that Albany is not going to remain a backwater of second and third tier senators… It’s taken a long time for voters to focus on but they are a lot smarter than many elected officials give them credit for.” Noting that the regular Democratic Conference in April had been willing to “turn the other cheek” in welcoming the IDC contingent back, he said, “the voters chose

➤ EARTHQUAKE, continued on p.7

September 27 - October 10, 2018 | GayCityNews.nyc

➤ EARTHQUAKE, from p.6 otherwise.” Hoylman acknowledged that the primary was only the first step in winning a progressive majority in the Senate. Democrats must still hold their current seats and win at least one more from the Republicans in November in order to achieve a Felder-proof majority. Among the opportunities Hoylman sees for Democratic pick-ups include Brooklyn’s District 22, where Democrat Andrew Gounardes, former counsel to Borough President Eric Adams, faces off against Marty Golden, an eightterm Republican incumbent; Long Island’s District 5, where Republican Carl Marcellino will once again face James Gaughran, who lost by less than two percent two years ago; District 7, also on Long Island, where first term Republican Elaine Phillips will face Anna Kaplan; District 39 in the Hudson Valley where longtime Republican Senator William Larkin’s retirement opens up an opportunity for Democratic Assemblymember James Skoufis; and District 43, further up the Hudson, where Republican Senator Kathy Marchione’s retirement similarly gives Democrat Aaron Gladd an opening. Hoylman warned, however, “I don’t think any one can take anything for granted,” in making the point that Democrats cannot automatically count on holding on to all the seats they currently hold. First term Long Island Democratic Senator John Brooks and Valesky’s primary vanquisher, Rachel May, in particular, he said, will face strong GOP competition in November. Asked what impact the loss of his IDC allies will have on Cuomo — who beat Nixon by roughly the same 30-point margin he did Zephyr Teachout in 2014 — Hoylman responded, “Every incumbent got a message. I think Albany got a message. Albany is all that stands between New York and Donald Trump’s Washington.” Ken Sherrill, an out gay professor emeritus of political science at Hunter College, however, told Gay City News that he believes the primary election results delivered a more problematic verdict on the governor. Despite a comfortable

win over Nixon, Cuomo remains, after eight years in office, out of favor with a third of the Democratic electorate. At a minimum, he said, that might discourage early endorsers should the governor jump into the 2020 presidential race. The fact that his lieutenant governor, Kathy Hochul, edged out challenger Jumaane Williams, a Brooklyn city councilmember, by only six points, and that his favored candidate in the attorney general primary, Public Advocate Letitia James, won but with less than 41 percent of the vote, suggests that Cuomo’s coattails are not very strong, Sherrill added. The rout of the IDC, a group whom he said “carried the governor’s water for a half dozen years [but] were allowed to drown in it,” suggests that Cuomo has demonstrated little political loyalty and may have trouble in the future in asking others to takes risks on his behalf. “If there is a Democratic Senate majority in January, I don’t think they’re going to feel very indebted to him,” Sherrill said. That could mean that Cuomo will face the kinds of taxing and spending demands by the Legislature that, in Sherrill’s view, he’s largely been able to avoid through Republican control of the Senate. On a day when progressives proved their moxie in State Senate races, a Queens Assembly primary proved a disappointment. In District 30 that stretches from Middle Village and Maspeth through Woodside into portions of Astoria and Long Island City, longtime transgender activist Melissa Sklarz came up short in her challenge to first term Democrat Brian Barnwell, garnering just over a third of the vote. In her campaign, Sklarz had criticized the incumbent for his votes against the Reproductive Health Act, which would update the state’s 1970 abortion rights law to fully encompass all guarantees provided by the US Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling, and the New York State Liberty Act, which would restrict state and local law enforcement involvement in federal government immigration round-up efforts. In a Facebook post late on primary night, Sklarz wrote, “Not this year. I did my best.”

GayCityNews.nyc | September 27 - October 10, 2018

Allow Me to Introduce Myself

I have been so happy with my decision to open my salon on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village. The response has been very overwhelmingly supportive – people stop by to say hello, talk about beauty and about life, take pictures (tourists love this area!) and have gone out of their way to make me feel like part of the community. This has been surprising in the most wonderful of ways. My business is named Lily Lan Chen 84 Salon, and as you might guess I am Chinese . I have encountered racism many times in the past, and was concerned that might be the case here. But this community sees past my ethnicity and sees me for who I am – an artist with a passion for sharing. I am particularly thankful to the LGBT community, which has embraced me with open arms. Thank you for your kindness, for your willingness to help me, and for always making me smile! Even though I am a businesswoman, I am ﬁrst and foremost an artist. I want to share my insights, my knowledge and my love with the community. I am about purpose before proﬁt. And part of my purpose is to make a meaningful contribution to my community. We have a small salon that feels like a home, and an amazing team of hair stylists who are focused on scalp health and hair regeneration. We not only want to make you look and feel better, we want to contribute to this wonderful community. My team and I will support other business owners in our community - restaurants, coffee shops, shoe store, eye glass store, etc. So please stop by and say hello. With much love and appreciation, Lily

Lily Lan Chen 84 Salon 9 Christoper Street New York, NY 10014 212-242-8484 lilylanchen.com 7

CIVIL RIGHTS

US Court Orders Gender-Neutral Passport Intersex plaintiff prevails against US State Department after four-year ﬁght BY ARTHUR S. LEONARD

S District Judge R. Brooke Jackson has ordered the State Department to issue a gender-neutral passport to Dana Alix Zzyym, who was identified as female at birth but rejects the gender binary, identifying neither as male nor female. Lambda Legal represents Zzyym in this long-running lawsuit in the federal trial court in Denver. Judge Jackson refers to Zzyym as “an intersex individual” who submitted a passport application in September 2014. In common with many intersex people, Zzyym uses the pronouns they, them, and their, but Jackson skirts the pronoun issue by using Zzyym’s gender-neutral first name throughout the opinion in place of pronouns. “Instead of checking the box labeled ‘M’ for male or ‘F’ for female on the application form, Dana instead wrote ‘intersex’ below the ‘sex’ category,” wrote Jackson, who noted that Zzyym sent passport authorities a letter explaining they were neither male nor female and wished to instead mark “X” in line with International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) standards for machinereadable travel documents. The State Department, however, denied the application, explaining it would instead issue a passport listing their gender as “female” because that was the sex listed on the driver’s license Zzyym submitted to prove their identity. Or Zzyym could

COURTESY OF L AMBDA LEGAL

After a four-year battle, Dana Alix Zzyym has won the right to receive a US passport with a designation reflecting their intersex identity.

receive a passport designating their gender as “male” by submitting a letter from “your attending medical physician” verifying a gender change. In appealing the denial, Zzyym submitted two sworn statements by physicians at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Cheyenne, Wyoming, verifying their gender as intersex. After several State Department refusals to reconsider, Zzyym, in 2015, sued the State Department, arguing that its conduct was “arbitrary and capricious” in violation of the federal Administrative Procedure Act, which requires that agency action be undertaken for a reason. The lawsuit also asserted that by imposing the male-female gender choice the State Department exceeded the

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authority Congress delegated to it for the issuance of passports and violated Zzyym’s Fifth Amendment due process and equal protection rights. They asked the court to compel the State Department to issue a passport “accurately reflecting the plaintiff as intersex.” On November 16, 2016, Judge Jackson ruled “the agency’s decision-making process was not rational based upon the evidence in the record,” but rather than compel it to issue Zzyym the passport they sought, he instead sent the case back to the State Department for “reevaluation of its gender policy.” In March 2017, two months into the new Trump administration, Zzyym sought either a permanent or temporary passport bearing an X or another third-gender marking so they could attend an international conference. The State Department denied that request, and two months later sent an explanation that boiled down to “that’s the way it is.” At that point, Zzyym moved to reopen the case, and on September 17 Jackson ruled, finding there is no reason to address their constitutional claim, since the matter can be resolved to the plaintiff’s satisfaction under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA). Jackson noted that US passports did not record gender prior to 1976, and that in his 2016 order, “I found

that the administrative record did not show that the Department’s decision-making process that resulted in the gender policy was rational.” Instead, it “seemed to be ad hoc rationalizations for the binary nature of the gender field.” The memorandum that the State Department provided to Zzyym in May 2017 fared no better. Though the agency acknowledged that other countries have accommodated nonbinary individuals by using an “X” on travel documents readable by standard passport equipment in use at border crossings and airports, it advanced five “reasons” for its “gender policy” — each of which pointed to inconveniences imposed on the State Department in verifying identity and coordinating with other government agencies. “Looking at the proffered reasons and cited evidence provided by the Department,” wrote Jackson, “I find that the Department’s decision is arbitrary and capricious,” and he went through the reasons step by step, explaining why they failed to show “rational decision making,” the minimal requirement under the APA to justify an administrative decision. Since Zzyym is neither male nor female, the agency cannot argue that its policy is justified by the need for “accurate” identification of people. Finding that the most recent memorandum from the State Department explaining its position “added very little” to what it unsuccessfully presented to the court in 2016, Jackson also held that the agency’s statutory authority to issue passports “does not include the authority to deny an applicant on grounds pertinent to basic identity, unrelated to any good cause...” Jackson enjoined the State Department from “relying upon its binary-only gender marker policy to withhold the requested passport” from Zzym. Lambda Legal attorneys Camilla Bronwen Taylor, M. Dru Levasseur, and Paul David Castillo were assisted in representing Zzyym by several pro bono attorneys and local Denver counsel.

September 27 - October 10, 2018 | GayCityNews.nyc

â&#x17E;¤ Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;DONNELL, from p.6 the remaining two years of the James term. â&#x20AC;&#x153;I have grown concerned by the increased use of unchecked executive power â&#x20AC;&#x201D; from the White House, to Albany, to right here at home in New York City,â&#x20AC;? Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Donnell stated in his email, saying the job shouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t be â&#x20AC;&#x153;a springboard to the Mayorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s mansion.â&#x20AC;? â&#x20AC;&#x153;I think the Public Advocateâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Office needs to be independent and capable of offering criticism,â&#x20AC;? he said in a phone interview last week, amplifying his emailed statement that â&#x20AC;&#x153;Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve never been afraid to call out those in power for acting out of self-interest instead of for the public good, even when it meant that I was the lone voice in the room.â&#x20AC;? Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Donnell, who as a state officeholder has never run a race using the cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s public campaign fi nance system that matches money raised by candidates, promises to run without real estate or corporate donations. Jamesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; successor could be public advocate until 2029, under the cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s term limits law, and Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Donnellâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s goals are long term: ending the AIDS epidemic by 2020, closing Rikers Island by 2027, â&#x20AC;&#x153;eliminating all trash [sent] to landfi lls,â&#x20AC;? and reducing 80 percent of the cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. He also promises to â&#x20AC;&#x153;bring a bullhornâ&#x20AC;? to the â&#x20AC;&#x153;corruption and disorganizationâ&#x20AC;? at the New York City Housing Authority, which is facing a federal investigation over false reports fi led that the paint in public housing is lead-free. In the phone interview, Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Donnell talked about his legislation allowing opioid users to access medical marijuana as part of their treatment. Communities where that option is available to heroin users, he said, experience 25 percent lower overdose death rates. He also voiced support for Safer Consumption Spaces, where drug users are supervised by healthcare professionals on hand to prevent fatal overdoses and link them to treatment, though he said â&#x20AC;&#x153;executionâ&#x20AC;? is key given likely community concern about such facilities. A key credential on Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Donnellâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s rĂŠsumĂŠ is the critical role he

played in making marriage equality a live issue on the stateâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s political stage. It was Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Donnell who steered then-Governor Eliot Spitzerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s program bill to passage just weeks after it was fi rst introduced in 2007. Six months after the bill became law in 2011, Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Donnell and his partner, John Banta, married in a gala wedding officiated by Judith Kaye, the retired chief judge of the stateâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s highest bench, the Court of Appeals, who had written a stirring dissent when that court rejected a gay marriage lawsuit in 2006. Alan van Capelle, who led the Empire State Pride Agenda when Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Donnell notched the fi rst legislative victory on marriage, told Gay City News in a recent telephone interview, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Danny has never received the credit he deserves for his work on marriage equality.â&#x20AC;? The hard slog to get Senate approval â&#x20AC;&#x201D; a full four years later â&#x20AC;&#x201D; he said, â&#x20AC;&#x153;overshadowedâ&#x20AC;? the groundwork Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Donnell created in the Assembly at a time when gay marriage remained â&#x20AC;&#x153;unpopular and politically risky.â&#x20AC;? One key to achieving Senate approval, van Capelle explained, was securing GOP Assembly support for the bill so that those members would not be in a position to primary a senator who supported it. Van Capelle said Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Donnellâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s personal lobbying â&#x20AC;&#x153;picked up votes we didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t expect.â&#x20AC;? Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Donnell was also the lead sponsor of the Dignity for All Students Act, the Stateâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s antibullying law that Governor David Paterson signed into law in 2010. That measure specifically protects LGBTQ students, among a number of categories. Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Donnell has been restless in the Assembly for years and was among those Governor David Paterson considered for the US Senate seat Hillary Clinton vacated when she became secretary of state. After Carl Heastie was elected speaker several years ago, Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Donnell became chair of the Committee on Tourism, Parks, Arts and Sports Development, a lateral transfer carrying less prestige than his previous post as chair of the Corrections Committee, overseeing the stateâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s prisons â&#x20AC;&#x201D; a sign he is not a member of Heastieâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s inner circle.

GayCityNews.nyc | September 27 - October 10, 2018

FAMILY PRIDE SECTION TO ADVERTISE CONTACT: GAYLE H. GREENBERG 718-260-4585 GGREENBERG@CNGLOCAL.COM GAYCITYNEWS.NYC 9

NEWS, IN BRIEF that they’re running very different kinds of campaigns than we’ve ever seen,” Democratic consultant Martha McKenna told Politico.

BY ANDY HUMM

ongtime Gay Activist Bruce Friedman Dies Bruce Friedman, a leader in LGBTQ political groups in New York as well as in the synagogue serving the city’s queer community, died September 24 after a long battle with leukemia. He was 70. A native of the Bronx, Friedman joined Congregation Beth Simchat Torah (CBST) in 1975 and was elected to its Board of Trustees the following year. His close friend there, the late Arthur Strickler, an out gay Democratic district leader and activist, got Friedman involved in politics and Friedman became a vice president of the Village Independent Democrats. A Queen resident since 1984, Friedman served as an officer of the Lesbian and Gay Democratic Club of Queens from 1997, acting as president from 2004 to 2012 before taking on the post of vice president. City Councilmember Daniel Dromm, a co-founder of the Queens club, said, “Bruce’s work led to the election of numerous LGBT-supportive public officials around the Borough of Queens. His knowledge of and love for American history and politics gave him an innate ability to vet local candidates. His contributions to the LGBT movement in Queens are numerous. His strength and spirit will be sorely missed by LGBT and non-LGBT people alike.” New York Law School Professor Arthur Leonard, a Gay City News contributor, wrote on Facebook that Friedman “was one of the first people I met at CBST when I started attending services back in the fall of 1977, and he was instrumental in getting me involved with the leadership of the congregation by persuading the board to appoint me as co-counsel when he found out I was a lawyer!” Friedman is survived by his sister, Margot Johnson, of Florida. Connecticut GOP Hatches Gay Candidate Strategy The Connecticut Republican Party actively recruited six out gay and lesbian candidates to run for State Assembly this November in

COURTESY OF COUNCILMEMBER DANIEL DROMM

Longtime LGBTQ activist Bruce Friedman, who died September 24.

ANDY HUMM

Carey Maloney (right), a New York Public Library trustee, hosted a reception there this week to preview two LGBTQ-themed exhibitions planned for 2019.

their bid to win a majority there. The Democrats have just two out gay Assembly candidates running. While the national Republican Party is dedicated to blocking and repealing LGBTQ rights, A.J. Kerouac, one of the out Republican candidates, told NBC News, “The majority of our Democrats are a little more conservative than most Democrats in the country, and most of our Republicans are a little more liberal than most of the Republicans in our country.” Gregory T. Angelo, president of the gay Log Cabin Republicans, told NBC that this strategy in Connecticut “is cutting Democrats off at their knees.” White Men A Minority Among House Dem Candidates We’ve read how record numbers

of LGBTQ people are running for office on November 6 — including the Democratic nominees for governor in Texas (Lupe Valdez), Colorado (Congressmember Jared Polis), and Oregon (incumbent Kate Brown) and for the US Senate from Wisconsin (incumbent Tammy Baldwin) and Arizona (Congressmember Kyrsten Sinema). Now Politico reports that white men constitute the minority of Democratic candidates for the US House. There are 180 women nominated so far — breaking the previous record of 120 — and 133 people of color. Republicans have nominated 52 women — also a record for the party but lagging far behind Democrats. “These grassroots candidates came out of non-political, nontraditional networks, meaning

Actor Dean Cain: From Superman to Right-Wing Darling Dean Cain, who starred as Superman on TV and played gay in “The Broken Hearts Club” film, caused a firestorm when he participated in the Values Voters Summit run by the anti-LGBTQ Family Research Council on September 21. He was there promoting his film “Gosnell: The Trial of America’s Biggest Serial Killer,” where he plays a detective going after a rogue abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell who was accused of murdering hundreds of newborns and convicted of killing three. GLAAD went after Cain on Twitter, writing, “Allies should not turn a blind eye to the people, groups, and rhetoric that propel this event. There is no event on the calendar that is more rabidly against LGBTQ people and our rights.” Cain shot back that he is proLGBTQ rights and pro-choice, but “I haven’t studied their record” and was just there to promote his movie, which takes the view that Philadelphia officials and reporters didn’t pursue Gosnell lest they be seen as anti-abortion. Cain accused gay critics who were trying to pry him away from the Family Research Council of “intolerance.” State Departments Ends Domestic Partner Recognition on Visas Employees of international organizations here on G-4 visas have been allowed to have their domestic partners here on derivative G-4 visas. UN-GLOBE, the United Nations LGBTQ group, has alerted UN employees that the State Department is now requiring these couples to be legally married in order to obtain the derivative visas for partners. It’s the same rule for different-sex couples, but many foreign workers cannot marry in their home countries. The UN is advising their gay employees in New York to marry here in order to maintain the visas.

➤ BRIEFS, continued on p.11

September 27 - October 10, 2018 | GayCityNews.nyc

䉴

BRIEFS, from p.10

Many corporations and state and local governments ended recognition of domestic partners once gay couples could legally marry. New York City itself has maintained the domestic partner option and more non-gay couples take advantage of it than same-sex ones. The State Department began recognizing domestic partners in 2009, the first year under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the Obama administration. Public Library Announces 2019 Stonewall 50, Whitman Exhibits The New York Public Library’s LGBT Collections will be drawn from heavily next year for the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion. Tony Marx, president of the library, and members of the LGBT Initiative co-chaired by trustee Carey Maloney and Hermes Mallea, hosted a reception for LGBTQ leaders September 24 in the Trustees Room to preview two “milestone exhibitions”: “Love and Resistance: Stonewall at 50,” set for February 14 through June 30 of next year, “Walt Whitman,” which will be on display March 29 through July 27. Jason Baumann, who heads the library’s LGBT Initiative, said the Stonewall exhibit will focus on LGBTQ life and activism from 1965 through ‘75. Carolyn Vega, who curates the library’s collection of English and American Literature, said the Whitman exhibit will mark the 200th anniversary of the poet’s birth. Marx noted that the library is home to collections from the Mattachine Society, the Gay Activists Alliance, the Barbara Gittings and Kay Tobin Lahusen papers and photographs, ACT UP, the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, and more. In addition to past LGBTQ exhibitions, including for Stonewall 25, Marx said the library welcomes an annual prom for LGBTQ youth at its Astor Hall. Maloney said the library “has unfailingly been at the forefront of LGBTQ advocacy” and dubbed its collection on queer history “the world’s greatest.” Texas AG Stands Up for Anti-LGBTQ Church Ken Paxton, the Republican attorney general of Texas, is telling

Austin school authorities that barring a fundamentalist church from holding weekend services in the district’s Performing Arts Center would run afoul of the Texas Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The district had announced that it was contemplating cutting back on outside groups using their facilities so as to be readily available for student activities. The Celebration Church of Georgetown is part of a churchplanting movement whereby congregations secure free or low-cost space in public schools for their weekly worship services to avoid investing in bricks-and-mortar churches. LGBTQ and civil liberties groups objected to the rental by Celebration, the Austin-American Statesman reported. The movement has been successful in securing such space all over the New York City, despite our human rights law that bars discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. Irish Catholics Want Gay Marriage, Married & Women Priests A poll conducted in the wake of Pope Francis’ visit to Ireland for the World Meeting of Families in August found the Irish people holding a very different concept of family from the one promoted by the hierarchy and a desire for a very different kind of church. In a country where more than 60 percent voted to open marriage to gay couples just three years ago, 77 percent want the Church to accept same-sex marriage. Ninety percent say priests should be able to marry. And 86 percent want women priests. The IPSOS MRBI poll, which sampled 750 adults, found these numbers for the Irish population similar for Catholics both practicing and lapsed. Two-thirds of those polled describe themselves as Catholics, lower than the 2016 census where 78 percent said they were. Of Catholics, 36 percent go to Mass weekly or more, 29 percent less often, and 36 percent only for weddings and funerals. While the Irish voted for a referendum this year to allow the government to allow abortion in some circumstances, 53 percent said abortion should be permitted widely. Seventy-seven percent said the Church should welcome those who do not follow all official teachings.

GayCityNews.nyc | September 27 - October 10, 2018

PERSPECTIVE: Guest Writer PRESIDENT & PUBLISHER Victoria Schneps-Yunis

Community Board Term Limits: Accidental Gift to Developers

CEO & CO-PUBLISHER Joshua Schneps FOUNDING EDITOR IN-CHIEF & ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER PAUL SCHINDLER

editor@gaycitynews.com ASSOCIATE EDITOR DUNCAN OSBORNE

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BY GALE BREWER

here’s a reason lawmaking is compared — unflatteringly — to sausage factories. It’s not neat, it’s not quick, and if you do it out in public, it can kill a lot of people’s appetite for the final product. But rushing through new laws with short notice and inadequate public review, on an issue that isn’t a genuine emergency, isn’t the answer either. That’s not how we make good policy — it’s how government makes mistakes. That’s the story with the three ballot proposals coming out of the mayor’s Charter Revision Commission, and placed on the General Election ballot this November 6. Proposal #3 would institute term limits of eight years for all Community Board members, cutting our first line of defense for protecting our neighborhoods. Introduced midway through a Charter Revision Commission that was convened to focus on different subjects, this change to Community Board appointments would further empower developers, who already wield too many advantages in the city’s land use process — and developers aren’t term-limited! Like a lot of well-intentioned ideas, it will have substantial unintended consequences. I should know; I served on my

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Gale Brewer is the Manhattan borough president.

PERSPECTIVE: Media Circus

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local community board for many years. When an issue reaches one of the city’s 59 all-volunteer boards (each with 50 members appointed to two-year terms by the borough presidents), the institutional memory of those members comes into play and helps them decide local issues large and small. In my Board experience on the West Side, we did our best to mitigate how Donald Trump could build over the West Side rail yards. During the development boom New York has experienced, the land use and zoning decisions boards make, and the scrutiny that boards can put development plans under, have all been critical in shaping neighborhoods’ destinies. Major rezonings by the administration in East New York, East Harlem, and Inwood have all been examined — and improved by — Community Board membership. And that’s just Proposal #3 on the ballot; Proposal #2 creates something called a “Civic Engagement Commission” with a majority of members appointed by the mayor, that would supply urban planners and other support services to Community Boards. But the mayor already has control over the Department of City Planning; why should his appointees help select the Community Boards’ technical advisors for land use decisions, too?

Borough presidents already have responsibility for appointing a diverse, active membership to Community Boards and help inform and support their work — and borough presidents are term-limited. I’ve appointed more than 360 new members as borough president — more than 60 percent of the 600 board members in Manhattan. We conduct a rigorous interview process and assign an urban planner to cover each board and supply technical advice and counsel. The Boards could certainly use more permanent staff, but that can be accomplished by the city’s budget process. The 2018 Charter Revision Commission the mayor proposed in February’s State of the City Address was charged with changing the City Charter to “enhance voter participation and improve the electoral process.” In proposing to term-limit Community Board members and change their staff support, it has ranged a little far afield — and used “term limits” as a buzzword to help sell their brand of reform. The Commission’s Proposal #1, on campaign finance, has merit. But the other two proposals will make it harder for Community Boards to do their job as an early-warning system and an honest advocate for neighborhood residents — and thus will strengthen the hand of developers. On Proposals #2 and #3, I’m voting no.

BY ED SIKOV

writer for “Sesame Street” created a buzz last week by voicing what anyone who ever watched the show already knew: Bert and Ernie are a gay couple. I know — stop the presses, right? Still, coming out is always A Good Thing, and especially gratifying here because it’s been such a long time coming. Among many stories on this non-revelation is Chelsea Ritschel’s, on independent.co.uk, who writes, “Sesame Street writer Mark Saltzman revealed the best friends are also a couple. According to Saltzman, who

joined the show as a writer in 1984, he always wrote the pair as lovers. ‘And I always felt that without a huge agenda, when I was writing Bert and Ernie, they were,’ he said in response to a question about the duo’s sexuality. ‘I didn’t have any other way to contextualise them.’” Ritschel continues, “After samesex marriage was legalised in New York, a petition circulated that requested a wedding episode between the duo. The sentiment was echoed with a 2013 [actually 2015!] cover of the New Yorker that depicted the Muppets watching the Supreme Court ruling as they lay together on the couch, clearly a couple.

“At the time, ‘Sesame Street’ had released a statement in which it referred to Bert and Ernie as ‘best friends’ that were ‘created to teach preschoolers that people can be good friends with those who are very different from themselves,’ according to Pink News.” As a white guy, I didn’t pick up on the whole orange/ yellow racial subtext. To me, they were both puppets of color — especially bright color. “Following Saltzman’s announcement,” Ritschel continued, “the Sesame Workshop reiterated its previous stance on Twitter, adding: ‘Even though they are identified as male characters and possess many human traits and characteristics, they

➤ MEDIA CIRCUS, continued on p.13 September 27 - October 10, 2018 | GayCityNews.nyc

PERSPECTIVE: A Dyke Abroad

Imagining Hannah Gadsby BY KELLY COGSWELL

efore she even opened her mouth, I knew she was something I’d never seen on stage before. An ordinary lesbian. With a sensible hairdo, sensible shoes, and a high-class blazer doing nothing to hide her wide hips. I felt a rare shock of recognition, followed by an incredible shame that I hadn’t imagined her at all, even if I know dozens of dykes in Real Life that look and move just like her. I’d heard a lot about Hannah Gadsby before I fi nally saw her show. Even read a couple of profi les extolling her groundbreaking work deconstructing comedy, her “fresh” (lesbian) voice. By the time I clicked on her show, “Nanette,” I had the totally mistaken idea she’d look like Tig Notaro but with grad school glasses and maybe an undercut. And I had to reckon again how visibility matters. If you aren’t seen as a community you won’t have a political voice. But what we see — or don’t — also shapes our imaginations. I’ve read posts by young women who identified either as bi or asexual because they hadn’t seen enough lesbians

䉴

MEDIA CIRCUS, from p.12

remain puppets, and do not have a sexual orientation.’ “Despite the show’s response, the new revelation regarding the pair’s homosexual relationship has been met with approval and support on social media. ‘Duh, I knew that at six,’ one person wrote.” But in the comments section after Ritschel’s article, “Rerob” writes, “Official statement from Sesame Street says otherwise, namely that they are puppets and as such do not have a sexual orientation. Grow up.” Commenter “RM” goes even further, writing in reference to the Sesame Workshop statement, “This from the show, not from some guy who came in in 1984 to write for characters created in 1969. Children are not sexual, as many paedophiles like to claim in their defense.”

to imagine that it was okay to only like other girls. Then there’s the young woman who won’t use the word lesbian because she doesn’t identify at all with the characters of the “L Word.” Who else have we got? In the mainstream media, the size 2 Ellen DeGeneres who wears masculine clothes, but styles her short blond hair to ingénue cute so we know the door to men’s not quite slammed shut. Lena Waithe buzzed her dreadlocks off just a month ago, no longer afraid of getting called stud, and so far has gotten more accolades than hate. But it helps that she has that long lean Instagrammable body that can pull off anything from pride capes to harem pants. Because even now, nothing’s worse than some fat dyke who’s probably only a lez because she’s too ugly to get a man. I still remember how when the chubby Rosie O’Donnell came out, she cut her hair truck driver short, but after the backlash immediately let it grow out to a softer, safer, more feminine length — where it still is today. Inside the great American brain, lesbians are still most present as femmes in the porn that straight guys wack off to.

There’s no use at all for a more masculine beauty. Masturbating to a butch would make a man practically gay. And so studly or androgynous or genderqueer dykes are sidelined, even in porn. Which means I couldn’t stop sobbing during the 2015 Tonys when, for nearly the fi rst time, Americans were forced to view butch dykes through the loving eyes of “Fun Home.” Why is it so hard to acknowledge that a woman with dungarees and a swagger and a ring of keys could be seen as beautiful? Or handsome? Could be seen at all. Hannah doesn’t minimize her body, or exist in spite of it. It is there in front of us as an indigestible fact. As female. As masculine. As lesbian. And as Hannah gradually shifts gears from a stand-up gig into more of a one-woman show, unraveling the jokes that stop at the punchline to tell the rest of the story without a chuckle or a sneer, we learn how much she’s paid for all that wrongness in the currency of violence, shame, and fear. In the process, she lifts the veil not just on her pain, but her anger against the source of it: men. And that was her most radical act of all. Despite #MeToo and the acknowledgment that rape culture is pervasive and defi ning and

that misogyny restricts our lives from the cradle, women are somehow still forbidden to be angry at men. The taboo is worse for lesbians. Even other lesbians hate dykes seen as man-hating. We, apparently, are just supposed to grin and bear it. No matter if we’ve been beaten. No matter if we’ve been raped and constantly degraded. Well, not Hanna Gadsby. Not that dyke standing unapologetically on the stage in her soft butch body, unprotected by swagger and tats, but still doing battle with the world as pointedly and brutally as Richard Pryor did. Invited to the Emmys last week on a wave of notoriety, Hannah Gadsby did our dyke team proud making jokes about jokes. And men, declaring, “This is… not normal. The world’s gone a bit crazy. I mean, for somebody like me — a nobody from nowhere — gets this sweet gig. Free suit, new boots, just cause I don’t like men.” She went on to say, “That’s a joke, of course. Just jokes, fellas, calm down. You know, #NotAllMen, but a lot of ‘em. No, it is just jokes, but what are jokes these days? We don’t know. Nobody knows what jokes are. Especially not men. Am I right, fellas? That’s why I’m presenting alone.”

Whoa! Where did that come from? It’s patently false, as anyone who has spent time with children knows. The little buggers can’t keep their hands off their peepees and pussies! They’d be fi ngering them constantly if their parents didn’t shame them into stopping. The “puppets don’t have a sexual orientation” argument is smarter, but falls apart when subjected to reason. Where, in art, does it stop? Do paintings have a sexual orientation? Do books? How about the characters in paintings and books? Only an idiot would suggest Romeo and Juliet aren’t sexual just because they exist only as words on a page and actors on a stage. Like Bert and Ernie, they have a relationship, though in the Muppets’ case the fact that they’re a gay couple who never have sex is one of the things that makes the relationship hilarious.

The Washington Post’s Nora Reed writes, “It’s affirming to see people who are like you in the fiction you read and watch. Most of the exposure that kids get to queerness comes in the form of the slurs they’re called on the playground. Whether you’re figuring out that you’re queer at the age of 4 or 14, that’s pretty depressing.” But Frank Oz, who created the characters (evidently with a certain blindspot), was defensive, tweeting, “It seems Mr. Mark Saltzman was asked if Bert & Ernie are gay. It’s fi ne that he feels they are. They’re not, of course. But why that question? Does it really matter? Why the need to defi ne people as only gay? There’s much more to a human being than just straightness or gayness.” But nobody, least of all Saltzman, is saying the famously bickering couple is nothing but

gay. Most gay men and lesbians would never say anything so preposterously dumb. In HuffPo, Jamie McGonnigal writes from the perspective of a longtime Muppets lover. “Some of you may remember the star of both ‘Sesame Street’ and ‘The Muppet Show,’ a little green fella known as Kermit the Frog. Kermit marries his longtime love, Miss Piggy, in 1984’s ‘Muppets Take Manhattan.’ Oscar the Grouch had a girlfriend named Grundgetta. The Count is a regular lothario, with no fewer than three girlfriends over the years Countess von Backwards, Lady Two, and Countess von Dahling…. Romantic relationships are not foreign to ‘Sesame Street’ or the Muppets. So why the defensiveness around this orange-and-yellow pair?” Apparently some puppets do have a sexual orientation — just not the gay ones.

GayCityNews.nyc | September 27 - October 10, 2018

FILM

A Leg Up for Indie Film at NYFF Major studios absent, offerings range from Iran to Trump’s Midwest to HIV-positive Paris Public Library,” whose 197 minutes passed by quicker than many much shorter movies. Yet it shows him addressing crises of the moment, down to ending with a funeral as though trying to capture a solar eclipse’s reflection safely and indirectly.

BY STEVE ERICKSON he fall festival circuit — which includes Telluride, Venice, Toronto, and our own city’s film festivals — has become the beginning of the film industry’s Oscar campaign. The past five years’ Best Picture Oscars have all gone to films that were genuinely independent or produced by “indie” divisions of studios. “The Shape of Water,” “Moonlight,” and “12 Years A Slave” needed festivals and arthouses to get initial buzz, even if they wound up in wide release. The New York Film Festival showed the latter two films. While this year’s lineup includes only two films distributed by conventional studios like Fox and Sony (Yorgos Lanthimos’ “The Favourite” and Tom Volf’s “Maria by Callas”), it’s clear Netflix and Amazon now have more influence on American culture than Sony or Paramount. Continuing a trend from last year, the festival includes six films distributed by Netflix and one Amazon Studios release. Netflix has shown its apathy toward theatrical runs for films it owns, and the festival may be your best bet for seeing the Coen brothers’ “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” or Orson Welles’ “The Other Side of the Wind” (shot in the 1970s, but only edited this year) on a screen larger than a TV. As far as LGBTQ cinema, “The Favourite” is a misanthropic tale of lesbian competition in 18th-century England; out gay French director Christophe Honoré’s “Sorry Angel” tells a 1990s love story between an HIV-positive man and a younger college student; the late gay Filipino director Lino Brocka’s 1975 “Manila In the Claws of Light” will be shown in the “Retrospectives” sidebar; and out gay Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang serves up the non-narrative film “Your Face.”

Iranian director Jafar Panahi was a protégé of the late Abbas Kiarostami, who wrote his debut film “The White Balloon” and the

STRAND RELEASING

Vincent Lacoste and Pierre Deladonchamps in Christophe Honoré’s “Sorry Angel,” which screens September 30 and October 1.

screenplay for his later neo-realist crime drama “Crimson Gold.” Kiarostami’s ghost hangs all over Panahi’s “3 Faces” (Oct. 8 at 5 p.m., Alice Tully Hall; Oct. 13 at 8:30 p.m., Walter Reade Theater) but rarely does Panahi make anything new from it. The other key fact in Panahi’s career is that he was arrested by the Iranian government and sentenced to a 20-year ban on directing, screenwriting, traveling outside the country, and giving interviews. He’s gone on to violate all these edicts except the travel ban — “3 Faces” is the fourth film he’s directed since his being silenced. The narrative sends Panahi (playing himself for the third time since his arrest) and actress Behnaz Jafari (also playing herself) to the rural, Turkish-speaking village where his real-life mother was born after Jafari receives a video depicting a teenage girl hanging herself because her family won’t let her perform in film. Panahi works better when he adopts a light touch but here his style relentlessly copies Kiarostami’s tendency to film his characters in cars and shoot long shots of roads. The final scene of his film refers overtly to the final shot of Kiarostami’s “Through the Olive Trees,” although it arguably puts a subversive twist on it by depicting a woman racing to meet an-

other woman. Still, “3 Faces” never finds its own identity separate from the influence of Panahi’s mentor. Ever since Trump’s election, the media has cast a spotlight on the rural Midwest, in a way that reduces the region’s people to a crude stereotype: culturally conservative working-class white Christians with a weakness for opioids. Frederick Wiseman’s “Monrovia, Indiana” (Sep. 30 at noon, Walter Reade Theater; Oct. 1 at 6:30 p.m. Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center) confirms these received notions in some ways but complicates them in others. As usual, Wiseman has made a lengthy documentary that avoids overt editorializing — he’s stayed true to his no-voiceover, nointerview style for more than five decades — but still engages with politics subtly and cautiously. But Wiseman speaks more through his mastery of framing and cutting, making even bureaucratic talk or a 15-minute view of a Masonic rite compelling (while unmistakably pointing out Monrovia’s compulsory Christianity). Wiseman, now 88, is one of America’s greatest living directors, but “Monrovia, Indiana” isn’t one of his major films; it lacks the hypnotic intensity of his far bleaker early work or even last year’s “Ex Libris — The New York

Honoré’s “Sorry Angel” (Sep. 30 at 8:45 p.m., Alice Tully Hall; and Oct. 1 at 8 p.m., Walter Reade Theater) has echoes of the 2017 NYFF pick “BPM (Beats Per Minute)” from Robin Campillo in its setting among gay men, many HIV-positive, in early ’90s Paris, but it avoids overt politics. (In fact, one character dismisses ACT UP meetings, which the first half of “BPM” revolves around, as a bore.) It tracks the slow development of a relationship between writer Jacques (Pierre Deladonchamps), who is taking care of his dying partner while suffering serious infections himself, and college student Arthur (Vincent Lacoste). Even if they were alive today, with legal same-sex marriage and effective treatment for HIV, they wouldn’t be headed for lifelong monogamy together. Still, there is something implicitly political in the way “Sorry Angel” ignores biological ties — Jacques is very bitter at his parents for reasons he fully never explains but that the audience can guess — in favor of showing how lovers, ex-lovers, and friends form a network that takes care of each other. It depicts the period as both sexually charged, with Arthur singing the praises of cruising public toilets and sleeping with both men and women, and filled with a sense of danger: it seems to end just before protease inhibitors were developed. Honoré directs the film elegantly, employing blue-tinted cinematography and using cinephiliac touches like a visit to François Truffaut’s grave and a poster for a Léos Carax film on a wall. 56TH NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL | Film Society of Lincoln Center | Sep. 28-Oct. 14 | filmlinc.org/nyff

September 27 - October 10, 2018 | GayCityNews.nyc

FILM

When Celebrity Became All Ian Schrager tells filmmaker Matt Tyrnauer the real story of 54 BY GARY M. KRAMER att Tyrnauer’s lively, entertaining documentary “Studio 54” takes viewers behind the velvet ropes and into the “experience” that was the famed New York City nightclub. Using hundreds of amazing photographs, as well as film clips, news footage, and interviews, Tyrnauer gets Ian Schrager — who co-owned the club with the late Steve Rubell and a silent partner named Jack Dushey — to “tell the story as it really happened,” nearly 40 years after its heyday. The filmmaker chatted with Gay City News about his fabulous new doc.

GARY M. KRAMER: Did you ever get to attend the storied nightclub? MATT TYRNAUER: No. I figured out I was in the third grade then — before my nightclubbing years. KRAMER: The story is about this particular club, American culture in general, and filtered largely through Schrager’s memory. What decisions did you make regarding how to tell this story? TYRNAUER: For me it was much more a story about the culture than it was about sex, drugs, and disco. They are appealing but don’t hold my interest as much as taking a look at a particular time and place where things of great consequence occurred. I see the 33 months of Studio 54 [in the original Schrager-Rubell-Dushey incarnation] coinciding with the Carter administration and it was the last volcanic moment of the sex revolution with the advent of birth control and the freedom and sexual expression and openness. Studio was the main venue for that freedom. And, of course, the story takes the darkest turn possible at the time the whole 54 shebang came tumbling down and Steve and Ian were sentenced to prison for tax evasion. And that was when the first unnamed cases of AIDS were reported. KRAMER: You feature hundreds

ADAM SCHULL / ZEITGEIST FILMS IN ASSOCIATION WITH KINO LORBER

Liza Minnelli, Bianca Jagger, Andy Warhol, and Halston at Studio 54.

of photos and film clips. How much did you comb through and what was your criteria for inclusion? TYRNAUER: We worked hard on finding images that really had never been seen before or weren’t the usual photos you’ve seen. We went through literally hundreds of thousands of images to select the couple hundred that made it into the film. We sought out archives of photographers who had never published their photos or we used alternate images, unseen contact sheets/ negatives that had never been printed. We were in basements of nieces or nephews of photographers. A great deal of attention went into identifying those photos. The 16mm footage of the club had never been seen before. KRAMER: You interview mostly folks directly involved with the club. How did you select the different points of view — the employees, the patrons, the outside observers? TYRNAUER: We don’t have celebrity voices, which was a conscious decision. The expected talking heads might have been the Rod Stewarts, Diana Rosses, George Hamiltons, and the paparazzi subjects. When I was shaping the film and conceiving it, that approach seemed less interesting to me because those people had a particular perspective and it was one that was pretty, I think, uninteresting in the end. The type of movie that dwells

GayCityNews.nyc | September 27 - October 10, 2018

on interviews with aging stars and celebrities pulls you out of the documentary. You’re looking at this face and think they look great or terrible or they had work done, and I find that to be a distraction. I made a calculated decision to focus on the real denizens of the club and who created the club and were the core constituency. The core wasn’t the pop music or movie stars, it was a certain class of New York persona, a creature of the night. It was only about 700 people who comprised this community of nightlife in New York. That was the world I wanted to capture and hear from. KRAMER: There are a few discrepancies in club’s history that are debated, such as the story of the money in the ceiling. What do you want viewers to think? TYRNAUER: I am a big fan of ambiguity, and I think that documentaries and feature films alike do a lot of handholding and I’m not all for that in every circumstance. In documentary, you’re seeing things from different perspectives, and I like to let that stand there and not over-explain. KRAMER: “Studio 54” deals with a culture of celebrity, even suggesting that the nightclub inaugurated the age of celebrity. Why are you — and by extension we — so fascinated by celebrity?

TYRNAUER: I think 54 marked a kind of change in the way media packaged celebrities and it provided a new fishbowl for the changing media to exploit. It was a symbiotic thing. Ian and Steve saw this wave rising and they rode it for all it was worth. It’s really an exploration of this particular moment, which seems quaint in the age of Instagram celebrities. It was a new phenomenon. There have always been celebrities in one form or another, and Hollywood, in the studio era, changed the game. The 1970s, and the burgeoning media culture, and TV coming into own, and the simultaneous upward rise of the middle class increasingly seduced us. Our celebrity culture is a precursor of the Kardashians. KRAMER: Would you call your film a cautionary tale about how Schrager and Rubell paid the price for their hubris? Do you think Studio 54 was ahead of its time, of its time, or a moment in time? TYRNAUER: Nothing lasts forever. If they had not gone to prison, it would have faded away. The HIV/ AIDS crisis would have extinguished its star anyway and in the most terrible way. For me, the story is as much about New York as it is about the club. This was a disco version of Edith Wharton. It’s a tale of social mores of a city in the throes of change. It’s that moment of the old WASP establishment about to fall away completely, and there was now an open door for ambitious outer borough people to come in and take over the old society and reform it into what we know as the era of 54 and the resurgence of New York in the 1980s and onward. “Studio” is the origin story of that period. I see it as a fascinating piece of social history that is perhaps under-explored and getting at it through the portal of 54 seemed liked a good opportunity. STUDIO 54 | Directed by Matt Tyrnauer | Zeitgeist Films in association with Kino Lorber | Opens Oct. 5 | IFC Center, 323 Sixth Ave. at W. Third St. | ifccenter.com

MUSIC

A Pop Attack on Gender Conformity Christine & the Queens’ boldly pansexual “Chris” offers plenty to catch the ear BY STEVE ERICKSON n a musical landscape where the distorting effects of Autotune on vocals are the clearest hallmark and glitchy production effects are increasingly common (the aesthetics behind trans producer Sophie’s “Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides” and rapper Travis Scott’s “Astroworld” aren’t so far apart despite vast differences in recording budgets and sales figures), the idea that music is most truthful when it consists of a singer/ songwriter standing with a guitar and performing confessional songs about their life is dying out. Christine & the Queens’ “Chris” is a deliberate feminist exercise in genderfuck designed to express many of the contradictions of being a pansexual woman, including expressing attitudes coded as masculine while still attracted to men. Chris is a persona adopted by the French singer Héloïse Letissier, the woman behind this one-person band, but she’s also the name Letissier uses in real life. The full version of “Chris” contains two parts: the first sung in English, the second in French, with the same instrumental backing. However, even when Chris performs in English, her voice is strongly accented, and she switches back and forth between the two languages; she makes no attempt to pass as a native English speaker. “Chris” borrows heavily from African-American music: ‘80s funk bands like Cameo and Midnight Star, Janet and Michael Jackson, and ‘90s West Coast hiphop (producer Dam-Funk, who made an album with Snoop Dogg, worked on the cut “Girlfriend”). Yet Chris sounds thoroughly French the whole time and uses her influences on her own terms. In this, she resembles the out gay French rapper Eddy de Pretto, whose music makes connections between hip-hop and the tradition of chanson artists like Jacques Brel and

CHRISTINEANDTHEQUEENS.COM

Christine and the Queens’ new album is “Chris,” a persona that French singer Héloïse Letissier has adopted in her real life.

Edith Piaf. In her album’s press kit, Chris cites Bruce Springsteen and Eminem as influences on her persona. Women generally don’t have the freedom to create a character like Eminem’s Slim Shady or reel off flippantly offensive songs like his “Role Model” and “Kill You” and still become a superstar, yet she finds something appealing about the rapper while feeling repulsed by many of his lyrics. The lyrics to “Chris” find a freedom in playing in drag. The way “Chris” turns to the dance floor of the past to express something political reminds me of one of the year’s best albums, U.S. Girls’ “In A Poem Unlimited,” which mixes rock with funk and disco a la late ‘70s Blondie and Talking Heads to make leftism and feminism go down more smoothly. Only on the final song, “The Stranger,”

does “Chris” delve into stereotypically French sounds, using accordion as the lead instrument. Even there, it shares place with synthesizer chords and a dance beat. If the song’s title itself seems archetypally French as well, evoking Camus’ famous novel, the lyrics ponder “Who is the stranger?” Instead of condemning masculinity and even machismo as toxic, the lyrics on “Chris” examine what women might be able to learn productively from them. It’s explicit in the album that gender roles are a form of drag that people can take on and off, and both men and women can embody the openly lustful and explicitly sexual attitudes described in songs like “Girlfriend” and “Goya Soda.” Chris’ lovers on this album are both male and female, and she does not compromise on being butch when she pursues the former.

“The Walker” (La Marcheuse”) describes strolling around Paris feeling lonely, alienated, depressed, and even tempted by violence. It’s told from the perspective of a character who scares people. In the song’s powerful music video, Chris strolls through the streets of a rural town, facing hostile stares and finding the only possibility of tenderness by embracing a bull. In a relatively gentle way, there’s something misanthropic about it. “Doesn’t Matter” shows a vulnerability that’s far from the sexual bravado elsewhere in the album. Released as a single in the summer, I thought it was a stunning song: it stares down some of the central questions of life and decides that it doesn’t matter if God exists. This isn’t so much a proud declaration of atheism as a reflection of the song’s narrator’s grim, apathetic state of mind. “Chris” is a guitar-free space. The album sticks to synthesizers, piano, and programmed beats. Some songs plow ahead in a straightforward fashion drawn from funk and more recent dance music. Others have fairly spare arrangements, like “Whats-her-face” and “Make Some Sense,” which rely on airy keyboards and a distant drum machine. In an interview with The Fader, Chris said, “But I still very much feel like as women we are refused complexity, or extreme emotions without being slightly dirty or deranged. We still have to make anger nonthreatening by being pretty.” This probably led to the way “Chris” puts its attack on conventional gender roles inside catchy, accessible pop songs, but as with “In a Poem Unlimited” it neither compromises its politics nor stints on earworms in doing so. CHRISTINE AND THE QUEENS | “Chris” | Because Music | christineandthequeens.com | Christine and the Queens’ Oct. 31 and Nov. 1 performances at Brooklyn Steel in East Williamsburg are both sold out

September 27 - October 10, 2018 | GayCityNews.nyc

FILM

Queen of the Night Anthony&Alex capture Susanne Bartsch in her supernatural milieu BY DAVID NOH ong the queen of New York nightlife, Susanne Bartsch, has now been immortalized in a documentary about her life and wild times, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Susanne Bartsch: On Top,â&#x20AC;? just released on video. Since arriving in Gotham on Valentineâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Day 1981, this Swissborn fashionista â&#x20AC;&#x201D; and then some â&#x20AC;&#x201D; took our little town by storm, fi rst with the most avantgarde boutique in Soho, featuring the earliest work of Vivienne Westwood, John Galliano, and Stephen Jones, among other Brit and local wunderkinder. This was one groovy place to hang, and it organically morphed into her next and extant career as an event planner and party hostess

extraordinaire. Indeed, in the grimmest days of AIDS, her soirĂŠes, particularly her legendary Love Balls â&#x20AC;&#x201D; where vogueing was introduced to the downtown hoi polloi and that raised vast amounts of money to fight the plague â&#x20AC;&#x201D; were among the few bright spots in the dimming landscape of a once vibrant Manhattan nightlife. In the doc directed by the team of Anthony&Alex, this incredible, incredibly glamorous survivor proves herself to be a Super Everywoman, adept at home repair, cooking, raising a son (who comes off as amazingly sane, after a childhood spent living in the Chelsea Hotel surrounded by flamboyant, gender-bending club kid friends of Mom and Dad â&#x20AC;&#x201D; ex-husband, diminutive, muscle-

bound gym entrepreneur David Barton), pulling off huge events that are always nerve-wracking, and making entrances sure to slay â&#x20AC;&#x201D; whether itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s at Bill Cunninghamâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s memorial in a bikini (basically), at her own wedding encased in an egg-shaped, fullbodied veil (with hubby in a kicky thong), or more recently on a fl ight to Austria I shared with her early this summer to attend Viennaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Life Ball, which took a page or two from her original. Gay City News recently interviewed the directors. DAVID NOH: How did this wonderful, vibrant fi lm come about? ALEX: We met Susanne about a week before we started filming the documentary at one of her parties. We premiered a fashion

film there that Susanne loved, and the next day she invited us to see the FIT exhibit she was putting together. Susanne was clearly such an artist and force of nature that we instinctively knew we wanted to make a feature documentary on her. NOH: I so loved the inclusion of the various club personalitieshearing their stories â&#x20AC;&#x201D; why was it important to include them? ANTHONY: Susanneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s impact and importance to underground art and nightlife can really only be shown through the stories and lives of the people sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s touched â&#x20AC;&#x201D; which is far too many people to actually include in the film! Her influence is so wide that the only

â&#x17E;¤ BARTSCH, continued on p.22

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GayCityNews.nyc | September 27 - October 10, 2018

E M 6

THEATER

Lonely Hearts Club Four forsaken women struggle to ward off despair in Depression-era St. Louis BY DAVID KENNERLEY Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur” is not one of Tennessee Williams’ top-drawer plays. But even as a middle-drawer work, it’s got a marvelous richness and poignancy to spare, thanks in no small part to a sturdy cast, led by the splendid Kristine Nielsen, nominated for a Best Actress Tony for the farcical “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike.” Creve Coeur, which means “broken heart” in French, refers to a heart-shaped lake near St. Louis. On a sunny Sunday in June, 1937, it is where a plump, middle-aged German gal named Bodey (Nielsen) intends to take her brother and her roommate, Dorothea, on a little picnic to escape their cramped efficiency apartment (set designer Harry Feiner must have gone wild at flea markets to assemble the dumpy, garish period decor) and the oppressive summer heat. And perhaps stir up a romance. Bodey’s simple plan is doomed from the get-

“A

JOAN MARCUS

Jean Lichty, Annette O’Toole, and Kristine Nielsen in Tennessee Williams’ “A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur,” directed by Austin Pendleton, at Theatre at St. Clement’s through October 21.

go. Dorothea is consumed waiting for a phone call from a dashing gentleman friend, the principal at the high school where she teaches civics. She wants no part of Bodey’s scheme, being

not the least bit attracted to the beer-swilling, cigar-chomping brother. “I’m sorry, but the life I design for myself is not along those lines,” Dorothea sniffs. “What I must have and finally do have is an affair of the heart, two hearts, a true consummated romance — yes consummated, I’m not ashamed!” Little does she know there’s an item in the Sunday paper that will shatter those romantic dreams, and Bodey is doing her darnedest to conceal it. Think of Dorothea as a cousin to Blanche from “Streetcar.” She’s from the Deep South and has the lilting accent to prove it, her health is fragile, her beauty is fading fast, she has delusions of grandeur and has rotten luck with members of the opposite sex. Jean Lichty infuses Dorothea with a deft mix of fragility and fortitude. The plot, centering on a lady pinning her future on the whims of a dubious gentleman caller, bears more than a passing resemblance to

➤ LOVELY SUNDAY, continued on p.19

Character Issues Looking at humans — their dreams and failures BY CHRISTOPHER BYRNE ot since Bill Irwin has there been a physical comedian — aka “clown” — with the soul, sophistication and storytelling genius of Richard Saudek. His extraordinary piece “Beep Boop,” now at Here Arts Center, is a multimedia exploration of the role technology plays in our lives and how in a connected world we may be more isolated than ever before. Over a brisk 45 minutes, Saudek takes us into the depths of a character chained to his devices, desperately seeking contact and yet fearful of the outside world. His amazingly expressive physicality is often breathtaking as it recalls animation styles of the 1950s and ‘60s, notably the UPA style, based in a philosophy of free expression, that used limited, monochromatic backgrounds, specific movement language, and exaggerated forms. The tension between Saudek’s allusion to that style and his narrative of a man trapped by — and sometimes literally inside — the allconsuming technology gives the narrative reso-

JEREMEY DANIEL

Richard Saudek in “Beep Boop,” at the Here Arts Center through October 7.

nance and a highly relatable poignancy. Almost from the outset, we feel connected to this character and his plight. Under Wes Grantom’s direction with original composition and sound design by Jesse Novak, this is a revelatory and compelling piece of work that is not to be missed.

Sharr White’s new play “The True,” getting its premiere at The New Group, is both fascinating and frustrating. It’s fascinating because a magnificent company brings this tale of Albany politics to life with passion and nuance. The finely etched characters, even in the smaller roles, are consistently interesting as the swirl of politics consumes them all. It’s frustrating because for all the drama — actual and emotional — at the end, we’re back where we started. That may be a commentary on politics, but it’s too obscure to be dramatically satisfying. It’s a wonderfully performed character study tautly directed by Scott Elliott, but it’s not clear why we’ve gone on this campaign. Polly Noonan is an operative in the upstate Democratic Party. She’s a staunch defender of Mayor Erastus Corning and is playing all kinds of political games to keep him in power. She’s profane, aggressive, and overwhelming, leaving those who can’t keep up in her wake as she wheels and deals. Rumors of an affair between Polly and Corning are unfounded, but

➤ CHARACTER, continued on p.19 September 27 - October 10, 2018 | GayCityNews.nyc

➤ LOVELY SUNDAY, from p.18 “The Glass Menagerie.” When Dorothea’s smug teaching colleague, Helena (the excellent Annette O’Toole, in full-on supercilious mode), appears uninvited to discuss an urgent business proposition, the household is thrown into disarray. Complicating matters further is a visit by their needy upstairs neighbor, Miss Gluck, distraught over the death of her mother. Williams has leavened the sadness with sly touches of levity. When describing her encounter with the butcher at the Piggly-Wiggly, where she was buying chicken to fry up for the picnic, Bodey repeatedly says, with a salacious undertone, “he lets me feel the meat.” The butcher’s name is Mr. Butts. There are passages where, under the direction of the legendary Austin Pendleton, who may be the hardest working septuagenarian in New York theater, the play veers too firmly into comic territory. Naturally, the gifted Nielsen plays up the

laughs. Another quibble is that the role of Miss Gluck is underwritten, and as portrayed by Polly McKie it registers as one-note. And it’s an uncomfortably shrill note indeed. As a play from Williams’ later life (1979), familiar motifs from previous works abound: the friction between social classes, the shame of living on the wrong side of town, the sting of failed romance, the importance of keeping up appearances, the battle for belonging, and the will to persevere in the face of adversity. Or, as Dorothea dispassionately proclaims not long before the final curtain of this underrated, lyrical tragicomedy, “We must pull ourselves together and go on.”

LOOK FOR OUR CIRCULAR IN TODAY’S PAPER!

A LOVELY SUNDAY FOR CREVE COEUR | La Femme Theatre Productions | Theatre at St. Clement’s, 423 W. 46th St. | Through Oct. 21: Wed.-Thu. at 7 p.m.; Fri.-Sat. at 8 p.m.; Sat. at 2 p.m.; Sun. at 3 p.m. | $65-$85 at lafemmetheatreproductions.org | One hr., 40 mins., no intermission

VISIT PCRICHARD.COM FOR A STORE NEAREST YOU ➤ CHARACTER, from p.18 that doesn’t stop the gossips. Even Polly’s husband, Peter, who tries to stay out of the fray, suffers collateral damage as the family and the politics cut a swath through everyone’s life. The play is reminiscent of David Hare’s “Plenty,” where a dynamic, driven woman, Susan Traherne, wreaks emotional havoc on everyone in her life. “Plenty” succeeds where “The True” falls short in that Hare delved into the sources of Susan’s neuroses and what caused her to be so destructive — almost against her will. White, while creating a similar character in Polly, gives us no such complexity and that limits our connection to her. Still, the cast is wonderful. Edie Falco as Polly shines. She simply absorbs the stage as her character sucks all the air out of every room. Each moment of her performance is richly detailed. Peter Scolari as Peter is a wonderful counterpoint to Falco’s ferocity. He’s gentle but not a pushover as he negotiates life with a force of nature. Michael McKean is excellent as Corning, who has to distance himself from Polly for his political and personal

salvation, but ultimately can’t resist her. If there was at one time sexual tension between Corning and Polly, it’s long in the past, and both McKean and Falco play that marvelously. The rest of the company — Austin Cauldwell, Glenn Fitzgerald, and John Pankow — play small roles, planets on a collision course with Polly’s orbit. Ultimately, “The True” is very like contemporary politics. Watching it can be entertaining, engaging, and affecting. For theater, however, “The True” would have to deliver more than surface situations and characters to get my wholehearted vote. BEEP BOOP | Here Arts Center | 145 Sixth Ave. at Dominick St. | Through Oct. 7: Tue.-Sat. at 7 p.m.; Sat., Sun. at 2 p.m. | $25 at here. org/shows/detail/2014/ or 212352-3101 | Forty-five mins., no intermission THE TRUE | The New Group at Signature Center, 480 W. 42nd St. | Through Oct. 28: Tue.-Fri at 7:30 p.m.; Sat. at 8 p.m.; Wed., Sat.-Sun. at 2 p.m. | $30-$125 at thenewgroup.org or 212-279-4200 | One hr., 45 mins., no intermission

GayCityNews.nyc | September 27 - October 10, 2018

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REMEMBERANCE

Farewell, Marin Broadway mourns a musical beacon’s ns p passing assing BY DAVID NOH f you were lucky enough to catch the Michael Blakemore-directed 1999 revival of “Kiss Me Kate,” then you experienced pure musical theater bliss. And no one was more responsible for this than Marin Mazzie, who succumbed to ovarian cancer at her home in Manhattan on September 13 at age 57 . The role of Lilli Vanessi encompassed all of Mazzie’s best qualities: she dazzled with charisma and was big, bold, and brassy, gorgeously laminating Cole Porter’s deliciously immortal songs with her rich, velvety, clarion voice. And, when she gave forth on “I Hate Men,” she kicked mincing, ear-piercing little Kathryn Grayson (from the 1953 MGM movie) right out of the room in my memory, turning it into a ferociousy funny diatribe aimed at the truly weaker sex. But this was but one of so many remarkable highlights in a Broadway career that spanned three decades, starting with a replacement gig in “Big River” in 1985. Her first Tony nomination came in 1994 for Stephen Sondheim’s “Passion,” and she gained two more for her exemplary work in “Ragtime” (1998) and “Kate.” One of her final Broadway appearances was as tempestuous diva in Woody Allen’s “Bullets Over Broadway,” a role she won over just about every other covetous actress in the business. Mazzie hailed from Rockford, Illinois, the child of musical-loving parents who had her taking singing lessons by age 12. She attended Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo and came to New York in 1982. At 24, her singing deeply impressed Sondheim himself, who would coach her for his La Jolla revival of “Merrily We Roll Along” — teaching her the vital difference between the words “so there’s hell to pay,” and “and there’s hell to pay,” which she had mistakenly substituted in the song “Not a Day Goes By.” While in a production of Charles Mee’s “The Trojan Women: A Love Story,” she met actor Jason Daniely, whom she married the next year and worked with again in concerts and as replacements in the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Next to Normal” (2010). He stood steadfastly by her after her diagnosis for cancer in 2015, and the two became valiant health advocates, speaking openly about her illness and treatment. Cancer was a challenge but never it stopped this indomitable soul who defiantly continued to work, replacing Kelli O’Hara in “The King and I” to rapturous reviews and in the Encores! revival of “Zorba!”, which actually opened on the day of her diagnosis. As the Chorus, she opened the show with the Fred Ebb lyrics “Life is what you do while you’re waiting to die. Life is how time goes by,” and how she managed to get through

DAVID NOH

Marin Mazzie performing her 2015 cabaret show “Make Your Own Kind of Music.”

that is one of the miracles of stage professionalism and pure joy in the art. Offstage, I found Mazzie immensely warm and down to earth, even as she radiated the ultimate, glowing blonde diva glamour. I asked her in a 2015 Gay City News interview how important was it to have a happy personal life in a business where many eschew it in search of a Tony or Oscar. “That’s definitely part of who I am,” she responded. “Yes, Jason and I are very definitely on the same wavelength as far as all that goes, because this business is crazy, unpredictable with its ups and downs. It’s very important to us to focus on our work and selves, staying healthy and being artists and creating. We thought about having kids, but it was all about the timing of when we met and how old I was when we got married [he was 10 years younger]. It wasn’t in the cards for us, which was our choice, a good one for us. We have Oscar, our dog who is our child, and I really didn’t feel like I needed to add to the surplus population… horrifying phrase.” On the night of writing this, the Broadway

theatrical community will celebrate Mazzie’s life by dimming all its lights — not just some as was originally planned, which was met with justifiable anger. Daniely posted on Facebook: “Don’t let the disease take away anything more from Marin than what it already has. Remember her as Clara, as Mother, as Kate, as Dulcinea, as The Lady of the Lake, as Margaret White, as Diana Goodman, as a favorite Sondheim interpreter, as a concert artist who brought joy to people around the world in cabaret, concert halls, and with symphony orchestras. “Remember her as a true champion of the art of Music Theatre. Not just as a popular entertainment but as the highest form of the art form that reflects and examines life and all of its complexities, putting it to music and prose and dance and having all of those disciplines shine through the artists, those who have made it their life mission to hone, polish, and shine their talents, so that we might learn from our past and set a beacon for the future, in art, yes, but also in life.” September 27 - October 10, 2018 | GayCityNews.nyc

OPERA

Romantic Italian Opera at Dawn Will Crutchfield’ss Teatro Nuovo features Rossini, Mayr BY ELI JACOBSON he theme of the inaugural season of Will Crutchfield’s Teatro Nuovo Summer Festival at Purchase College was “The Dawn of Romantic Opera,” which according to Crutchfield happened in Italy in1813. In February of that year in Venice, 21-year old Gioachino Rossini scored his first breakthrough triumph with the opera seria “Tancredi. In November 1813 in Naples, 50-year-old Bavarian-born Giovanni Simone Mayr scored his greatest theatrical success with “Medea in Corinto.” Teatro Nuovo presented both operas in a (barely) semi-staged concert. Rossini in “Tancredi” stuck with the old opera seria conventions — a high-voiced contralto hero (in place of the vanishing baroque castrato), an emphasis on florid vocalism, secco recitatives, and a happy ending. The French-derived Bourbons of the Two Sicilies who ruled Naples in the first quarter of the 19th century influenced the artistic direction of the Teatro San Carlo to emulate French tragédie-lyrique models. Mayr in “Medea” shows the influence of Gluck, Haydn, and Mozart, featuring two tenor protagonists, expressive declamation inspired by Gluck’s French reform operas, and a large symphonic orchestra accompanying the recitatives. Mayr’s music, though elegant and well crafted, often falls into routine formulas. It seldom evokes terror and awe, except in Medea’s Act II invocation to vengeful demons “Antica Notte.” Jennifer Rowley as Medea lacked the dramatic fire of a Giuditta Pasta (who took over Mayr’s opera in the 1820s and 1830s) or Maria Callas in the Cherubini “Medea.” Rowley was more the proud abandoned queen than the scorned fury or pagan sorceress. She lavished a velvety and luscious full lyric soprano voice on Medea’s low-lying expressive declamation. The part sits in the middle range with only a few declamatory high notes and little of the virtuoso coloratura writing

STEVEN PISANO/ TEATRO NUOVO

Tamara Mumford and Amanda Woodbury in the Teatro Nuovo production of Rossini’s “Tancredi.”

that Rossini composed for Colbran in “Armida” and elsewhere. Rowley rose to powerful authority in Medea’s Act II invocation to vengeful demons “Antica Notte.” The two tenors were contrasted: Derrek Stark as Giasone (the Nozzari role) sang with a bright and firm tenor in broad declamatory phrases that had a golden gleam that matched his glittery gold lamé dinner jacket. The silvery tenore di grazia of Mingjie Li as Jason’s rival King Egeo nimbly executed the florid writing and high notes with ease. The ill-fated Princess Creusa, who has ditched Egeo to become Giasone’s second wife, also is a high coloratura in contrast with her rival, the darkly dramatic Medea. Creusa’s vocal line is delicate and artfully decorated. Teresa Castillo’s pure coloratura soprano communicated mournful pathos and deep foreboding but also delivered the vocal gymnastics with brilliance. Conductor Jonathan Brandani led the Teatro Nuovo Orchestra in a fluent reading of the “Medea” score. “Tancredi” (based on a Voltaire tragedy) established Rossini as the rising star of Italian Opera — within a decade he conquered all of Europe earning the sobriquet “The Napoleon of Music.” “Tancredi” premiered in Venice with the mandated happy ending — a later Ferrara production occasioned a stark,

GayCityNews.nyc | September 27 - October 10, 2018

discordantly Monteverdian death scene that closely followed the original Voltaire tragedy. Rossini added new arias for various productions around Italy (replacing both of Tancredi’s and Argirio’s arias) — eventually providing alternate music for nearly half the score. Crutchfield presented “Tancredi” with the alternative arias and tragic ending as “Tancredi Rifatto” on August 5. Tamara Mumford’s Tancredi in the original Venice version was more the lyrical and reflective lover than ballsy bravura warrior. Mumford’s oboe-like tone is mournful and moving, especially in long-lined cantilena. Her mellow low mezzo lacks tonal thrust (especially on the bottom end) and her coloratura has limited speed (she also lacks a trill). Her alternate in “Tancredi Rifatto” was the rising young mezzo-soprano Aleks Romano. Her Tancredi was more the warrior and bravura bel canto technician. Romano’s rounded tone possessed a brilliant ring from top to bottom and she attacked the machine gun coloratura with commanding gusto. I think the extroverted Romano could have handled the lively Venice happy ending with more panache while the introvert Mumford would have found the spare, expressive writing of the tragic ending more congenial. As the falsely accused Amenaide, young coloratura soprano

Amanda Woodbury confirmed the fine impression she made at the Metropolitan Opera as Juliette and Leila in “Les Pêcheurs de Perles.” She sang her arias with cool precision and blended beautifully in thirds in duet with Mumford. The “Rifatto” alternate Amenaide, newcomer Christine Lyons, was a revelation. Woodbury took an instrumental approach to Amenaide’s music while Lyons’ quick vibrato and complex timbre brought greater emotional immediacy to Amenaide’s conflict between duty and desire. Both sopranos handled the florid passages with musicianship and flair. As Amenaide’s aggrieved father Argirio, Santiago Ballerini lavished gleaming, golden tenor tone and frank emotionalism on the music more suitable to Bellini or Donizetti than Rossini. In “Tancredi Rifatto,” David Margulis brought a lighter, more dulcet-toned Rossini tenor to Arigirio’s less florid, more heroic replacement arias. As with the two mezzos, the two tenors might have profitably swapped assignments. During his 20 years at the Bel Canto at Caramoor festival, Maestro Crutchfield had the benefit of the experienced and highly polished Orchestra of St. Luke’s as his pit band. The newly formed Teatro Nuovo Orchestra is a period ensemble playing at a lower pitch on historical instruments — natural horns, wood flutes, and gut strings. Leading “Tancredi” from the fortepiano in collaboration with first violinist Jakob Lehmann, Crutchfield had trouble keeping the woodwinds and horns in tune. There were several moments of less than precise ensemble. The musicians seem to be mostly young and fresh from school (like the supporting singers). It takes time to forge an orchestra into a polished ensemble. All the performances were poorly attended — this festival will need time to find its footing and its audience. What we did hear was full of exciting promise and enriched the listener with a combination of musical scholarship and sheer beauty.

➤ BARTSCH, from p.17 way to properly tell her story is to include the voices of the people who were affected by her. We also wanted to give voice to Susanne’s philosophy that we’re all connected and doing our best to move through life in a positive and artistically fulfi lling way. NOH: Tell me about your backgrounds, please, in film? ANTHONY: Our background in fi lm started in theater actually. We started incorporating multimedia into our work, which eventually led to us to making music videos, fashion films, and video art. It was in the process of working with incredible artists in New York that we were led to Susanne. NOH: How long was the shoot? You were all over New York and everywhere. Was that easy to pull off? ALEX: The shoot was a little over a year, with the entire fi lm being completed in about two. Luckily, Michael Beach Nichols

and Chris Walker, our producers and collaborators, are all Brooklyn-based like us. There were many nights when we were shooting in a nightclub until 4 in the morning, which can be a little difficult with fi lm and sound equipment, but it was an exciting experience that took us to truly amazing places and events. ANTHONY: One of our most cherished memories was filming Flawless Sabrina [Jack Doroshow], who has since passed away. Beyond what was said in the interview, Jack took the two of us aside and spoke to us about life and pushing through adversity in an industry that isn’t always the kindest to queer people or content. We’ll always carry that with us. It was one of our greatest pleasures to sit with that beautiful human while she was around. NOH: Amazing archival footage. How did you acquire it? ALEX: The vast majority of the footage came directly from Susanne herself. She had several boxes of VHS tapes with various moments of her life and career

from the past that we digitized. Of course the home movies also came from her, which gives the film such an intimate feeling. It was a wild process to get the hundreds of hours of archival footage digitized, and an ever harder process to edit all of the amazing footage into just the most incredible moments. NOH: Did you have to cut the film down much in the interests of running time. Anything that might have been left out because of that? ALEX: In the earlier cuts there were long moments of Leigh Bowery and Lady Hennessy Brown as they performed their acts at a Susanne party in the ‘80s. Susanne always pushes the envelope with the performers she hires and we really wanted to illustrate that, but it can be hard to keep a film on track when there’s long breaks of Leigh Bowery giving birth on stage or Susanne pulling dozens of tied scarves out of Lady Hennessy Brown’s vagina, you know? NOH: I recall she was somehow

forever lactating, causing clubgoers to buy glasses of kahlua liquer for her to squirt into for White Russians. In your own words, describe incredible Suzanne and what it was like to capture her world. ANTHONY: Susanne is a force of nature. She’s incredibly strong and wise, with a power to make things happen. To capture her world was incredibly exciting, but also stressful because it was so important to us that we truthfully capture that world and honor it for the contributions it’s made to culture. NOH: Future projects? ALEX: We have several super exciting projects that we’re in preproduction for now! ANTHONY: This film has opened up so many incredible doors for us, and we want to keep honoring icons who haven’t fully gotten their day in the sun. SUSANNE BARTSCH ON TOP | Directed by Anthony&Alex | The Orchard & World of Wonder | Available at noweahter.com

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GayCityNews.nyc | September 27 - October 10, 2018

WHAT’S DOIN’ IN THE GAY CITY “You Wouldn’t Expect” A New York City premiere, lesbian playwright Marilynn Barner Anselmi’s “You Wouldn’t Expect” is a drama about involuntary sterilization in North Carolina set in 1965 with strong racial and feminist overtones. It’s a powerful history lesson you won’t want to miss. Chain Theater 312 W. 36th St., Fourth Floor 347-422–7309 info@americanbard.org Through Oct. 7: Wed. – Sat. at 8 p.m.; Sun. at p.m. $25 general admission, $18 students & seniors eventbrite.com/e/you-wouldnt-expect-tickets-49150405185 View from Room 302 The Gay Men’s Male Figure Drawing Group, which meets weekly to draw nude models, with artists working in different mediums — paint, charcoal, digital, and more — showcase their work and offer some pieces for sale. LGBT Community Center 208 W. 13th St.

Theatre at St. John’s presents

Mary Cappello, James Morrison, and Jean Walton read from their new book, “Buffalo Trace: A Threefold Vibration,” on September 30.

Sat., Sep. 29, from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. https://www.facebook.com/photo. php?fbid=10100763005473057&s et=gm.2662602037298395&type =3&theater&ifg=1 Queer Tango Weekend New York Queer Tango Weekend returns to New York with workshops and master classes taught by the leading teachers and opportunities to explore the endless variety

THE LARAMIE PROJECT written by Moisés Kaufman and the members of Tectonic Theater Project A Staged Reading

Twenty years ago, on Oct. 6, 1998, college student, Matthew Shepard was abducted, beaten, and left to die because he was gay. Using the voices of the people of Laramie, Wyoming collected by the Tectonic Theater Project, we tell this story... - in memory of the life that was lost. - to encourage us in the fight before us. - to always remember and learn. - to find hope even in suffering. - to shine light on the truth that all are children of God. A free will offering will be taken to support the ministries of St. John’s that support and give assistance to LGBTQ+ youth and young adults who face homelessness and other challenges.

October 6 7:00 PM 81 Christopher St.

of tango at milongas — tango social parties — and mix and mingle with the New York tango community. Friends of Argentine Tango, a New York-based nonprofit organization, will present awards to tango teachers and activists who have made important contributions to disseminating tango and creating a thriving tango community in the US and worldwide. The weekend includes parties at venues in Midtown and Astoria. 917-496–7547 nyqueertango.com Thu., Sep. 27, 9:30 p.m.–2 a.m. Fri., Sep. 28, 9 p.m.–midnight Sat., Sep. 29, 9:30 p.m.–5 a.m. Sun., Sep. 30, 7 p.m.–1:30 a.m. Price varies according to event Brains, Bodies, Books, and Doubt Mary Cappello, James Morrison, and Jean Walton read from their new book, “Buffalo Trace: A Threefold Vibration,” set in the upstate city in the 1980s and comprised of three intricate, interrelated essays that meditate on the limits of expression, on the gender of ambition, on secrecy, eroticism, academic time, and snow. Novelist and historian Christopher Bram writes, “Smart, honest, and beautifully written, these three tales of grad school life in the 1980s could be called ‘Love in the Time of Deconstruction.’ A hothouse world of brains, bodies, books, and doubt (in Buffalo, no less), it’s all a bit mad, but in the exciting, necessary way of life in your twenties. ‘Buffalo Trace’ is a strange, original, wonderful book.” Bureau of General Services — Queer Division LGBT Community Center 208 W. 13th St., room 210 646-457–0859; bgsqd.com Sun., Sep. 30 at 4 p.m. Suggested donation of $10 Former Planned Parenthood Chief Speaks Out The NYU Wagner School’s Rudin Center hosts its Henry Hart Rice Urban Policy Forum featuring Cecile Richards, the former president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and author of “Make Trouble: Standing Up, Speaking Out, and Finding the Courage to Lead,” who will discuss

the role of activism in urban politics. NYU Wagner 295 Lafayette St., btwn. E. Houston St. & Jersey St., second fl. eventbr ite.com/e/hen r y-ha r tr ice-urba n-pol icy-for um-t ickets-49987175989 Tue., Oct. 2 from 6 to 7:30 p.m. Free, but registration suggested New Yorkers Against Gun Violence Annual Benefit The New Yorkers Against Gun Violence Education Fund hosts its annual benefit, honoring Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez, Ed Skyler, Citi executive vice president for Global Public Affairs, and Paola Paez and Gregory Williams, ReACTION Alumni and “Youth Over Guns” activists. The evening’s proceeds support NYAGV youth and community education programs to prevent gun violence. Edison Ballroom, 240 W. 47th St. or g 2 .s a l s a l a b s.c om/o/5 610/ c/209/p/salsa/event/common/ public/?event_KEY=87775 Tue., Oct. 9 from 6:30–9 p.m. $250; $180 for young professionals Bill T. Jones In Conversation with Hank Willis Thomas Legendary choreographer, National Medal of Arts (2013) honoree, MacArthur “Genius” Award (1994) recipient, and artistic director of New York Live Arts Bill T. Jones welcomes a discussion with Hank Willis Thomas, a conceptual artist, socio-political activist, Guggenheim Fellow (2018), and co-founder of For Freedoms, an artist-run platform for political engagement, discourse, and 50-state action. As both artists and changemakers, Jones and Thomas will explore their responsibilities in being creatives while engaging with the world around them, as well as For Freedom’s 50-State Initiative, which involves 200 institutional partners and 300 artists in encouraging broad participation in and conversation about November’s midterm elections. New York Live Arts 219 W. 19th St. 212-924–0077 newyorklivearts.org Mon., Oct. 8 at 7 p.m. $10, with student & senior discounts available

September 27 - October 10, 2018 | GayCityNews.nyc

GayCityNews.nyc | September 27 - October 10, 2018

TRAVEL

Fall Perfection in Upstate’s Finger Lakes Waterfront sunsets, wine tastings, and progressive history compete for tourist attention BY KELSY CHAUVIN

he Northeast’s famed fall foliage is reason enough for an autumnal getaway. But few regions compare to New York’s Finger Lakes, where the natural scenery is matched by cozy B&Bs, delightful restaurants, remarkable history, lovely hiking, and oh such wonderful wineries. The 11 Finger Lakes are actually “fjord lakes,” whose long, narrow shapes stretch out in rows across central New York State like hands. The two largest lakes, Cayuga and Seneca, are among the continent’s deepest, yet slim enough to see across their smooth waters to tree-lined far shores. The region was long ago inhabited by the Iroquois people, and many of their names for the lakes and towns remain — along with the fertile and beautiful landscapes that have long charmed travelers. The Finger Lakes are prime road-tripping territory, and most city dwellers can save hours by hopping a quick flight into Ithaca, Syracuse, or Rochester for a car rental. Each of those towns has its own appeal, though for ultimate leaf-peeping, you’ll want to drift toward the rural areas. Around Cayuga Lake On the east side of Cayuga Lake is the village of Aurora, home to Wells College, one of the first women’s colleges, founded in 1868 (and turned co-ed in 2005). The school made Aurora an upstate destination, and many travelers today are fans of the Inns of Aurora. The LGBT-friendly inn is comprised of four separate buildings built between 1833 and 1909, each with its own design style and all within the national historic district of Aurora. As the only luxury accommodation in the area, the Inns of Aurora is an indulgent experience thanks to comfy furnishings, grand shared spaces, and picture-perfect porches and lakefront yards. Do not miss the sunsets across Cayuga Lake. Dining at the Inns of Aurora is both upscale and homey, with a menu that prioritizes ingredients sourced locally and made in-house. Menus for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and weekend brunch span charcuterie and cheeses from New York farms, seasonal fish and greens, cocktails made with regional spirits, and a wine menu with a long list of Finger Lakes vintages. Thanks to the inn’s owner, original art decorates the hotel, along with plenty of locally made MacKenzie-Childs pottery. The brand is known for whimsical housewares and kitchen tools with colorful designs and patterns. MacKenzie-Childs occupies a restored 1800s farmhouse, open daily for free tours (and great sales).

KELSEY CHAUVIN

A view of Lake Cayuga, one of the two largest of the 11 Finger Lakes, from the porch of the Inns of Aurora.

“urban farm winery” that makes its own Cabernet Franc and Riesling, and is a tasting room/ wine shop for other New York winemakers. Weary of wine? Head to Kashong Creek for craft-cider tastings and innovative cocktails. Geneva has turned into something of a hotspot for the region, home to reliably good tipples and dishes at memorable establishments. The Linden Social Club pours stellar libations and light bites in a speakeasy atmosphere. Kindred Fare serves both inventive and familiar “farmhouse cooking” from its downtown outpost. FLX Live (aka “Finger Lakes Live”) brings live entertainment and dance nights to Geneva’s Headless Sullivan Theater. Drive a few miles outside town to Geneva on the Lake for lodging on a historic 10-acre landscaped lakeside property. Wineries along the way include Ravines Wine Cellars, one of the region’s top winemakers, and Billsboro Winery, tucked away in a converted barn for tastings that can be paired with local chocolate.

Wine is one of the main draws to the Finger Lakes. As New York’s largest wine region, more than 100 wineries and vineyards dot the landscape, many of them along the Cayuga Lake Wine Trail (mostly on the lake’s west side). Several kinds of grapes thrive in the fertile swaths between the lakes, but the most common varietals are Cabernet Franc and Riesling (both sweet and dry). Most tasting experiences are affordable, sometimes as little as $3 for five tastes. And many, like Long Point Winery and Treleaven Winery, offer gorgeous outdoor spaces with views across rolling hills and forests. They say Cayuga’s is America’s first “wine trail,” and it’s spurred other themed trails like the Finger Lakes Beer Trail, Sweet Treats Trail, Haunted History Trail, and Cheese-Alliance Trail.

Progressive Upstate New York Seneca Falls is home to the Women’s Rights National Historical Park, which occupies the site where the first Women’s Rights Convention was held in July 1848. It’s worth a visit to the National Parks Service center there to learn about suffrage, abolitionism, and other 19th- and early 20th-century political reform struggles. In neighboring Cayuga County, the Harriet Tubman Home sheds light on the former slave’s legendary struggle and success to save slaves via the Underground Railroad. It’s now a National Historic Landmark. Another local landmark is the Susan B. Anthony House, located further west in Rochester. Along with its annual suffrage celebrations, Anthony’s home is preserved with original furnishings and historic materials, and is open for daily tours. Her grave and that of Frederick Douglass can be found in Rochester’s Mt. Hope Cemetery, both popular stops for reverent visitors. As the state’s third-largest city, Rochester offers more culinary and cultural options than smaller towns upstate. Photography and film fans will love the George Eastman Museum for its art and history exhibits. Queer travelers can head to Bachelor Forum for drinks among the upstate LGBTQ locals. On its namesake river, there’s the famous (and enormous) Genesee Brew House, one of the country’s oldest breweries, and now a destination unto itself.

Around Seneca Lake The pretty town of Geneva is perched at Seneca Lake’s north end. In the heart of its historic downtown, don’t miss a visit to Wicked Water, an

Kelsy Chauvin (@kelsycc on Twitter and Instagram) is Brooklyn-based writer and photographer, specializing in travel, culture, and LGBTQ interests.

KELSEY CHAUVIN

The Rochester home of suffrage advocate and abolitionist Susan B. Anthony, now a national historic landmark.

September 27 - October 10, 2018 | GayCityNews.nyc

GayCityNews.nyc | September 27 - October 10, 2018

TRAVEL

Southern Decadence in the Vieux Carré New Orleans’ huge gay Labor Day bash began as a bohemian bar crawl BY GEORGE DE STEFANO

rank Perez, bewigged and dressed as King Louis XIV, gave a brief but pointed history lesson to the crowd gathered outside the Golden Lantern bar in New Orleans’ French Quarter: “Fortysix years ago, when we had the first Southern Decadence, the city was still arresting us. Now they’re fucking toasting us!” Perez, one of two grand marshals of Southern Decadence 2018, spoke from a stage to kick off the Grand Marshal Walking Parade, the festival’s oldest event, held on the Sunday before Labor Day. His comment referred to the 1970s, when police were raiding gay bars in the French Quarter, arresting and often abusing patrons. The cops also busted anyone appearing in public in full drag. There even had been earlier attempts by conservative neighborhood preservationists to drive gay men and lesbians from the French Quarter. But as Perez’s profane remark attested, things have changed. The Sun King of this year’s Southern Decadence received a proclamation from the office of Mayor LaToya Cantrell recognizing the significance of the festival and honoring him, his co-grand marshal Adikus Sulpizi, and all the previous grand marshals. New Orleans hardly could ignore Southern Decadence. The annual event, most of whose activities occur over the Labor Day weekend, is now the city’s third-largest festival, after Mardi Gras and JazzFest. This year it generated $275 million in revenue, attracting about 235,000 attendees from around the world. Revelers had a dizzying array of Decadence-related activities to choose from — the Bourbon Street Extravaganza, a free outdoor concert featuring disco divas; the Dykeadence dance party for lesbians; HARD|soft, a black women-centric fetish ball; Mr. Louisiana Leather, presented by the gay male Carnival “krewe” the Lords of Leather; drag brunches; hotel pool parties; bar parties featuring porn stars; and events presented by out-of-town party promoters, like the “bear”oriented Bearracuda Atlanta and Furball NYC, Horsemeat Disco, and Daniel Nardicio’s “Bette, Bathhouse and Beyond,” a recreation of a 1970s Bette Midler show at the Continental Baths. Only the Grand Marshal Walking Parade is deemed an “official” Southern Decadence event; its roots are in the festival’s origins. The other oldest event, the Bourbon Street Extravaganza hosted by Chuck Robinson, owner of the Napoleon’s Itch bar, has been a Southern Decadence standby for 14 years. This year’s show featured gay circuit party favorites Jeanie Tracy, who

ROB EISDORFER

Grand marshal Frank Perez, as Louis XIV, with his fellow grand marshal Adikus Sulpizi and Sulpizi’s Manimals as they prepare for the Grand Marshal Walking Parade.

ROB EISDORFER

The Camel Toe Lady Steppers in the Grand Marshal Walking Parade,

started out as one of Sylvester’s backup vocalists; R&B singer and actress Deborah Cox; and Jennifer Holliday, who, two days before, sang at Aretha Franklin’s funeral. As Robinson told me, “Nobody owns Southern Decadence, just like nobody owns Easter or Halloween or Christmas. Everybody does their own thing and it all just comes together.” Gay men are the majority of Southern Decadence attendees, and the festival is popularly known as “gay Mardi Gras.” In the lobby of our

hotel, I overheard a desk clerk say to another employee, “Must be Southern Decadence, all the gay guys are in town.” “And God bless ‘em,” his co-worker replied. As Perez noted, the business is “a very welcome thing, especially since it’s usually slow for the service sector in the South during the summer.” During Decadence, gay men seem ubiquitous, in the crowds packing the French Quarter’s gay bars and streets, in restaurants and at popular tourist attractions like Café Du Monde in the French Market and Jackson Square near the Mississippi riverfront. Like other tourists, they peruse and shop in the art and antique stores on Royal Street; the difference is that they’re more likely to do so in fetish wear, like the six-foot-plus, bearded and tattooed man in a leather jockstrap and harness I saw peering at the art prints in a shop window. But Southern Decadence actually did not begin as a gay event. This annual extravaganza has much humbler origins, as a house party and bar crawl. Its founders were a mixed group of men and women, gay and straight, black and white, who partied at a house in the Tremé neighborhood, near the French Quarter. The house, owned by a gay couple, David Randolph and Michael Evers, was a rundown structure they and their friends dubbed Belle Rêve, after the DuBois family plantation in Tennessee Williams’ “A Streetcar Named Desire.” They were a literary and bohemian bunch who had been English or film studies majors in college and, in 1972, on one of New Orleans’ oppressively hot

➤ DECADENCE, continued on p.31 September 27 - October 10, 2018 | GayCityNews.nyc

TRAVEL 䉴

DECADENCE, from p.30

and humid late summer weekends, they held a party, inviting guests to come dressed as their favorite “Southern decadent” characters from literature. The following year, the revelers met at a local bar and then paraded back to Belle Rêver. By 1981, Perez said, what had grown from a bar crawl into a parade started getting gayer and began its route at the Golden Lantern, its kickoff point ever since. “This year the parade is bigger than it’s ever been, with more than 100 groups and some 1,500 people marching,” he added. “I would say that most of the people who come to town for Southern Decadence don’t even know that there is a parade. But that’s what the core of Southern decadence is, the parade.” Although the Grand Marshal Walking Parade has a permit from the city and police protection, it remains, in Perez’s description, “a loosey-goosey affair.” The grand marshals, he said, have “sole discretion” to select their successors. “We have to raise anywhere from $10,000 to $12,000 just to produce the parade,” according to Perez. “That’s paying for the parade permits and for the security details, sanitation, parade insurance, as well as all the expenses that go into hosting dozens of small fundraisers throughout the summer. Whatever is left over is given to charity.” The charities the grand marshals selected this year were Team Friendly, an HIV organization with which Sulpizi is associated, and the LGBT+ Archives Project of Louisiana, which Perez heads. Frank Perez, born in Baton Rouge to a Cuban immigrant father and a mother from New Orleans, spent much of his childhood in the city. He lives in an airy apartment on St. Ann Street, in the heart of the French Quarter, an is an historian not only of Southern Decadence but also of New Orleans’ LGBTQ communities. On the Thursday before Southern Decadence weekend, he went to the historic Beauregard-Keyes House on Chartres Street to give a talk to members of the Vieux Carré Property Owners and Residents

Association, founded in the 1920s to promote the “preservation, restoration, beautification and general betterment” of the French Quarter. Perez’s lecture filled the large hall in the old mansion, the audience comprising mostly older white people. “There’s a certain liberty in the French Quarter today but it wasn’t always that way for gay people,” Perez told his listeners. “There have been gays and lesbians and transgender people here since the city’s founding. But in the 1950s, it was a very dangerous time to be gay in New Orleans.” As French Quarter tourism took off during that decade, some feared that the growing and visible presence of gay people would deter straight visitors. “There was a concentrated effort by politicians to suppress the gay community in New Orleans,” Perez said. “Police raids [of gay establishments] were very common.” In 1958, the owners of one frequently-raided bar, Tony Bacino’s, sued the city. They lost the case, but their lawsuit, said Perez, “was the first attempt at gay activism in New Orleans.” That year, a young gay man named Fernando Rios was murdered by three undergraduates from Tulane University who had gone to the French Quarter to “roll a queer,” which Perez mordantly called “a very popular recreational sport in the 1950s for straight kids.” Rios’ assailants were acquitted after a trial in which their lawyers presented a “gay panic” defense, falsely claiming that Rios had propositioned one of the undergrads. That same year, at the urging of neighborhood preservationists and political and religious conservatives, the New Orleans City Council formed the Committee on the Problem of Sex Deviance. In a report, the committee recommended that New Orleans adopt “a climate of hostility towards homosexuals.” Bar raids, street arrests, and other harassment were the concrete manifestations of that official hostility. Fifteen years later, the horrific arson attack on the UpStairs Lounge, which resulted in the deaths of 32 patrons, brutally reminded the city’s gay population of their despised status. Parents refused to claim the burnt bodies

GayCityNews.nyc | September 27 - October 10, 2018

of their children, churches denied funerals to victims, and local media condemned the bar and its patrons, with one writer suggesting that the victims be buried “in fruit jars.” “I find this climate of hostility, this very homophobic attitude, somewhat ironic,” Perez told his audience, noting that gay men, such as the philanthropist William Ratcliffe Irby and the writer Lyle Saxon, were influential champions of French Quarter preservation. “You might not have a French Quarter today if it were not for gay men who were preservationists,” he said. Every year since 1977, religious conservatives have protested at Southern Decadence, descending on the French Quarter with signs and using bullhorns to blare chants condemning homosexuality. They returned this year, a group of a dozen or so grim-faced, mostly middle-aged white men who kept popping up at various locations over the weekend. They positioned themselves outside gay bars and picketed the Grand Marshals Walking on Sunday. Most people ignored them; others mocked them; some confronted them, like the very angry, muscular gay black man who got in the face of one protester and floridly cursed him. The protester looked like he was living his worst nightmare. The protests used to be led by Reverend Grant Storms, a preacher from Metairie who, in 2003, marched with his followers on Southern Decadence with bullhorns. Storms also made a videotape purporting to show gay “orgies” occurring in public during the festival. It actually depicted one man with bared buttocks; another wearing a G-string, inside a gay strip club; and one man on his knees in front of two men on Bourbon Street. Storms sent the video to a right-wing Republican legislator who drafted a bill that would increase penalties for public sex, which already was illegal in Louisiana. The bill passed the state House of Representatives on a 102-1 vote, subsequently passed the State Senate, and was signed into law by the governor. In 2011, however, the crusading

Reverend Storms was arrested for masturbating in his car in a public park. He was subsequently convicted of obscenity and sentenced to three months’ probation. He no longer leads the anti-Southern Decadence protests. The Grand Marshal Walking Parade was a delight, a colorful, often outrageous celebration that showcased not only the city’s LGBTQ community but also the bohemianism from which Southern Decadence sprang. There were the Rolling Elvi (various Elvis impersonators), a flag-waving contingent, a Vladimir Putin dance troupe, fetish groups like Louisiana Pups and Handlers, a gay male rugby team, too many drag queens to count, and dance groups, like the Nyxettes, the Camel Toe Steppers, Baby Dolls, Merry Antoinettes, and Organ Grinders. The story of Southern Decadence is how a house party and bar crawl among a small group of friends, gay and straight, grew into New Orleans’ third largest festival. Its success represents the increased acceptance and political and economic clout of New Orleans’ LGBT Qcommunity while also embodying the city’s vaunted let-the-goodtimes-roll ethos and its Carnival traditions. Southern Decadence’s demographics have changed, too, with the greater involvement of people of color in festival events. But New Orleans’ image as “the city that care forgot” and as a mecca for LGBTQ people, nonconformists, and rebels of all kinds belies the fact that it suffers from great social and racial disparities, with inadequate housing, violent crime, joblessness, poor public schools (the city has become a living laboratory for school privatization), and a longstanding tradition of corruption and brutality among its police force. New Orleans has yet to fully recover from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Tourists coming to New Orleans for Southern Decadence, or for JazzFest, Mardi Gras, Essence Music, or any of the smaller festivals held throughout the year, might do well to remember that although this unique, irreplaceable, and troubled city is a place to play, it is not just their playground.

Books, Skates, and Lots of Love A September wedding at the Strand BY PAUL SCHINDLER

hey met online three and a half years ago, and agreed to meet up at the Grey Dog Café in Union Square, neither of them necessarily looking for something serious. “We liked each other so much we walked from there to Washington Square Park, then back to Union Square,” recalled Margot Atwell. “I wanted to keep hanging out with her but I had to leave to go to roller derby practice… We fell for each other really hard.” This past Saturday Atwell, 35, and the woman she met at the Grey Dog, 31-year-old Elle Faraday, returned to Union Square. This time for something very serious — and very festive: their wedding at the Strand Bookstore on Broadway and 12th Street. The couple explained that the venue was symbolic of their love of both books and venerable New York traditions. “I’m a writer and publisher, and we’re both prolific readers, so we couldn’t have imagined anything better than celebrating our love sur-

STEPHANIE Z AK AS

Elle Faraday and Margot Atwell in front of the Strand on their wedding day.

rounded by books at an independent bookstore and New York literary institution like The Strand,” explained Atwell, who is director of publishing at Kickstarter, where she helps writers and journalists raise money and build community around their projects. As a wedding favor, the couple worked with an artist to design a custom enamel pin of a typewriter. Faraday heads up pedagogy at Pursuit, a tech education nonprofit that works with promising future software engineers (many of whom, of course, may never have touched an old-school typewriter). The Strand reflected the couple’s veneration of words and education, but it also proved a “beautiful” spot to enjoy great food, friends and family, and “an amazing dance party,” Atwell said. DJ Tikka Masala “gave us the dance party of our dreams,” Faraday added, enjoyed by their 110 guests. The women, who live in Bushwick, say neither one specifically proposed to the other. “We had conversations about what we wanted

➤ BOOKS & SKATES, continued on p.33

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The happy couple kiss under a surprisingly large bubble in Union Square.

➤ BOOKS & SKATES, from p.32 and decided together,” Faraday explained. “We chose rings together and when they arrived we celebrated by taking pictures at the carousel in DUMBO.” Even if no surprise bent knee was involved, the women found other ways to offer each other unexpected treats leading up to the wedding. “I surprised Margot with a Princess cake, which we had both been obsessed with from ‘The Great British Baking Show’ — which we ate in Central Park with our siblings,” Faraday said. Roller Derby, on Atwell’s mind the day they met, has remained a constant in their lives. Their officiant at the ceremony was Dara Fineman, aka Hebrewham Lincoln — “our close friend and roller derby teammate,” as Faraday described her. Fineman, she said, wrote “a heartfelt and book-themed ceremony.” The couple also met their pho-

tographer, Stephanie Zakas (more on her on page 34), playing roller derby, and Zakas had already shot weddings for other members of their league. “She does amazing work, obviously, but she is also so kind and funny and great at setting everyone at ease,” Atwell said. Zakas shot their engagement photos while the couple rollerskated around Transmitter Park in Greenpoint. Their formal wedding day photos included a stroll from Washington Square Park to the Strand. One other highlight Faraday made a point of singling out was the work of Rae Tutera at Brooklyn’s Bindle and Keep, who created for her “a custom-made suit [that] was so beautiful and made me feel exactly like myself.” If this couple weren’t lucky enough, as their story goes to press, they are honeymooning in Italy — Rome, Florence, Parma, Bologna, Cinque Terra, and Venice. Ah, the stories they’ll be able to write!

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Wedding Photographer with an Adventurous Streak Stephanie Zakas learns by doing â&#x20AC;&#x201D; and is always doing sons, Zakas will do 30 to 35 weddings and engagements in New York. On top of that is her work in Iceland, a place she fell in love with for â&#x20AC;&#x153;the people, the culture,â&#x20AC;? and a landscape unlike any other. Her clients suggest the work suits Zayas. Margot Atwell, whose

BY PAUL SCHINDLER

he picture of photographer Stephanie Zakas â&#x20AC;&#x201D; taken by Canadian Sherry Nelson of Fresh Air Photography â&#x20AC;&#x201D; tells you a lot about this womanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s adventurous spirit. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s shot in Iceland, where this Williamsburg-based professional spends two weeks a month. Zakas is obviously a quick study â&#x20AC;&#x201D; learning how to drum up business in a foreign culture or mastering professional photography equipment on the fly as a newcomer working at Disney World. Growing up, Zakasâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; dad had been an amateur photographer, but when she first got out of college in Florida, she worked professionally doing lighting for film shoots. When she figured out sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d rather be a photographer, she started at the bottom, doing the heavy lifting

wedding she shot last weekend, said, â&#x20AC;&#x153;She does amazing work, obviously, but she is also so kind and funny.â&#x20AC;? Elle Faraday, Atwellâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s new wife, added, â&#x20AC;&#x153;She was so organized and thought of everything so it made the whole experience really smooth on a chaotic day.â&#x20AC;?

SHERRY NELSON/ FRESH AIR PHOTOGRAPHY/ Z AK ASPHOTOGRAPHY.COM

Photographer Stephanie Zakas in Iceland.

for a husband and wife team who shot weddings. Zakas parlayed that into a gig at what she called a â&#x20AC;&#x153;wedding photography factory.â&#x20AC;? When she decided it was time to move on, she acted quickly. Three weeks after deciding to head to New York, she was in Brooklyn. Though weddings are her specialty, sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s also done couture shoots for magazines and at Fashion Week. Now, in the spring and fall sea-

â&#x17E;¤ JUMP, continued on p.34

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