All posts by Dan Vera

Funny Drag

I have to say that the few times I’ve seen a drag performance I’ve found them pretty uninteresting. They have usually consisted of people doing VERY bad lip-synching.

Anyway, this clip, from a Drag performer named "Anita Mann" is pretty damn funny. And very clever. It gets better as it goes.

20/20 on Gay PDAs

In case you missed it, ABC’s program 20/20 had an interesting segment on the public reaction to gay public displays of affection.  It was a hidden camera investigation using two real gay couples, one male, one female.  They started in Birmingham, Alabama and then redid the experiment in New Jersey.  The responses were what you might expected but some were heartening.

Ancestors Issue Online

76coverExcerpts from the Spring issue of White Crane are now up online

The topic for the issue was "Ancestors" and featured a cover I’m particularly proud of.  It features the portraits of a number of Gay and proto-Gay writers and activists from the past — now "ancestors" of course. 

The issue includes a real mix of submissions from our writers and two interviews with folks we were fascinated with.  There’s one interview with Steven Solberg, who’s working on a documentary about Gay Elders and Aging and an interview with former Clinton gay friend and politico David Mixner (who endorsed Obama this year). 

Subscribers should be receiving their copies in the next few days.

Read excerpts here

Hip-Hop Tuba Opera

Howzabout some hip-hop tuba?  Opera rap?  Well, you got that and a whole lot more unpleasantness in a 25 minutes of the "worst music of all time" in one piece.

This is truly boggling.  Apparently the result of polling data used to determine the most hated parts of music.  Then they squonched all of that alltogether and voila! you have this audio din that just has to be heard.

Here’s how the description of the finished product:

The most unwanted music is over 25 minutes long, veers wildly between loud and quiet sections, between fast and slow tempos, and features timbres of extremely high and low pitch, with each dichotomy presented in abrupt transition. The most unwanted orchestra was determined to be large, and features the accordion and bagpipe (which tie at 13% as the most unwanted instrument), banjo, flute, tuba, harp, organ, synthesizer (the only instrument that appears in both the most wanted and most unwanted ensembles). An operatic soprano raps and sings atonal music, advertising jingles, political slogans, and "elevator" music, and a children’s choir sings jingles and holiday songs. The most unwanted subjects for lyrics are cowboys and holidays, and the most unwanted listening circumstances are involuntary exposure to commercials and elevator music. Therefore, it can be shown that if there is no covariance–someone who dislikes bagpipes is as likely to hate elevator music as someone who despises the organ, for example–fewer than 200 individuals of the world’s total population would enjoy this piece.

You can give it a listen to here.  Pretty hysterical at points.

Repressed Thinking 102

So in the midst of a long and interesting interview about the state of the Catholic church, a little nugget of worldview pops up in the words of the former master general of the Dominicans:

080409_timothyradcliffe"We have to see that behind much of the furor is fear and these fears are comprehensible. There is a fear among straight priests of becoming a member of a small minority in what is perceived as a "gay’ vocation." There is a fear among some homosexual priests of being found out, a feeling of guilt and so on. We have to reassure people so that the issue can be faced calmly. If there is a fevered anxiety about all this, then it does not help people mature and face their own complexity. It is not the case that there are just these two groups, homosexuals and heterosexuals. People are complex, and have contrary motions in their hearts. Straight people may be tempted to strangle the little bit of them that responds to people of the same sex and fear gay people. But that is a disguised form of fearing themselves. And gay seminarians may be tempted to deny who they are, adopt an anti-gay rhetoric, and all that is highly unhealthy and deforming.

It is important also that someone’s sexual orientation is not the most important thing about them, as if everyone was a sexual maniac, endlessly wanting to get other people into bed. The most important thing about anyone, regardless of whether they are gay or straight, is that they be able to love, and that they are helped to love well, deeply, honestly, transparently," – Timothy Radcliffe, OP, former master general of the Dominicans in an interview with Busted Halo.

How telling that Radcliffe’s very first association (actually the only as far as I can tell) with "sexual orientation" is of "sex mania."  In the mind of the life-long repressed, sexual orientation itself equals mania.  And if we’re to be serious here, read "homosexuality" when one says "sexual orientation" because that term only comes up in conversations about homosexuality.  You never find heterosexuals speaking of their own loving as an orientation.  Very rarely, unless the conversation is taking place in a group that is known to include people of multiple orientations.

So, orientation/homosexuality can only be understood in this mindset as the extreme and the pathological.

I hope that Mr. Radcliffe can continue in his journey and achieve a greater perspective that also speaks to the intrinsic nature of goodness involved in sexual orientation.

Split This Rock & Mark Doty

SplitthisrockSo this weekend was the first Split This Rock Poetry Festival. Poets from around the country converged for this first ever festival celebrating poetry of provocation and witness. The festival was put on by the local DC Poets Against War group with the support of a number of organizations and individuals (including White Crane Institute).

The weekend’s lineup of poets included: Grace Cavalieri, Dennis Brutus, Mark Doty, Naomi Shihab Nye, Brian Gilmore, Alex Olson, Martin Espada, Carolyn Forche, Kenneth Carroll, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Galway Kinnell, Coleman Barks, Pamela Chris August, Princess of Controversy, Joel Dias Porter (aka DJ Renegade), Ishle Yi Park, Steve Kuusisto, Semezdin Mehmedinovic, E. Ethelbert Miller, Alicia Ostriker, Sonia Sanchez, Patricia Smith, Susan Tichy, Pamela Uschuk, Belle Waring.

The festival was a great success and the hope is to hold these every two years.

I got some video of Mark Doty’s gorgeous reading on Saturday night.  Doty read a number of poems including Walt Whitman’s "Over the Carnage Rose Prophetic A Voice." But I was really stunned by his reading of an earlier poem of his titled "Charlie Howard’s Descent" written after the killing of a Gay boy in Maine. The video is below. Below are links from other videos I posted to Youtube.

Mark Doty reading Whitman:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7HgO3d3AmA

Galway Kinnell stunning reading Paul Celan’s "Fugue of Death"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDpaNLaBt0I

James Alison on Gay Catholicism

Jamesalison James Alison has a very well written meditation on being a Gay Catholic on his site (link).

Two fine excerpts:

You may have tried to talk informally about being a gay Catholic to a priest, or even a Bishop, whom your gaydar has picked up as likely to be “family”, and you will have noticed how, with all their desire to be friendly, a hidden check comes into their voice. A kind of internal restraining order means that when they say “you”, you can pick up that the “I” that is speaking has moved into a mode of masking, has become somehow official, and the “you” who is being spoken to is not being breathed into being, but somehow designated as ‘to be handled with extreme caution’. There is a “but” hovering in the background of the voice which speaks as loud as anything they say, because the “but” says “you, but not as you are”.

I don’t want to pretend that being an openly gay Catholic is something easy or obvious. It isn’t. For a start, merely the fact of your wanting to read a letter like this at all is a sign of how many obstacles you must have overcome already. You may have faced hatred and discrimination in your own country, from family members, at school, at the hands of legislators eager for cheap votes, through shrieking newspaper headlines that sear your soul, and in the glare of which you are speechless in your own defence. And you’ve probably noticed that at the very best, the Church which calls itself, and is, your Holy Mother has kept silent about the hatred and the fear. While all too often its spokesmen will have lowered themselves to the level of second-rate politicians, lending voice to hate while claiming that they are standing up for love. The very fact that, through and in the midst of, and despite, all these hateful voices, you should have heard the voice of the Shepherd calling you into being of his flock is already a miracle far greater than you know, preparing you for a work more subtle and delicate than those voices could conceive.

Hate in Oklahoma

Interesting to see the poisonous bile that spews forth from elected officials — especially when they think they’re not being recorded. What follows are the opinions of Sally Kern, an Oklahoma State Representative. If you’re disgusted by this elected official’s hatefilled attack against members of her constituency please feel free to send her a message to that effect at sallykern@okhouse.gov

What is especially choice about this clip is the insistence that she doesn’t actually hate Gay people. According to her Oklahoma House webpage she’s married to a Southern Baptist minister. So I shouldn’t be too surprised. Disgusted yes. Surprised not really.