Gay City News - December 20, 2018

Orrin Hatch’s Disingenuous Farewell 05

The Stakes in Losing Obamacare 08

Feel Sorry for Kevin Hart? 18

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FREE | VOLUME SEVENTEEN, ISSUE TWENTY SEVEN | DECEMBER 20, 2018 – JANUARY 2, 2019

In This Issue COVER STORY 2018: The best in film & music 26-31

TRAVEL Honolulu: Where big city meets paradise 16

CIVIL RIGHTS Upstate marriage license refusenik bails on NYS 04

POLITICS Trump’s urgency on banning trans troops 20

Kosher restaurant New Year’s Eve for lesbian comic 10

THEATER “Clueless, the Musical: far from heinous 32

POLITICS First gay president from Indiana?

14

2

Trans boxer KOs gender barriers 12

Cher: babe, lady & star 36

December 20, 2018 - January 2, 2019 | GayCityNews.nyc

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GayCityNews.nyc | December 20, 2018 - January 2, 2019

3

POLITICS

Upstate Marriage License Refusenik Quits After Tense Years Rose Marie Belforti denied lesbian couple service, later clashed with town board

BY DUNCAN OSBORNE

A

n upstate New York town clerk who became a hero among right wingers opposed to same-sex marriage after she refused to issue a wedding license to a lesbian couple in 2011 quietly left her job in 2017 amid tensions with her colleagues in town government that prompted her to file a discrimination complaint with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).

“A personnel issue was briefly discussed before a decision was made to go into Executive Session at 7:45 pm,” the minutes of the September 2017 Ledyard town board meeting read.

The board voted five-to-0 to go into executive session and then “The Town Board ended the Executive Session at 8:01. The Town Clerk, Rose Marie Belforti left the meeting at 8:02. Tiffany Potter, Deputy Clerk was called up to the table to sit with the Town Board.”

In a five-to-0 vote, the board “voted to approve payment for Deputy Clerk Tiffany Potter and to send her information to the [Cayuga County] Civil Service Dept.”

That meeting was the last that Belforti attended in her official capacity, though she continued to perform other responsibilities of her office.

Belforti, who was first elected as town clerk in the Fingers Lakes area community in 2002, stayed in her job until after the November 2017 election, when Jamie Bailey was elected Ledyard’s town clerk, and only then did Belforti retire. She and her husband, Tim Wallbridge, moved to Fredericksburg, Texas.

Belforti gained national prominence in 2011 when she cited her religious beliefs to deny a lesbian couple a marriage license. Belforti chose to remain in her job, but no longer sign marriage licenses or perform weddings. She hired a deputy to perform that part of her job on an asneeded basis, though Gay City News reported in 2014 that Belforti issued marriage licenses to two heterosexual couples after pledging to stop issuing such licenses.

After New York enacted marriage for same sex couples in 2011, two other town clerks resigned to avoid having to sign licenses or perform weddings for same-sex couples and a third stopped performing weddings, but continued to sign licenses. There are 933 town clerks in the state.

As the town clerk, Belforti was responsible for keeping the minutes of town board meetings. She documented her conflicts with other members of the Ledyard government dating back to at least 2014 in the minutes and posted those minutes on Ledyard’s website. In at least

4

FACEBOOK.COM

Rose Marie Belforti on the Ledyard, New York farm she and her husband formerly owned.

one instance, she posted minutes on the website that had not been approved by the town board.

“I think things tended to deteriorate in more recent years,” Jim Frisch, who has served on the town board for 23 years, told Gay City News.

“The town board is in no position to dictate how the clerk runs their office… Hopefully, there is a good working relationship. It was frequently the case that we were at loggerheads, but we have to deal with what the people give us.”

The minutes show that deterioration. In 2014, the Ledyard website, which was administered by the Cayuga County government, crashed and a great deal of Ledyard’s data was lost. It took two to three months to restore the site and Belforti resisted taking on the responsibility for running it.

In the March 2015 town meeting minutes, she told the board that the “maintenance of the Town of Ledyard website may be better served by someone who has the time to maintain it.

She requested that the Board consider finding a volunteer who might have the interest and the time.”

In October 2015, Belforti requested that the town clerk position be given a raise. A $500 increase in the clerk’s base salary was approved in November for the next fiscal year by a threeto-two vote, but Belforti did not see that raise in her check until November 2016, she wrote in the minutes from that month. Belforti complained that her job responsibilities had grown while

her pay had not. In 2015, she had declined to perform clerk duties for the Ledyard planning board because she was not being paid for that work. She was told that the raise was withheld because the website had not been updated or it was due to an accounting error, the minutes say.

“It just seemed like she wanted full-time pay for a part-time job and that just wasn’t going to happen,” Mark Jordan, a town board member and the town supervisor, told Gay City News.

The discussion about Belforti’s pay and her responsibilities in the November 2016 minutes is lengthy, with Belforti and her husband contributing much of the content. When the town board saw those minutes in December 2016, some members objected. John Binns, a board member, “suggested taking out opinion” and they were not approved. Belforti posted the unapproved minutes on the town’s website.

At the February 2017 town board meeting, Jordan reported that he had received the complaint that Belforti made to the EEOC and he “read off the charge against the Town of Ledyard filed by Town Clerk Rose Marie Belforti” as Belforti recorded the minutes of that meeting.

“That complaint was based on gender harassment in the workplace,” Belforti wrote in an email to Gay City News. “It had nothing to do with my refusal to sign same sex marriage apps. It was based on good old boy harassment.”

Jordan has a different view.

“She did not get a raise for the next year in our town budget and she did not deserve a raise because she was the only one who got a raise the year before,” he told Gay City News. “The basis of her complaint was she was the only woman who didn’t get a raise. They investigated it and closed it. They sent us back a memo saying there was no basis for her complaint.”

The town board’s engagement with Belforti did not end with her retirement. In March of this year, Bailey reported to the town board that she had unearthed two credit cards carrying Belforti’s name and the town’s name. One of those cards had “a forwarding address to the state of Texas,” according to the March 2018 minutes.

In April, Bailey reported that one card had already been cancelled and it had “No transactions and zero balance.” The town has no records on the second card to suggest that town funds were used to pay its charges, Bailey told Gay City News. The town never contacted Belforti about the cards.

“No one contacted me,” she wrote in an email.

“No fraud, I can guarantee that.”

December 20, 2018 - January 2, 2019 | GayCityNews.nyc

POLITICS

Hatch “Compromise” All About Protecting Discrimination Utah bill retiring senator points to allows broad, unacceptable religious exemptions

BY DUNCAN OSBORNE

W

hile retiring US Senator Orrin Hatch endorsed pluralism in his farewell speech and said it could lead to compromises between the LGBTQ community and religious conservatives who oppose legislative advances for that community, he failed to note that the compromises he championed in his 42-year career in the US Senate were controversial in the LGBTQ community.

“Nowhere is the pluralist approach more needed than in the fraught relationship between religious liberty and LGBTQ rights,” the 84-year-old Republican said on the Senate floor on December 12. “It shows us that protecting religious liberty and preserving the rights of LGBTQ individuals are not mutually exclusive. I believe we can find substantial common ground on these issues that will enable us to both safeguard the ability of religious individuals to live their faith and protect LGBTQ individuals from invidious discrimination.”

For much of his career, Hatch was an avowed opponent of legislation sought by the LGBTQ community, but in recent years his stance on such legislation and his general opposition to the community has softened.

Hatch supported the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), which would have barred employment discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. ENDA passed the Senate with yes votes from 54 Democrats and 10 Republicans, including Hatch, in 2013. The bill never got a vote in the House, which was controlled by Republicans then.

Some LGBTQ groups opposed ENDA and in the months following the vote, growing numbers of LGBTQ groups withdrew their support for ENDA because its religious exemption, which Hatch championed, was sweeping. Queer Nation, which I belonged to at the time, launched a months-long campaign

AMY ROSSET TI/ WHITEHOUSE.GOV

Senator Orrin Hatch receiving the Medal of Freedom from President Donald Trump last month

WASHINGTON AND LEE UNIVERSIT Y

Law Professor Robin Fretwell Wilson.

to pressure more groups to defect from ENDA and back comprehensive federal legislation that would add sexual orientation and gender identity to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Such legislation, called the Equality Act, was introduced in the Senate and House in 2015.

While Hatch did not mention ENDA by name, he did discuss what is called the Utah Compromise, which Hatch said was “a bipartisan anti-discrimination law that both strengthened religious freedoms and offered special protections to the LGBTQ commu-

GayCityNews.nyc | December 20, 2018 - January 2, 2019

nity.”

That 2015 state law added sexual orientation and gender identity to Utah’s existing anti-discrimination law. While hailed as a breakthrough in the mainstream press, the amended law had a religious exemption that placed any entity owned by a religious institution outside of the law’s purview. It covered housing and employment, but did not address discrimination in public accommodations. At the time, Chad Griffin, now the outgoing president of the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the nation’s larg-

est LGBTQ lobby, said the Utah law “should serve as a model for other faith traditions.”

Queer Nation attacked the Utah Compromise in a March 2015 press release charging that Robin Fretwell Wilson, a conservative law professor who routinely presents herself as an LGBTQ ally and expert on legal matters affecting the LGBTQ community, had authored the legislation and that HRC had partnered with her.

HRC, Equality Utah, and other LGBTQ groups that were involved in passing the legislation denied that Wilson wrote the law and said they had not engaged with her during negotiations. But they were also quick to assert that what occurred in Utah was not a model for other states.

Utah legislators had a different view of Wilson’s role. At the March 5 Senate Business and Labor Standing Committee hearing, Senator Todd Weiler, a Republican, told Wilson, “I hope your name is known in annals of Utah history for bringing all of the stakeholders together. I can’t overemphasize how important your involvement has been.” (See Gay City News coverage of the 2015 debate about the Utah bill here.)

Hatch’s speech was greeted with some salutes on social media, but mostly charges that he should have exercised “pluralism” during his time in the Senate. A number of commenters noted his recent “I don’t care” response when CNN asked him about Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer, implicating the president in a crime to violate campaign finance laws. That comment was seen as proving the senator’s hypocrisy. Hatch later walked back that comment.

Mitt Romney, who, like Hatch, is a Mormon, will take Hatch’s seat in the 116th Congress. During his time as governor of Massachusetts, Romney was known for his opposition to the LGBTQ community’s interests, including marriage, though he was less strident than some Republicans.

5

CRIME

Rapper Seeks to Have Assault Conviction Thrown Out Defense says mention of “hate crime” in DA’s opening statement not backed by any testimony

BY DUNCAN OSBORNE

“C

iting “prosecutorial misconduct” and a judge’s “erroneous rulings,” the defense in a Brooklyn assault case that was originally charged as an anti-LGBTQ hate crime has asked that the defendant’s conviction be vacated and he be granted a new trial.

“The prosecution went forward and opened to the jury in a highly inflammatory opening statement that the defendant committed these assaults because of an anti-gay bias — making this a hate crime — prejudiced the defendant’s right to a fair trial,” Barry Krinsky, the attorney for James Thomas, wrote in a motion that was submitted to Donald Leo, the Brooklyn Supreme Court judge who heard the case, as Thomas was about to be sentenced on December 12.

Thomas, 34, faced multiple felony

and misdemeanor assault charges with some charged as hate crimes.

He was convicted on November 21 on first-degree assault and other charges, though at that point all of the hate crime charges had been dismissed because witness testimony did not support them.

In March 2017, Thomas attacked three men in a restaurant near Langston, an LGBTQ nightclub in Brooklyn. He slashed one man’s face with a knife, a wound that required 18 stitches, and stabbed a second. That second man required stitches and was held overnight in the hospital. Thomas pushed the third man and menaced him with the knife. He surrendered to police soon after the attack.

Only two of the three victims testified at trial. Krinsky’s argument is that the hate crime charges, which were still in place against the third victim who did not testify at trial, permitted the prosecutor’s opening statement, but were ultimately not

supported because that third victim did not testify. The third man was on the district attorney’s witness list. During the trial, the assistant district attorneys on the case said on the record that they believed that the third man had been persuaded by friends of the defendant to not testify.

Krinsky, who declined to speak with Gay City News following the December 12 proceeding and did not respond to a phone call seeking comment, argued that the Brooklyn district attorney knew that the third man would not testify, but proceeded with the opening statement that referenced the hate crime charges. “[The third man] was not going to testify and therefore the people would not be able to sustain the hate crime charges,” Krinsky wrote.

“There would be no evidence to support those charges and therefore the people should [have been] precluded from arguing to the jury that

this was an anti-gay hate crime.”

Defense attorneys dislike hate crime charges and will often aggressively fight to get them dismissed because they can inflame juries.

Krinsky noted in the motion that he raised these same issues during the trial, but that Leo declined to dismiss the case and order a new trial. It is unlikely that Leo will now reverse course and agree with Krinsky’s motion. While Krinsky raises what may be an interesting legal issue, such motions can also be pro forma exercises filed by defense attorneys to preserve legal issues and their client’s rights for a later appeal.

Thomas aspired to be a rapper and performed using the stage name Mousey Baby. He appears to have had little success.

The Brooklyn district attorney has until January 4 to respond to Krinsky’s motion and the case will be before Leo on January 11.

Brooklyn DA Announces Hate Crimes Bureau LGBTQ people are targeted more than any other group in the borough

BY MATT TRACY

O

ne week after city councilmembers and other elected officials unveiled a proposal to open a city office dedicated to hate crimes, Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez announced his office is creating a Hate Crimes Bureau.

The bureau will allow the DA’s Office to conduct more thorough investigations and spend extra time connecting with vulnerable communities, educating them on ways to protect themselves from attacks, according to Gonzalez.

The push for a stronger focus on hate crimes at the city level and in Brooklyn coincides with an increase in hate crimes across the five boroughs. The Brooklyn DA’s current hate crimes unit has handled

6

BROOKLYN DA’S OFFICE

The new Brooklyn DA’s Office Hate Crimes Bureau is staffed by Maggie Dunbar, Ari Farkas (deputy chief), Kelli Muse (chief), Prabhalya Pulim, Adrianna Rodriguez, and Peter Choi.

more than 70 cases within the last two years, and LGBTQ people have been targeted the most. Jewish and black people are the second and third-most targeted groups, respectively.

Previously, hate crimes were handled by the Civil Rights Bureau, and a new bureau focused on hate crimes represents an upgrade in the

office’s focus on such offenses. The Brooklyn DA’s Office currently has a hotline for those who have been victims of hate crimes.

The DA’s Office is planning to assign senior prosecutors to the new bureau and task them with more responsibility to investigate cases from the very beginning. The prosecutors will interview victims and

suspects at the scene and explore ways to add hate crime enhancements to the charges, if necessary.

Brooklyn City Councilmember Carlos Menchaca, who is the borough’s first openly gay councilmember, said the fact that the office needs to be created in the first place reflects “new and alarming realities.”

“I think the DA is responding correctly to what is going on and my office will support his efforts in any way possible,” he said.

Senior Assistant District Attorney Kelli Muse, who previously served as the deputy chief of the Civil Rights Bureau and the hate crimes unit, will be the chief of the bureau, while Senior Assistant District Attorney Ari Farkas will be deputy chief. Peter Choi, Prabhalya Pulim, Maggie Dunbar, and Adrianna Rodriguez will also be on the bureau’s staff.

December 20, 2018 - January 2, 2019 | GayCityNews.nyc

Volume 2 | Issue 5

The Pulse of

Lenox Health Greenwich Village

Ice and snow mean take it slow: 5 tips to avoid slips and falls this winter During the winter months, ice, snow and cold temperatures can make life challenging for everyone—especially as we get older.

Practice these safety tips to stay upright this winter.

1. Walk slowly and carefully. Take shorter, shuffle-like steps with your toes pointed slightly outward to maintain a stable base of support. Bend slightly and walk flat footed to keep your center of gravity over your feet as much as possible.

2. Watch where you’re stepping. Stay aware of the surfaces ahead of you. Look down with your eyes only. (If you move your head downward, you may shift your balance.)

3. Keep your arms at your sides. Carrying items or walking with your hands in your pockets makes it harder to catch yourself if you lose your balance. Consider carrying items in a backpack instead.

4. Use caution exiting your car. Plant both feet firmly on the ground before moving; steady yourself on the door frame until you have your balance.

5. Remove shoes before entering your house. Take off wet shoes at the doorway, so you don’t slip when you come inside.

Did you know…

Almost 25 percent of slips and falls are caused by improper footwear. Wear shoes or boots with treaded soles to lower your risk of injury.

Did you know…

More than one out of four people age 65+ falls each year, but less than half tell their doctor. Be open with your healthcare provider— they can evaluate your risk of falling and help you prevent another accident.

We’re providing local residents with a new model of community-based care. From 24-hour emergency services to a full range of medical specialties, we’ve got you covered. Visit us at Northwell.edu/LenoxHealth or call (646) 846-6105.

GayCityNews.nyc | December 20, 2018 - January 2, 2019

7

HEALTH

Obamacare Ruling Imperils Key LGBTQ Protections Law remains in place, but anti-bias, widespread coverage provisions could be wiped away MATT TRACY

T

he Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) protections for LGBTQ people and their health are hanging in the balance after a federal judge in Texas struck down the entire law on Friday in a move that will almost certainly take the issue back to the Supreme Court.

Former President Barack Obama’s signature healthcare law, which has been a top target of President Donald Trump dating back to his 2016 presidential campaign, contains specific guidelines in Section 1557 preventing discrimination against people on the basis of gender identity and provides crucial coverage — partly thanks to the Medicaid expansion under the measure — to those with

DONNA ACETO

Doug Wirth, the president and CEO of Amida Care.

pre-existing conditions and chronic conditions such as HIV. The law also requires coverage of important women’s health benefits such as birth control and preventative services like mammograms.

Judge Reed O’Connor of the US

District Court for the Northern District of Texas, appointed to the bench by George W. Bush, ruled that the law’s individual mandate (the penalty for not complying having already been wiped out by Trump’s tax bill) is unconstitutional and, as a result, deemed the rest of the law invalid. The ACA remains in place for the time being, but the timing of the ruling — hours before the deadline for enrollees to sign up for healthcare in the new year — and the uncertainty surrounding its future have instilled fear among advocacy groups, experts, and LGBTQ folks alike who worry that the law’s demise could devastate protections and coverage for marginalized groups, especially with no alternative in sight.

Doug Wirth, president and CEO of Amida Care, a nonprofit that

offers wide-ranging coverage and care to Medicaid recipients in New York, said in a written statement that the court decision marks “a step in the wrong direction.”

“For those individuals who live with chronic conditions, such as HIV and hepatitis C, playing politics with health care is a life or death situation,” said Wirth, who also noted that those living with pre-existing conditions would be forced into poverty if they lose health care coverage.

While Friday’s ruling is the most visible threat to LGBTQ protections across the board, advocates are fighting simultaneously on multiple legal fronts. In the ongoing case of Franciscan Alliance v.

Azar (formerly Franciscan Alliance

➤ OBAMACARE, continued on p.9

Cuomo Broadens HIV Drug Cost Supports New ADAP guidelines increase maximum income, eliminate cap on liquid assets

BY MATT TRACY

M

ore uninsured or underinsured New Yorkers living with HIV will be eligible for financial assistance with their healthcare costs beginning in 2019, according to new regulations announced by Governor Andrew Cuomo.

The State Department of Health is set to loosen eligibility requirements that are currently too strict for many HIV-positive people who fall just outside of the range of coverage for the HIV Uninsured Care Programs (HUCP). The HUCP includes a variety of components of the AIDS Drug Assistance Program (ADAP), which covers the cost of health insurance premiums, HIV medications, home care services, and more.

Existing rules stipulate that recipients are only eligible if they do not have more than $25,000 in

8

DONNA ACETO

Governor Andrew Cuomo at the unveiling of the LGBT Memorial in Hudson River Park this past June.

liquid assets and their household income does not exceed 435 percent of the federal poverty level.

(The current federal poverty level

is $12,140 for individuals and $16,460 for a family of two.) The new rules will increase the household income requirement to 500 percent of the federal poverty level, and there will no longer be a cap on resources on hand.

“Expanding access to care is crucial to ending the epidemic, and the new regulations will ensure that people get the help they need,” Dr. Howard Zucker, the state’s commissioner of health, said in a written statement. “Treatment is only possible after a diagnosis, so I encourage everyone to get tested and know their status.”

The proposed changes, which are a part of Cuomo’s “Ending the Epidemic” initiative to lower the amount of new HIV infections by the end of 2020 to no more than 750 — a level at which experts estimate the epidemic can no longer sustain itself — are slated to go into effect early next year.

Additionally, the New York State

Department of Health AIDS Institute is implementing a new policy that will focus on speeding up the time an individual begins HIV treatment upon diagnosis. The policy calls for initiation of treatment between three and 30 days of diagnosis.

The state has reached new milestones in recent years in its fight to eradicate HIV. New diagnoses have dropped by 20 percent since 2014 and dipped to an all-time low of 2,769 last year. New diagnoses per 100,000 people have decreased by 42 percent among Hispanic people and 52 percent among black people during that period. According to statistics from the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, the number of new infections — a measure distinct from new diagnoses — continued its decline from 2016 to 2017, with reductions seen in all measured demographic subgroups except Latino gay and bisexual men.

December 20, 2018 - January 2, 2019 | GayCityNews.nyc

➤ OBAMACARE, from p.8 v. Burwell), which is overseen by the same judge who struck down the ACA in its entirety, the Trump administration is seeking to overturn the nondiscrimination protections laid out in Section 1557.

According to IntoMore, the administration on Monday urged O’Connor to lift the stay he put on his late 2016 injunction against the transgender protections — a stay that stalled the case for 17 months.

Trump hopes to have a final decision from O’Connor about whether the protections should remain by May of next year.

The ACA most recently survived a scare in the summer of 2017 when the late Republican Senator John McCain cast the decisive vote in the wee hours of the morning to save the legislation from repeal. In 2012, the Supreme Court narrowly ruled — by a vote of 5-4 — to uphold the individual mandate, which is especially noteworthy in light of of the mandate’s role in O’Connor’s ruling last week.

Officials at the Callen-Lorde Community Health Center, which

provides comprehensive healthcare and related services to LGBTQ people in New York, say that the consequences of the court ruling could be severe — and that even now they are seeing the impact of the Trump administration’s elimination of the penalty originally imposed under the individual mandate.

“We are already noticing community members are opting out of getting insurance,” said Kimberleigh Joy Smith, Callen-Lorde’s senior director for community health planning and policy. “This is frustrating because we know that our LGBTQ communities are more likely to be poor and uninsured or underinsured.”

Others have cast doubt on the strength of Friday’s ruling.

Mara Keisling, the executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, stressed in a written statement that the judge holds a “bizarre view of the law” that strays from the mainstream interpretation expressed by other legal experts.

“The entire case is part of an administration desperate to undermine the ability of millions of

GayCityNews.nyc | December 20, 2018 - January 2, 2019

Americans to access life-saving health care, but it is far from the death blow the president and his administration hoped it would be,” she said.

As the Trump administration has taken every opportunity to undermine the ACA, a surprisingly large groundswell of Americans have turned out to defend it since January 2017. Still, there is ongoing dissatisfaction with expensive premiums, high deductibles, and the number of Americans who remain unsinsured. Even as Republicans continue their attacks, a growing number of Democrats are looking to move in the other direction — beyond the intermediate step of Obamacare to a truly universal approach voiced most compellingly by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders in his 2016 presidential campaign.

With Democrats taking power in the House of Representatives, new progressive voices like New York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez could reignite the push for universal coverage — with many voters warming up to that. Here in New York, with Democrats also newly ascendant

in the State Senate, the New York Health Act, which would guarantee universal coverage for the state’s residents, could become a viable option in Albany.

“Ultimately we want to see universal, comprehensive health care for all,” Smith said of Callen-Lorde’s vision for the future of health care.

The likelihood of a universal system is unknown at this moment, but in the meantime, the ACA remains the law of the land — and as everyone waits to see how higher courts react to O’Connor’s shocking ruling from last week, health care professionals are moving fullsteam ahead with enrollment efforts. Even healthcare.gov, the enrollment website administered by the Trump administration, scrambled to clear up any immediate concerns about the court ruling’s impact with a banner posted noting, “Court’s decision does not affect 2019 enrollment or coverage.”

In New York, the enrollment deadline for coverage on January 1 has already passed, but the deadline to gain coverage for the remainder of the year is not until January 31.

9

CIVIL RIGHTS

Lesbian Comic Back In Biz After Kosher Venue Reversal Leah Forster believes Orthodox rabbis targeted her because of her sexual orientation

BY MATT TRACY

T

he party is back on!

A lesbian comedian’s New Year’s Eve gig is back on after rabbis appear to have backed away from pressuring multiple kosher restaurants into pulling the plug on her event or else their kosher certifications would be revoked.

Leah Forster, who communicated in depth with Gay City News about her struggle to find a kosher venue willing to host her performance alongside “Flatbush Girl” Adina Miles, said the event is again slated to be held at the original planned venue, Garden of Eat In, a kosher restaurant in Flatbush.

Forster provided Gay City News with a document indicating “an agreement between Garden of Eat In and Leah Forster/ Adina Miles to host a private event.”

Chaim Kirschner, who Forster said is the owner of Garden of Eat In, could not immediately be reached for comment.

The latest development follows a whirlwind week featuring allegations of homophobia, questioning by the city Human Rights Commission, and a string of letters — one of which was derided by a rabbi as fake.

A statement circulated on social media, which showed an apparent signature by Rabbi Tzvi Shaul Goldberg and was dated December 13, stated on behalf of “The Vaad Harabinim” of Flatbush that “we publicly call upon all of our supervised restaurants, including the one in question, not to discriminate in any way against people based on sexual orientation.”

However, a subsequent statement on December 14 — which was provided to Gay City News by the Vaad Harabanim — called the previous letter “a forgery and was not issued by the Vaad Harabanim.

The issuance of this forgery is being reported to the office of the District Attorney of Kings County.” The statement further noted that “Harabanim” was spelled incorrectly in the first letter that surfaced.

10

COURTESYOF LEAH FORSTER

Lesbian comedian Leah Forster’s New Year’s Eve show is back on at the Flatbush kosher restaurant Garden of Eat In.

In a written statement provided to Gay City News, Rabbi Tzvi Goldberg of the Vaad Harabanim denied all allegations that restaurants were threatened for allowing a lesbian to perform.

“At no time did the Vaad, or any representative of the Vaad, threaten to remove the Vaad’s Kashrus certification (i.e., it’s ‘religious stamp of approval’) because of the sexual orientation of a performer at a supervised restaurant,” the statement read.

When reached via phone, Goldberg refused to comment on whether or not he approves of Forster holding the New Year’s Eve event.

Forster said “something sounds corrupt” and she is not buying Goldberg’s denial of the allegations.

“No one knew The Garden of Eat In was hosting it,” she said. “I kept it quiet. He is denying that he is solely the reason the restaurant had to cancel on me.”

Forster said a second restaurant, Orchidea in Borough Park, also canceled on her due to pressure from Orthodox rabbis.

Forster had always made clear that she did not hold hard feelings

toward the owners of the two venues, and she noted in a December 5 Facebook post that those same people tried to accommodate her by searching for a new location for her event.

“For me, that’s a win because I’ve kicked and

been down pushed

away so many times just to be me, and finally the law steps in,” said lesbian comic Leah Forster.

Before the situation got resolved happily, however, Flatbush Girl

took a more aggressive posture toward the two establishments that pulled their invitations, noting in a Twitter post that “People have a RIGHT to know that these restaurants are not places LGBT Jews can feel safe patronizing. That is a consequence of their actions.”

The statement from the Vaad Harabanim and the decision by the Garden of Eat In to again agree to host the event came just days after Forster said she was contacted by the city’s Human Rights Commission and was asked a series of questions about how her events wound up getting shelved.

The Human Rights Commission did not immediately respond to requests for comment on whether or not they contacted the rabbi or the restaurants involved, but earlier in the week indicated it does not comment on ongoing investigations.

During a recorded phone conversation between Forster and Goldberg, which was provided to Gay City News, Forster is heard asking, “You put it out there that you’re OK with this, so if you’re OK with this, then we can hold the event there, right?”

Goldberg responded by asking Forster to speak with his attorney and said, “I hope that you understand the position that I’m in.”

But whether the event has the blessing of any rabbis no longer appears to be an issue after the Garden of Eat In opted to again host the event — and Forster believes it is because of legal pressure.

“For me, that’s a win because I’ve been kicked down and pushed away so many times just to be me, and finally the law steps in,” she said, referring to the city’s human rights law specifying that it is illegal for places of public accommodation to discriminate based on sexual orientation.

“It doesn’t mean that ppl wont be homophobic or discriminatory in their heads and in their hearts, but they have no choice but to be afraid of the law,” she added in a final text message. “And eventually, if that fear leads to love, that would be the best thing ever.”

December 20, 2018 - January 2, 2019 | GayCityNews.nyc

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SPORTS

Trans Boxer Knocks Out Gender Barriers With Historic Win Patricio Manuel became the first transgender man to debut — and win — professionally

BY MATT TRACY

T

ransgender boxer Patricio Manuel was on the verge of making history when he stepped into the ring on Saturday night, and it didn’t even faze him.

The 33-year-old felt right at home when he made his debut as the first transgender male professional boxer in the United States, defeating Mexican super-featherweight opponent Hugo Aguilar in Indio, California, after three judges scored unanimously in Manuel’s favor.

“I am both happy and relieved to finally start this next chapter in my life,” Manuel told Gay City News one day after holding a victory party to celebrate his win.

Manuel endured a mixed big of disappointment and joy during the time leading up to his monumental December 8 victory, which capped off a six-year journey during which he transitioned to living as a man.

Along the way, he not only dealt with the macro- and micro-aggressions faced by so many transgender people, but he also said he had to navigate the wildly gendered expectations permeating the sports world.

The prevalence of toxic mascu-

TEX AS ISAIAH

Boxer Patricio Manuel.

linity in the sport was on full display earlier this month when Mexican boxer Dario Larralde said in a since-deleted tweet that gay people “are a plague,” “make me sick,” and “I hate them.”

Yet, no matter his gender identity or the public’s perception of him, Manuel’s dedication to the sport he has enjoyed for 15 years remained as strong as it was when he turned to boxing to overcome gender dysphoria as a teenager.

“Boxing has shown me the world and given me a sense of pride in my

accomplishments,” he explained. “I knew I was far from done with my career once I decided to medically transition.”

A five-time national amateur champion, Manuel is no stranger to success. After competing in the 2012 Olympic trials, however, he was sidelined by a shoulder injury — and that time away from the sport gave him a perfect opportunity to focus on his transition.

But he was presented with newfound challenges, including questions about whether or not box-

ers would even be willing to face a transgender opponent. Aguilar publicly stated that he had no issues facing Manuel, but future opponents might not be as welcoming.

“I have struggled to remain active in boxing since medically transitioning and I hope the days of not finding willing opponents is behind me,” Manuel said.

Still, his victory two weekend ago undoubtedly gives him a major boost in his effort to show the boxing world that he can compete — and beat — cisgender opponents.

He never doubted that he would beat Aguilar, but nevertheless said it felt “very satisfying to prove to those who claimed there was no chance I’d win.”

Manuel isn’t sure exactly what’s next— he’s taking a break and hopes to return to the ring by the end of February — but in the meantime, he hopes others can look to him and realize that dreams are possible regardless of hegemonic social norms.

“I hope my story can serve as an example to all people, both cisgender and transgender, that we are not limited by the labels society assigns us,” he said. “We all have the ability to make our dreams a reality.”

CRIME

Cops Nab Suspect In Anti-Gay Subway Attack Manhattan man, 54, allegedly yelled homophobic slurs, critically injured woman

BY MATT TRACY

A

man who hurled anti-gay slurs at a woman and broke her spine on an E train on November 30 has been arrested, the NYPD announced on

Thursday.

Allasheed Allah, 54, was charged with assault as a hate crime and aggravated assault as a hate crime after he allegedly — according to the Daily News — called the woman a “dyke” and then hit her so hard that she fell to the ground and broke her spine.

12

NYPD

The suspect, Allasheed Allah, is seen on the E train in November.

After the attack, Allah fled the train at the Forest Hills 71st Ave. station, but not before his face was caught on video — and that wound up making the difference in the investigation by the NYPD’s Hate Crimes Task Force.

Police fi rst announced the case on December 8 and they were unaware of the man’s identity at the time. But the photo of his face was widely circulated, and a police spokesperson told Gay City News that a tip led to his arrest.

Allah, who resides in Manhattan, was taken into custody at 9:30 a.m. December 13.

December 20, 2018 - January 2, 2019 | GayCityNews.nyc

CRIME

Pastor Charged in Detroit Trans Woman’s Slay Prosecutors say her gender identity played a role in the killing

BY MATT TRACY

A

pastor who shot and killed a transgender black woman in Detroit on December 7 targeted her because of gender identity — and evidence of that will be presented in court, Wayne County prosecutors told Gay City News.

Police found the body of 36-yearold Kelly Stough, who also identified as Keanna Mattel, on that Friday morning at 6 a.m. at the corner of East McNichols and Brush Streets, about seven miles north of downtown Detroit.

Following an investigation, Albert Weathers, 46, was arrested and charged with open murder and use of a firearm in commission of a felony. He is being held on $1 million cash/ surety, and a probable cause conference is slated for December 20 at 8:30 a.m. A preliminary examination in front of Judge Michael Wagner is set for December 27 at 1:30 p.m.

It is not clear whether Stough and Weathers knew each other personally before the fatal shooting. The county’s assistant prosecutor, Maria Miller, was reluctant to divulge further details.

“There are aspects of the case that are under investigation, so very few facts have been released,” Miller told Gay City News in a written statement.

New St. Paul Missionary Baptist Church, which lists Weathers as a pastor from 1997-1999, did not respond to a request for comment.

Stough was involved in the local ball scene and is seen performing in Facebook videos posted by acquaintances. She was also outspoken about transgender issues and voiced her opinion about violence against the community during an interview with The Guardian in 2015.

“The police are unaware with our struggle so they have no sym-

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Kelly Stough, who also identified as Keanna Mattel.

pathy for us,” she said following the murder of 20-year-old transgender woman Amber Moore. “Nobody ever asks, what happened to that person to get here?”

Special prosecutor Jaimie Powell Horowitz of the Fair Michigan Justice Program is handling the case. The FMJP is a joint effort between the prosecutor’s office and Fair Michigan Foundation, which works with police officers and prosecutors in cases involving crimes against the LGBTQ community.

“This case reflects the excessive brutality that members of Detroit’s transgender community constantly face,” said Fair Michigan Foundation president Dana Nessel, just elected as Michigan’s next attorney general and the first out LGBTQ person to hold statewide office.

Black transgender women continue to be the target of the vast majority of cases of violence against the community during a year when the Human Rights Campaign has tallied 25 deaths against transgender women in the United States.

Stough’s tragic death came roughly a week after another transgender black woman, 37-yearold Tydi Dansbury, was shot and killed in Baltimore. In that case, authorities have not apprehended a suspect and there are very few details about the circumstances of her death.

GayCityNews.nyc | December 20, 2018 - January 2, 2019

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POLITICS

In Advocate Race, Mark-Viverito Lays Out LGBTQ Platform Former Council speaker discussed 10-point plan exclusively with Gay City News

BY MATT TRACY

T

here is an underlying theme in Melissa MarkViverito’s newly-unveiled vision to address LGBTQ issues in her campaign for New York City public advocate: She wants the community to drive the conversation about how the city can help.

The former City Council speaker, who spoke exclusively to Gay City News on Wednesday, released a 10-point platform specifying a number of ways that, if elected public advocate, she would work with the City Council to support LGBTQ people from all walks of life, from entrepreneurs to homeless youth to seniors in the community. She faces a crowded field of candidates — roughly a dozen people have declared their candidacy or are exploring a run — but she is confident that she will convince voters that she can successfully build upon the work she did

MICHAEL SHAIN

Melissa-Mark Viverito seen here at an LGBTQ Pride Prom held at the Queens Museum in 2016.

during 12 years on the City Council.

Mark-Viverito’s wide-ranging LGBTQ platform includes calls for the city to fund various health and economic justice services, staff every city agency with what she

termed an LGBTQIA liaison, pursue a variety of legislative opportunities, and push for a review of the NYPD’s Patrol Guide regarding the department’s interactions with transgender people.

Among the most unique aspects

of her plan is a goal to advocate for legislation creating a new procurement program to support LGBTQ entrepreneurs and give LGBTQowned businesses access to city contracts.

“That came out of conversations with people in the community,” she explained. “It’s about having some consideration and encouragement.

What’s the next level that we can reach as a city to encourage contracts to go to entrepreneurs?”

Mark-Viverito has an eye on LGBTQ seniors, too. There are currently at least two housing developments in the works for that population, but she wants to go further by exploring ways to utilize support services specifically geared toward LGBTQ seniors and prevent elder and financial abuse.

Moreover, she would like to see funding that has a lasting impact.

“I think the issue and challenge for us in the City Council is that

➤ MARK-VIVERITO, continued on p.41

Gay South Bend Mayor Won’t Deny Presidential Chatter Pete Buttigieg has built a national profile; what’s his next step?

BY MATT TRACY

T

he out gay mayor of South Bend, Indiana, Pete Buttigieg, is gaining steam as a potential dark horse candidate in the 2020 presidential election — and he isn’t denying it, either.

Buttigieg, an Afghanistan War veteran who was first elected mayor in 2011, has decided not to run for re-election, though he remains mostly tight-lipped about the next step of his budding political career.

Buttigieg enhanced his national profile by running unsuccessfully for DNC Chair in 2017. He opted to withdraw from the race at the end when the choice came down to former Secretary of Labor

14

FACEBOOK

Pete Buttigieg is all smiles as he ponders his political future during his final term as mayor of South Bend, Indiana.

Tom Perez, the eventual winner, and Minnesota Congressmember Keith Ellison, now the attorney

general-elect of that state.

In the time since, Buttigieg has launched a political action committee and has plans to release a new book in February. According to CNN, he said, “I don’t think it’s a secret” that he could run for president, but he hasn’t spoken beyond that about his future.

The soon-to-be 37-year-old, who married Chasten Glezman earlier this year, has become accustomed to his name being tied to potential White House ambitions. In 2016, The New York Times profiled him with an article headlined “The First Gay President?”

Should he decide to enter the race, Buttigieg can expect to face an uphill battle against a crowded field of potential Democratic opponents who boast much larger

national profiles. But the long list of names could also work to his advantage if no candidate emerges as the clear-cut frontrunner as the race heats up.

He also has a long history of campaigning in pivotal states like Iowa, where he canvassed as early as 2008 for Barack Obama, and he has since developed key relationships with political operatives such as David Axelrod, Obama’s former senior advisor, who attended Buttigieg’s wedding and called him “a very gifted guy in a very understated way,” according to the Indianapolis Monthly.

Buttigieg is widely viewed as a charismatic and well-rounded political figure, and part of his

➤ PETE BUTTIGIEG, continued on p.25

December 20, 2018 - January 2, 2019 | GayCityNews.nyc

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GayCityNews.nyc | December 20, 2018 - January 2, 2019

15

TRAVEL

Where City Living Meets Tropical Paradise Honolulu and the exquisite Waikiki beckon travels to an America apart

BY KELSY CHAUVIN

W

hen you see barefoot surfers carry their boards through downtown streets, you know you’re in a cool spot.

They flock to the ocean waves every morning and evening. Meanwhile, all around them are the gleaming high rises, the international tourists snapping pictures, the open-air restaurants lining the avenues. Welcome to Waikiki, the bustling beachfront neighborhood of Honolulu.

The Hawaiian state capital is unlike any other. From its perch on the south shore of Oahu, the Pacific Ocean sparkles with vast serenity, sending warm breezes through the metropolis.

Rarely does a destination offer such a magically balanced beachmeets-city scene. Travelers to Oahu can find abundant, untouched nature across the island. They can also discover the polished urban culture of a storied city that today is a global culinary and arts magnet.

Best of all, to visit Oahu is to escape to a faraway land that, though it’s part of America, feels refreshingly distant from the stressors of the mainland. Here, travelers become residents for a spell, as the fast-moving Hawaiian rain showers wash away woes and the sunshine follows day after brilliant day.

Oahu is the third-largest Hawaiian island, and home to about a million locals across its modest 600 square miles. Most travelers start their visits here, since Honolulu’s airport is the international hub where most of the island’s nearly six million annual visitors arrive (others visit via cruise ships).

The city itself is massive, encompassing nature preserves, tropical gardens, and forests, including the picturesque Diamond Head State Monument and Park, home to the volcanic crater with hiking trails and one of the island’s best ocean vistas.

Waikiki, the main oceanfront

16

KELSY CHAUVIN

Waikiki Beach in Honolulu.

KELSY CHAUVIN

A view of Diamond Head from the ocean.

KELSY CHAUVIN

The annual October Pride celebration in Honolulu.

district, is where you’ll find most of the action. Kapi’olani Park and the Honolulu Zoo anchor its south end, from which Kuhio Beach stretches north to become Waikiki Beach — both ever-popular with surfers and sunbathers.

The beaches are lovely, but can

be crowded, so lodging in a comfortable, quiet place is key. There’s a wide range of hotels for every budget here, but the best splurge is the newly expanded Ritz-Carlton Residences Waikiki. From its undulating twin-tower facades, large, elegant rooms with balconies face

the ocean or mountains. Complemented by its impeccable guestservices team, you can sip tropical cocktails at either of the hotel’s elevated infinity pools and breezy restaurants and feel miles away from the busy avenues below.

For a boutique option, the Surfjack Hotel & Swim Club offers vintage-inspired, island-chic accommodations that feel homey, even with its selfie-ready pool adorned with a “Wish you were here!” mural. The open-air, poolside hotel lounge and Mahina & Sun’s restaurant are well worth a visit, as is the on-site store with its unique beachwear and handmade souvenirs.

Restaurants are a big part of Waikiki’s appeal. Affordable spots like Marukame Udon and Surf & Turf Tacos offer reliable fare. Great sushi, meanwhile, awaits at Doraku inside the Royal Hawaiian Center, and at Morimoto Asia, with its open-air dining space overlooking Kuhio Beach. Waikiki’s International Marketplace is an expansive indoor/ outdoor complex that houses local shops as well as Stripsteak, where yes, the steaks are divine, as are the seafood selections and craft-cocktail menu.

Head to Duke’s Waikiki for one of the area’s more traditional, deliciously filling Hawaiian beachside dining experiences.

Most of Hawaii’s LGBTQ culture glimmers in Waikiki. The gold standard here is Hula’s Bar & Lei Stand, located inside the fun, gayfriendly Waikiki Grand Hotel. For more than four decades, Hula’s has anchored the queer nightlife scene with incredible 10 a.m.-6 p.m. weekday happy hours and other daily food and drink specials, plus drag shows, club nights, and pretty sunsets from its open-air, second-floor outpost. Hula’s also hosts catamaran harbor sails every Saturday, and is a top local sponsor for fabulous Honolulu Pride every October.

Other friendly gay bars dot the area, like Tapas Restaurant & La-

➤ HONOLULU, continued on p.17

December 20, 2018 - January 2, 2019 | GayCityNews.nyc

We Share Your Dream

KELSY CHAUVIN

The majestic 1882 ‘Iolani Palace.

➤ HONOLULU, from p.16 nai Bar, with its patio and karaoke nights. Bacchus Waikiki is a local’s favorite with a mixed crowd, daily drink specials, and weekend DJ nights. Among the city’s famous LGBTQ hotspots is flirty Wang Chung’s karaoke bar, with drag brunches and a late-night kitchen.

Drift over to Chinatown, a short cab ride away, for big drag revues and late-night dancing at Scarlet Honolulu. While you’re in the neighborhood, duck into atmospheric Tchin Tchin! Bar for bites and one of the city’s best wine lists.

Between all the glorious lounging, happy hours, and beachcombing, discover some of the state’s fascinating Polynesian roots and modern history at the majestic ‘Iolani Palace. This marvelously ornate 1882 mansion was built by King Kalakaua, the last monarch of the Kingdom of Hawaii. A tour here reveals both architectural splendor and some of the state’s fascinating, complex cultural heritage.

A few blocks away is the Honolulu Museum of Art, opened in 1927 and now home to a massive, international art collection, plus temporary exhibits, and the ARTafterDARK evening series, every last Friday of the month. Catch a shuttle from the museum to the satellite Spalding House contemporary art museum and hilltop gardens, located on Mount Tantalus.

To experience Hawaii’s largest natural— and cultural — history museum, head further west to the Bishop Museum. Housed in a former school, the 1898 Romanesque structure is a national landmark and houses an expansive collection of Polynesian and Hawaiian artifacts on display and in its archives.

KELSY CHAUVIN

The pool at the Ritz-Carlton Residences Waikiki.

At Yale Medicine Fertility Center, we can help you to achieve your dream of becoming a parent and having a family.

Whether you are ready to start a family or would like to preserve your options for another day, we can help turn your hope into your greatest pride and joy.

New Haven | Guilford | New London | 203-785-4708 Stamford | Westport | 203-341-8899

yalemedicine.org/fertilitycenter KELSY CHAUVIN

Pearl Harbor, located near the Honolulu airport.

For a bit of US history, don’t miss Pearl Harbor. The site is just outside the airport, and conveniently allows for checked bags and luggage ($5 apiece), making it an easy stop for a few hours before a flight home. Access to the Pearl Harbor Visitor Center, a short film, and the quick boat ride to view the Arizona Memorial are free, but you’ll want to reserve your ticket time well in advance. Reserve and buy tickets separately to tour the battleship, submarine, and Aviation Museum.

Oahu is sometimes called “the gathering place.” It seems a perfect nickname for an island that mixes history with modern life, and nature with urbanity. Maybe that’s why Honolulu makes visitors feel so welcome — like they’ve traveled across an ocean to find a place that, at least for a while, feels like home.

Kelsy Chauvin is a writer and photographer based in Brooklyn, specializing in travel, culture and LGBTQ interests. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram @kelsycc.

GayCityNews.nyc | December 20, 2018 - January 2, 2019

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PERSPECTIVE: Media Circus PRESIDENT & PUBLISHER Victoria Schneps-Yunis CEO & CO-PUBLISHER Joshua Schneps FOUNDING EDITOR IN-CHIEF & ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER Paul Schindler editor@gaycitynews.com DIGITAL EDITOR Matt Tracy mattt@gaycitynews.com ASSOCIATE EDITOR Duncan Osborne CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Donna Aceto (Photography) Christopher Byrne (Theater), Susie Day (Perspective), Brian McCormick (Dance)

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Kelly Jean Cogswell, Andres Duque, Steve Erickson, Andy Humm, Eli Jacobson, David Kennerley, Gary M. Kramer, Arthur S. Leonard, Michael T. Luongo, Lawrence D. Mass, Winnie McCroy, Eileen McDermott, Mick Meenan, Tim Miller, Donna Minkowitz, Christopher Murray, David Noh, Sam Oglesby, Nathan Riley, David Shengold, Ed Sikov, Yoav Sivan, Gus Solomons Jr., Tim Teeman, Kathleen Warnock, Benjamin Weinthal, Dean P. Wrzeszcz

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18

Are We Supposed to Feel Sorry for Kevin Hart?

BY ED SIKOV

U

nless you’ve been living on Uranus — sadly, I never get tired of Uranus humor — you’ve probably heard more about Kevin Hart over the last two weeks than you heard the rest of your life. That’s because Hart got booted from his role as Oscars host after some of his anti-gay tweets and Instagram posts surfaced.

As Variety reported, some of the tweets were feverishly deleted, leading to an Instagram video from the comedian that only made matters worse: “My team calls me, ‘Oh my God, Kevin, everyone’s upset by tweets you did years ago,’” he said in that video.

“Guys, I’m nearly 40 years old. If you don’t believe that people change, grow, evolve as they get older, I don’t know what to tell you. If you want to hold people in a position where they always have to justify the past, do you. I’m the wrong guy, man.”

To my knowledge, nobody asked or expected Hart to justify his bigotry.

People were looking for an apology, not a justification. Something from the heart, not the fist.

Variety continued: “Those words rang as a defiant non-apology for many. Hours later, Hart resurfaced with another video stating that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had given him an ultimatum: Apologize or we’ll find a new host. ‘I chose to pass on the apology,’ the 39-year-old actor-comedian said in the video. ‘The reason why I passed is because I’ve addressed this several times. This is not the first time this has come up. I’ve addressed it.

I’ve spoken on it. I’ve said where the rights and wrongs were. I’ve said who I am now versus who I was then. I’ve done it. I’m not going to continue to go back and tap into the days of old when I’ve moved on and I’m in a completely different place in my life.’

“That, too, rang hollow for many,” Variety went on unnecessarily.

“Less than two hours later, Hart announced via Twitter that he was removing himself from the gig, and he finally offered the apology everyone was looking for.”

One interesting aspect to this sour

INSTAGRAM

Kevin Hart’s first non-apology, in oddly sleepy fashion, on Instagram, which was followed by a more polished response when it came time for him to bail from hosting the Oscars.

little story is the way people sprang to Hart’s defense. I’ll quote some of them later, but first I’d like to quote one of Hart’s “jokes”: From 2011: “Yo if my son comes home & try’s 2 play with my daughters doll house I’m going 2 break it over his head & say n my voice ‘stop that’s gay.’”

Hilarious, huh? As I always say, there’s nothing quite like a joke about breaking a dollhouse over your son’s head.

The Daily Beast’s Amy Zimmerman noted that “Hart has a history of homophobic remarks and close to a hundred anti-gay social media posts.”

A Twitter user observed that “Hart’s Twitter page was filled with antigay sentiment until around 2010… which also happens to be the year his career really took off after his first stand-up special was a hit… the same standup special where he ‘joked’ about how his ‘biggest fear’ in life was having a gay son.”

And Queerty reported that in 2015, Hart told Rolling Stone that “he prob-

ably wouldn’t make that same joke again, not because it was homophobic, but because people have become too sensitive and it’s just not worth the backlash.” Now that’s enlightenment!

Jerry Seinfeld weighed in.

“Kevin is in a position, because he’s a brilliant comedian, to kind of decide what he wants to do,” Seinfeld said in an interview for “Sunday Today” with Willie Geist. “He doesn’t have to step down, but he can. And when you look at that situation, well who got screwed in that deal?”

I’d say gay people, though obviously Seinfeld was going for the Academy on the grounds that Hart was indispensable.

And why are LGBTQ folks screwed?

Because we’re first expected to go along with any joke made at our expense, no matter how cruel and insulting, and when we don’t, we get blamed for not having a sense of humor — or worse.

Witness Albert Eisenberg, writing for philly.com: “The optics of the shaming of Hart, a successful black comedian, by a mostly white LGBT Hollywood establishment were horrible.”

As though the “optics” of a father bashing his kid over the head with a dollhouse weren’t downright depraved.

Comedian Nick Cannon responded to the controversy by digging up old anti-gay tweets from Sarah Silverman and Lena Dunham, a strategy that only proved that straight white female comedians can be as cruel and demeaning to LGBTQ folks as straight black male comedians.

Jason Okundaye, writing for The Independent, is one of the few commentators with something useful to add to the conversation: “As Hart is someone who has based sections of his comic performance on degrading gay people, and makes little apology for it, I have zero sympathy for him and feel indifferent to his resignation.

I’m unmoved by the controversy itself, because I’ve already had the pleasure of discovering that many black household names in comedy like Hart, Bernie Mac and Eddie Murphy have long sacrificed the dignity of gay people like me for the sake of a cheap two-liner.”

Okundaye ends his piece with this challenge: “Even in international policy, when Denmark announced it was

➤ HART, continued on p.19

December 20, 2018 - January 2, 2019 | GayCityNews.nyc

PERSPECTIVE: Guest Commentator

Time to Un-Erase Trans Civil Rights in NYS and I must pass legislation banning so-called “conversion therapy”, a fraudulent practice that claims to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity. Conversion therapy has been banned by the New York City Council, but remains legal elsewhere in New York State.

BY DANIEL O’DONNELL

I

n late November, we celebrated Trans Awareness Week and Trans Day of Remembrance, honoring the memory of members of the trans and non-binary communities who were victims of violence only because of who they were. While there is no doubt that the trans community is more visible than ever before, this violence persists, and even here in New York we must correct actions of the past that unfairly leave the trans community vulnerable to legal discrimination and bias.

In December 2002, New York State passed the Sexual Orientation Non-Discrimination Act, or SONDA, a bill that was drafted to provide basic civil rights protections to the LGBTQ community. Unfortunately, New York ended up being the last state in the nation to pass such a bill that did not include gender identity and expression. Cruelly, trans protections were left out. Although some legislators tried to amend the bill to protect trans people, trans protections were ultimately left out of the final bill with the promise that this would be fi xed in the next year.

It’s been 16 years, and despite real efforts by advocates, this promise to the transgender community was never kept, leaving trans and non-binary people still subject to legal discrimination here in New York. But with a new Democratic majority in the State Senate, it’s time to finally right this wrong by passing the Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act, GENDA. Across the country and here in New York, we face threats from Donald Trump and his bigoted agenda that seeks to remove rights and protections from members of the LGBTQ community and delegitimize our humanity. The Human Rights Campaign reported that at least 22 transgender people have been killed in 2018, and 82 percent were women of color. From trying to ban trans people from the military to requiring that bathrooms be used strictly based on gender assigned at birth to attempting to limit the definition of gender, the Trump administration has made a concerted effort to

➤ HART, from p.18 withholding aid from Tanzania due to anti-gay comments pedaled by a senior politician, I thought of those Tanzanian LGBT+ people, who would not only suffer the economic consequences alongside straight Tanzanians but would also be scapegoated. As black LGBT+ people our identities often feel fragmented — this is intensified when we witness conversations on race

Our

broth-

ers and sisters have always been on the front lines of LGBTQ civil rights — often the most vocal even though they continue to be the most vulnerable. We owe it to them to get GENDA passed.

GAY CIT Y NEWS

State Assemblymember Daniel O’Donnell.

threaten the recognition of our trans and nonbinary siblings.

In order to truly counter Trump, we have a lot of work ahead of us. According to the Trevor Project, an organization providing suicide prevention training to LGBTQ youth, LGBTQ youth are almost five times as likely to attempt suicide compared to their heterosexual peers. Our local and state leaders should be the first line of defense against this hatred, and passing GENDA is a vital first step. GENDA will add gender identity and gender expression to the protected classes in New York’s human rights and hate crimes laws, providing critical protections for trans and nonbinary New Yorkers. In addition, my colleagues

and LGBT+ rights where we are a glaring omission. But people should listen to us, consider us, platform us. We have a lot to say, and we can probably say it better.”

Take a look at the difference between Hart’s first statement, the defiant one obviously written by him, and his second, the one that sounds like it was penned by a publicist in heavy damage-control mode. 1) “So I just got a call from the academy, and that call basi-

GayCityNews.nyc | December 20, 2018 - January 2, 2019

trans

In the United States, we believe that all people are created equal. And until the threats from the Trump administration end, we must continue to fight for rights for all of us. As leaders, we have a duty to fight for all New Yorkers, regardless of their political beliefs, class, race, sexual orientation, or gender identity. These protections for our trans and non-binary siblings are essential. Our trans brothers and sisters have always been on the front lines of LGBTQ civil rights — often the most vocal even though they continue to be the most vulnerable. We owe it to them to get GENDA passed.

Daniel O’Donnell has been a state assemblymember from Manhattan since January 2003 and is a candidate to fill the vacancy when Public Advocate Letitia James becomes the state attorney general next month.

cally said, ‘Kevin, apologize for your tweets of old, or we’re going to have to move on and find another host,’ talking about the tweets from 2009, 2010. I chose to pass.

I passed on the apology. The reason why I passed is because I’ve addressed this several times.” 2) “I have made the choice to step down from hosting this year’s Oscars.

This is because I do not want to be a distraction on a night that should be celebrated by so many amazing

talented artists. I sincerely apologize to the LGBTQ community for my insensitive words from my past.

I’m sorry that I hurt people. I am evolving and want to continue to do so. My goal is to bring people together not tear us apart. Much love & appreciation to the Academy. I hope we can meet again.”

I don’t.

Follow @EdSikov on Facebook and Twitter.

19

MILITARY

The Urgency in Trump’s Bid to Ban Trans Troops Solicitor general pulls out the stops to make sure high court acts in current term

BY ARTHUR S. LEONARD

A

pparently irked by lower federal courts refusing to let President Donald Trump’s transgender military ban go into effect, the administration, represented by Solicitor General Noel J. Francisco, has peppered the Supreme Court with petitions and motions seeking to short-circuit the normal litigation process and allow the ban to go into effect while lawsuits in numerous district and appellate courts grind on.

Impatient that two circuit courts of appeals had not ruled on the government’s motions to dissolve four nationwide preliminary injunctions issued a year ago blocking the ban, Francisco filed petitions in three pending cases on November 23, asking the court to take those appeals directly and decide them in the term running through June of next year. Then, on December 13, Francisco filed motions in all three cases asking the court to stay the preliminary injunctions — even if it decides not to take on the cases for review now — so that the policy can go into effect right away. As a lastditch move, Francisco also asked that if the court were unwilling to stay the injunctions, it at least narrow them so they apply only to the specific plaintiffs in the three cases.

Trump announced his ban in a series of three tweets in July 2017. Defense Secretary James Mattis, who was on vacation at the time, is reported to have first learned about the president’s idea the prior evening, and the Pentagon was caught by surprise, unable to answer journalists’ inquiries the next day. With the government stonewalling against discovery requests in the pending cases, district judges have suggested there was no factual basis for the ban.

Indeed, press reports in the weeks following its announcement suggested it was entirely political, Trump’s response to demands by some conservative House Republicans that he take action to prevent federal funds being spent on gender transition procedures for military personnel. Those members threatened the president with blocking an appropriations bill — which he hoped would include funding for his border wall — if he didn’t take action. Banning transgender people from serving in the military was his response, according to these accounts.

Litigation followed in four federal district courts, resulting within months in all four trial judges granting the plaintiffs’ motions for preliminary injunctions to stop the ban from going into effect while the litigation was going on. In each case, the plaintiffs persuaded the judge they were likely to succeed in proving the ban was unconstitutional, that blocking it was not

20

DEFENSE.GOV

President Donald Trump and his defense secretary, James Mattis.

harmful to the national interest, and that letting it go into effect would cause irreparable harm to them. Several judges held that a policy that discriminates against transgender individuals is subject to an intermediate level of judicial scrutiny under the Fifth Amendment’s equal protection requirement — meaning the policy is presumed unconstitutional and the government bears the burden of showing it substantially advances an important public interest.

Judge Marsha Pechman of the Western District of Washington went further, finding gender identity discrimination involves a “suspect classification” subject to strict judicial scrutiny.

The burden in such cases is higher — the government must show the policy is necessary to achieve a compelling government interest.

So, while Defense Secretary Mattis pursued Trump’s charge to devise an implementation plan for the ban by February 2018, the Pentagon was required to allow transgender individuals to enlist as of this past January 1. That date represented Mattis’ earlier six-month delay of Obama Defense Secretary Ash Carter’s deadline for opening up service to trans personnel.

The Pentagon under Carter concluded that banning transgender people from serving in the military was generally unjustified, although he set some criteria for determining which trans people should be allowed to serve.

Mattis’ February plan was a revised version of the policy Trump described in an August 2017 memorandum that followed his tweets.

The Mattis plan was purportedly based on the findings of a new policy review undertaken by a special Task Force he appointed, but whose members remained anonymous to the public.

Mattis claimed to shift the focus of the ban from transgender identity to individuals diagnosed with gender dysphoria, and so he claimed his

“new” policy was not a “transgender ban” but rather a ban on individuals suffering a diagnosable mental condition disqualifying for military service, though it “grandfathered” transgender personnel who had identified themselves and transitioned after Secretary Carter ended the prior ban effective July 1, 2016.

With the announcement of Mattis’ policy, the administration filed motions in all four pending lawsuits to dissolve the preliminary injunctions, arguing they were directed against Trump’s August 2017 memorandum and not the Mattis policy. Since that policy purported to be based on a diagnosable mental condition, the government argued, it does not get heightened scrutiny and is not presumptively unconstitutional, and the government has no burden to justify it.

The Mattis policy is entitled to the traditional deference federal courts pay to military personnel policies, the administration argued.

Three of the district judges — in Seattle, Riverside, and Washington, DC, rejected the government’s motions to dissolve the preliminary injunctions, seeing the administration’s semantic game for what it is. The Mattis plan was developed on orders from Trump to implement his ban, and with minor exceptions, the “new” policy is merely a restatement of the one Trump tweeted and has the same effect. The government has appealed those three cases.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments in the cases from Washington and California in October, and the DC Circuit heard arguments on December 10. Both courts of appeals could issue decisions at any time, but the impatient administration, perhaps anticipating that its appeals will be unsuccessful, filed its petitions on November 23 urging the Supreme Court to intervene immediately.

In the fourth case, pending in the District Court in Baltimore, the judge who issued the preliminary injunction retired in June, and the judge who took over has not ruled on the government’s motion. However, in a November 30 ruling on discovery matters, that judge clearly signaled he will likely join his three colleagues from the other district courts in denying the motion, in which case the government would be filing an appeal in the Fourth Circuit, too.

In his recent filings to the Supreme Court, Solicitor General Francisco argues as if there is an emergency to national security that requires the Defense Department to start dismissing transgender troops and suspending the enlistment of new trans personnel as quickly as possible. At the same time, they appear to be deceptive and revisionist accounts of the

➤ TRANS BAN, continued on p.25 December 20, 2018 - January 2, 2019 | GayCityNews.nyc

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➤ PETE BUTTIGIEG, from p.14 appeal is that he is progressive enough to cater to those in blue states but also can connect with rural conservative voters who range from churchgoers to fellow war veterans. In a profile with Indianapolis Monthly, he noted that he could find common ground with evangelical voters through his Episcopalian faith.

Indiana Congressmember Jim Banks, a Republican, offered praise from across the aisle when he expressed admiration for Buttigieg and suggested that Democrats would “be wise to look to leaders like him and believe that he has a lot to offer.”

“I’ve seen him portray himself as mayor in more of a moderate approach, but now that he’s talk-

➤ TRANS BAN, from p.20 Trump administration’s history on this issue. Though Trump’s initial tweets stated a categorical ban on transgender individuals serving in the military, Francisco’s account suggests this was not a ban at all, projecting backwards from Mattis’ semantic sleight-of-hand.

And Francisco implies that Mattis’ directive at the end of June 2017 to delay by six months former Secretary Carter’s date for lifting the ban on trans enlistment to study implementation issues was actually setting in motion a complete re-evaluation of Carter’s policy decision and so provided the basis for Trump’s tweets and his August 2017 memorandum that followed.

This framing clearly aims to undermine the findings by the trial judges that the Trump ban was implemented without any professional military expertise and that the Task Force Mattis appointed in the fall of 2017 was intended to provide an after-the-fact justification for Trump’s politically-motivated policy declarations.

Francisco insistently presses for speedy action by the Supreme Court, clearly mindful of the schedule that currently lists April 24 as the last day for argument in the term ending in June. And Francisco is asking that his motions for staying the injunctions be taken up together with his petitions for high court review of the underlying

ing about national politics, it’s more ideological, further to the left,” Banks said.

Indeed among the issues he’s recently raised, Buttigieg has discussed a universal basic income, campaigned to raise the minimum wage in South Bend, and voiced his support for Medicare for All. “I do favor Medicare for All, as I do favor any measure that would help get all Americans covered,” he said in a Tweet in February.

Buttigieg will continue to serve out the remainder of his current term, which will conclude in just over a year. It is not yet clear whether he has an alternative option on deck if he does not run for president, but for now, his next stop is Iowa, where he is slated to speak at the Progress Iowa holiday party on December 20.

merits of the cases, most likely at the court’s January 11 conference.

Francisco has also mounted an attack on the nationwide preliminary injunctions, emphasizing a controversy over the ability of a single district judge to issue an order suspending a federal policy on a nationwide basis. He contends that in fewer than two full years, the Trump administration has suffered 25 nationwide injunctions from federal district courts, and argued that the situation is out of control. These injunctions involve attempts by the Trump administration to abruptly change significant federal policies without congressional authorization and frequently in violation of requirements of the Administrative Procedure Act, in ways that will inflict irreparable injury on many people.

But some Supreme Court justices have signaled their uneasiness about nationwide injunctions by federal district judges, and Francisco appeals to this uneasiness.

Once the court receives the plaintiffs’ responses, due within weeks, it will be presented with a very different account, contradicting Francisco’s revisionist history at many turns. The Ninth and DC Circuits may issue their decisions before the Supreme Court conferences these cases, likely adding more voices to discredit the dishonest position taken by the administration ever since Trump first tweeted his ban.

GayCityNews.nyc | December 20, 2018 - January 2, 2019

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FILM

Queer Film Highlights of 2018 This past year offered quality, diversity, and depth in LGBTQ themes lump in the throat.

Runner Up: “Lean on Pete.” Out gay filmmaker Andrew Haigh’s achingly beautiful drama about a boy (Charlie Plummer) and his horse does not leave a dry eye in the house.

BY GARY M. KRAMER 018 featured memorable films by LGBTQ filmmakers, for LGBTQ audiences, and about LGBTQ topics.

This was a year where Hollywood achieved a few notable firsts: A major studio released its first teen comedy with a gay leading character, “Love, Simon.” The Chilean film, “A Fantastic Woman,” about a trans woman (Daniela Vega) grappling with the sudden death of her lover, won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, the first trans-themed film to be honored by the Academy. And “Crazy Rich Asians,” which featured an LGBTQ character in a supporting role, became the first Hollywood film in 25 years to have an all-Asian cast.

This year also had a dubious achievement: A scandal involving out gay filmmaker Bryan Singer being fired from the Freddie Mercury biopic, “Bohemian Rhapsody,” over “creative differences” with star Rami Malek just as the cavalcade of sexual misconduct charges against the director escalated. The film went on to do boffo box office.

Here is a look back on the highlights in queer cinema from 2018:

2

Best Debut: Sam Abbas for “The Wedding.” It just opened in New York, but Abbas’ film, in which he plays an engaged Egyptian man grappling with his sexuality, shows the promise in this 25-year-old filmmaker’s ability to tell impactful stories for the LGBTQ and Muslim communities. Bravo.

Runner Up: Dominic Cooke for “On Chesil Beach.” Cooke’s stunning adaptation of Ian McEwan’s eponymous novel showed the out gay filmmaker’s talent for directing actors, using exterior space to a claustrophobic degree, and generating considerable tension and emotion.

Best Film No One Saw: “Night Comes On.” Jordana Spiro wrote and directed this gem about a teen-

26

Best Documentary: A tie. While it’s hard not to feel righteous outrage after seeing trans filmmaker Kimberly Reed’s “Dark Money” about campaign finance reform, it’s just as hard not to be charmed

by Gail Freedman’s “Hot to Trot” about competitive same-sex ballroom dancing.

FOX SEARCHLIGHT

Melissa McCarthy in “Can You Ever Forgive Me?”

ROBERT VIGL ASK Y/ BLEECKER STREET

Best Lesbian Film: “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” Melissa McCarthy gives an Oscar-worthy performance as Lee Israel, a sad, lonely lesbian who commits forgery to keep herself out of debt and despair. A scene of her having a heart-to-heart with her ex, Elaine (Anna Deavere Smith), is painful and exceptional, and it counterbalances her darkly comic bad behavior with gay pal Jack (Richard E. Grant, also excellent).

Runner Up: “Gemini.” Aaron Katz’s sly mystery has Jill (Lola Kirke), the personal assistant to Heather (Zoë Kravitz), a possibly lesbian actress, investigating a murder only to discover the truth is not what it seems.

Denise Gough and Keira Knightley in “Colette.”

age lesbian (Dominique Fishback) released from juvenile detention and intent on reconnecting with her family.

Runner Up: “Good Manners.” This strange and wondrous Brazilian fantasy blends stinging social commentary, lesbianism, werewolves, motherhood, and a few musical numbers — and never misses a beat!

Best Adaptation of a Gay Novel: “If Beale Street Could Talk.” Barry Jenkins’ adaptation of gay writer James Baldwin’s novel was a beautiful and searing film about an Af-

rican-American couple experiencing joys and hardships.

Runner Up: “We the Animals.” Jeremiah Zagar’s heartbreaking adaptation of Justin Torres’ book was an impressionistic masterpiece that captured the palpable emotions of its young hero, Jonah (Evan Rosado), as he realized he is “different” from his brothers.

Best Tearjerker: “1985.” Yen Tan’s poetic drama about a gay man (out gay actor Cory Michael Smith) hiding his sexuality and his HIV status was a simple, sensitive, and poignant drama that left a real

Naughtiest Lesbians: A tie. It’s tough to choose between Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone as rivals for Queen Anne’s (Olivia Colman) affections in “The Favourite.” They are both hilarious trying to one-up each other in this witty, bitchy period piece.

Runner Up: Rachel Weisz and Rachel McAdams in “Disobedience.”

Their hotel room tryst is sexy AF, but McAdams is miscast as an Orthodox Jew. Best Trans Film: “The Misandrists.” Bruce LaBruce’s film is an

➤ BEST QUEER FILMS, continued on p.27

December 20, 2018 - January 2, 2019 | GayCityNews.nyc

➤ BEST QUEER FILMS, from p.26 absolutely hilarious and knowing take on radical feminist politics. It featured trans characters, outrageous gay porn, and — in a scene not for the squeamish — a graphic, unwanted sex change operation.

Runner Up: “Assassination Nation.�

This film featured out trans actress Hari Nef as one of four girls who take matters into their own devious hands after their community’s data is dangerously hacked.

Worst Trans Film: “Anything.� Here, cis actor Matt Bomer is just plain awkward and unconvincing as a trans character.

STRAND RELEASING

Best Bisexual Performance: Keira Knightley gave a terrific performance as the title character “Colette� in Wash Westmoreland’s fabulous biopic, co-written with his late husband, Richard Glatzer. This handsomely mounted period piece showed how Colette’s relationships with various women helped her in her personal and professional relationship with her husband, Willy (Dominic West).

Runner Up: “The Catcher Was a

Tim Kalkhof and Roy Miller in “The Cakemaker.�

Spy.� This film about Moe Berg (Paul Rudd) was mediocre, unfortunate given its intriguing true storyline about a pro baseball player who also worked as a spy — and had a girlfriend, but also slept with men.

Best Nudity: “Permission.� This film by out gay writer/ director Brian Crano, about two couples — one gay, one straight — had a blink-

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and-you-missed it run in theaters this year. No one who saw it wanted to blink when François Arnaud, lying naked in bed post-coitus, got up and walked around in the altogether. He gave viewers quite an eyeful.

Runner Up: “The Cakemaker.� Tim Kalkhof’s German baker proffered his hot cakes in this Israeli film about a queer love triangle.

Best Re-Release: “Buddies.� The brief re-release of Arthur J. Bressan, Jr.’s 1985 film — the first feature to depict AIDS — was a cause for celebration.

Inspiring and moving, it was a reminder not only of how AIDS was stigmatized and denied 30 years ago, but also how great independent queer cinema was back in the day.

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FILM

Ten Winners — & Five Losers — in Film Standouts, runners up, and misfires in the 2018 cinema world films like “Gravity” and “Children of Men” toward honoring workingclass life by blowing up its details to a grand scale, a la Luchino Visconti.

BY STEVE ERICKSON

M

y choices for the year’s 10 best films are:

1. “Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?” (Travis Wilkerson) A self-declared “white nightmare story” and radical response to “To Kill A Mockingbird,” as well as a minimalist road movie, it avoids comforting rhetoric about racism and goes for an emotional and political gut punch instead.

Wilkerson’s great-grandfather S.E. Branch killed an African-American man, Bill Spann, and got away with it and other crimes. The fact that Wilkerson, no matter how well-intentioned he is, is around to make this film while Spann’s grave can’t even be located, says nothing positive about America or even himself, and he gives full voice to that horror.

5. “Hale County This Morning, This Evening” (RaMell Ross) Ross’ unconventional documentary depicting several years in a small town with Alabama dispenses with clichés and tropes about African-American life. His sensibility reflects a freedom and respect for his subjects. While he follows the lives of two men, he’s not primarily concerned with storytelling and gives himself room to insert scenes of an actor in blackface from a silent film or out-of-focus close-ups of a lightbulb.

GRASSHOPPER FILM

“Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?” includes remixed film clips of Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch in “To Kill A Mockingbird.”

2. “Happy As Lazzaro” (Alice Rohrwacher) Drawing on the generation of Italian directors who started working in the 1960s, “Happy As Lazzaro” takes the legacy of neo-realism, especially its interest in the brutality of classism, in new directions inflected by Italo Calvino and Gabriel García Márquez. It starts out seeming like a naturalist tale of peasants working on a tobacco farm, but quickly gets weirder, juggling several time frames and levels of reality while the baseline oppression it depicts never goes away.

3. “Revenge” (Coralie Fargeat) The goriest new film I saw in 2018, it’s also an oddly upbeat revisionist take on the rape-revenge sub-genre. Deliberately over the top, it’s the story of a woman who’s viewed as a sex object and gains control over her narrative in a way that’s carefully and brilliantly reflected in Fargeat’s visual style, while the finale emphasizes violent men’s bodily vulnerability.

4. “Roma” (Alfonso Cuaron) “Roma” has an epic sweep and

28

MARVEL CINEMATIC UNIVERSE

Michael B. Jordan’s as the villain Killmonger in Ryan Coogler’s “Black Panther.”

a delight in the possibilities of elaborate camera movement and set pieces that make one say “this is cinema.” Of course, Netflix is its distributor, so that means audiences’ chances of seeing it in an actual movie theater are disappointingly

limited — that too is what cinema has to come to mean in 2018. But Cuaron switches the focus from his own childhood to the woman who served as his family’s maid and takes ideas he learned making elaborate Hollywood genre

6. “Cam” (Daniel Goldhaber) This Netflix release played for a week at the Alamo Drafthouse, but by the time I learned about it, my only option was watching it on my laptop. That proved to be totally fitting for a thriller about a webcam sex site worker who finds that a doppelgänger has convincingly stolen her identity and blocked her from logging in. It’s likely to go down as the equivalent of “Videodrome” for an era when social media feels more like a threat than a communication tool and the oppressive aspects of freelancing have become increasingly clear.

Director Goldhaber creates a look that bleeds stylized online fantasy into the real world, while Isa Mazzei’s screenplay, inspired by her own experience, refuses easy explanations.

7. “24 Frames” (Abbas Kiarostami) A posthumous release from the late Iranian director, “24 Frames” consists of a series of non-narrative shorts that were digitally animated. It challenges easy assumptions about the direct relationship of Kiarostami’s work to reality since he was quite willing to use CGI here.

The final “frame” suggests a new

➤ FILM’S BEST, continued on p.29

December 20, 2018 - January 2, 2019 | GayCityNews.nyc

â&#x17E;¤ FILMâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S BEST, from p.28 and quite moving embrace of romantic love found on his deathbed.

At that point, the whole film comes together startlingly.

8. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Zamaâ&#x20AC;? (Lucrecia Martel) Martel is generally considered the best director to emerge from the Argentine New Wave of the 2000s. but she still went nine years between her previous film, â&#x20AC;&#x153;The Headless Woman,â&#x20AC;? and â&#x20AC;&#x153;Zama.â&#x20AC;? (She turned down the opportunity to direct Marvelâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s â&#x20AC;&#x153;Black Widowâ&#x20AC;? because they wouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t give her control over its action scenes.)

Sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s taken her oblique but pointed explorations of the pained privileges of the Argentine bourgeoisie back to their roots in her first period piece, adapted from a classic novel.

9. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Black Pantherâ&#x20AC;?

(Ryan Coogler) Marvel Cinematic Universe films havenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t all been bad (especially â&#x20AC;&#x153;Captain America: The Winter Soldierâ&#x20AC;?), but theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve taken up a drastically outsized place in American

culture well beyond their aesthetic worth. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Black Pantherâ&#x20AC;? finally brings mythic heft and imaginative world-building to them, conjuring up a visual style appropriate to an Africa that was never colonized (and even extending that aesthetic to the soundtrack). It also plays fairer to the political struggle it depicts than the script alone might have, thanks to Michael B. Jordanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s magnetic performance as Killmonger.

10. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Fatal Pulseâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; (Damon Packard) This didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t get a single theatrical screening in New York, but anyone can rent it from Amazon to stream. Packardâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s paranoid dive into â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;90s pop culture â&#x20AC;&#x201D; originally called â&#x20AC;&#x153;Yuppie Fear Thrillerâ&#x20AC;? â&#x20AC;&#x201D; is a jagged but extremely fun postmodern riff with imaginative lighting and editing. Lifting images from movies and TV with no respect for copyright and using real people as characters without flattering them, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Fatal Pulseâ&#x20AC;? serves as a potent requiem for the time when sampling and home video had radical potential and piling past influences on

top of each other could produce something really transformative.

(The found footage â&#x20AC;&#x153;Vertigoâ&#x20AC;? remake â&#x20AC;&#x153;The Green Fogâ&#x20AC;? also brought that sense back.) This is the film Richard Kellyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s â&#x20AC;&#x153;Southland Talesâ&#x20AC;? shouldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve been.

Runners-up: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Angels Wear Whiteâ&#x20AC;? (Vivian Qu) â&#x20AC;&#x153;The Ballad of Buster Scruggsâ&#x20AC;?

(Joel & Ethan Coen) â&#x20AC;&#x153;BlacKkKlansmanâ&#x20AC;? (Spike Lee) â&#x20AC;&#x153;Can You Ever Forgive Me?â&#x20AC;? (Marielle Heller) â&#x20AC;&#x153;Custodyâ&#x20AC;? (Xavier Legrand) â&#x20AC;&#x153;Discreetâ&#x20AC;? (Travis Matthews) â&#x20AC;&#x153;Gavagaiâ&#x20AC;? (Rob Tregenza) â&#x20AC;&#x153;The Green Fogâ&#x20AC;? (Guy Maddin/ Evan Johnson/ Galen Johnson) â&#x20AC;&#x153;I Remember the Crowsâ&#x20AC;? (Gustavo Vinagre) â&#x20AC;&#x153;The Islandâ&#x20AC;? (Bo Huang) â&#x20AC;&#x153;Leave No Traceâ&#x20AC;? (Debra Granik) â&#x20AC;&#x153;Life and Nothing Moreâ&#x20AC;? (Antonio MĂŠndez Esparza) â&#x20AC;&#x153;1985â&#x20AC;? (Yen Tan) â&#x20AC;&#x153;Notes on an Appearanceâ&#x20AC;? (Ricky Dâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Ambrose) â&#x20AC;&#x153;Werewolfâ&#x20AC;? (Ashley McKenzie) â&#x20AC;&#x153;The Wild Boysâ&#x20AC;? (Bertrand Mandico)

â&#x20AC;&#x153;Wonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t You Be My Neighbor?â&#x20AC;?

(Morgan Neville) Worst films: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Assassination Nationâ&#x20AC;?

(Sam Levinson) â&#x20AC;&#x153;Godard Mon Amourâ&#x20AC;? (Michel Haznavicius) â&#x20AC;&#x153;Ready Player Oneâ&#x20AC;? (Steven Spielberg) â&#x20AC;&#x153;Suspiriaâ&#x20AC;? (Luca Guadagnino) â&#x20AC;&#x153;Viceâ&#x20AC;? (Adam McKay) Worst scene: The â&#x20AC;&#x153;Freddie Mercury cruises a leather bar/ Queen records â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Another One Bites the Dustâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; montageâ&#x20AC;? in â&#x20AC;&#x153;Bohemian Rhapsodyâ&#x20AC;?

Notable shorts: The contents of â&#x20AC;&#x153;The Arboretum Cycleâ&#x20AC;? (Nathaniel Dorsky) Vince Staplesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; music video â&#x20AC;&#x153;FUN!â&#x20AC;?

(Calmatic) â&#x20AC;&#x153;The Green Rayâ&#x20AC;? (Scott Barley) â&#x20AC;&#x153;Normal Appearancesâ&#x20AC;? (Penny Lane) â&#x20AC;&#x153;Story of Benjaminâ&#x20AC;? (Mehdi Omidvari) Tierra Whackâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s music video â&#x20AC;&#x153;Whack Worldâ&#x20AC;? (Thibaut Duvermeix & Mathieu LĂŠger)

Celebrate With a Plate %&- %*'&! 3 -" -*) 3*/, $&#. 1&'' $* .1& " - # , $' --3 3 % - $")",*/-'3 $,""! .* ( . % "0",3 %*'&! 3 (" ' !*) .&*) /+ .* "'+ /- -+," ! 2 .%" %"", .* */, 0/')", '" )"&$% *,- &-&. .%"&, %*'&! 3 +*+ /+ . &0&)$.*) . .%,*/$% "

4

GayCityNews.nyc | December 20, 2018 - January 2, 2019

29

MUSIC

The Year in Music Albums, singles, LGBTQ artists who made 2018 memorable beats bridging the gap between flamenco and trap and a Justin Timberlake sample.

BY STEVE ERICKSON

L

ooking back over 2018, here are my top 10 favorites among all albums released:

1. Low: “Double Negative” (Sub Pop) Guitarist Alan Sparhawk and drummer Mimi Parker’s vocals and instrumental work are fed through filters, effects pedals, and samplers to the point where this album would be almost impossible to reproduce live faithfully. The opening song, “Quorum,” is dominated by rhythmic loops of static. It speaks eloquently from a deep pit of alienation and despair whose sources are never fully spelled out by the lyrics’ allusions to faith, murder, war, and drugs, but the overall effect is an audio snapshot of the psychic damage caused by the America’s current toxic political climate.

2. Yves Tumor: “Safe in the Hands of Love” (Warp) Queer singer/ producer Tumor’s second studio album is far more accessible than his abrasive debut, “Serpent Music.” “Licking an Orchid” resembles a ‘90s alternative rock ballad. But the sense of anxiety and terror remains. The neodisco “Noid” locates it in police brutality toward African-Americans, but the rest of the album looks inward, addressing self-hatred and the damage we can do to ourselves.

3. Pusha T: “Daytona” (G.O.O.D. Music) For an album whose main subject is cocaine dealing, “Daytona” is remarkably cozy. Without sounding retro, it feels like a lost classic of ‘90s hardcore hip-hop. Pusha T may be not be on the side of the angels, but he cares deeply about his lyrics, and he uses the subject of drugs as a springboard to discuss class, authenticity, and the history of hip-hop. Kanye West’s feature on “What Would Meek Do” is the album’s low point, but his production shows why we took him seriously before the MAGA endorsement.

4. U.S. Girls: “In a Poem Unlimited” (4AD) Meg Remy, a singer/ songwriter who works with different backing bands under the U.S. Girls name, started out playing riot grrrl-inspired noise-punk. She hasn’t changed her politics one bit, but “In a Poem Unlimited” pursues a catchy dance-rock sound in a bid to reach a much wider audience. While it doesn’t quite succeed in that goal, songs like “Velvet 4 Sale” and “Pearly Gates” find a similar vein to Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” or Talking Heads’ “Burning Down the House,” except with lyrics musing on rape.

5. SOPHIE: “Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides” (Future Classic)

30

RVNG INTL.

Queer singer/ composer Colin Self, who is also a choreographer, released “Siblings,” which combines dance music with noise, pop, choral vocals, and even opera.

Trans producer SOPHIE has worked behind the scenes with artists like Madonna and Lady Gaga, but her debut album raised her profile as a solo artist considerably. With one foot in pop and another in experimental electronic music, songs like “Faceshopping” take unconventional structures and glitchy passages but still sound like potential hit singles. “Immaterial” simultaneously pays homage to “Material Girl” and critiques it, while the album’s chopped-up sound and bursts of noise reflect — as much as her lyrics do — her difficulty in accepting and expressing her trans identity.

6. Dos Santos: “Logos” (International Anthem) The Chicago-based International Anthem label prides itself on releasing music that defies genre categorization. Dos Santos fits the bill, mixing salsa, cumbia, psychedelic garage-punk, and noisy post-punk, with lyrics entirely in Spanish.

One reason rock music seems to be in a rut is that so many artists are just creating a pastiche of hip influences of the past without reflecting their own personality. “Logos” takes its inspirations and forges them into something new and resonant.

7. Rosalía: “El Mal Querer” (Sony Music España) A Spanish flamenco singer might be an unlikely international pop star, but Rosalía has found herself in that position; her single “Malamente” went gold in the US. “Pienso En Tu Mira” may be the single catchiest new song I heard in 2018.

Rosalía makes music that’s accessible to listeners who know nothing about the context from which she came without denying her roots, with

8. CupcakKe: “Ephorize” (self-released) CupcakKe has obvious precursors — the Prince of “Dirty Mind” and “Come,” X-rated female rappers like Lil’ Kim and Foxy Brown — but her mix of socially conscious lyrics and witty raunch is sui generis. She comes across as a three-dimensional person all the time. Her most explicit lyrics gain something from their proximity to the vulnerability of songs like “Self-Interview” and “Single While Taken.” Her anthem of LGBTQ allyship, “Crayons,” benefits from her complete lack of interest in respectability politics, as well as her good taste in beats drawn from hip-hop and dance scenes around North America. “Ephorize” was released on the first Friday of January; in November, she dropped a second, weaker album, “Eden.”

9.

Kacey Musgraves: “Golden Hour” (MCA Nashville) 2018’s consensus instant classic, “Golden Hour” brought Musgraves out of the country music niche to a wider audience. Most of it suggests ‘70s Neil Young or Fleetwood Mac with a banjo rather than the gloss of contemporary mainstream country, and “High Horse” ventures into disco. But the mixture of innocent, stoned wonder (she’s admitted that two songs were inspired by an acid trip) with eloquent, witty kiss-offs to useless men is Musgraves’ own. If “Golden Hour” feels like soft rock from 40 years ago, it would’ve been remembered as fondly as “Rumours” or “Tapestry” were it actually released then.

10. Colin Self: “Siblings” (RVNG Intl.)

Inspired by feminist philosopher Donna Haraway (mentioned by name in a song title), “Siblings” combines dance music with noise, pop, choral vocals, and even opera in a rare level of conceptual ambition, devoted to celebrating chosen rather than biological families, from this queer singer/ composer (who also works as a choreographer). It’s kin to “Safe in the Hands of Love’ in its sense of navigating a disorienting world looking for comfort, although Self is more optimistic. “Emblem” and “Survival” deserve to become club hits.

With LGBTQ artists noted with asterisks, the runners-up are: A.A.L.: “2012-2017” (Other People) Anteloper’s “Kudu” (International Anthem) Nik Bärtsch’s Ronin: “Awase” (ECM) Behemoth: “I Loved You At Your Darkest” (Metal

➤ MUSIC HIGHLIGHTS, continued on p.31 December 20, 2018 - January 2, 2019 | GayCityNews.nyc

â&#x17E;¤ MUSIC HIGHLIGHTS, from p.30 Blade) Various Artists: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Black Panther: The Albumâ&#x20AC;? (TDE/ Interscope) *Boygenius: s/t (Matador) Chills: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Snowboundâ&#x20AC;? (Fire) *Christine and the Queens: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Chrisâ&#x20AC;?

(Because Music) DJ Taye: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Still Trippinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;â&#x20AC;? (Hyperdub) Drinks: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Hippo Liteâ&#x20AC;? (Drag City) Elucid: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Shit Donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t Rhyme No Moreâ&#x20AC;? (Backwoodz Studioz) Fauxe: â&#x20AC;&#x153;I K H L A Sâ&#x20AC;? (Chinabot) Masayoshi Fujita: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Book of Lifeâ&#x20AC;?

(Erased Tapes) Benjamin LaMar Gay: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Downtown Castles Can Never Block the Sunâ&#x20AC;?

(International Anthem) Imperial Triumphant: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Vile Luxuryâ&#x20AC;? (Gilead Media) JPEGMAFIA: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Veteranâ&#x20AC;? (Deathbomb Arc) Bettye LaVette: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Things Have Changedâ&#x20AC;? (Verve) Loma: s/t (Sub Pop) *H. C. McEntire: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Lionheartâ&#x20AC;?

(Merge) *Janelle Monae: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Dirty Computerâ&#x20AC;?

(Bad Boy) *Meshell Ndegeocello: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Ventriloquismâ&#x20AC;? (NaĂŻve) Ohmme: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Partsâ&#x20AC;? (Joyful Noise) Pig Destroyer: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Head Cageâ&#x20AC;? (Relapse) *Troye Sivan: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Bloomâ&#x20AC;? (Capitol) Slowthai: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Runtâ&#x20AC;? (Method) Sons of Kemet: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Your Queen Is a Reptileâ&#x20AC;? (Impulse!)

Vince Staples: â&#x20AC;&#x153;FM!â&#x20AC;? (Def Jam) Earl Sweatshirt: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Some Rap Songsâ&#x20AC;?

(Columbia) Thou: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Inconsolableâ&#x20AC;? (Community) Tirzah: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Devotionâ&#x20AC;? (Domino) Tropical Fuck Storm: â&#x20AC;&#x153;A Laughing Death in Meatspaceâ&#x20AC;? (Joyful Noise) Tunng: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Songs You Make At Nightâ&#x20AC;?

(Full Time Hobby) Tierra Whack: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Whack Worldâ&#x20AC;? (selfreleased) Finally, the 40 best singles (with no overlap with the above albums): JhenĂŠ Aiko featuring Rae Sremmurd: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Sativa (remix)â&#x20AC;? (Def Jam) Arctic Monkeys: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Four Out of Fiveâ&#x20AC;?

(Domino) Lil Baby & Gunna: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Drip Too Hardâ&#x20AC;?

(Quality Control) BlocBoy JB featuring Drake: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Look Aliveâ&#x20AC;? (OVO Sound) David Byrne: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Everybodyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Coming To My Houseâ&#x20AC;? (Nonesuch) Cam: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Road To Happinessâ&#x20AC;? (RCA) Charli XCX: â&#x20AC;&#x153;5 In the Morningâ&#x20AC;?

(Asylum) Eric Church: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Desperate Manâ&#x20AC;?

(EMI Nashville) Code Orange: â&#x20AC;&#x153;The Hurt Will Go On (Shade remix)â&#x20AC;? (Roadrunner) Denzel Curry: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Clout Cobainâ&#x20AC;?

(Loma Vista) Cypress Hill: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Band of Gypsiesâ&#x20AC;?

(BMG) *Lucy Dacus: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Addictionsâ&#x20AC;? (Matador) Hannah Diamond: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Trueâ&#x20AC;? (PC Music) Gesaffelstein: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Resetâ&#x20AC;? (Columbia) Ghost: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Dance Macabreâ&#x20AC;? (Loma Vista Bodega) Peggy Gou: â&#x20AC;&#x153;It Makes You Forget (Itgehane)â&#x20AC;? (Ninja Tune) Ariana Grande featuring Nicki Minaj: â&#x20AC;&#x153;The Light Is Comingâ&#x20AC;? (Republic) Khalid, 6LACK & Ty Dolla $ign: â&#x20AC;&#x153;OTWâ&#x20AC;? (RCA) Lorde featuring Run the Jewels: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Supercut (El-P remix)â&#x20AC;? (Universal) *Demi Lovato: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Soberâ&#x20AC;? (Island) Ella Mai: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Booâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d Upâ&#x20AC;? (Interscope) Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Middle Americaâ&#x20AC;? (Matador) MGMT: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Me and Michaelâ&#x20AC;? (Columbia) Men I Trust: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Say, can you hearâ&#x20AC;? (self-released) Father John Misty: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Mr. Tillmanâ&#x20AC;?

(Sub Pop) Mitski: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Nobodyâ&#x20AC;? (Dead Oceans) *Bob Mould: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Sunshine Rockâ&#x20AC;?

(Merge) The 1975: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Not Living (If Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Not With You)â&#x20AC;? (Interscope) *Oneohtrix Point Never (featuring an uncredited Anohni): â&#x20AC;&#x153;Black Snowâ&#x20AC;? (Warp) *Lil Peep: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Life Is Beautifulâ&#x20AC;? (Columbia) Pistol Annies: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Best Years of My Lifeâ&#x20AC;? (RCA Nashville) Rae Sremmurd featuring Juicy J: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Powerglideâ&#x20AC;? (Interscope) *A$AP Rocky & Tyler, the Creator: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Potato Saladâ&#x20AC;? (RCA) Travis Scott featuring Drake: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Sicko Modeâ&#x20AC;? (Epic) *serpentwithfeet: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Cherubimâ&#x20AC;? (Secretly Canadian) Shame: â&#x20AC;&#x153;One Rizlaâ&#x20AC;? (Dead Oceans) Shifting Sands: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Runâ&#x20AC;? (Fishrider) Slowthai: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Polaroidâ&#x20AC;? (Method) Vein: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Virus:// Vibranceâ&#x20AC;? (Closed Casket Activities) Young Fathers: â&#x20AC;&#x153;In My Viewâ&#x20AC;? (Ninja Tune)

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www.gaycitynews.com/broadwaycon2019 31

THEATER

Far From Heinous Giddy stage musical version of “Clueless” celebrates the ‘90s, Baldwins, and Monets

BY DAVID KENNERLEY hen jukebox musicals falter, and they often do, critics are quick to blame the book. Unlike traditional book musicals, where score and story are conceived hand-in-glove, jukebox musicals attempt to shoehorn a narrative between beloved, preexisting songs. The fit inevitably feels off.

“Clueless, The Musical,” based on the delightful — some might say “bitchin” — movie draws from the 1990s jukebox, but solved that approach’s inherent dilemma by grafting new lyrics onto iconic pop hits. That way songs and story are in sync. They’ve invented a new subgenre I’m anointing the “jukebook musical.”

It should be noted that other tuners based on cult movies, like “Mean Girls” (currently on Broadway), “Legally Blonde,” “Heathers,” and “Far From Heaven,” are book musicals, bringing their familiar

W

MONIQUE CARBONI

Justin Mortelliti, Dove Cameron, and the cast in “Clueless, The Musical.”

stories to life with original songs and music that were tailor-made.

“Head Over Heels” (about to close on Broadway) which borrows tunes from The Go-Go’s catalog, is a jukebox musical.

The jukebook conceit is perfect

for the sly, whimsical tone of this reimagined “Clueless.” The movie, you may recall, was a goofy reworking of Jane Austen’s “Emma,” transported to 1995 in a Beverly Hills high school and starring the irrepressible Alicia Silverstone, a

tough act to follow.

The teen protagonist is named Cher, whose ditzy demeanor belies a generous heart and a sharp mind. She employs her keen fashion sense and bargaining skills to rescue unfortunate, lovelorn souls who need a makeover and a push to get their social lives on track.

The manically optimistic Cher is a trouper and doesn’t dwell on her mother’s heinous untimely death, due to a freak liposuction incident.

Amy Heckerling, who wrote the screenplay, was tapped for this iteration as well. Does she stray from the original? As if!

This updated, somewhat uneven stage version, courtesy of The New Group Off Broadway, stars newcomer Dove Cameron as Cher, and her portrayal is spot-on. She brings a winsome charm to the conniving teen who juggles taking care of her gruff attorney father (the outstanding Chris Hoch),

➤ CLUELESS, continued on p.37

FILM

Why This Cartoon Now? Adam McKay hits hard at Dick Cheney, but with little penetrating insight suming that the rot in American politics began with Trump’s election. Director Adam McKay’s recent interview remarks that Bush was much worse than Trump and Bill Clinton was also a terrible president are consistent with this film’s montage featuring Alex Jones pointing a gun at the camera, drug overdose victims, and forest fires, among other numerous allusions to present-day ills, and ending with a shot of “Dick

BY STEVE ERICKSON hat audience was “Vice,” a satirical but unfunny rundown of Dick Cheney’s (Christian Bale) life, made for? Its story is old news to anyone who was politically aware during the Bush/ Cheney administration.

The uncritical, downright hagiographic media reception that George H. W. Bush received upon his recent death shows the dangers of historical amnesia and as-

W 32

GREIG FRASER / ANNAPURNA PICTURES

Christian Bale in Adam McKay’s “Vice,” which opens citywide on Christmas Day.

➤ VICE, continued on p.34 December 20, 2018 - January 2, 2019 | GayCityNews.nyc

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33

➤ VICE, from p.32 and Lynne” carved into a tree.

“Vice” is an implicit reproach to people with short memories who want to recruit the Bushes into #theresistance.

But how progressive can a film that treats its spectators as though their attention spans are so short they can’t sit still for a shot lasting more than a few seconds be? McKay’s “The Big Short” succeeded at being an entertaining take on Wall Street corruption. While its style wasn’t all that different from that of “Vice,” it was far more expressive. “Vice” plays like a “Saturday Night Live” sketch about politicians’ crassness extended to 132 minutes, except that it’s pissed-off in a way that’s willing to risk making it look uncool. Cheney’s final scene directly implicates the audience for enabling his rise to power.

All of this would hit home much harder if the direction and editing didn’t feel like a college student’s Oliver Stone impression.

“Vice” begins with the young Cheney getting into a car accident

while drunk, then leaping to him watching TV on 9/11 in the White House. It avoids telling a completely linear story as it shows Cheney’s rise from getting kicked out of college to his first political job with Donald Rumsfeld (Steve Carell) in the Nixon administration. After suffering his fi rst heart attack on the campaign trail for a Wyoming US House seat and a temporary loss of power under Jimmy Carter’s ascendancy, he became vice president under George W. Bush (Sam Rockwell) in 2001.

The pseudo-Brechtian pretensions of “Vice” are decorative. Just after someone says “we can’t include a Shakespearean monologue,” the film cuts to Lynne Cheney (Amy Adams) in bed with her husband, delivering one. It imagines an alternate world where Cheney was content to leave public office and work for Halliburton, complete with fake ending and closing credits. Most of its “adventurous” touches are extremely shallow and gimmicky, like illustrating a conversation with grainy video of a big cat tak-

CARNEGIE HALL

PRESENTS

ing down prey. It has a narrator whose place in Cheney’s life seems odd given that he’s a working-class soldier. His role is only fully explained in the film’s final 20 minutes, but the cynicism that it tries to blame on the Cheneys spreads out into “Vice” itself.

Bale gained 45 pounds to portray the older Cheney and wore extensive prosthetic makeup throughout. The effect is quite convincing, as are the makeup jobs on the whole cast. “Vice” is a fi lm that deliberately glides along the surface. It’s obviously denying the people it portrays the respect of a three-dimensional depiction as a political gesture, instead mocking them relentlessly. But while Bale gives the film’s best performance, the whole cast has been directed toward impersonation: Carell seems to have put most of his effort into imitating Rumsfeld’s voice. “Vice” is so uninterested in engaging with people that it has to make even the minor figures in its story instantly recognizable as political celebrities.

“Vice” is conscientious enough that its least cartoonish scene in-

volves Mary Cheney (Alison Pill) coming out to her parents and the film returns twice to Bush and her family’s reactions to her lesbianism as a marker of Republican hypocrisy. It also takes America’s torture and murder of Iraqis more seriously than the majority of our politicians and media did for the first few years of the Bush administration’s Iraq War. But it winds up blaming America’s problems mostly on the personal flaws of a handful of leaders who can dupe an apathetic public into giving them power.

At its smartest, “Vice” conveys a sense of how Cheney used and was used by systems well beyond him. The reliance on cheap shots would be more justifiable if the film had enough artistry to make its rage hit home. Was it supposed to be a comedy? I honestly don’t know. It’s a history lesson full of sound and fury, signifying something but nowhere near as much as it would like to.

VICE | Directed by Adam McKay | Annapurna Pictures | Opens citywide Dec. 25

UNIQUE MULTIMEDIA SHOW

CARMINA BURANA

BY CARL ORFF Bolshoi Symphonic Orchestra of the Moscow State Tchaikovsky Conservatory, Yurlov Capella Choir, Soloists of Bolshoi Theater, Conductor Jan Latham-Koenig (UK), Director Igor Ushakov (Bolshoi Theatre Russia)

December 29 TH s 8 PM

Bolshoi Theater soloists Anna Aglatova, Stanislav Mostovoy, and Vasiliy Laduk sing with Yurlov Capella Choir and Bolshoi Symphonic Orchestra of Moscow Conservatory. Inspired by Medieval poetry, Carl Orff wrote his cantata Carmina Burana. To emphasize the power of this work and its philosophical and emotional meaning, the music will be accompanied by visual effects, including laser projections of art masterpieces housed in Russian museums from the Middle Ages.

57TH STREET & 7TH AVE, NEW YORK, NY 212-375-3649 W W W.CARNEGIEHALL.ORG 34

December 20, 2018 - January 2, 2019 | GayCityNews.nyc

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Russian stars perform new staging of ‘Carmina Burana’ A consolidated troupe of 300 artists of famous creative teams of Russia will present “Carmina Burana,” a cantata

by Carl Orff, under the vaults of the famous Stern Hall of Manhattan’s Carnegie Hall on Dec. 29.

The evening promises to be a grand spectacle, attended by 300 Russian artists of the country’s most famous and oldest arts and cultural groups: soloists of the Bolshoi Theatre — Anna Aglatova (soprano), Stanislav Mostovoi (tenor), and Vasily Laduk (baritone) — sing with Yurlov Capella Choir and Bolshoi Symphonic Orchestra of Moscow Conservatory. The staging includes enchanting lighting effects, as well as paintings from great artists of the Middle Ages and the =ifd c\]k JfgiXef f] k_\ 9fcj_f` K_\Xki\ 8eeX 8^cXkfmX Xe[ <e^c`j_ Zfe[lZkfi AXe CXk_Xd$Bf\e`^% early Renaissance.

“Carmina Burana” is an ancient manuscript of the collection of medieval poetry, the original manuscript of which was found in 1803 in the Benedictine monastery Bayern (Beuern, lat. Buranum), now Benediktbeuern, Bavaria.

The German composer Carl Orff first encountered these texts in John Eddington Simon’s publication “Wine, Women and Songs of 1884,” which contained English translations of 46 poems from a collection found in the monastery.

Michael Hoffman, a law stu- =ifd c\]k K_\ Z_`c[i\eËj Z_f`i Xe[ YXi`kfe\ MXj`c`p CX[lb% dent and enthusiast of Greek and Latin, helped Orff choose 24 poems about the impermanence of luck and wealth, the transience of life, the joy of the return of spring, and the pleasure of drunkenness, gluttony, gambling, and carnality.

The manuscript, hidden in the monastery in the 13th century, was found many centuries later. During the European Middle Ages, it was a “forbidden” text written, first, by “renegades vagrants” — people who had the most ironic, and even satirical =ifd c\]k :fe[lZkfi >\eeX[`p ;d\kipXb# k\efi JkXe`jcXm Dfjkfmfp# Xe[ k_\ 9fcj_f` Jpdg_fe`Z FiZ_\jkiX% views on the life, society, and its mores. There is no religion food, carnal love, warm com- about the power and beauty Ushakov, who invited Eng- kovsky Conservatory Yurin these songs — even close pany and cheerful songs, here of human life sounded more lish conductor Jan Latham- lov Capella Choir Soloists of relevant than ever. But even Koenig for the director’s Bolshoi Theater present “Carto no words — but almost on and now!

Orff wrote the libretto the composer himself could console. Music producer is mina Burana” at Carnegie every page, it communicates about the removal of taboos with the texts of the poems not assume that his creation Vladimir Davydenko. Gen- Hall [881 Seventh Ave. between and all sorts of prohibitions. in the old German and Latin would become a bestseller nadiy Dmetryak, people’s art- W. 56th and W. 57th streets in Yes, life is fleeting, fortune is languages. The first perfor- of the 20th century. Now, the ist of Russia, is the chief con- Manhattan, (212) 247–7800, blind and ruthless, there is no mance of “Carmina Burana” most famous orchestras and ductor and artistic director of https://www.carnegiehall. doubt. But, stop praying, fear- took place on June 8, 1937, choral chapels have in their the Yurlov Russian State Aca- org/Cart/Seat-Selection-Performance/Syos?eventid=37213 demic Choir. ing, and waiting for the end conducted by Bertil Wetzels- repertoire Orff’s work.

Bolshoi Symphonic Orches- ] Dec. 29, 8 pm. Tickets from “Carmina Burana” is of the world — let’s rejoice: berger. In Europe, on the eve spring, sun, drink, delicious World War II, the cantata staged by director Igor tra of the Moscow State Tchai- $22.50 to $210 GayCityNews.nyc | December 20, 2018 - January 2, 2019

35

THEATER

Cher Bests Howard Beale and the Ape “Network,” “King Kong” falter, but the diva richly gets her due

BY CHRISTOPHER BYRNE y the time the monkey shows up, the show is pretty much over. That’s because the new musical “King Kong” has very little going for it other than the enormous puppet, which, when at its full height, nearly reaches the top of the proscenium of the Broadway Theatre. It’s an impressive bit of engineering, design, and rigging brought to life by a team of about 10 puppeteers. The animatronic face and the voice are run by a team of technicians at the back of the theater. But, like most attractions from Barnum to Disney, once seen and marveled at, there’s not really much more to it. Feast your eyes, and head to the exits.

The problem is not the puppet.

“Avenue Q” and, especially, “War Horse” demonstrated the comic and emotive power of puppetry in grown-up theater. No, the problem with “King Kong” is the show itself. The book by Jack Thorne is a hodgepodge mess that makes the vain attempt to update the classic “damsel in distress” scenario with a more empowered woman, but don’t look for it to make sense. The score by Marius de Vries and Eddie Perfect is a pastiche of middling, generic rock performed with the kind of talent show belt that’s far too common these days. Director and choreographer Drew McOnie devoted a lot of effort to keeping sets and people out of the way of the puppet. Some of the choreography is quite interesting, contemporary, and athletic, though it makes no sense to insert what appears to be a brief homage to Martha Graham when the people of New York are fleeing Kong on the rampage. Had all of this been played for camp and silliness, or if it were half the length and designed to show off the puppet, it might have worked, but the show is weighted down by its attempt to be moralistic and epic.

The basic premise is the same as the movie. Director Carl Denham discovers young, struggling

B

36

JOAN MARCUS

Teal Wicks, Stephanie J. Block, and Micaela Diamond in Rick Elice’s “The Cher Show,” directed by Jason Moore, at the Neil Simon Theatre.

actress Ann Darrow, and off they go to Skull Island to film with the gigantic King Kong. When things don’t go so well, they bring the ape back to exhibit him, though Ann has now developed a relationship of sorts with Kong, who is depressed. Ann runs away from him.

He climbs the Empire State building and gets shot down. The end.

Eric William Morris does pretty well with the shallow role of Carl.

He’s got a strong voice, but he never really finds a focus for the role, which is the fault of the script.

Christiani Pitts as Ann has all the earnestness one would expect of an aspiring actress/ pop singer — with a great stage presence and the ability, on occasion, to lend the vapid songs some feeling. The ensemble is enthusiastic, hardworking, and often given to mugging, but that too is in the writing. For all the good intentions, though, “King Kong” the musical is just a beast.

Sometimes, though, big and dumb is just the ticket. And when it’s done with the kind of style, comedy and showbiz razzle dazzle of “The Cher Show,” the result is an eye-popping spectacle that’s a great big Broadway show that wants nothing more than to entertain. And entertain it does. At heart, it’s a bio of Cher featuring

all her greatest songs. Book writer Rick Elice, who does a fine job of telling the story with affection and humor, probably knew that Cher was too big a character for just one actress, so he has three, who play her at different stages of her life — as Babe, Lady, and Star.

This is the kind of conceit that either works or it doesn’t, and here it does because of the easy banter among the three, who illuminate the internal life of a woman who’s lived her life in public — and the tabloids. It’s at once very humanizing and reflective of the ironic sense of humor Cher always seems to have had about herself. All the other boldface names from Cher’s life are here, too: Sonny Bono, Bob Mackie, Gregg Allman, Phil Spector, and Cher’s mother, Georgia Holt. They’re all integral to the story, but the show is most engaging when we’re with Cher and all her selves at different times of her life.

Elice has made Cher relatable, and looked for the soul beneath the sequins.

Don’t worry, though, there are plenty of sequins, including classic and unforgettable outfits and a full-on fashion show from the iconic Mackie, who did all the clothes.

Who else could? Under the witty and affectionate direction of Jason Moore, the show flies by, and choreographer Christopher Gattelli has

outdone himself with period-rich quotations in some of the numbers and the exuberant athleticism he does so well in others.

As Cher, Stephanie J. Block as Star walks away with the show.

From the moment she opens her mouth and sounds almost exactly like Cher through the end of the show, she commands the stage with effortless style. Block is a standout in any show she’s in, but here she’s at the top of her game.

It’s no mean feat impersonating a living legend, and Block does more than just an impression: she gives Cher a full life. Teal Wicks as Lady and Micaela Diamond as Babe are both excellent, as well, and it’s fascinating to hear how each of them interprets the voice at different ages. The three women are wonderful together, which is also what makes the concept work. Jarrod Spector is terrific as Sonny Bono, and Emily Skinner, in great voice, also demonstrates her powerful comic talents as Georgia.

I was never a Cher fan, though I enjoyed some of her songs, and I knew virtually none of her story going into this show. In recent years, though, her savvy political commentary, activism, ability to keep reinventing herself, and determination never to give up have revealed an inspiring depth and complexity.

That, combined with the knockout showmanship, is what make “The Cher Show” a must-see celebration of a very versatile star.

“Network,” the Broadway show based on the Paddy Chayefsky film, adapted for the stage by Lee Hall, is as timely as it was when the film came out 40 years ago, perhaps more so. The essential argument in the piece is about whether news objectively delivers factual information as a public service or is a business to be exploited for profitability. Our society currently wrestles with every possible nuance raised by that conflict.

The story, set decades ago, revolves around Howard Beale, a

➤ CHER, continued on p.37

December 20, 2018 - January 2, 2019 | GayCityNews.nyc

â&#x17E;¤ CHER, from p.36 veteran newscaster being fired because his ratings have dropped.

That is until he has a meltdown live on TV, and his ratings skyrocket.

No longer a journalist, he becomes a personality, and along the way a corporate pawn. The news era of Murrow and Cronkite gives way to the world of â&#x20AC;&#x153;infotainment,â&#x20AC;? as manipulation of people becomes the order of the day, whether in selling products or ideas. Chayefskyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s script was always a little preachy, and Hallâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s adaptation is as well.

Given the scandals at Facebook and the exploitation of social media for propaganda, the play seems arcane, even pointless. The battle is over, and no amount of outrage

â&#x17E;¤ CLUELESS, from p.32 playing matchmaker with two of her teachers, and turning the new girl, Tai (Ephie Aardema), from frumpy loser into popular hottie.

Sure, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s tempting to search for messages about seizing the day, the rewards of perseverance and selflessness, and how outward appearances can be deceiving.

Theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re all in there somewhere.

But at its best, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Cluelessâ&#x20AC;? is a joyous, unabashed musical love letter to the awesome 1990s.

To refresh our memories, the show, directed by Kristin Hanggi (â&#x20AC;&#x153;Rock of Agesâ&#x20AC;?) opens with a montage of now-classic images of television shows, movie stars, and newsmakers from the era. All to a revamped rendition of the Ace of Base hit â&#x20AC;&#x153;Beautiful Life.â&#x20AC;? â&#x20AC;&#x153;Even the president is a Baldwin,â&#x20AC;? Cher declares, referring to a photo of a handsome Bill Clinton wailing on a saxophone.

When it comes to 1990s touchstones, thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s no such thing as

is going to change the outcome; too many people are making too much money. When it comes to news, as with the products advertised on it, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s caveat emptor all the way.

Though Ivo Van Hoveâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s production does its best to convey the urgency of live news â&#x20AC;&#x201D; on a magnificent set by Jan Versweyveld â&#x20AC;&#x201D; and the vibrancy of the newsroom, it is largely a cold and cerebral exercise. The characters are onedimensional and there is no tension or conflict. A subplot about an affair between Howardâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s longtime producer Max and a young woman immersed in the soulless machine of TV profits, Diana, falls flat. A scene where Diana achieves orgasm while screwing with Max and talking about ratings points plays

as heavy handed and gratuitous.

(As in â&#x20AC;&#x153;Pretty Woman,â&#x20AC;? simulated sex on stage is usually clumsy and cringe-inducing.)

At the center of the piece is Bryan Cranston as Howard. Cranston is insanely charismatic and always exciting to watch, but the script allows for no nuance, and the performance, though impressive, comes off as highly technical and often cartoonish. Tony Goldwyn as Max and Tatiana Maslany as Diana are both wonderful actors, and they fill their roles to the extent the script allows them to. But the characters are all pawns in a dated, wannabe morality play. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d just as soon change the channel.

too much. References to â&#x20AC;&#x153;Seinfeld,â&#x20AC;? breakdancing, California Pizza Kitchen, iMacs, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Ren & Stimpy,â&#x20AC;? â&#x20AC;&#x153;Dawsonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Creek,â&#x20AC;? and more abound.

The hit-and-miss musical numbers, with fly, hip-hop inflected choreography by Kelly Devine, are astute parodies of some of the dopest tunes of the decade by artists such as Desâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ree, MC Hammer, Deee-Lite, En Vogue, and Blink 182.

My favorite is the thumping *NSYNC number â&#x20AC;&#x153;Bye Bye Bye,â&#x20AC;? which captures the crucial moment when Christian (Justin Mortelliti), the suave new guy that Cher is dating, debates revealing that heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s gay, and the entire company weighs in. Sample lyrics:

Elevating the proceedings is the dazzling, efficient set design

by Beowulf Boritt, an intentionally cartoonish backdrop with all kinds of surprising windows and doors. It also provides a perch for the live band, though much of the music is, by necessity, prerecorded. Darrel Maloneyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s projection design gives the impression that Cher really is driving her jeep through Beverly Hills, with her bestie Dionne (Zurin Villanueva) or stepbrother Josh (Dave Thomas Brown, a worthy stand-in for Paul Rudd) in tow.

â&#x20AC;&#x153;You donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t like it but you know itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s true That Christian has a better sense of style than you!

Yeah that ainâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t no lie Baby, bye bye bye!â&#x20AC;?

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But be forewarned: if youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve never seen the movie, donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know the difference between a Baldwin and a Monet, or donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have an affinity for 1990s pop, the charms of this endearing if unpolished â&#x20AC;&#x153;Cluelessâ&#x20AC;? may be lost on you.

CLUELESS, THE MUSICAL | The New Group | Pershing Square Signature Center | 480 W. 42nd St. | Through Jan. 12: Tue.-Fri. at 7:30 p.m.; Sat. at 2 p.m. & 8 p.m.; Sun. at 2 p.m. & 7:30 p.m. | $40-$125 at TheNewGroup.org | Two hrs., 15 mins., with intermission

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OPERA

Camille Dies in Disneyland Michael Mayer presents “Traviata” as memory play — but a garish one

BY ELI JACOBSON annick Nézet-Seguin officially took his place as the Metropolitan Opera’s new music director with a splashy, starry new production of Verdi’s evergreen romantic drama “La Traviata.” The director chosen for this important commission was Michael Mayer, who debuted at the Met in 2013 with a flashy neon-lit new production of “Rigoletto” set in 1960s Las Vegas.

Mayer’s “Traviata” production, like Sir David McVicar’s new “Tosca” production last season, replaces a stark modernist production with a return to the romantic and representational, sprinkled with a few updated touches to add a little dramatic fiber to the pretty eye candy. Willy Decker’s 2010 production (which premiered at Salzburg in 2005) was an expressionist study in black and white with minimalistic sets and maximalist stage direction. Every stylized gesture for the cast was precisely choreographed. It was a cool, even clinical take that emphasized Violetta’s isolation and suffering at the expense of the other characters.

In contrast, Mayer has borrowed concepts from “Traviata” productions past and present filling the stage with acid colors, decorative furniture, gilded pianos, ormolu screens, and candelabras. Liberace would feel right at home in Violetta’s parlor.

Following Franco Zeffirelli’s 1958 Dallas production for Callas, Mayer stages the prelude with Violetta on her sickbed remembering her past which then plays out onstage as a flashback. (Of course, one problem with this concept is that Violetta is flashing back to events she did not witness like Germont and Alfredo’s meeting in Act II or the events at Flora’s party before Violetta arrives.) Each act is played as a different season of the year — Violetta and Alfredo fall in love at her party in the Spring, escape to the country for the Summer, split up in the

Y

38

MART Y SOHL / METROPOLITAN OPERA

Juan Diego Flórez and Diana Damrau in the Met Opera production of “La Traviata.”

Fall, and Violetta dies in Winter.

Violetta’s bed remains center stage throughout, symbolizing both the deathbed framing device and the courtesan’s erotic workplace.

Some of Mayer’s updated touches are reasonable. Others, like making Alfredo’s virginal sister a silent onstage character witnessing the action, are foolish. Germont would never allow a sheltered young girl into the home of a prostitute or the sick room of a consumptive since the poor girl could be contaminated with either Violetta’s wicked ways or her illness. The only trope that was missing was a large clock ticking the hours of Violetta’s life away — Decker had already taken that idea to its limit.

Christine Jones’ unit set is a curved rotunda wall with arched openings and a ceiling oculus from which flowers, chandeliers, or snow descend to denote the change of seasons and locale. The unit set looks rather oversized for the country villa but instantly transforms for Flora’s salon without a pause.

Susan Hilferty’s costumes are a riot of bright colorful fabrics accented with gold embroidery. The Act I male partygoers wear burgundy, teal, and purple cutaway jackets with knee boots like refugees

from the Stahlbaum’s “Nutcracker” Christmas party. Flora’s Act II party resembles Orlofsky’s ball from “Die Fledermaus” with everyone in brocaded fancy dress. Lorin Lotarro’s Act II toreador ballet has the dancers done up as zombie extras from Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” music video vogue-ing to Verdi.

(Zeffirelli dancing cows come back, all is forgiven…) The smock apron Annina wears in Act III is of shiny blue silk. This isn’t 19th century Paris as historical recreation but as a theme park fantasy world filtered through Hollywood musicals and Disney cartoons. It looks pretty and bright shiny new. You can see where the money was spent, so the Met audience seemed to enjoy it.

The main advantage of replacing the Willy Decker production is that this one can play more easily in repertory rotation and with varied casting. Conceived as a festival presentation, Decker’s meticulously detailed production required hours of rehearsal even in revival (often with Decker restaging). The acting, costuming, and physical demands required of Violetta and Alfredo limited who could be cast in Decker’s production. Mayer’s production can be thrown onstage with a few days of rehearsal fea-

turing sopranos and tenors of any type, age, or size.

There is a smart and very musical trio of singers in the center of this floor show who work hard to upstage the scenery. Diana Damrau, an impressive Violetta in the Decker production in 2013, is not quite the strong coloratura technician she once was. Her soprano in its current estate clearly can’t take pressure at any extremes of volume or range without losing control.

The repeated staccati and scales in Act I’s “Sempre Libera” started to unravel, turning shrill and forced.

Damrau sagely took the low option at the climax, eschewing either the high C or E-flat. In the more lyrical Acts II and III, Damrau found herself on increasingly firm ground, gaining in musical and dramatic strength. With Maestro Nézet-Séguin’s help, Damrau turned her disadvantages into assets by working from a baseline of delicate soft singing, only rarely vocalizing full out. A naturally positive, hearty and energetic performer, Damrau brought a soft-grained approach subtly highlighting Violetta’s feminine vulnerability and frailty. Initially rather frenetic, Damrau’s acting gains in quiet focus and eloquence, overcoming Mayer’s often trite stage direction. She is a probing musician and committed high energy performer.

Returning to the Met after an absence of five seasons, Juan Diego Flórez made his role debut as Alfredo in this production. Again Flórez’s voice seemed slight for the role. Again Nézet-Séguin catered to his weaknesses, keeping the orchestral volume level down in his solo moments. Flórez’s bel canto facility ensured that the turns and grace notes in the “Brindisi” and “Parigi o Cara” have never sounded better. He phrases with charm and elegance. When Verdi calls for power, Flórez’s tone can turn nasal and blatant. As an actor, I don’t see much difference between Flórez’s

➤ LA TRAVIATA, continued on p.39

December 20, 2018 - January 2, 2019 | GayCityNews.nyc

DANCE

Hard Return The nutty holiday classic is back at BAM

BY BILL ROUNDY his show keeps dancers on their toes!

The beloved ballet “The Hard Nut” — a joyfully strange take on “The Nutcracker” — leapt back into the Brooklyn Academy of Music on December 14. The Mark Morris Dance Group debuted the show at BAM in 1992 and has performed it somewhere every holiday season since. It never gets old, however, said one of its stars.

“The show is always different, every single night,” said Lauren Grant, who has played the leading role of Marie for 20 years. “It’s finely choreographed, but there is room to make changes as you go, especially in the party scene...

You’re always getting a fresh show, but it’ll always be the show you know and love.”

Creator and choreographer Mark Morris used Tchaikovsky’s classic music, but set his show in an indeterminate 1970s-ish era, opening at a swinging suburban house party. He also restored a then-little known scene from the ballet’s original inspiration, “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King” by E.T.A. Hoffman, in which a Rat Queen promises to restore beauty to a princess if a young man can crack the “hard nut” with his teeth.

Morris said that he wanted to restore some of the story’s energy to the ballet.

“I wanted it to be really interesting and fun and scary and delightful, like the Hoffmann story,” said Morris, from his company’s office in Fort Greene.

T

➤ LA TRAVIATA, from p.38 Alfredo and his Ernesto or Tonio or Elvino. But you do see why Violetta falls in love with him.

The only major Verdian voice on the stage was that of Hawaiian baritone Quinn Kelsey as Papa Germont. Kelsey’s voice is big, broad, and imposing, with enveloping legato phrasing that evokes

STEPHANIE BERGER

The host with the most: “The Hard Nut” creator Mark Morris, seen here in a 2010 production with Amber Star Merkens, did not always play Dr. Stahlbaum. “I used to be the drunk party guest and the beautiful princess, and then I wasn’t,” he said. “I don’t know if I was promoted or demoted.”

“Whenever you bring a show back, there’s an opportunity to enhance the performance — it just gets more vibrant.”

The show was seen as subversive when it debuted, with a shocked New York Times review noting in a headline that it had “men in tutus” — a description that Morris disputes.

“It’s not men in tutus — it’s men and woman as snowflakes,” he specified.

But the show has plenty of actors in drag and same-sex dancing pairs, which was out of the mainstream in 1992, said Grant.

“Putting two men together in a pas de deux — that had a lot of shock value, whether it was intended to or not,” she said. “And it’s so interesting to see that it’s not shocking anymore. I think Mark was one of the people who made that change.”

In the years since the its debut, the ballet has become a Brooklyn tradition.

“It’s stood the test of time,” said Morris. “People who saw it as kids are bringing their own children — I love that. It’s a really becoming a family event.”

And Morris said “The Hard Nut” will continue for as long as audiences keep showing up.

“This has been a great run,” he said. “And we’ll keep doing it until something better comes along.”

Morris also plays a role in his show, playing party host Dr. Stahlbaum and, in a later scene, the King. He dreads the makeup and wig, but said he still enjoys working with his fellow dancers each night.

“It’s fun, and I’m very close with the gentleman who plays Mrs. Stahlbaum [John Heginbotham],” said Morris. “There’s a lot of spontaneity, I love that.”

Over the years, his take on Dr. Stahlbaum has only varied to the degree that physics has required, said Morris.

“I’ve tried to make him age gracefully,” he laughed. “He’s gotten a little kookier. It’s not exactly autobiographical, but his knees have gotten worse.”

Grant, meanwhile, is eternally youthful in the role of Stahlbaum’s middle child, Marie. All of the child characters are played by adults, said Morris, because “children are terrible at playing children.”

Grant finds new aspects of her character every year, she said.

“I’ve had over 20 years to grow the role, to be deeply nuanced,” said the Prospect Heights dancer.

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paternal concern and tenderness.

His rich sound can turn blunt in high or fast moments but he has power and authority in spades.

Nézet-Séguin’s conducting was alert to details, attentive to the singers and generally rather moderate in tempo. His reading could be over-controlled but the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra sounds as good as it ever has — clearly the

players love him and so does the Met audience. The musical edition is fuller than the usual but some traditional cuts are opened while others are preserved; sometimes we get one verse only and sometimes both verses.

If the design concept of the Mayer production were less garish, the memory play concept would seem less artificial. Something poetic

like the black and white French romantic fantasy films of the 1940s of Marcel Carné or Jean Cocteau would evoke the right atmosphere.

Dreamlike visuals with soft-focus misty backgrounds, delicate pastel shades, and chiaroscuro lighting — more like Cocteau’s “Beauty and the Beast” and less Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast” with better songs.

GayCityNews.nyc | December 20, 2018 - January 2, 2019

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December 20, 2018 - January 2, 2019 | GayCityNews.nyc

➤ MARK-VIVERITO, from p.14 there were initiatives that we funded, but they were not baselined in the city budget,” she said. “The idea is to advocate and prioritize these initiatives, not just have them as an add-on.”

Mark-Viverito’s other funding proposals include increased spending for HIV testing, care, and services — especially for communities of color — and assistance for homeless queer youth to help them obtain education, housing, and paid internships.

Notably, she is placing emphasis on identifying ways to improve the lives of transgender and gender non-conforming people. She would like the city to provide educational, employment, and housing opportunities for them, which are much needed after a recent survey by the Anti-Violence Project revealed that although trans and gender non-conforming people are more likely to have bachelor’s degrees, less than half of the 118 respondents had full-time jobs.

Among other points, MarkViverito would support an executive order prohibiting the city from funding entities engaging in discrimination against the LGBTQ community, continue to staff an LGBTQ liaison in the public advocate’s office, and introduce a law that would form a transgender and gender non-conforming advisory board for the city’s hospital system.

Mark-Viverito is vying for the role of public advocate at a time when the city has seen a rise in hate crimes citywide — with the LGBTQ community being among the most targeted groups — and she said she “likes the sound of” legislation proposed

by Councilmembers Mark

Levine of Manhattan and Donovan Richards of Queens to create a hate crimes office at the city level.

“This is a serious issue that we are seeing,” she said.

“Having real, focused attention on it in the form of an office, to me, indicates there is a sense of urgency.”

The 49-year-old pol, who represented parts of the Bronx and Manhattan from 2006-2017 and served as speaker from 2014-2017, helped lead the effort to pass legislation requiring singleoccupant restrooms to be gender-neutral, campaigned for marriage equality, allocated funding to hire a staff member to serve as LGBT liaison for city schools, and more.

Mark-Viverito didn’t spell out many specifics on her new platform — she admitted that many of her ideas will need to be fine-tuned as she continues to work with members of the LGBTQ community — but she hopes it represents a starting point and an opportunity for her to build upon the progress already made during her time in office. She emphasized that LGBTQ people should be the ones to direct their path forward, and that she should be there to listen.

“It’s not for me to identify,” she said, while stressing that she will be having roundtable discussions to further solidify her plans. “These are priorities in their community.”

Current Public Advocate Letitia James, who was elected state attorney general in November, will assume her new position in January. The race for public advocate is expected to culminate early in the new year after Mayor Bill de Blasio sets a date for the special election.

For more news & events happening now visit www.GayCityNews.nyc GayCityNews.nyc | December 20, 2018 - January 2, 2019

41

POLITICS

O’Donnell Campaign Office Launch Brings Out Stars Surrounded by “family,” gay public advocate candidate sounds personal note

BY DONNA ACETO

W

hen out gay State A ssembly member Daniel O’Donnell — who has served a Manhattan district stretching from the Upper West Side to West Harlem since 2003 — opened a campaign office on Broadway this week to support his run for public advocate, he was feeling the love of family. His LGBTQ Manhattan Assembly colleague Deborah Glick was on hand. So too were Cathy Nolan, a Queens assemblymember, and a former member of the Assembly, Keith Wright of Harlem, who now chairs the county Democratic Committee. Longtime lesbian and AIDS activist Ann Northrop also turned out.

Oh, and so did one Rosie O’Donnell, or as her name tag read, “the sister.” Rosie said her brother

DONNA ACETO

Assemblymember Daniel O’Donnell (right) with his husband, John Banta.

DONNA ACETO

Democratic County Chair Keith Wright speaks as Assemblymember Deborah Glick (center) and “the sister” look on.

was a born politician, as a child telling a neighbor who’d chased them to the sidewalk that they were now on government property.

Danny, in very personal remarks, recalled growing up without a lot

of money, being gay, falling in love with John Banta, but believing for too long that politics was closed to him as an out gay man. He described the office of public advocate as an independent one without ties

to either the mayor or the governor — “No problem there,” he said — and also not a stepping stone to the mayoralty. Voicing opposition to the new Amazon deal in Long Island City, O’Donnell stressed that he wants to be a “watchdog” for the people — and a local counterweight to the growing “fascism” in Washington.

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December 20, 2018 - January 2, 2019 | GayCityNews.nyc

REMEMBRANCE

Buzzcocksâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Out Bi Pete Shelley Dead at 63 British singer/ songwriter created one of â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;70s punkâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s most enduring legacies

BY STEVE ERICKSON ete Shelley wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t the only LGBTQ musician involved in the 1970s punk scene, but he was the most talented and the one whose legacy has proved to be the most influential.

Born Peter McNeish in Lancashire, England in 1955, he formed Buzzcocks in Manchester with singer Howard Devoto in 1976. Quickly becoming disenchanted with punk, Devoto left to form the band Magazine, and Shelley became Buzzcocksâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; lead singer and main songwriter. In 1977, they released the EP â&#x20AC;&#x153;Spiral Scratchâ&#x20AC;? on their own New Hormones label and signed to EMI. Buzzcocks broke with the notion that punk should consist solely of angry expressions of alienation and direct political accusations. If the Clash and the Sex Pistols inadvertently reinforced a tradition of rockâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;nâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;roll machismo while trying to rebel, Shelleyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s songs spoke eloquently about the vulnerability and rejection that come with love and sex. His more philosophical songs looked inward.

Buzzcocksâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; first major label single, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Orgasm Addict,â&#x20AC;? got banned from many radio stations, but it addresses the downside of the sexual freedom of the â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;70s with a campy wit. The band queered the Ramonesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; bubblegum through blown-

P

DRAG CIT Y

Pete Shelley, in a photo taken around the time of his album â&#x20AC;&#x153;Sky Yen.â&#x20AC;?

out speakers sensibility, borrowing as well from the pop sparkle of the early Beatles, the propulsion and groove of German bands like Can and Neu!, and glam artists like T. Rex and â&#x20AC;&#x153;Ziggy Stardustâ&#x20AC;?-era David Bowie.

Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m not sure how many people noticed while the first incarnation of Buzzcocks were together, but Shelleyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s love songs never mentioned the gender of his partners. Their 1978 single â&#x20AC;&#x153;Ever Fallen In Love (With Someone You Shouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;tâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve)â&#x20AC;? has gone down in history as Buzzcocksâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; biggest hit. It was inspired by Shelleyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s seven-year relationship with a man named Francis.

Shelley came out as bisexual in 1981, around the release of his first solo single, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Homosapien.â&#x20AC;? It was promptly banned by the BBC for its allusions to gay sex with lyrics like â&#x20AC;&#x153;homo superior in my inte-

rior.â&#x20AC;? In 2018, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s more memorable for its recognition that sexual labels can be traps (â&#x20AC;&#x153;I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t wanna classify you like an animal in the zooâ&#x20AC;?) and insistence about the simple humanity of all LGBTQ people (â&#x20AC;&#x153;youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re a homosapien too, Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m a homosapien like youâ&#x20AC;?) without abandoning frank desire in its claims of universality.

Shelleyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s solo career, however, is too often reduced to that one song.

He actually recorded â&#x20AC;&#x153;Sky Yen,â&#x20AC;? an album of 20-minute instrumental electronic drones in 1974, but it wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t released until 1980. After the breakup of Buzzcocks, he recorded several albums in an electronic pop vein.

The band reformed in 1989, releasing their fourth album, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Trade Test Transmissions,â&#x20AC;? in 1993. Their earlier compilation â&#x20AC;&#x153;Singles Going

Steadyâ&#x20AC;? and third album â&#x20AC;&#x153;A Different Kind Of Tensionâ&#x20AC;? transcend the punk context: they rank with the best music produced in the â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;70s in any genre. Beyond Shelleyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s penchant for love songs, â&#x20AC;&#x153;I Believeâ&#x20AC;? spends seven minutes pondering the emptiness of politics and organized religion while trying not to succumb to the nihilism other bands turned into empty sloganeering.

Shelleyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s sudden death from a heart attack at age 63 on December 6 came as a shock. The current lineup of Buzzcocks, which also includes original guitarist Steve Diggle, planned a US tour next year.

Information about Shelleyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s private life is hard to come by. At the time of his death, he had moved from Manchester to Estonia. Heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s survived by his brother Gary.

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