Category Archives: Arts

What Would the Theater Be Without Gay Folk?

ArthurLaurentstomhatcher Tony-winning playwright-director Arthur Laurents' (left in picture) and late partner Tom
Hatcher’s (right in picture) foundation has established an annual $150,000 prize. The
Laurents/Hatcher Foundation Award will be given for an unproduced, full-length
play of social relevance by an emerging American playwright.

The prize includes a $50,000 cash award for the selected playwright and a
$100,000 grant for production costs of the play's premiere at a nonprofit
theater.

The foundation said Thursday it's the first major award for playwrighting to
be named in honor of a gay couple. The 92-year-old Laurents wrote the books for
"Gypsy" and "West Side Story." Hatcher was Laurents'
partner of 52 years. He was an actor and real estate developer and died in
2006. Submissions from invited applicants will be accepted June 15 to September
15th 2010. The first award recipient will be notified March 15, 2011.

NY Times Lesbian Alerts

Ellen-degeneresSome editor in the Sunday edition of the Times Entertainment section ought to be slapped for allowing Allesandra Stanley's comments about Ellen Degeneres to get printed. I quote:

"Ellen Degeneres leaves no opportunity untapped, not even a few seconds of chat on "American Idol." 

And then Ms. Allesandra goes immediately to a clever comment Ellen happened to make to Casey James about how, "for most women, their hearts are going to start racing just looking at you, right, but then for people like me…" She paused, holding the beat while judges and audience members tittered over the implied allusion to her being a lesbian. As the laughter swelled, Ms. Degeneres held up a finger, prolonging the joke with a knowing grin…delivered the punchline: "…blondes…"

Yeah…Allesandra?…that's called being clever. Not "taking every opportunity to make sure everyone knows she's a lesbian."

Frankly, the joke seems to be on Ms. Allesandra, who goes on to talk about how, whenever possible, Ellen makes comments about the performers outfits. And this is yet another way for her to make the point that she is a lesbian! 

Really!? I mean really?…if only! Ellen is perhaps the most un-in-your-face gay person anyone would ever hope to see (or not hope to see, frankly). Honestly, I wish she was a lot more out about it all. 

I'm sorry, but if that isn't outright, garden-variety homophobic (and some kind of me-thinks-she-doth-protest-too-much latency on Ms. Allesandra's part, one can only suspect) it's just plain stupid. And it is so typically hetero-stupid… Kara what's-her-name (had anyone ever heard of her before she was on this show?) is drooling all over blond boy-toy Casey James and no one seems to think that's making some kind of issue about her sexual preferences. She sits there and paws Simon Cowell and rubs up against him every few seconds or so. To say nothing of Simon making all kinds of homo innuendos to that Ken-doll cypher-host (I can never remember his name.) and no one's writing Sunday features about all the displays of heterosexual heat on American Idol.

But should Ellen make a comment about an outfit one of the performers is wearing (you know…like Randy Jackson manages to do every now and then with his 15 word vocabulary of "dog" "dude" "pitchy" "cool" and "you know what I'm sayin'?" and then he blurts out something about "the outfit you're working") and suddenly this is, in Ms. Allessandra's world "a quick way to remind the audience that [Ellen] is a lesbian."

Because, you know, only gay people are fashion conscious, right?My friend Jerry in Salt Lake City said he thought it was the kind of article he'd only see in the Salt Lake City papers, not the New York Times (which, for the record, didn't see fit to even use the term "gay" until 1987.)

Whatever. Someone needs to throw some cold water on Allessandra Stanley…I think she's getting the hots for Ellen.

What an utterly sophomoric piece of writing.

Theater History

AN EVENING WITH MARIO MONTEZ, DRAG SUPERSTAR
Lola Mario Linda
 (left to right: Lola Pashalinski, Mario Montez, Linda Chapman)
…the great drag Superstar who reigned over the New York Underground film and
theater scene from the early 1960s until the mid-1970s.

Presented by the NYU Tisch Department of Performance Studies

Mario Montez and Marc Siegel (he is a Berlin based archivist and found Mario in
Orlando Fl and invited him to the Berlin Film Festival when the Jack Smith documentary
was being shown in 2009…)

in conversation with Ela Troyano and Lola Pashalinski

Tuesday April 6th
7 to 8:30PM

Free.

34 Stuyvesant Street
The Barney Building
Einstein Auditorium
New York City

Seating is limited and is on a first come basis. Please arrive early.

This is a historical event .. two
authentic legends talking about the creation of underground theater ,,,off off
Broadway .. and the queerness of the Ridiculous Theater company etc.. Mario is
75 and Lola ageless so who knows when next they will be in the same place
chatting about history, He worked with Jack Smith and Warhol as well  in Vain Victory, She was an original
Ridiculous Theater member and most recently played Gertrude Stein

The Monette-Horwitz Trust Award

Monette

We're pleased to announce…heck, we're tickled pink…that White Crane has been honored by The Monette-Horwitz Trust with their 2010 award. Along with co-honoree, RFD, White Crane is acknowledged by the Trust as reader-written-and-produced
quarterlies celebrating queer diversity. White Crane is celebrating 20 years of publishing; RFD is celebrating 35 years.

Other honorees this year include activist and author, Leslie Feinberg, the oral history film project Impact Stories, the civil rights group Iraq LGBTQ, the Reverend Eric P. Lee, President of the Los Angeles Chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Indian NGO AIDS care organization The NAZ Foundation.

The Trust has been presenting these awards for the past twelve years.

We're pleased and honored to be in such company.

Writer, Paul Monette and his lover, attorney Roger Horwitz, moved from Boston to Los Angeles in 1977. Both men were strongly associated with the LGBT activities of that city until their deaths. Horwitz succumbed to HIV-AIDS in 1896, which inspired Monette to write his groundbreaking memoir, Borrowed Time (1988). Monette went on to win the National Book Award for Becoming A Man: Half A Life Story (1992) and dedicated himself to the writing and activism for which he will remain known, capturing in poetry, prose and public speaking the hopes dreams and rage of a generation of gay men.

Before his death from HIV-AIDS in 1995, Monette established the Monette-Horwitz Trust to ensure the continued fruits of their activism as well as the memory of their loving partnership. The Monette-Horwitz Trust provides annual awards to people of diverse cultural backgrounds, genders and sexual orientations who hare, through their work, making significant contributions to eradicating homophobia.

Homogenization

LRLogoStandard

 This morning on NPR I heard an article about the closing of Lambda Rising, DC's oldest, exclusive GLBT bookstore. While I couldn't locate the segment online for this morning's session I did find this interview with All Things Considered from last Saturday. A lot of things ran through my head, well, the economy is sucking and small businesses are failing. Niche markets are hardest hit when disposable income suffers, and queer literature is indeed a niche market.

What hits me hardest though is the sentiment that "every mainstream bookstore has a GLBT literature section."

Though true, Borders and Barnes and Noble both have gay literature sections, they pale in comparison. A mainstream bookstore may carry at most 100-200 titles in a GLBT "section" usually at most five shelves versus 20,000 titles in a store like Lambda Rising. Thinking about the selection process alone and only the most highly rated potential sales would even be chosen for that select shelf. Not to mention that most mainstream bookstores would include the erotica in there as well, thus taking up one of those five shelves with literary porn. Throw in biographies and histories and gay literature standards that are always selling (Jeanette Winterson, etc.) and you've got next to nothing left for new ideas, new fiction, theoretical works, subcultures… You only get what the mainstream bookseller thinks the gay consumer will buy, the lowest common denominator.

With the fading of indie bookstores and the move to the homogenous big box store what we get is a watering down of the breadth of gay culture. We become one small, carefully selected shelf in the vast body of popular literature.

This makes me wonder about monoculture.

When I was a child, I grew up in a small town with little to no ethnic diversity. People weren't German, Greek, Italian, Appalachian… We were all just white people. It didn't even occur to me that my family was of Irish descent until we got one of those family reunion ploys in the mail to get people to travel to Ireland. They must have sent every Riley in the country a mailer. Until I was about 18 years old, the only diversity I saw was on television.

Suffice it to say I didn't understand what being gay was until I was much older, and even then my perception of what it was colored my understanding of who I was. I didn't claim a gay identity until I was 21 or so. I didn't think I was one of the kinds of people I saw on television. I was different from them. It took me actually reading about gay people, going out to clubs, going to the GLBT community center and eventually finding the Radical Faeries before I could truly say that yes, I was gay and that it doesn't look like x, y or z. The kind of gay I am is not even in your alphabet. But it took years and years of learning and time and structure to form the identity I claim now. I had to learn the language, to navigate the wilds of subcultures to find the kinds of people who made sense to me.

I talk to a lot of people, many of them not much younger than I am, who say they're "post-gay" or don't identify as that kind of gay. They're something else, some kind of new-gay. Part of me wonders if they say this because they've grown up with an understanding of gay as some sort of homogenous identity. Perhaps much like I grew up just being generically a white person, these people have grown up with a definition of gay and they reject it because they recognize something more in themselves.

As we transition to a world where the breadth of gay identity is plowed under by mega-corporatizing influences, I suspect I'll hear more of this claim of a "post-gay" identity. Who we are needs the breadth of a library to explicate and understand the diversity of our lives, but our larger society run solely on profit incentive doesn't care about that. They only want to make money, they don't care who we are, where we came from or where we're going. They only care that we'll probably buy erotica. And we probably will.