Category Archives: Gay Wisdom

Ancestors, Culture, Dan Vera, Family, Friends, Gay Wisdom

Witt Pratt – Maker of Beauty.. Rest In Peace

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Witt_cat I just received word that a good friend, Witt Pratt, a dear deep luscious soul of great beauty and creativity, is no longer alive in this world.  I'm in a state of shock with the news.  He was such a delight in my life and even though I didn't know him long before he moved from the city, he gave of himself with every interaction.  He was the sort of guy who would light up every room he walked into.

I had the chance to interview him for White Crane a few years ago.  I so loved interviewing him for the issue, which was on "Craft."  He was a friend, but he was more importantly, a man who had dedicated his life to making beauty without making any excuses for it:

65_wittpratt Well, I think that whether its hobby or salvation or occupation or preoccupation, it depends on how we look at it. I do believe that as difficult as it may be that it is possible for us to decide that we would rather spend our lives expressing ourselves in that way. In my case the expression is with knitting, in somebody else’s case with making really amazing cakes, or whatever. Sometime ago I decided to do that. But it took a conscious decision and it took a lot of conscious effort to bring what had been a hobby or a pastime into a more enriching and focal position in my life.

By its own being, it is creation in motion. Like so many things if we take the time to notice, when you’ve got a ball of yarn, which to many of us represents nothing short of infinite possibility, the world just opens up before you. I consider myself extremely fortunate to have found this for myself. Knitting can be practical, it can be nonsensical, it can be insanely complex or completely simple. There’s beauty in all of it if you take the time to notice it. I’m thankful to be able to notice that and just want for everyone to find something in the world that they can notice that enriches them similarly.

The excerpted interview is here: http://www.whitecranejournal.com/65/art6510.asp

In his memory, whether you knew him or not, I invite you to pay attention to your surroundings, to speak about the beauty you see, to go out of your way to make others happy in their day.  This was what he taught me by his presence and his example.  My thoughts are with his beloved Gary who I know is deeply missing his fere, his companion, his heart.  I know he was so close to his beloved mother Bobbie, and my heart goes out to her as well.

Bo Young, Community, Culture, Current Affairs, Elders, Fellow Travelers, Friends, Gay Health, Gay History, Gay Wisdom, Health, History, Homophobia, Literature, Politics, Science

We Mourn Again: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick 1950 – 2009

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Eve_Kosofsky_Sedgwick Is that a lovely face or what?…

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick was an American theorist in the fields of gender studies, queer theory (queer studies) and critical theory, which mainly means she was concerned with how many queer angels were dancing on the heads of academic pins. Influenced by Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, feminism, psychoanalysis and deconstruction, her work reflected an abiding interest in a wide range of issues and topics including something called queer "performativity"…whatever the hell that is…and performance; experimental critical writing; the works of Marcel Proust; artists' books; Buddhism and pedagogy. Academic polemic gobble-de-gook aside…she was a friend to the LGBTQ community.

Surprising to some, she was married for 40 years to her husband, Hal Sedgwick, a CUNY professor of visual perception (optometry), but apparently only saw him on weekends. She would also prefer it to be reported in that manner, i.e. she was married to a man, as opposed to assigning her the "straight" or "hetero/homo" categorizations (a too conveniently neat division rejected by Sedgwick.)

Sedgwick wasn’t a household name, unless you count the brouhaha over her 1989 essay Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl, which featured in many of the ritualistic first-kill-all-the-professors stories from our long culture war.

Sedgwick’s books, including “Between Men” and “Epistemology of the Closet,” were on the shelves of most of the graduate students and comp-lit survivors, Gay and non-Gay, queer and non-queer, back in the 1990s. She virtually invented the field, or at least brought it to new heights. My personal favorite was an essay entitled How To Bring Your Kids Up Gay: The War on Effeminate Boys. If that was all she ever wrote she'd be worthy of laurels, from the aeries of the academe and the mundane streets alike.

Sedgwick’s radical challenge to heteronormative ways of reading and living may seem quaint (if that’s the word) in a time when people are celebrating same-sex weddings in Iowa and the White House Easter egg hunt conspicuously includes Gay and Lesbian families. Perhaps the misty future evoked in Pace University professor of English and women's studies, Karla Jay’s review of “Tendencies” — one where Sedgwick would be photographed shaving fellow queer-studies scholar Terry Castle on the cover of Time magazine, à la Cindy Crawford and K. D. Lang — isn’t quite here.

But alas, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, one of the foundational non-Gay allies, won't be around to see that future. She died April 12 of breast cancer. She was 58.

Our sincere condolences to her family and friends. In an age of anti-intellectualism and religious mythopoesis run amok, we need all the rational, intelligent voices we can find.

Bo Young, Community, Culture, Current Affairs, Elders, Fellow Travelers, Friends, Gay Health, Gay History, Gay Wisdom, Malcolm Boyd, Men, Radical Faerie

The Rainbow Key Awards

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Mark and Malcolm at home 3  

The Rainbow Key Award was created to recognize individuals and organizations whose efforts have significantly benefited the Lesbian and Gay community, and since 1993, has been bestowed upon more than 70 artists, educators, activists, civic leaders, and community organizations. The Award is presented by the City Council on the recommendation of the Lesbian and Gay Advisory Board. Nominations may be made by anyone, and nominees may labor in any area of endeavor; eligibility is not restricted by geography or sexual orientation.

The 2009 Rainbow Key Award for significantly benefiting the Lesbian and Gay community will be presented to White Crane friends and advisors Canon Malcolm Boyd and Mark Thompson by the City of West Hollywood at a civic event on June 17. The Lesbian and Gay Advisory Board of West Hollywood cites the couple for "showing by example that Gay, intergenerational partnerships can be stable, loving and long-lasting." This year marks the couple's twenty-fifth anniversary.

It couldn't happen to two nicer people.

Bo Young, Community, Culture, Current Affairs, Elders, Fellow Travelers, Friends, Gay Health, Gay History, Gay Wisdom, History, Homophobia, Men, Politics, Religion, Right Wingers

Julian Bond on Gay Rights

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This is a little long, but well worth the investment of time:

It does not matter the rationale: religious, cultural, pseudo scientific —
no people of goodwill should oppose marriage equality, but oppose it they do.  As we saw here in California last Fall.  So we all have work to do in terms of education and enlightenment and at the NAACP, we pledge to do our part.

Now two years ago we celebrated the 40th anniversary of a case aptly called  "Loving versus Virginia," which struck down anti-miscegenation laws and many, many years later allowed my wife and me to marry in the state that declares "Virginia is for Lovers."

Then, as now, proponents of marriage as is, wanted to amend the United States constitution.  Introducing a constitutional amendment in 1911 to ban interracial marriage, Rev. Seaborn Roddenberry of my former home state of Georgia, argued:

"Intermarriage between whites and blacks is repulsive and adverse to every sentiment of pure American spirit. It is abhorrent and repugnant. It is subversive to social peace.  It is destructive of moral supremacy."

Sound familiar?

Then, as now, proponents of marriage as is, invoke God's plan.
The trial judge who sentenced the Lovings said that when God created the races he placed them in separate continents.  The fact that he separated the races showed that he did not intend for the races to mix.

Well God made plans for interracial marriage and he, or she, will no doubt do the same for same-sex marriage."   – Julian Bond

Bo Young, Community, Culture, Current Affairs, Gay Health, Gay Wisdom, Health, History, Homophobia, Nature, Science

Crimes Against Nature

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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.

Apu - Eight is Enough! 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?

Ancestors, Bo Young, Books, Community, Culture, Current Affairs, Elders, Fellow Travelers, Friends, Gay Health, Gay History, Gay Wisdom, History, Literature, Men, Politics

Every Elder Lost is a Library Lost…

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Teal 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 & The Militant Homosexual 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.

Historian David Carter adds: Donn's closest friends, Trumbull Rogers and Randy Wicker, the early homophile movement militant, asked me to make the above material available to the media. I volunteered to use whatever media was available when they remarked to me that he and Randy would arrange a memorial service for Donn "although only seven people will show up."  

I volunteered to do this, because I regard Teal's book, The Gay Militants, as one of the most important works of LGBT history and I did not want Donn's passing to be noted by only a handful of people. As the author of The Stonewall Riots I have always said that the Stonewall Riots are important only because they gave birth to the Gay liberation movement, just as the fall of the Bastille is important because it led to the French Revolution. If that book was about the spark that set things off, then Donn's was about something immeasurably more important: the revolution itself. And a damn fine history it was, written by Donn, who went to all the meetings he reported about in the book, allowing the book to be both highly accurate, have a wealth of detail and be told with an immediacy that makes it gripping to read. Unfortunately the book has been rather forgotten except by scholars. Anyone who has an interest in Gay history should — no…rather he or she must read this book.

 

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. OscarWildeoutside

Arts, Bo Young, Community, Culture, Current Affairs, Dan Vera, Elders, Friends, Gay History, Gay Wisdom, History, Homophobia, Men, Politics, Religion, Television

WE WILL NOT BE ERASED

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 Bishop_Gene_Robinson-1 As many of you know, the Right Rev. Gene Robinson, the out Gay Episcopal Bishop of New Hampshire, gave the opening prayer at yesterday's Lincoln Memorial event. It was the first event in the inaugural festivities this year. HBO, which had paid for exclusive rights to the event chose not to broadcast Bishop Robinson's prayer. 

https://youtube.com/watch?v=kWWAnitUCw4

So if you watched there you wouldn't have caught it or even known that it occurred. To his ever-lasting credit, Brian Lehrer at WNYC in New York aired the first two minutes of the prayer on his morning show. But shamefully, there's no record of it in images placed on the sites of Getty Images, New York Times and the Washington Post.

It's a complete erasure of his ever having delivered the prayer. 

As if that wasn't enough, the chorus appearing behind Josh Groban, was none other than the Washington D.C. Gay Men's Chorus…also unidentified in the chiron, unlike virtually every other performer.   DC Gay Men's Chorus

Such is the continuing policy of silence and erasure we have to live with from people who should know better.  We are used to this. If you know your Gay history this has happened again and again. In fact White Crane is really about recovering the truth in our history and celebrating it.

So we're going to celebrate it by providing here the full text of Bishop Robinson's prayer. We suggest you forward this around so that everyone has a chance to enjoy it.

Lincoln memorial
   Opening Inaugural Event

Lincoln Memorial, Washington, DC

January 18, 2009

Delivered by the Right Reverend V. Gene Robinson:

"Welcome to Washington! The fun is about to begin, but first, please join me in pausing for a moment, to ask God's blessing upon our nation and our next president.

O God of our many understandings, we pray that you will…

Bless us with tears – for a world in which over a billion people exist on less than a dollar a day, where young women from many lands are beaten and raped for wanting an education, and thousands die daily from malnutrition, malaria, and AIDS.

Bless us with anger – at discrimination, at home and abroad, against refugees and immigrants, women, people of color, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.

Bless us with discomfort – at the easy, simplistic "answers" we've preferred to hear from our politicians, instead of the truth, about ourselves and our world, which we need to face if we are going to rise to the challenges of the future.

Bless us with patience – and the knowledge that none of what ails us will be "fixed" anytime soon, and the understanding that our new president is a human being, not a messiah.

Bless us with humility – open to understanding that our own needs as a nation must always be balanced with those of the world.

Bless us with freedom from mere tolerance – replacing it with a genuine respect and warm embrace of our differences.

Bless us with compassion and generosity – remembering that every religion's God judges us by the way we care for the most vulnerable.

And God, we give you thanks for your child Barack, as he assumes the office of President of the United States.

Give him wisdom beyond his years, and inspire him with Lincoln's reconciling leadership style, President Kennedy's ability to enlist our best efforts, and Dr. King's dream of a nation for ALL the people.

Give him a quiet heart, for our Ship of State needs a steady, calm captain in these times.

Give him stirring words, for we will need to be inspired and motivated to make the personal and common sacrifices necessary to facing the challenges ahead.

Make him color-blind, reminding him of his own words that under his leadership, there will be neither red nor blue states, but the United States.

Help him remember his own oppression as a minority, drawing on that experience of discrimination, that he might seek to change the lives of those who are still its victims.

Give him the strength to find family time and privacy, and help him remember that even though he is president, a father only gets one shot at his daughters' childhoods.

And please, God, keep him safe. We know we ask too much of our presidents, and we're asking FAR too much of this one. We know the risk he and his wife are taking for all of us, and we implore you, O good and great God, to keep him safe. Hold him in the palm of your hand – that he might do the work we have called him to do, that he might find joy in this impossible calling, and that in the end, he might lead us as a nation to a place of integrity, prosperity and peace.

AMEN."

Books, Community, Culture, Elders, Entertainment, Gay Wisdom, History, Jesse Monteagudo, Literature, Malcolm Boyd, Perry Brass, The Magazine, White Crane Books

Jesse’s Journal — In Praise of Books

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I recently saw Mark Doty accept the National Book Award in Poetry for his book Fire to Fire: New and Collected Poems (Harper Collins).  During his acceptance speech Doty thanked his husband Paul; they Doty Fire to Fire were recently married in Massachusetts. Like Augusten Burroughs’s memoirs, and David Sedaris’s humor, Mark Doty’s poetry appeals to all readers regardless of sexual orientation. Needless to say, it is a great distinction for an out Gay poet to be honored, not as an "American Gay poet," but as an American poet, period. Doty’s honor was well-deserved. (He is, by the way, also the judge for the 2008 White Crane James White Poetry Prize, the winner of which will be announced in the spring issue of White Crane.)
 
 
Doty and dog Doty’s NBA acceptance speech was one of the most inspirational I have seen or heard in quite a while. Unfortunately, I had to go to the National Book Awards Web sit to see and hear Doty’s acceptance speech, and those of the other NBA winners. That is because, unlike awards ceremonies honoring movies, recorded music, television or theater, literary awards are never televised, except perhaps on C-SPAN (which, as the saying goes, “nobody watches”). The fact that literary awards are almost never televised is an indication of literature’s low standing in modern American society, gay or straight. While the major networks know that broadcasting the Oscars, the Grammys, the Emmys or the Tonys will win them large audiences, televising the National Book Awards would almost certainly be a ratings disaster and, even worse, drive away the advertisers.
 
 
There was a time, before recorded music, movies, radio and television, when literature was our culture’s most popular art form. Great writers like Voltaire, Goethe, Scott, Byron, Hugo, Dickens, Zola, Tolstoy and Mark Twain were celebrities in their own right, and their lives and loves enthralled the public the way that the antics of Britney Spears or Lindsay Lohan do today. Today, of course, we have a wide variety of media to give books and their authors stiff competition.  Books have to compete with movies, television and recorded music for the public’s time, money and interest, and books generally lose. Only a few writers dominate bestseller lists and make fortunes from their works. J. K. Rowling (Harry Potter), Stephenie Meyer (Twilight), TV preacher and homophobe Rick Warren (The Purpose Driven Life) and, of course, Barack Obama are just four names in an all-too short list of popular and successful writers.
 
 
Xie - the MOMA Library 46-50 - oil on canvas For generations of Gay men, Lesbian women, bisexuals and transgender people, books were an important part of the coming out process. Books like Malcolm Boyd's Take Off the Masks, Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, Donald Webster Cory's The Homosexual In America, Christine Jorgensen’s Personal Autobiography, Rita Mae Brown's Rubyfruit Jungle or Patricia Nell Warren's The Front Runner, helped many of us come to terms with our own sexual or gender identity. 
 
 
Sadly, interest in books and writers is not what it used to be, not even in the GLBT community. For many years GLBT bookstores served as de facto community centers. Today, there is only one GLBT bookstore left in Florida, Lambda Passages in Miami. Wilton Manors, Florida’s leading “gayborhood,” has many types of stores on Wilton Drive, but no book store. And while book reviews are still a major part of such publications as White Crane, the Lambda Book Report, the Gay & Lesbian Review and the online Books to Watch Out For, most mainstream GLBT publications have dropped their book columns altogether for lack of interest. (Most mainstream journals, Gay or straight, have done the same.)
 
 
At their best, books are an important part of our lives: they educate us, they entertain us, they enlighten us, they inspire us. Unlike most media, books do not require expensive equipment (unless you consider reading glasses to be “equipment”). Long before other media deigned to notice us, books spoke to us and about our lives as GLBT people. And books will continue to do so (I hope) when the other media are long gone. So I urge you to support good Gay books, writers, literary journals, book stores and book clubs, for they give us so much in return.
 
 
Jesse Monteagudo is a South-Florida based freelance writer and Gay book buff.  Write him and express your views at jessemonteagudo@aol.com.