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FREE VOLUME ELEVEN, ISSUE SEVENTEEN AUGUST 15 - 28, 2012

Paul Ryan Virtual Zero at HRC 5 Young Mind & Body Seized 8 Prop 8 Fans Seek Supreme Intervention 7 Queer French Films 17

See p. 4 © GAY CITY NEWS 2012 • NYC COMMUNITY MEDIA, LLC, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

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August 15, 2012 | www.gaycitynews.com

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| August 15, 2012

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Pressure builds over paid sick leave 04

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POLITICS

Year Ahead of Election, Sick Leave Key Labor Test for Quinn

BY PAUL SCHINDLER

Among those Speaker Christine Quinn is hearing from on paid sick leave is Dr. Marjorie Hill, CEO of GMHC.

did not respond to a request for comment for this story. Upper West Side Councilwoman Gale Brewer, paid sick leave’s chief sponsor, told Gay City News she met with Quinn on August 14 and discussed the economy. “She has kept her commitment to keep talking,” Brewer said. “I can’t say we will have a bill in a month, but we are talking.”

Like other advocates, Brewer said the success of paid sick leave laws elsewhere — from Connecticut to San Francisco — has strengthened their case.

With just 15 months left before the next mayoral election, both sides in the battle seem to sense that a final showdown is approaching. In the past ten days, a letter signed by more than 175 business own-

State Senate Primary Debate Three candidates are vying to succeed State Senator Tom Duane in the September 13 Democratic primary. Citizens Union and NYC Community Media, parent company of Gay City News, host a debate among Tom Greco, Brad Hoylman, and Tanika Inlaw. Monday, August 20, 7 p.m. at the LGBT Community Services Center, 208 W. 13th St. RSVP to events@citizensunion.org. impact on lower-wage LGBT workers.

Their activism comes as Quinn faces mounting pressure from both sides of the debate on an issue she has resisted for more than two years. In 2010, the speaker, while expressing sympathy for the legislation’s goals, said she worried about its impact on small businesses during the current recession. The bill has 36 co-sponsors, more than enough to override an expected veto by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, but without Quinn’s okay, the measure will not get a vote.

As recently as last month, the speaker, in a statement to the New York Times, reiterated her concern that the economy remained too weak to adopt the paid sick leave measure. Her office

DONNA ACETO

GAY CITY NEWS

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abor plans to ‘sick’ gays on Christine.”

So read the headline of an August 8 “exclusive” in the New York Post detailing a plan the newspaper said had been hatched at a meeting in Washington in July. According to the account, prominent LGBT leaders in New York were prepared to “publicly buck Quinn’s” run for mayor next year if the out lesbian City Council speaker failed to allow a vote on a measure guaranteeing workers at companies with five or more employees between five and nine paid sick days each year.

The Post did not identify its sources nor did it name any of the prospective Quinn antagonists, and Gay City News has uncovered no evidence of anything quite so dramatic afoot on the paid sick leave front. That’s not to say that there are not important LGBT leaders pressing to make paid sick leave a reality in New York City nor that the arguments in favor of the bill are not based, in part, on issues of specific concern to the queer community.

In fact, in recent weeks, public health and social justice advocates –– ranging from Dr. Marjorie Hill, the chief executive officer of Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC), to Queers for Economic Justice (Q4EC) –– have come forward with full-throated endorsements of the measure, emphasizing its public health benefits for people living with HIV and its

ers urged Quinn to continue resisting the bill. Their opposition, echoed in strongly-worded editorials in the Post and the Daily News, emphasized the burden the measure imposes on small businesses.

Writing in the Post, Councilman James Gennaro of Queens pointed to a 2010 survey by Ernst & Young indicating that as much as 90 percent of the city’s workforce already enjoys paid sick leave. That finding, he said, demonstrated that only those businesses least able to handle the cost fail to offer the benefit.

Paid sick leave advocates strongly dispute that statistic, estimating that somewhere between one million and a million and a half workers in New York lack any paid sick leave. Data in

a 2012 report from the Community Service Society, an anti-poverty group, suggests the picture might be worse.

Half of the city workers it surveyed said their employers offered no such benefit –– suggesting there are as many as 1.8 million without paid sick leave.

Tony Juliano is the general manager of XES Lounge, a gay bar in Chelsea, the sort of small business paid sick leave opponents have made the face of their efforts. In a Daily News op ed, Juliano warned “our close-knit business is being threatened by a well-intentioned but terribly damaging paid sick leave bill.”

He said the business had no interest in sick employees showing up to work, but explained that it helps its workers swap their shifts in such situations.

Advocates for paid sick leave emphasize that without it, employees who are ill often feel compelled to go to work anyway, but Juliano argued that if XES were required to pay sick leave, it would stop allowing such swaps. That, he said, could also have the effect of inducing a sick employee to show up –– in order not to lose the tips that could have been earned if the lost time had instead been traded with another worker.

Juliano, also the president of the Greenwich Village-Chelsea Chamber of Commerce, said XES would be forced to end its employee health insurance program in the face of sick leave costs. The Council bill, he wrote, was “a surefire way to ruin my business.”

In their editorials, the Daily News and the Post were similarly dire in assessing the Council measure. The Post called it “a sick job-killer.” The Daily News warned that its advocates were trying to “bully” Quinn into okaying a “misbegotten… job-killing measure.”

Advocates acknowledge that small businesses are less likely than larger ones to offer paid sick leave, but note that many large corporations, including fast-food franchises and retail chains, also fail to grant such a benefit. “Those large businesses are point-guarding the

opposition,” one advocate of paid sick leave told Gay City News.

If opponents of paid sick leave are stepping up their efforts, that is likely in response to aggressive organizing on the part of the bill’s proponents, including major labor unions, the Working Families Party, civil rights leaders, public health professionals, immigrant and economic justice advocates, and women’s groups.

Dan Cantor, executive director of the Working Families Party, showed his side is also prepared to roll out tough talk. In a statement to Gay City News, he said, "For lobbyists and CEOs who have paid sick days, paid vacation, paid personal days, health insurance plans, and retirement plans to begrudge low-wage workers a few paid sick days to take care of their families' health is just wrong. A vote on paid sick days would be a great day for hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers."

Last month, the Times –– which, unlike its rival dailies, supports the measure on its editorial page –– reported that about 200 prominent women, led by feminist leader Gloria Steinem, a Quinn supporter, had written the speaker urging her to change her position on the issue. Steinem was joined by influential lesbians, including GMHC’s Hill, Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, and the actor Cynthia Nixon.

“It actually is not that much of a stretch,” Hill told Gay City News of her group’s support for the bill. “We are a public health organization and so obviously committed to structures and policies that will promote public health.

And we are a social justice organization committed to equity for all.”

She said its view was shared by many “sister organizations in HIV/ AIDS,” though GMHC, as the city’s largest group working on the epidemic, would take the lead in the public policy debate.

Other LGBT leaders who have spoken out on behalf of the measure include Brad Hoylman, who is running to succeed Tom

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QUINN, continued on p.9

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POLITICS

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Paul Ryan Virtually A Zero at the Human Rights Campaign Voted against ENDA before he voted for it, otherwise never took pro-LGBT stance

BY PAUL SCHINDLER

US CONGRESS

P

aul R yan, the self-styled budget hawk and conservative darling that Mitt Romney has selected as his vice presidential running mate, has in a number of media appearances shown impatience when asked about LGBT rights issues.

His disinclination to broach the topic should not be mistaken for anything other than nearly absolute fealty to social conservative dogma.

“Actually, I came on to talk about the debt crisis we have and the budget,” Ryan complained when asked his views on marriage equality by David Gregory on “Meet the Press” this past February.

“I support the Wisconsin amendment to define marriage between a man and a woman… I don’t know why we are spending all this time talking about this. We’ve got a debt crisis coming and the administration just gave us a budget that simply just charts another path to debt and decline.”

It’s not simply that Ryan is reluctant to take the plunge on marriage rights for same-sex couples.

Throughout his years in Congress, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the Washington-based LGBT lobby, has identified only one instance in which the 42-year -old Wisconsin Republican has ever taken a pro-LGBT position.

In 2007, R yan was one of 35 Republicans to vote for the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), which at that time only proposed to protect against job bias based on sexual orientation, not gender identity or expression.

R yan’s advocacy that day was not unambiguous. When Republicans unsuccessfully tried a parliamentary maneuver to shelve the bill prior to its passage –– with what is known as a motion to recommit –– he joined 26 other GOP ENDA supporters in the unsuccessful effort to kill the bill they would vote for just moments later. That day, he voted against ENDA before he voted for it.

Mitt Romney’s VP pick, Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan.

HRC does not issue congressional scorecards until the end of a two-year session, so no rating is available for 2011-2012. In the prior five scorecards, R yan received four zeroes and one rating of 10 out of 100, for his half-hearted support of ENDA in 2007.

In both 2004 and 2006, Ryan voted for a feder al marriage amendment that would have defined marriage as the union of one man and one woman everywhere in the United States. On both occasions, he joined the preponderance of his fellow Republicans and several dozen Democrats in unsuccessful efforts to achieve the two-thirds majority necessary if an amendment is to go on to the states for their approval.

In both the 2009-2010 and the 2007-2008 sessions, he voted against hate crimes protections, which became law in 2009. He also did not support repeal of the military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy in 2010 –– a measure that received votes in

TREVOR THOMAS FALLS SHORT IN MICHIGAN HOUSE BID Roughly three hours after the polls closed in Michigan on August 7, Trevor Thomas, an out gay man with four years’ experience in LGBT advocacy in Washington, conceded the Democratic primary race in the third congressional district centered on Grand Rapids and Battle Creek.

Thomas, who is 28, had hoped to face off in November against Justin Amash, a 32-year-old freshman Republican congressman who won election in 2010 as a Tea Party darling, but was defeated by a margin of 56-44 by Steve Pestka, a 60-year-old attorney who served four years in the State House of Representatives and six years on the Kent County Circuit Court bench.

In the primary campaign, Thomas –– who worked in the communications department at the Human Campaign before leading the communications effort at the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network –– took on Pestka over his longstanding opposition to a woman’s right to choose, his votes as a legislator to defund Planned Parenthood, and his personal investment in a company acquiring land for fracking.

Though Thomas generally ran to the left of his Democratic opponent, Pestka hammered him over his support for raising the Social Security eligibility age for Americans currently under 40.

Thomas faced formidable odds in term of both financial resources and Democratic establishment support. Federal Election Commission filings as of July 18 showed Pestka with about $450,000 dollars on hand compared to just $86,000 for Thomas. Significantly though, of Pestka’s $798,000 in campaign

receipts, $590,000 came in loans and contributions from the candidate himself.

Fully $281,000 of the $293,000 Thomas raised came from individual contributors.

Pestka also won endorsements from many leading Democratic elected officials in Michigan –– including the women who serve as the State Senate Democratic leader and the House Democratic floor leader –– as well as the influential United Auto Workers, the union both of Thomas’ parents belonged to for 34 years.

Thomas, however, had very active support from former Governor Jennifer Granholm, for whom he worked before moving to Washington. Granholm had appointed Pestka to his judicial perch.

In his 2010 campaign, in addition to his support from Tea Party leaders, Amash enjoyed endorsements from the FreedomWorks PAC, founded by industrialist David Koch and chaired by former GOP House Majority Leader Dick Armey, the Club for Growth, an anti-tax lobby that puts enormous rightward pressure on the Republican Party, and Texas Congressman Ron Paul.

Though redistricting has added Battle Creek to the Michigan Third, tilting it slightly more Democratic, the Cook Political Report scores the district as +6 Republican, meaning that in recent elections the GOP has outperformed its national showing by six percentage points there. Cook rates the November contest as a “likely Republican” win. On primary night, Thomas pledged to help Pestka in his fall campaign.

— Paul Schindler

both May and December.

In the 2001-2002 session of Congress, R yan voted to exempt faith-based initiatives fr om state and local government civil rights laws –– an effort aimed squarely at LGBT nondiscrimination protections, since other civil rights categories are covered by federal law as well as locally.

A familiar Republican push against LGBT rights has taken aim at the autonomy of the District of Columbia, which has the burden of significant congressional oversight. In 1999, his first year in the House, he supported a ban on gay adoption in DC. In the following session, he opposed implementation of DC’s domestic partnership registry.

On several occasions, Ryan voted to forbid federal funding of syringe exchange programs, which have consistently been shown to reduce the rate of HIV transmission.

He also declined to sign an office nondiscrimination policy protecting LGBT employees circulated by HRC. Ryan’s customary hostility to LGBT rights measures did not diminish the enthusiasm the Log Cabin Republicans voiced for the pick.

In a written statement, R. Clarke Cooper, the group’s national executive director, said, “Congressman Paul R yan is a strong choice for vice president, and his addition to the GOP ticket will help Republican candidates up and down the ballot. As chairman of the House Budget Committee and author of the Republican ‘path to prosperity’ that provided the blueprint for serious spending cuts in this Congress, nobody is more qualified to articulate a conservative economic vision to restore the American economy and stimulate job creation.”

A Roman Catholic from Janesville, a community of roughly 60,000 southeast of Madison near the Illinois border, R yan has also been a consistent opponent of a woman’s right to choose, earning 100 percent ratings from National Right to Life and zeroes from NARAL. Democrats and progressives have typically aimed their fire at Ryan over the damage they warn his budget plan would do to Social Security and Medicare. American Bridge 21st Century, a political action committee aiming to hold Republicans accountable, presents a comprehensive review of Ryan in an online report at meetpaulryan.com.

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August 15, 2012 | www.gaycitynews.com

POLITICS

Tough Keeping Bedfellows Straight in Buffalo Dem, GOP Senate Primaries Republican marriage supporter Mark Grisanti faces party challenger and perhaps a NOM-backed Democrat

BY ANDY HUMM

SENATORMARKGRISANTI.COM

A

f r a c t i o u s N e w Yo r k State Senate race in Buffalo has brought that city’s LGBT leadership and the Erie County Democratic Party into open conflict with outside gay money and the Empire State Pride Agenda (ESPA) –– who are supporting the pro-marriage equality Republican incumbent –– as well as with the leader of the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee, who is pushing a party-switching, locallyreviled nominal Democrat who is backed by the Conservative Party, the antigay National Organization for Marriage (NOM), and the political operative behind a treacherous former Bronx state senator, Pedro Espada, who is now a convicted felon.

The 60th District, which stretches from Buffalo to Niagara Falls, will have both Republican and Democratic primaries in September, and the November general election could determine which party controls the Senate come January.

The incumbent is Mark Grisanti, one of four GOP senators to vote for marriage equality in June 2011. He ran in 2010 opposed to same-sex marriage and upset incumbent Democrat Antoine Thompson in a year when Republicans retook the State Senate. Grisanti’s marriage vote has won him buckets of gay money in addition to the endorsement of ESPA, which would not tell Gay City News where Grisanti stands on its top priority, the Gender Expression NonDiscrimination Act (GENDA), a transgender civil rights bill. His office also did not respond to a question on his position.

Grisanti is opposed in the Republican primary by Kevin T. Stocker, who gave Democratic Assemblyman Robin Schimminger a tough race in 2010.

Stocker is attacking Grisanti’s “integrity” for switching on marriage and for his involvement in a notorious brawl at the Seneca Niagara Casino in February.

Democrats have a more than twoto-one advantage in enrollment in the district, making it a prime opportunity for the party re-taking the seat. But the best-financed candidate to emerge on the Democratic side is Chuck Swanick, a former Erie County legislator who already has the Conservative Party line and whose opposition to same-sex marriage has earned him $7,000 in direct donations from NOM and another $16,800 from Sean Fieler, a big Republican donor who has chaired the group’s project to paint President Barack Obama as a “social radical.”

The race for Republican Senator Mark Grisanti’s seat in the Buffalo area this year is riven by unique factions.

What’s more, Swanick switched to the Republican Party in 2003 to continue as chair of the County Legislature and has switched back now.

One of Swanick’s key backers is the infamous Steve Pigeon –– dubbed “The Political Prince of Darkness” by the Niagara Falls Reporter –– who was behind the campaign of the virulently antigay Republican Carl Paladino, whom Andrew Cuomo crushed for governor in 2010. Prior to that, Pigeon, a longtime operative for Tom Golisano, an upstate billionaire who made three runs for governor since 1994, was even more notorious as the architect in 2009 of the “Four Amigos” — renegades from the 20082010 Democratic majority in the Senate, two of whom (Espada and Hiram Monserrate of Queens) defected to restore Republican rule for several chaotic months that year. Pigeon was rewarded with a position on the Senate staff and considerable patronage.

Espada was defeated by progressive Gustavo Rivera in a 2010 primary, and Monserrate was expelled from the Senate after being convicted on a misdemeanor count related to an assault on his woman friend. A third “Amigo,” Senator Carl Kruger, did not defect but was convicted of bribery and conspiracy to commit fraud and sentenced earlier this

year to seven years in federal prison. The fourth is Bronx Senator Ruben Diaz, Sr., a stridently anti-gay Democrat who is the only one of the quartet still in office.

Niagara County Conservative Party Chair Dan Weiss is openly defying the state party’s endorsement of Swanick, saying in a release that his Erie County counterpart, Ralph Lorgio, “abandoned Conservative principles long ago in exchange for patronage jobs and legal clients. He is an embarrassment to the party.” Weiss is backing Grisanti despite his vote for same-sex marriage and calls Pigeon “a cheap political hack that lacks any true conservative principles.”

The plot thickens. Swanick’s reactionary, party-switching politics, NOM backing, and association with Pigeon do not seem to bother the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee’s leader, Senator Michael Gianaris of Queens. Gianaris, who voted for marriage equality last year, donated $6,500 from his own campaign war chest to Swanick’s campaign and sees his election as essential to the Democrats taking back the Senate. “I expect that should Swanick be elected,” Gianaris said, “he will be a loyal member of the Democratic conference that is going to advance a lot of the issues the progressive caucus would want.”

Gianaris took a swing at the gay

money going to pro-same-sex marriage Republicans, a chunk of which is ending up in the coffers of the State Senate Republican Campaign Committee.

While he is focused on re-electing Democratic Senator Joe Addabbo of conservative southern Queens, “the RCC is using his marriage vote to attack him,” Gianaris said. “The focus should be on a Republican Party that is using gay community money to support an attack on people who support the very issues the community cares about.”

ESPA is backing Grisanti, explained Erica Pelletreau, the group’s communications director, because “we want to say thank you for standing up for equality,” but she would not say if Grisanti’s support for “equality” included transgender rights. ESPA has not yet endorsed Addabbo, and Pelletreau offered no insight into its thinking in that race, saying its political action committee’s deliberations are “confidential.”

In 2009, Addabbo, first elected the year before with significant LGBT support, voted against marriage equality, though he changed his position last year.

Swanick has a progressive opponent in the Democratic primary, Mike Amodeo, an attorney and political newcomer from a locally prominent political family. Amodeo has been endorsed by the Erie County Democratic Party and is backed by several big labor unions and the LGBT Stonewall Democratic Club of Western New York.

In comments to Gay City News, Amodeo said Gianaris told him he was backing Swanick because he had “more name recognition.”

“Swanick was in office for 26 years, but he is recognized for raising property taxes, cutting services, becoming a Republican, and being run out of office in a fiscal crisis, and running from news cameras,” Amodeo said.

“I’m with the LGBT community 100 percent on their issues,” he said, noting that he filled out an ESPA questionnaire.

Swanick did not respond to a request for comment.

Al Coppola, a former state senator and perennial candidate, is also bidding for the Democratic nomination, and Patrick Mang, the mayor of Kenmore, is seeking the Working Families Party line.

The Stonewall Western New York former president Bruce Kogan said, “I don’t know what Pride Agenda is thinking. If Amodeo gets some decent money, he can do battle.” He added he is “disgusted” with Gianaris’ backing of Swanick.

“He is cancelling his own vote on samesex marriage,” Kogan said, arguing that

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PRIMARIES, continued on p.13

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| August 15, 2012

LEGAL

Prop 8 Supporters File Supreme Court Appeal Gay marriage foes warn

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r oposition 8’s Of ficial Proponents have asked the US Supreme Court to review the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision that their initiative violates the 14th Amendment of the Constitution. The Proponents were allowed to intervene in defense of Prop 8 after California’s governor and attorney general declined to do so.

Attorneys for the plaintiffs, who under the leadership of the American Foundation for Equal Rights (AFER) challenged the constitutionality of Prop 8, announced they would oppose Supreme Court review, but were ready to defend their Ninth Circuit victory before the high court if

ples have only been able to enter into “domestic partnerships,� but those enjoy all the state law rights of mar riages.

The same week that the California Supreme Court upheld Prop 8, AFER filed suit in the San Francisco federal district court. In 2010, Judge Vaughn Walker ruled for the plaintiffs. Prop 8’s Proponents appealed that ruling to the Ninth Circuit, which earlier this year affirmed Walker’s ruling but on narrower grounds. Walker ruled that same-sex couples have an equal protection and due process right to marry under the 14th Amendment.

The Ninth Circuit panel, in a 2-1 ruling, held that the enactment of Prop 8 violated the Equal Protection Clause because the majority of the panel could discern no rational basis for

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necessary.

The Pr oponents’ petition, filed with the Supreme Court on July 30, framed the question as “whether the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits the State of California from defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman.� Proposition 8 was enacted by California voters in November 2008, less than five months after same-sex couples there began mar rying as a result of a State Supreme Court ruling that denying marriage rights to same-sex couples violated the California Constitution.

Prop 8’s enactment was immediately challenged in state court, but was upheld by the California Supreme Court early in 2009. However, the California high court said that Prop 8’s enactment had no effect on its own prior state equal protection and due pr ocess ruling, holding that same-sex couples remained entitled to all the rights and benefits of mar riage, even without the name. Since November 2008, then, same-sex cou-

California to rescind from same-sex couples the right to marry previously recognized by the State Supreme Court while continuing to provide them with all the state law rights and benefits. Withholding the word “marriage� advanced none of the interests argued by Prop 8’s Proponents, wrote the appeals court majority, since it didn’t affect the state’s already established policy of extending all marital rights to same-sex couples.

The Ninth Circuit majority concluded that Prop 8 “serves no purpose, and has no effect, other than to lessen the status and human dignity of gays and lesbians in California, and to officially reclassify their relationships and families as inferior to those of opposite-sex couples.�

Under Supreme Court rules, the Proponents’ petition will be granted if at least four of the nine justices vote in favor of review. The court is free to reframe the question posed by a petitioner if it grants review. The

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PROP 8, continued on p.13

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HEALTH

A Young Mind and Body Seized Gay dancer falls to bipolar disorder, but what is being treated?

BY DUNCAN OSBORNE

GAY CITY NEWS

S

everal weeks before Mikhail was involuntarily committed to a psychiatric ward at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, his father noticed a change in him.

“His behavior, his communications with me became very erratic and unlike him,” the father testified at an August 7 hearing after Mikhail challenged his continued detention. “I sensed a kind of urgency and confusion.”

The 22-year -old gay man was an accomplished college student and was beginning a promising dance career. In early July, Mikhail was going to perform at a dance festival, but abruptly quit the night before the opening. He told his father, “I never felt better. I just quit the ballet company, I threw away my phone, I’ll see you.”

Mikhail began dancing at four. The family moved to Europe so he could study at an academy there. At 14, an adrenal gland problem, which requires him to take hydrocortisone daily, stopped his growth. At five feet, five inches tall, Mikhail’s dance career potential is limited.

“It had a huge impact on his dance possibilities because he is smaller,” his mother testified. But he persevered, and eight years later Mikhail’s efforts were paying off at the point when he quit the company.

After doing so, he arrived at his father’s financial services firm.

“He turned up at my office the next day looking terrible, rail thin, wearing rags,” the father said. He took his son to a Connecticut hospital for a psychiatric evaluation. The son thought the trip had another purpose.

“He believed he was being evaluated for or by the CIA for, in his words, possible inauguration into the CIA,” Dr. Matthew Zimmerman, Mikhail’s psychiatrist at Presbyterian, testified during an August 9 hearing.

At one point, Mikhail left his emergency room bed.

His father found him standing outside dressed in pants and a hospital gown, with monitor leads hanging from his body.

“It’s a test, right?” Mikhail asked his father, in an apparent reference to the supposed CIA evaluation.

Mikhail was discharged on July 17 with a treatment plan that required daily doses of an antipsychotic drug and hydrocortisone as well as daily hospital visits. On a drive back to New York City with his mother and stepfather, Mikhail exited the car when it stopped at a red light and disappeared. He traveled by bus to Chicago, where his brother lives. Mikhail made intermittent calls home on borrowed cell phones.

“We would call people back and random strangers would say, ‘Yeah, I loaned a kid my phone,’” the mother said.

Tortured by the changes they saw in Mikhail, the family was growing desperate. The mother told Mikhail’s friends to call the police and have him detained if he should appear. The father called Chicago bathhouses to try to find Mikhail and hired a private investigator.

“As a parent, it’s a terrifying experience,” the father said. Mikhail’s brother put him on a plane to New York City on July 22 when he turned up at his Chicago apartment. The father met Mikhail and drove him to his mother’s Manhattan apartment.

The family was already in touch with the hospital,

New York-Presbyterian Hospital, where Mikhail has been involuntarily committed to a psychiatric ward.

which had prepared an intervention. Mikhail left the apartment once, then returned, and began to leave again, only to have his mother block the door with her body. Angered, Mikhail went into a nearby bedroom.

“I turned the TV on, I turned the radio on, and I blasted it,” he said at one hearing. Alone in the room, he slid or threw a chair into the wall. The intervention group was on its way.

“They were on the phone and said, ‘My team can’t get there fast enough, so I want you to call 911,’” the mother said. The police arrived, put Mikhail in handcuffs, and took him to Presbyterian. He was committed for 60 days on July 24 after two psychiatrists certified he was mentally ill, in need of immediate care, and a danger to himself or others.

Mikhail challenged his commitment before Judge George J. Silver, who approved Mikhail’s continued detention. That hearing began on August 2 and continued on August 7. The hospital petitioned for a court order requiring Mikhail to take medication on August 7. Judge Paul Wooten heard that petition on August 9 and granted it as well. Gay City News attended both proceedings.

The newspaper is identifying Mikhail with a pseudonym and keeping his family and fiancé anonymous because identifying them would identify Mikhail. The paper is naming the lawyers, judges, and doctors.

Gay City News learned of Mikhail’s commitment after his 47-year-old fiancé contacted the newspaper saying the younger man had been locked up because he was gay. Other than the assertions by Mikhail and the fiancé, there was no evidence at the hearings that Mikhail was committed because he was gay or that the hospital is treating his homosexuality. He was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, with manic and psychotic symptoms.

What was in evidence is that psychiatry, at least in this case, remains mired in beliefs about what is normal.

At the August 2 proceeding, Zimmerman, who is gay, said that if Mikhail is not treated, “he won’t be able to live a typical life.” This was once a justification for psychiatric professionals treating homosexuality, and remains so for religious and secular groups that currently seek to cure homosexuality.

Among the symptoms mentioned in evaluations of Mikhail is hypersexuality, which doctors saw in his talking about sex and drawing penises.

“He told me yesterday that he enjoys unprotected sex,” Zimmerman told Silver. This puts him “at high risk for medical illness,” the psychiatrist said. Testifying before Wooten, Zimmerman said, ”He had sex with someone in Chicago who he didn’t know.”

Questioned by Dorothea A. Constas, Mikhail’s attorney, Zimmerman testified that Mikhail had not exposed himself or had sex at the hospital nor had he propositioned any patients or staff. One hospital document, dated July 24, noted that in Chicago, Mikhail “had protected sex with someone he met there.”

Psychiatry is the only branch of medicine in which disagreeing with your doctor can become a symptom of your illness. Mikhail denies he is bipolar –– though he has also conceded to Gay City News he is bipolar –– and says his behavior is due to his missing doses of hydrocortisone. Zimmerman told Silver that Mikhail had “a real lack of insight about his illness...

His thinking right now is psychotic. His ability to think and reason about his illness is not adequate.”

Responding to Constas on August 2, Zimmerman said that Mikhail had refused medication only twice, but had otherwise been cooperative. He approved the release of medical records related to his adrenal problem to Presbyterian.

“It’s an indication of a modicum of insight,” Zimmerman said. “Relative to nothing, it’s insight, but in the scheme of his illness, it’s nothing... He has insight surrounding his medical problem.”

Zimmerman said that it is “not unusual” for patients to resist a mental illness label.

“People can grapple with a diagnosis,” Zimmerman said. “There are degrees of this, and this degree is severe, it’s psychotic.”

A central issue in the Silver hearing concerned whether Mikhail was a danger to himself or others.

While the hospital said the chair-throwing was evidence of violence, Silver rejected that conclusion.

Zimmerman and Dr. Stanley Arkow, Presbyterian’s director of inpatient services, said that Mikhail was not suicidal.

“He’s not actively suicidal, but he would be in great danger of getting into dangerous situations,” Arkow told Silver. Mikhail told Gay City News that he had once “half heartedly” attempted suicide. He could not remember when this occurred.

“I took three Klonopins,” he said. The harm Silver ultimately found in Mikhail’s mental illness was based on his irregular use of hydrocortisone.

But, Zimmerman, who is not an endocrinologist, told Wooten, “He may actually not need to be on long-term replacement therapy,” referring to the hydrocortisone.

Despite the ambiguity of these issues, the judges in these two hearings followed a customary pattern by deferring to the recommendations of the psychiatrists.

Mikhail testified at both proceedings and attributed his behavior to his adrenal gland problem. He told both judges that he determines his medication schedule.

“I was using my hydrocortisone so sporadically my hormones were going up and down,” Mikhail told Sil-

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HOSPITAL, continued on p.24

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| August 15, 2012

REMEMBRANCE

The Legacy of Gore Vidal

BY DOUG IRELAND

T

he Best Man is gone, and we are all orphans. Gore Vidal, America’s most brilliantly wide-ranging man of letters, who has been a beacon of light for queers for six decades, finally left us on July 31 at the age of 86.

His death was something those of us who loved and revered him had feared for years — he fought a long battle with Epstein-Barr syndrome, and his health had been in sharp decline ever since the death of his life partner of 53 years, Howard Austen, nine years ago.

“Uncle Gore,” as he was fondly referred to by many writers of my generation, burst onto the literary scene in 1946 at the age of just 20 when he published the finely chiseled “Williwaw,” a cynical portrait of war, based on Vidal’s naval service in the Aleutian Islands in the closing years of World War II. The novel won Vidal comparisons to Stephen Crane, a writer he much admired.

“Williwaw” was such a critical success that it immediately propelled Vidal into the front ranks of the new generation of writers who emerged from the war, including James Jones, Norman Mailer, Kurt Vonnegut, and J.D. Salinger. He was one of those featured in a Life magazine cover story on these new writers, winning him instant celebrity.

He did not follow in the career path of Crane, who burned the manuscript of his novel of a 15-year-old boy prostitute, as Edmund White tells us in his historically based novel “Hotel de Dreams.” In 1948, Vidal published his third novel, “The City and the Pillar,” a love story of two masculine, boy-next-door young Americans; it was the nation’s first work of literary quality to portray male homosexuality as a natural variant of human existence.

It is difficult to overstate the courage

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Vidal demonstrated in publishing “The City and the Pillar” in his early years as a writer. At that time, homosexuality was both a crime and, in the eyes of the medical establishment, a debilitating “disease” — as well as the great American taboo.

But honesty, both intellectual and moral, was an innate Vidal quality all his life — he always said and wrote exactly what he thought, no matter what the cost.

And oh, what a cost there was. Orville Prescott, then the reigning literary czar of the New York Times, denounced “The City and the Pillar” as “pornography” (though there’s little description of physical coupling in any of Vidal’s fictions) and refused to permit any Times review of Vidal’s next seven books. The newspaper refused even to run any paid advertisements for the groundbreaking novel. The country’s most important magazines of that time followed suit, and Vidal was in essence blacklisted for years by the lit-crit business, which pigeon-holed him as a “fag.”

But “The City and the Pillar” went on to become an American classic, and when published in paperback sold well over a million copies, helping a great number of “same-sexers” — a preferred Vidal vocable — to accept themselves and come out, including this writer.

One of America’s most erudite and cosmopolitan writers, Vidal was largely an autodidact who never attended college. As the scion of an old patrician political family — his grandfather, Thomas Gore, who helped raise him, was a maverick US senator and his father was the federal government’s top aviation bureaucrat in the 1930s — Vidal went to the best private schools, St. Alban’s and Phillips Exeter, but eschewed his destined place at Harvard. Instead, he enlisted in the navy in the closing phase of the war, at a time when a prospective invasion of Japan loomed large.

QUINN, from p.4

Duane in the State Senate seat he is vacating at the end of the year, the Jim Owles Liberal Democratic Club, Liz Margolies, executive director of the National LGBT Cancer Network, and Melissa Goodman, the senior litigation and policy counsel for LGBT and reproductive rights at the New York Civil Liberties Union.

Margolies said that the evidence she found most compelling on the sick leave question was recent findings from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showing that workers lacking such a benefit are statistically less likely to undergo routine screenings for breast, colorectal, and cervical cancer. “It’s my job to help remove any obstacle to screening and getting care,” she said.

Quinn’s three out gay and lesbian colleagues on the Council also support the paid sick leave bill.

Rosie Mendez, who represents the Lower East Side,

CARL VAN VECHTEN/ WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

Prolific writer shattered conventions with 1948’s “The City and the Pillar” in ’48, never looked back

Gore Vidal at age 23 in 1948.

“The City and the Pillar” was dedicated to “J.T.,” whom Vidal, in his scintillating 1995 memoir “Palimpsest,” revealed to have been James “Jimmy” Trimble III, who had been killed at the battle of Iwo Jima, and with whom he’d had a passionate affair at St. Alban’s. He described Trimble as the greatest love of his life.

Politics, of course, was always central, in one way or another, to Vidal’s fiction.

He first seriously dealt with imperialism in the 1950 novel “Dark Green, Bright Red,” about American interference in Central America. Set in Guatemala, the book prefigured the CIA-sponsored coup four years later against the radical leftwing government of President Jacobo Arbenz at the behest of the US multinational United Fruit, whose corporate colors were green and red.

When his serious post-“City and the Pillar” novels were blacked out by the Times and the other powerful critics, Vidal, under the pseudonym Edgar Box, churned out in a few weeks each a series of entertaining detective stories, which were commercially successful and kept him in funds for the next decade. Even

noted that the measure began working its way through the Council at about the same time the living wage bill –– which guarantees a minimum pay and benefit level for employees of companies receiving city subsidies and other public incentives –– was also under discussion.

After a concerted drive by labor and some compromises, Quinn threw her support behind that measure.

“I thought this was going to get done, too,” said Mendez, who predicted the delay on putting paid sick leave into law might prove only temporary. “I am hopeful,” she said. Mendez added the measure is “good economic policy,” in good times or bad.

Jackson Heights Councilman Daniel Dromm also predicted success, explaining he is most concerned about low-income and immigrant workers in his district.

Jimmy Van Bramer, a councilman from Sunnyside, pushed back on the tone of the Post’s recent story on LGBT support for paid sick leave.

here, he continued to probe politics and present homosexuality as natural, as in the delightful 1952 Box mystery “Death in the Fifth Position,” a satire of McCarthyism featuring a sweatily masculine ballet dancer who chased everything in pants.

For economic reasons, he also moved into writing original dramas for live television during its so-called Golden Age in the 1950s — work that brought him to the notice of Hollywood and a new career as a screenwriter. His film scripts included “Ben-Hur,” into which, as he was quoted saying in Vito Russo’s “The Celluloid Closet,” he introduced a homosexual subtext between the actors Stephen Boyd and Charlton Heston, which he and director William Wyler conspired to conceal from the notoriously homophobic Heston. He also wrote the screenplays of “I Accuse,” the acclaimed film version of the Alfred Dreyfus affair starring José Ferrer, “Suddenly Last Summer,” and “Is Paris Burning?”

Vidal regained celebrity status by writing for Broadway — where his homosexuality was not an issue — scoring hits with “Visit to a Small Planet” (1958) and “The Best Man” (1960), for which he also wrote the screenplay of a 1964 film that starred Henry Fonda.

With the money he’d made from Hollywood, Vidal and Austen, in the early ‘60s, moved to Italy, where they found and bought their famous home in Ravello.

It was there that Vidal completed his literary rehabilitation by writing the 1964 novel “Julian,” about the apostate Roman emperor, which surprisingly soared to number one on the Times’ bestseller list.

“Julian,” though set in the fourth century A.D., was, in reality, a novel about the timeless perils of empire and a metaphor for the way Vidal saw America.

Always a visceral dissident with a

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VIDAL, continued on p.24

“I don’t think it’s about sicking anyone on anyone,” he told Gay City News. “Some people want to sensationalize the issue, pitting gays against gays. I think the coalition is enlisting support from all communities in the city, including the LGBT, and that’s just smart.

That’s good organizing. It’s about showing the full breadth of your support.”

Matthew McMorrow, co-president of Brooklyn’s Lambda Independent Democrats, made a similar point.

While noting the club is not formally part of any coalition working on the bill, he wrote in an email, “As a progressive Democratic club, LID supports the paid sick leave bill currently before the City Council, and we hope that the speaker will give the Council the opportunity to vote on the bill.” He added, “As LGBT advocates, we disagree with the tone of the recent headline that described the political strategy as sicking the gay community on Quinn over this issue.”

10

August 15, 2012 | www.gaycitynews.com

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The Meaning of Paul Ryan

BY PAUL SCHINDLER “I don’t know why we are spending all this time talking about this,” Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan told “Meet the Press” host David Gregory when asked his view of mar riage equality earlier this year. “Actually, I came on to talk about the debt crisis we have and the budget.”

Gay and lesbian Americans might be excused a bit of impatience with the impatience voiced by the presumptive Republican vice presidential nominee, especially since, in the same response, he issued unambiguous support for his home state’s constitutional amendment barring same-sex couples from marrying.

But as news of his choice as Mitt Romney’s running mate broke this past weekend, many pundits interpreted R yan’s answer to Gregory as a sign that he was a serious economic conservative with little interest in contesting divisive social issues. That conclusion, however, assumes that conserva-

tives fall neatly into discrete categories. It also ignores a Washington record that demonstrates that Ryan’s thinking was largely forged from the same social conservative mold that continues to have a nearly iron grip on the national Republican Party.

In 14 years in the House, Ryan has shown only a single instance in which he stood with the LGBT community. In 2007, he was one of 35 House Republicans to vote for the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, though that version included protections based on sexual orientation alone, not gender identity and expression as well. The Log Cabin Republicans, in a statement praising R yan’s selection, pointed to the ENDA vote as a sign he is a “fair-minded policymaker” and urged Romney to borrow that “page out of his running mate’s playbook.”

It’s not unreasonable to conclude that the gay GOP group is simply working hard to make lemonade out of a bushel mostly full of lemons. Ryan did vote for ENDA –– just minutes after he voted against it. As the House Democrats appeared on the verge of success, diehard Republican opponents of

gay rights trotted out a parliamentary maneuver known as a motion to recommit, a procedure that would have killed the measure. Ryan dutifully voted his party’s anti-gay position.

The Wisconsin Republican –– who captured the Tea Party’s heart by using his perch as chair of the House Budget Committee to push a draconian budget that imperils Medicare and rewards the GOP’s wealthy patr ons — has also voted twice in favor of a federal constitutional amendment that would ban marriage by samesex couples in all 50 states. He opposed repeal of the military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy and the federal hate crimes law. He voted against needle exchange programs shown to save lives in the fight against HIV, tried to exempt faith-based charities from observing state and local gay rights ordinances, and supported efforts to end gay adoption and curtail a domestic partner registry in Washington, DC. The Log Cabin Republicans claim Ryan has shown a “consistent willingness to engage with” them “on a range of issues.” Given that less than three-dozen Republicans supported the final ENDA vote in

2007, Ryan is clearly somewhat more hospitable to the Log Cabin message than the vast majority of his GOP colleagues.

But that really says more about the state of the Republican Party on Capitol Hill than it does about Ryan. Two and three years later, he was still unmoved on easy questions like hate crimes protections and allowing every American willing to die for their country to do so.

Log Cabin can pick at President Barack Obama’s shortcomings on LGBT progress, but the effort to trumpet Ryan as a bold step forward for the LGBT community is laughable.

What R yan really adds to the Romney ticket is accountability. The for mer Massachusetts governor has dodged spelling out the details of his economic vision with the curious argument that doing so would only give the president something to beat him up over.

Romney will no longer have the luxury of vagueness.

Ryan’s fingerprints are all over the Republicans’ most regressive economic proposals in Washington. Romney can tell “60 Minutes” that he –– and not his second –– will be the decider, but in selecting Paul Ryan, he can no longer be 2012’s Manchurian candidate. The Republican ticket will have to explain the Ryan budget to the American voters this November.

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PERSPECTIVE

Chavela Vargas, Lesbian Icon, Lives

VERA MUSA vera@gaycitynews.com

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JWSutter@communitymediallc.com Gay City News, The Newspaper Serving Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender NYC, is published by NYC Community Media, LLC. Send all inquiries to: Gay City News, 515 Canal Street, Unit 1C, NYC 10013 Phone: 212.229.1890 Written permission of the publisher must be obtained before any of the contents of this paper, in part or whole, can be reproduced or redistributed. All contents (c) 2012 Gay City News.

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FOUNDING MEMBER

She was 81 when she decided to kick open the closet door. It was the autumn of 2000 and she’d just gotten a big prize in Madrid after 15 years in an alcoholic wilder ness, then a decade of an incredible comeback partly engineered by gay filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar who apparently tracked her down in a Mexico City bar, got her sober, and back to work.

At the time, there were hardly any out Latin American queers.

And it meant something huge that she said it out loud, several times, even if everybody already

knew that the hard-drinking, cigar-smoking, womanizer was a dyke.

Afterwards, she did an interview in the Spanish paper El País and was so absolutely fierce, thumbing her nose at the Catholic Church, not wor ried about what anybody thought. “I’ve had to fight to be myself and to be respected.

I’m proud to carry this stigma and call myself a lesbian… I’ve had to confront society and the Church, which says that homosexuals are damned. That’s absurd. How can someone who’s born like this be judged?

I didn’t attend lesbian classes.

No one taught me to be this way. I was born this way, from the moment I opened my eyes in this world. I’ve never been to bed with a man. Never. That’s how pure I am. I have nothing to be ashamed of. My Gods made me the way I am.”

She was born in Costa Rica in 1919 and fled to Mexico when she was 14, mostly to get away from a suffocating, conventional society and a family that tried to force her into its straitjacket. According to the BBC, she once said, “I never got to know my grandparents. My parents I got to know better than I would have liked. They never loved

me and when they divorced, I stayed with my uncles, may they burn in hell!”

In Mexico, she somehow survived by singing on the streets, gradually moving into the bars.

Only in her 30s did she really get popular by styling Mexican ranchero songs about love and loss, usually sung by men. Despite Mexico’s own conservative culture, she stepped into their shoes and found a way to fill the halls with her lush, raw voice and masculine persona, tossing back tequila, lighting up cigars, and refusing to wear women’s clothes or change the pronouns in the songs. It was still women that done her wrong.

She became a favorite of artists like Frida Kahlo, apparently one of her many lovers. Chavela adored women almost as much

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COGSWELL, continued on p.12

11

| August 15, 2012

PERSPECTIVE

Christine Quinn Should Move On Paid Sick Leave

BY AMBER HOLLIBAUGH AND BRANDON LACY CAMPOS While many in the LGBTQ community take paid sick days for granted, half of all workers in New York City — and two-thirds of low-wage workers — get no paid sick time. Many of these workers are LGBTQ. These workers don't have the luxury of putting their health first. When they get sick, instead of focusing on getting better, they are forced to choose between going to work sick to make rent at the end of the month or sacrificing their days’ wages and/ or getting fired. No one should be forced to make this choice.

Last week, Queers for Economic Justice returned from the International AIDS Conference to New York City, where a debate over whether employers should be required to give their workers paid sick days has become a leading issue in City Hall and in the media. Lack of paid sick days is a significant problem for New Yorkers liv-

ing and working with HIV/AIDS, who don’t have the privilege of taking sickness lightly and must prioritize their health above all else when sick. This could mean staying home in bed to get needed rest or scheduling an emergency visit to the doctor’s office. Without the ability to take paid sick time, the health and economic security of people living with HIV/AIDS are jeopardized.

There is legislation pending in the City Council that would alleviate this problem by requiring most businesses to give a modest number of paid sick days to their workers to use for themselves or to care for a sick family member.

The legislation enjoys broad public support as well as a veto-proof majority of votes in the City Council. If passed, the legislation would lift a serious burden off the nearly 1.5 million workers in New York City who currently don’t get a single paid sick day. This is especially true for immigrant workers, people of color, and people with low-wage jobs, who are among the least likely to

get paid sick days.

Paid sick days also play an important public health role. When sick workers go to work, they increase the spread of illness. Nobody wants to be served by a sick waiter at a restaurant.

For people living with HIV/ AIDS, the risk of complications from influenza and other communicable illnesses make the public health importance of paid sick days particularly vital.

Considering how important this issue is to LGBTQ workers and our brothers and sisters living with HIV/ AIDS, it’s disturbing that some of the most prominent and powerful opponents of the legislation come from within the LGBTQ community. The openly gay speaker of the City Council, Christine Quinn, is the single person standing in the way of the legislation’s passage. If she allowed the bill to the floor for a vote, it would fly through the Council.

Two years ago, Quinn chose not to bring the measure up for a vote. A

Tito’s Class-Conscious Classifieds

BY SUSIE DAY In a r ecent PBS interview with Bill Moyers, journalist Chris Hedges discussed protest for social change.

“Revolt,” he said, apropos of salvaging a collapsing world, “is all we have. It is our only hope.”

I agree. So would my friend T ito Gerassi, who believed all his life in revolution. And, since rising unemployment is part of the collapse of our world, I think T ito would have e n j o y e d m a k i n g o c c u p y i n g Wa l l Street — and other forms of social activism — into respectable occupations. Think of the job market potential…

WANTED: Revolutionary Wackos Applicants must retain childhood ability to identify with the power less. Must have at least seven years’ experience believing that humanity is capable of living by kindness and cooperation rather than by greed and competition. Applicants must not be inclined to laugh upon reading this last sentence. (Those who did laugh, please refer to Form 1186 regarding job openings for US president.)

Applicants must enjoy out-ofdoors activities such as marching, singing, chanting, blocking, sittingin, dying-in, self-chaining, brickhurling, and stor ming, either singly or in groups of fellow Wackos, to protest various social inequities and/ or oncoming disasters.

Applicants must stay infor med about socio-political crises, especially atrocities directly caused by US policies but largely ignored by US mainstream — invasions, kidnappings, torture, financing of for eign death-squads, etc., etc. Applicants must accept occupational hazard of being called “Wacko” by US mainstream for caring about these things in the first place.

When explicating political positions, applicants must be able to fire off accurate data — e.g., 80,000 U.S. prisoners currently held in isolation — 400,000 immigrants detained on U.S. mainland; 1,145 Afghan civilians killed by NATO in the first six months of 2012 — while maintaining Zen-like awareness that each statistic represents individual, unrepeatable human beings who would probably not appreciate

being subsumed into a number for the sake of an explication.

Artistry with spray paint and/ or computer graphics encouraged.

Poetic ability to compose refreshing updates for such time-tested rhyming couplets as “Racist Sexist Antigay/ first name last name GO AWAY!” is a real plus.

WANTED: Movement Leaders The most important qualification for this job is that the applicant does not want it. Applicants must be impervious to assassination attempts, long prison sentences, and lucrative book contract offers.

Must possess depths of humanity no less than 11,030 meters. Must be infor med about and critical of racist-patriarchal-homophobiccapitalist ruling class, while committed to delivering nonrhetorical sound bites. Symmetrical facial featur es with an ability to look good on T -shirts — possibly coins, if revolution succeeds — highly recommended.

At least 25 years’ experience as one of The Masses. No imperialist oligarchs need apply.

backer of the speaker, Tony Juliano, the general manager of the gay bar XES Lounge in Chelsea, explained in a recent Daily News op ed why he supports her current intransigence.

Despite saying he considers his workers to be family, he opposes giving them five paid sick days per year.

Almost ninety percent of restaurant and bar workers don’t get paid sick days –– most go to work sick for fear of losing their jobs and many actually do lose them when they call in sick.

At Queers for Economic Justice, we have an initiative called Poverty and HIV/ AIDS Stop Together. Through this project, we are highlighting how issues like paid sick days connect anti-poverty work and HIV/AIDS activism. We are also launching a Queer Survival Economics initiative, which seeks to make visible the impact of the recession on LGBTQ communities. In today’s economy, workers are struggling to stay employed and provide for those closest to them, and they need paid sick days more than ever.

It’s time for the LGBTQ community to come together to support this safe, sane, and sensible policy.

Amber Hollibaugh and Brandon Lacy Campos are co-directors of Queers for Economic Justice.

While there is one soul whose house is in foreclosure, you are not free.

WANTED: The Masses Humanity a must. Equal oppor t u n i t y e m p l o y e r. Wo m e n , p e o p l e of color, queers, the poor encour aged to apply. Must see own life as inextricably linked to nearly seven billion other members of The Masses, within context of planetary ecosystem. BYO drums, babushkas, machetes, tractors, smart phones. Guaranteed lifetime employment.

WANTED: Replacement for Professor John (T ito) Gerassi Applicant must have been bor n in 1931 in France and called “Tito” (diminutive of “Juan” or “Juanito”) from childhood. Applicant must have grown up in Paris around artists and intellectuals, including Mar c Chagall, Andr é Br eton, and Simone de Beauvoir, who were friends of Applicant’s parents. Atheist Jean-Paul Sartre must have been Applicant’s “non-godfather.”

Applicant’s father Fer nando must have been abstract painter who left for Spain in the 1930s to become

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SUSIE DAY, continued on p.12

12

PERSPECTIVE

August 15, 2012 | www.gaycitynews.com

Making Good HIV Outcomes Possible

BY NATHAN RILEY

The United States trumpeted its leadership in the global campaign against the HIV epidemic when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton addressed the recent International AIDS Conference and pledged to create an AIDS-free generation.

“Children and teenagers,” she said, as they “become adults, will be at significantly lower risk of ever becoming infected.” But the US itself has been unable to show it can pass this test. The stresses our society places on black and Latino gay and bisexual youth make HIV prevention as difficult here as it is in Russia and Africa.

A new study, released by the HIV Prevention Trials Network on the day of Clinton’s speech, showed alarming rates of new infections nationally among African-American men who have sex with men: “Young black MSM — those 30 years of age and younger — acquired HIV infection at a rate of 5.9 percent per year, three times the rate among US white MSM.” This is a gruesome finding. Even if the trend itself is not news, this study, conducted in six major US cities, provides harder data than was previously available.

In New York City, the Health Department similarly offers troubling statistics. In 2010, there were 478 new diagnoses among black youth against 171 among whites between the ages 13 and 29. Among Hispanics, there were 334 new diagnoses. These figures are slightly better than the national average, but the problem continues to bedevil this city.

The goal of turning around the rate of new infections among blacks requires that it become easier for the African-American community to access healthy practices.

Being homeless and unemployed don’t qualify as factors that “make it easier.” The lack of progress is troubling.

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COGSWELL, from p.10

as she loved singing, which was still topped by passion for tequila. Rumor has it that she once kidnapped a woman at gunpoint. She always denied that one, but not that her slight limp was earned when she jumped out a window after being disappointed in love.

Her open desire for women fueled her music, but also made her a target for dickheads who even now dismiss her as a minor quirk, an outsider, though she transfor med the ranchero landscape, out-manning the men, even if

䉴

New York State has a service delivery system in place for single men, but it isn’t bringing good outcomes. There are outreach programs for the homeless, but they only provide referrals. Programs exist to enroll youth in counseling and education programs. A higher level of care is offered by five transitional care coordination programs that serve HIV-positive individuals who are homeless. Medicaid is available for young men; in fact, a report by the Black AIDS Institute rated New York City number one, saying its Medicaid program was “among the country’s most expansive, offering comprehensive coverage for single, childless adults” below the poverty line. The city health department distributes condoms to nearly 4,000 establishments and is constantly looking to expand its efforts.

But the system is not working. Dr. Beryl Koblin, the head of the Laboratory of Infectious Diseases at the New York Blood Bank, called the results of the six-city study “alarming” and said they must “spur new commitments” from local governments. Koblin, who helped design the study, said its findings demonstrate the need for “different levels of intervention. We can’t be focused on individual behavior.”

The New York Civil Liberties Union points to hostile factors that help explain the high rate of HIV infections in communities of color. Black and Hispanic youth in this city live under constant police surveillance. It starts in the hallways of their homes, where police can demand to know whom you are visiting and make arrests for criminal trespass. The NYCLU charges that many of the arrests are groundless. Adolescents complain they are stopped while trying to visit their friends. Out on the street, these youth are subject to the relentless stop and frisk policies that

she repeatedly said she didn’t want to be one. She was her own thing. Later on, she identified what it was. A dyke. And if men got an inferiority complex listening to her rough and tender voice that made even straight women swoon, that was their problem.

Chavela Vargas upended Mexican music. She cut more than 80 records, and composers used to say she “robbed” the songs, not just squeezing every last bit of life from them, but like Billie Holiday, making every song so fully her own it was nearly impossible for other singers to approach them afterwards.

SUSIE DAY, from p.11

a Revolutionary Wacko in the Civil War against fascist General Francisco Franco. Applicant’s mother must have acknowledged at the time that, although the war was already lost: "Fer nando is not fighting because we're going to win. He's fighting because one must fight fascism."

Applicant must have come to the United States as a boy, becoming one with The Masses, later a jour nalist for T ime, Newsweek, and the New York T imes, interviewing the likes of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro. In 1965, Applicant must have written “The Great Fear in Latin America,”

have led to mass protests.

The surveillance continues in school. On August 14, the NYCLU issued a new report about police in the public schools stating that “there are more than 5,100 police personnel in our schools, compared to approximately 3,000 guidance counselors and 1,500 social workers.” The civil rights group contends that the “over-policing of New York City schools, paired with school zero tolerance policies, drives youth directly towards the juvenile and criminal justice systems.”

Zero-tolerance policing and public health are not often discussed as related problems. The six-city study of black gay and bisexual men, however, links these issues. Sixty percent of the MSM in the six cities had been in jail; in New York, 57% of those in the study had a history of incarceration. Jail is only the most extreme form of contact between minority youth and the law. Police stops and contacts are an everyday occurrence.

Public health officials rightly focus on the right of the young to receive health care and be nurtured. Law enforcement isn’t helping matters on those scores. The police confiscate condoms from people suspected of prostitution, an amazing act of contempt that would seem to say, “Go get AIDS. Nobody cares.” Koblin offered a dry assessment of this attitude: “Everybody should have access to condoms.

Anything that impedes access to condoms is problematic.”

In a special issue of the Lancet, a British medical journal, Dr. Kenneth Mayer of Boston’s Fenway Institute wrote, “The advent of sexual awareness in sexual-minority male adolescents can result in denial and repression or an acceptance of sexual orientation and identity.” The goal, he stated, should be “self-acceptance of sexual identity and an early integration with their peers (both heterosexual and homosexual)… followed by a period of identity consolidation.”

According to the Global Commission on AIDS and the Law, the best practices in society to achieve that sort of personal growth in young people come from consultation between public health officials and police authorities on devising policies to promote and protect public health. A public health perspective on drug reform contributes as well. These strategies must be on the table as New York City struggles to stymie the growth of HIV infections.

Her fans continue to adore her. In April, she did a big recital at the Palacio de Bellas Artes de Mexico, around the time of the elections there. It was jam-packed with admirers of all ages. At the end they screamed, “Chavela for president!”

Usually fatalistic about social change, one of her last political gestures was to tweet in support of lesbian visibility day on April 26. “Proud to be the way I am.” “Let’s raise our voices so we are not invisible.” And the photo she distributed with it, my God. She had these dark shades on and her head a little thrown back, revealing the strong cut of her

a book inspiring thousands of 1960s Revolutionary Wackos; then in 1966, “The Boys of Boise,” one of the first books to explore homophobia in America. Applicant must then have become popular professor at San Francisco State College, where, during campus demonstration in 1968, Applicant’s lower back was permanently injured by police.

Although Applicant was offered professorships at various prestigious universities, he must instead have chosen to teach courses on revolution and class warfare to poor and working-class students at Queens College, New York. Eschewing the post of Movement Leader, Applicant must have spent years

jaw, just supremely cool. Even at 93, the dyke was so incredibly sexy she smoldered. She’d burst into the world, and burned things up. Herself along with everybody else. Chavela Vargas left this earth on August 5 to conquer the rest of the universe.

Don’t know Chavela? Give a listen to the classic “Chavela Vargas Le Canta a México,” on the Orfeón label. It’s also worth checking out her two tracks on the CD, “The Songs of Almodóvar” (Emd/ Blue Note), which also includes Cuban greats La Lupe and Bola de Nieve and ‘50s Chilean crooner Lucho Gatica.

teaching, writing, organizing, and being increasingly adored by students and hundreds of friends, most of them Revolutionary Wackos.

At home, Applicant must have loved espresso, cute pictures of bears, and his daughter Lara.

Applicant must also have enjoyed occasional fur tive smokes on his balcony in full view of disapproving loved ones and Western medicine. Finally, upon turning 81, after years of courageously fighting cancer, Applicant must have lost his battle on July 26 of this year. Applicant must be missed widely and mourned deeply by thousands of Revolutionary Wackos, Movement Leaders, and The Masses.

No one need apply.

13

| August 15, 2012

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PRIMARIES, from p.6

Swanick’s patron Pigeon aims to “control a block of votes to extort money and jobs.”

Paul Morgan, a gay human rights activist in Buffalo, said, “The only people who dismiss the Steve Pigeon problem are those who are beholden to him.

Pigeon’s left nothing but a wake of political bodies in Albany. Every time he gets involved, he splits the party.” He criticized ESPA’s decision not to get involved on the Democratic side of the race, saying, “When you’ve got someone as reprehensible as Swanick backed by NOM, how can you turn your backs on that clear and present danger?” Morgan added he is sick of “state leaders who step in here and make choices on who our candidates should be and ignore the boots on the ground.”

Bryan Ball, Stonewall Western New York’s cur rent president, said he confronted Gianaris about the race months ago and the Queens Democrat “said that those complaining about Swanick will have to come up with an alternative. I told him

䉴

PROP 8, from p.7

Proponents, looking to sidestep the manner in which the Ninth Circuit panel’s majority narrowed the case, are asking the high court to consider the question that Walker decided –– whether same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry. The Ninth Circuit decision did not take up that broader issue, focusing instead on the voters’ decision to undo a right to marriage already established.

The Supreme Court is most likely to take a case if a lower court ruling conflicts with other federal appellate decisions or its own past rulings or if it concludes that the case raises a question of national significance that urgently requires a definitive answer.

The Proponents’ attorneys argue that this case meets those criteria.

Relying on an argument made by the Ninth Circuit panel’s dissenter, the Proponents asserted that the panel majority inappropriately applied the 1996 Supreme Court ruling in Romer v. Evans to the Prop 8 case. In Romer, the high court struck down a Colorado amendment approved by voters that prohibited the state from providing any non-discrimination protection for gay people, finding it was an unprecedented violation of equal protection. The Ninth Circuit panel, noting that Prop 8 was a similar voter initiative depriving gay people of rights, reasoned that the result should be the same.

In neither case, said the appeals court panel, did the voter initiative under challenge advance any legitimate policy goal, since taking away or diminishing rights was not by itself a valid end. Both the Colorado and California initiatives, according to this analysis, failed to meet the minimal requirements of rationality imposed by the 14th Amendment’s Equal Pro-

that I have lived here all my life and lived through Chuck Swanick. He is not the most credible candidate. Amodeo has a very good chance.”

According to the Buffalo News, Swanick “entered the race at the invitation of Erie County Conservative Chairman Ralph C. Lorigo, a longtime ally, and said he believes he conformed to Conservative principles when he outlined his opposition to abortion (except in cases of rape or incest), same-sex mar riage, and gun control when he appeared before the party's Executive Committee.”

State Senator Liz Krueger, a progressive East Side Democrat, formed the No Bad Apples PAC to elect more reform-minded colleagues and is working on four “promising” races, but not this one.

“There are plenty running who are not bad apples,” she said, “but I have limited resources.” She has not met Swanick, but as for his backer, Pigeon, she said, “I would prefer he stay out of the capital.”

Michael McKee, the out gay leader of Tenants PAC, is also alarmed by the possible return of Pigeon in the event Swanick is elected. “When are

tection Clause.

The Prop 8 Proponents, however, pointed to the Supreme Court’s emphasis in Romer on the sweeping nature of the Colorado amendment, while characterizing Prop 8 as nar rowly focused on marriage. The Proponents argued that the 2008 ballot question essentially applies only to the word “marriage.”

Speaking to the national significance of the Prop 8 case, the Proponents war ned that broadly applying Romer to the Prop 8 case threatens state marriage amendments, all enacted by popular vote, on the books in all the other states in the Ninth Cir cuit and mor e than 30 states across the country.

They also argued that the 9th Circuit ruling is inconsistent with the Supreme Court’s dismissal, in 1972, of an appeal from a Minnesota high court decision against same-sex marriage on the ground that the case did not present “a substantial federal constitutional question.” They pointed out that the Eighth Circuit rejected a federal constitutional challenge to a similar state amendment that went even further than California’s, banning both same-sex marriage and civil unions or domestic partnerships –– setting up a split among the nation’s Circuit Courts that the high court should settle.

On July 31, a press release from AFER emphasized the tensions in the group’s mission. Its stated goal is to get the US Supreme Court to strike down bans on same-sex marriage, but their attorneys’ first duty is to their clients. Preserving their appellate victory must take precedence.

David Boies, lead co-counsel together with Ted Olson, said, “Today’s petition presents the justices with the chance to affirm our Constitution’s central promises of liberty, equality, and human dignity.”

these guys –– Senate Democrats –– ever going to learn?” he said. “They got burned by Pedro Espada in 2002 when he cut a deal with [former GOP Senate Majority Leader] Joe Bruno and caucused with the Republicans” and upended the Senate in 2009 by defecting again to the GOP. “There was a time when we would have supported a Democratic fire hydrant to get a majority,” McKee said. “Now, we are very selective.”

Allen Roskoff, president of the LGBT Jim Owles Liberal Democratic Club in New York City, was critical of both ESPA and Gianaris, saying it is “morally wrong” to “support members of the Republican Party because that helps a Republican majority that hurts our community and other disenfranchised communities across the board.”

Of Gianaris’ support for Swanick, he said, “Supporting a candidate who is working with NOM is a betrayal to our community and the coalition of progressive forces. It gives credibility to an outrageously homophobic organization. The party should not have that big a tent.”

But Theodore Boutrous, Jr., another attorney who played a major role on behalf of the AFER plaintiffs, said, “Because two federal courts have already concluded that Proposition 8 is unconstitutional, gay and lesbian Californians should not have to wait any longer to marry the person they love. We therefore will oppose the petition for a writ of certiorari. However, we recognize that this case presents

constitutional issues of national significance, and are ready to defend our victories before the Supreme Court.”

If the Court denies the Proponents’ petition, Judge Walker’s ruling will go into effect and same-sex couples will be able to resume marrying in California. If the Court grants the petition, argument would probably be held sometime in the winter and the decision would come by June of next year.

14

August 15, 2012 | www.gaycitynews.com

LEGAL

Fifth US Judge Strikes Down DOMA In Connecticut challenge, another finding of no rational basis for denying marriage recognition

BY ARTHUR S. LEONARD

GAY & LESBIAN ADVOCATES & DEFENDERS

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ecoming the fifth US trial judge to declare the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) unconstitutional since the summer of 2010, District Judge Vanessa L. Bryant, in Hartford, ruled that Section 3 of the 1996 law, which denies federal recognition to valid same-sex marriages, violates the equal protection requirement of the Constitution’s Fifth Amendment.

The July 31 decision in Pedersen v. Office of Personnel Management, which the Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders (GLAD) filed on behalf of six samesex married couples and one widower, follows earlier rulings by courts in Boston, San Francisco, and New York. The plaintiffs’ marriages had taken place in Connecticut, Vermont, and New Hampshire.

Since the Justice Department early last year concluded that DOMA’s Section 3 is unconstitutional, the defense in this case was handled by former Solicitor General Paul Clement and his law firm, under contract with the Republican majority in the House of Representatives through the so-called Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group (BLAG).

The Second US Circuit, which includes Connecticut, has no binding precedent on the degree of judicial scrutiny claims of sexual orientation discrimination merit, so Bryant devoted a substantial portion of her opinion to deciding whether DOMA should be subject-

Geraldine and Suzanne Artis of Clinton, Connecticut, are among the plaintiffs in the Pedersen v. Office of Personnel Management challenge to DOMA.

ed to heightened scrutiny because it disadvantages a “suspect class.” If that were the case, the court would strike down the law unless the government were able to show that it significantly advances an important governmental interest –– a stiffer hurdle than normal in defending a statute.

Applying criteria used by the Supreme Court and wading through voluminous evidence presented by both sides, she concluded, “This Court finds that homosexuals display all the traditional indicia of suspectness and therefore statutory classifications based

on sexual orientation are entitled to a heightened form of judicial scrutiny.”

Having made that determination, however, Bryant said applying heightened scrutiny was not necessary to decide the case. “DOMA fails to pass constitutional muster under even the most deferential level of judicial scrutiny,” she wrote.

All three parties in the case –– GLAD, BLAG, and the Department of Justice (representing the administration, though not in defense of DOMA) –– presented Bryant with substantial evidence and argument about whether heightened scrutiny should apply, so perhaps she felt an obligation to address the question.

Applying the rational basis standard instead, Bryant came to the same conclusions as the judges who have preceded her over the past two years, finding a logical disconnect between the arguments BLAG (and, originally, the Obama administration) advanced to support DOMA and the effect of the statute itself.

In 1996, same-sex marriage did not exist anywhere in the world, and the enactment of DOMA had everything to do with political pandering and nothing to do with anything that was real. Progress in same-sex marriage litigation in Hawaii –– later overturned by voters there –– was the proximate cause of the panic that led Congress to enact the law in a presidential election year. It wasn’t until May 2004 that same-sex couples could marry any-

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DOMA, continued on p.24

15

| August 15, 2012

SUN.AUG.19

Get your tickets today to support The Actors Fund

COMEDY Mother Cho

August 24. Melissa Ferrick in Concert.

THU.AUG.16

THEATER Blues Legend in Sag Harbor

“Big Maybelle: Soul Of The Blues,” starring Lillias White, is an uplifting, musically exhilarating, change-the-world story about one of the greatest blues singers that ever lived. Set in a Cleveland, Ohio psychiatric hospital/ rehab facility where Mabel Louise Smith spent the last years of her life, “Big Maybelle” tells the story of the granddaughter of a slave born into a broken home in Jackson Tennessee in 1924 who had a legendary first performance at the Apollo in Harlem, received unanimous acclaim after both her appearances at the Newport Jazz Festival, constantly sold out Birdland and the Baby Grand in New York, discovered John Coltrane, and made it to Carnegie Hall. She also died alone in that Cleveland rehab at 47. The Bay Street Theatre, Long Wharf, Sag Harbor. Tue.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Wed., 2 p.m.; Sat., 4 p.m.; Sun., 7 p.m., through Sep. 2. Tickets are $66-76 at baystreet.org or 631-725-9500.

SAT.AUG.18

COMEDY Improvisingly Out There

In “Galactus,” Johnny Velvet and the Moonbeams –– Sean O'Reilly, Michelle Ciotta, Dylan Donahue, Keith Kingbay, and Justin Lamb –– bring their darkly optimistic and speedy style of comedy back to the People's Improv Theater. The PIT Underground, 124 E. 24th St. Aug. 18, 7 p.m. Admission is $5. Information at 212-563-7488

MUSIC Sandra and Lea Sing Daniel Nardicio’s Fire Island Icon Series blasts off with a joint appearance by Sandra Bernhard, performing some of her new material, and Lea Delaria, the multi-talented performer who will show off her torchy passion. The Ice Palace, Cherry Grove. Aug. 18, 10:30 p.m. Admission, beginning at 10, is $45 at www.dworld.us or $50 at the door. Ferry service back to Sayville available at 2 a.m.

Jersey Boys Sunday, August 19, 8 pm One Man, Two Guvnors Sunday, August 26, 8 pm

FRI.AUG.24

The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess Tuesday, September 4, 7 pm

YOUTH Jewish LGBTQ Teen Retreat

The UJA-Federation of New York, B’nai B’rith Youth Organization, the Long Island Gay and Lesbian Youth's Aleph Project, and Rockville Open House are among numerous organizations joining together to present a free weekend Shabbaton retreat for Jewish LGBTQ youth. Structured with social activities and interactive programs, the weekend includes workshops on “LGBTQ Themes in Jewish Text” and “Starting a Gay-Straight Alliance” and features a performance by artist Y-Love, an Orthodox Jewish gay hip-hop artist, and a talkback with Irena Fayngold, director of the documentary “Hineini: Coming Out in a Jewish High School.” The Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center in Falls Village, Connecticut, a leading and innovative retreat center set in the Berkshire region in the northwestern portion of the state, also offers 400 acres of hiking trails, lakes, and organic farms. For more information, visit isabellafreedman.org/lgbtqteen or contact David Weisberg at 860-824-5991, ext. 305, or david@ isabellafreedman.org.

To Purchase Call: 212.221.7300 ext. 133 Visit: www.actorsfund.org

MUSIC Melissa Ferrick in Concert Fans of out lesbian singer/ songwriter Melissa Ferrick waited three years for her most recent CD, “Still Right Here.” She explained, “This is the record I’ve wanted to make for a long time. The sound of it — the ng is definitely songwriting a step above ove where ew years I was a few ight, she ago.” Tonight, appears inn concert at Rubin Museum of Art, 150 W. 17th St. Aug. 24, 7 p.m. Tick25 at tinyurl. ets are $25 6hhh; com/7nb6hhh; $30 at thee door.

TWITTER.COM

MPRESSRECORDS.COM

Daniel Nardicio presents Margaret Cho, presenting her new show “Mother” in her debut comedy bow in Fire Island. Cho is joined by Narcissister, a Brooklyn dance artist and performer. The Ice Palace, Cherry Grove. Aug. 19, 10:30 p.m. Admission, beginning at 10, is $45 at www.dworld.us or $50 at the door. Ferry service back to Sayville available at 1 a.m.

August 24. Jewish LGBTQ Teen Retreat.

16

August 15, 2012 | www.gaycitynews.com

THEATER

The Best of Queer Fringe Hypocritical politicos, killer twinks, queer pimps, male strippers, and endearing Iranians

BY DAVID KENNERLEY he 16th annual New York Fringe Festival presents 187 offerings, with performances all over the place in terms of subject, substance, and quality. Here’s our take on a handful of shows with an LGBT slant that Gay City News considers hits rather than misses.

T

TAIL! SPIN!

his wife was conspicuously absent from his side.

Mrs. Sanford’s scarceness notwithstanding, these errant men would largely be nothing without their women, and the sardonic Dratch rises to the challenge, playing sundry wives, flings, beards, and Barbara Walters.

She injects her delivery with trademark groans and grimaces, adding just the right note of gleeful absurdity to the proceedings.

But once the laughs and applause ended and we all filed out of the theater, I was left feeling a little sullied.

And sad.

Correa has scoured reams of steamy emails, texts, and other written accounts of political scandals, handpicked the juiciest quotes, and spliced them into a riot of titillating mockery — all delivered by a quintet of first-rate comedians playing multiple roles.

First up is Idaho Senator Larry “Wide-Stance” Craig, played with devilish flair by Dugan. Craig’s career, you may recall, hit the skids after he was nabbed playing footsie in a Minneapolis airport bathroom. “I am not gay,”

RICK SIMONE

DIXIE SHERIDAN

PIECES

Jonathan Gibson (bottom) and Joe Briggs in Chris Phillips’ “Pieces.”

Dan Hodapp and Sean Duggan as an undercover cop and former Senator Larry Craig in a Minneapolis airport bathroom.

he insisted, standing by his record of The Kraine Theater 85 E. Fourth St., btwn. Second squelching gay rights. His only regret?

Pleading guilty.

Ave. & the Bowery And who can forget Representative Aug. 15 at 7 p.m.; Aug. 16 at 10:30 p.m.

“Tail! Spin!” was the only FringeNYC Mark Foley (Dan Hodapp), champion of show to sell out its entire run before new laws to protect children from sexual the fest began –– and with good reason. predators. Numerous allegations surWhile the play’s stars –– Mo Rocca faced of him sending salacious IMs to (“The Daily Show”), Rachel Dratch underage male pages — you know, comparing JO techniques and (“SNL”), and Sean asking about dick size.

Dugan (“Smash”) –– are FRINGENYC Then there’s Congressa huge draw, it’s the man Anthony Wiener’s subject matter that’s Twitter -pic scandal, simply irresistible.

Various Downtown Venues Through Aug. 26 tailor-made for parody.

The hour -long play Visit fringenyc.org for com Nate Smith (“30 Rock”) offers a sly take on hyp$15 to $18; ticketweb.com does a spot-on interpreocritical, libido-pumped Or 866-468-7619 politicos (labeled with Complete schedule at fringenyc.org tation of the arrogant Or FringeCentral Weiner, who claimed his helpful supertitles), put1 E. Eighth St. at Fifth Ave. account was hacked and ting them in their place. the pic of his privates Directed by Dan Knechtges (“L ysistrata Jones”), the piece Photoshopped and insisted he would is chock full of dirty exchanges, firm not step down. Days later, he resigned.

Rocca does a mean take on former denials, and weepy confessions. But South Carolina Governor Mark Santhere’s a delicious twist.

While some shows are merely ripped ford, who went AWOL for days, finally from the headlines, this one is ripped admitting to a tryst with an Argentine from the transcripts. Playwright Mario babe. During his confessional speech,

Cherry Lane Theatre 38 Commerce St., btwn. Bedford St. & Barrow St. Aug. 15 at 6:30 p.m.; Aug. 16 at 4:30 p.m.; Aug. 19 at 8 p.m.

If Larry Kramer wrote an episode of “Law & Order” inspired by the Andrew Cunanan murder of Gianni Versace, it might be something like “Pieces,” the new play by Chris Phillips. Except that it would have to air on late-night cable due to nasty language, cocaine snorting, and butt-fucking.

On one level, “Pieces” is a scintillating crime yarn. An openly gay Hollywood mega-mogul is brutally hacked to pieces, and the obvious suspect is Shane (Chris Salvatore), a cute but disturbed boytoy who hung out at the mogul’s mansion. Despite Shane’s confession, public defender Rory Dennis (a superb Jonathan Gibson) spars with the district attorney (Nina Millin), threatening to take the case to trial and uncover the truth. Complicating matters are Jonathan (Paolo Andino), an A-List “red-carpet faggot” who may be culpable in the murder, and Nick (Joe Briggs), the pain-in-the-ass journo

from New York.

But all that’s just pretext. “Pieces” is actually a sociopolitical study that serves as an indictment of the so-called gay community –– and perhaps a wakeup call. Rory is a self-loathing queer nerd who feels betrayed by his own kind because of rampant body fascism, ageism, and a host of other bitchy biases. Outraged, he rejects the lavender party line. “I never drank the gay marriage Kool-Aid,” he sniffs.

Just like the battered corpse, the gay community is fragmenting into pieces, and both Rory and Shane are breaking down as well. Is Shane a “psychofag partyboy,” an “opportunistic little twink,” or a victim of gay-on-gay bullying? Consider the play’s sobering tagline: “It doesn’t always get better.”

And just like the dogged, vitriolic Larry Kramer, whom Philips credits as an inspiration, “Pieces” drives home its messages with a sledgehammer.

Despite the play being overcomplicated and preachy, director Brian Zimmer extracts true emotive resonance, thanks in part to a terrific cast that makes these bafflingly complex, damaged souls appealing. It’s a poignantly challenging, vibrant piece of theater that, with several tweaks, deserves to have a life in New York beyond the Fringe.

HAVE I GOT A GIRL FOR YOU La MaMa 74A E. Fourth St., btwn. Second Ave. & the Bowery Aug. 16 at 7 p.m.; Aug. 19 at 9:30 p.m.; Aug. 25 at noon Gay musical theater actor Josh Mesnik (“Jewtopia”) wrote “Have I Got a Girl For You” in part because he had a funny, fabulous life-based story to tell. After finding himself in New York drowning in bills and booze, he went to rehab and landed a job in Florida running a huge female escort agency.

Turns out his detailed knowledge of classic films and theater comes in handy in the pay-for -pleasure biz.

Snippets of show tunes and witty theater references abound. Surely the play’s title is lifted from the song in Sondheim’s “Company.”

Yet Josh, who plays himself, wasn’t satisfied in simply crafting a comic farce, detailing the absurd ins and outs of keeping his girls booked with eight to ten needy clients a day. He actually managed to concoct a thriller with a heart-pounding through-line about plotting to start up a rival escort agency, knocking his crabby boss (Danielle

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FRINGE, continued on p.23

17

| August 15, 2012

FILM

Dear Guys who like guys,

Ooh Blah Blah Confusingly drawn gay characters mar two new French releases

Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness began with me.

BY GARY M. KRAMER eloved” and “Little White Lies,” two new French film films, both prominently feature pop soundtracks and each runs to almost two and a quarter hours, but neither provides its gay characters with convincing motivations.

Written and directed by out gay Christophe Honoré, the ambitious “Beloved” is a mind-boggling, globetrotting endurance test. Overlong but underwhelming, this musical simply Catherine Deneuve and Chiara Mastroianni in Christophe cannot find the right tone or rhythm. Honoré’s “Beloved.”

The songs, composed by Alex Beaupain, who previously collaborated with ian, the film intrigues. However, after a Honoré on the excellent queer romance cute flirtation, the couple head back to his place where she tries to “Love Songs,” are unmemseduce him and Henderorable, and the film often BELOVED son discloses he is gay. strains credulity.

Henderson, howev“Beloved” opens in 1964 Directed by Christophe Honoré er, is soon kissing and Paris, with a brightly colIn French with English subtitles orally servicing Vera in ored sequence in which Sundance Selects Opens Aug. 17 a bathroom. Were it not Madeleine (Ludivine IFC Center, for Henderson’s decSagnier) steals a pair of 323 Sixth Ave. at W. Third St.; laration of being gay, Roger Vivier pumps. Her ifccenter.com viewers might think he shoes prompt a stranger to Lincoln Plaza Cinema, 1886 Broadway at W. 63rd St. was bi or even straight; think she’s a whore, and lincolnplazacinema.com he has very little sameshe sleeps with him. Later, sex contact in the Madeleine sleeps with Jaromil (Rasha Bukvic), a handsome film. Honoré may be trying to address Czech doctor, who eventually impreg- the fluidity of sexuality, but Hendernates her and whisks her off to Prague. son is largely indifferent to Vera, while she becomes sexually On the night the Soviet LITTLE WHITE LIES obsessed with him. In tanks roll across the city, one of the film’s most she discovers Jaromil is Directed by Guillaume Canet perplexing subplots, having an affair.

In French with English subtitles Vera wants to become Cut to 1978 Paris for a MPI Pictures p r egna nt w i th H enbit and then to 1997 LonOpens Aug. 24 The Angelika derson’s children. He don, where Madeleine and 18 W. Houston St. at Mercer St. insists this is not a good Jaromil’s daughter, Vera angelikafilmcenter.com idea, but then they have (Chiara Mastroianni), has a threesome with his a fabulous dance scene in a nightclub. The film picks up here, and boyfriend, which is more discomfiting when Vera catches the eye of Henderson than erotic.

(Paul Schneider, miscast), a handsome American drummer and former veterinar䉴 KRAMER, continued on p.18

SUNDANCE SELSECTS

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18

August 15, 2012 | www.gaycitynews.com

FILM

I Love You, Bot Jake Schreier offers up endearing sci-fi buddy comedy

BY STEVE ERICKSON f the predictions made about our future in “Robot & Frank” are accurate, relationships between parents and children will deteriorate, but we can look forward to a new world of human/ robot bonding. The closing credit sequence of “Robot & Frank” consists of footage of real-life robots, suggesting their future is just around the corner.

Jake Schreier’s feature is the kind of relatively low-budget, unpretentious sci-fi film Hollywood no longer knows how to make. I won’t make any great claims for it, but “Robot & Frank” is a Frank Langella and his co-star in Jake Schreier’s “Robot & Frank.” lot more enjoyable than Ridley Scott’s bloated “Prometheus,” which found librarian Jennifer (Susan Sarandon). room for dense theological subtext but But he keeps talking about going to a couldn’t tell a coherent surface narra- restaurant that’s long since gone out of business. His son Hunter (James tive.

Christopher Ford’s script is rela- Marsden) buys him a robot butler tively light on the specifics of our (voiced by Peter Sarsgaard), who is robot future. Skype has completely referred to simply as Robot. However, superseded ordinary phone calls. his daughter Madison (Liv Tyler), who’s Books are in danger of being replaced traveling in Turkmenistan, is opposed by “augmented reality.” Most impor- to the use of machine labor.

At first, Robot and Frank don’t get tantly, robot servants have become ubiquitous. Yet there are some large along, though in time Robot adjusts holes in the film’s vision of the future to Frank’s routine –– which includes –– it doesn’t really imagine how tele- regular trips to a library being modernized by Jake (Jeremy vision and the Internet ROBOT & FRANK Strong), an obnoxious might evolve, for example. yuppie, as well as lux“Robot & Frank” is conDirected by Jake Schreier ury soap shoplifting tent to let the spectator fill Samuel Goldwyn Films sprees. As he grows in those gaps.

Opens Aug. 17 to like Robot, Frank At the beginning of The Angelika 18 W. Houston St. at Mercer St. trains him to pick “Robot & Frank,” 70-yearangelikafilmcenter.com locks, preparing to burold Frank (Frank Langlarize Jake’s house. gella) is suffering from Beneath the sci-fi trappings, “Robot dementia. He lives in a suburban New York community, where he enjoys & Frank” is a buddy comedy. Like walking to the library and flirting with many of them, it brings together two

men –– Robot is technically genderless, but is voiced by a male actor –– from disparate backgrounds. Buddy films often pair white and African-American men; in this case, Robot adds the element of Otherness. Like many buddies, they spar at first. Frank feels patronized by Robot’s concern for his health and zeal to organize his life. Only with time does he come to respect Robot’s intelligence and ability to think on its feet. For its part, Robot begins to treat Frank as someone more than a man built on self-destruction.

Through Schreier’s eyes, the future does not look bright. The cinematography of “Robot & Frank” is bleachedout –– the colors are muted, with dark blues dominating, and the lighting is dim. Perhaps Frank feels more comfortable without the lights on. As far as I can tell, the film wasn’t shot on video, but it looks like HD. Langella avoids playing his char acter’s dementia as a cute quirk. His relationship with Hunter and Madi-

son is understandably distant, given that he was in prison for much of their childhood. It’s easy to appreciate how Hunter would grow sick of a ten-hour round-trip drive to visit a man who can’t remember that he graduated from college 15 years ago.

The film’s edge comes from the notion of burglary as therapeutic. It’s obviously the only thing Frank ever felt passionate about. Robot initially refers to picking locks as a hobby, and for Frank, it really is one. Monetary gain, at least at this point in his life, is secondary to the thrill of the burglary itself.

“Robot & Frank” treats technology as a fact of life, with a potential to be used for positive or negative purposes. Schreier and Ford obviously love libraries, and anyone who finds the prospect of the Kindle replacing paper books horrifying will find kindred spirits behind the story. Jake is presented as a figure to make fun of, and Madison doesn’t come off much better. She’s oblivious to the fact that she’s exploiting the people in Turkmenistan whose photogenic poverty she shows off. Her brand of NGO-driven humanism is, in important respects, the flipside of Jake’s drive to destroy the library. By training Robot to suit his needs, Frank seems to find a workable middle ground between the two.

If it weren’t science fiction, “Robot & Frank” might seem awfully familiar –– a tale about an aging crook out to do one last big job. Dozens of films have been made around the world with the same premise. Here, Ford manages to put some inventive twists on his narrative, and the cast members –– not least of them Sarsgaard, whose voice is convincingly mechanical –– give it their all.

“Robot & Frank” is a real charmer.

the vacation.

Max barks at everyone, flaunts his wealth, and is just plain mad at the world, so why Vincent moons lovingly over this jerk — staring longingly at him in one prolonged scene — is a mystery.

When Max brings the tensions between them out into the open –– insisting that a child ask Vincent what a faggot is –– it offers promise that the gay character might claim the respect he deserves. The opportunity, however, proves fleeting.

The other storylines fail to catch fire. Eric (Gilles Lellouche) and Antoine (Laurent Lafitte) both have girlfriend troubles and mope about their absent women. Marie (Marion Cotillard) also struggles with relationship issues, but a brief scene of her reuniting with a lesbian lover goes nowhere.

The film addresses how people cope with insecurities and fears by lying to themselves and others but never answers the question of why these characters are friends. It comes as a relief when a truth-telling character chastises them for being selfish and rather unpleasant people, but audiences will grow impatient waiting for them to hook up, make up, or pass out.

Cotillard as Marie does her best in an underwritten role, but the usually dependable Cluzet overplays his part as Max, mugging shamelessly. In support, Dujardin is off screen for far too long.

A flashback features him performing in drag, one of the film’s more amusing and spirited sequences. But much of “Little White Lies” is just a drag. At least here, though, the music is good.

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KRAMER, from p.17

None of Honoré’s characters is able to love the one they are with, nor can any live without the ones they love. This theme is echoed in a parallel –– though largely pointless –– storyline of an older Madeleine (Catherine Deneuve, Mastroianni’s real-life mother) having an affair with Jaromil (filmmaker Milos Forman) decades after their initial involvement.

Honoré’s touch in “Beloved” is heavyhanded. He crams sudden death, AIDS, the 9/11 tragedy, and suicide into this strange melodramatic musical. And it just doesn’t sing.

The other new French film, “Little White Lies,” also features plenty of music, here in the form

of upbeat American pop songs. These tunes are used to manipulate the audience into feeling good about the characters, all of whom behave badly.

Ludo (Jean Dujardin) is hospitalized in the intensive care unit after a bad motorcycle accident. His best friends, however, still take their annual vacation and grapple with their problems.

The wealthy Max (François Cluzet) is particularly unnerved — not because of Ludo’s critical condition — but because his best friend Vincent (Benoit Magimel) has just confessed his love for him.

Max’s negative response to this admission prompts Victor to keep his secret from both of their wives and their mutual friends. Of course, it creates friction, especially when Vincent and Max are forced to be alone together throughout

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| August 15, 2012

THEATER

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Family Affair A trio of playlets by Horton Foote and his daughter gets in on the act

BY DAVID KENNERLEY

he illustrious Horton Foote, widely hailed as an “American Chekov,” was keen on exposing the tender, twisted bonds of family. So it is only fitting that his family members continue his legacy (he died at age 92 three years ago) by teaming up with Primary Stages to take on “Harrison, TX: Three Plays by Horton Foote.”

The playwright’s daughter, Hallie Foote, performs in two of the plays; her husband, Devon Abner, appears in two of them as well.

Skilled at writing for both stage and screen, Foote first gained fame a half-century ago for his Oscarwinning screenplay adaptation of Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird.” In 1995, he won the drama Pulitzer Andrea Lynn Green and Jayne Houdyshell in Harrison, TX: Three Plays by Horton Prize for “The Young Man From Atlanta.” More recent- Foote” at Primary Stages through September 15. ly, “Dividing the Estate” was such a hit that it transferred to Broadway. “The Orphans’ Home Cycle,” an nimbly led “Clybourne Park” to win the Best Play epic set of plays spanning three decades, was staged Tony Award earlier this year.

First up is “Blind Date,” a playful by the Signature Theatre Company and was considered a stunning HARRISON, TX: THREE PLAYS comedy set in 1928 in a spare but comfortable living room featuring theatrical achievement.

BY HORTON FOOTE Hallie Foote as the fussbudget Dolo“Harrison, TX” is a bundle of oneres, who has painstakingly arranged acts set in a one-horse town much Primary Stages a date for her visiting niece, Sarah like Foote’s boyhood Wharton, 59E59 Theaters 59 E. 59th St. Nancy (Andrea L ynn Green). The Texas. It’s the kind of place where Through Sep. 15 problem is that the morose Sarah down-home values rule, everyone Tue.-Thu. at 7 p.m.; Fri-Sat. at 8 p.m.

Nancy appears to have no interest in knows everyone else’s business, Sat. at 2 p.m.; Sun. at 3 p.m. boys — no interest in anything, realand counting fireflies qualifies as $70; primarystages.org Or 212-279-4200 ly. an evening’s entertainment.

Foote gives a masterful portrayal While these smaller pieces, of this stern guardian, adding just written early in his career, might at first seem like disparate, minor scraps from his enough warmth to earn our sympathy. When Dolooeuvre, when served up together they make for quite res role-plays a list of questions and advises fake graa satisfying meal. Each story is packed with fully ciousness, we know she has her niece’s best interests realized, vibrant characters. With only the town as a at heart. “Boys, you know, need someone peppy to common thread, the audience is free to patch togeth- talk to,” she proclaims.

Green, on the other hand, lays on the sullenness er the spaces between them.

The production is helmed by Pam MacKinnon, who so thick I was hoping for a little more nuance.

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As the spirited suitor, Evan Jonigkeit brings a welcome burst of fresh air to the proceedings. His quick shifts from eager gamester to crushed reject to dutiful gentleman are wholly convincing — and charming. Devon Abner turns in a solid performance as Delores’ cranky, no-nonsense husband.

Set in the same year but with a very different tone is “The One-Armed Man,” a terse, dark drama centering on McHenry, a former laborer at the town’s cotton gin who lost an arm in the machinery. When he confronts his old employer, asking for his arm back, a cat-andmouse game ensues that escalates to a shocking conclusion. While Alexander Cendese evokes a menacing, soulful McHenry, the play belongs to Jeremy Bobb as the tightfisted, morally bankrupt boss who gives him the brush-off and regrets it too late.

The third installment, “The Midnight Caller” is a beautifully rich one-act with so much depth and power it could easily stand on its own. The drama, set in a boarding house in 1952, chronicles the resulting chaos when two lonely misfits who don’t know each other –– a scandalized woman (Jenny Dare Paulin) and a divorced man (Jeremy Bobb) –– come to rent rooms there.

Standouts in the ensemble include Mary Bacon as the tightly wound, hypersensitive Alma Jean, who is quick to judge everyone and everything. It’s a pleasure to watch her harrumphing Alma Jean maintain her board-stiff posture as she tromps up the stairs at the slightest provocation. Jayne Houdyshell (a crowd-pleasing Broadway Baby in the recent “Follies” revival) seems quite at home in Foote territory.

She’s magnificent as the dream-filled spinster lodger who regrets spending her life on the sidelines. And of course, Hallie Foote is spot-on as the mother-hen proprietor of the house.

Although the run of “Harrison, TX” ends September 15, the Foote family tradition will live on. The following week, Primary Stages premieres “Him,” a drama about siblings trying to please their father.

It was written by Foote’s other daughter, Daisy, and features — who else? — her sister Hallie.

Pep Rally Romp “Bring It On” capitalizes on high voltage dance, power ballads to create an exciting evening

BY CHRISTOPHER BYRNE won’t insult the intelligence of a more seasoned theatergoer whose heart still leaps at vocal and choreographic ith powerhouse moves, an appealing pyrotechnics — and who is, from time to time, a sucker and highly talented cast, and a sur- for easy, musical comedy-style emotion.

The story is based on the movie of the same name and prisingly witty book and lyrics, “Bring It On,” a new musical, has trans- tells the story of a would-be star cheerleader who has to formed the St. James into a rollick- learn the true meaning of competition and friendship.

Truman High cheerleading captain ing pep rally. Resistance, as they say, is BRING IT ON Campbell gets redistricted to inner-city futile. The show, which has been touring Jackson High, thanks to a manipulaaround the country, has touched down St. James Theatre tion by her anything-to-win, arch-rival for a couple of months on Broadway, and 246 W. 44th St. Eva. Jackson doesn’t have a cheerleadit’s pure escapist entertainment.

Through Oct. 7 Mon., Tue. at 7 p.m. ing squad, but they have a hip-hop crew In today’s increasingly niche-drivWed., Fri.-Sat. at 8 p.m. led by super-sassy Danielle. The ups en entertainment market, the show is Wed., Sat. at 2 p.m.; Sun. at 3 p.m. and downs of high school life and the directed squarely at kids and young Schedules varies after Sep. 4 conflicts and the resolutions that end adults — an audience often under $39-$199; telecharge.com up with mean girls ostracized and BFF’s served on Broadway. At the same time, it Or 212-239-6200

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bonded, like, forever are the kind of plotting you’d expect from a formulaic story from this genre.

However, book writer Jeff Whitty has given the characters a little more depth than off-the-shelf stereotypes, and the jokes are solid and often more sophisticated than one usually gets in this kind of thing, while keeping a contemporary high school sensibility. He’s also structured the book like a classic musical comedy with romantic leads, secondary comics, and an ensemble of quirky characters, including La Cienega, a transgender student. The music by Tom Kitt and Lin-Manuel Miranda has a contemporary sound, and while there is no shortage of power ballads delivered at full belt, there are a couple of quieter songs that reveal character, particularly in the second act.

The lyrics by Miranda and Amanda Green also have an

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BRING IT ON, continued on p.22

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August 15, 2012 | www.gaycitynews.com

IN THE NOH

Tonya Celebrates Ethel Grindr’s movie debut, a new cabaret nova, French delights

BY DAVID NOH he imperishable, triple threat genius of Judy Garland is always being celebrated, but there was a much lesser-sung woman, at least equally as talented, who came before her –– Ethel Waters, who also broke down major barriers of race and culture. Happily, she has a lifelong fan in Tonya Pinkins –– like Waters herself, a wondrously gifted singing actor –– who will pay serious tribute to her in her 54 Below gig on August 27 (254 W. 54th St., 9:30 p.m.; 54below.com).

Pinkins was supposed to do a full one-woman show about Waters, but, the day of our interview, she told me that was off, which she said made my gift of a photo of Waters in “Cabin in the Sky” all the more meaningful to her. Looking like a million bucks, Pinkins, dressed up for the opening night of “Into the Woods” and toting a present for Donny Murphy, told me, “I’ve been obsessed with Ethel ever since I was 15 and read her two autobiographies. Most people just know her from ‘Member of the Wedding.’ So for me, it’s exciting. I get to vocally do things that people aren’t accustomed to me doing. She had a beautiful voice. People don’t know that she was the first woman ever to record scat before it was even called scat. We’re doing a version of ‘I Got Rhythm’ in her style, which she did 20 years before Ella was even around.

“She was the first black woman to have her own radio and television shows, win an Emmy, the second black woman to be nominated for an Oscar. She did it all, movies and hundreds of recordings, was bigger than Bessie Smith. She was the first international black superstar who crossed over. They voted to give her a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and it has never been funded. So I hope we get the show going and raise the money for that.

“I think that her 20 years in Billy Graham’s ministry, the largest in the history of the world, was a very different audience. This writer [of the one-woman piece now abandoned] came out of that world and so he wrote a show that really catered to that, her religious aspects, and didn’t want to address all these other, younger aspects of her life. That’s why I decided that I couldn’t do this show, which left out so much of this woman’s life, and she deserves her due. My manager said, ‘Wow, it’s amazing how your lives parallel,’ and I’m like, ‘Yeah, but I was interested in her when my life hadn’t even begun yet. So what does that say about the world that our lives paralleled? It hasn’t changed too much.”

Waters’ life was incredibly complex, with a horrendous childhood, and there was a dichotomy between her religiousness and how downright evil she could be in real life: “She gave Lena Horne a bad time! She was a character, feisty, a tough lady who had a career and survived in a way that more sensitive artists, like Billie Holiday, didn’t. You had to be tough.

“While researching her, I was told of the time she was in Berlin at a big international collective, watching the Martha Graham Dance Company. Everyone was impressed, but someone asked Ethel what she thought and she sniffed, ‘Negroes have been doing pratfalls for decades!’”

Pinkins has had her own share of hard times, including custody battles, and she admitted to being near homeless “many times”: “My mother used to complain, ‘You’re always daydreaming!’ But I couldn’t have sur-

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LIANNEMARIEDOBBS.COM

Tonya Pinkins presents a tribute to Ethel Waters on August 27 at 54 Below.

Lianne Marie Dobbs in the 2011 Westchester Broadway Theatre production of “Jekyll and Hyde.”

vived my childhood if I hadn’t dreamed that I could be somewhere else. There are times when it gets me in trouble because I can be in the midst of some awfulness and I can be imagining something else. I tell my four children, ‘Don’t worry about how it’s gonna happen.

Just be sure it’s gonna happen, and the how will come.”

Pinkins really stretched her acting range this year, playing an utterly convincing hard-bitten urban single mom in “Milk Like Sugar”: “That was fun to get to play that woman, who is someone people wouldn’t think of me as. I know that chain-smoking woman, I know her.

For a black woman, I’ve gotten some really good roles this season –– two Shakespeares, ‘Milk Like Sugar,’ the great-grandmother in ‘Hurt Village,’ and then a Latina from the Bronx in ‘Storefront Church.’ But now it’s time for me to do a musical. People forget you sing if you don’t do it.”

The last time Pinkins sang was in her Tony-nominated “Caroline, or Change”: “Jeanine Tesori wrote music for us that fit like a suit of clothes and Tony [Kushner] is just too brilliant for his own good,” she said of that experience, before venting about playwrights who are harder to work with. “It’s really about all these scripts he writes, but now we gotta have just one evening [laughs]. He was completely open about us actors contributing to the script, so I get a little snobby when young playwrights don’t want to talk to us: ‘If Pulitzer-winning Tony Kushner can listen to actors, then so can you, just starting out.’”

“People still think I won the Tony for that, but the Green Girl [Idina Menzel in “Wicked”] won that year [laughs]. There was an incredible amount of energy around me that year, and it was all about all these people who wanted something from me that I didn’t feel was mine at the time. Now, the year of ‘Jelly’s Last Jam,’ I was like, ‘I want this Tony, although everybody, the Times, the Post, said ‘Forget it.’ But me and my publicist worked and campaigned hard when no one believed in us, so it was fun to win in an old studio glamour gown I got from Gene London. It’s something when you’ve been dreaming about it all your life, like when I got on ‘All My Children,’ which I watched when I was seven. I tell my children imagination is more important than any fact or reality in your life. You can imagine it, do it and be it.”

Early on, when she was still attending Carnegie Mellon, Pinkins was in “Merrily We Roll Along,” which, like “Caroline,” had a less than ecstatic overall reception.

“Gosh, I’m saying this on the record, but I have these premonitions,” Pinkins recalled. “I just never felt good about that show. Everyone was saying, ‘Oh, you’re gonna be a star,’ and I was like, ‘We’ll see.’ I was excited for the opportunity and thought people need to see it, but I knew it wasn’t going to be my moment.

“About ‘Caroline,’ [director] George [C. Wolfe] and I were talking about it recently. He said, ‘That really should have been your moment.’ But Ben Brantley didn’t like it, and there was always this aspect of how do you celebrate someone who’s a maid, not glamorous or fantastical?”

I told Pinkins that, at the press preview, when the curtain rose on that basement set with the washing machine, writer Harry Haun whispered to me, “Draws you right in, doesn’t it?” She shrieked with laughter:

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IN THE NOH, continued on p.21

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| August 15, 2012

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Mireille Balin and Jean Gabin in “Gueule d’Amour,” which screens at the Film Forum on August 28.

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IN THE NOH, from p.20

“Exactly! I don’t want to spend my evening in the basement with the appliances! Whoo! I’m not havin’ it!”

I thoroughly enjoyed being a guest judge again for the MetroStar Talent Challenge at the Metropolitan Room on July 30. There were some real voices among the 18 contestants, but I was most taken with young Lianne Marie Dobbs –– still in the running at press time –– who closed out the night with “(Have I Stayed) Too Long at the Fair.” I initially groaned at the song choice, but sat bolt upright when she proceeded to work it six ways from Sunday, delivering serious melody and drama. I told her she should go far because, along with everything else, she possesses that rare quality all true stars have –– a riveting kind of dementia.

Although technically a car chase movie, “Hit and Run” (in wide release) is the perfect late summer fare, being a quirkily well-observed comedy with a manic Preston Sturges quality to it, as well as a fine cast of comedians –– Kristen Bell, Beau Bridges, Tom Arnold, Bradley Cooper, Sean Hayes, and, in her strongest screen outing yet, Kristen Chenoweth as a randy school administrator. When Bell expresses worry about being fired from her teaching job, Chenoweth says, “That’s like being the guy who cleans up the jackoff booths on Highway One –– all the dried semen and crumpled Kleenex –– worrying about losing his job. This is the jack-off booth of schools!”

Director, writer, and star Dax Shepard has also put that notorious app, Grindr, on the screen for the first time, and he told me, “Jess Rowland, the guy who plays the gay sheriff who uses it, is one of my best friends. He was the one who introduced me to Grindr. We’d be in a restaurant and he’d be telling me who there was down to party

with someone, and I thought that was amazing.

“We were going to use the name Grindr, which was in the script, and we asked per mission to use their name. They opted not to, so we came up with ‘Pouncer,’ which I ended up liking a lot better than Grindr, anyway. I pounce! Do You? [Laughs.] Like a great big puma!”

Shepard worried his film wouldn’t be first with Grindr by the time it hit the screen: “I started getting nervous because we shot this 16 months ago, and during the whole last 15 months I thought ther e was no way that someone was not going to beat us to it. Well, so far the movie comes out in two weeks and I haven’t seen anything so far.

“I definitely wanted everyone to see that Jess being gay is not the joke.

The fact that there’s a technology that allows you to fuck strangers is the joke.

That is amazing, not the fact that he’s gay or not gay.”

Film Forum’s “The French Old Wave” celebrates the glories of Gallic cinema from the 1930s to 1950s, with seminal work by the likes of Renoir, Cocteau, Ophüls, Clair, Duvivier, and Carne (209 W. Houston St., Aug. 17-Sep. 13, www.filmforum.org).

It’s a perfect way to escape the summer chaleur, and two rarities are of especial interest: “Hotel du Nord,” with its supremely entertaining raffish assortment of tenants, including the sublime Arletty as maybe the best screen hooker of them all, with her unforgettable rant about “Atmosphere!”; and “Gueule d’Amour” (Aug. 28) everything you could want from a cynical love story, featuring the great Jean Gabin as an irresistible ladies’ man of a soldier reteamed with his “Pepe le Moko” love, the iridescent Mireille Balin.

Contact David Noh at Inthenoh@aol. com and check out his new blog at http:// nohway.wordpress.com/.

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August 15, 2012 | www.gaycitynews.com

POLITICS OPERA

Operatic Daytripping Caramoor, Bard’s SummerScape stand in for Met, not always without letdowns

BY ELI JACOBSON

hen the Metropolitan Opera season ends in May, opera-addicted New Yorkers have to travel out of town to get their fix. Luckily, a few hours drive from New York City are the Caramoor Festival and Bard’s SummerScape, which provide unusual and stimulating operatic fare.

Will Crutchfield’s “Bel Canto at Caramoor” series followed up the Rossini rarity “Ciro in Babilonia” with a concert presentation of Vincenzo Bellini’s much more familiar “I Capuleti e i Montecchi.” The raison d’être for the presentation was to showcase two rising American singers –– the Cuban-American coloratura Eglise Gutiérrez and the striking mezzo Kate Aldrich. Unfortunately, both disappointed.

Aldrich, a vocally successful Carmen at the Met two seasons ago, sang her first Romeo after an absence due to pregnancy. Her once rich, medium-sized mezzo has lost focus, tonal core, and projection throughout the range. The low notes were weak, the middle woolly with a sour edge, and only a few clear high notes emerged.

She was frequently covered by the orchestra and in ensembles. I wondered if the singer I was hearing was actually a short soprano singing in the wrong range.

Gutiérrez goes from dazzlingly accomplished to clumsy and jejune from phrase to phrase. The basic instrument is fuller and creamier than most coloraturas, with a smoky sensuality in the middle and a spinning, shimmery fast vibrato above. Runs and trills flow easily and without strain. Her opening romanza “Oh quante volte” was floated in a magical mezza voce with sensitive phrasing.

However, it soon became evident that piano-pianissimo was her default vocal mode. Bellini’s Giulietta has some dramatic moments, but Gutiérrez was unable to modulate from “float” to a more outspoken vocal manner. Her tone turned diffuse and weak as if stuck in the throat. One gets the sense of a gifted vocalist who has an incomplete sense of the full musical picture, missing the forest for the trees.

Crutchfield included the short arioso passage –– “Morir dovessi ancora” –– equivalent to Juliet’s “potion” speech in Shakespeare, that Bellini added to Giulietta's Act II duet with Lorenzo in the 1831 La Scala production. Gutiérrez seemed to wake up for a moment there.

BRING IT ON, from p.19

appealing edge and wit.

Director and choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler keeps the shifting scenes between the two high schools fluid and clear, but it is his choreography that is really the standout. Naturally, the cheerleading routines are gasp-inducing feats of physical prowess, but the other numbers offer impressive classically inspired moves that complement the acrobatics.

Of course, none of this would work without the amped up performances of the young and nimble cast. Taylor Louderman does an excellent job as Campbell, both singing and dancing. Ryann

Michele Angelini and Liam Bonner in “Le roi malgré lui” at Bard’s SummerScape.

Italian-American lyric tenor Leonardo Capalbo sang Tebaldo with an overly darkened, thick voice production that dulled the brighter overtones and limited his success above a high A. He eschewed several optional high C’s and sounded uneasy on the B’s.

Caramoor Young Artists Jeffrey Beruan and Benjamin Harris were hardworking and sonorous in the lowvoiced duties of Capellio and Lorenzo.

Crutchfield and the Orchestra of St. Luke’s got an ovation for an atmospheric, passionate rendering of a prelude in Act II. They might have made a persuasive case for Bellini’s rousing Rossinian overture, which was unfortunately omitted.

Emmanuel Chabrier’s 1887 opéracomique “Le roi malgré lui” is a connoisseur’s delight –– the music sparkles and effervesces with a surprising kick like vintage champagne. However, as in a lot of beloved Broadway cult flop musicals, a glorious score is lavished on a book that simply doesn’t work. The convoluted plot concerns French Prince Henri’s attempts to evade assuming the Polish throne and get back to France. Internal logic and comprehensibility go by the wayside with stock situations concerning mistaken identity, disguises, and bedroom farce antics.

The piece works best in audio recordings; the 1984

Redmond is the awkward second lead who, ostracized and forced to be the mascot at Truman High, finds she’s popular and attractive when she too is redistricted to Jackson. Jason Gotay is appealing as Campbell’s new Jackson boyfriend Randall, and Gregory Haney turns in a fine performance as La Cienega, who to Haney and the creators’ credit feels real and is not a cartoon.

Elle McLemore as the scheming Eva is outstanding, reminiscent of a young Kristin Chenoweth effortlessly blending comedy and villainy. The standout performance of the evening, though, is Adrienne Warren as Danielle. As a black girl trying to get out of Jackson and into college, she

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CORY WEAVER

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Erato recording under Dutoit is now a prized collector’s item. Several attempts have been made to revise the book, but without success.

In 2005, Leon Botstein conducted the work in concert with the American Symphony Orchestra at Lincoln Center, and he initiated a fully-staged production at this year’s Bard College SummerScape Festival. Director Thaddeus Strassberger, a rising star on the international opera circuit, edited the dialogue and updated the action to the mid-20th century Cold War era. A Polish man in a tiny apartment watched what seemed to be a tacky old movie musical on a TV set with rabbit ears; the movie then came to life onstage. Strassberger attempted to solve the flimsiness of the book by adding more absurdity, artificiality, sex, and sight gags. Essentially, he was parodying a parody –– everything was selfconsciously theatrical and absurd, undercutting any real emotion.

The one genuinely touching character, Minka, a serf maiden who loves the French nobleman Nangis, was turned from a loving girl in trouble to a sexy doubleagent cum cabaret/ TV star. Her arias became floor shows with dancing girls and mid-number costume changes. Andriana Churchman flaunted sensational gams and gleaming high notes, but when she sneaked into the King’s bed in a piece of added business, the character lost all emotional credibility. I wasn’t bothered by the changes to a book that is silly and unconvincing in the first place, but what was added distracted from rather than strengthened the piece.

Strassberger, however, has a terrific way with singers, and an attractive young cast shone with lots of precisely executed comic business and detailed byplay.

Liam Bonner’s light baritone and suave good looks suit the operetta genre, and the unflappable Roi Henri showed well. With easy bright high notes, tenor Michele Angelini managed to bring sincere romantic feeling to Nangis. Churchman looked and sounded sensational as Minka. Nathalie Paulin as a visibly pregnant Alexina sang with a tart but colorful soprano, bringing real French style and diction. Frédéric Gonçalves also had Gallic flair as the buffoonish Italian courtier Fritelli.

Botstein leading the American Symphony Orchestra can’t match Dutoit for French style and sparkle, but he did relish every harmonic twist and musical joke. I suspect we won’t be hearing “Le roi malgré lui” often, but Chabrier’s music cannot be dismissed or forgotten.

Adrienne Warren in “Bring It On,” at the St. James through October 7 only.

is wholly believable and often touching — and her singing is out of this world.

Does the story end up a little too easily or predictably? Sure. Are the characters revelations and transformations a little sudden? Undoubtedly. Yet to criticize that is to indict the vast majority of musical comedy. “Bring It On” may not have a score we’ll be singing in 20 years (though I’m betting we may hear some of the songs on vocal competition shows), but it’s very much a show for contemporary musical and dance sensibilities that still has its roots in classic musicals. And if it’s bringing in new audiences while entertaining established ones, then, as the cheerleaders would say, “Score!”

23

| August 15, 2012

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joint, selling the illusion of fantasy and desire. At the onset, he admits he likes men — their power, grace, and beauty — and in the next breath claims he’s straight with a beautiful wife. Remarkably, our skepticism melts away as he works hard to convince us why this just might make sense.

With only a trunkful of costumes, the exuberant Kipp morphs into a range of personas. He’s a cocky stripper welcoming a hairy newbie with a hygiene issue (that newbie was him). He’s a boy on a fishing trip with his dad, hungry for approval. He’s a strip-club patron, irate that Ryan is straight and refuses to find him desirable in the one place he expects (and pays) to be desired. “I don’t want you here,” the patron yells at Ryan.

Later, he’s a jarhead in the military mourning the loss of his secret boyfriend, devastated that he must lie to his buddies, and referring to Alex as Alice. Toward the end, he plays his mother, recounting a tragic incident involving his drunken dad that feels like a punch to the gut.

The piece is energized by projected images of male nudity, bathed in red light, and of his boyhood. A pulsating soundtrack blasts pop tunes from Lady Gaga, Gwen Stefani, Justin Timber lake, Eminem, and 50 Cent.

Sure, this piece is rough around the edges. The only major flaw is the climax, which comes early (after about 40 minutes) and awkwardly, muffling the impact of the final reveal.

FRINGE, from p.16

Di Vecchio from “The Sopranos”) for a loop. In other words, this self-effacing second-fiddle pulls off a stunt worthy of Eve Harrington in “All About Eve.” Occasionally Josh addresses the audience, explaining legalities (paying for time is legal, talk of sex is a crime), rate structure (roughly $300 to $500 an hour), the cut (the house gets 40 percent), the Yelp-like website where clients rate the girls (the Erotic Review), and handy acronyms (BDE=back door entry).

Kim Morgan Dean is a marvel at playing a bevy of call girls, and Jon Seymour gamely handles all the johns as well as the boss’ clueless husband.

The production is enhanced by Sara Sahin’s crisply paced, inventive staging, which often finds two characters in different locales talking on phones while standing alongside one another. Special credit for sound design goes to Josh Hobbs, whose well-timed cell phone tones punch up the proceedings.

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If you come to see the inventively engaging “REDlight,” which offers a peek inside the seamy VIP rooms of a notorious gay strip club, with the aim of gleefully chowing down on beefcake, you’ll be disappointed. This is no gay parody of “Magic Mike.”

Rather, this solo show, written and performed by R yan Kipp, offers an unblinking, intentionally fractured portrait of one man’s meditation on masculinity, desire, and grief as he reconciles memories of an awful childhood.

Under the direction of Jennifer Tuttle and Marc Santa Maria, with dynamic choreography by Carol Johnson, this is one of the more heartfelt, unnervingly affecting pieces you’re likely to see at the Fringe this year.

Kipp presents loosely connected vignettes drawn from real life working as “the resident ginger” at a gay strip

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This solo show from Pandemic Theatre comes with a pedigree, winning multiple awards at the 2012 Fringe Fest in Toronto. But pedigrees raise expectations, and although this richly textured “Mahmoud,” written and performed by Iranian actress Tara Grammy, has much to recommend it, the piece falls a bit short.

The titular Mahmoud is an engineer from Tehran who came to Toronto with the promise of a better life and ended up driving a taxi for 25 years. His wife, whom he adores, calls on his cell phone “500 times a day.” He is often derided as an Arab about to commit jihad.

There’s also Tara, an Iranian-Canadian teen who aspires to be an actor despite the expectation that Iranian girls in the West will become doctors.

She also aims to unleash her inner bombshell with a couple of bottles of Nair and blonde hair dye.

We also meet Emanuelos, a swishy gay Spaniard who spritzes Dolce & Gabbana cologne on passing shoppers.

He is dating a gorgeous Iranian man

and they hope to marry, but when the boyfriend goes back to Iran to visit his family, plans go horribly awry.

Toward the end of this bittersweet play, directed by Tom Arthur Davis (also the co-writer), the characters’ lives collide in unexpected ways, revealing difficult truths.

In this type of solo endeavor, accent and character delineation are key, and Grammy, who has a way with the arched eyebrow, is generally skilled at both. Her choice to interact with the audience forges an intimate connection.

Yet the play’s real power lies in its edgy content, shining a light on the negative labels assigned to Middle

Easterners and, by extension, all immigrants. It strives to humanize these stereotypes without idealizing them.

For my tastes, however, Grammy’s characterizations are too pronounced, bordering on caricature. I found the shrill, ultra-flamboyant Emanuelos grating and offensive — not what you want in a show about erasing stereotypes.

Some transitions were choppy, and at times her delivery seemed labored.

To be fair, Grammy is stuck with a lousy venue, wedged in the back room of an East Village basement bar with no air conditioning and a stage area hardly bigger than the backseat of a taxi. She deserves better than this.

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HOSPITAL, from p.8

ver. He told Wooten, “I self-regulate, I self-regulate hydrocortisone as well.”

Questioned by the hospital’s attorney, Louis I. Piels, Mikhail said that some of the statements he made resulted from the drugs he was given.

“You guys were pumping me full of Ativan and lithium, so I think a lot of what I said should be taken with a lot of grains of salt,” Mikhail told Wooten.

Mikhail’s fiancé is a ferocious defender of him, and said that

䉴

August 15, 2012 | www.gaycitynews.com Mikhail’s father was a former CIA operative who used his power to lock up his son and that the detention resulted from a “Jew conspiracy.” He has offered other theories for the commitment, and he has advised Mikhail to induce vomiting after taking his psychiatric medications.

Living in a neat but cramped Manhattan apartment with two sweet and obviously healthy dogs, the fiancé said that he lives off “a trust fund that my father left me,” but presented a food stamp card as identification

VIDAL, from p.9

keen interest in the early ‘60s New Left, Vidal was further radicalized by the Vietnam War and the social movements of the ‘60s. An important precursor to this shift came out of his profound disillusionment with the administration of John F. Kennedy — even though he had been a frequent White House guest of JFK and his wife, Jackie, with whom Vidal shared a stepfather Hugh Auchincloss — a disaffection he codified in a famous 1967 Esquire essay, “The Holy Family.”

Vidal also established himself as our most formidable political polemicist as a founding essayist of the New York Review of Books, launched during the city’s newspaper strike of 1963. Many of his best political essays appeared there, including those later collected in such essential books as “Homage to Daniel Shays,” “Reflections Upon a Sinking Ship,” and “The Second American Revolution,” as well as in “Pink Triangle and Yellow Star and Other Essays, 1976-1982,” in which he drew the parallels between the concentration camp experiences of homosexuals and Jews.

It was also in the New York Review that Vidal established himself as one of our most perceptive literary critics, becoming the first to bring to the attention of American readers such enormous talents as the Italian novelist Italo Calvino.

His 1968 novel “Myra Breckinridge” was in the forefront of the cultural assault on gender and sexuality norms that swept the world in the late ‘60s and ‘70s. The gay liberationist writer Dennis Altman, in his 2005 book “Gore Vidal’s America,” observed that

䉴

DOMA, from p.14

where in the US –– in Massachusetts.

The congressional debate in 1996 consisted of sloganeering, posturing, moralizing, and factually unsupported assertions about the interests of children, but as Bryant found, none of the reasons cited in committee reports or the ex-post-facto hypothesizing that the Justice Department originally put forward –– before abandoning its defense of the statute –– could stand up to serious examination. Nothing in DOMA acts to incentivize different-sex couples to act responsibly in their reproductive activities by marrying, there is no evidence that recognizing same-sex marriages would have any effect on different-sex marriages, children being raised by same-sex couples are disadvantaged by the federal government’s refusal to recognize their parents’ marriages, and the Supreme Court, in its 2003 sodomy rul-

when entering a psychiatric facility for a hearing. Always well dressed, he arrived and left in a hired Cadillac Escalade for one hearing. He hired a car service to travel to another.

Among many claims, the fiancé told Gay City News that he was a renowned fashion photographer and produced a tattered 2005 copy of a fashion magazine in which he was profiled. He also said he was responsible for capturing 87 terrorists and had knowledge of Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts prior to his death.

The fiancé has a 1993 conviction for

the novel “said more to subvert the dominant rules on sex and gender than is contained in a shelf of queer theory treatises.”

In the wake of the Stonewall riots, Vidal was one of the only public intellectuals — along with the historian Martin Duberman — to ally himself with the critiques mounted by gay liberation. In a much-discussed September 1969 Esquire essay, he wrote, “We are all bisexual to begin with. That is a fact of our condition. And we are all responsive to sexual stimuli from our own as well as from the opposite sex. Certain societies at certain times, usually in the interest of maintaining the baby supply, have discouraged homosexuality. Other societies, particularly militaristic ones, have exalted it.

But regardless of tribal taboos, homosexuality is a constant fact of the human condition and it is not a sickness, not a sin, not a crime... despite the best efforts of our puritan tribe to make it all three. Homosexuality is as natural as heterosexuality.”

Vidal’s radical critiques of power and government in his American Chronicles series of novels, including his magnificent “Burr” (in which he dissected the hypocrisies of our founding fathers) and “Lincoln” (in which he provided a biting revisionist portrait of America’s most overly iconized president), tell us, as the great critic Harold Bloom wrote, ”more about what really happened in American hisrtory than many orthodox historians do.”

In consciously constructing himself as a celebrity, Vidal sought to explain to a large public how the insidious effects of the nation’s domination by a ruling class of power elites bent on imperial expansion had led, as he put it, to “the destruction of any meaningful choice

ing, decisively rejected the idea that legislative moral judgments about homosexuality can be used to justify statutory discrimination against gay people.

What is left after these questions are disposed of is the contention that the federal government needs to have uniform national standards for determining eligibility for federal benefits and that recognizing same-sex marriages would put further strain on the deficitplagued federal budget.

States vary in their marriage eligibility standards –– on questions such as age and marriage by cousins, for example –– and the federal government has traditionally treated a couple as married if they are lawfully married under state law. Uniformity only became an issue when it looked like some states would allow gay couples to marry, and the current system –– requiring states and private sector actors to treat certain marriages as non-marriages if

second-degree assault that he said was pleaded down from attempted murder.

He said he was set upon by “four Mexicans” and stabbed one in the neck. He served his time in a medium security prison in New York.

When Silver ruled that the hospital could continue to hold Mikhail, the mother and father reacted with palpable relief. Mikhail, who has cut off his parents, reacted angrily. As he left the courtroom followed by one of the two hospital staffers who accompanied him to court, he said, “They’re lying, they’re lying.”

or genuine information in an electoral process which is increasingly irrelevant to most Americans.”

He frequently used television to deliver his radical critiques, when he was allowed to. In the 1960s and ‘70s, he delivered a series of annual “State of the Union” dissections on “The David Susskind Show” and became a regular guest of Dick Cavett. Sixteen years ago, he wrote and hosted a series on “The American Presidency” originally produced for the UK’s Channel 4. It was purchased here by the History Channel, for which it was way too radical. Aired once late at night, the series was then permanently shelved — a pity, for it should be required viewing in civics and history classes.

Uncle Gore had a healthy and varied sex life, and in private conversation was often entertainingly ribald.

He’d say things like, “The difference between American boys and Italian boys is that American boys have dirty assholes and clean feet, while Italian boys have clean assholes and dirty feet.” The secret of his half-century with Howard Austen, he wrote, was that they did not have sex with one another: “It’s easy to sustain a relationship when sex plays no part and impossible, I have observed, when it does.”

A brilliant novelist, political essayist, literary critic, historian, scenarist, television pundit, raconteur extraordinaire, polemicist, and pamphleteer in the Tom Paine tradition — Gore Vidal was all of these things and more. He was sui generis, unique. We shall not see his like again, and there is no one to fill the void he has left. I treasure the memories of our all too infrequent encounters, and I shall miss him enormously.

there is any federal nexus –– actually imposes a regime of non-uniformity. A group of major private sector employers, in an amicus brief in another DOMA case, points out that Section 3 imposes unnecessary costs on them, since they have to treat employees differently for benefits and tax purposes depending on whether they have a same-sex or different-sex spouse.

On the question of federal budget pressures, the Congressional Budget Office recently calculated that if samesex couples could marry everywhere in the US, the federal government would enjoy a slight financial benefit in terms of tax revenue.

Concluding there is no rational basis for the federal government to deny recognition to same-sex marriages and such denial works a substantial hardship on married same-sex couples, Bryant granted the plaintiffs’ motion for summary judgment and denied BLAG’s

motion to dismiss the case.

BLAG would normally file an appeal to the Second Circuit, as it did in the wake of the recent victory by Edie Windsor, a widow challenging DOMA, in a New York federal court. However, the American Civil Liberties Union, representing Windsor, has filed a petition with the Supreme Court seeking to take the case directly there for review, bypassing the Second Circuit. Meanwhile, BLAG has a petition pending in the Supreme Court to review the First Circuit’s decision affirming a 2010 ruling in a Boston district court striking down DOMA. It probably makes sense for GLAD to file a petition in this case similar to the ACLU’s petition in the Windsor case.

Since it is very likely that the constitutionality of DOMA Section 3 will be on the Supreme Court’s docket for the term beginning in October, it would certainly be efficient to get all the pending cases up there at the same time.

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| August 15, 2012

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August 15, 2012 | www.gaycitynews.com

OBITUARY

Pete Fisher, Pioneering Author of “The Gay Mystique,” Dead at 68 Led Gay Activist Alliance zaps in early ‘70s, inspired a generation

BY ANDY HUMM

COURTESY: RICH WANDEL/ NATIONAL HISTORY ARCHIVE, LGBT COMMUNITY CENTER

P

ete Fisher, who with his late partner Marc Rubin and a cadre of fearless comrades in the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA) militantly challenged anti-gay bigotry in the early 1970s, has died in Springfield, Massachusetts. The cause was suicide by suf focation, according to his sister L ynne Fisher with whom he had been living for the past several years. He was 68.

His groundbreaking 1972 book “The Gay Mystique” chronicled the early, vibrant post-Stonewall movement and explained homosexuality to straight people and to homosexually-oriented people still coming to terms with themselves. For this reporter, it was a seminal text as a college student coming out and, later, becoming an activist in 1974.

Describing his intense joy marching in the Christopher Street Liberation Day march in 1970 that commemorated the first anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion, Fisher wrote, “There’s no going back after that. You can’t feel those things and take them back to the closet and nurse them.

When you know what it really means to be free, you know that freedom is life. Do you know how it tastes to be alive for the first time? Oppression in any form requires the complicity of the oppressed.

To come out is to refuse to oppress oneself, refuse to play the game.”

Fisher was writing and agitating at a time when sodomy was still a crime in most states including New York, psychiatry classified homosexuality as a mental illness, and civil rights protections on the basis of sexual orientation were non-existent. He led several of the most famous “zaps” for which GAA was known, taking over the offices of the Daily News when its editors derided gay people as “fairies, nances, and queers” and of Harper’s magazine when its Joseph Epstein wrote, “If I had the power to do so, I would wish homosexuality off the face of the earth, because I consider it a curse.”

When City Councilman Saul Sharison refused to allow the New York gay rights bill to be heard in committee in 1971, Fisher was among those who led more than a thousand people from a dance at the GAA Firehouse at 99 Wooster Street to Sharison’s high rise at 70 East Tenth Street and got clubbed by the police. “It was the most nightmarish scene I had ever witnessed: long, brutal clubs smashing left and right, landing on people’s heads, the crowd panicking, pushing first to the barricades and then falling back,” he wrote. He and Rubin were arrested, but five days later the hearing was scheduled on the bill that GAA put forward as the first in the country to propose protections on the basis of “sexual orientation.”

Veteran gay and AIDS activist Bill Bahlman, 60, who worked in GAA with Fisher, said, “Whenever he spoke at a GAA meeting, everybody listened. He could turn the debate on an issue around. And at demonstrations, he was larger than life.”

Allen Roskof f, 62, now president of the Jim Owles Liberal Democratic Club and also a GAA vet, paid tribute to Fisher and Rubin, saying,

Pete Fisher at an early ‘70s meeting of the Gay Activists Alliance.

“They were totally devoted to the movement and totally devoted to each other.” He said that neither of the men put much stock in electoral politics, which became a big focus of the movement in later years. Rubin went on to co-found the Gay Teachers Association.

Bahlman said, “Both were S&M activists as well as gay activists. They declared their lifestyle in their dress. There was a dignity and power and demand for justice just in the way they walked hand-in-hand in Central Park.”

Steve Ault, one of the principal organizers of the first two marches on Washington for LGBT rights in 1979 and 1987 and a close friend of Rubin’s, said, “When Marc got sick nine years ago of prostate and brain cancer, Pete did heroic work caring for him.” While he said Fisher “was a very sweet man,” he also said “he was an absolute wreck and lived in a state of semi-breakdown for many years” and even before Marc’s death often considered suicide, something his sister confirmed.

Rich Wandel, GAA’s second president, runs the archive at the LGBT Community Center where the papers of Fisher and Rubin reside. “Pete was in many ways overshadowed by Marc who was a big gun dealing with municipal government,” he said, “but he was there all the time. He was the first chair of the committee to make contact with other groups around the country. In two bound volumes, he saved every flier and newsletter in GAA, and we have them.”

Gay historian David Carter wrote in an e-mail, “Any time a member of the leadership of the Gay Activists Alliance such as Peter Fisher dies, it is important because GAA did more than any other

organization to change what we today call the LGBT civil rights movement into a mass movement.”

Perry Brass, a veteran of the Gay Liberation Front, wrote in an e-mail, “I remember Pete as a very handsome, very charismatic, blonde young man. He was always dressed either in leather or a tight, beautifully fitting T -shirt, but he was totally devoted to GAA and the cause of real gay liberation, that is, leaving self-hatred, leaving oppression, and forging a new identity as a gay man.” “‘The Gay Mystique’ played an important part in my life,” wrote author and book critic Jesse Monteagudo. “It was one of the seminal LGBT books that were published in 1972, written by openly LGBT authors (like Pete Fisher) instead of heterosexual ‘authorities.’... It helped me, a college freshman in 1972, deal with my homosexuality and helped me to come out as a gay man the following year. Pete's passing is another terrible loss for our community in a year that has already seen too many of those losses.”

With Rubin, Fisher wrote the novel “Special Teachers/ Special Boys” based on Rubin’s experiences teaching troubled youth.

Fisher, coming to consciousness of being gay pre-Stonewall, had a rough time. His father, an executive at the New York Times, strongly disapproved and sent him to a shrink to try to turn him heterosexual — partly by forbidding masturbation! Fisher’s counsel to parents in “Mystique”: “The rule with regard to sexuality is a simple one.

Hands off — let your child be himself.”

L ynne Fisher said her brother “told me he spent 60 percent of his time thinking about suicide” and made several unsuccessful attempts over the years. This latest successful try was not unexpected. But she also remembers Pete as “exceptionally intelligent, a book writer and a songwriter,” and “a quiet but popular kid.” He was cremated, and his ashes were scattered in her backyard in Springfield with Rubin’s Peter Randolph Fisher was bor n on May 19, 1944 in Richmond, Virginia, graduated from Eastchester High School in Westchester, went to Amherst College for two years, enlisted in the Air Force rather than wait to be drafted, and graduated Magna Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Columbia University in 1969. He was pursuing a graduate degree “but resigned to become a fulltime homosexual. I have yet to regret it,” he wrote in 1972.

He joined GAA in 1970 where he met Rubin, and their relationship endured until Marc’s death.

In addition to L ynne, Fisher is survived by his parents, Andrew and Cor nelia of Vero Beach, Florida, and a brother, Randy. He is also survived by generations of LGBT people who owe much of their self-respect and even their lives to the courageous work that he did 40 years ago. He was part of a group of activists who did not ask for their rights, but took them, and responded to attacks not with press releases but immediate, militant action that got results. His expansive vision in “The Gay Mystique” bears reconsideration by a generation of LGBT leaders in suits pushing a relatively narrow agenda — and not too successfully at that.

27

| August 15, 2012

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August 15, 2012 | www.gaycitynews.com