Playing for our team…publicly
Let the walls come down dept: Phoenix Suns president and CEO Rick Welts came out as a gay man this week. See the NYT article here…congrats, Rick…
Twilight world from a distance, and up close
Alvin Baltrop took the long view. I relish his head-spinning panoramas of places that no longer exist; Baltrop’s camera captured the looming gilders inside abandoned hangars and the wide expanses of wooden piers along the Hudson in the West Village, ones that hadn’t seen a ship’s arrival in many a moon. But look closely, and...
At the Whitney and Artists Space, Art by Boys Who Like Boys
Glenn Ligon, Malcolm X Like Stonewall, the art revolution of the 1980s was a coming out as explosive as the times required. Many of the artists who broke out were gay: Mapplethorpe, David Wojnarowicz, Peter Hujur, Catherine Opie and Keith Haring marched into our consciousness with forceful works that expressed an era’s glittery...
Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell 1993-2010
Gone the way of Jim Crow, and every other heinous bit of marginalizing legislation. RIP, you bastard.
No Place for Politics in Art
Not to mention religion. Below is an excerpt from the New York Times Arts Beat Blog, a response to the Smithsonian’s recent excision of the late David Wojnarowicz’s (pictured above) work from their current exhibition, after harassment from the head of the Catholic League and a few bullying Republican Congressmen. Bravo to Wachs and his...
Feel the Rapture
Funny, forthright, bittersweet: none doesn’t quite describe Everyday Rapture, the lovely, not-quite one woman show starring Sherie Rene Scott at the Roundabout’s American Airlines Theater (what whores, the Roundabout, bartering naming rights for such a clunky moniker). Rapture is more than that quintessential show biz tale of a girl who makes it to New York...
An Understanding of Our Nature
“I wanted to sound an alarm. But nothing had happened.” Alfieri, A View from the Bridge by Arthur Miller. In the current revival of A View from the Bridge, the alarms ring throughout. The play’s big Greek epiphany centers on a matter of trust: Eddie Carbone, the dockworker, commits a betrayal so huge that...
Pre-Stonewall, A Struggle for Dignity
Woodstock isn’t the only anniversary being celebrated this year; the summer of 1969 was also marked by the Stonewall Riots, an event seen by many as the birth of gay liberation. That uprising ignores years of work by a lot of brave forward-thinking folk whose activism, while discreet, embodied the age-old frustrations of men...
We are stardust, we are golden
Time flies, I thought, as my partner and I wandered the main drag on a recent, all-too-brief trip to Woodstock. The media heralds the 40th anniversary of the event that besieged Yasgur’s farm and a generation’s doobie-fueled conscience, but little of its genuine spirit (what I imagine that to be) lives in the new land...
Rodger McFarlane 1955-2009
Sad to hear of the suicide of McFarlane, one of the founders of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, an executive director of Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS and more recently, of the Gill Foundation, an advocacy organization for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender civil rights. I keep reading articles bemoaning the lack of gay heroes; McFarlane...
Jack Wrangler, Porn Icon 1946-2009
…well, yes, I was Jack Wrangler’s butt boy…I’m totally kidding. But I actually worked for him back in 1997, under circumstances more akin to an ass-kicking; I was a replacement for one in a trio of boy singers who backed the female lead in a review called It Could Happen to You: The Songs of Jo Stafford....
