Richard’s Blanco’s One Day
Nothing like an inauguration and a pop of poetry to inspire one’s day. Happy MLK Day to all. “One Today” One sun rose on us today, kindled over our shores, peeking over the Smokies, greeting the faces of the Great Lakes, spreading a simple truth across the Great Plains, then charging across the Rockies. One...
But how will it play in the South?
Finally he’s off the fence. Obama endorses same-sex marriage–thousands cheer…history is made…and the hand-wringing (over his re-election prospects, and whether this constitutes a genuine sea change for gay rights in America) begins…
Too much to see dept…
From Gayletter: Above: Charles Demuth (American, 1883–1935). Dancing Sailors, 1917 Slideshow: Keith Haring (American, 1958–1990). Unfinished Painting, 1989.
Shortcuts: Coriolanus
Fiennes, with Vanessa Redgrave Was it accidental, or did Ralph Fiennes anticipate the cries of the rabble? At the beginning of Coriolanus, Fiennes’ adaptation of Shakespeare’s parabolic tale of a war hero who, prodded by minions and his politic/duty-bound matriarch (Vanessa Redgrave, better than ever, if that’s possible) loses the courage of his convictions...
Suffering indignities in order to simply be
Here’s an interesting bit from Chapter 11 of The Gay and Lesbian Almanac: …in 1962, the president of the District of Columbia’s Mattachine Society, Dr. Franklin Kameny, appeared on local television for 90 seconds to talk about his organization. Such appearance was so rare and daring that the interview was preceded by a five-minute apology...
At war with woe
Last night from the fire escape of our apartment my partner and I gazed downtown to take in the Manhattan skyline. There were our skyscrapers—the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building, Citicorp, Time Warner and the still rising One World Trade Center—dotting the horizon, their spires lit up like an early Christmas. Suddenly two large...
Another Page
Live from New York: this morning as a family of starlings chirped me into cognizance, I thought, the past is present again. Funny—it remembered the first day of my Woodstock residency almost a month ago, less evocative of home than a clue to the sheer volume and diversity of bird stock in that neck of...
Undoing the Folded Lie
In the powerful revival of Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart, villains abound: there’s institutional homophobia fed by a conformist über-het society; New York’s red-tape bound local government led by a bachelor mayor rumored to be gay (Ed Koch, though never mentioned by name—oh, those pesky libel laws); the gay community adrift in a sexual roundelay...
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.
They lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow…
When I tuned into NY1 for the 9/11 ceremonies to hear the reading of the names they’d only made it to F; when I went back later they’d reached the R’s. I’d missed hearing the name of the only person I knew who perished that day. Rebecca Kaborie was a college classmate from Ohio, a...
Lena Horne 1917-2010
Over the past few months we’ve suffered the loss of pioneers the likes of who we’ll never see again: Benjamin Hooks, Dorothy Height, and now Lena Horne: she certainly deserves a place alongside those lauded blacks activists if onlyl because one could chart the progress of black civil rights in this country through the trajectory...
