Band of Thebes

Halberstam on Creative Mayhem and the Collapse of Heterosexuality

A year after The Queer Art of Failure, theorist Judith/Jack Halberstam is back with Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal [Kindle] again shredding the heteronormative straight-jacket. Halberstam argues the increasing number of women living alone, men avoiding marriage, pop culture bromances, pregnant men, gay marriage, and queers raising kids all signal the flaming end of heterosexuality. And from those tired ashes will rise freer sexualities and more fluid genders. It's a Gaga world.

Says Halberstam, "In this book I am building on the potentiality of failure to say that if marriage, long-term relationships, the couple form and family itself are all failing as social forms, then instead of grieving their collapse, we should revel in the new opportunities for relationality, connection and kinship that are suddenly and startlingly available to us in the world today."

USC News reports "In large part, the book examines how mass media is struggling to keep up, broadcasting conflicting messages about how men and women are supposed to act, love, marry and raise children. It’s all becoming more liquid "because the social forms that held all those categories in place are dissolving." Halberstam added, "We’re basically going to have an opposition in this country not between gay and straight but between traditional, monogamous households and alternative ones. And, frankly, the alternative ones will probably eventually outnumber the traditional ones."

Out lesbian, author, and New Yorker staffer Ariel Levy says the book is a "provocative and pleasurable romp through contemporary gender politics... as fun as it is illuminating."

This Saturday at 4:30pm, Halberstam reads at Bluestockings, 172 Allen St., NYC.

Born September 6: Jane Addams

Failing in her longheld goal to become a doctor, dropping out of a med school after a spinal injury and a nervous breakdown, Jane Addams did the next best thing: She spent two years traveling in Europe, which laid the foundation for her second foreign tour, when she secretly studied the world's first settlement house in London's East End with dreams of starting one in America with her girlfriend Ellen Gates Starr. They did it, opening Chicago's renowned Hull House in 1889, built on the three R's: residence, research, and reform. Their primary social causes were healthcare, education, immigration, child labor, and women's suffrage. At its peak Hull House accommodated two thousand visitors a week in its free lectures, concerts, library, book bindery, gym, bathhouse, coffeehouse, clubs, drama group, music school, art gallery, nursery, kindergarten, and adult classes, ultimately inspiring widespread continuing education programs throughout the nation and nearly 500 copycat settlement houses by 1920. A charter member of the American Sociological Society in 1905, a cofounder of Teddy Roosevelt's Progressive Party in 1912, Addams was elected president of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom in 1915. Sixteen years later she became the first American woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, in 1931. She died in 1935, still running Hull House which had expanded to a compound of thirteen buildings. For a private escape in every sense, she shared a summer house in Bar Harbor, Maine with her longtime partner Mary Rozet Smith. They are shown together above circa 1896 and at left thirty years on. 

Read Louise Knight's biography Jane Addams: Spirit in Action [Kindle]. Or go right to the source with The Jane Addams Reader.

After 122 years, Hull House Association abruptly ceased operations earlier this year due to bankruptcy, denying some 300 employees severance pay, earned vacation, and continued health coverage. They provided services to 60,000 people annually. The mansion remains open as a museum.

Born August 29: Edward Carpenter

Ardent socialist (author of the anthem England Arise, founding member of the Independent Labour Party), feminist (saying, “there is no solution except the freedom of woman,” he considered traditional marriage to be a form of prostitution), gay activist (his ground-breaking books like My Days and Dreams and The Intermediate Sex go far beyond earlier essays by his friend John Addington Symonds), pacifist, nudist, mystic, poet, and the first person to introduce sandals to modern Britain, Edward Carpenter’s greatest legacy may be how he lived his life. Utterly changed after reading Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass in 1863, he began to dream of a brotherhood of manly love that would erase class lines and give rise to a true democracy. After graduating from Cambridge and leaving a position vacated by Leslie Stephen, Virginia Woolf’s father, Carpenter gave public lectures in Leeds intended for the working class (but attended only by the middle class, who didn’t warm to his ideas) and sought to befriend laborers, unsuccessfully. Finally in 1891, after meeting by chance on a train, he and uneducated George Merrill became lovers. In 1898, when Carpenter was fifty-four and Merrill was thirty-two, they established a house together, absolutely unheard of in an England still widely antigay in the aftermath of the Oscar Wilde trials. They lived together openly as a couple for thirty years until Merrill’s death, and their cross-class love was the direct inspiration for their friend E.M. Forster’s novel Maurice, as well as D.H. Lawrence’s heterosexualized version, Lady Chatterley's Lover. Not all authors were so enamored. In the decade after Carpenter’s death, George Orwell ridiculed “every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal wearer [and] sex maniac” among the Socialists. Yet an American Communist, Harry Hay, credited Carpenter’s writings for galvanizing him to start the first gay rights group, The Mattachine Society, in Los Angeles in 1950. The Lammy winning biography of Carpenter by Sheila Rowbotham was Peter Tatchell's and Jeanette Winterson's favorite book of 2008 and Sarah Schulman's favorite lgbt book of 2009.

Born August 28: Karl Ulrichs

Karl Heinrich Ulrichs had an affair with his riding instructor when he was fourteen, was forced to quit his civil servant job for being gay when he was thirty-four, and began publishing pamphlets explaining and defending same-sex love when he was thirty-seven. Five years later, the day after his forty-second birthday, he addressed the German congress, coming out publicly and demanding they repeal their anti-gay laws. It was 1867, one hundred two years before Stonewall, and he was shouted down before he could finish his speech. Though his books were banned in Saxony and Berlin he continued writing on the subject for the rest of his life. In 1870, he published Araxes, which lays out all of the modern arguments for the rights of gay citizens. In 1879, he published the twelfth volume of his ongoing project, Research on the Riddle of Man-Manly Love, and moved to Italy, which was more hospitable. Indeed, Ulrichs was awarded an honorary degree by the University of Naples shortly before he died, one month prior to his seventieth birthday. Today, streets are named for him in Bremen, Hanover, and Munich, where this afternoon they will celebrate with their annual street party and poetry reading in Karl-Heinrich-Ulrichs-Platz. In his final years, he wrote

 

“Until my dying day I will look back with pride that I found the courage to come face to face in battle against the spectre which for time immemorial has been injecting poison into me and into men of my nature. Many have been driven to suicide because all their happiness in life was tainted. Indeed, I am proud that I found the courage to deal the initial blow to the hydra of public contempt.”

Born August 16: Dennis Altman, Wolfgang Tillmans

Forty-one years ago, way back in 1971, Australian gay rights pioneer Dennis Altman published his groundbreaking book Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation. While teaching at the University of Sydney, La Trobe, and Harvard, he has continued to publish "savvy, energetic" work, including Gore Vidal's America, AIDS in the Mind of America, and Global Sex, about which PW said: "Altman is best when he... compares Bangkok's current reputation with Vienna's as "the global brothel" circa 1900; when he traces the dissemination of U.S. gay culture around the world; or when he discusses how Reagan and Thatcher used traditional "moral panics" to promote their agendas. Drawing upon a wide range of sources and cultural artifacts including Playboy, U.N. Development Programme reports, Sharon Stone's famous leg crossing in Basic Instinct, and La Cage aux Folles, as well as the theories of Freud, Herbert Marcuse, William Reich and Franz Fanon Altman ranges outside the usual boundaries of academic research."

Born in Remscheid, Germany in 1968, photog phenom Wolfgang Tillmans made it to England as an exchange student when he was fifteen in 1983, just in time for the queerish alt rock explosion led by Depeche Mode, the Smiths, the Cure. After stints in Hamburg, and a year in New York where he met his German partner Jochen Klein, they settled in London in 1995. Two years later Klein died of aids. Three years after that, in 2000, Tillmans became the first photographer and the first non-British artist to win the UK's prestigious Turner Prize. Two years later he filmed the video for Pet Shop Boys' "Home and Dry." In 2006, he opened Between Bridges gallery space in London to promote overlooked political art. But what's his own style? All over the map. New York mag tried to nail it last year: "A Tillmans has slackerlike beauty and nonchalance; a color sense that is more like that of a monochrome painter who works in large or otherwise unbroken fields; an accidental and uncontrived appearance; an attraction to the abstract and fragmented; and a sense of the photograph as an object that (usually unframed) occupies wall space more like a sheet than like a piece of art." Taschen has a three-volume, 556-page retrospective of his work.

Queering Committed Relationships

Unlikely that those tabloid photos of Anderson Cooper's boyfriend Ben Maisani kissing another man in a NYC park are going to become a cultural moment, but HuffPost's Gay Voices editor Noah Michelson dreams they will launch a national discussion about healthy open relationships. Once again, it's the gay vs. queer divide. Michelson writes:

"One gay friend of mine, who has been with his partner for nearly a decade but is unable to marry him because they reside in a Midwestern state where gay marriage isn't legal, thought the photos of Maisani could make it even harder for him to wed. He questioned how mainstream America would react to Maisani's public display of affection with a man who wasn't his boyfriend and how it would do anything to 'help gay acceptance.' 

"But in my fantasies, we're not gunning for gay acceptance -- especially not if the only way we're granted it is by "behaving ourselves" and struggling to fit into a heteronormative mold (which, as far as I can tell, hasn't really benefited heterosexual people very well, either). Instead, I want us to be pushing for queer liberation, which, to me, has always meant that when it comes to sex and love, we all get to do whatever we want with whomever we want as long as we're not hurting anyone..."

Michelson doesn't mention aids but the pandemic further cemented the dichotomy between the good, monogamous gay and the bad, promiscuous queer. The broader debate has lasted nearly fifty years: Are we going to get equality by saying we're the same as you or by saying it's okay to be different.

Uganda's First Gay Pride

Unthinkable two years ago, now look: Uganda celebrated its first gay pride last weekend. On assignment covering LGBT rights in Africa, Alexis Okeowo reports for the New Yorker blog: 

“Can you imagine that the worst place in the world to be gay is having Gay Pride?” Kasha Jacqueline Nabagesera asked a crowd of cheering gay men, lesbians, transgendered men and women, and queers somewhere in between. It was Saturday afternoon, and we were on the shores of the giant, cloudy Lake Victoria in the Ugandan city of Entebbe, where L.G.B.T. activists had decided to stage the country’s first Pride Parade. Nabagesera, a lesbian activist covered, for the occasion, in glitter and neon spray paint, with homemade angel wings, was being half-sarcastic. A barrage of media coverage has painted the country as a hell for gays—a place where they are suffering and being attacked constantly—and, despite the need to combat such threats, L.G.B.T. Ugandans were tired of hearing a story that ignored their nuanced experiences of both joy and hardship."

The rainbow sashed sailor is Frank Mugisha, the pioneering activist who recently won an RFK Human Rights Award and the 2011 Rafto Prize.

Corporate Cultures' Queer Clashes

Two media attempts to cheer you up after the hellroarin' success of Chick-Fil-A Appreciation Day: 

AlterNet runs a piece called "Six Brands Playing Footsie with Conservatives and Paying the Price." It starts well, with reassuring stats about how the haters are old people who "don’t buy stuff!" and the young are overwhelmingly for gay marriage. And the author takes a sharp look at the Komen debacle. But the other examples go limp by the end.

Tiffany Hsu and Ricardo Lopez at the LA Times write "Many Businesses Seek Favor Among LGBT Customers," offering a wide range of some meaty, some meager evidence of companies courting queers. JC Penney hiring Ellen, Bank of America and nearly 40 other companies offering tax relief to gay employees. You'll recall two years ago Lady Gaga had to break up with Target for their antigay ways and hate funding; now they're running this ad and selling rainbow t-shirts to raise money for the pro-gay Family Equality Council. Some actiivists are skeptical of Target's turnaround. The article also mentions cultural changes at formerly antigay Coors and the grandpappy of them all, Cracker Barrel, which "once required that any employees who did not display 'normal heterosexual values' be fired. The Lebanon, Tenn.-based company now employs a nondiscrimination policy and diversity training."

For more on the subject, read the guru of gay marketing Bob Witeck's book Business Inside Out: Capturing Millions of Brand Loyal Gay Consumers or Alexandra Chasin's Selling Out: The Gay and Lesbian Movement Goes to Market. Or for a different view, read The Tragedy of Today's Gays.

Born July 31: Barbara Gittings

Barbara Gittings deserves a major museum exhibit, a biographer, and a feature film like Kinsey. She was heroic at least since her freshman year at Northwestern (1949-50), when a Chicago psychiatrist proposed to "cure" her lesbianism and, rather than submit, or fall apart, Gittings devoted all her time to studying homosexuality in the medical and legal libraries. The dreadful descriptions ("deviate," "pervert"), the exclusively male focus, and the lack of any mention of love only spurred her on. Typical gusto: When she found the anonymously written book The Homosexual in America, she called the publisher to find out who the author was and arranged to meet him. Later, she met Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin, founders of the Daughters of Bilitis in California, and within two years she had begun a New York chapter despite living in Philadelphia. She edited the group's magazine, The Ladder, and became friends with Frank Kameny in Washington. Together they organized the picketing of the White House in October 1965 and at Independence Hall, where Gittings carried a sign reading Homosexuals Demand Their Civil RIghts. She and Kameny were instrumental in convincing the APA to de-list homosexuality as a mental disorder in 1973. With her life partner Kay Lahusen, whom she met at a Daughters of Bilitis picnic in 1961, she never stopped working for gay equality. She died in 2007. Several awards are named in her honor, including one from GLAAD and the top ALA Stonewall Book Award, this year won by Wayne Hoffman for Sweet Like Sugar [Kindle], last year by Barb Johnson for her New Orleans stories More of This World or Maybe Another [Kindle only $1.99].

Thank Lesbian Jennifer Cast for Jeff Bezos' Huge Gay Marriage Support

Like most of us, Jennifer Cast said she figured her former boss, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, was well aware of the threat to gay marriage in Washington State by the upcoming the ballot iniative and wrote to him, "I figured that if you felt the desire to support marriage equality, you would do it." But, unlike many of us, this time she spoke up with a direct ask, and for the first time in twelve years working on the issue, Cast, 50, partners of 20+ years with Liffy Franklin, 63, emailed Bezos, "I beg you not to sit on the sidelines and hope the vote goes our way. Help us make it so." She wrote, "We need help from straight people. To be very frank, we need help from wealthy straight people who care about us and who want to help us win." She asked the billionaire for a contribution of $100,000 to $200,000. Within thirty-six hours he replied, "Jen, this is right for so many reasons. We’re in for $2.5 million. Jeff & MacKenzie"

This is the largest ever donation in support of marriage equality and it only happened because a lesbian spoke up and asked for it. Learn from her. The announcement also inspired other gifts, according to the Seattle Times, which reports, "Cast said she has received hundreds of emails since news of Bezos' gift broke early Friday from well-wishers and those who suddenly wanted to give. One donor pledged $25,000."

Jeff Bezos is worth $18.4 billion. Although William Lynch, the CEO of Barnes & Noble, isn't a billionaire, his compensation last year was $10 million, going up to $15.3 million this year. He doesn't have a connection to Washington State, but some of the Amazon haters need to ask Lynch for a significant donation. He can give to Maryland's or to Maine's campaign.

What she said: I beg you not to sit on the sidelines and hope the vote goes our way. 

Contribute here.

Spain's Firefighters Demonstrate Proper Way To Protest Austerity

 

Angry Greeks, take note. First in Bilbao, above. And last Thursday in Meires, Asturias, below, where their declining salary is 1,500 euros a month.

   

ACT UP Marches on Wall Street To Mark 25th Anniversary

Of the hundreds of people marching on Wall Street yesterday to mark the 25th anniversary of ACT UP, nine were arrested. Among the many artists, filmmakers, and writers in attendance, I saw Ira Sachs wearing a baby, Tom Kalin talking truth about My Week with Marilyn, John Weir, and Daniel Allen Cox. The demonstration was a joint action with Occupy, and groups came from at least as far as Boston and Philadelphia to demand more aids funding and to honor the New Yorkers who started it all in 1987. The Nation offers some background.

Remember, in a pinch, duct tape is your friend.

James Beard Foundation Returns Boy Scouts Award Over Antigay Bias

People often dismiss the Huffington Post's Gay Voices page but thanks entirely to this essay posted there yesterday by Michelangelo Signorile, the president of the James Beard Foundation has returned an award she had accepted earlier in the week from the Boy Scouts. Beard was kicked out of Reed College in 1922 for being gay and Signorile rightly asked if he was rolling over in his grave at the thought of an award from the homophobic Scouts. Beard Foundation president Susan Ungaro informed the BSA she is rescinding her acceptance of their Distinguished Citizen Award specifically because she "absolutely does not" support their antigay policy. Don't for a minute think the Boy Scouts have mellowed. Earlier this month the organization expelled an Ohio mom, Jennifer Tyrrell, from Cub Scouts after discovering she is a lesbian.

[Photo by Dan Wynn]

Gay in Africa: The Hairdresser of Harare by Tendai Huchu

Why do the Americans who follow international news know the names Aung San Suu Kyi, Elena Bonner, and Thich Quang Do but not Frank Mugisha? Why do they know Uganda is considering a law to punish homosexuality with the death penalty but they're unaware of the nation's heroic gay rights leader? Other people know Mugisha. Last year he won the Rafto Prize, the Norwegian global award for human rights, previously given to Suu Kyi, Bonner, and Thich, and he won the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award.

Our conflict-obsessed media leaves too many people with the impression all of Africa north of Joburg is a wasteland of ignorance and intolerance. Signs of gay progress are invisible here. The news stories are not balanced by, for example, the success of Kenya's first LGBT film festival last September. Social media was a driving force in the Arab Spring, but reporters never deign to mention the thriving online world of gay Africa, from the continent-spanning Behind the Mask to more local magazine's such as Morocco's Mithly, and, launched just last month, Rainbow Sudan.

Unfiltered, firsthand experience is best. Short of a long trip to see for yourself, you can immerse your senses in the Zimbabwean novel The Hairdresser of Harare [Kindle] by Tendai Huchu who now lives in Scotland. Told in the breezy style of another Edinburgh author who writes about Africa, Alexander McCall Smith, Huchu's book is full of surprises. Would you ever have guessed a struggling, 26 year-old single mom hairdresser would have a live-in maid? Funny, smart, and sensible, the narrator Vimbai is the queen of Khumalo Hair & Beauty Treatment Salon. That is, until she's gently dethroned by the salon's first male stylist, the charming, handsome 22 year-old Dumisani Ncube. He rents a spare room from Vimbai, allowing her a peek at his amazing abs but still blind to what Western readers will see instantly, he's gay.

Postponing this revelation until the end of the book is one of a couple of sticky decisions, but plot really isn't the point. The immense pleasure of The Hairdresser of Harare is its window into another world, where the characters display enviable insouciance in coping with delusional customers who want to look like Beyonce, massive currency devaluation, unreliable men, severe rationing, disapproving parents, official bribes, demanding children, military jackboots, family rifts, electricity blackouts, stale rap music, corrupt politicians, hellfire preachers, and worries about what to wear. To them, it's just life.

Although this is his first novel, Huchu is nimble in depicting every layer of social strata. The working-class girls style the hair of a dragon lady government Minister, and after she's (unwittingly) been Dumi's beard at his brother's wedding, Vimbai enters his family's life of immense privilege. Newly comfortable with infinity pools, armed guards, and a sister schooled in America, she struggles at dinner with the knife and fork, having always eaten rice with a spoon and chicken with her hands. It's a dazzling moment, telling the reader far more than the narrator knows. Similarly, we see all of Dumi's anguish and excitements as a closeted gay young man through details that Vimbai notes without understanding. Flawed in its final pages by sudden character reversals and re-reversals, the novel is still a rewarding and necessary read.

For Harry Hay Centenary, L.A. Dedicates Mattachine Staircase

East Coast queers like to believe the gay rights movement was born on their turf but nineteen years before Stonewall and eleven years before Frank Kameny started the DC chapter, Harry Hay co-founded the Mattachine Society in Los Angeles in 1950. (Before him, Henry Gerber created the Society for Human Rights in Chicago in 1924, which suffered a quick demise after members were arrested.) 

Harry Hay would be 100 today. He is a forgotten hero of American history who deserves far greater recognition; you could make a case that his contributions were more important than Harvey Milk's. Yet it's easy to see why Gay Inc. prefers to ignore him -- he wasn't mediagenic, he was a Communist, he was strongly anti-assimilationist, and he and his longtime partner John Burnside also co-founded the Radical Faeries. So kudos today to Silver Lake for renaming the Cove Steps in his honor, The Mattachine Steps. Though I'm obliged to point out the sign omits the word gay and does nothing for queer visibility for passersby who don't know the Mattachine Society.

The play The Temperamentals has gotten plenty of press. Read Stuart
Timmons' newly updated biography or try the Hay collection, Radically Gay: Gay Liberation in the Words of Its Founder. On Sunday April 15, the ONE Archives culture series will host a panel discussion about Harry Hay with film clips and readings. Or, shut up and dance: PJ DeBoy, John Cameron Mitchell, Amber Martin, and Paul Dawson host monthly party Mattachine, now in its fourth year at Julius. 

Below, an amazing trifecta: Vito Russo interviews Barbara Gittings and Harry Hay, circa 1983.

(Hay photo via. Sign photo: Anthea Raymond)

Gran Fury Reunion

Did you know the two sailors in the READ MY LIPS ad have their pants open and are firmly at crossed swords? After the Furies appropriated the top half of the image and made it famous, one of the men called to say thank you. Such were the revelations Tuesday night when four members of the queer activist art collective Gran Fury discussed their work and legacy: from left, moderator Andrew Ross, with Robert Vasquez, Tom Kalin, Avrim Finkelstein, and Marlene McCarty. Several times they emphasized that their work was created when they were at war, it was made to be used in direct action, and the shopworn question "Is it Art?" was an artificial conversation. They reminded the audience that their famous Kissing Doesn't Kill, which you recall for its two same sex and one interracial kisses in the style of a Benetton ad, was "about saliva transferability," a "huge controversy at the time." Tom Kalin said aids absolutely brought on PTSD which he suggested was why the trio of aids documentaries needed until now:We Were Here, United in Anger, and How To Survive a Plague. Predictably, members of the panel differed on the role of social media; either they cited the importance of old school, non-virtual encounters or the success of the Arab Spring revolutions driven by Twitter and Facebook. 

The NYU show of Gran Fury's work, on display at 80 WSE until March 17, is a must-see.

Ira Sachs Wins Teddy Award for Best Queer Film at Berlinale

Congratulations to Ira Sachs whose Keep the Lights On won Best Feature at the 26th Teddy Awards celebrating queer film at the Berlinale. Over ten years, a New York gay couple's relationship is threatened by competing addictions.

Zuschauerpreis der Siegessaeule: The bigger winner might be The Parade [above]. From Serbia, the turbulent farce follows homophobic mafia hitmen forced to defend the flaming queers at a fractious gay pride parade, with additional comedy/conflict among Serbs, Bosnian Muslims, Kosovo-Albanians and Croatian war vets. The cliche-riddled movie equally lampoons nellie fags and moronic machismo in the name of ultimately affirming gay acceptance. Amazingly, it became a monster box office smash success across the Balkans, becoming the #1 movie of 2011 with double the ticket sales of the number two movie, The Smurfs. The optimistic, solipsistic director expects this year's gay pride parade to be the region's first ever without anti-gay violence, thanks to his movie.

Best Documentary: Call Me Kuchu, a film by Katherine Wright and Malika Zouhali-Worral, about Uganda's first openly gay activist, David Kato, who was murdered. More here.

Best Short: Loxoro. A mother in Peru searches for her teenaged daughter and her best friend, both transsexuals.

Special Jury Prize: Jaures

Special Teddy I & II: Ulrike Ottinger, Mario Montez

As for the main jury prizes at the Berlinale, the Golden Bear went to Caesar Must Die by 80 and 82 year-old brothers Paolo and Vittorio Taviani. (Last year's Golden Bear winner, which also swept the acting awards, was the Iranian drama A Separation. It has an impossible 99% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and truly is as good as everyone says. See it before it wins on Sunday.)

MoMA Hosts World Premiere of ACT UP Doc "United in Anger"

Someday, someone will write a definitive history of 20th century activism and protest, and ACT UP will get credit for changing the world. Until then, there's Jim Hubbard's awesome, imperfect documentary United in Anger, which MoMA screened as opening night of its Documentary Fortnight on Thursday. From 1987 to roughly 1992, with a coda bringing it up to today, the film shows one inspired, phenomenal, queer zap after another: the FDA, the New York Stock Exchange, Grand Central, CBS News, and St. Patrick's where up to 8,000 people rallied against the church's policies. Brazen successes that upended the power dynamic, sped drug approvals, lowered prices, and saved lives. The movie is excellent on women's essential part in the coalition and gives much, deserved time to the always-quotable media godsend Ann Northrop. She points out their goal was visibility and effecting change, not to be liked. A distinction lost on the cozy assimilationists of the past twenty years, I'd say. Among the writers on screen are Sarah Schulman (who co-produced), John Weir, K.M. Soehnlein, Larry Kramer, Urvashi Vaid, and an angry, early '90s Michael Cunningham speaking out against the government more forcefully than he has lately. Of course people might mellow with age and success, and, obviously, the pandemic while still deadly has become more manageable. My point is the movie captures a moment that is gone and you should see it. 

If you can help, please give via Kickstarter.

United in Anger has the sweep I wanted from the widely-praised, more intimate aids doc We Were Here. I'm still looking forward to Sundance's How To Survive a Plague, which has just been picked up for theatrical distribution.

The Gentrification of the Mind by Sarah Schulman

Monday was the on-sale date for Sarah Schulman's compelling new nonfiction book The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination [Kindle]. The three chapters that may most interest readers here are "The Gentrification of AIDS," "The Gentrification of Gay Politics," and "The Gentrification of Gay Literature." I was grateful to engage with an intelligent and spirited point of view, even when I did not see eye to eye with all of her assertions. 

Each of the chapters is worthy of an entire book, so readers will have to cope with short looks at huge subjects. The political chapter especially is too brief but worth it for reprinting her interview from the 90s with a rawther prickly Andrew Sullivan. Her comments about gay male authors eradicating their sexuality and their experience of hetero cruelty in order to be accepted by the straight literary establishment are sure to spark discussion, but many readers will see some truth there, too. Certainly no serious person can dispute the lack of visibility for books about lesbians written by out American lesbians. 

Because she writes about power and privilege and because she challenges the status quo, some readers get uncomfortable and some get upset. What gets lost, almost always, is that even while pointing out dire inequalities, Schulman remains a great optimist. Her detractors could learn a lot from her.

She will appear at the Union Square B&N (with Robert Polito) on February 23, in Toronto on March 10, and at the Gotham Center on April 12.

Ryan James Yezak's 7-Minute Tour of Modern Gay History

Filmmaker Ryan James Yezak is raising money for his $150,000 documentary "Second Class Citizens," about the LGBT rights movement. His 6 minute 52 second video is an instant success. Jezebel says you'll cry.