Band of Thebes

Gay Alaska

For the many people who ask about gay life up here in Alaska: Meet 28 year-old David from Bethel. He's Athabaskan, Yupik, versatile, and an identical twin. David came out when he was 17, the same year his dad came out. David's twin just came out recently. Formerly a cook for 180 hungry dudes on an oil rig, David currently works at the B&B his dad and his dad's partner have owned for 10 years. Of Alaska he says, "It’s one of the best places on earth. There’s a lot to do here if you’re optimistic and okay with the weather. The winter is crazy. Last week, it was raining and forty-five degrees, this week it’s snowing." About the gay thing: "Honestly, I know some gay Alaska Native people. Back in the seventeenth century or so, the Russian Orthodox religion was introduced… They weren’t very keen on gay people, but things have changed."

More proof of how things have changed is coming later this month in the form of Navy Lt. Gary Ross, who turns 35 this year. On September 20, 2011, he and his partner Dan (16 years his senior) wed at midnight at the Moose Meadow Lodge in Duxbury, Vermont, to become the first same-sex military couple to legally marry in the US, with the official repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Now his ship, the aptly named USS Anchorage, is coming to town for its official commissioning ceremony and he's reaching out to the city's lgbt organization Identity Inc. to meet the local queer community. Details to follow. The 684' ship, which holds 360 sailors and has a surge capacity of 800, will be open to the public on April 26, 27, 29, and May 3. Gary has written about the pressures of trying to hide their relationship here. For starters, Dan had to create a fake email account and sign all his letters Danielle.

Born January 24: Hadrian

Born in Italica, Spain 1,936 years ago today, Publius Aelius Hadrianus became, at 41, the third of the Five Good Roman Emperors, following the death of Trajan who was a cousin of Hadrian's father. Overall, his reign was marked by comparable peace, the exception being the second Roman-Jewish War, after which he remained violent in his Anti-Semitism. Without constant military battles he was able to fortify the empire which stretched from north Africa to northern England and from Portugal to Iraq. Along with the wall that bears his name near the Scottish border, Hadrian oversaw several colossal building projects. Most notable are the Pantheon in its current form (entirely rebuilt after a fire destroyed the original) and what is said to have been the largest temple in the ancient capital, The Temple of Venus and Roma. A great traveler, he rarely saw his wife, vastly preferring the culture of Athens to Rome and the company of young men to women. Of course, his greatest love was Antinous, whom he met at thirteen or fourteen in Turkey. After Antinous drowned in the Nile at nineteen, Hadrian's tributes were unparalleled: He had him deified, founded the city of Antinopolis, commissioned dozens of busts and statues of him, built a temple to him at his villa in Tivoli, and put his likeness on money, the only non-Emperor ever honored with a coin. They were not just friends. The Cult of Antinous was extremely popular with a certain kind of man throughout the empire and flourished until later when it was harshly condemned for being based on an 'immoral relationship' and suppressed by the emerging Catholic church. Hadrian died at 62 without any biological children. In his final year, he adopted for the sake of an heir a 51 year-old named Antoninus Pius.

Regardless of whether or not you think you're interested in the ancient world, read lesbian Marguerite Yourcenar's amazing novel, Memoirs of Hadrian, translated into English by Grace Frick, her partner for forty-two years. The book is so good it made Yourcenar the first woman elected to the Académie Française, founded in 1635.

Born January 14: Yukio Mishima, Cecil Beaton

Brilliant writer and fascist militant nut, Yukio Mishima published forty novels, many collections of stories and essays, and was thrice nominated for the Nobel Prize before, at 45, launching a deranged coup attempt against the Japanese government with four other men immediately after which he and another committed ritual suicide. Mishima wrote his first book in his early twenties and became a celebrity at 24 with his bestselling second novel, the autobiographical gay conformity story Confessions of a Mask. While that book chronicled a solitary experience, bigger shocks awaited in his novel Forbidden Colors exploring Tokyo's vast gay subculture. In dreaming of an all male world it also gave voice to Mishima's misogyny and gave rise to his dedication to a hyper-masculine ideal of beauty, starting with himself. He detested intellectuals' emphasis on the mind, instead espousing a life of physicality, muscle, and action, which led to increased scenes of sadomasochism and gay rape in his fiction and greater vanity in his life. On a hardcore workout regimen, he began posing nude for gay photographers and acting in movies. Highlights of his prolific output are The Sound of Waves, a hetero love story so popular it's been filmed five times; The Temple of the Golden Pavilion; The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea; and his Sea of Fertility tetralogy beginning with Spring Snow. In 1998 Jiro Fukushima published a book about his affair with Mishima and Mishima's son and daughter successfully sued him for invasion of privacy and copyright violation for quoting their father's letters to him.

Avoiding sports as a child, Cecil Beaton learned photography from his nanny on her Kodak 3A, and avoiding academics at Cambridge, which he left without a degree in 1925, he took his first published photo, printed in Vogue, of one of England's leading Shakespearean scholars in drag: To be exact, George "Dadie" Rylands, a Cambridge Fellow for 72 years, was costumed as the Duchess of Malfi. From there Beaton had to go work for his father's timber company, which he suffered for eight miserable days. After that he returned to his rightful place in the world of design, creating book jackets and studying photography until Vogue hired him fulltime in 1927. Although his style is flowery and theatrical, many of his most enduring images are serious people captured at critical times: a tense Churchill in 1940, Queen Elizabeth II's coronation portrait, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor's wedding portrait. During the war, he volunteered and was posted to the Ministry of Information, capturing images of the Blitz, its young injured on the cover of Life, and RAF pilots in their cockpit.

Versatile in his talents, Beaton also designed the lighting, sets, and costumes for many Broadway musicals, winning four Tony Awards, and for several Hollywood extravaganzas, winning the Oscar for best costumes twice, for Gigi and most famously for his high camp creations in My Fair Lady. Although he never consummated his long unrequited love for Peter Watson, a gay art collector whose interests lay elsewhere, Beaton did enjoy possibly the greatest consolation prize of the twentieth century, an affair with Gary Cooper. For his entire life, he kept his childhood diary in which he first realized he was a "terrible, terrible homosexualist" and that shame never fully disappeared, driving him to a few misguided affairs with women later in his life, including one with Greta Garbo, who dumped him and went back to women. When he was seventy he suffered a major stroke that left him partially paralyzed, and though he adapted to drawing and photographing with his left hand, he never recovered his earlier ease. He died six years later, in 1980.

Click here, to re-read Sandy Leonard's immortal Beaton/Coral Browne memory.

Gale and Van Der Merwe Tie for Green Carnation Prize

Ultimately, even with their delay, the Green Carnation Prize judges couldn't agree on a single winner, so the 2012 award is a tie between veteran Patrick Gale's A Perfectly Good Man and newcomer Andre Carl van der Merwe's Moffie [Kindle].

Gale's sixteenth novel looks at the life of an Anglican priest in Cornwall who apparently assists in the suicide of a paralysed former rugby player.

Van der Merwe's debut novel is about a sensitive, gay nineteen year-old conscripted into the Angola Bush War.

 The shortlist was:

• Carol Anshaw, Carry the One [Kindle]
• Patrick Gale, A Perfectly Good Man
• Philip Hensher, Scenes from Early Life
• Kerry Hudson, Tony Hogan Bought Me an Ice-Cream Float Before He Stole My Ma 
• Andre Carl Van Der Merwe, Moffie [Kindle]
• Edmund White, Jack Holmes and His Friend [Kindle]

Previous winners are Catherine Hall's The Proof of Love last year and Christopher Fowler's Paperboy in 2010.

Born August 3: Rupert Brooke

Yeats called him “the handsomest young man in England” and he was adored throughout Britain for his poetry as much as his legendary looks -- so how could someone as heroic as Rupert Brooke be killed by a mosquito bite when he was only twenty-seven? A star all his life, he blossomed at Cambridge, where he was one of the founders of the Marlowe Society acting club and a member of the Apostles. Throughout his schooling he had deep crushes on his male classmates, particularly Charles Lascelles and Michael Sadleir, and in his twenties dated both women and men, seeming proudest of his seduction of Denham Russell-Smith, the brother of a friend. (See his letters to James Strachey, which Brooke’s executors kept out of print for eighty-three years, until 1998.) His poetry is largely impersonal and, of course, he is most celebrated for his idealistic War Sonnets, having died soon after their publication, before he ever saw battle, en route with his Navy unit to Gallipoli. Two months after Brooke’s death, his younger brother William volunteered with the 8th Battalion London Regiment, known as the Post Office Rifles, and was killed in battle within twenty days. Still today, the Rupert Brooke Society erases his gay/bi side on their site. Brooke is, of course, one of the prevailing spirits behind Alan Hollinghurst's The Stranger's Child.

Swift Cuts

Reacting to Chick-Fil-A's increasingly vocal antigay rhetoric, The Muppets have severed ties with the fast food chain. Founder's daughter and current co-CEO Lisa Henson, a strong supporter of gay marriage, directed the fuzzy puppets in the accounting department to forward Chick-Fil-A's final royalty check to GLAAD.

Also, Boston's mayor Tom Menino says he will block Chick-Fil-A from opening a franchaise in the city.

Highlighting the mental in fundamentalist, Mike Huckabee is organizing a Chick-Fil-A APPRECIATION DAY for August 1. Evil queers plan gay kiss-ins at the restaurants nationwide on August 3.

I, alone and unheard, continue to protest the moronic spelling of Fil-A.

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The week after the Boy Scouts unanimously upheld their antigay policy, Major League Soccer announced they are ending their partnership with the BSA.

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After conflicting responses from commanders, on July 19 the Pentagon for the first time ever granted permission for military servicemembers to wear their uniforms in a gay pride parade. The exemption was limited to one time, on Saturday in San Diego [below], while the chiefs review their policy prohibiting uniforms in civilian parades. If next year the soldiers and sailors have to march out of uniform... not complaining.

 
photo via San Diego Union Tribune

Rachel Maddow's Drift

In her first book Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power [Kindle], Rachel Maddow "traces how U.S. national intelligence agencies have taken over duties that were once assigned to the military, and how this shift has increased the public disconnect from the consequences of war." 

Rachel says she grew up in a household that respected military service -- her father fought in Vietnam -- and she might have joined up herself, were it not for that LGBT ban.

The NPR site:

"Politically, secrecy is a great excuse," Maddow tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "If something is being done on a secret basis in national security, that's a great reason for elected officials to not talk about it. And that's a great way to shirk accountability for it with the public."

That lack of accountability, says Maddow, lets America's national defense operate without public oversight or knowledge.

"When things are done in secret in our name, we can be held accountable for them, even if we can't hold accountable our government for directing it," she says. "And that feels very un-American to me."

Using intelligence agencies and private contractors has also increasingly disconnected the American public from the consequences of war, says Maddow.

"I don't think anybody set out to make us so divorced from the wars that we wage," she says. "But all of these little tweaks — all of these little changes that we made — had the effect of letting a president wage war without political restraint and letting us wage war in a way where we didn't necessarily notice or know the names of all of those who were deployed in our name. Because a lot of them were working for companies that didn't have any obligation to report to us when their people were killed. We ended up doing stuff in a way that insulated the American public from what our military was doing to the point where we don't feel much friction when Americans go downrange."

Guess who had an easy time getting blurbs? Everyone from Naomi Klein and Matt Taibbi to Roger Ailes and Tom Brokaw lavishly praise the book. I don't care what Tom or Roger think but Naomi Klein promises the work isn't an overly academic trudge, "With her savage wit, dazzling command of facts, and eye for the absurd, Maddow tells the epic story of how American warfare came to be both never-ending and practically invisible..."

What a great spring for lesbian authors: Ellis Avery, Carol Anshaw, Jeanette WInterson, Sarah Schulman, Rachel Maddow, Lucy Jane Bledsoe, and soon Alison Bechdel.

Just One Single Accurate Authentic Detail, Please

Satire, for now, from the Onion: 

"Seeking to honor filmmakers for fair and inclusive portrayals of the LGBT community, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation announced Sunday the establishment of a prestigious new prize to be awarded to any mainstream motion picture that gets even one thing right about being gay.

"We're not asking for a two-hour-long pitch-perfect exploration of the gay and lesbian experience—just a single accurate, believable detail that feels in any way telling or true-to-life," said GLAAD spokesperson Cheryl Weingardt, who promised a major cash prize and high-profile award ceremony to any Hollywood director able to deliver a film—any film at all—that includes a brief on-screen moment in which a gay character seems even somewhat authentic. "It can be a line of convincing dialogue, an emotionally honest reaction shot. All we ask is that you have someone gay in the frame for a couple seconds without it being completely insulting to the audience's intelligence."

Amen, Onion. (And yet didn't the genuine gay Marine homecoming pic [after the jump] that went viral yesterday look like something from an Adam Sandler movie?)

Lesbians Share Navy's Official First Kiss Returning to Home Port

Photo by Brian Clark | The Virginian-Pilot

As widely reported, yesterday morning two lesbians became the first same-sex couple to get the traditional dockside first kiss when an officer returns home from sea. After 80 days away, Petty Officer 2nd Class Marissa Gaeta embraced her waiting girlfriend Petty Officer 3rd Class Citlalic Snell, 22. Gaeta got the honor by winning the on-board lottery, having bought fifty tickets at a dollar each. (Other sailors purchased more than one hundred tickets each.) The couple has been dating for a little more than two years, since they were roommates at their first training school after boot camp. Of their official kiss Gaeta said, “It's a big deal. It’s nice to be able to be myself. It’s been a long time coming.” Snell said, "This is the first time we can actually show who we are."

By coincidence, it's the one year anniversary of Obama signing the DADT repeal. NBC News reports that the haters were wrong: "But the chaos they predicted if openly gay and lesbian soldiers served in close quarters during combat never happened." Watch the segment featuring out gay soldiers in Afghanistan.

To see how far we've come, revisit Christopher Bram's gay sailor / gay brothel / WWII spy novel Hold Tight.

Born October 7: John Horne Burns, Herbert List

Born in 1916 in Andover, the eldest of seven children, John Horne Burns graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard, taught at Loomis for five years, and joined the army in 1942. A gay man could do worse than to be stationed in Casablanca, Algiers, and Italy, and a budding novelist could hardly do better than to spend a violent war reading the mail written by enemy prisoners to censor the compromising lines. He used his experiences, including international cross-class pickups in gay bars in Naples, in his first and best known novel The Gallery, a panoramic story-cycle recently reissued by NYROB Classics. As you see from Nina Leen's LIFE magazine photo above, his debut launched him alongside James Michener and Irwin Shaw. Alas, their career trajectories diverged. Two years later, in 1949, Burns suffered a typical second novel comedown in Lucifer with a Book, and retaliated by moving permanently to Italy. He published his third novel, mawkishly titled A Cry of Children, in 1952, again greeted by bad reviews or critical silence. He suffered a cerebral hemorrhage in 1953 and died at 36. According to Gore Vidal, Burns said "To be a good writer, one must be homosexual."

Part Jewish and all gay, Herbert List fled his family's Hamburg coffee brokerage business in 1936 and traveled through free Europe taking many of his best known photographs. He was in Greece shooting pictures like this front and this back when Germany invaded the country in 1941. List was forced to return home and later had to join the German army. He spent 1944-45 in Norway making military maps. After the war he joined Magnum but for whatever reason he didn't take many photos. He published three major books of earlier work and eventually gave up photography altogether to concentrate on his drawings, which are currently on view at the gay museum in Berlin. I saw them last year and was charmed by his light touch, bright colors, and happy nude gay couples. In 1988, Stephen Spender finally published his novel The Temple, a roman a clef of his pre-War years in Germany, which includes a List-inspired character named Joachim. List died in 1975 but his style lives on in the work of Herb Ritts and Bruce Weber, among others. Check this Slate gallery of sixteen images.

Captain Harding's Six-Day War

Elliott Mackle's third novel Captain Harding's Six-Day War gains traction in its second half with the crash of an F-105 near Wheelus Air Base five miles east of Tripoli in June 1967. The pilot, a married major, attempted an unauthorized loop and instead hit the sand. The wreck underscores the anxieties of the closeted narrator, Captain Joe Harding, 26, who comes to believe the accident was a suicide and the major intended for his wingman, who may have been going down on him, to go down with him. The very distraught lieutenant survives, yet rather than accept help from someone "like us," he threatens to expose "Captain Cocksucker" to the base's ranking, already suspicious homophobes. The novel links Harding's fear of being outed with his fear of intimacy, all the way back to his abusive father. By that point, he's juggling three suitors: the bald, "muscular pug" Major Hal Denman, 35, who limits their encounters to rubdowns and handjobs; the far more flexible, and needy, nurse Duane Hayes, also 35, who takes him to an all-male sex party and wants to settle down; and Cotton Boardman the puppyish, Shakespeare-quoting, high school tennis star who says he's "seventeen, AAALLL-most." Women in minor roles, Cotton's mother who is the U.S. ambassador, and a straight black nurse, Merlene Williams, are nicely sketched. Mackle, a USAF vet once stationed at Wheelus in the 1960s, keeps his eye trained on the many intrigues at the base and opts not to explore any possible parallels of closeted life and/or secret subcultures in Tripoli. The Libyan characters are an undelineated chauffeur and a one-dimensional blackmailing murderer. Lethe Press classifies the novel as "gay romance" so the hopeful ending is assured. Check out his previous books, Hot off the Presses and It Takes Two.

Two Videos

 

A very nervous airman Randy Phillips, 21, called home from Germany as soon as the DADT repeal was enacted, to say, "Dad, I'm gay. Do you still love me?" Mr. Phillips said, "Yes."

Jamey Rodemeyer, 14, posted a video called "It Gets Better, I Promise!" but years of anti-gay bullying wore him down and he killed himself last weekend. Typical comments on his blog included: "Kill your self!!!! You have nothing left!" "Listen to us, you're a bad person, you don't belong here, jump off a bridge or something!" "Go kill yourself, you're worthless, ugly and dont have a point to live." "You werent born this way. You shouldnt have ever been born." Buffalo-area police are investigating three individuals to "determine whether to charge some students with harassment, cyber-harassment or hate crimes." His final Facebook post before he died was to thank Lady Gaga. Yesterday the pop star tweeted that she is meeting with Obama to discuss anti-gay bullying. Jamey's mother said she is burying her son in a Born This Way t-shirt.

Born June 23: Alan Turing, David Leavitt

Anyone calculating the cost of Britain's horrific homophobia must include all the things Alan Turing didn't solve or invent because he killed himself at 41. The brilliant mathematician had already broken the Germans' Enigma code during WWII, become an OBE, laid the groundwork for the modern computer by designing the Automatic Computing Engine, and devoted himself to a field of mathematical biology called morphogenesis (specifically, discerning the Fibonacci numbers in plant structures). In 1952 his home was burgled by two men, one of whom was a 19 year-old Turning had slept with, and as a result of their break-in he was charged with gross indecency under the same 1885 law that felled Oscar Wilde. To avoid prison, he was forced to undergo painful injections of estrogen as a form of chemical castration. He died by eating a poisoned apple. His mother strongly believed the cyanide in the fruit was accidental, owing to her son's legendary carelessness, but his death was ruled a suicide. Timothy Ferris points out that Turing's favorite fairy tale was Snow White. The best short biography of him is The Man Who Knew Too Much by David Leavitt.

Raised in Palo Alto, David Leavitt graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Yale at 21, by which time he had already published a gay themed short story in The New Yorker. His first collection, Family Dancing, appeared the following year and was nominated for an NBCC (losing to Louise Erdrich) and the PEN/Faulkner Award (won by Tobias Wolff). Since then he's published seven novels, the most recent of which, The Indian Clerk, was also a PEN/Faulkner finalist (won by Kate Christensen); three other collections of stories or novellas; his collected stories; a brief book on Florence; and, because karma is king, the short biography mentioned above of gay birthday-mate Alan Turing. He is a professor at the University of Florida, where he and his partner Mark Mitchell co-edit the excellent literary journal Subtropics whose fiction is regularly gay and often selected among the year's best. Leavitt and Mitchell also co-edited an anthology of gay fiction from 1748 to 1914, Pages Passed From Hand to Hand. They divide their time between Florida and Tuscany and in their spare time have co-written two other books about Italy. Today Leavitt is 50.

The Last Deployment, Bronson Lemer's Gay Iraq War Memoir

When you hear that Bronson Lemer, a closeted gay midwestern soldier, had to wear pantyhose in Iraq you envision another god-awful straight military drag show, but no, he had to wear them to thwart the ever-present sand fleas. It wasn't what he had planned for his twenties. After five and a half years as a carpenter in the North Dakota National Guard, he thought he was nearly done with his service; then he was deployed to Baghdad for a year. Dodging landmines, hiding his sexuality, he endures his tour of duty thanks to the lessons of his father and discovering his own core strength. According to his publisher, Lemer's memoir The Last Deployment is: moving, provocative, often funny, sometimes anguished, and deeply personal.

News: Presbyterian Clergy, Navy Chapels, DADT, Delaware

After 33 years of grappling with the issue of lesbian and gay clergy, the Presbyterian Church (USA) will ordain openly queer people in committed relationships. Since 1997, three similar amendments have passed in the church's general assembly only to fail at the regional level, where a majority of 173 presbyteries must approve it. On Tuesday, the Twin Cities presbytery returned a yes vote, giving the amendment a majority. The Presbyterians join Lutherans, Episcopalians and United Church of Christ members in allowing gay clergy. Combined, those churches have just under 11 million members. The four largest churches that don't allow gay clergy -- Catholics, Baptists, Methodists, and Mormons -- have more than 100 million members.

You have a friend in Rear Admiral Mark Tidd, the head of all chaplains in the US Navy, who issued a directive that as of this summer Navy facilities and Navy chaplains would be available for gay weddings in states that allow it. Predictably, the memo was leaked to a conservative site and Congress freaked friggin out. Yesterday, the Navy released a statement putting the earlier directive in reverse, saying they need more time to consider the matter. Last night, the House Armed Services committee passed an amendment from Rep. Akin (R-MO) demanding that military installations comply with anti-gay DOMA.

The same committee also passed a delaying tactic amendment from young Duncan Hunter (R-CA) to slow-walk the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Hunter argued that the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman and the Secretary of Defense are not qualified to make military decisions because they lack his own level of combat service. While two Republicans voted against it (Gibson-NY, Platts-PA), one Democrat voted for it (McIntyre-NC). It's easy to blame the reactionary GOP, but if the administration hadn't back-burnered DADT for a year and a half, we wouldn't be here now. Gay pundits say it's unlikely the Senate will pass the Hunter amendment; if somehow they do, Obama will have to decide whether or not to veto.

Yesterday, governor Jack Markell signed Delaware's civil unions bill into law. The bill passed both chambers with nearly a 2 to 1 margin. Effective January 1, Delaware will become the eighth state to grant comprehensive same-sex relationship rights.

Born March 24: Grethe Cammermeyer

Resistance and duty might be twin strands of Col. Grethe Cammermeyer's DNA. After all, she was born in Nazi-occupied Norway, where her parents smuggled weapons and housed rebels of the underground. Following her father's winning a Rockefeller fellowship as a doctor, the family immigrated to the US when she was nine, bad timing for a very tall science buff and jock girl in 1951. (She tried to cool her face by putting poison ivy leaves on her eyelids.) After graduating from the University of Maryland, she did her required basic training as part of the Army Student Nurse Program and within two years had married a serviceman. The next year, 1966, they both volunteered for Vietnam; Cammermeyer went first and was Head Nurse for a division. As their toured ended, she became pregnant and, according to the rules, had to quit the Army as the family relocated to Washington State. She had four sons but was unfulfilled. In 1980 the couple divorced and her husband was awarded custody of their children.

In 1987 Cammermeyer was promoted to Colonel and the following year she became Chief Nurse for the Washington State National Guard. She was forty-six, had begun a relationship with her partner Diane Divelbess, and, being completely honest, she said during a standard security clearance interview that she is a lesbian. The army didn't like that, but, being the army, it took them three years to discharge her, on June 11, 1992. Diane convinced her to sue, and she was eventually reinstated in June 1994 by a Federal Court Judge who ruled the military's Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy violates the Constitution. In 1995, Glenn Close portrayed her in the television movie Serving in Silence, based on Cammermeyer's autobiography. After retiring from the national guard in 1997, she ran for Congress in 1998 and lost to Republican Jack Metcalf. Always intrepid, she hosted a talk show on the web for two years. She is still with Diane (above, left). Check out her website which carries on her tradition of resisting injustice:

Another responsibility was the need to continue to challenge the anti-gay rhetoric in society, the ignorance, and the notion that, somehow, as gay and lesbian people we should be judged by another's God.

DADT Discussion: Socarides, Frank, Stachelberg, Capehart

l to r: Socarides, Capehart, Stachelberg, Frank

Lively discussion called "Don't Ask, Don't Tell: Where Are We and How Did We Get Here?" last night at NYC's LGBT Center, with two gay heroes and two Washington insiders. The heroes were brilliant, shrewd, honest, and frustrated. The Washington insiders were even-handed, in that they balanced their question dodging with answer avoidance and matched their defense of the administration with their defense of the military.

DADT expert Nathaniel Frank, author of the great, great award-winning Unfriendly Fire: How the Gay Ban Undermines the Military and Weakens America, made clear that the current situation is the result of the Obama team's 2009 strategy of "stalling" and "waiting." He said, currently we're "here because it was a bad plan." Miserably, this is exactly as he and others had warned them from the start. Later in the evening, former HRC political director and now CAP svp Winnie Stachelberg said "We find ourselves in this environment," to which Frank said, "They created the environment," to audience applause.

In her opening answer Stachelberg characterized Obama's promise to lift DADT in his 2009 HRC dinner speech as "Huge" yet, later, offered the opinion that she was "not sure" if the president "had been more engaged on the issue in May it would have made any difference." Throughout the night Stachelberg employed a seesaw style of responding in general summaries without giving her own opinion, "Some will say the study was needed. Some will say it was a delay." She often mentioned "variables."

In his reponses, Washington Post editorial writer Jonathan Capehart so often said, "I'm not sure," "I don't know, Winnie would know," that the cute, angry liberals seated in my row wondered why he was on the panel. Certainly he offered variety. Capeheart defended his Post piece endorsing the administration's appeal of Judge Phillips' landmark decision overturning DADT. He said, "The appeal was the right thing to do," and his justification for that was "It is an important tradition to uphold," claiming that if we do it now, then "President Palin in 2012 or 2016" will also "have to appeal the laws" she doesn't agree with.

That. Is. Ridiculous. And it shows a profound ignorance of how she operates.

Nathaniel Frank refered to an article that named thirteen times the present administration has not appealed cases.

Capeheart has also written against the option of Obama signing an executive order to halt DADT discharges. Nathaniel Frank told him, "You were undercutting a very useful strategy." Capehart responded he did "not appreciate" that, and told Frank, "You should have called me and told me that was a strategy."

After that, Nathaniel went out of his way to praise the intelligence of Jonathan's editorials. Jonathan did not return any compliments.

When asked if he thought the adminstration now understood the level of LGBT frustration, Capehart looked incredulous. He repeated, "'Now'?" and said, "They've always gotten it."

Three times throughout the night Capehart informed the large audience that he was "someone who has worked in the White House." The second time saying this, he peered down at the crowd and said, "I don't know if any of you have worked in the White House."

Seated next to him was the evening's ace moderator, Richard Socarides, former White House Special Assistant to Clinton. Socarides tried hard to get real answers from his panelists. Foremost, he wanted to know if DADT would pass during this Congress, and what would happen if it didn't. Cue the hedging. [Obviously, no one knows.] They more or less agreed they were "more hopeful" tonight than they had been Tuesday night. Informed and insightful, Socarides did the best anyone could. But there was too much of this, and not enough time for questions:

Capehart: "They're pushing like crazy."
Socarides: "Who?"
Capehart: [Surprised] "Everybody."
Frank: "What does that mean?"
Capehart: [More surprised] [Silence]

Another account of the panel can be found at Gay City News.

Obama's DOMA, DADT, Drilling, Climate, FDA, Spying, Wall Street

Late yesterday the Obama Administration filed a notice of appeal in the case where the Defense of Marriage Act was ruled unconstitutional. Early in 2011 they will defend DOMA, which candidate Obama called "abhorrent" and vowed to repeal. The White House still claims to want to overturn DOMA.

Yesterday the administration also ended its moratorium on offshore drilling. Anyone who felt during the gulf spill crisis that BP was calling the shots, should read the NYT about the president's "haste" when the three studies about the spill are unfinished. The Secretary of Interior(!) said, "We are open for business."

Yesterday Federal Judge Virginia Phillips issued an injunction to halt Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Last month when she declared DADT unconstitutional, the White House said she lacked authority over the military. Now 21 senators have called on Obama not to appeal Judge Phillips' decision.

Speaking of lacking authority over the military: Afghanistan.

Read The New Yorker piece on Obama and the failed climate change bill: "The White House’s “grand bargain” of oil drilling in exchange for a cap on carbon had backfired spectacularly... Obama said that he knew “the votes may not be there right now, but I intend to find them in the coming months.” He never found them, and he didn’t appear to be looking very hard...[a lobbyist:] '...Everybody is going to be thinking about whether Barack Obama was the James Buchanan of climate change.”

Not to mention the loophole-riddled, gift to big pharma, no public option but yes pre-existing conditions health care compromise written by industry lobbyists.

Speaking of industry lobbyists: Genetically modified meat is coming your way and the FDA doesn't want it labeled as such because that would "confuse consumers." The Washington Post reports the FDA may even ban non-modified food from saying its GMO-free.

Obama is calling for drastically expanded powers to spy on citizens who are not suspected of wrongdoing (Salon). Additionally, the administration wants to track every single international money transfer, in any amount, sent to or from the US.

The documentary Inside Job, which my partner and I loved, was made by an early Obama supporter, Charles Ferguson. Asked to assess the Financial Reform Bill, an industry player said he only needs one word, "Ha!" Of the entire $2 trillion catastrophe, not one person has been charged with a crime. Virtually every principal villain has been rehired or brought into the Administration.

Born October 7: John Horne Burns, Herbert List

Born in 1916 in Andover, the eldest of seven children, John Horne Burns graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard, taught at Loomis for five years, and joined the army in 1942. A gay man could do worse than to be stationed in Casablanca, Algiers, and Italy, and a budding novelist could hardly do better than to spend a violent war reading the mail written by enemy prisoners to censor the compromising lines. He used his experiences, including international cross-class pickups in gay bars in Naples, in his first and best known novel The Gallery, a panoramic story-cycle recently reissued by NYROB Classics. As you see from Nina Leen's LIFE magazine photo above, his debut launched him alongside James Michener and Irwin Shaw. Alas, their career trajectories diverged. Two years later, in 1949, Burns suffered a typical second novel comedown in Lucifer with a Book, and retaliated by moving permanently to Italy. He published his third novel, with the don't-read-me title A Cry of Children, in 1952, again greeted by bad reviews or critical silence. He suffered a cerebral hemorrhage in 1953 and died at 36. According to Gore Vidal, Burns said "To be a good writer, one must be homosexual."

Part Jewish and all gay, Herbert List fled his family's Hamburg coffee brokerage business in 1936 and traveled through free Europe taking many of his best known photographs. He was in Greece shooting pictures like this front and this back when Germany invaded the country in 1941. List was forced to return home and later had to join the German army. He spent 1944-45 in Norway making military maps. After the war he joined Magnum but for whatever reason he didn't take many photos. He published three major books of earlier work and eventually gave up photography altogether to concentrate on his drawings, which are currently on view at the gay museum in Berlin. I saw them last year and was charmed by his light touch, bright colors, and happy nude gay couples. In 1988, Stephen Spender finally published his novel The Temple, a roman a clef of his pre-War years in Germany, which includes a character based on List named Joachim. List died in 1975 but his style lives on in the work of Herb Ritts and Bruce Weber, among others. Check this Slate gallery of sixteen images.

Details on the Wachowskis' Marine - Iraqi Gay Romance

New York magazine's Vulture spies have read the Matrix makers' script of their much-rumored, ultra-secret next project, Cobalt Neural 9, a gay romance between a hot U.S. marine and a militant Iraqi soldier. Hollywood insiders/naysayers agree the movie will "never, ever" be made by a studio and the rich, rich pair will need to self-finance the picture. Unfortunately it sounds like what starts as a Brokeback-like character-driven story morphs into another cheap assassination pic. But won't that turn guarantee tragedy for the star-crossed lovers who ought to be enemies, re-emphasizing similarities with Romeo & Juliet? Vulture says:

"...the film takes place in the future all right — nearly a hundred from now. But its main story is told in Cloverfield-esque flashbacks by digital archeologists sorting through “found footage” from CNN and chips from old digital cameras from the U.S. occupation of Iraq. The heroes are indeed a gay American soldier named (with little irony) "Butch" and an Iraqi soldier turned militant. Butch is endearing, young, and a ravishingly handsome Marine. Our spies tell us that he "just wants to fuck and kill everything" in Iraq — until, that is, he falls in love with the Iraqi.

"The two meet while Butch is on a combat patrol in Iraq during the second Gulf War, and soon enough, the two are engaged in graphically described sex (actual line from the script: "They rut like animals behind this fence") albeit while disguised in burqas. The two soldiers’ relationship blossoms, and Butch begins to get to know his lover's family. But after he inadvertently draws attention to their ancestral home, disaster strikes. This tragedy radicalizes the pair and they become convinced that the only way to rid the world of evil is to kill the architect of the invasion, the then-president of the United States, George W. Bush. And so, during one of the president’s secret sorties to Iraq, they attempt to assassinate him."

As film geeks know but oddly missing from all these reports, the Wachowskis have already made a great same-sex thriller, Bound, starring Gina Gershon and Jennifer Tilly. Literary types will be glad to know the Wachowskis other current project is an adaptation of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas penned by Tom Tykwer, whose bi romance Three just played at Venice.

(No, no, just a random photo.)