MAY 28 2014 GAY CITY NEWS by Schneps Media

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May 28, 2014 | www.gaycitynews.com

“G ay C ure ” B an G ains G round , G enda F alters

BOOKS

MEDIA

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LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

COVER ILLUSTRATION BY MICHAEL SHIREY

Thumb drive

Queer black men getting their tens

On GENDA, we need to hear from Senator Klein and from Governor Cuomo

| May 28, 2014

MARRIAGE

In Stunner, Pennsylvania’s GOP Governor Waves White Flag Conservative Republican, facing tough reelection fight, lets federal judge’s marriage order stand n a surprising development, the State of Pennsylvania announced it will not appeal the May 20 federal district court decision striking down its ban on marriage by same-sex couples. Just one day after the ruling, Governor Tom Corbett, a Republican widely considered a social conservative, announced he would abide by the ruling from US District Judge John E. Jones III in a case brought by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of 11 same-sex couples, a widow from an out-of-state same-sex marriage, and two teenage children of one of the plaintiff couples. In a statement released by the governor’s office, Corbett said, “As a Roman Catholic, the traditional teaching of my faith has not wavered. I continue to maintain the belief that marriage is between one man and one woman.” However, he also said his duties as governor require that he assess the prospect for prevailing in an appeal and

GOVERNOR’S OFFICE/ STATE OF PENNSYLVANIA

BY PAUL SCHINDLER

Pennsylvania’s Republican Governor Tom Corbett.

he concluded that such an effort was “extremely unlikely to succeed.” Just last October, Corbett compared same-sex marriage to marriage between siblings. Asked by a Harrisburg television station to comment on a statement by attorneys for Pennsylvania in a court filing likening marriage by members of the same sex to marriage between chil-

dren, the governor responded, “It was an inappropriate analogy, you know. I think a much better analogy would have been brother and sister, don’t you?” Corbett faces a tough reelection fight this November against Democrat Tom Wolf, a wealthy businessman who spent an estimated $10 million of his own money in winning his party’s primary

this week. In a March poll conducted by Quinnipiac University, marriage equality held a 57-37 edge in Pennsylvania. With Corbett’s decision, Pennsylvania becomes the 19th state to allow gay marriage. Earlier the same week, a US district judge in Oregon struck down that state’s statutory and constitutional bar on marriage equality, a ruling officials there pledged in advance not to appeal. Marriage by same-sex couples is also legal in Washington, DC. Forty-four percent of the US population now lives in marriage equality jurisdictions. Since the US Supreme Court struck down DOMA’s prohibition on federal recognition of legal same-sex mar riages last June, federal district courts have thrown out bans on same-sex marriage or recognition of same-sex marriage from other jurisdictions in Virginia, Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Texas, Oklahoma, Utah, and Idaho. (Two weeks ago, a state court in Arkansas struck down that state’s

CORBETT, continued on p.12

Oregon Win Based on Court Finding No Rational Purpose in Ban BY ARTHUR S. LEONARD

S District Judge Michael McShane’s permanent injunction against Oregon’s statutory and constitutional ban on same-sex marriage and its recognition was based on his finding that the state has no rational basis for that policy. McShane decreed that his May 19 ruling “be effective immediately,” and couples began getting married the same afternoon. Since neither the state nor Multnomah County, the other defendant in the lawsuit, defended the existing ban or plans an appeal and there is only a remote chance of the ruling otherwise being successfully challenged in a higher court, Oregon effectively became the 18th marriage equality state. The National Organization for Marriage (NOM), an organization formed specifically to oppose same-sex mar riage, had filed a last-minute motion to intervene as a defendant in the case shortly before the court’s scheduled hearing last month, but McShane

denied it on May 13. NOM then filed an appeal from his ruling with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and sought an “emergency stay” of the district court proceedings, hoping to block the court from issuing its opinion. Hours before McShane ruled, the Ninth Circuit denied that motion. NOM’s appeal of the judge’s ruling on its motion to intervene remains pending, a remaining issue that could — but probably won’t — interfere with the ability of same-sex couples to continue marrying in Oregon. The unlikelihood of such a scenario is buffered by the Supreme Court’s ruling last year that the proponents of California’s Proposition 8 had no standing to appeal the 2010 district court ruling that struck down that voter initiative from two years earlier. McShane predicated his denial of the NOM motion on that conclusion. The lawsuit was brought by four plaintiff couples — two represented by Portland attorneys Lake Perriguey and Lea Ann Easton and two by the American Civil Liberties Union and its Oregon affiliate.

OREGON UNITED FOR MARRIAGE.ORG

Planning no appeal, state welcomes ruling; licenses issued to same-sex couples

Plaintiffs Ben West and Paul Rummel.

Prior to McShane’s ruling, Oregon had been gearing up for a ballot measure in November to overturn the 2004 marriage ban. McShane, an out gay appointee of President Barack Obama who began serving on the district court last year,

included some deeply personal reflections in his opinion. “Generations of Americans, my own included, were raised in a world in which homosexuality was believed to be

OREGON, continued on p.16

May 28, 2014 | www.gaycitynews.com

Join us to hear how HIV-positive patients have taken the courageous first step in their treatment journey.

Meet a Couch Coach

Hear from an Expert

Join the Conversation

A Couch Coach will be providing information and advice. Hear an honest story, be inspired.

A local healthcare professional will be providing information on TIVICAY, a prescription HIV-1 medicine.

You will have the chance to ask questions.

We encourage you to talk to your doctor about HIV and your treatment—and to see if TIVICAY may be right for you. All presenters are paid spokespersons of ViiV Healthcare.

What is TIVICAY? TIVICAY is a prescription HIV medicine that is used with other antiretroviral medicines to treat Human Immunodeficiency Virus-1 (HIV-1) in adults and children 12 years of age and older and weighing at least 88 pounds. HIV-1 is the virus that causes Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). It is not known if TIVICAY is safe and effective in children younger than 12 years or who weigh less than 88 pounds. TIVICAY does not cure HIV-1 infection or AIDS. You must stay on continuous HIV-1 therapy to control the HIV-1 infection and decrease HIV-related illnesses.

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IMPORTANT SAFETY INFORMATION Who should not take TIVICAY? • Do not take TIVICAY if you take dofetilide because of a life-threatening interaction. What are the most serious side effects of TIVICAY? • Allergic reactions. Stop taking TIVICAY and get medical help right away if you have: ° A rash with any of these symptoms: fever; general ill feeling; extreme tiredness; muscle or joint aches; blisters or sores in your mouth; blisters or peeling of your skin; redness or swelling in your eyes; swelling of your mouth, face, lips or tongue; problems breathing. ° Any of the following signs or symptoms of liver problems: yellowing of your skin or whites of your eyes; dark or tea-colored urine; pale-colored stools (bowel movements); nausea or vomiting; loss of appetite; pain, aching, or tenderness on your right side below the ribs. • Changes in liver tests. People with a history of hepatitis B or C virus may have an increased risk of developing new or worsening changes in certain liver tests during treatment with TIVICAY. Your healthcare provider

may do tests to check your liver function before and during treatment with TIVICAY. • Changes in body fat can happen in people who take HIV-1 medicines, including increased amount of fat in the upper back and neck (“buffalo hump”), breast, and around the middle of your body. Loss of fat from the legs, arms, and face may also happen. The exact cause and long-term health effects of these problems are not known. • Changes in your immune system can happen when you start taking HIV-1 medicines. Your immune system may get stronger and begin to fight infections that have been hidden in your body for a long time. Tell your healthcare provider right away if you start having new symptoms after starting your HIV-1 medicine. What are the other possible side effects of TIVICAY? • The most common side effects of TIVICAY include trouble sleeping and headache. Tell your healthcare provider about any side effect that bothers you or that does not go away. These are not all the possible side effects of TIVICAY. Important Safety Information continued on next page.

| May 28, 2014

A speaker program about HIV treatment

YOU’RE INVITED TO A SPECIAL HIV EVENT We’re bringing people together to talk honestly about HIV. Save the date: Tues., June 10 Hostos Community College – Savoy Building 120 East 149th Street, Bronx, NY or Wed., June 11, Alhambra Ballroom 2116 Adam Clayton Powell Blvd., Harlem, NY Registration: 6:00 pm Program start: 6:30 pm

RSVP by calling 1-855-653-7430 Walk-ins are welcome but registration is encouraged.

What should I tell my healthcare provider before I take TIVICAY? Before taking TIVICAY, tell your healthcare provider if you: • have ever had an allergic reaction to TIVICAY • have or had liver problems, including hepatitis B or C • have any other medical condition • are pregnant or plan to become pregnant. It is not known if TIVICAY will harm your unborn baby • are breastfeeding or plan to breastfeed. Do not breastfeed if you take TIVICAY. You should not breastfeed if you have HIV-1 because of the risk of passing HIV-1 to your baby. It is not known if TIVICAY passes into your breast milk. Talk to your healthcare provider about the best way to feed your baby. Tell your healthcare provider about all prescription and nonprescription medicines, vitamins, and herbal supplements you take. TIVICAY and other medicines may affect each other, causing side effects. TIVICAY may affect the way other medicines work, and other medicines may affect how TIVICAY works. Especially tell your healthcare provider if you take: • other HIV-1 medicines including: efavirenz (SUSTIVA®), etravirine (INTELENCE®), fosamprenavir (LEXIVA®)/ritonavir (NORVIR®), nevirapine (VIRAMUNE®), or tipranavir (APTIVUS®)/ritonavir (NORVIR).

• antacids or laxatives that contain aluminum, magnesium or calcium, sucralfate (CARAFATE®), iron or calcium supplements, or buffered medicines. TIVICAY should be taken at least 2 hours before or 6 hours after you take these medicines. • anti-seizure medicines: oxcarbazepine (TRILEPTAL®), phenytoin (DILANTIN®, DILANTIN®-125, PHENYTEK®), phenobarbital (LUMINAL®), carbamazepine (CARBATROL®, EQUETRO®, TEGRETOL®, TEGRETOL®-XR, TERIL®, EPITOL®) • St. John’s wort (Hypericum perforatum) • a medicine that contains metformin • rifampin (RIFATER®, RIFAMATE®, RIMACTANE®, RIFADIN®) You are encouraged to report negative side effects of prescription drugs to the FDA. Visit www.fda.gov/medwatch, or call 1-800-FDA-1088. Please see Patient Information for TIVICAY on the next pages and discuss it with your healthcare provider. ©2014 ViiV Healthcare group of companies. All rights reserved. Printed in USA. DGV179R0 March 2014

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Food will be provided

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May 28, 2014 | www.gaycitynews.com

PATIENT INFORMATION TIVICAY® (TIV-eh-kay) (dolutegravir) Tablets Read this Patient Information before you start taking TIVICAY and each time you get a refill. There may be new information. This information does not take the place of talking with your healthcare provider about your medical condition or treatment.

Who should not take TIVICAY? Do not take TIVICAY if you take dofetilide. Taking TIVICAY and dofetilide can cause side effects that may be life-threatening. What should I tell my healthcare provider before taking TIVICAY? Before you take TIVICAY, tell your healthcare provider if you: • have ever had an allergic reaction to TIVICAY • have or had liver problems, including hepatitis B or C infection • have any other medical condition • are pregnant or plan to become pregnant. It is not known if TIVICAY will harm your unborn baby. Tell your healthcare provider if you become pregnant while taking TIVICAY. Pregnancy Registry. There is a pregnancy registry for women who take antiviral medicines during pregnancy. The purpose of the registry is to collect information about the health of you and your baby. Talk to your healthcare provider about how you can take part in this registry. • are breastfeeding or plan to breastfeed. Do not breastfeed if you take TIVICAY. • You should not breastfeed if you have HIV-1 because of the risk of passing HIV-1 to your baby. • It is not known if TIVICAY passes into your breast milk. • Talk to your healthcare provider about the best way to feed your baby. Tell your healthcare provider about the medicines you take, including prescription and over-the-counter medicines, vitamins, or herbal supplements. TIVICAY and other medicines may affect each other causing side effects. TIVICAY may affect the way other medicines work, and other medicines may affect how TIVICAY works. Especially tell your healthcare provider if you take: • other HIV-1 medicines including: efavirenz (SUSTIVA®), etravirine (INTELENCE®), fosamprenavir (LEXIVA®)/ritonavir (NORVIR®), nevirapine (VIRAMUNE®), or tipranavir (APTIVUS®)/ritonavir (NORVIR).

How should I take TIVICAY? • Take TIVICAY exactly as your healthcare provider tells you. • Do not change your dose or stop taking TIVICAY without talking with your healthcare provider. • Stay under the care of a healthcare provider while taking TIVICAY. • You can take TIVICAY with or without food. • If you miss a dose of TIVICAY, take it as soon as you remember. If it is within 4 hours of your next dose, skip the missed dose and take the next dose at your regular time. Do not take 2 doses at the same time. If you are not sure about your dosing, call your healthcare provider. • If you take too much TIVICAY, call your healthcare provider or go to the nearest hospital emergency room right away. • Do not run out of TIVICAY. The virus in your blood may become resistant to other HIV-1 medicines if TIVICAY is stopped for even a short time. When your supply starts to run low, get more from your healthcare provider or pharmacy. What are the possible side effects of TIVICAY? TIVICAY may cause serious side effects, including: • Allergic reactions. Call your healthcare provider right away if you develop a rash with TIVICAY. Stop taking TIVICAY and get medical help right away if you: • develop a rash with any of the following signs or symptoms ° fever ° generally ill feeling ° extreme tiredness ° muscle or joint aches ° blisters or sores in mouth ° blisters or peeling of the skin ° redness or swelling of the eyes ° swelling of the mouth, face, lips, or tongue ° problems breathing • develop any of the following signs or symptoms of liver problems: ° yellowing of the skin or whites of the eyes ° dark or tea-colored urine ° pale-colored stools or bowel movements ° nausea or vomiting ° loss of appetite ° pain, aching, or tenderness on the right side below the ribs • Changes in liver tests. People with a history of hepatitis B or C virus may have an increased risk of developing new or worsening changes in certain liver tests during treatment with TIVICAY. Your healthcare provider may do tests to check your liver function before and during treatment with TIVICAY. (continued)

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What is TIVICAY? TIVICAY is a prescription HIV medicine that is used with other antiretroviral medicines to treat Human Immunodeficiency Virus-1 (HIV-1) infections in adults and children 12 years of age and older and weighing at least 88 pounds. HIV-1 is the virus that causes Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). It is not known if TIVICAY is safe and effective in children under 12 years of age or who weigh less than 88 pounds. When used with other HIV-1 medicines to treat HIV-1 infection, TIVICAY may help: • Reduce the amount of HIV-1 in your blood. This is called “viral load.” • Increase the number of white blood cells called CD4+ (T) cells in your blood, which help fight off other infections. • Reduce the amount of HIV-1 and increase the CD4+ (T) cells in your blood which may help improve your immune system. This may reduce your risk of death or getting infections that can happen when your immune system is weak (opportunistic infections). TIVICAY does not cure HIV-1 infection or AIDS. You must stay on continuous HIV-1 therapy to control HIV-1 infection and decrease HIV-related illnesses. Avoid doing things that can spread HIV-1 infection to others. • Do not share or re-use needles or other injection equipment. • Do not share personal items that can have blood or body fluids on them, like toothbrushes and razor blades. • Do not have any kind of sex without protection. Always practice safe sex by using a latex or polyurethane condom to lower the chance of sexual contact with any body fluids such as semen, vaginal secretions, or blood. Ask your healthcare provider if you have any questions about how to prevent passing HIV to other people.

• antacids or laxatives that contain aluminum, magnesium or calcium, sucralfate (CARAFATE®), iron or calcium supplements, or buffered medicines. TIVICAY should be taken at least 2 hours before or 6 hours after you take these medicines. • anti-seizure medicines: • oxcarbazepine (TRILEPTAL®) • phenytoin (DILANTIN®, DILANTIN®-125, PHENYTEK®) • phenobarbital (LUMINAL®) • carbamazepine (CARBATROL®, EQUETRO®, TEGRETOL®, TEGRETOL®-XR, TERIL®, EPITOL®) • St. John’s wort (Hypericum perforatum) • a medicine that contains metformin • rifampin (RIFATER®, RIFAMATE®, RIMACTANE®, RIFADIN®) Ask your healthcare provider or pharmacist if you are not sure if your medicine is one that is listed above. Know the medicines you take. Keep a list of them to show your healthcare provider and pharmacist when you get a new medicine.

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| May 28, 2014

PATIENT INFORMATION (CONT’D)

How should I store TIVICAY? • Store TIVICAY at room temperature between 68°F to 77°F (20°C to 25°C). Keep TIVICAY and all medicines out of the reach of children. General information about TIVICAY Medicines are sometimes prescribed for purposes other than those listed in a Patient Information leaflet. Do not use TIVICAY for a condition for which it was not prescribed. Do not give TIVICAY to other people, even if they have the same symptoms you have. It may harm them. You can ask your pharmacist or healthcare provider for information about TIVICAY that is written for health professionals.

For more information call 1-877-844-8872 or go to www.TIVICAY.com. What are the ingredients in TIVICAY? Active ingredient: dolutegravir sodium Inactive ingredients: d-mannitol, microcrystalline cellulose, povidone K29/32, sodium starch glycolate, and sodium stearyl fumarate. The tablet film-coating contains the inactive ingredients iron oxide yellow, macrogol/PEG, polyvinyl alcohol-part hydrolyzed, talc, and titanium dioxide. This Patient Information has been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Manufactured for:

ViiV Healthcare Research Triangle Park, NC 27709

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• Changes in body fat can happen in people who take HIV-1 medicines. These changes may include increased amount of fat in the upper back and neck (“buffalo hump”), breast, and around the middle of your body (trunk). Loss of fat from the legs, arms, and face may also happen. The exact cause and long-term health effects of these problems are not known. • Changes in your immune system (Immune Reconstitution Syndrome) can happen when you start taking HIV-1 medicines. Your immune system may get stronger and begin to fight infections that have been hidden in your body for a long time. Tell your healthcare provider right away if you start having new symptoms after starting your HIV-1 medicine. The most common side effects of TIVICAY include: • trouble sleeping • headache Tell your healthcare provider about any side effect that bothers you or that does not go away. These are not all the possible side effects of TIVICAY. For more information, ask your healthcare provider or pharmacist. Call your doctor for medical advice about side effects. You may report side effects to FDA at 1-800-FDA-1088.

by:

GlaxoSmithKline Research Triangle Park, NC 27709 August 2013 TVC:1PIL ©2013, ViiV Healthcare. All rights reserved. TIVICAY and LEXIVA are registered trademarks of ViiV Healthcare. The brands listed are trademarks of their respective owners and are not trademarks of ViiV Healthcare. The makers of these brands are not affiliated with and do not endorse ViiV Healthcare or its products.

FAMILY

Lesbian Parenting Ruling Harder Than It Should Have Been New York trial judge struggles to reach conclusion birth mother’s lesbian spouse is also a mother BY ARTHUR S. LEONARD

s we approach the third anniversary of New York State’s Marriage Equality Law, which says that same-sex marriages and different-sex marriages will be treated equally for all purposes under New York law, this issue should be a no-brainer. Apparently, in the view of some state courts, it is not. Otherwise it might not have taken an upstate judge 28 pages to answer the following question: What happens if two women marry, decide to have a child through donor insemination, and then have a parting of the ways shortly after the child is born? Can the biological mother insist on exclusive parental rights and exclude her spouse from contact with the child? If the Marriage Equality Law means anything, the answer to that question should be no. And that is what Monroe County Supreme Court Justice Richard A. Dollinger concluded in a May 7 decision, but only after detailed and agonizing analysis.

The two women, unnamed in Dollinger’s opinion in a case titled Wendy G-M v. Erin G-M, married in Connecticut before New York enacted its marriage law, but decided to have a child in October 2011, several months after it went into effect. They both signed a consent form agreeing to donor insemination procedures, as did their doctor, but the form was not notarized and so fell short of a New York legal requirement that such a form must be formally “acknowledged” to be valid. Both women participated in donor insemination, but once the birth mother became pregnant, the other mother stopped her effort. The couple jointly attended appointments at the fertility clinic, took pre-birth classes, and behaved as a family. On Facebook, the birth mother’s posted, “Our daughter will have two mommies when she arrives and a family that’s recognized wherever we go in the US.” (A bit too optimistic, since a majority of states still do not recognize same-sex marriages from other states.) The other mom was present dur -

ing childbirth, and the couple “jointly decided the name of the child,” according to Dollinger’s opinion. Hospital officials were told by the birth mother that her spouse was a parent of the child, who was given a hyphenated surname reflecting both mothers, with the birth mother’s spouse named first. The birth certificate listed both women as parents of the child, but after the birth, the spouse “left the household, in her words, to ‘not cause undue stress or potential other problems.’” By a week after the child’s birth, they had established separate households. The birth mother filed the divorce proceeding in December 2013, less than three months after the child was born. Once she filed for divorce, she denied access to the child to her spouse, who then filed a motion seeking access to the child, maintenance expenses, and attorney’s fees. Dollinger said the case could be analyzed using either a statutory or a common law approach. The statutory avenue, unfortunately, would lead through a complex maze of antiquated New York

laws not adequately updated to reflect diverse types of families or progress in reproductive technology. Amazingly, New York’s statutes do not define “parent” and the courts have been left to fend for themselves without legislative guidance, leading to a variety of decisions, some widely deplored as unfortunate and outof-touch with modern day family life. Following a statutory line of analysis, Dollinger found, the spouse would be out in the cold in terms of parental rights. The Marriage Equality Law, however, suggests this would not be an appropriate approach to take, because under longestablished New York “common law” —– non-statutory law that arises from court decisions — there is a strong presumption that when a married woman gives birth, her legal spouse is the parent of the child. That traditional presumption grew out of the expectation that people obeyed now-defunct laws that the only lawful sexual acts were intercourse between a married different-sex couple. In other words, it was logical to assume that if a

FAMILY, continued on p.19

May 28, 2014 | www.gaycitynews.com

“G ay C ure ” B an G ains G round , BY PAUL SCHINDLER

ith less than four weeks to go until the State Legislature winds up its regular 2014 session, prospects for action on a long-stalled transgender civil rights measure appear dim even as another key LGBT objective in Albany, first introduced last year — a proposal to bar licensed mental health professionals from practicing “sexual orientation change efforts” (SOCE) with patients who are minors — is well positioned for approval. For transgender rights advocates, lack of action by the State Senate on the Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act, nearly a dozen years after the state adopted a gay rights law that lacked protections based on gender identity and expression, is a bitter pill to swallow. “Trans New Yorkers want a vote in the Senate,” said Melissa Sklarz, a longtime transgender activist and a recent past president of the Stonewall Democrats of New York City. “We want it on the floor, we want to hear a debate, and we want to see a real vote.” But Senator Daniel Squadron, a Lower Manhattan-Downtown Brooklyn Democrat who is GENDA’s lead sponsor, acknowledging he has received “no clear encouragement” from leadership that a floor vote would be allowed, said, “I wish I could be optimistic.” In contrast, Squadron’s Manhattan colleague Brad Hoylman, an out gay Democrat, is getting encouragement that a measure banning SOCE — also dubbed conversion therapy, even a “cure” for homosexuality — will be voted on before the June 19 Senate adjournment and can prevail. He cited not only “personal conversations” with senators on both sides of the aisle, but also published reports indicating that both Governor Andrew Cuomo and BronxWestchester Senator Jeff Klein — who as head of the five-member Independent Democratic Conference, which broke away from the rest of the Democrats, shares control of the Senate with Long Island Republican Dean Skelos — support action on the bill. Advocacy on behalf of the measure by Klein is critical. It is an irony of New York State politics that although LGBT rights have enjoyed their greatest and earliest support in the Democratic-dominated Assembly, key initiatives — including the 2002 gay rights law and the 2011 marriage equality law — became law under Republican-run Senates. But that success has only come after determined efforts to win agreement for

a floor vote — and at times with only a handful of GOP votes. As one of the two senators with ultimate say as to what gets to the floor, Klein, should he follow through on his support for the measure, could lower what is often a formidable hurdle to Republicans agreeing to take up an LGBT measure. Hoylman emphasized that the context for the measure’s rapid advance is its nonpartisan appeal. “It is fundamentally about protecting kids,” he explained. “And it doesn’t impinge on religious freedom.” The bill places no restrictions on any counseling or spiritual guidance offered by faith groups or others who are not licensed by the state to practice mental health treatment and therapy. Hoylman also noted that the idea has won bipartisan support elsewhere in the country, with New Jersey’s Republican governor, Chris Christie, a likely 2016 presidential aspirant, signing the nation’s second such law last year. The bill Hoylman and his out lesbian Assembly colleague Deborah Glick, also a Manhattan Democrat, are advancing follows on legislation first adopted in the US by California in 2012. The California law faced two court challenges from SOCE practitioners on the grounds that it violated their free speech rights, but last August a federal appeals court upheld the statute, distinguishing between the rights practitioners enjoy to advocate for the practice in public debate and the limitations on the therapeutic practices they can employ in their professional conduct governed by state licensing. The Hoylman-Glick legislation and the memo accompanying it emphasize the position taken by leading professional groups — including the American Psychological Association, the American School Counselor Associations, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the National Association of Social Workers, and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry — that SOCE, in treating homosexuality and gender nonconformity as mental illnesses in need of cure, actually increases mental health risks for young people in terms of depression, substance abuse, and suicide. At a recent Manhattan hearing on their bill, which would ban treatment to change not only sexual orientation but also gender identity and expression, Hoylman and Glick heard from a variety of such professionals, LGBT advocates, and SOCE survivors, including Mathew Shurka. Shurka spoke about a variety of disabling effects — including anxiety, depression, and weight gain — that he

Genda F alters suffered as a result of five years of SOCE treatment he underwent from a licensed professional practicing in Manhattan’s Union Square. According to Nathan Schaefer, the executive director of the Empire State Pride Agenda (ESPA), which has made the bill one of its top priorities this year, though the number of SOCE practitioners his group has identified in New York State is small, the problem of parents turning to it as an option when they learn their child is LGBT “is huge.” He cited a study out of the University of California at San Francisco finding that up to one-third of LGBT youth are encouraged or required to undergo SOCE. Most SOCE therapy, Schaefer said, is undertaken in religious or other nonprofessional settings, though he also said there are likely a number of mental health professionals who carry out such treatment without advertising it broadly, so their activity has not been identified by advocates fighting the practice. One of the key benefits of legislation like the Hoylman-Glick bill, he said, is its “symbolism” — a statement by the State of New York that it does not license or condone what Hoylman referred to as “quackery.” On the Assembly side, Glick is confident of passage. The 26-member Higher Education Committee that oversees professional licensing, which she chairs, approved the measure with the support of three Republicans. Consideration by the Codes Committee, where she anticipates “no problem,” will likely take place either this week or next, clearing the way for a floor vote. Both Hoylman and Schaefer are upbeat about the prospects in the Senate, though both caution more work needs to be done. Hoylman has discussed the measure with Higher Education Committee chair Kenneth LaValle, a Long Island Republican, though he said more conversations are needed. Schaefer urged the LGBT community to focus particular effort on reaching out to LaValle, who, he said, “needs to hear this is an important mental health need for the community.” ESPA and other advocates, however, are warning that a more likely impediment is opposition from upstate Republican Michael Nozzolio, who chairs the Codes Committee and has long been hostile to LGBT interests. Hoylman and others have noted that Senate procedures allow bills an alternative route to

the floor other than through the customary committee approvals — by a favorable vote in the Rules Committee, which is run by leadership. Which brings the discussion back to Klein’s willingness to go to bat on the issue. In recognition of the fact that nothing is done until it’s done in Albany, Hoylman also identified a silver lining should anything cloud his bill’s advance in the Senate, saying, “If the bill only passes the Assembly this year, that’s still progress.” That sort of interim advance is no longer sufficient for the advocates who have pressed GENDA’s case since 2003. Though this year will mark the seventh time the Assembly approves the measure, the only action ever taken by the Senate was a failed vote in the Judiciary Committee, largely along partisan lines, in 2010. ESPA’s Schaefer echoed Squadron in saying he’s received no assurance from leadership that the measure will get floor consideration in June. And both Squadron and ESPA agree that with one Senate Democratic vacancy (the seat formerly held by Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams) and two other Democrats (Brooklyn’s John Sampson and Queens’ Malcolm Smith) under criminal indictment and, as a result, politically unreliable, their confidence that the measure has the 32 votes needed for passage is less than it previously was. Still, GENDA’s supporters want an up or down floor vote.

ALBANY, continued on p.19

| May 28, 2014

PERSONAL FINANCE

Even With DOMA Gone, Tax Issues Convoluted Lack of universal marriage recognition in US creates confusion, inequities BY DUNCAN OSBORNE

espite the 2013 US Supreme Court ruling that struck down the part of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) that barred federal recognition of same-sex marriages, filing federal and state tax returns remains a complex endeavor for those couples as most states still do not recognize their marriages. “We’re moving in the right direction,” said Yolanda Rego, tax supervisor at Gonzalez & Associates, a Massachusetts accounting firm. “The only thing that’s switching now is the roles are being reversed.” Prior to the 2013 decision that invalidated the DOMA provision, married same-sex couples who lived in a state that recognized their marriage had to prepare a dummy federal tax return, as if married for that purpose, and use that to prepare their state tax return. They then filed their actual federal tax returns as single individuals. Now those couples can file their federal return as married or married filing separately. “Most state tax codes say start with your federal return,” said Janis Cowhey, a partner at Marcum, LLP, a national accounting firm. Some of the 19 states that allow gay and lesbian couples to wed only granted that right or made it effective this year so the benefit of that will come when they file for the 2014 tax year. One persistent tax issue that arises occurs when a legally married gay or lesbian spouse is included on an employer’s health plan of the other spouse. The value of that benefit is counted as income, called imputed income, in states that do not recognize same-sex marriage. Since the DOMA ruling, the federal government no longer treats such benefits as imputed income. States that have an income tax and do not recognize same-sex mar riages still do. “What’s actually going to happen now is the opposite,” Rego said. In states that do not recognize samesex marriages, couples will prepare their federal return as married then prepare dummy federal returns as if they were filing as single to prepare their state tax returns. The tax on imputed income is seen as particularly unfair for some in the community as married straight couples do not pay it. In effect, the married gay and lesbian couples who pay

that tax are subsidizing a discriminatory scheme by paying taxes that married heterosexuals do not pay. Some employers have responded by increasing the pay of married gay and lesbian employees to compensate for the cost of the tax. Even as the community is enjoying consistent wins, with federal courts striking down marriage bans or requiring state governments to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states, the complexity and opportunities for mistakes that result from having marriages recognized by the federal government and in some states, but not in others, is apparent. “It’s more complex for some people and easier for some people,” Cowhey said. “It’s still complicated.”

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The IRS has allowed married same-sex couples to file amended returns to recoup some of the higher taxes paid on imputed income or as the result of filing as single. The Supreme Court ruling has provided some financial benefits. The IRS has allowed married same-sex couples to file amended returns to recoup some of the higher taxes paid on imputed income or as the result of filing as single in prior tax years. Cowhey said filing an amended joint return for some of her married gay and lesbian clients “saved them a lot of money.” But Rego said that as her firm has prepared amended returns from past years for clients in Massachusetts, they have found that some employers made mistakes in reporting imputed income on W2s. Some did not report the income at all. Others reported the imputed income to the state as well as to the IRS, even though Massachusetts did not tax those benefits. Another problem that persists is that married gay and lesbian couples who live in a state that recognizes their marriage, but earn income through employment or an investment in another state that does not recognize their marriage

FINANCE, continued on p.41

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May 28, 2014 | www.gaycitynews.com

POLITICS

Advocates Lay Out Criminal Justice “Roadmap” Policy paper offers detailed recommendations for curbing abuses aimed at LGBT, HIV/ AIDS communities n 2012, Mitchyll Mora was walking to a poetry reading on the Lower East Side wearing high-heeled boots. Suddenly, three police officers ran toward him yelling at him to “get against the wall.” One of the officers grabbed his butt and called him a “faggot” before letting him continue on his way. Mora is not alone. In addition to communities of color, homeless, and lowincome communities in New York, LGBT youth and adults have complained of experiencing police profiling — in their cases based on gender and sexuality. “There are so many testimonials of similar instances,” Andrea J. Ritchie, coordinator at Streetwise and Safe, said. “A lot of people feel trapped when they are surrounded by one, two, or even three armed people with badges and don’t know their rights. We are fighting to change that. To help protect not jut people in the LGBT community, but everyone.” Earlier this month, the Center for Gender & Sexuality Law at Columbia Law School released “A Roadmap for Change: Federal Policy Recommendations for Addressing the Criminalization of LGBT People and People Living with HIV,” which outlined in detail criminal justice issues facing these communities. Prime among them are the profiling and discriminatory policing that Mora and countless others have faced. But the report goes further than that, offering federal policy recommendations for each issue explored. Specifically, it is intended to “provide analysis that will serve as a resource for policy makers and advocates alike.” “The report covers a lot of ground with a lot of different agencies,” explained Urvashi Vaid, an attorney affiliated with the Center at Columbia, who is a longtime activist and one of the report’s authors. “So, what we have done is put together this advocacy coalition, and we are going to work together in a coordinated way with the agencies noted in the recommendations.” Vaid worked closely with fellow advocates from Columbia, Streetwise and Safe, the Center for HIV Law and Policy, and the Center for American Progress in Washington to produce the report. She emphasized the importance of this kind of effort, focusing on issues in the LGBT community other than marriage equality. Even though the specific fight for marriage equality is picking up momentum, with victory in 19 states and challenges

STREETWISE AND SAFE

BY RYAN HOWE

Mitchyll Mora (left) was among a group of young people who turned out at a City Hall rally several years ago opposing the profiling of LGBTQ New Yorkers.

“For too many gay people, we are narrowing the focus of our issues, and we need to stretch that focus,” said Urvashi Vaid, a co-author of the report. ongoing in every remaining state except for North Dakota, the overall fight for equality is far from over, Vaid said. “One of the things I appreciate about this report is that we are working in a concerted way toward many hot topic issues,” she said. “For too many gay people, we are narrowing the focus of our issues, and we need to stretch that focus.” Indeed, the report stretches that focus to six different issues that LGBT people and those living with HIV/ AIDS face — policing and law enforcement, prisons, drivers of incarceration, immigration, criminalization of youth, and criminalization of HIV. Despite the detailed recommendations discussed, the progress is still at the starting point of the roadmap on many of these issues. But with 16 LGBT organizations, including the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, Lambda Legal, and the American Civil Liber ties Union’s LGBT and HIV/ AIDS unit already involved in the efforts, the coalition can start working on more than one at a time, Vaid explained. “We don’t have a specific layout of x, y, and z issues that are going to be worked on first,” she said. “Some are going to be

harder than others. For example, [the Prison Rape Elimination Act] has taken a great stride in the right direction, but we are far from eliminating rape and how it is operationalized in prison.” PREA was passed in 2003 with the purpose of eliminating sexual harassment and abuse among incarcerated populations through administrative action and by providing funding for research programs, training, and technical assistance to address the issue. It took nearly a decade, however — until May 2012 — for the draft standards for the elimination of prison rape to be finalized. On May 6 of this year, the Department of Homeland Security put the final standards into effect in immigration detention and other facilities it controls. According to the Department of Justice’s most recent report on sexual violence in prison, half of gay and bisexual inmates reported sexual victimization while imprisoned. Among women, 20 percent of lesbians and 25 percent of those who identify as bisexual reported such victimization. Within the criminal justice establishment and among political leaders, there is growing awareness of a crisis of sexual

victimization in federal, state, and juvenile detention centers, said Chris Daley, deputy executive director of Just Detention International. “Now that we know we can actually fix it, we need to start fixing it,” he said. Even after a decade, PREA is still in the early stages of implementation and impact. For Daley, it needs to be expanded not only into prisons but also into police cars and assisted living centers. “It is our responsibility to keep an open line of communication about the issue and keep moving forward,” Daley said. “We have to make new changes, and some of those changes are going to take a very long time.” Working with different advocacy groups could help speed up the process, Vaid said. Although “Roadmap for Change” includes a testimonial from former National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) president Ben Jealous, the coalition has yet to enroll the leading civil rights organizations outside of the LGBT and AIDS communities in the effort the report lays out. Any groups working toward decriminalization of behaviors stigmatized based on race, ethnicity, orientation, occupation, or health status represent natural allies, its authors emphasize. “We want to join forces with any broad criminal justice advocacy groups,” Vaid said. “Combining with these groups and working together is what is going to be getting stuff done.” Vaid and the coalition recognize that these changes aren’t going to happen overnight, or even over the next several years. Catherine Hanssens, executive director of the Center for HIV Law and Policy, has grown accustomed to the baby steps her group has been taking for years as it continues to work on the decriminalization of HIV and its transmission on both a federal and state level. In the most recent sign of progress, on May 27, Iowa Republican Governor Terry Branstad announced he will sign a decriminalization measure approved overwhelmingly by the Legislature early this month. The first step for a change in law is educating people on the issue, Hanssens said. “If the Centers for Disease Control would release a statement about what exactly HIV is, how it is transmitted, how it affects people, and that it isn’t a death sentence, our job would be much easier,” she said. “And even though the steps are small, at least we are moving at some pace. I think that can be said about a lot of these issues.”

| May 28, 2014

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MARRIAGE

Just One Day After Oregon, Pennsylvania Ban Falls

WHYMARRIAGEMATTERSPA.ORG

US district judge orders state to allow same-sex marriages, recognize them from other jurisdictions

Marriage plaintiffs Lynn and Fredia Hurdle, in front of an iconic Pennsylvania site, the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Fallingwater home in Mill Run.

BY ARTHUR S. LEONARD

Republican appointed to the federal bench by President George W. Bush in 2002 has struck down Pennsylvania’s statutory ban on same-sex marriage and its recognition. US District Judge John E. Jones III, in a May 20 ruling, found that the ban violates both the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the US Constitution’s 14th Amendment. Jones made no mention of any stay, and the day after the ruling, Republican Governor Tom Corbett announced he will not appeal (see page 3). The American Civil Liberties Union filed this lawsuit last July on behalf of what Jones described as “eleven courageous lesbian and gay couples, one widow, and two teenage children of one of the aforesaid couples.” Some of the couples are seeking marriage licenses, others want recognition of their outof-state marriages, the teenagers complained about the deprivations they suffer from their parents not being married, and the widow, who married her late partner out of state, pointed to the harms she suffers from not being recognized as a surviving spouse. One defense raised by the state was that the plain-

CORBETT, from p.3

constitutional ban on same-sex marriage on the basis of both state and federal constitutional claims, a ruling that has been appealed to the Arkansas Supreme Court.) Except for Oregon and Pennsylvania, all of the federal district court rulings are being appealed, and arguments have already been held in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in

tiffs failed to show any injury for the court to redress, a nonsensical position that Jones dispatched efficiently. He found that the “stigmatizing harms” imposed by the statutes, which were passed in 1996 in response to progress in a marriage equality lawsuit in Hawaii, were “cognizable” as a matter of law, and, additionally, that “plaintiffs suffer a multitude of daily harms, for instance, in the areas of child-rearing, healthcare, taxation, and end-of-life planning.” He also noted the discussion by Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, in his majority opinion in the Defense of Marriage Act case last year, about the harms suffered by legally married couples denied federal recognition. The state’s other main defense was that this case is precluded by the Supreme Court’s 1972 ruling in Baker v. Nelson, in which the high court declined — for lack of a “substantial federal question” — to hear an appeal of a Minnesota Supreme Court decision denying equal marriage rights. All of the recent marriage equality decisions from US district courts have rejected this argument — pointing to the significant developments in American constitutional law since 1972, not least last year’s Supreme Court ruling striking down DOMA — and concluded that exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage now presents a very substantial federal question. Jones found the Pennsylvania statutes unconstitutional on two separate theories — due process and equal protection. The due process conclusion rests on Supreme Court decisions finding that the “right to marry” is a fundamental right, guaranteed to each individual. Jones rejected the state’s argument that because “the United States Supreme Court has never recognized that the fundamental right to marry includes the right to marry a person of one’s choice,” the state’s marriage laws did not violate the plaintiffs’ due process rights. After briefly summarizing important Supreme Court marriage decisions, Jones wrote, “This Court is not only moved by the logic that the fundamental right to marry is a personal right to be exercised by the individual, but also rejects Defendants’ contention that concepts of history and tradition dictate that same-sex marriage is excluded from the fundamental right to marry. The right Plaintiffs seek to exercise is not a new right,” he continued, “but is rather a right that these individuals have always been guaranteed by the United States Constitution.” He concluded this right encompasses both the right to marry and the right to remain married after crossing a state line.

two consolidated cases in Virginia and in the 10th Circuit regarding the Utah and Oklahoma cases. A ruling from either of those circuits or from circuits that have not yet heard arguments in pending marriage equality cases could come at any time. A ruling from a circuit court of appeals this spring or summer would likely be taken up by the Supreme Court in the term that begins in October, which could

Turning to equal protection, Jones noted that one branch of equal protection jurisprudence would apply strict scrutiny — imposing the most demanding form of judicial review — to any law that discriminates regarding a fundamental right. Nobody, he pointed out, contends that same-sex marriage bans would survive that standard. Setting that issue aside, however, the judge analyzed whether discrimination based on sexual orientation requires heightened scrutiny, a standard of review used, for example, in cases of sex discrimination. The Third Circuit Court of Appeals has never ruled on the question, and neither has the Supreme Court, at least directly. Jones noted that several of the other courts that have issued marriage equality rulings, in addition to the Ninth Circuit in a recent unrelated jury selection case, have held that heightened scrutiny is appropriate for sexual orientation claims. He also found that a review of the Supreme Court’s gay rights decisions suggests that it has been applying a more demanding standard of judicial review than the traditional deferential rational basis test, under which a law in presumed constitutional unless plaintiffs can show the state has no legitimate rational grounds for it. In the end, Jones concluded that heightened scrutiny was the appropriate level of review. Then, presuming the ban to be unconstitutional, he considered whether there was a countervailing “important governmental objective” to support Pennsylvania’s statute. Given that the state’s arguments sought to satisfy a more lenient standard of review, they fell well short of satisfactory for Jones. Analyzing the state’s asssertions, the judge identified “promotion of procreation, child-rearing and the wellbeing of children” and “tradition” as the only interests Pennsylvania was putting forward. “Significantly,” he wrote, “Defendants claim only that the objectives are ‘legitimate,’ advancing no argument that the interests are ‘important’ state interests as required to withstand heightened scrutiny. Also, Defendants do not explain the relationship between the classification and the governmental objectives served; much less do they provide an exceedingly persuasive justification. In essence, Defendants argue within the framework of deferential review and go no further. Indeed, it is unsurprising that Defendants muster no argument engaging the strictures of heightened scrutiny, as we, too, are unable to fathom an ingenuous defense saving the Marriage Laws from being invalidated under this more-searching standard.”

mean a definitive ruling on whether same-sex couples have a claim to marriage rights under the US Constitution by June 2015. “This is a milestone for our movement,” James Esseks, the director of the ACLU Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Project, said in a written statement. “It reinforces the reality that this isn’t a partisan issue. It’s about fundamental fairness and dignity for all peo-

PENNSYLVANIA, continued on p.38

ple, including lesbians and gay men.” In a joint statement, Witold Walczak, legal director of the ACLU of Pennsylvania, and Mark Aronchick, an attorney from the firm Hangley Aronchick Segal Pudlin & Schiller who participated in the successful litigation, said, “As the judge noted, we are a better people than the marriage ban and the governor’s historic decision not to appeal will be an enduring legacy.”

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| May 28, 2014

MARRIAGE

Heightened Scrutiny Hinted at in Idaho Stay

Ninth Circuit blocks weddings, expedites appeal, suggests its tougher standard of review permanent

BY ARTHUR S. LEONARD

n a May 20 ruling, a threejudge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals extended — pending the appeals process — what had been a temporary stay of a federal court ruling that struck down Idaho’s ban on same-sex marriage. A week earlier, Magistrate Candy Wagahoff Dale ruled that the ban, which also denied recognition to valid out-of-state marriages by same-sex couples, violated the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution. She ordered the state to begin issuing marriage licenses three days later, on May 16, and denied Republican Butch Otter’s motion for a stay. In extending its May 15 temporary stay, the Ninth Circuit also expedited its consideration of Otter’s appeal. In issuing its stay, the three-judge panel cited the January 6 stay issued by the US Supreme Court of a December order by US District Judge Robert Shelby that threw out Utah’s same-sex marriage ban. That stay gave the State of Utah time to appeal Shelby’s ruling to the 10th Circuit. The Ninth Circuit panel, however, implicitly acknowledged the urgency of the plaintiffs’ quest for the right to marry or have their marriages recognized, scuttling its customary briefing timetable, setting tight deadlines for the appeal, and informing the parties there would be no extensions. The written briefing process will be completed in July, with oral arguments expected the week of September 8. Judge Andrew D. Hurwitz, an Obama appointee and the junior member of the three-judge panel, in a concurring opinion, explained that while the Supreme Court’s January stay in the Utah case “has virtually instructed courts of appeals to grant stays in the circumstances before us today,” if the panel “were writing on a cleaner slate,” the unlikelihood of the state actually prevailing on appeal “counsels against the stay requested by the Idaho appellants.” Acknowledging, “It is almost certain that the Supreme Court will eventually resolve the merits of this appeal,” Hurwitz asserted that under the Ninth Circuit’s new precedent for examining claims of sexual orientation, “I find it difficult to conclude that the Idaho ban on same-sex marriage would survive interim Ninth Circuit review.” In a recent ruling on the peremptory exclu-

sion of a gay juror in civil litigation over an AIDS drug between SmithKline Beecham and Abbott Laboratories, the Ninth Circuit found that “heightened scrutiny” — which presumes that laws under challenge are unconstitutional unless the government demonstrates that it significantly advances an important government policy — must be applied when plaintiffs claim discrimination based on their sexual orientation. Hurwitz also said that in balancing the harms faced by the plaintiff couples and the state in deciding whether a stay was warranted, he could find no public interest that outweighed the burden put on the couples challenging the marriage ban. In her May 13 ruling, Dale found that the Idaho marriage ban violates the 14th Amendment Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses. Her decision closely resembles the long string of federal trial court decisions dating back to the December Utah ruling, but it has one important distinguishing factor — it’s the first decision by a trial court within the Ninth Circuit to rule on a marriage equality claim in light of the SmithKline heightened scrutiny ruling. Most legal commentators agree with Hurwitz that a ban on same-sex marriage cannot survive heightened scrutiny review. In defense of Idaho’s marriage ban, the state argued that SmithKline was distinguishable from this case because it is limited to “instances of proven animus or irrational stereotyping.” Dale rejected that contention. “SmithKline addresses purposeful discrimination and the perpetuation of impermissible stereotypes, but it does so,” she found, in the context of jury selection, not regarding its discussion of the DOMA case. The DOMA holding, Dale concluded, “was undeniably broad: ‘[Its] heightened scrutiny applies to classifications based on sexual orientation.’ Had the Ninth Circuit intended to limit its holding to cases involving animus or irrational stereotyping, it easily could have done so. Instead it found [the DOMA ruling] to be ‘dispositive of the question of the appropriate level of scrutiny in this case.’” Ironically, Dale did not need the SmithKline precedent to reach her result since she had already concluded that Idaho’s marriage ban would be subjected either to strict or heightened

IDAHO, continued on p.38

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a moral perversion, a mental disorder, or a mortal sin,” he wrote. “I remember that one of the more popular playground games of my childhood was called ‘smear the queer’ and it was played with great zeal and without a moment’s thought to today’s political correctness. On a darker level, that same worldview led to an environment of cruelty, violence, and self-loathing. It was but 1986 when the United States Supreme Court justified, on the basis of a ‘millennia of moral teaching,’ the imprisonment of gay men and lesbian women who engaged in consensual sexual acts.” Later in the opinion, he conceded, “My decision will not be the final word on this subject, but on this issue of marriage I am struck more by our similarities than our differences. I believe that if we can look for a moment past gender and sexuality, we can see in these plaintiffs nothing more or less than our own families. Families who we would expect our Constitution to protect, if not exalt, in equal measure. With discernment we see not shadows lurking in closets or the stereotypes of what was once believed; rather, we see families committed to the common purpose of love, devotion, and service to the greater community.” He continued, “Where will all this lead? I know that many suggest we are going down a slippery slope that will have no moral boundaries. To those who truly harbor such fears, I can only say this: Let us look less to the sky to see what might fall; rather, let us look to each other… and rise.” McShane’s opinion took a narrowly focused equal protection approach to the case. Significantly, he rejected the plaintiffs’ argument that denying marriage to same-sex couples was a form of sex discrimination that would require the court to apply heightened scrutiny, under which the existing ban would be presumed unconstitutional and the state would have to affirmatively make the case for its necessity. Instead, McShane insisted, this case was about sexual orientation discrimi-

OREGON UNITED FOR MARRIAGE.ORG

May 28, 2014 | www.gaycitynews.com

Plaintiffs Lisa Chickadonz and Christine Tanner.

nation. While acknowledging that a Ninth Circuit panel, in an unrelated case in January, ruled that sexual orientation discrimination claims should invoke heightened scrutiny, he pointed out that the ruling was not yet “final” and therefore not a binding precedent. That did not matter to the outcome of this case, McShane found, because “the state’s marriage laws cannot withstand even the most relaxed level of scrutiny.” Both the state and Multnomah County joined the plaintiffs in arguing that the law was unconstitutional, so the judge relied on amicus briefs and arguments made in other marriage equality cases to consider whether there was any rational justification for Oregon to refuse to allow same-sex couples to marry. Unlike some of the other states in which same-sex marriage bans were struck down in federal court in recent months, Oregon already provided same-sex couples with nearly all of the state law rights of marriage through a domestic partnership statute adopted seven years ago. And after last summer’s ruling in Edie Windsor’s challenge to the Defense of Marriage Act, the state’s Democratic attorney general, Ellen Rosenblum, issued a formal opin-

ARKANSAS SUPREME COURT STAYS MARRIAGE RULING After a week in which hundreds of same-sex couples married in Arkansas and legal action moved back and forth between a county circuit judge and the state’s high court, the Arkansas Supreme Court has issued a stay on the county judge’s May 9 marriage equality order, allowing time for the legal issues to play out on appeal. Late in the day on May 16, the Supreme Court, in a brief order, granted motions by the state and by several county clerks asking for a stay on Pulaski County Circuit Court Judge Charles Piazza’s ruling, which he himself had declined to stay. Though many same-sex couples rushed to take advantage of the window to marry, some counties declined to issue such licenses pending word on a stay. The first licenses were issued on Saturday, May 10 in the Ozarks resort town of Eureka Springs in Carroll County. On Monday, May 12, Pulaski County, the state’s largest and home to Little Rock, the capital, first issued licenses. According to the Arkansas Times, most of the reported 500 licenses were issued there. — Paul Schindler

ion that state agencies should recognize legal same-sex marriages from other states. As a result, McShane concluded, it was difficult to hypothesize how any legitimate state interest was being advanced by denying marriage to samesex couples. The judge focused on two types of arguments generally advanced by opponents of same-sex marriage. One is that the states have a right to maintain longstanding traditions deeply rooted in history and the belief systems of many citizens. “Such beliefs likely informed the votes of many who favored Measure 36,” the 2004 constitutional amendment question approved by voters in 2004, McShane wrote. “However, as expressed merely a year before Measure 36′s passage” in the Supreme Court’s Texas sodomy decision, “moral disapproval of a group cannot be a legitimate governmental interest under the Equal Protection Clause.” The high court reiterated its conclusion on that point in last year’s DOMA ruling. Emphasizing that the debate is about civil marriage, not religious marriage, McShane wrote, “Overturning the discriminatory marriage laws will not upset Oregonians’ religious beliefs and freedoms.” The other type of arguments McShane addressed were those about “protecting children and encouraging stable families.” Here he echoed the findings of a long string of federal marriage equality rulings since Utah’s in December. “Although protecting children and promoting stable families is certainly a legitimate governmental interest,” he wrote, “the state’s marriage laws do not advance this interest — they harm it.” He noted that Oregon’s domestic partnership law articulated “a strong interest in promoting stable and lasting families, including the families of same-sex couples and their children,” evidence that the state’s own policymakers saw no state interest in depriving same-sex couples and their children of the same

legal rights provided to different-sex couples and their children. Withholding the “full rights, benefits, and responsibilities of marriage” forces the state “to burden, demean, and harm gay and lesbian couples and their families so long as its current marriage laws stand,” the judge found, concluding that violates the spirit of last year’s Supreme Court DOMA decision. “Creating second-tier families does not advance the state’s strong interest in promoting and protecting all families,” he wrote. McShane specifically rejected the contention that “any governmental interest in responsible procreation” would be “advanced by denying marriage to gay and lesbian couples” because “there is no logical nexus between the interest and the exclusion. Opposite-gender couples will continue to choose to have children responsibly or not, and those considerations are not impacted in any way by whether same-gender couples are allowed to marry.” McShane did not address an alternative argument cited by other federal judges recently — that the Supreme Court’s frequent mention of the right to marry as a fundamental right under the Due Process Clause justifies the use of heightened or even strict scrutiny (the most searching level of judicial review) in reviewing same-sex marriage prohibitions. McShane is the second gay judge — after District Judge Vaughn Walker, in the Proposition 8 litigation — to issue a marriage equality ruling. In that case, the voter initiative’s proponents unsuccessfully sought to use his sexuality to have the ruling vacated, and NOM’s current appeal to the Ninth Circuit argues that as a partnered gay man raising a child, McShane should have recused himself. It’s unlikely the Ninth Circuit would credit that argument. Should McShane’s decision prove, as expected, the last word, equality advocates would be spared the considerable cost and effort — not to mention uncertainty — of mounting a ballot fight in November. Two weeks ago, the Oregon Family Council, an anti-gay group, announced it was suspending a rival campaign to enact a measure allowing businesses broad religious exemptions to decline providing goods and services to same-sex couples. Earlier this year, Mike Marshall, the campaign manager for Oregon United Against Discrimination, which has been pushing the pro-marriage equality referendum, acknowledged, in an interview with Gay City News, that the competing effort by the Oregon Family Council would present gay advocates with a complicated public education challenge — working to ensure passage of one measure while campaigning to defeat the other — in advance of the November election. It now appears that voters will face no referendum in November. — Additional reporting by Paul Schindler

| May 28, 2014

MARRIAGE

US Judge to Utah: Honor Your Own Marriages Federal court says unions celebrated before Supreme Court stay must be recognized by state BY ARTHUR S. LEONARD

US DISTRICT COURT/ DISTRICT OF UTAH

US district court judge has ordered the State of Utah to recognize the marriages of samesex couples celebrated there between December 20, 2013 and January 6, when the Supreme Court stepped in with a stay to allow time for an appeal of a marriage equality decision. Judge Dale A. Kimball’s May 19 ruling involves more than 1,300 mar riages that occurred after another federal district judge, Robert Shelby, ruled that Utah’s ban on same-sex marriage was unconstitutional. Shelby and, subsequently, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals refused to stay that decision pending appeal. It took several weeks for the matter to get to the Supreme Court, which did accept the state’s motion for a stay. At that point, Governor Gary Herbert declared that the same-sex marriages performed were “on hold” as the stay had “revived” the state’s marriage ban. Kimball found that the state is barred by the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment from putting legally valid marriages “on hold,” but temporarily stayed his own ruling for 21 days to give the state an opportunity to appeal to the 10th Circuit. He was ruling on a suit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of several of the recently married couples. The problems couples who mar ried in Utah have experienced since the Supreme Court stay include adoption proceedings thrown into limbo as Utah trial judges are uncertain how to proceed. Indeed, the state is facing the threat of a contempt proceeding from one trial judge for the refusal by Utah officials to honor his adoption order to produce an appropriate birth certificate. There are also questions pending at the Utah Supreme Court about the status of these marriages. That court has temporarily stayed various adoption proceedings while it decides whether the state must recognize the marriages. The ACLU originally filed its lawsuit in state court, but the state removed the suit to federal district court and opposed the plaintiffs’ motion to certify to the Utah Supreme Court the question whether couples legally married under Utah law have vested rights in their marriage that could not be taken away by the state without a compelling interest.

Judge Dale A. Kimball.

The plaintiff couples moved for a preliminary injunction, arguing that as a matter of law their vested rights were being abridged by the state for no valid reason. The state, in response, argued that the Supreme Court’s stay had essentially a retroactive effect, restoring the marriage ban going back to December 20, thus rendering the marriages invalid. Kimball found that Utah precedents are clear on the question of vested marriage rights. The state’s arguments, he concluded, were contradicted by wellestablished principles of Utah law as well as the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment. Kimball placed heavy reliance on a somewhat analogous situation, when the California Supreme Court, in the wake of Proposition 8, concluded that the thousands of same-sex couples who married in the five months between its marriage equality ruling and the November 2008 election had vested rights in their marital status and everything that went with that status, which could not be taken away by a subsequent constitutional amendment. Kimball found that Utah cases dating back to the 19th century had also taken the position that once a couple was legally married, they had vested marriage rights protected against retroactive rejection by the state. Utah’s attorneys argued that while the California marriages had been authorized by a final order from the State Supreme Court in May 2008, the 1,300 marriage licenses in Utah were issued in compliance with an order from a single federal trial judge that was promptly appealed. Kimball was not persuaded by the distinction and also noted the strong

UTAH, continued on p.38

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May 28, 2014 | www.gaycitynews.com

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

JENNIFER GOODSTEIN

Jennifer@communitymediallc.com ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER & CO-FOUNDER TROY MASTERS

troy@gaycitynews.com

On GENDA, We Need to Hear from Senator Klein and from Governor Cuomo BY PAUL SCHINDLER

EDITOR IN-CHIEF & CO-FOUNDER PAUL SCHINDLER

editor@gaycitynews.com ASSOCIATE EDITOR Duncan Osborne

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS

Christopher Byrne (Theater), Susie Day (Perspective), Doug Ireland (International), Brian McCormick (Dance)

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Among the 21 states in the union that ban discrimination based on sexual orientation, only three fail to extend those protections based on gender identity and expression as well. New York is one of the three. That fact alone should be enough to pull off of the bench the man who three summers ago declared, “This state, when it is at its finest, is a beacon for social justice. The legacy of this state was that we were the progressive capital of the nation.” That assertion was made by Governor Andrew Cuomo on June 24, 2011, one of his finest moments — when he signed the Marriage Equality Act, on which he staked so much political capital during his first year in office. To his credit, Cuomo, during his campaign the year before, made clear he supported the Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act, which would correct the omission of transgender civil rights protections from the 2002 New York State gay rights law. However, according to the Empire State Pride Agenda, though the governor repeated that commitment in 2011, he has not spoken out on the issue since then. We need to hear from Cuomo again. As Melissa Sklarz, a longtime transgender rights and Democratic political activist, put it in comments this week to Gay City News, “The leader of the New York political system is the governor. He creates the agenda and sets the tone.” According to the governor’s political supporters, Cuomo’s contribution goes far beyond that — he is, they say, the indispensible force in clearing the clogged arteries of Albany’s dysfunctional political system. Put a different way, we need to hear from Cuomo because we are not hearing from the Senate leadership. In coming weeks, the Democratic-controlled Assembly will pass GENDA for the seventh time. The Senate has only once taken action on the bill, when the Judiciary Committee in 2010, in a farce of a hearing, refused to approve it for further consideration. A bill doesn’t get a vote on the Senate floor unless the majority party allows it. Republicans will tell you they have presided over the LGBT community’s greatest victories — on gay rights in 2002, on marriage in 2011. But the truth is that those wins only came after enormous pressure from advocates and Democrat-

ic senators to allow a simple up or down vote. We should be better positioned under the current Senate leadership than we were under past GOP-run Senates. The Republicans hold the majority only with the support of a rump faction of Democrats who style themselves the Independent Democratic Conference. That caucus’ members all say they support GENDA. But the silence from their leader, Jeff Klein, who represents portions of the Bronx and Westchester, has been deafening on GENDA during the 2013 and 2014 sessions. The bill’s sponsor, Democrat Daniel Squadron, can’t get a commitment from Klein that he’ll insist on a vote and neither can the advocates. Cuomo may not be speaking up publicly, but his office does return press calls about GENDA. Klein’s office doesn’t. So we need to hear from Jeff Klein as to where he and his four IDC colleagues

stand on delivering justice to the transgender community. Sklarz, in her comments to me, noted that “political movement costs political capital.” But the risks here are nothing compared to those involved in New York’s pioneering forward position on marriage equality three years ago, when we were only the sixth state to the table. The vast majority of New Yorkers support these vital civil rights protections, and 18 states have shown us the way. We can’t say for certain whether there are 32 votes to pass the bill, but it’s unlikely we’ll know unless we try — and trying means a vote of the full Senate. The governor, too, should see how little political capital he is being asked to risk this time around — and how urgently his help is needed. If we are going to get a vote on GENDA, we need to hear either from Senator Klein or, failing that, from Governor Cuomo. The opportunity to lead is there for the picking.

HARVEY MILK FOREVER STAMP DEDICATED At a White House ceremony on what would have been the 84th birthday of gay rights leader Harvey Milk, the US Postal Service held a FirstDay-Issue dedication ceremony for a forever stamp in his honor. “Let this stamp remind us of the fundamental truth behind Mr. Milk’s message — that we all have a stake in equality,” Ronald Stroman, the deputy postmaster general, said in remarks at the dedication. “Let this stamp inspire a new generation to continue Harvey Milk’s legacy — to keep working toward a world where prejudice gives way to acceptance, where division gives way to unity, and where fear gives way to hope.” Milk’s nephew, Stuart Milk, the founder of the Harvey Milk Foundation, was also on hand. “The dreams Uncle Harvey shared with me — for a world based not simply on tolerance, but on inclusion, not simply on an allowance for differences, but on the celebration of humanity’s diversity, are dreams for which he made the ultimate sacrifice,” he said. “These dreams have a wonderful new emblem with the US Postal Service’s issuance of the Harvey Milk Forever Stamp.” Milk was a longtime gay leader in San Francisco before his election to the city’s Board of Supervisors in late 1977. A year later — just weeks after his victory in beating back a statewide voter referendum calling for the firing of all gay schoolteachers — Milk was shot dead, along with Mayor George Moscone, by Dan White, a fellow city supervisor who had recently resigned his post but was hoping to rescind that decision. In 2009, Milk posthumously received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.

UNITED STATES POSTAL SERVICE

PUBLISHER

| May 28, 2014

PERSPECTIVE

e w Yo r k C i t y i s s t i l l arresting black and brown youth for marijuana and leaving white youth alone. The change of mayors and a new police commissioner, William Bratton, have yielded more of the same. The number of arrests in the first three months of this year is basically the same as in the first three months of 2013 and the racial skew is unchanged. The Marijuana Arrest Project compared statistics sent to the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services to track marijuana enforcement under the old administration and the new. The overall picture is essentially unchanged. Nearly 50 percent of those arrested were black, nearly 40 per cent were Latino, and only nine percent were white. This was true under Mayor Michael Bloomberg and remains true under Mayor Bill de Blasio. Arrests are, for the most part, made in communities of color. One person was arrested in downtown Manhattan and 285 in Washington Heights; one on the Upper East Side, but 176 in East Harlem. In Brooklyn, seven were booked in Park Slope but 438 were in East New York during the first three months of 2014. Residents of predominantly white neighborhoods don’t attract police attention. “Marijuana arrests in 2014 continued the pattern of unequal, unfair policing and arrest policies in the ‘two New Yorks’ that Mayor de Blasio called attention to

FAMILY, from p.7

married woman became pregnant, the father was her husband. Such a presumption would make little sense in the case of a same-sex couple, of course, if it were based solely on biology. This presumption, however, was employed to advance the preference in law that newborn children not be deemed “illegitimate” if at all possible.

accused’s risk of conviction. Using alternatives to incarceration solves this problem, giving youth an opportunity to be heard — but also to learn. De Blasio is making a serious effort to fulfill his promise of a progressive administration. He has reached settlements with labor unions that give city residents wage increases; his budget raises funding for homeless youth shelter, rental assistance to people living with AIDS, libraries, public housing, and student aid at City University. He appointed a noted progressive, Steven Banks, to head the Human Resources Administration, which provides assistance to the poor. The mayor is increasing staffing at Children’s Services, which intervenes in cases of child abuse. Traffic and pedestrian safety is clearly an important priority. But conservatives are attacking de Blasio for being soft on crime at housing projects. Two police precincts, the 47th in the Bronx and the 73rd in Brooklyn have seen jumps in shootings and homicides. Members of the City Council are calling for 1,000 new police officers to protect their neighborhoods. The Brooklyn Bureau web project at City Limits magazine pointed out that “by many metrics, Brownsville’s public safety is on par with or better than prior years. According to the 73rd precinct’s CompStat for the week of March 2, the last week for which data is publicly available, there had been an 80 percent decline in rapes compared to this point last year; the precinct also logged decreases in robberies (2.6 percent), burglaries (7.7 percent), and grand larceny

Dollinger decided that this common law presumption, viewed in connection with the Marriage Equality Law’s requirement of equal treatment, and the uncontested fact that both women did sign the consent forms, even if they were not “acknowledged” to the satisfaction of New York statute, created a presumption that birth mother’s same-sex spouse is the child’s parent. This presumption, Dollinger said, is rebuttable to the extent

there is evidence that this was not what the parties intended. Such evidence, however, did not exist in this case — as the consent forms, the Facebook posting, and the other conduct of the former couple during the insemination and pregnancy show. Other courts around the state have reached similar results without the struggle evidenced in Dollinger’s decision, and of course women who marry their same-

sex partners and have children probably routinely have the expectation that his conclusion is, in fact, the law. But a trial court ruling does not establish precedent across the state, and it is unclear whether the birth mother intends to appeal. The lawyers in the case are Jeanne Colombo from Rochester for the birth mother and Joanne Best from Brockport for the other mother.

ing people to take a stand is an important part of its passage.” Senate Democrats clearly see the Independent Democratic Conference’s inability to get action on GENDA as emblematic of the hollowness of its conceit that it brings a progressive voice to the running of the Senate. And, last year, after GENDA failed to get a vote, Schaefer agreed that the problem was with the Senate leadership.

Now, however, ESPA is also raising complaints about Cuomo’s silence on the issue, a critique echoed in a May 27 editorial in the New York Times. “We would like to see more from the governor on GENDA,” Schaefer told Gay City News. “He said it was a priority in 2011, but we haven’t heard from him since. And the Senate leadership will need to hear from the governor on this if it is to move.”

Squadron disagreed with that assessment, saying, “The governor is supportive of this and has been for some time. The governor’s office is engaged on this issue and that is meaningful.” Asked about the governor’s posture on GENDA, his press secretary Matt Wing reiterated Cuomo’s longstanding support for its passage. Klein’s office did not provide a promised reply as of press time.

On Marijuana Busts, Still a Tale of Two Cities

BY NATHAN RILEY

in his campaign,” the Project warned in its press release. Comparing the first quarter this year to the first quarter of last year, arrests were down 8.5 percent — 7,671 in 2013 versus 7,017 this year. There is wide support for reform. Elected officials rallied behind a policy change made by Brooklyn’s new district attorney, Ken Thompson, who defeated longtime incumbent Joe Hynes last year. Thompson sent a memorandum to the NYPD outlining a new policy for handling marijuana arrests in his office. Persons with no or a minimal criminal record would have the charges dropped. End of story, there would be no more trips to court or missed days of work and no criminal record. A legal exercise of the district attorney’s discretion, the memorandum was leaked to the New York Post, which concluded it “seems to care more about the defendant and their day than about the crime.” The DA wouldn’t provide the memorandum, but the New York Times quoted from it extensively, allowing greater insight into its contents. To be sure, Brooklyn’s Thompson has pushed the envelope; no other DA has gone this far. Other minor offenses, like turnstile jumping, would also receive innovative treatment. The offenders would be required to attend classes to discuss topics like making good choices. Studies have shown that defendants want an opportunity to explain their actions, but that criminal defense lawyers can’t permit that in court without increasing the

(5.5 percent). But the picture was not entirely rosy. There has been an uptick in the number of assaults; nearly a third more shootings that claimed a victim were recorded this year.” Conservatives don’t mention “upticks” — they are proclaiming a new crime wave and blaming it on the mayor and his allies. “The lawmakers complaining about crime in their neighborhoods,” fumed the Post columnist Michael Goodwin, “included many who had demonized the most successful police force in America, demanded an end to stop-and-frisk despite record low crime, and passed a law allowing people to sue individual cops if they believed they were stopped improperly.” The police, he argued, had been “handcuffed” and City Council members would let the cops become “targets” who would “stand around and wait to get shot.” The lawmakers Goodwin characterized as foolish, even dangerous are from the “Black, Latino, and Asian Caucus,” who issued the call for more police. This group makes up just over half of the City Council. They and the mayor should expect four years of rabid criticism aimed at splintering the multi-racial coalition that dominated last year’s elections. Bratton is the mayor’s personal choice and he will back up his department to the end. De Blasio’s detractors will not shy from playing the race card, and he is unlikely to find sympathy among the police, who resent the criticism leveled at its enforcement record. The mayor will have to tell his own story and that will require public relations staffing with strong activist backgrounds — especially in the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice and for the new post of police inspector general. Smart voices from true believers will be needed to withstand right-wing hysteria warning of a return to the bad old days.

ALBANY, from p.8

“The transgender community has been working on this for more than a decade,” Schaefer said. “They deserve a vote.” “We are again urging a vote as we have in recent years,” said Squadron, who, noting a 2013 media campaign by ESPA that cost more than $300,000, added, “Last year there was a particularly strong push and we still didn’t get a vote. Forc-

May 28, 2014 | www.gaycitynews.com

MEDIA CIRCUS

Joined in Holy Sanctimony, Swathed in Academic Robes

BY ED SIKOV

he most fiercely contested LGBT -related media story so far this year has been the resignation of poor, unfairly-treated Brendan Eich, who voluntarily stepped down from his new-found position as CEO of Mozilla, the company that gives us the popular web browser Firefox, because he’d been outed — if you will — as a financial supporter of California’s Proposition 8. That noxious 2008 voter referendum deemed gay men and lesbians — and, for the most part, trans folks, as well, though the major media rarely talks about them — unworthy of the claim to civil marriage, which is, you should pardon the expression, a basic civil right. The outcry from the crank right was predictable; this column will not give print space to Fox News.

But Andrew Sullivan was also outraged, as was the Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf, who wrote what he clearly thought was a stinging rebuke to those of us who applauded the demise of a purebred bigot. Calls for Eich’s ouster, Friedersdorf asserted, “were premised on the notion that all support for Proposition 8 was hateful, and that a CEO should be judged not just by his or her conduct in the professional realm, but also by political causes he or she supports as a private citizen. If that attitude spreads, it will damage our society.” One could be forgiven for knee-jerk agreement with these platitudes. They seem reasonable enough. Free to be, you and me! But on closer examination — meaning a few seconds of reasoning — they fall entirely to pieces. Our society is already damaged. Why should we suddenly get all teary-eyed now that a bigoted straight white guy has bitten the dust? And, for that mat-

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ter, why do we pick and choose among a variety of bigoted straight white guys? Some, like Eich, get defended. Others get thrown to the wolves. Deservedly. Friedersdorf correctly interprets the essence of the criticism aimed at Eich. Support for Proposition 8 is, in fact, unquestionably hateful. What else could it be? A simple difference of opinion among equals? Baloney. No religious organization would have been forced to per for m marriages that violated precepts of that religion. End of argument. Proposition 8 was about civil rights, specifically the right of gay men and lesbians to the same advantages and benefits civil marriage affords to everyone else. Why LGBT people have been excluded from this right in the past is a subject best left to historians. But in the 21st century, all honest proponents of civil liberties must acknowledge that civil marriage is a civil right, available to all. So yes, Conor, Proposition 8 was hateful. It singled out a class of citizens and denied them a civil right granted to everyone else. Hate. Period. The assumption that “a CEO should be judged not just by his or her conduct in the professional realm, but also by political causes he or she supports as a private citizen” seems, on the surface, to be tougher to justify. That’s terrible, one is tempted to conclude. Everyone should be free to express his or her political views in private and should be judged professionally only by his or her skills at the job. How reasonable. How liberal. How puke-worthy. Doesn’t the name Donald Sterling ring a bell? In real life, nobody is judged solely by his or her abilities on the job. Certainly no one sprang to Sterling’s defense. The owner of the Los Angeles Clippers wasn’t banned for life by the National Basketball Association because he was bad at the job of owner. He was canned because he spewed racist trash in a private conversation. And then there’s Robert Copeland, the police commissioner in charming Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, who didn’t find many friends in the media for exercising his right to free speech. Copeland, you may recall, was overheard in a diner calling President Obama “a fucking nigger” back in March. It took two months, but he’s now out on his ass, and nobody’s crying foul. Nor should anyone. Such judgments are ingrained in

American culture. They are ways in which we discriminate — if you will — about acceptable behavior, even if we don’t like to talk about it that way. Like Eich, Sterling and Copeland weren’t judged by how well they did their jobs. They were judged by what they said and did in their private lives — in Sterling’s case, even while being illegally audio-recorded. They, too, are objects of a discriminating sensibility, though nobody is calling it that. What’s at issue in all three cases is the nature of the discrimination exercised — discrimination that forms the foundation of corporate and political life in America. To which I say, “Good.” Is the treatment of these three men morally right? Yes, of course it is. Is society damaged as a result? Of course not. A civil society must be civil, and bigotry isn’t civil. But why the outrage over an anti-gay bigot’s voluntary departure from one company while a racist is forced to sell another company against his will — to no public outcry whatsoever? Who you are privately and what you think privately make all the difference in business and politics. Anybody who proclaims otherwise is a willful idiot. That includes Conor Friedersdorf, Andrew Sullivan, and his 58 gay cosignatories of a statement published at RealClearPolitics in late April, that read, in part, “The test of our commitment to liberal principles is not our eagerness to hear ideas we share, but our willingness to consider seriously those we oppose.” How can one argue with their statement? It’s so reasonable, so liberal, so self-righteous. I’m definitely willing to consider seriously those ideas I oppose. In this case, I consider them to be beneath contempt. Think about the innumerable ways in which one’s private decisions and characteristics determine success in American political, corporate, professional, and athletic life — and in how many cases such discrimination is based on nothing more valid than pure bigotry. Name a Jewish president. Name a Muslim governor. Name a transwoman who’s the CEO of a major corporation. As for not being willing to consider ideas society rejects, name a Marxist in any responsible position in America outside of academia (where the only thing that matters is currying favor with faculty committees and the administration). For that matter, name a neo-Nazi who’s been elected to public office or serves as a CEO of a corporation of any real size. Coming up blank? There ya go. We discriminate as a matter of course.

MEDIA CIRCUS, continued on p.41

| May 28, 2014

FILM

Sweden’s Got Punk Lukas Moodysson celebrates grrrl power, growing right up out of the middle class BY STEVE ERICKSON

MAGNOLIA PICTURES

ere’s a list of things Americans associate with Sweden: social democracy, ABBA, Ingmar Bergman, IKEA, crime novels. Punk rock is notably missing. For the three teenage heroines of Swedish director Lukas Moodysson’s “We Are the Best!,” that fuels their fury all the more. Fury, though, may not be the best word to describe any aspect of this delightful but lightweight film.

WE ARE THE BEST! Directed by Lukas Moodysson In Swedish with English subtitles Magnolia Pictures Opens May 30 Angelika Film Center 18 Houston St. at Mercer St. anglikafilmcenter.com Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center Film Society of Lincoln Center 144 W. 65th St. filmlinc.com

The punk band in “We Are the Best!” only gets around to writing one song

Liv LeMoyne, Mira Barkhammar, and Mira Grosin in Lukas Moodysson’s “We Are the Best!”

— a protest tune against sports. By using only Swedish-language punk on the soundtrack, Moodysson may be making a point about the strength of the country’s homegrown scene. Yet the teenage musicians he depicts are thoroughly middle-class and deeply

sheltered. The 1977 British punk scene had its share of poseurs pretending to be working-class, but it also reflected real anger and despair. The Swedish band who sing “Brezhnev and Reagan/ Fuck off” seem to be doing so because they think leftist politics are part of the

punk package. Bobo (Mira Barkhammar) and Klara (Mira Grosin) are two bored 13-year-old girls in 1982 Stockholm. Their baby boomer parents have the misguided notion they’re still hip. Bobo and Klara are enamored with the Swedish punk scene — though everyone else thinks it’s dead — and decide to start a band. They don’t own any instruments and even if they did, they don’t know how to play them. However, they sign up for band rehearsals at a local youth center. At a talent show, Bobo and Klara see Hedvig (Liv LeMoyne), an extremely talented guitarist. Despite several offputting traits — her Christianity and the fact that she plays classical music on an acoustic guitar — she is invited into the band, and they begin incessantly practicing their one song. When Moodysson debuted with “Show Me Love,” a tender teenage lesbian love story, his work felt like a real breath of fresh air in Scandinavian cinema, not least for its light touch. His follow-up,

BEST, continued on p.30

Band of Brothers DMW Greer’s story of homoerotic competition explores military life’s intense camaraderie

urning Blue” is an intense, engrossing drama about a military investigation that turns up a possible “gay cell” on a Navy aircraft carrier in the bad old days of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Daniel (Trent Ford) and William (Morgan Spector) are best buddies. When Matthew (Rob Mayes) enters their unit, a love triangle, tinged with jealousy, develops, even though one of the men is straight.

BURNING BLUE Directed by DMW Greer Lionsgate Films Opens Jun. 6 AMC Empire 25 234 W. 42nd St. amctheatres.com

Writer/ director DMW (David) Greer, adapting his own play, has crafted a poignant story about masculinity and sexuality within the culture of the military. “Burning Blue” is really about wanting

what others say you can’t have. The story, which concludes in 2001, is also one about dignity and individual integrity in the face of discrimination. Ford’s strong performance is freighted with Daniel’s guilt about a variety of matters. Greer met with Gay City News to discuss “Burning Blue.” GARY M. KRAMER: “Burning Blue” began as a play. What prompted you to tell this story then and now as a film? DMW GREER: It was a need to exorcise very deep grief. It’s a personal story but it’s a work of fiction, one very much inspired by my real life. I was in the military. I had been in love with a guy for years who was killed flying. I lost a lot of friends in aircraft accidents, but when this guy was killed, his death was the epiphany. It was the seed that was planted for me to tell the story. But the catalyst was my closest friend’s response to my telling him that I was in love with this other man. GMK: How did he react? DMWG: He shamed me. We were estranged from each other for almost a year.

GMK: Had you been involved with men before? DMWG: I had relationships with men prior to this, but not anything that was as deeply profound as this. It was a platonic relationship, but it was very special and intimate. GMK: What can you say about the homoerotic tension in the film? DMWG: I think that human sexuality — and this is no great revelation from me — is a very, very complex and very nuanced gray area. I think that there is some element of sexual energy, sexual tension in almost every interaction, every relationship. GMK: There is a very macho culture in the military. What can you say about this hyper-masculine culture? DMWG: I think it’s been spun in the media that we've been fed. In America, it’s the greatest exponent of that hypermasculine imagery and storytelling, and I think it’s inaccurate. What I’ve seen in films, the portrayal of the military always seems a bit cartoonish and broad-stroked to me. Me, and all

LIONSGATE FILMS

BY GARY M. KRAMER

Trent Ford stars as Daniel in “Burning Blue.”

of my contemporaries in the Navy, are — again, clichéd terms here, but — very multidimensional guys, complex individuals that have different interests and are fallible.

BROTHERS, continued on p.26

May 28, 2014 | www.gaycitynews.com

What is STRIBILD? STRIBILD is a prescription medicine used to treat HIV-1 in adults who have never taken HIV-1 medicines before. It combines 4 medicines into 1 pill to be taken once a day with food. STRIBILD is a complete single-tablet regimen and should not be used with other HIV-1 medicines. STRIBILD does not cure HIV-1 infection or AIDS. To control HIV-1 infection and decrease HIV-related illnesses you must keep taking STRIBILD. Ask your healthcare provider if you have questions about how to reduce the risk of passing HIV-1 to others. Always practice safer sex and use condoms to lower the chance of sexual contact with body fluids. Never reuse or share needles or other items that have body fluids on them.

IMPORTANT SAFETY INFORMATION What is the most important information I should know about STRIBILD? STRIBILD can cause serious side effects: • Build-up of an acid in your blood (lactic acidosis), which is a serious medical emergency. Symptoms of lactic acidosis include feeling very weak or tired, unusual (not normal) muscle pain, trouble breathing, stomach pain with nausea or vomiting, feeling cold especially in your arms and legs, feeling dizzy or lightheaded, and/or a fast or irregular heartbeat. • Serious liver problems. The liver may become large (hepatomegaly) and fatty (steatosis). Symptoms of liver problems include your skin or the white part of your eyes turns yellow (jaundice), dark “tea-colored” urine, light-colored bowel movements (stools), loss of appetite for several days or longer, nausea, and/or stomach pain. • You may be more likely to get lactic acidosis or serious liver problems if you are female, very overweight (obese), or have been taking STRIBILD for a long time. In some cases, these serious conditions have led to death. Call your healthcare provider right away if you have any symptoms of these conditions.

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• Worsening of hepatitis B (HBV) infection. If you also have HBV and stop taking STRIBILD, your hepatitis may suddenly get worse. Do not stop taking STRIBILD without first talking to your healthcare provider, as they will need to monitor your health. STRIBILD is not approved for the treatment of HBV.

Who should not take STRIBILD? Do not take STRIBILD if you: • Take a medicine that contains: alfuzosin, dihydroergotamine, ergotamine, methylergonovine, cisapride, lovastatin, simvastatin, pimozide, sildenafil when used for lung problems (Revatio®), triazolam, oral midazolam, rifampin or the herb St. John’s wort. • For a list of brand names for these medicines, please see the Brief Summary on the following pages. • Take any other medicines to treat HIV-1 infection, or the medicine adefovir (Hepsera®).

What are the other possible side effects of STRIBILD? Serious side effects of STRIBILD may also include: • New or worse kidney problems, including kidney failure. Your healthcare provider should do regular blood and urine tests to check your kidneys before and during treatment with STRIBILD. If you develop kidney problems, your healthcare provider may tell you to stop taking STRIBILD. • Bone problems, including bone pain or bones getting soft or thin, which may lead to fractures. Your healthcare provider may do tests to check your bones. • Changes in body fat can happen in people taking HIV-1 medicines. • Changes in your immune system. Your immune system may get stronger and begin to fight infections. Tell your healthcare provider if you have any new symptoms after you start taking STRIBILD. The most common side effects of STRIBILD include nausea and diarrhea. Tell your healthcare provider if you have any side effects that bother you or don’t go away.

What should I tell my healthcare provider before taking STRIBILD? • All your health problems. Be sure to tell your healthcare provider if you have or had any kidney, bone, or liver problems, including hepatitis virus infection. • All the medicines you take, including prescription and nonprescription medicines, vitamins, and herbal supplements. STRIBILD may affect the way other medicines work, and other medicines may affect how STRIBILD works. Keep a list of all your medicines and show it to your healthcare provider and pharmacist. Do not start any new medicines while taking STRIBILD without first talking with your healthcare provider. • If you take hormone-based birth control (pills, patches, rings, shots, etc). • If you take antacids. Take antacids at least 2 hours before or after you take STRIBILD. • If you are pregnant or plan to become pregnant. It is not known if STRIBILD can harm your unborn baby. Tell your healthcare provider if you become pregnant while taking STRIBILD. • If you are breastfeeding (nursing) or plan to breastfeed. Do not breastfeed. HIV-1 can be passed to the baby in breast milk. Also, some medicines in STRIBILD can pass into breast milk, and it is not known if this can harm the baby.

You are encouraged to report negative side effects of prescription drugs to the FDA. Visit www.fda.gov/medwatch, or call 1-800-FDA-1088. Please see Brief Summary of full Prescribing Information with important warnings on the following pages.

PALIO Date: 4.4.14 • Client: Gilead • Product: Stribild • File Name: 16873_pgiqdp_F_Winston_Gay_City_News_fi.indd

Winston

| May 28, 2014

STRIBILD is a prescription medicine used as a complete single-tablet regimen to treat HIV-1 in adults who have never taken HIV-1 medicines before. STRIBILD does not cure HIV-1 or AIDS.

I started my personal revolution Talk to your healthcare provider about starting treatment. STRIBILD is a complete HIV-1 treatment in 1 pill, once a day. Ask if it’s right for you.

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PALIO Date: 4.4.14 • Client: Gilead • Product: Stribild • File Name: 16873_pgiqdp_F_Winston_Gay_City_News_fi.indd

Winston

May 28, 2014 | www.gaycitynews.com

Patient Information STRIBILD® (STRY-bild) (elvitegravir 150 mg/cobicistat 150 mg/emtricitabine 200 mg/ tenofovir disoproxil fumarate 300 mg) tablets Brief summary of full Prescribing Information. For more information, please see the full Prescribing Information, including Patient Information. What is STRIBILD? • STRIBILD is a prescription medicine used to treat HIV-1 in adults who have never taken HIV-1 medicines before. STRIBILD is a complete regimen and should not be used with other HIV-1 medicines. • STRIBILD does not cure HIV-1 or AIDS. You must stay on continuous HIV-1 therapy to control HIV-1 infection and decrease HIV-related illnesses. • Ask your healthcare provider about how to prevent passing HIV-1 to others. Do not share or reuse needles, injection equipment, or personal items that can have blood or body fluids on them. Do not have sex without protection. Always practice safer sex by using a latex or polyurethane condom to lower the chance of sexual contact with semen, vaginal secretions, or blood. What is the most important information I should know about STRIBILD? STRIBILD can cause serious side effects, including: 1. Build-up of lactic acid in your blood (lactic acidosis). Lactic acidosis can happen in some people who take STRIBILD or similar (nucleoside analogs) medicines. Lactic acidosis is a serious medical emergency that can lead to death. Lactic acidosis can be hard to identify early, because the symptoms could seem like symptoms of other health problems. Call your healthcare provider right away if you get any of the following symptoms which could be signs of lactic acidosis: • feel very weak or tired • have unusual (not normal) muscle pain • have trouble breathing • have stomach pain with nausea or vomiting • feel cold, especially in your arms and legs • feel dizzy or lightheaded • have a fast or irregular heartbeat 2. Severe liver problems. Severe liver problems can happen in people who take STRIBILD. In some cases, these liver problems can lead to death. Your liver may become large (hepatomegaly) and you may develop fat in your liver (steatosis). Call your healthcare provider right away if you get any of the following symptoms of liver problems: • your skin or the white part of your eyes turns yellow (jaundice) • dark “tea-colored” urine • light-colored bowel movements (stools) • loss of appetite for several days or longer • nausea • stomach pain You may be more likely to get lactic acidosis or severe liver problems if you are female, very overweight (obese), or have been taking STRIBILD for a long time. 3. Worsening of Hepatitis B infection. If you have hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection and take STRIBILD, your HBV may get worse (flare-up) if you stop taking STRIBILD. A “flare-up” is when your HBV infection suddenly returns in a worse way than before. • Do not run out of STRIBILD. Refill your prescription or talk to your healthcare provider before your STRIBILD is all gone

• Do not stop taking STRIBILD without first talking to your healthcare provider • If you stop taking STRIBILD, your healthcare provider will need to check your health often and do blood tests regularly for several months to check your HBV infection. Tell your healthcare provider about any new or unusual symptoms you may have after you stop taking STRIBILD Who should not take STRIBILD? Do not take STRIBILD if you also take a medicine that contains: • adefovir (Hepsera®) • alfuzosin hydrochloride (Uroxatral®) • cisapride (Propulsid®, Propulsid Quicksolv®) • ergot-containing medicines, including: dihydroergotamine mesylate (D.H.E. 45®, Migranal®), ergotamine tartrate (Cafergot®, Migergot®, Ergostat®, Medihaler Ergotamine®, Wigraine®, Wigrettes®), and methylergonovine maleate (Ergotrate®, Methergine®) • lovastatin (Advicor®, Altoprev®, Mevacor®) • oral midazolam • pimozide (Orap®) • rifampin (Rifadin®, Rifamate®, Rifater®, Rimactane®) • sildenafil (Revatio®), when used for treating lung problems • simvastatin (Simcor®, Vytorin®, Zocor®) • triazolam (Halcion®) • the herb St. John’s wort Do not take STRIBILD if you also take any other HIV-1 medicines, including: • Other medicines that contain tenofovir (Atripla®, Complera®, Viread®, Truvada®) • Other medicines that contain emtricitabine, lamivudine, or ritonavir (Atripla®, Combivir®, Complera®, Emtriva®, Epivir® or Epivir-HBV®, Epzicom®, Kaletra®, Norvir®, Trizivir®, Truvada®) STRIBILD is not for use in people who are less than 18 years old. What are the possible side effects of STRIBILD? STRIBILD may cause the following serious side effects: • See “What is the most important information I should know about STRIBILD?” • New or worse kidney problems, including kidney failure. Your healthcare provider should do blood and urine tests to check your kidneys before you start and while you are taking STRIBILD. Your healthcare provider may tell you to stop taking STRIBILD if you develop new or worse kidney problems. • Bone problems can happen in some people who take STRIBILD. Bone problems include bone pain, softening or thinning (which may lead to fractures). Your healthcare provider may need to do tests to check your bones. • Changes in body fat can happen in people who take HIV-1 medicine. These changes may include increased amount of fat in the upper back and neck (“buffalo hump”), breast, and around the middle of your body (trunk). Loss of fat from the legs, arms and face may also happen. The exact cause and long-term health effects of these conditions are not known. • Changes in your immune system (Immune Reconstitution Syndrome) can happen when you start taking HIV-1 medicines. Your immune system may get stronger and begin to fight infections that have been hidden in your body for a long time. Tell your healthcare provider right away if you start having any new symptoms after starting your HIV-1 medicine.

| May 28, 2014

The most common side effects of STRIBILD include: • Nausea • Diarrhea Tell your healthcare provider if you have any side effect that bothers you or that does not go away. • These are not all the possible side effects of STRIBILD. For more information, ask your healthcare provider. • Call your healthcare provider for medical advice about side effects. You may report side effects to FDA at 1-800-FDA-1088. What should I tell my healthcare provider before taking STRIBILD? Tell your healthcare provider about all your medical conditions, including: • If you have or had any kidney, bone, or liver problems, including hepatitis B infection • If you are pregnant or plan to become pregnant. It is not known if STRIBILD can harm your unborn baby. Tell your healthcare provider if you become pregnant while taking STRIBILD. - There is a pregnancy registry for women who take antiviral medicines during pregnancy. The purpose of this registry is to collect information about the health of you and your baby. Talk with your healthcare provider about how you can take part in this registry. • If you are breastfeeding (nursing) or plan to breastfeed. Do not breastfeed if you take STRIBILD. - You should not breastfeed if you have HIV-1 because of the risk of passing HIV-1 to your baby. - Two of the medicines in STRIBILD can pass to your baby in your breast milk. It is not known if the other medicines in STRIBILD can pass into your breast milk. - Talk with your healthcare provider about the best way to feed your baby. Tell your healthcare provider about all the medicines you take, including prescription and nonprescription medicines, vitamins, and herbal supplements: • STRIBILD may affect the way other medicines work, and other medicines may affect how STRIBILD works. • Be sure to tell your healthcare provider if you take any of the following medicines: - Hormone-based birth control (pills, patches, rings, shots, etc) - Antacid medicines that contain aluminum, magnesium hydroxide, or calcium carbonate. Take antacids at least 2 hours before or after you take STRIBILD - Medicines to treat depression, organ transplant rejection, or high blood pressure - amiodarone (Cordarone®, Pacerone®) - atorvastatin (Lipitor®, Caduet®) - bepridil hydrochloride (Vascor®, Bepadin®) - bosentan (Tracleer®) - buspirone - carbamazepine (Carbatrol®, Epitol®, Equetro®, Tegretol®) - clarithromycin (Biaxin®, Prevpac®) - clonazepam (Klonopin®) - clorazepate (Gen-xene®, Tranxene®) - colchicine (Colcrys®) - medicines that contain dexamethasone - diazepam (Valium®)

- digoxin (Lanoxin®) - disopyramide (Norpace®) - estazolam - ethosuximide (Zarontin®) - flecainide (Tambocor®) - flurazepam - fluticasone (Flovent®, Flonase®, Flovent® Diskus®, Flovent® HFA, Veramyst®) - itraconazole (Sporanox®) - ketoconazole (Nizoral®) - lidocaine (Xylocaine®) - mexiletine - oxcarbazepine (Trileptal®) - perphenazine - phenobarbital (Luminal®) - phenytoin (Dilantin®, Phenytek®) - propafenone (Rythmol®) - quinidine (Neudexta®) - rifabutin (Mycobutin®) - rifapentine (Priftin®) - risperidone (Risperdal®, Risperdal Consta®) - salmeterol (Serevent®) or salmeterol when taken in combination with fluticasone (Advair Diskus®, Advair HFA®) - sildenafil (Viagra®), tadalafil (Cialis®) or vardenafil (Levitra®, Staxyn®), for the treatment of erectile dysfunction (ED). If you get dizzy or faint (low blood pressure), have vision changes or have an erection that last longer than 4 hours, call your healthcare provider or get medical help right away. - tadalafil (Adcirca®), for the treatment of pulmonary arterial hypertension - telithromycin (Ketek®) - thioridazine - voriconazole (Vfend®) - warfarin (Coumadin®, Jantoven®) - zolpidem (Ambien®, Edlular®, Intermezzo®, Zolpimist®) Know the medicines you take. Keep a list of all your medicines and show it to your healthcare provider and pharmacist when you get a new medicine. Do not start any new medicines while you are taking STRIBILD without first talking with your healthcare provider. Keep STRIBILD and all medicines out of reach of children. This Brief Summary summarizes the most important information about STRIBILD. If you would like more information, talk with your healthcare provider. You can also ask your healthcare provider or pharmacist for information about STRIBILD that is written for health professionals, or call 1-800-445-3235 or go to www.STRIBILD.com. Issued: October 2013

COMPLERA, EMTRIVA, GILEAD, the GILEAD Logo, GSI, HEPSERA, STRIBILD, the STRIBILD Logo, TRUVADA, and VIREAD are trademarks of Gilead Sciences, Inc., or its related companies. ATRIPLA is a trademark of Bristol-Myers Squibb & Gilead Sciences, LLC. All other marks referenced herein are the property of their respective owners. © 2014 Gilead Sciences, Inc. All rights reserved. STBC0077 03/14

May 28, 2014 | www.gaycitynews.com

BOOKS

Thumb Drive GARY M. KRAMER

ohn Waters is out to shock again. The filmmaker’s latest book, “Carsick: John Waters Hitchhikes Across America,” chronicles his recent experiences hitchhiking west along Route 70 from his home in Baltimore to his apartment in San Francisco.

CARSICK: JOHN WATERS HITCHHIKES ACROSS AMERICA By John Waters Farrar, Straus and Giroux $26; 336 pages

But before the author describes his life “on the road,” he offers readers two novellas. One depicts the “Best That Could Happen,” the other the “Worst.” And boy, is the worst that can happen bad! Nauseatingly so, with disgusting bodily fluids and functions that remind folks why Waters has been dubbed the Prince of Puke. (Spoiler alert: Waters does not get kidnapped or killed on his travels). “When I was young I hitchhiked a lot,” he said. “But never that far. I drove across country five times. I thought that might be a good book, but what would that be like? So I fantasized about the good, the bad, and what I was going to do.” Waters mentioned that he often hitchhikes in Pr ovincetown, and “got into it, even inviting dates to go hitchhiking.” He added with a laugh, “Those were my training wheels.” His real experiences, recounted in the book, were “all good,” he effused. “It was

BROTHERS, from p.21

GMK: Do you think the military creates a homosocial society? DMWG: I think it could, perhaps it could contribute a bit. If you believe people’s sexuality is fluid, definitely. GMK: Despite the sexual tension in the film, you are extremely discreet in filming the sex scenes. Can you explain why? DMWG: There is so much ambiguity in male sexuality and intimacy, and I think that is really heightened in the military setting. It was really deliberate. I didn’t want to make this about sex. What this was about was a really powerful, deep, deep love, which transcends sex. Certainly in any longterm relationship, it does over time.

an optimistic journey. There was not one bad person. They were all kind and helpful. One woman wouldn’t leave until she gave me money. She thought I was a homeless man.” W h i l e m a n y p e o p l e Wa t e r s encountered on the road did not recognize the filmmaker behind “Pink Flamingos” and “Hairspray” — though some folks, like the band Here We Go Magic, did — Waters was amused that some drivers knew him only from his “Seed of Chucky” film. “With the celebrity I have, the only ones who recognize you are the ones you want to,” he said. Still, Waters had moments where he hoped using his fame would help him get a ride. “As soon as I was out there not getting a ride, I was flashing my mustache,” he admitted. “You’ll do anything to get a ride. You’ll get in a car with anybody.” Sheepishly, he added, “You do what you have to do to get to the next place.” The non-fiction section of “Carsick” is full of fascinating encounters. Waters bonds most and best with a 20-year-old, sandy-haired straight young Republican driver he calls “the Corvette Kid,” whom he recalls fondly. “He was just on an adventure,” he recalled. “He didn’t know who I was. We had fun. It was a bromance, and we understood what it looked like. Friends texted him: ‘Way to go! You’re in a hotel with a gay man in Reno when you were on your way to a lunch at a Subway!’ We stayed [together] for three days in San Francisco. It really looked…” He let that thought dangle as if not daring to finish it. While the stories of the real rides are fun, Waters’ “Best” and “Worst”

Love trumps everything. Sex is a great galvanizer. GMK: The guys dancing shirtless is possibly the film’s most erotic moment. DMWG: Imagination is a very, very powerful thing, I think, if each viewer can fill in the blanks visually and emotionally. For me, it creates a more powerful experience. G M K : What made you join the military? DMWG: I grew up in a military family. I was a fledgling human being. I did not have much self-possession. I was good at faking it, but I was not very clear on who I was or what my opinion or emotions were on almost anything.

FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX

The salacious, unseemly sage of Baltimore takes to the road

novellas are equally entertaining. They play like extended riffs on Waters’ “Puff Piece (101 Things I Love)” and “Hatchet Piece (101 Things I Hate)” from his book “Crackpot.” The fictional essays feel like short stories that could be made into films. In fact, one episode, set at a carnival, was a movie idea for Waters at one point, he explained. “All the good/ bad chapters were like my movies,” he said. “I could picture them as movies. I could be extreme, and hopefully I wrote it like I’m just telling you the story when I got out of the car.” Waters treats the tales’ sexual episodes with humor. “You can’t write a hitchhiking book without sex,” he said. “I tried to have humorous fantasies about what would G M K : Yo u h a v e a m i l i t a r y background, but you now work as a filmmaker and landscape architect. How did that happen? DMWG: I went to the Naval Academy for a year and a half and I was kicked out because my grade point average wasn’t high enough. I ended up going to Oregon State University, and I studied naval science there and landscape architecture. My degree is in landscape architecture. My husband and I — he’s a Brit — we have a design firm and renovate apartments for people. We do this for specific clients. The military thing was probably the most disconnect. I loved part of it a lot — my friends, the camaraderie, I loved flying. Everyone in my family flew. It was in my blood.

happen.” Still, he acknowledged, “No one will jerk off reading ‘Carsick.’” John Waters being who he is, he supplements the book’s pleasures with some very nasty episodes. “I take the worst that can happen seriously,” Waters insisted, but added, “I think the gross stuff is so ridiculous. The tapeworm thing — I heard that as a child. I used to tell that at summer camp. And with hitchhiking, the paranoia is: Where am I going to eliminate? You can’t say ‘pull over.’ All those things were my fears. And hopefully they can be funny, too.” A scene involving a goiter shows off Waters’ ability to be shocking, gross, and funny all at the same time. Fans of the filmmaker’s work will likely be more amused than put off. That’s not to say that Waters doesn’t surprise himself with all that he went through. “Even when I read the book in proofing, when I read the real parts, I’m shocked I did them,” he said. He is daunted that while on the trip he would wake up in a hotel only to have to go out and thumb another ride. “Usually when I stay at a hotel there’s a car picking me up, a limo,” he said. But while he worked on “Carsick,” Waters confessed, “I felt guilty that I got a cab on my night off to go to a movie. I felt like a pussy when I took a bus.” John Waters reads from “Carsick” on June 3 at 7 p.m. at Barnes and Noble Union Square, 3 East 17th Street. On June 4 at 7 p.m., Waters appears at the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street ($25; $15 for students and seniors at showclix.com/event/3802120).

The architecture thing was something I was interested in. GMK: Although Daniel’s character is based on your experiences, there are differences. How would you have handled what Daniel went through? DMWG: Probably not with as nearly as much integrity and grace as Daniel did. My niece was a helicopter pilot who left because of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. She ended up falling in love with her roommate. GMK: Do you think the military is more likely to persecute queer members because of their sexuality? DMWG: Probably, yes. I think that society and culture in general view it as a form of weakness. That is what we are striving to overcome.

| May 28, 2014

THEATER

Politics, Potions, and People to Forget A brilliant play, a bit of compelling college humor, and a wasted evening BY CHRISTOPHER BYRNE

he backstage power politics of Washington under a string of presidential administrations is the context for “The City of Conversation,” Anthony Giardina’s wellcrafted and completely engrossing new play now at Lincoln Center.

THE CITY OF CONVERSATION

Kristen Bush, Michael Simpson, and Jan Maxwell in Anthony Giardina’s “The City of Conversation.”

performances out of all of his characters. Michael Simpson as Colin and as the adult Ethan gives wonderfully centered performances in two distinct roles. Anna’s role as written comes close to being a literary device (a la Shaw), but Kristen Bush finds the details that make her believable. Beth Dixon as Hester’s sister and lifelong assistant is superb — just the kind of placating personality who often stands beside powerful people. But it is Jan Maxwell who elevates this play to must-see status. Playing Hester at three ages — at the peak of her power and charisma, slightly chastened but still fighting while she tends to her family, and as the older fighter who has stayed true to herself — she imbues each phase with heart and passion. Every moment is exquisitely realized, and we see in Hester the passage of time and the payments it exacts — providing additional insights that make this play so exciting and profound.

“Drunk Shakespeare”

is sophomoric, silly, and utterly irresistible. Performed by a rotating series of actors on the second floor of Quinn’s Bar on West 44th Street, it is based on the conceit of a “drinking club with a Shakespeare problem.” Amidst the silliness and literary creativity, the troupe performs a much truncated and alcoholically lubricated “Macbeth.” Of course, there are time-outs for drinking games and random improvisations, such as requiring that whenever Ross appears, he do so in the guise of a Disney animal. And many real shots are imbibed by at least

JENNY ANDERSON

Ostensibly the story of one Hester Ferris and her stormy relationships and subtle machinations, it is also a tale of family and of ideals and their related costs. Power is the focal point —its expression, its use, and the risks and consequences it entails. When Hester’s adult son Colin arrives home from London, he brings his fiancée Anna along. Colin and Anna, archetypal new conservatives ushered in with President Ronald Reagan, stand in stark contrast to Hester’s more liberal posture. Anna, especially, is power-hungry and impatient with Hester’s more delicate manipulations. Their interaction is commentary on the way our politics have changed over the past three decades. The play’s crisis arrives when Hester is working against Ronald Reagan’s ultimately failed nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court, an appointment that Colin and Anna’s political fortunes are tied to. With Anna and Colin advancing under the Washington’s new Republican regime, Hester assumes daily charge of her grandson Ethan, but as the family’s generational conflict grows, Anna makes the boy a pawn — and it is Hester who loses. Here, Giardina deftly shows how politics shifted from its traditional focus on people and relationships to a game in which winning is all. This is a fascinating, multi-layered play that manages to blend the classic “All About Eve” with the Netflix Kevin Spacey hit “House of Cards.” Giardina’s instinctively liberal bent is never in doubt, but to his credit he sets up a good fight. Like Shaw, he isn’t afraid to give validity to opposing viewpoints. All of which makes the play so much richer. Director Doug Hughes once again demonstrates his unique skill in drawing complex, human, and believable

STEPHANIE BERGER

Lincoln Center Newhouse Theater 150 W. 65th St. Through Jul. 6 Tue.-Sat. at 8 p.m. Wed., Sat. at 2 p.m.; Sun. at 3 p.m. $77-$87; telecharge.com Or 212-239-6200 2 hrs., 15 min., with intermission

One of the rotating casts of “Drunk Shakespeare” running at Quinn’s Bar on West 44th Street.

DRUNK SHAKESPEARE

THE FEW

Quinn’s Bar 356 W. 44th St., second fl. Through Jun. 14 Mon., Wed., Sat. at 8 p.m.; Fri.-Sat. at 10 p.m. $29; drunkshakespeare.com Or 765-537-8650 90 min., no intermission

Rattlestick Playwrights Theater 224 Waverly Pl. Through Jun. 21 Sun.-Wed. at 7 p.m. Thu.-Sat. at 8 p.m.; Sat. at 3 p.m. $10-$55; ovationtix.com Or 866-811-4111 90 min., no intermission

one member of the company, chosen for the night to be inspired by that indomitable muse John Barleycorn. As with any undertaking of this nature, the combination of intelligence and silliness is what makes this work and, remarkably, the Scottish Play stands up pretty well to the pummeling it takes over approximately 90 minutes of revelry — with the cast even managing moments of inspired acting. It takes a special kind of talent to pull that off, and director David Hudson and his company deliver an unabashedly good time.

literary genius, a kind of Kerouac for truckers. Sadly, Bryan is just a feckless dolt. QZ spouts conventional, injuredyet-stoic woman nonsense, and Matthew serves as little more than a dramatic device to set up conflict. Considering the quality, human insights, and impact of Hunter’s other plays — “A Bright New Boise” and “The Whale” — this is a real disappointment. The play receives little help from Davis McCallum’s direction, which is ponderous, with the actors, particularly Michael Laurence as Bryan, displaying self-indulgence to the point of toothgrinding tedium. There is, after all, a difference between naturalism and rigor mortis, but in some of Bryan’s excruciatingly long pauses, it’s hard to tell the difference. Tasha Lawrence as QZ gives a generic performance in a generic role, but the most unfortunate performance is Gideon Glick’s as Matthew, who has been directed to pander to some idea of a bullied gay teen apparently suffering from PTSD. The performance lacks specificity, rendering it both unbelievable and offensive. When all the play’s secrets are finally revealed, they hardly seem worth waiting for.

Samuel D. Hunter’s new play “The Few” is the most frus-

trating kind of playwriting. Hunter thinks that by withholding information he can create tension and curiosity, but given the slim plot — a guy leaves his girl; she moves on; he comes back; trouble ensues — the piece really only exists as a character study. Unfortunately, the characters are not very interesting. After the guy, Bryan, leaves, his girl, QZ, transforms their faux-poetic newspaper targeting truckers into something that actually pays. She hires an abused gay relative, Matthew, who idolizes Bryan and believes he was a

May 28, 2014 | www.gaycitynews.com

IN THE NOH

Enduring Cowboy, Divas Below 54

KENN DUNCAN

MICHAEL BLASE

Leslie Uggams, Katie Finneran, and Kate Baldwin dish, but Randy Jones really dishes

Randy Jones in the late ‘70s, just before the Village People hit big, and, with Remy Zaken, in “The Anthem” at the Culture Project’s Lynn Redgrave Theater.

BY DAVID NOH

or those who lived through the 1970s, we are now experiencing a moment in time of an unprecedented nostalgia — like the ‘70s had for the 1930s — for an economically depressed but far more fun era, which mixed innocence and decadence with such thrilling insouciance, all of it pre-AIDS and preReagan/ Giuliani. And, from that glittering disco ball epoch, there is no more iconic figure than Randy Jones, the Cowboy from the Village People. He’s returning to the New York stage for the first time in years in “The Anthem,” an Off-Broadway musical inspired by Ayn Rand’s novel (through Jul. 6, Culture Project’s Lynn Redgrave Theater, 45 Bleecker St. at Lafayette St.; cultureproject.org). “I play Tiberius, the evil overlord,” Jones told me over dinner and a few vodkas at BBar. “The script is by Gary Morgenstein and tells a story not unlike a Shake-

spearean or even classic Greek tragedy, with people at war, killing each other. My brilliant director, Rachel Klein, describes it as discotopia, a dystopic society in the future with a rigid code wherein everybody is for community and the greatest crime is individuality. The music is very synth-oriented, incredibly arranged, and is by the gifted Jonnie Rockwell, who’s also a respected physician on the Upper East Side!” Jones, who’s more used to doing one-night stands all over the world, confessed to finding a legit play’s schedule grueling: “People don’t see me out and about as much and are wondering if I’m okay. I’m MIA during the rehearsals and run of this because it’s so demanding but I just have to do this because I want to prove to myself that I can do it. My agent said, ‘When was the last time you did something in New York?’ I want to show people I can do something besides sing ‘YMCA.’ “I so often have to leave my cute wonderful husband I’ve been with for 30 years, Will Grega, that it’s nice to be based in New York for a while. He’s a VP at Bank of America, but with this rehearsal process, we’re like ships that pass in the night. We come and go, which sounds like something on Rentboy.com. But life is good, and I’ve been so blessed to have a 40-year career. I came to New York and two years after joined the Village People, and now they sing our songs at all the major baseball games, in video machines in just about every casino. And I’ve managed to survive somehow and maintain the exact same positive, pleasant, and upbeat perspective that I’ve always had.” True, indeed, for Jones, a true gracious Southern gent from North Carolina, has always been one of the nicest people in this town. And the dish he can shovel, all of it accompanied by his endearingly unbridled cackle! He was always in the right place at the right time, like when he went to Hollywood to appear in Allan Carr’s mythic “Can’t Stop the Music,” and leased Joan Collins’ Coldwater Canyon house. He befriended legends like Rock Hudson, whom he found instantly lik-

able and so perfect that, even when he passed out on a chair at a party, the drink he dropped fell to the floor with nary a spill. Lucky Jones met my favorite director, George Cukor, toward the end of his life: “I would visit him at his fabulous house and we’d drink cocktails and I’d sit at his knee, and this man who directed ‘The Women’ and had a hand in ‘Gone with the Wind’ and ‘The Wizard of Oz’ would tell me stories, with his little legs crossed, in his slippers. And not in the bedroom — he never got that – but I’m not saying that I might not bring someone over as he always liked cute company, even a couple, so he’d have a choice. You know he was famous for his protruding jaw, and I remember once, maybe he said it to impress the company I brought, ‘You know how I got this jaw? From sucking big cock!’ I also remember I left but the couple stayed [laughs].”

On May 9, a press preview was held at 54 Below featuring headliners from their daz-

zling spring season. I grabbed the chance to sit down with three of my favorite ladies. Katie Finneran will be at 54 on May 28-31 (54below. com) and described her show as “about loving New York and loving my work as an actress. Every show I do, that community of people becomes my family, and this is about my journey to find the love of my life, my husband, and what went on before and after we had children, and how to combine the two loves of my life, career and family. Finneran, a two-time Tony winner whose comedic chops are already legendary, names as her influences Carole Lombard, Carol Burnett, Meryl Streep, “and nobody’s better than Maggie Smith.” Her one-scene appearance in “Promises, Promises” was the bright spot of that show: “I heard Sally Kellerman on the radio once and I sorta liked the way she talked and took a

IN THE NOH, continued on p.35

| May 28, 2014

OPERA

Season’s End BY DAVID SHENGOLD

ondra Radvanovsky’s role debut as Elizabeth in Canadian Opera Company’s “Roberto Devereux” — coming to the Met stage two seasons from now — certainly excited Toronto audiences. Her bravely theatrical performance (seen April 29) generated ovations and a huge buzz online, but as a totality remains a work in progress, a very good first pass at a supremely tough role. Pianissimi were often exquisite. Sometimes the huge, electric voice executed smooth runs, but technical challenges remain, and while Radvanovsky proved touching she never strung words imprintingly on a bel canto line in the manner of a Callas, Scotto, or Sills. Stephen Lawless’ over-detailed, overbusy “history lesson”-style production didn’t help. Wax museum-style cases of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn rolled out as the elderly, gray-haired queen tottered around during the Prelude, guaranteeing that she herself would disappear into one, muddying the work’s powerful final moments. Lawless interestingly stressed rulership’s performative aspects, but spaces were alternately too crowded and too distended. Dressed like Marlon Brando in “The Wild One,” directed to radiate louche sexuality throughout, Leonardo Capalbo was more stable boy than earl. His diction was gratifyingly clear, but in Act One his overstressed, choked tenor proved nearly unlistenable. He did better later on, but attractive sounds were the province of Allyson McHardy — a lovely Handelian mezzo not suited to Donizetti’s high attacks — and especially of Russell Braun, though vocally miscast a really admirable Nottingham musically and dramatically, never overtaxing his instrument. Corrado Rovaris led propulsively.

B o s t o n ’s H a n d e l a n d Haydn Society has a long, proud

tradition: they’re the oldest continually performing arts group in the United States, founded in 1815. May 4’s concert of Handel’s oratorio “Samson” at Symphony Hall reminded one that, under music director Harry Christophers — in charge for the last five years — the chorus is absolutely top notch. Despite wonderful performances from two of the soloists — soprano Joelle Harvey as Dalila and a Philistine Woman, and bassbaritone Matthew Brook as Samson’s father Manoah — the chorus deservedly won the greatest cheers.

Harvey’s light, clean soaring timbre and spectacular technical facility always delight. With the quiet, violinaccompanied “With plaintive note,” the purity of her singing drew tears, which returned for Brook’s simple, heartfelt traversal — in strong, beautifully projected and articulated sound — of “How willing my paternal love.” Dashon Burton, a darkly resonant Harapha , showed good passagework; his words were not as telling as those of chorus tenor Stefan Reed, an alert Messenger. Agile soprano Sonja DuToit Tengblad fared nicely as the Israelite Woman in the work’s sparkling last minutes. The instrumental playing was sterling, save for the weak, wavery baroque horns — the same section that faltered in Nic McGegan’s March “Samson” in New York. One annoyance amidst all H & H’s virtues is that Christophers — working in one of North America’s centers for early music — has consistently hired British vocal soloists for a huge percentage of the works performed. In Brook’s case, it paid off handsomely, but the travel, visa, and housing costs must be considerable and this fact can hardly inspire those young North American singers in command of the requisite styles to pursue their craft. Catherine Wyn-Rogers, a yearly visitor, certainly knows her Handel style and managed to downplay as Micah the vocal depredations that made her (also poorly acted) Met Adelaide in “Arabella” such an unnecessary import. But tenor Joshua Ellicott’s flinty, burred tenor proved a trial as Samson. Britain has no lock on Handel style, still less on Bach style. Does Christopher really think that North America has no “Messiah” tenors? Does he never attend the Boston Early Music Festival or the concerts of Boston Baroque?

Philadelphia’s Chamber Music Society consistently has

outstanding vocal recitals at prices far below those in New York — and often in more suitable venues. On May 6 at the Philosophical Society in Olde City (a restaurant mecca), masterful veteran pianist Richard Goode gave a recital largely shared with young Curtis Institute soprano Sarah Shafer. Already singing with the local Opera Company, Shafer performs with a sincerity, musicality, and attention to verbal detail that reflect credit on and evoke her distinguished teachers, Benita Valente and Joan Patenaude-Yarnell. Goode worked and recorded with Valente decades ago, and his fine collaboration with Shafer in songs by

MICHAEL COOPER

Varied classical vocal delights all over

Leonardo Capalbo and Sondra Radvanovsky in the Canadian Opera Company production of “Roberto Devereux.”

Schumann, Debussy — the “Ariettes oubliées,” for once not tiresome but keenly interpreted and purely vocalized — and Hugo Wolf seemed an extension of their fine work together. Goode and Shafer phrase with utmost naturalness and produce sterling tonal combination. Best of all were the Schubert encores (“Rastlose Liebe” and “Im Fruehling”) — since Schubert is the best of all. Next season PCMS of fers many fine singers, all paired with excellent pianists: Mark Padmore/ Jonathan Biss; Dawn Upshaw/ Gilbert Kalish; Susanna Phillips and Eric Owens/ Myra Huang; Shafer/ L ydia Brown; Matthew Polenzani/ Julius Drake; and Dorothea Roeschmann/ Mitsuko Uchida. Few American cities do more to welcome queer travelers; day and overnight trips recommended.

On May 15, the New York Philharmonic auspiciously played

Mahler’s Third Symphony under Bernard Haitink. The 85-year-old Dutch maestro has long been an expert Mahler interpreter, and for this curious, multi-

modal work — all six movements and 90 allusion-crammed minutes of it — one needs an accomplished leader to make it sound an organic whole, as Haitink did. The orchestra fared very well — the Phil strings seemed on fire, not a common occurrence — and both concertmaster Glenn Dicterow and the offstage trumpeter performed magically. The only source of opening night glitches and pitch problems was the hor n section, whose instruments — one kept reminding oneself — are of remarkable difficulty. Bernarda Fink’s mezzo has — like that of Anne Sofie von Otter — grown more sopranoish in timbre over time, and a slight register break was evident in the repeated phrase “Gib acht,” but Fink still provides a very attractive sound and remains a class act in terms of chiseled line, verbal meaning, and intonation. The Women of New York Choral Arts and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus performed with alertness and accuracy. David Shengold (shengold@yahoo.com) writes about opera for many venues.

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FILM

Frankfurt Talk Marc Bauder’s study of a failed investment banker offers grim assessment of where we’re headed BY STEVE ERICKSON

nthology Film Archives’ program notes liken German director Marc Bauder’s “Master of the Universe” to “a kind of minimalist documentary version of ‘The Wolf of Wall Street.’”

MASTER OF THE UNIVERSE

AUTLOOK FILMS

Directed by Marc Bauder In German with English subtitles Autlook Films Opens Jun. 6 Anthology Film Archives 32 Second Ave. at Second St. anthologyfilmarchives.org Financier Rainer Voss looks out on the skyscrapers of Frankfurt’s financial district.

Martin Scorsese’s film is an ambitious attempt to treat capitalism — or at least materialism and corporate culture — as an addiction, acknowledging its mix of pleasures and dangers, but it gets bogged down in its infatuation with excess. In contrast, Bauder’s austerity helps him keep a clear head. There’s only one “character” in “Master of the Universe”: former investment banker Rainer Voss. Bauder, who has studied both business administration and filmmaking, shot Voss speaking over the course of several days and nights in an empty building in Frankfurt left abandoned after a failed merger of two banks. The filmmaker pays a great deal of attention to style; “Master of the Universe” is one of the few recent documentaries shot in Cinemascope. Indeed, Bauder’s long-shot vistas of Frankfurt skyscrapers, in which people are tiny but unmistakable presences, resemble Andreas Gursky’s photos. One can sense two Bauders battling it out for control of “Master of the Universe.” One director just wants to let Voss speak with little to no interruption, while the other illustrates his words with the now-empty spaces of Germany’s failed banks. Voss does much of talking from the former stock trading floor, whose small size he notes. Indeed, such physical places are now a thing of the past, he informs us; chat rooms have taken the place of huge, loud trading floors. The stillness of Bauder’s “set” seems filled with

BEST, from p.21

“Together,” about a failing commune in the ‘70s, continued down the same path, but Moodysson’s work grew darker with “Lilya 4-Ever.” This new tone didn’t suit him, and he seems to have wasted years searching for a different style. Although nothing much seems to be at stake in “We Are the Best!” — unlike Moodysson’s first two films — it’s something of a return to his strengths. “We Are the Best!” is a celebration of female friendship, something that’s still all too rare in contemporary cinema. The differences between Hedvig and the duo of Klara and Bobo wind up uniting

ghosts, although the audience isn’t informed about the building’s exact nature until the closing credits. Presumably, his shots of the Frankfurt skyline, which still contains plenty of thriving banks (as Voss points out in an early scene), are taken from the building’s windows. The only exterior appears to be the building’s roof, and the film ends with Voss driving away. “Master of the Universe” would have fit into Anthology’s “Talking Head” documentary series held a few years ago. At the same time, the cinematography captur es a chilly gloss that seems to define contemporary Austrian cinema, fiction and non-fiction. (Although Bauder isn’t Austrian, much of his film’s production money is.) If Michael Haneke and Ulrich Seidl were in the business of creating heroes instead of anti-heroes, I could even see them coming up with a man like Voss. Economics is a field that’s notoriously prone to jargon and difficult to explain to people who aren’t specialists, although the success of Michael Lewis’ books suggests an appetite for understanding it. “Master of the Universe” doesn’t rely too heavily on jargon, but there are a few places where I got lost. For the most part, Voss’ descriptions of the human cost of being a successful investment banker are more compelling. In the film’s opening scene, he relates being pressured to work “one-nighters” and “two-nighters” — essentially ignoring his family to stay up all night

them. When Hedvig points out it’s not really the greatest idea for 13-year-olds to drink alcohol, her refusal to partake doesn’t lead to any long-term problems for the band. Her Christianity might be a bigger sticking point, but she has a sense of humor about it and her band members are willing to accommodate her. When Klara and Bobo give Hedvig a bad haircut and anger her mother, Hedvig forgives them and takes their side, even when Klara suggests her mother has a point. In a world where female jealousy and competition are so often depicted as the norm, Moodysson’s optimism is refreshing. Unfortunately, Moodysson’s main

toiling away for the bank. An investment banker’s success is dependent on his willingness to give up his personal life. I used the word “his” in the last sentence deliberately; as described by Voss, the banking world seems oppressively macho, and I can’t imagine how a woman with any desire to raise a family could navigate its demands. Voss seems a more dubious source when he suggests that some nameless organization deliberately triggered Greece’s economic crisis as a way of destroying the Euro, has gone on to do so with Portugal, Spain, and Italy, and has the eventual goal of driving France into depression. It’s not that this couldn’t happen, but Voss offers conspiracy theories with no real evidence. He’s on more solid ground when he points out how interwoven the world’s economies have become and how their delicate dependency has left us all far more vulnerable. With a few exceptions, Voss is a reliable narrator in these shark-filled waters. As we eventually find out, he fell prey to them himself; as far as I can tell from the closing credits, he now lives off his savings. Bauder’s voice is only heard a few times, but his role in shaping the material is felt throughout. This is an intensely pessimistic film, but has much happened to the banking industry since the 2008 recession to make one think it shouldn’t be? As Voss points out, talk about reform is easy, but real systemic change can take decades, unless provoked by a new, even worse crisis.

attempt to create drama falls flat. The band takes a trip to the suburbs to meet up with a male punk duo. Rather than seeing them as musical competition, Hedvig, Klara, and Bobo’s libidos suddenly kick into gear and they treat the band as potential boyfriends. The film turns into a love triangle, and jealousy threatens to break apart the girls’ affection for one another. That angle, stale and overused in 2014, is quickly resolved, and the film soon goes back to exalting female bonding. Unlike “Show Me Love,” there’s no hint that any of the girls in “We Are the Best!” are lesbians. “ We A r e t h e B e s t ! ” e v o k e s

punksploitation films like Allan Moyle’s “T imes Square,” riot grrrl pioneer Kathleen Hanna’s favorite movie. It may have a tighter grasp on reality than “Times Square” — in which a teenage girl manages to get a job at a strip club where she doesn’t have to take her clothes off — but one senses a certain distance in Moodysson’s approach, as well. For one thing, his memories seem colored by nostalgia. “We Are the Best!” is the kind of film in which learning one song and surviving the taunts of male hecklers can end up seeming more triumphant than living out the entire career of ‘70s female glam-punk band the Runaways.

| May 28, 2014

May 28, 2014 | www.gaycitynews.com

MEDIA

Queer Black Men Getting Their Tens Collectible magazine celebrates cultural sway, rambunctious impatience of gay African-Americans

The creative collective Pink Rooster Studio launched the semi-annual magazine The Tenth in April.

BY MICHAEL LUONGO

he Tenth, experimental, collectible, and, at $40 an issue, expensive, is a new publication in town that aims to show gay black men in a new light. The creative collective Pink Rooster Studio’s Andre Jones, Khary Septh, and Kyle Banks are the driving forces, working with more than 80 contributors — including fashion designers, photographers, writers, models, and others. The first issue of the semi-annual magazine (thetenthzine. com) was launched in April with a party here in New York. Gay City News corresponded via email with Septh about the new project. MICHAEL LUONGO: Tell me more about the three of you at Pink Rooster behind the project. KHARY SEPTH: Each of us has for some time now worked in the fashion, film, and music industries, so quite naturally with Pink Rooster, our creative studio based out of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, we often find ourselves paired with clientele from those worlds. Collectively, we’ve appeared on Broadway, at Sundance, and have shown at Mercedes Benz Fashion Week. By joining our talents, we are able to offer our clients, which range from Swarovski Crystal to Sony Music, a one-stop creative shop. ML: What was the process for deciding to launch this magazine? KS: We decided to do an investiga-

THETENTHZINE.COM

quite a bit in our conversations about The Tenth because it places our work in historical context. What we're doing isn't necessarily new; it's just of its time. In Volume One, we talk with art insider Sur Rodney Sur and creative director Derek Jackson, who published Hungzinepapers years back, and we’re actually collaborating now with the kids of BDGRMMR, which is also a zine of black queer origins. Stylistically, we’re bedfellows with 429 and other glossy LGBT publications, but we’re a rather rambunctious, radical, and annoyed bunch ready to edge a little blackness into the larger conversation so we feel more aligned with those types of books.

Volume One features a spread set at the Alice C Plantation in Franklin, Louisiana.

tion of ourselves as black gay men and bring together others like us to do work that reflects our personal interests, not our commercial interests. What might we create if there was no dollar sign attached to it? Could we build a stronger community and engage in sharing resources in the process? Those were the honest goals. We know and work with a lot of kids doing indie publishing here in the city. And the truth is the white boys have an army of resources at their disposal to create this work. We wanted to build our own army. ML: What do you feel is missing in mainstream gay publications that The Tenth fulfills? KS: Black gays as seen in mainstream media tend to fit into the tiniest, most compartmentalized boxes — the homo thug, the flamboyant queen — but are hardly ever seen/ written as fully realized human beings as most of us indeed are. There are one or two examples to the contrary as we must pay homage to trailblazers like RuPaul, but we can’t expect Ru to carry all the black boys on his back, and I’m more than sure he doesn’t want to. We are indeed multi-dimensional, nuanced characters that take on many forms and faces, and although we’ve diverse talents and interests, we are all certainly linked through the shared experience of being black and gay. What we’ve learned in the process of making this work is that it takes time, energy, and care to find each other, as so many of us are working in isolation feeling

like the “only ones” in the room. But, if we can create a platform such as The Tenth, then we may perhaps be able to reach out and touch each other in a real way. ML: How did you go about selecting the models, photographers, writers, and others who would contribute? KS: We assorted a loose set of ideas and a small wish list of exceptional black men, some whom we knew personally as we are very much “in the know” here in New York, but most of whom we were not immediately connected to. We began reaching out and found a genuine interest in what we were trying to create, and the collaborators we initially worked with began referring us to other exceptional black gay boys and it took on a life of its own. By the close of it, we had over 80 contributors. And we know it’s not just about what’s happening on the coasts either. For Volume One, we connected with brothers in Chicago and Seattle and New Orleans and Detroit and hope to continue to explore the diversity of our culture in different areas of the country to get a very real look into what’s happening now in our little black gay utopia. ML: Were there other magazines or books that were models for this? One might think of Kevin Sessums’ recent collectible 429 magazine. KS: We actually credit Fire!! — the radical literary project by Langston Hughes, Richard Bruce Nugent, Wallace Thurman, and Zora Neale Hurston published during the Harlem Renaissance

ML: A striking aspect of this issue is the plantation photo spread and accompanying piece on homosexual love affairs between slave and master. Can you tell me more about their creation? KS: With the Alice C Plantation, located deep in the swamps of Franklin, Louisiana as the backdrop, we found ourselves immediately transported back to a time when we would have ourselves been slaves and it was an eye-opener. We sometimes think of ourselves as so far removed from the painful history of slavery in America — as so modern, so fashionable, so enlightened, so educated — but the truth is that with the right styling and set location, it became crystal clear to us what our lots in life would have been during those times. It was your color that determined it, and being able to connect to and feel the energy of the ancestors was amazing. The vastness of that plantation, which at one time supplied cotton and tobacco for the much of the region, and the thought of the number of enslaved Africans it must have taken to keep that machine running were, for us, a true wow moment. We also figured out that homosexuality was probably not as big of a deal as we might have thought, as the method of survival was surely priority number one. Homosexuality may just have been seen as “human nature” or “what you did,” but how could any attention have been paid to it, or judgments been passed, as we were all just trying to survive, to make it out of that awful place? Courtney Harvier directed “I Saw Africa On His Mind” around the love scene which we shot in Master’s bedroom. How bold of us to fuck in Master’s Bed without inviting him to the party? Elfred Pinkard offered an academic perspective about Master’s relationship to his male slaves in a very powerful essay entitled “Love Among The Shadows.” We only

TENTH, continued on p.40

| May 28, 2014

May 28, 2014 | www.gaycitynews.com

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| May 28, 2014

IN THE NOH, from p.28

little bit of that, and then really thought about who this woman was. She wants to go out and meet the love of her life and starts doing her hair and starts drinking as she’s doing her hair. She doesn’t quite finish it and goes out, and maybe forgets a shoe or something, a very sweet woman who probably lives with her mother. The years go by so quickly because you can fill your life with so many other things. I was 37 before I met my husband.” Finneran’s take on Miss Hannigan in “Annie” was a bold, unorthodox one, to say the least: “It was very dark. I terrified the children who came backstage, so I had to take them on a little tour to relax them. I saw that character as the oldest of 12 children, so she didn’t want to take care of one more. A burlesque dancer, but not a very good dancer or singer, and getting older. She needed a job and there were two options — either the red light district or this job she happens to get at an orphanage. I saw her with one foot out the door; any minute somebody’s gonna come and make her a movie star. Very complex psychologically, maybe too complex!” Up next is a TV series with Netflix, “with Sissy Spacek, Sam Shepard, Kyle Chandler, and the great Norbert Leo Butz plays my husband. It’s a mur der mystery family drama, and Norbert and I have so much fun offset. But it’s a drama, so we have to put a lid on it.”

If only to hear her awes o m e a capella “ H e l l o, Young Lovers,” or her lushly definitive “If He Walked Into My Life,” you must see the living goddess of song that is the phenomenal Leslie Uggams (on June 6-7). She replaced the announced Diahann Carroll in “On Golden Pond” in 2005 and I wondered if they called her to do similar duty on “A Raisin in the Sun.” “Listen,” she said, “some members of the cast said, ‘We thought they were gonna call you, and I said, ‘Well, they didn’t!’ [Chuckles.] I would like to do that role, but, you know what? I’m going to be doing ‘Gypsy’ at the University of Connecticut this summer. The ironic thing is that Arthur Laurents had wanted me to take it on the road after Bernadette Peters did it. Arthur was such a character. When I did ‘Hallelujah, Baby’ it was originally to have been Lena Horne, but she and Arthur had a falling out and she decided not to do it. “I always felt that Arthur would look at me, with his eyes going ‘Hmmm.’ I’d see him on and off through the years and he would say, ‘You’re getting better.’ “’Really, Arthur? Come on!’ “But when I did my first reading of ‘Stormy Weather,’ my Lena show, unbeknownst to me, he came and I blew him away. He wrote me the most beautiful

letter and you know he did not like everybody. I called him up and we had a long chat, and he said, ‘You have to do Lena,’ though he wasn’t crazy about the book.” That show is financed and ready to come into New York, “but we just need a theater. It’s hard today to get in there, but it’s ready to go.” On Frank Sinatra: “He was tough, which scared you at first, but if he thought you were talented he was spectacular. I did that TV special with him and on that day he wasn’t in a great mood. He believed in one take only and had a problem with Loretta Lynn, who didn’t know her stuff, and he had to do more than one take. He’d had it and I was taping right after her in this gorgeous Bob Mackie dress, nude on one side and black on the other. “They came to me in the dressing room and said, ‘Frank is not happy.’ ‘Oh no, this is my great chance!’ We were both walking out of our dressing rooms, and I said to him, ‘I heard you had a fabulous day!’ He looked at me and started laughing and then we were great. We got on the set and he looks at me and said, ‘Are you trying to seduce with that dress?’ and I wound up singing ‘The Lady is a Tramp’!”

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The luminous Kate Baldwin sang her lovely heart out at 54 on

May 15 in her show, “Sing Pretty, Don’t Fall Down.” I told her that her beautiful voice sounds even more so these days, richer, and she laughed, “I’m old now! Having a child definitely changes your voice. The big operatic sound that I always wanted in my 20s is easier now in my 30s. It really is a luxury and a wonderful surprise, those deeper, richer high notes become easier because you have this seasoning. I trained in opera but just loved musicals so much I wanted to belt.” Baldwin did get a chance to try out her more classical chops when Susan Stroman invited her and Marc Kudisch to workshop the new “Merry Widow” script by Jeremy Sams, which is coming to the Metropolitan Opera (with Kelli O’Hara as Valencienne). “They just wanted to get in a room and hear it, and I thought for a second, ‘This would be a really fun road to go down, but of course they have Renée Fleming!’” Baldwin will be doing Charlotte in “A Little Night Music” this summer at the Berkshire Theater Festival with her husband Graham Rowat as Carl-Magnus: “Penny Fuller is Madame Armfeldt, Gregg Edelman is Frederic, and opera singer Maureen O’Flynn, the real deal, is Desiree. I’m really looking forward to it — I do ‘The Miller’s Son’ in my show. Charlotte’s the best one, so chic and unhappy.” Contact David Noh at Inthenoh@aol. com, follow him on Twitter @in_the_noh, and check out his blog at http://nohway. wordpress.com/.

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MARRIAGE

Marriage Gala Focuses Attention on Bigger Goals Honorees Cathy Marino-Thomas, Mayor Bill de Blasio point to persistence of discrimination, homophobic violence BY PAUL SCHINDLER

ED REED/ OFFICE OF MAYOR BILL DE BLASIO

he news that same-sex marriage had begun in Oregon earlier in the day — as the result of a federal court ruling the state will not appeal — added an extra element of festiveness to Marriage Equality USA’s May 19 New York gala. And that was without the foreknowledge of a court ruling the following day ordering marriage equality in Pennsylvania, a decision that surprisingly is also not being appealed. But the event, held at Midtown’s Copacabana near Times Square, also highlighted the fact even on an occasion focused specifically on the goal of winning equal marriage rights, there was significant concern about the broader issue of what MEUSA executive director Brian Silva termed “lived equality.” Among the evening’s honorees was Mayor Bill de Blasio, awarded recognition as an “ally,” a term he said he was happy to earn. “This is such a noble fight, and one that we need to fight all over the country until it is won,” he said of the push for equal marriage rights. The mayor, however, quickly pivoted to other, more comprehensive concerns. “We are trying to create one city,” he said, noting that New York “has been a place where people didn’t always feel included.” Noting the persistence of discrimina-

Mayor Bill de Blasio, an honoree of the evening, with Marriage Equality USA executive director Brian Silva and another honoree, Cathy Marino-Thomas.

tion as well the spate of anti-LGBT violence that swept the city in the spring of 2013, de Blasio said the appropriate response is to “call it out at the moment of occurrence. Don’t ever let it be accepted.” Another honoree, Cathy-Marino Thomas, who will leave her longstanding position on the group’s board this summer, also integrated her discussion of marriage equality into bigger themes. Recalling her activism on the marriage issue, which dates to the late 1990s, she said, “It’s been an incredible 17 years. When we started this work, no one wanted to even entertain the possibility that we could have the right to marry.”

She singled out for praise her friend Edie Windsor, the successful plaintiff in last year’s Defense of Marriage lawsuit at the Supreme Court, for “suing the shit out of the US government.” Marino-Thomas moved on from there to a larger message. “Beyond marriage is a much bigger victory to be won: comprehensive federal civil rights legislation,” she said. “LGBT Americans deserve the legal protections that are given to every other American. Now is the time to achieve full equality in all 50 states by adding four words, four simple, inclusive words — sexual orientation and gender identity — to the

The Paul Rapoport Foundation, established in 1987 with a $7.5 million endowment, held a May 14 farewell reception at Chelsea’s Dream Hotel in recognition of its decision — made back in 2009 — to disburse the remaining grants it can support by the end of June and cease operations entirely by next year. Rapoport, an attorney who was a co-founder of both the LGBT Community Center and Gay Men’s Health Crisis, died of AIDS in 1987 at the age of 47. Since the foundation was established under the terms of his will, it has distributed grants to roughly 200 LGBT and HIV/ AIDS organizations totaling nearly $17 million, though the final dollar figure will not be known until early next year. In recent years, the foundation placed priorities on support of groups within transgender and people of color communities as well as those serving youth. The decision to spend down its resources, the group explained, reflects its desire to make the greatest contribution possible in an environment where many community organizations are suffering the continued effects of the economic slowdown that began in 2008. In its 2009 announcement of the timeframe for winding down operations, the group stated, “Given the current financial crisis, the foundation has been searching for a way to balance the needs of the LGBT communities — which are becoming more acute amidst the economic tumult — with its strengths as a funder and its own fiscal situation… the foundation’s board and staff

DONNA ACETO

MAXIMIZING IMMEDIATE IMPACT, RAPOPORT FOUNDATION SPENDS DOWN ENDOWMENT

Paul Rapoport Foundation executive director Jane Schwartz (right) is joined by the group’s program director Ona Winet, David Stern, the executive director of Equal Justice Works, a foundation grantee, Eugene Chen, Equal Justice Works’ 2014 Paul Rapoport Fellow, and Alisa Goodwin, the manager of fellowships and advancement at Equal Justice Works.

unanimously agreed to seek to maximize its impact over the next five years by dramatically increasing its funding levels in the near-term and spending-out by 2015.” — Donna Aceto and Paul Schindler

Civil Rights Act of 1964.” Then in a jab at the long-stalled Employment NonDiscrimination Act, the key agenda item for LGBT lobbying efforts in Washington, Marino-Thomas said, “Don't be fooled — ENDA doesn't do that. ENDA is not equal, and together we can pledge to make a better bill.” Her comments reflected growing unease, both among grassroots activists and legal advocates, about ENDA’s shortcomings — not only in its exclusive focus on employment, in contrast to the broader protections in housing, public accommodations, and other areas afforded by the 1964 Act, but also in the scope of the religious exemptions it includes. Evan Wolfson, an attorney who heads up Freedom to Marry, has characterized the exemption language as “a license to discriminate.” In her critique of ENDA, MarinoThomas echoed the feelings of activists who gathered outside the Copacabana — and also outside a Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network fundraiser the same evening — handing out flyers headlined “ENDA IS NOT EQUAL!” The activists were affiliated with Queer Nation and the American Equality Bill Project, a group that seeks to add sexual orientation and gender identity protections to the 1964 Act, which already provides protections based on race, ethnicity, and gender, among other categories. In his remarks, Silva did not specifically address the ENDA controversy, but he did make clear that the fight for equality extends beyond securing marriage rights. Talking about the desire to travel with his family to North Carolina and have their dignity recognized, he said, “Our goal is lived equality.” Other honorees included the Imperial Court of New York, which has raised millions of dollars on behalf of a broad range of LGBT groups since its founding in 1986, and Love & Pride, an online retailer that offers a diverse line of jewelry products and accessories suited to LGBT people and couples and donates a portion of its sales to community organizations. The event drew a crowd of roughly 200 and raised $60,000. With Oregon and Pennsylvania, marriage equality is now the law in 19 states and the District of Columbia, which comprise 44 percent of the US population. In the past five months, federal courts have struck down curbs on equal marriage rights in nine additional states, which have filed appeals, and a state court in Arkansas recently threw out that state’s ban on gay marriage, a decision being appealed to the State Supreme Court.

| May 28, 2014

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Like the other trial judges ruling in marriage equality cases over the past several months, Jones rose to an eloquent conclusion. “The issue we resolve today is a divisive one,” he wrote. “Some of our citizens are made deeply uncomfortable by the notion of same-sex marriage. However, that same-sex marriage causes discomfort in some does not makes its prohibition constitutional. Nor can past tradition trump the bedrock constitutional guarantees of due process and equal protection. Were that not so, ours would still be a racially segregated nation

IDAHO, from p.15

scrutiny because it abridges a right frequently referred to by the Supreme Court as fundamental: the right to marry. The Idaho lawsuit was no more about the right to same-sex marriage, she concluded, than the 1967 challenge to Virginia’s miscegenation law was about the “right to interracial marriage.” Mentioning also cases about the right of prisoners and dead-beat dads to marry, she wrote, “Even in cases with such vastly different facts, the Supreme Court has consistently upheld the right to marry, as opposed to a sub-right tied to the facts of the case.” She also wrote, “The Supreme Court’s marriage cases demonstrate that the right to marry is an individual right, belonging to all. If every individual enjoys a constitutional right to marry, what is the substance of that right for gay and lesbian individuals who cannot marry their partners of choice? Traditional man-woman marriage is no answer, as this would suggest that gays and lesbians can switch off their sexual orientation and choose to be content with the universe of opposite-sex partners approved by the State.”

UTAH, from p.17

bias against retroactive application of new legal rulings. The Supreme Court’s stay, issued without any explanation, he pointed out, would not be deemed to have any sort of retroactive effect. Had that been its intention, the high court could have said so. Under Utah judicial precedents, Kimball concluded, from the time Judge Shelby issued his ruling until the time the Supreme Court stayed it pending appeal, it was legal for samesex couples to marry there, and as soon as any such marriage was per formed, the couple had vested rights that could not be abridged by the state. Last year’s Supreme Court ruling in the Defense of Marriage Act case, he noted,

May 28, 2014 | www.gaycitynews.com according to the now rightfully discarded doctrine of ‘separate but equal.’” Citing the Supreme Court’s key ruling against racial segregation, the 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, he continued, “In the sixty years since Brown was decided, ‘separate’ has thankfully faded into history, and only ‘equal’ remains. Similarly, in future generations the label same-sex marriage will be abandoned, to be replaced simply by marriage. We are a better people than what these laws represent, and it is time to discard them into the ash heap of history.” Adding together rulings on the right to marry and those dealing just with marriage recognition from out of state,

Jones’ decision was the 15th consecutive favorable ruling by a state or federal court since last June’s Supreme Court decision in Edie Windsor’s challenge to DOMA. No court has rejected such a claim, although most of the trial court decisions are on hold due to stays pending appeal. In New Mexico and New Jersey, the states’ highest courts last year agreed with their trial courts, and in Oregon the state announced in advance it would not appeal a pro-equality ruling, which was issued on May 19. (A federal ruling in Illinois merely sped up implementation of a marriage equality statute already approved there — and only in Cook County, at that.)

No federal appeals court has yet ruled that the 14th Amendment guarantees gay and lesbian people the right to marry the partner of their choice. The US Courts of Appeals for the 10th Circuit in Denver and the Fourth Circuit in Richmond have heard arguments on cases arising from Utah, Oklahoma, and Virginia, and other circuits will hear arguments soon from other states. While there will likely be more federal trial court decisions in the months ahead — with cases pending in all but one of the remaining states that ban same-sex marriage — the next truly significant development will be the first court of appeals ruling, which could come at any time.

Dale carefully reviewed all of the state’s justifications for its ban and found them wanting. The argument that the ban advanced the welfare of children struck her as “so attenuated that it is not rational, let alone exceedingly persuasive.” She rejected outlier “scientific” publications that argue children need to have parents of both sexes in order to thrive, writing, “The best that can be said for [the state’s] position is that some social scientists quibble with the prevailing consensus that the children of same-sex parents, on average, fare no better or worse than the children of opposite-sex parents.” But even that argument is irrelevant, Dale noted, saying the real issue was whether there is any “logical link between child welfare and Idaho’s wholesale prohibition of same-sex marriage.” In fact, she pointed out, denying same-sex couples the right to marry disregards “the welfare of children with same-sex parents.” Dale also dismissed arguments that banning same-sex marriage somehow encourages heterosexuals to procreate responsibly by raising their children in married households, that federalism leaves the question of who can marry solely in the hands of states, or that the state’s policy was necessary to “accom-

modate religious freedom.” Quoting from the federal district court’s marriage equality opinion in the Utah case, Dale wrote, “By recognizing the right to marry a partner of the same sex, the State allows these groups the freedom to practice their religious beliefs without mandating that other groups must adopt similar practices.” As so many of the other federal judges who have ruled in favor of marriage equality have done, Dale quoted from Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who, in dissent, warned that the high court’s 2003 sodomy ruling would open up constitutional claims to same-sex couples’ right to marry. Idaho argued that the discriminatory effects of denying their right to marry are “merely incidental… [to] efforts to preserve Idaho’s traditional civil marriage institution.” In that vein, Scalia had argued, “But ‘preserving the traditional institution’ is just a kinder way of describing the State’s moral disapproval of samesex couples” — disapproval that the sodomy ruling found an impermissible ground for discrimination. “Idaho’s Marriage Laws,” Dale concluded, “deny same-sex couples the economic, practical, emotional, and spiritual benefits of marriage, relegating each couple to a stigmatized, sec-

ond-class status. Plaintiffs suffer these injuries not because they are unqualified to marry, start a family, or grow old together, but because of who they are and whom they love.” The Ninth Circuit already has another marriage equality appeal pending, in the unsuccessful challenge to Nevada’s marriage ban decided prior to last summer’s DOMA ruling. Arguments in that case, originally scheduled for April, were postponed as the circuit took up the request of one judge that the heightened scrutiny finding in the SmithKline case be reviewed by the entire circuit. Hurwitz’s reliance on the SmithKline precedent in his concurring opinion on the Idaho stay strongly suggests the circuit has decided not to reconsider that case, so Nevada is therefore also expected to proceed now to oral arguments. Governor Otto’s appeal in Idaho will likely be heard by the same appellate panel. Four lesbian couples brought the Idaho lawsuit — Susan Latta and Traci Ehlers, Lori Watsen and Sharene Watsen, Shelia Robertson and Andrea Altmayer, and Amber Beierle and Rachael Robertson. They are represented by Boise attorneys Deborah A. Ferguson and Craig Durham and the National Center for Lesbian Rights.

“held that divesting ‘married same-sex couples of the duties and responsibilities that are an essential part of married life’ violates due process.” As well, Utah’s constitutional and statutory same-sex marriage bans, Kimball found, are stated in the present tense and make no mention of retroactive application. The state argued it was not engaged in retroactive application of the marriage ban, the judge wrote, “because the laws were enacted long before the Plaintiffs entered into their marriages. However, this argument completely ignores the change in the law that occurred. The marriage bans became legal nullities when [Shelby’s] decision was issued and were not reinstated until the Stay Order.”

Kimball also found that Utah law defines a retroactive application of a law as anything that ‘takes away or impairs vested rights acquired under existing laws in respect to transactions or considerations already past.’ Under this definition, the State’s application of the marriage bans to place Plaintiffs’ marriages ‘on hold’ necessarily ‘takes away or impairs vested rights acquired under existing law.’” Significantly, even if the Shelby decision is eventually reversed, Kimball concluded, the marriages that were performed would remain valid under the vested rights theory and the state’s strong policy against retroactive application of law. Responding to the request by Utah’s lawyers that his preliminary injunction

be stayed to allow for an appeal to the 10th Circuit, Kimball concluded “the State has not met its burden of establishing the factors required for a stay pending appeal” — including the eventual likelihood of success and the lack of “irreparable harms” for the plaintiff couples — but decided to exercise discretion to grant to the state a “limited 21-day stay” to pursue an emergency motion for a stay. However, unless the 10th Circuit responds favorably to the state’s request, Kimball’s order will go into effect. Kimball, who was appointed to the federal district court by President Bill Clinton in 1997, teaches at Brigham Young University Law School and has held leadership positions in the Mormon Church.

| May 28, 2014

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Playwright Terrence McNally and actress Tyne Daly.

TENTH, from p.32

ever consider Master and his forced relationships with the enslaved women during this time, but to explore the idea that Master also had eyes for the males that were subject to his rule was new for us. But the more we thought about it, why wouldn’t Master have been turned on by the striking faces, strong backs, sweaty brows, and bulging manhoods of the African men he enslaved? ML: There are also voices from the African diaspora beyond African-American, like the story “Masisi” by Alex Breuggeman about being gay and Haitian. KS: The experience of the black gay man is a global one. We are aware of the fact that although we may be afforded luxuries here in America — well, luxuries by the standards of the conditions many of our brothers are living under in most

parts of the world — we are united in our goals for more access to education, capital, visibility, equal rights, and all of those other things that no man should be denied. If a gay kid in the Caribbean can’t come out because he believes the culture there won’t allow it, perhaps in reading Alex Breuggeman’s piece about being gay and Haitian, or Mateo Bijoux’s story about being gay from Jamaica and then coming to the States to make it, we can share some of this experience and do some good service.

What’s notable, however, is that as we were working on the piece, we knew we wanted to include out white boys, because we’re over the fetishizing of straight boys that so much of the mainstream gay media indulges in. And there was no shortage — Zachary Quinto, Cheyenne Jackson, Matt Bomer, Marc Jacobs, Neil Patrick Harris and his yummy BF. Then we thought, “What if we had to do this same collage with out black boys?” Silence. So it’s the opposite side of the piece — the Paul Ryans, the Bill O’Reillys, the Kirk Camerons, the George Zimmermans — that represent institutional racism and homophobia that keep so many of our people marginalized and living in communities that don’t allow us to be out and proud. White boys still have all of the power and options, and that’s going to have to change. But even though Elvis was a big ‘ol racist, we still would have fucked him in his “Hound Dog” days. He was a total

ML: Tell me more about creating the Fuck White Boys layout – contrasting men you literally want to fuck and others you want to fuck off, like Paul Ryan, the KKK, and Elvis Presley? KS: We’re gay. And more than anything, we appreciate men. Our tastes aren’t limited to any one flavor and, well, who the hell doesn’t want to fuck Jared Leto or Colby Keller?

Khary Septh explains that The Tenth found inspiration in Fire!!, a radical literary publication from the Harlem Renaissance.

THETENTHZINE.COM

Actor Bobby Steggert sings “You’ll Never Walk Alone”

MICHAEL SHIOREY

Mayor Bill de Blasio in an unannounced appearance at the AIDS Walk.

Despite controversy over whether PrEP users will be consistent in their use of the drugs, the approach was endorsed two weeks ago by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for people at high risk of infection. It is also a key component of a plan endorsed by the Cuomo administration and under review by the de Blasio administration for ending AIDS in New York by 2020. Mayor Bill de Blasio made an unannounced appearance to thank GMHC and the walkers. “This work is so important,” the mayor said. “This is one of those things a citizen can do to change things. Sometimes people drift away, but you haven’t let that happen. Because you haven’t stopped fighting.” “Mothers and Sons” playwright Terrence McNally and its costars Tyne Daly and Bobby Steggert were among the many notable participants at the opening ceremony. “I’m always startled when I’m asked why I chose to write about AIDS. There was no choice,” McNally said. He added that “each of us here, in our own way, is writing about AIDS.” Steggert closed the ceremony by singing “You’ll Never Walk Alone” from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Carousel.” Other notable participants included Randy Fenoli (“Say Yes to the Dress”), Lana Parilla (“Once Upon a Time”), Nick Wechsler (“Revenge”), and Dot-Marie Jones (“Glee”). The Walk came at a critical moment for the agency, when a lengthy search to replace former CEO Marjorie Hill, who left late last summer, finally resulted in Louie’s appointment. Having served most recently as chief operating officer at Harlem United, another AIDS service group, Louie, upon his appointment, immediately faced allegations published on DNAinfo. com that he was at the center of a fraud scheme to “rig” a board election at the gay sports club Front Runners to keep fundraising dollars flowing to Harlem United. Despite the charges, many of the facts in that controversy remain unclear. The turnout and funds raised in this year’s AIDS Walk continue a declining trend dating back three years. The 2011 Walk raised almost $6.5 million and drew more than 40,000 participants. — Michael Shirey and Paul Schindler

As many as 35,000 walkers helped raise more than $5.1 million dollars for the 29th annual AIDS Walk New York. The 10-kilometer event supports the work of Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC) and other local AIDS service organizations. Janet Weinberg, the group’s interim chief executive officer, in remarks during the opening ceremony, highlighted the services GMHC provides, including serving hot meals, free HIV/ AIDS testing, and youth prevention and education. “You are the people who keep us going strong,” Weinberg said. “GMHC will never stop advocating for all people affected by HIV. We can be so much more helpful today than when we started.” Kelsey Louie, GMHC’s new chief executive officer, due to take the reins in early June, spoke of this being an historic moment in HIV/ AIDS history. He credited what he called “landmark progress” to the availability of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), a regimen of antiAIDS drugs for HIV-negative people to take to avoid infection.

DONNA ACETO

Kelsey Louie, GMHC’s incoming chief, speaks at the opening ceremony.

MICHAEL SHIREY

AT KEY CROSSROADS, GMHC RAISES $5.1 MM AT AIDS WALK

| May 28, 2014

MEDIA CIRCUS, from p.20

Until a transwoman stands a snowball’s chance in hell of becoming president of the United States, the argument that private lives are — or should be — divorced from public judgment is a pernicious, purposefully ignorant lie that protects the status quo. Andrew Sullivan, Conor Friedersdor f, and the sanctimonious signatories of that repellent statement can kiss my illiberal ass.

And, speaking of sanctimony, one might conclude from

recent media coverage that the academic tradition known as “commencement” — which in fact signals a blessed finale — is under grave threat from a rabid horde of student thought police. The Roster of the Rejected is most impressive. Condoleezza Rice turned away by Rutgers. Christine Lagarde, head of the International Monetary Fund, smacked out of Smith. Robert J. Birgeneau, former president of the University of California, Berkeley, hammered out of town by my own alma mater, Haverford. And Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a fierce critic of Islam, booted from Brandeis. (What exactly is a “fierce critic of Islam,” anyway? Is she like a “fierce critic of Christianity?” And were any of Christianity’s most vocal detractors offered honorary degrees at major universities this year? No? Well I’ll be damned.) The New York Times’ Timothy Egan led the charge against what he called student “censors.” “Give me a brisk, strong, witty defense of something I disagree with over a tired replay of platitudes,” Egan congratulated himself. “It matters little if the speaker is a convict or a seminarian, a statesman or a comedian.” Nice sentiment, Tim, but I doubt you’d applaud Mark David Chapman, John Lennon’s assassin, being given

FINANCE, from p.9

have to file as single in that other state if they earn enough to trigger the requirement to pay income tax. “I have many clients who have K1s,” Cowhey said referring to the IRS document used to report income earned in a business partnership. LGBT legal groups, most of which opposed suing for marriage in federal court as recently as 2009, are cur rently engaged in a race to get back to the Supreme Court for what they hope will be a ruling establishing marriage in all 50 states. Currently, there are marriage lawsuits in every state that bars recognition of same-sex marriages except North Dakota, which is expected to see a lawsuit soon. Efforts to enact marriage with votes in state legislatures and by ballot initiative continue

an honorary degree by Notre Dame. Michael Alig at the New School? In point of fact, students scarcely forced any of these people away from their respective podiums. Each one of them bowed out on their own. Yes, in all cases, a band of students threatened to protest these fine figures’ appearances on the platform, but the objects of their wrath all chickened out themselves. I have a question for Egan and the many finger-waggers so upset by students’ proposed political actions: Have these four speakers never before faced an audience that included hostile people? Are their egos so easily bruised by some students — and maybe even a few faculty — standing silently with their backs to the dais? I was loudly booed while giving my commencement address in high school, and it was one of the proudest moments of my life. At 17, I was braver than a former secretary of State, who had no hesitation about taking on foes when they were halfway around the world and wildly outmatched militarily. At issue for us is this: Since when has nonviolent protest not served the interests of the LGBT community? The Gay Activists Alliance used zaps in the early 1970s to make their points, and sometimes they weren’t even entirely nonviolent. ACT UP was scarcely polite to public officials from Ed Koch to Jesse Helms. They’re all heroes now — to us, anyway. Had these brave protestors simply listened politely to people whose ideas they despised — well, I wouldn’t be married to the man I love, there wouldn’t be a lesbian US senator, Ellen DeGeneres would still be closeted, there’d be no “Brokeback Mountain.” The list of hard-earned freedoms is endless, and we have politically incorrect rudeness to thank for it. Follow @edsikov on Twitter.

as well. The disparate tax treatment, among other penalties, of gay and lesbian marriages and the resulting financial burden it places on married gay and lesbian couples will continue as long as some states do not recognize those unions. “This is actually pretty complex and will vary state to state,” Andrew Sherman, a senior vice president and benefits consultant at Segal Consulting, a Boston firm, wrote in an email. “And remember that not all states have income tax. And some states have income tax that is directly based on federal income tax, and others do not… Our advice to clients is that they really need to check with the tax authority in each ‘non-recognition state,’ on a state by state basis. (And know that all of this is in flux.)”

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Queens Pride, which hosts its big event on Jun.1, is joined by Brooklyn Pride, where the festivities take place on Jun. 14; NYCPride, which hosts the Manhattan parade on Jun.29; the LGBTQ Center of the Bronx, which holds its annual gathering on Jul. 19; the Staten Island LGBT Center, where Pride takes place on Jul. 12; and OutAstoria for a Pre-Pride Party to support the efforts of the AIDS Center of Queens. Studio Square, 35-33 36th St. at 36th Ave., Astoria. May 29, 6-9 p.m. There are two-for-one drinks until 7, and a $10 donation to ACQC gets you a free drink. The evening includes a performance by Haus of Mimosa. More information at queenspride.org.

The Bi Writers Association holds its annual celebration of work by bisexual writers, combining the second annual Bisexual Book Awards Ceremony with Bi Lines VII, an annual program of multi-arts readings. The readings, including many of the award finalists, will represent one of the most diverse programs in Bi Lines history — across ethnicity, age, gender, and genre of book — and precede the awards themselves. Sheela Lambert hosts a program that includes work from Manil Suri, Cecilia Tan, J.R. Yussuf, Bushra Rehman, Marina Peralta, Jean Roberta, Charles “Zan” Christensen, and Lena Chandhok, and live music by Michael David Gordon. Westbeth Community Room, 55 Bethune St. at Washington St. May 31, 6:30-10 p.m. Tickets are $12 at the door, but seating is limited. Afterparty, with free admission, follows at Café Gitane at the Jane Hotel, 113 Jane St., btwn. Washington & West Sts. More information at biwriters.org.

BOOKS A Feminist Twist on Hillbilly Noir

NIGHTLIFE How the Sausage Is Made

In “Within between,” John Jasperse’s newest evening length worth, the choreographer aims to both embrace and resist the habits of his own history, creating a cross-pollination or catalytic mating of sensibilities. “Within between” includes an original commissioned score by composer Jonathan Bepler, which will be performed live by musicians Mick Barr, Megan Schubert, and Jonathan Bepler. Featured dancers include Maggie Cloud, Simon Courchel, Burr Johnson. and Stuart Singer. New York Live Arts, 219 W. 19th St. May 29-31, 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $15-$30 at newyorklivearts.org or 212-924-0077. On May 28, 6:30 p.m., Jasperse engages in a pre-performance with the piece’s dramaturg Ariel Osterweis. On May 29, there is a post-performance discussion moderated by Tere O’Connor.

FRI.MAY.30

The Immigration Social Action Group hosts the sixth annual LGBT Immigrant Heritage Fair & Cultural Event, which provides free opportunities for LGBT immigrants of all ages to access more in-depth knowledge in person, meet providers, gain resources, network with other members, and receive the support they need most, all in the same place. LGBT Community Center, 208 W. 13th St. May 29, 5-9 p.m. For more information, contact Heidi Peck at hpeck@gaycenter.org.

BGSQD.COM

FILM Remembering Stonewall

Harlem artist Diego Vela opens his exhibition “Delicate Identity,” which explores identity in relation to what is considered to be the norm and what is considered to be beautiful in representations of the human body that range from the obviously sexual to the tormented physiologically. Bureau of General Services — Queer Division, 83A Hester St., btwn. Orchard & Allen Sts. Opening reception on May 29, 6-9 p.m. Through Jul. 6. More information at contact@bgsqd.com.

CABARET Isle of Klezbos

The all-women sextet Isle of Klezbos, which brings the same versatile, eclectic spins to klezmer music that its parent ensemble Metropolitan Klezmer does, returns to a Lower East Side post-modern listening

SAT.MAY.31

BOOKS Writings by the Bisexual Community

DANCE The Latest from John Jasperse

Ozarks author Nancy Allen reads from her debut novel, “The Code of the Hills,” a courtroom drama set in the Missouri Ozarks and featuring an ambitious young prosecutor who battles for justice in a highprofile incest case. Bluestockings, 172 Allen St., btwn. Stanton & Rivington Sts. May 29, 7 p.m. More information at bluestockings.com

GALLERY Who We Are

(BAAD!). To close the month long event, Angela's Pulse and Urban Bush Women present “Dancing While Black: Collective(s) Action,” featuring choreographer and dancer Paloma McGregor, Rashida Bumbray/ Dance Diaspora Collective , Ebony Noelle Golden/ The Body Ecology Performance Ensemble, and Adia Whitaker/ Ase Dance Theater Collective. BAAD!, 2474 Westchester Ave. at Blondell Ave., Westchester Sq. May 30-31, 8 p.m. Tickets are $20 at baadbronx.org.

In honor of the Stonewall Rebellion’s 45th anniversary and 30 years Heritage of Pride began producing Manhattan’s week of Pride activities, NYC Pride will host a screening and panel discussion of the groundbreaking PBS American Experience documentary film “Stonewall Uprising.” The 2010 film, based on David Carter’s classic “Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Rights Movement” depicts the struggle between the police, the gay, lesbian, and transgender bar patrons, and the Mafia, which controlled the bar and many other queer watering holes around town. St. John’s Lutheran Church, 81 Christopher St., btwn. Seventh Ave. S. & Bleecker Sts. May 30, 6 p.m. refreshments, 7 screening, 8:30 discussion. Free. For more information contact communityrelations@ nycpride.org. or call 212-807-7433.

DANCE Boogie Down in the Bronx “The Boogie Down Dance Series” is an annual spring offering of the Bronx Academy of Art & Dance

Party maven Daniel Nardicio and porn mogul Owen Hawk debut their Sausage Factory, a one-nightonly, clothing-optional love fest at an exclusive Hells Kitchen club. Performers include Hans Berlin, amidst a cavalcade of hot guys. 250 W. 40th St., fourth fl. May 31, 11p.m. Tickets are $25 at danielnardicio.com

SUN.JUN.1

PRIDE The First to Step Off

Queens kicks off the summer season of Pride celebrations with its annual parade and multicultural festival. The parade kicks off on Jun. 1, noon, from 37th Ave. & 85th St., proceeding to 75th St. The grand marshals are the entire LGBT caucus of the City Council — Councilmembers Daniel Dromm, Corey Johnson, Carlos Menchaca, Rosie Mendez, and Ritchie Torres and Majority Leader Jimmy Van Bramer — longtime activist Melissa Sklarz, and Chutney Pride. The festival also begins at noon, on 37th Rd., btwn. 74th & 75th St., and runs until 6 p.m. More information at queenspride.org.

BOOKS The Legacy of Grief

Victori Noe, the author of a series of books about the deaths of friends and the grief that accompanies them, reads from and sign the second in the series, “Friend Grief and AIDS: Thirty Years of Burying Our Friends.” Bureau of General Services — Queer Division, 83A Hester St., btwn. Orchard & Allen Sts. Jun. 1, 7-9 p.m. More information at contact@bgsqd.com.

SUN.JUN.1, continued on p.43

| May 28, 2014 SUN.JUN.1, from p.42

ADVOCACY Women Who Inspire Girls to Write

CABARET The Talented Ms. Ripley

MON.JUN.2

ADVOCACY Supporting Our Health Center

“Roar” is the Callen-Lorde Community Health Center’s annual summer party, which includes food, drinks, arts and crafts for the young, facing painting, and performances by Stomp as well as by sea lions. Sea Lions? Wha? Oh, the event is held at the Central Park Zoo, enter at 64th St. & Fifth Ave. Jun. 2, 6-9 p.m. Tickets begin at $85 at callen-lorde.org.

WED.JUNE.4

PERFORMANCE No Cover

Lauren Molina (“Marry Me a Little,” “Sweeney Todd,” “Rock of Ages”) and Nick Cearley (“All Shook Up”) became YouTube sensations when they burst on the nightlife scene as the Skivvies, an undie-rock, comedy-pop duo. They don't just strip down their musical arrangements, they literally strip down to their underwear to perform their distinctive mashups and eccentric originals for cello and ukulele, with touches of glockenspiel, melodica, and a surprising array of under-used instruments. 54 Below, 254 W. 54th St. Jun. 4, Jul. 1, 9:30 p.m.; Jun. 20, Jul. 26, 11 p.m. Actually, there is a cover — $30-$40 at 54below.com — and there’s a $25 food & drink minimum.

TUE.JUN.3

LADY BUNNY.NET

BOOKS Extreme Statements from Fran Lebowitz

Fran Lebowitz, a longtime purveyor of urban cool, witty chronicler of the “me decade” (remember 1978’s “Metropolitan Life” and 1981’s “Social Studies”), and cultural satirist who remains one of the foremost advocates of the Extreme Statement, appears at the Poetry Project in conversation with poet Ariel Goldberg. Lebowitz will offer insights on gender, race, gay rights, and the media as well as her own pet peeves — including celebrity culture, tourists, and strollers. Sanctuary of St. Marks Church, 131 E. 10th St. June 4, 8:30 p.m. Admission is $10 at poetryproject.org. More information at AQ@poetryproject.org or 212-674-0910.

CABARET The Lady Is a Camp

BOOKS Post-Gay

LESLIEUGGAMS.COM

Girls Write Now honors women who inspire the work of the group and those it seeks to serve. This year’s awardees include attorney Roberta Kaplan, who represented Edie Windsor in last year’s landmark and successful Defense of Marriage Act challenge at the Supreme Court; iconic feminist Gloria Steinem, who recently turned 80; and Dawn Davis, the publisher of 37 Ink, an imprint of the Atria Publishing Group. The evening includes readings by mentees of the group, and the premiere of a music video songwriter Suzzy Roche produced for a song she co-wrote with several Girls Write Now mentees about Malala Yousafzai, the heroic Pakistani teenager whose advocacy for girls’ education almost cost her life at the hands of the Taliban. Tanzina Vega of the New York Times is the emcee. The Bowery Hotel, 335 Bowery at Great Jones St. Jun. 3, 6-9 p.m. Tickets begin at $175 at girlswritenow.org/ awards2014.

Following her recent sold out appearances, Tony winner Alice Ripley returns with a brand new show at 54 Below. In “Alice Imagines,” the star of Broadway's “Next to Normal,” “Sunset Boulevard,” “The Who's Tommy,” “Side Show,” and “The Rocky Horror Show” explores the roles she'd love to play and why. It promises to be a night of pure magic from one the Great White Way's favorite stars. 54 Below, 254 W. 54th St., Jun. 1, 9:30 p.m. The cover charge is $35-45 at 54below.com, with a $25 food and beverage minimum.

One of New York’s most beloved drag performers is back with “Clown Syndrome,” an all-new show of song, “dance,” and all the raunchy humor that has made Lady Bunny a popular entertainer for three decades. Expect oodles of new song parodies, from crass to clever, as the songstress re-works hits by artists as diverse as Prince, Adele, Katy Perry, Daft Punk, Bobbie Gentry, and even Frank Sinatra. Escuelita Night Club, 301 W. 39th St. Jun. 3, 11, 18 & 25, 8 p.m. Tickets are $20 at brownpapertickets.com/ event/629583 or at the door.

FRI.JUN.6

CABARET Hallelujah, She’s Back

SAT.JUN.7

BOOKS Yesterdays, Tomorrows in the 212

As part of the Brooklyn Museum’s monthly First Saturday program, coordinators from the Park Slope-based Lesbian Herstory Archives will celebrate the group’s 40th anniversary and LGBT lives generally. Founder Deb Edel is joined by coordinators Rachel Corbman, Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz, and Flavia Rando to talk about the growth and survival of the archives, made possible through the hard work and participation of many communities. Materials from the Archives, the most comprehensive collection dedicated to lesbian lives in the world, will be presented. Brooklyn Museum of Art, Sackler Center for Feminist Art, 200 Eastern Pkwy. near Grand Army Plaza Jun. 7, 8:30 p.m. Free admission. More information at lesbianherstoryarchives.org, lesbianherstoryarchives@gmail.com, or 718-768- 3959.

MON.JUN.9

FILM Summer of Drag

WED.JUN.11

PERFORMANCE Queer Theory, Queer Bodies Queer theory meets the queer body in a series of workshops that draw on various performative interests and inspirations of the teaching artists who lead them. Bureau of General Services — Queer Division, 83A Hester St., btwn. Orchard & Allen Sts. The workshops are led by: Luke George (Jun. 11, 7-9 p.m.); Mariana Valencia (Jun. 12, 11 a.m.-1 p.m.); Jaamil Kosoko (Jun. 12, 7-9 p.m.); Tatyana Tenenbaum (Jun. 13, 11 a.m.-1 p.m.); iele paloumpis (Jun. 13, 7-9 p.m.); and Marissa Perel (Jun. 14, 11 a.m.-1 p.m.). For more information, contact whatisqueerperformance@gmail.com.

Kenneth Walsh, creator of the famed Kenneth in the 212 blog, appears in conversation with Gore Vidal biographer and Daily Beast writer and editor Tim Teeman to discuss Walsh’s memoir “Wasn’t Tomorrow Wonderful?” Bureau of General Services — Queer Division, 83A Hester St., btwn. Orchard & Allen Sts. Jun. 7, 7-9 p.m. More information at contact@bgsqd. com.

SAT.JUN.14

PRIDE The Party Arrives in Brooklyn

THU.JUN.5

Dennis Altman appears in conversation with renowned novelist and writer Christopher Bram to discuss Altman’s latest book, “The End of the Homosexual?” Bureau of General Services — Queer Division, 83A Hester St., btwn. Orchard & Allen Sts. Jun. 5, 7-9 p.m. More information at contact@ bgsqd.com.

ACTIVISM Forty Years of Chronicling Lesbian Lives

Queer/ Art/ Film and the IFC Center’s “Summer of Drag,” featuring films selected by legendary New York drag artists — Lypsinka, Barbara Herr, the queens of Brooklyn’s BUSHWIG festival, and Murray Hill — continues with Herr hosting the Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s classic “Suddenly, Last Summer” (1959), based on Tennessee Williams’ Gothic mix of cannibalism, homosexuality, and lobotomy and starring Elizabeth Taylor, Katharine Hepburn, and Montgomery Clift. IFC Center, 323 Sixth Ave. at W. Third St. Jun. 9, 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $14, with a series pass at $50 at queerartfilm.com.

Broadway legend Leslie Uggams, whose career in television, film, and Broadway spans more than half a century, returns to 54 Below for two performances. Best known for her Tony Award-winning role in “Hallelujah, Baby!” as well as the groundbreaking miniseries “Roots,” Uggams is, in the words of Gay City News’ David Noh, a “goddess of song… you must see.” 54 Below, 254 W. 54th St. Jun. 6-7, 8:30 p.m. The cover charge is $40-50 at 54below.com and there’s $25 food and beverage minimum.

BGSQD.COM

Brooklyn Pride kicks off at 10 a.m. on Jun. 14, with a 5k run in Prospect Park, starting near BartelPritchard Sq. entrance to the park at 15th St. & Prospect Park W. Registration is $30 at brooklynpride.org or $35 on the day of the run. Nearby, on Park Slope’s Fifth Ave., btwn. Third & Ninth Sts., the annual street festival runs from 11 a.m.-5 p.m. At twilight, the city’s only evening Pride Parade begins at Fifth Ave. at Lincoln Pl. and proceeds south. The grand marshals this year are out gay City Councilman Carlos Menchaca, who represents Sunset Park and Red Hook, Public Advocate Tish James, and Borough President Eric Adams. For more information, visit brooklynpride.org.

May 28, 2014 | www.gaycitynews.com

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