BEST ACTOR: SEAN PENN
BEST SCREENPLAY: DUSTIN LANCE BLACK
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Jesse’s Journal
It is hard to believe, but almost forty years after the Stonewall Riots Gay men are still being harassed by the New York City Police Department. Since 2004, the NYPD has entrapped and arrested 52 Gay or bisexual men on trumped-up prostitution charges in eight adult video stores in Manhattan. In each case, an attractive young man would approach an older man who is minding his own business in the sex shop and proposition him. Once the older man agrees to the proposition, the younger man would offer his partner money for sex, and then proceed to arrest him for “prostitution.”
Though police entrapment is bad enough, it is not the whole story. In fact, most of the time the men are not convicted of prostitution. Instead, at the advice of their lawyers, the men plead guilty to “disorderly conduct,” pay a fine, attend a health course for “sex workers” and agree to keep their mouths shut. The NYPD then proceeds against its real target, Manhattan’s Gay or Gay-friendly adult video stores. Using its 1977 “nuisance abatement” law, the City would sue the porn shops, asking the courts to close them down for allegedly “allowing” prostitution to go on in the premises. This, of course, is part of the decade-long campaign by NYC’s former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and his successor Michael Bloomberg to turn Manhattan into a Disneyland for tourists.
All this would have gone undetected, even by the GLBT community, if it wasn’t for the hard work of two Gay men. The first one of this dynamic duo is Duncan Osborne, associate editor of New York’s Gay City News, who exposed the whole sordid campaign in a series of hard-driven news stories. The second man is Robert Pinter, who was one of a dozen men arrested last year at the Blue Door Video in the East Village. Though Pinter also pled guilty to “disorderly conduct,” he refused to go away quietly. Instead, Pinter decided to fight back. He started a new group, the Coalition to Stop the Arrests, “in response, not just to my arrest, but to this whole pattern of arrests.” Pinter hopes the Coalition would “take some kind of legal action and create awareness in our community that these arrests are happening.”
It wasn’t long before Pinter’s activism, combined with Osborne’s journalism, got Gotham’s queer community to stand up and take notice. New York’s LGBT Center joined forces with the City’s Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence (AVP) to host a Town Hall Meeting at the Center on January 15. A crowd of over 300 heard statements by Pinter, Osborne, the AVP’s Jennifer Ramirez, Joey Nelson of the Queer Justice League, and Sienna Basin and Andrea Ritchie of the Sex Workers Project at the Urban Justice Center. According to activist Jim Eigo, who was present, the crowd “was fired up and angry that a full generation after Stonewall and a few years after the striking down of sodomy laws in the US we still had to contend with the interference of NY law enforcement with our basic sexual rights.” Eigo, Pinter and other activists hope that the Town Hall Meeting was just the beginning of a new era of queer activism that at least would put a stop to the NYPD’s arrests and harassment of gay or bisexual men. On Valentine’s Day Pinter, Bill Dobbs and other activists picketed outside Mayor Bloomberg’s home, demanding that the mayor put a stop to the whole sorry business.
For too long, the GLBT community has been passive, thinking that our rights would be given to us on a silver plate. The passage of Proposition 8 in California and Amendment 2 in Florida led to a wave of community activism unheard of since the days of ACT-UP and Queer Nation. But there is more to the GLBT movement than the legal rights of same-sex couples. The recent wave of arrests and entrapment of queer men in New York reminds us that for all that we do to be “just like them,” we will continue to be persecuted because we are, in fact, different. Even the established Gay media failed to do its job, and it took Osborne and the Gay City News to tell us what we should have known all along. And anti-Gay police entrapment is not limited to New York City. Over five years after the Supreme Court ruling in Lawrence v. Texas, GLBT communities everywhere must continue to fight any and all attempts to “recriminalize” homosexuality.
For more information: Coalition to Stop the Arrests
Robert Pinter, Coordinator STOPTHEARRESTS@aol.com
Robert Pinter, Coordinator STOPTHEARRESTS@aol.com
Bipartisanship Baloney
A few stray thoughts this President's Day…
A lot of talk about the "failure" of bipartisanship. Here's what I think: f**k'em.
We had eight years of Republican dominated, neocon policy and they drove us into a ditch. What's more, when they were at the wheel, they left the Democrats on the side of the road as they merrily used their scare tactics to drive us into an unnecessary war and ignore financial excess ("Don't you worry you're pretty little head about these things…we know better").
True, they never promised "bipartisanship"…as I recall their goal was "to reduce the federal government to a size they could drown it in a bathtub."
In other words, they wouldn't recognize "bipartisanship" if it bit them in their tight asses.
The "less government is better government" crowd succeeded in proving what it is we need government for in the first place: adult supervision. I'm sure the people of New Orleans have a thought or two about that. The problem, as President Obama has put it so clearly, isn't too much government, it's government that works. And when you send a majority to Congress and the White House whose central organizing principle is "No government" you get…well, you get right where we are now. In a ditch, out of gas, waiting for a tow truck.
That said, I'm wary of the apotheosis of Obama. I'm from Chicago, so I'm all too aware that you don't get anywhere in politics without a fairly good ability to compromise…or what you might call "selling out" depending on which side of the compromise you end up on. If you've bothered to read either (I recommend both) of President Obama's beautifully written books, you know he is nothing if not pragmatic. We're bound to be disappointed, and everything he's going to "throw at the wall" isn't necessarily going to "stick." But for the time being, I wish he would worry less about the Republicans, who have no clue, no ideas and should really spend the lion's share of their air time apologizing IMHO, and more about getting that money into the economy, getting Detroit (ie the automobile industry) back to work, and some of this much needed infrastructure work on track.
Republicans? Go away. You had your chance. Either get with the program or stop sniping. There's too much at stake here for your politics as usual.
Clap If You Believe!!!!
I’m Hip…and I’m sad…
Somehow it is appropriate that she would leave this world the night before the Grammy's. I don't think she ever won one, which says more about the Grammy's than it does about Blossom. Anyway, she would never be bothered with such folderol. She had songs to sing.
She wasn't Gay gay…but she was a delicious throwback to the time when gay meant gay…light, witty, charming. A soubrette…a chanteuse…even into her 80s…But a Gayer icon there never was. And you've just got to love a woman who hated Andrew Lloyd Webber.
So it is with a sad heart that we report and mourn the passing of Margeurite Blossom Dearie…the inimitable, the one, the only Blossom Dearie.
There was no one like her. Singing her jazz in her kittenish, sly voice, she ruled the roost at Danny's Skylight Lounge (now also gone.) She could go funny, hip, romantic, smart and sexy with the flick of a wrist on her keyboard. [click on any one of those links to get a taste of the lady's wares.] Stephen Holden, in the New York Times, called her rendition of Antonio Carlos Jobim's Wave "definitive." [You can buy it at Amazon if you click that.]
If you came to New York and didn't see Blossom Dearie…you didn't really come to New York.
Crimes Against Nature
https://youtube.com/watch?v=b0vGamcQIYs
One of the most common slurs aimed at Gay folk is the "crime against Nature" accusation…the idea that homosexuality doesn't occur "naturally." Now, of course, we all know that's a bunch of heteronormative bunkum…Gay penguins, Lesbian seagulls, Bonobos (known taxonomically as Pan paniscus, or the "diminutive Pan"), dolphins ("birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it!")…all you have to do if you're looking for instances of homoeroticism in Nature is look for it and be willing to actually see it.
On the other hand, am I the only person in the room who is mildly disturbed by these stories of multiple births (eight at last count in California, to a woman who apparently already had six children…and they are questioning whether fertility drugs were involved. Well duh!…ya think!?) and, this morning, a 60 year old woman who gave birth. Now…I'm going to be 59 myself this year, and I can tell you, the idea of getting up for middle-of-the-night feedings, to say nothing of diapers, is the very last thing I would welcome. The story mentioned that this 60-year-old woman had turned to fertility drugs after decades of attempting to conceive… ahem… naturally. In my humble opinion, these aren't births…they're litters.
No one is supposed to question the aching desire of these women. Nevermind how self-centered and entitled it all is. My favorite part of all of these stories is how the mother in question always manages to see herself and her conception as something for which god needs to be involved and thanked, completely ignoring the fact that none of it would have happened without the science of in vitro fertilization. One wonders how many of these women who see their wombs as "miracle sites" would in the next breath condemn evolution. Or the women who, with multiple embryos crowding their otherwise unfertile wombs, decline what the doctors refer to as "selective reduction", i.e. selective abortions of some of the embryos for the health of the remaining embryos, citing "god's will," as though god had anything to do with the multiple embryos science placed in her. If god had anything to do with it, then perhaps the very idea that someone, after decades of infertility, might figure out the message that perhaps she isn't supposed to conceive.
And I have to wonder: did anyone bother to tell these self-absorbed "aching wombs" that, in the United States alone there are more than 129,000 children in foster care in need of a loving families and mothers?
And what doctor gave this woman fertility drugs? Where is the oversight? This woman is not married, already has 6 children, lives with her mother and her excuse for having fertility treatments – and therefore eight more children – is that she just wanted one more girl? She was lonely!!?? These are not Barbie Dolls, they're human beings. Babies. Yeah…that's the answer: Collect them all!
That's what I call "a crime against Nature."
And another question: How many of these multiple birth families end up needing public tax monies (paid by Gay people who are, in some states, forbidden to adopt) to manage their families?
Every Elder Lost is a Library Lost…
G. Donn Teal, one of the founders of the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA) organization in late 1969, died February 3, 2009 after a long illness. He was 76 years old.
On February 23rd 1969, his pro-Gay New York Times article, "Why Can't 'We' Love Happily Ever After, Too?" appeared: a protest against the "doomed misfit/sinner" stereotype of American Gay men and lesbians in film, on stage, and in literature. The article provoked great response, and was followed on June 1st by "Why Record Homosexual Anguish?", a Times review of A&M Records' original-cast recording of Mart Crowley's play "The Boys in the Band."
More importantly, he wrote the first history of the Gay liberation movement, "The Gay Militants" (Stein & 
Day, 1971; St. Martin's Press, 1995), as well as articles in The Advocate, Ovation, Musical America, and other magazine and newspapers, notably the Village Voice, in which appeared "Straight Father, Gay Son: A Memoir of Reconciliation" on June 26, 1978; the article was later republished under Mr. Teal's nom de plume, Roger Forsythe, in Ralph Keyes' 1992 collection for HarperCollins, Sons on Fathers.
Donn was one of the co-founders of the Gay Activist Alliance (GAA), the organization that was the main exemplar of that revolution, and, unfortunately today too many people have forgotten about GAA, Donn was so modest that not many people ever thought of him as a founder of GAA, but he was one of the original 13 wo started it in December of 1969.
Let us remember, then, that this is year is not only the 40th anniversary of the birth of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) and of the Gay Activist Alliance and hence of the Gay liberation movement, that critical phase of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender civil rights movement that put us on the map for all time.
Donn Teal was born in Columbus, Ohio.
Also: The Oscar Wilde Bookstore has announced that, under the strains of the current economy, it is closing its doors. The Oscar Wilde Bookstore first opened in 1967. 
Go Iceland! Go Iceland! Go Iceland!
Iceland is set to become the first country to have an out-queer head of government. Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir, a Social Democrat and the current Minister of Social Affairs who's also an out Lesbian and is likely to be announced as the new prime minister as the former Icelandic prime minister leaves office due to esophageal cancer.
Besides being the first Lesbian prime minister in the world, she would also be the first female prime minister in Iceland.
Although Ms. Sigurdardottir’s rise has drawn widespread attention on the Web among Gay men and Lesbians outside Iceland, it is important to note, that her relationship is considered unremarkable at home. In 1940, while still a dependency of Denmark, Iceland decriminalized Gay sex. It approved civil partnerships for Gay and Lesbian couples in 1996, one of the first countries to do so.
“Iceland is a small society, and the public knows what Sigurdardottir stands for as a politician, and that’s the only thing that is important,” said Frosti Jonsson, a spokesman for Iceland’s National Association of Queers. “Nowadays, not only does Iceland have one of the most progressive legal environments for Gay people, there have also been changes in public attitudes towards Gay people. It simply isn’t an issue anymore.”
Wow.
Martin Delaney
It is with profound sadness that we pass along Project Inform's announcement of the passing this morning of their Founder, Martin Delaney. He was 63 years old.
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Martin Delaney, |
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When the full history of the HIV/AIDS epidemic is written, there can be no doubt that Martin Delaney will rank as one of the greatest contributors to ending this great human tragedy. Those of us living with HIV, and all of us who care about people living with HIV, mourn the loss of this great leader, lifesaver and wonderful human being.
Delaney’s activism is legendary. He was a David among many Goliaths. He has assured that government, researchers and pharmaceutical companies understand and respond to the needs of HIV-positive people. He heavily influenced the development of the strong arsenal of medications we now have to prolong life for millions of people worldwide.
Personally and through Project Inform, Martin Delaney educated or counseled tens of thousands of HIV-positive individuals and their caregivers about how to treat HIV. A day does not pass in the life of this agency that a person living with HIV or a supporter tells of a life lengthened or saved as a result of Marty’s efforts.
Intellect, activist, diplomat, mentor, friend — each of us will remember Marty for the great attributes he brought to his lifesaving work. He will be missed terribly.
We will provide information as quickly as we are able about the date of a public event to memorialize Marty. Emails of support can be sent to support@projectinform.org and cards can be mailed to Project Inform, 1375 Mission Street, San Francisco, CA 94103.
Healthy Balls
As you may or may not be aware, White Crane sponsors the Gay Men’s Health Leadership Academy, under the guidance of the wonderful Chris Bartlett. In the interests of Gay men’s health, then we would like to offer this instructive video…NOT your father’s instruction video:
We recommend you do the same.