Band of Thebes

Born March 20-22: John Boswell, Zackie Achmat, Stephen Sondheim

Native New Yorker Stephen Sondheim, the winningest composer in Broadway history, has earned eight Tonys, eight Grammys, seven Drama Desk awards, an Obie, an Oscar, and a Pulitzer Prize. Last year he turned 80 and was feted with major special concerts by the New York Philharmonic at Lincoln Center, the New York Pops at Carnegie Hall, the BBC Proms at the Royal Albert Hall, and assorted stage and screen legends at benefits by the Roundabout Theatre Company and the New York City Center. Also, they renamed the former Henry Miller Theatre on 43rd Street in his honor. Arlington Virginia's acclaimed Signature Theatre created the Sondheim Award, of which Sondheim was the premiere recipient, Angela Lansbury the second, and next will be Bernadette Peters. Last October, Knopf published Sondheim's Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics (1954-1981) with Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes, this coming October they'll release Look, I Made a Hat: Collected Lyrics (1981-2011) with Attendant Comments, Amplifications, Dogmas, Harangues, Wafflings, Diversions and Anecdotes. A great lover of puzzles and games, he contemplated giving up theater to write mysteries, and did co-author two whodunnit screenplays; The Last of Sheila, co-written with Anthony Perkins, won them an Edgar. Sondheim did not have a live-in boyfriend until 1992, when he was 61; he and dramatist Peter Jones lasted seven years.

Born of Indian parents in South Africa in 1962, Zackie Achmat grew up in the "coloured" community and was always a rebel for equality. By the time he was ten he was a total bookworm and gained special permission to use the whites-only library for reading, but he was still prohibited from using its restrooms. When he was fourteen, during the Sowetto Uprisings, he set his school on fire to convince his classmates to join the boycott. As an active member of the illegal ANC for years, he was jailed many times before apartheid ended and the ANC's Nelson Mandela was elected president in 1994. That same year Achmat co-founded the National Coalition for Gay and Lesbian Equality, and in 1996 South Africa had become the first nation whose Bill of Rights bans discrimination based on sexual orientation.

Building on lessons from the gay rights and anti-apartheid movements, in 1998 Achmat created the Treatment Action Campaign [TAC] to fight aids through prevention, to increase awareness, and to get medicines to the poor. Immediately he gained worldwide attention by announcing he was HIV+ and would refuse to take his drugs until they were available to all South Africans. Among the many ways TAC has changed lives is by helping to erode the shame and stigma of HIV, proclaiming one's positive status with bold t-shirts rather than hiding or lying. Winning numerous legal and public relations victories against the government and international pharmaceutical corporations, Achmat finally resumed his meds when he was very ill in August 2004, anticipating correctly that in November the Ministry of Health would announce its plan to distribute ARVs widely. The New Yorker ran an excellent profile of him written by Samantha Power in 2003, and the following year the American Friends Service Committee nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize (which went to Kenya's Wangari Maathai). In 2008, he married his partner Dalli Weyers, 25, in a terrific wedding where the traditional caketop figures of a bride and groom were replaced by a king and a cowboy.

When Publishing Triangle ranked the 100 Best LGBT Nonfiction Books of all time, they included works by Plato, Freud, Foucault, Faderman, Duberman, et al., and their undisputed choice at #1 was Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality by John Boswell, a history professor at Yale. He was 33 when it was published in 1980. Newsweek said it was, "an astonishing work of scholarship that ranges with ease over fourteen centuries...What makes the work so exciting is not simply its content -- fascinating though that is -- but its revolutionary challenge to some of Western culture's most familiar moral assumptions." Specifically, he proved that the Roman Catholic Church hadn't always been antigay, had either been indifferent to or had actually celebrated male - male love until the twelfth century. No surprise, Boswell was attacked by some conservative academics who thought he was promoting a gay agenda and by some gay people who said he was a Church apologist. Ultimately the complaints only added to the book's popularity because it was impeccably researched; it won the 1981 American Book Award for history.

After writing the first book about the widespread practice of child abandonment in medieval times, Boswell returned to gay topics and the early Church in another groundbreaking work, Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe. This time he argued the Church actually condoned certain male - male relationships with ceremonies that could be seen as precursors to gay marriage. Again, the book was brilliantly researched; again, the uproar; but the public debate was cut short: Boswell died of aids in December 1994 when he was 47. At Yale, he helped start the Lesbian and Gay Studies Center, and his pre-modern history courses were immensely popular, among the top ten in enrollments. He is said to have written his comments on student papers in perfect medieval calligraphy.

Joan Acocella on J.R. Ackerley

Today's New Yorker features a comprehensive essay by the always, always insightful Joan Acocella on gay writer J.R. Ackerley, author of an early play, a barely disguised novel, and three memoirs, the most famous of which is My Dog Tulip. A bit of a perfectionist, Ackerley spent 34 years working on his final book about his father, who was a closet bigamist (having three children by his other wife) and secretly was a gay hustler during his years in the Guards. When, late in life, Ackerley tried to come out to him, his father interrupted with, “It’s all right, old boy. I prefer not to know. So long as you enjoyed yourself, that’s the main thing.”

In his writing, Ackerley refused to be cut off and insisted on over-sharing. For one, his sexual relations -- "fantastically promiscuous," always with himself fully clothed and the young Guardsman, soldier, or cop fully naked, never ever oral -- were ruined by premature ejaculation. Acocella ponders the moral dimensions:

"How do you survive the humiliation of always having your body go against your will? Do you have to succeed at sex in order to feel that you have succeeded in life? And how do you tell your partner, who at that moment is innocently taking off his clothes, that the act for which he is preparing has already been completed?"

More importantly, she realizes, "The real fruit of Ackerley’s candor, however, is the power it lent his writing: the richness of characterization, the tartness of metaphor, the protection that honesty gives against sentimentality, or just a stupid simplicity." She is just as wise about the works themselves. Don't miss Hindoo Holiday about his six months in 1923 as secretary to a gay maharaja in Chhatarpur. But first read Acocella's essay. After the books, go on to his biography by Peter Parker which she calls "superb."

Vote for Neel Mukherjee in The Times/South Bank Sky Arts Award

Following the praise of Vestal McIntyre, Steven Amsterdam, and A.S. Byatt -- all of whom named A Life Apart the best novel of the year -- the judges of The Times of London/ South Bank Sky Arts Breakthrough Award have chosen Neel Mukherjee as the only nominee in literature. Good show for a gay novel about an illegal alien from Calcutta in London, by way of an Oxford scholarship and King's Cross hustling. In Thebes poll, Vestal noted the protagonist ultimately secures "a position as a live-in nurse for a woman in her nineties. Ritwik's relationship with woman, the brilliantly depicted Anne Cameron, gives rise to some of the most tender and genuinely moving scenes I've read in recent years."

Neel's competition for the Breakthrough award are the pop band Everything Everything, dancer Brian Maloney, tv actress Michelle Dockery, stage actor Andrew Scott, conductor Nicholas Collon, doc filmmaker Clio Barnard, opera soprano Pumeza Matshikiza, comedian Gregg Davies, and installation artist Simon Fujiwara. Obviously your heart, mind, and vote are with the gay book. Click here before midnight [UK time!] January 12.

Although the printed book is not available in the U.S. [Kindle only], someone's bear cache in Alaska boasted a hardcover this morning. Amazing.

13 Arrested in Raid on Private Gay Party in India

If you'd crossed India off your worry list while celebrating last year's legal victory overturning the Colonial anti-sodomy laws in Delhi, remember that the court's ruling did not legalize homosexuality nationwide. Parvez Sharma reflects in this essay about the recent arrest of thirteen men at a private gay party in the conservative town of Saharanpur where he grew up.

"The location of the dharamshala is just two miles from my old school, where I was mercilessly bullied for being too effeminate when I was a boy.

"There are quotes from the police officer who organised the raid, in which he talks about finding "used condoms" and guests in a "compromising position". Saharanpur is described as an "ultra-conservative" town and a college teacher called Ayub Qureshi is quoted expressing his indignation: "This is certainly unheard of in Saharanpur. I don't know where are we heading to."

"Thirteen men were arrested, though according to police the party was attended by more than 100. The arrests should be condemned. These "gay" men probably have nowhere else to meet and many perhaps still live with their families, where discussing their sexuality would not be an option."

Sharma is the director of A Jihad for Love, the documentary covering his five-year journey through the Muslim world interviewing gay/bi/curious followers of Islam.

(Photo via Bilerico.)

Born Oct. 30 - Nov. 4: Almendros, Barney, lang, Visconti, Ackerley

After the jump, author J.R. Ackerley, director Luchino Visconti, singer k.d. lang, expat hellcat Natalie Barney [above on bearskin, and later with her 50-year partner painter Romaine Brooks], and cinematographer Néstor Almendros.

Born October 8, 11: Urvashi Vaid, Eleanor Roosevelt

In addition to being one of the most energetic humanitarians of the 20th century, Eleanor Roosevelt was an inexhaustible writer. She wrote her syndicated column My Day six times a week for twenty-seven years, missing only four days when her husband died. Always insightful, she was usually decades ahead of her time and frequently funny. Please, please read her column from sixty years ago, October 1947, about Hollywood and HUAC by clicking here. The relevance of her writing career is that she used words precisely and carefully and she meant exactly what she said. Detractors obfuscate ad nauseum but there is no question that she and Lorena Hickok, her closest friend for thirty years, were lovers. Read excerpts of their correspondence below, remembering that their most intimate letters were destroyed, many by Hickok herself, after Eleanor’s death in 1962.

Hick darling,

All day I've thought of you & another birthday I will be with you, & yet tonight you sounded so far away & formal. Oh! I want to put my arms around you. I ache to hold you close. Your ring is a great comfort to me. I look at it and think she does love me, or I wouldn't be wearing it.
_________________________________________

[Eleanor to Hickok]

I wish I could lie down beside you tonight & take you in my arms.

_________________________________________

[Hickok writing to Eleanor after a long separation...]

Only eight more days . . . Funny how even the dearest face will fade away in time. Most clearly I remember your eyes, with a kind of teasing smile in them, and the feeling of that soft spot just north-east of the corner of your mouth against my lips. . . .

The website brainyquote.com lists seventy-four of her most memorable sayings. Four examples:

"You must do the things you think you cannot do."

"Sometimes I wonder if we shall ever grow up in our politics and say definite things which mean something, or whether we shall always go on using generalities to which everyone can subscribe, and which mean very little."

"Women are like teabags. We don't know our true strength until we're in hot water!"

"I once had a rose named after me and I was very flattered. But I was not pleased to read the description in the catalog: no good in a bed, but fine up against a wall."

Obviously, the place to start is Eleanor Roosevelt, Vol. 1: 1884-1933, then Eleanor Roosevelt: Volume 2 , The Defining Years, 1933-1938. When Blanche Weisen Cook won Publishing Triangle's lifetime achievement award, she promised she was about to finish volume 3.

Born in New Delhi, Urvashi Vaid moved with her family to Potsdam, New York when she was eight, in 1966, attended her first anti-war rally when she was eleven, and gave her first political speech, supporting McGovern, when she was twelve. Basically, she's never stopped working for broad issues of peace and social justice, especially for LGBT rights within a larger vision of fairness and equality. After receiving her law degree, she joined the ACLU's prisons project, then began her long association with the NGLTF, whose Policy Institute she headed for many years, both before and after a break to write her essential book Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay and Lesbian Liberation. For five years earlier this decade, she was deputy director of a unit of the Ford Foundation's peace and social justice program. From 2005 until earlier this year she was Executive Director of the Arcus Foundation, whose dual missions are, I kid you not, rights and protections for Great Apes and LGBT humans. This academic year (2010-11) she's a visiting scholar at CUNY's Graduate Center’s Department of Sociology and writing a new book. She also is a board member of the Gill Foundation and was recently one of OUT's 50 most influential lgbt people. For a long, funny time she's been partners with Kate Clinton, dividing their time between Manhattan and Provincetown. Read the texts of her speeches on her site. (Photo by Don Hamerman.)

Sacha Baron Cohen's Freddie Mercury Biopic To Avoid AIDS

The world's first major rock star to die of aids won't have aids in his first major biopic. Deadline Hollywood is reporting that Sacha Baron Cohen has signed a deal to play Freddie Mercury in a film written by Golden Globe winner and two-time Oscar nominee Peter Morgan who penned The Queen, Frost/Nixon, The Last King of Scotland, and Eastwood's forthcoming Hereafter.

Producers already have said the movie will not deal with Mercury having aids. Opting for a simpler, happier ending, they are stopping their story at Live Aid, in 1985, where Queen's performance rocked the world and continues to be voted the best rock gig of all time. Mercury tested positive for HIV in 1987 yet despite frequent speculation in the British press, he did not acknowledge having aids until one day before he died in November 1991.

Screenwriter Morgan could again mine the complexities and tensions between public/private persona, this time through a man who was less than forthcoming about the extent of his gay sex life and perhaps less than eager to discuss his 100% Parsi background. (Born Farrokh Bulsara in Zanzibar, he did not change his surname until he was 24 in England. How, for example, did being born and raised in Africa affect Mercury's much-condemned decision in 1984, to break the cultural boycott of apartheid South Africa and play Sun City?) Then again, the script may go soft, yielding another give-the-masses-what-they-want movie. In that case, expect a lot of Mercury's early 1970s relationship with Mary Austin, who remained his best friend for life. Mercury left Mary his mansion, most of his estate, and all his royalties; while giving Jim Hutton, whom he'd been with six or seven years at the time of his death, a mere half million pounds.

Sacha Baron Cohen played gay, awesomely, in Talladega Nights and flamboyantly in Bruno. His one song was a good reason to wake up from the otherwise sleepy Sweeney Todd.

This marks the first time the remaining members of Queen have licensed their songs for a movie about the band. Production on the film starts next year.

Thank You, India. Thank You, Consequence.

India's high court finally overturned the 1861 law banning homosexual acts between consenting adults. Although technically the ruling applies only to Delhi it will have enormous consequences throughout the nation. In the best scenario, the government now will repeal the law for the entire country. Read the reports from the Times of London and the NYT.

When you hear the phrase "gay activists" do you think of the women above? Adnan Abidi captured their jubilation in this Reuters photo, my new favorite picture.

In anticipation of the such an outcome, in May India's only gay magazine, Bombay Dost, went back in print after a seven year hiatus. The big comeback issue includes a year in review section, stories about bloggers, bi people, "the lesbian continuum," possible arranged gay marriages, something called "straights' corner," and a list of 100 gay Indian films.

Bollywood Award for Best Couple Goes to Gay Pretenders

Wednesday night in Mumbai the 15th Star Screen Awards marked a first for Southeast Asian cinema as the Best Couple award was won by two male actors whose characters pretend to be gay. That's news, given that homosexuality is still illegal in India. And it signals a shift in the homophobic society that two major Bollywood stars agreed to play the roles. Since the movie's release in November, superstar John Abraham's yellow swim trunks have become nearly as popular as that blue pair, and apparently he even appeared in them during the black tie ceremony on Wednesday. (Since 2002, he's been dating a female co-star from his first movie, Jism.) The other actor, Abhishek Bachchan, is married to international icon Aishwarya Rai who was nominated in the same category. Dostana aims to be a frothy, over the top comedy that good naturedly pokes fun at all stereotypes including gay cliches. While I'm not a fan of the "OMG! They're Gays!!! But Not Really!" storyline, I did laugh once during this trailer, which is a giant leap from my reaction to previews for Boat Trip or I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry.

Lesbian, Gay Movies Open in NYC and California Today

Festival favorite Were the World Mine opens today in New York, San Francisco, and Berkeley. Reviewing for the NYT, Stephen Holden said the gay puppylove musical set during a Chicago high school's production of Midsummer Night's Dream "is an enchanting, mildly subversive fantasia that reconciles sassy teenage argot with Elizabethan." He added:

Ms. Fogle’s most striking music, especially the title song, sets Shakespearean dialogue in an ethereal Minimalist style that has the entranced intensity of centuries-old sacred music.

and

its charm overcomes the inevitable weaknesses of a musical made on a stringent budget. Like its Disney counterparts, it operates on the assumption that the movie musical is a world unto itself in which ordinary rules of logic don’t apply.

Two weeks ago Shamim Sarif's new movie was released starring Lisa Ray and Sheetal Sheth as lesbians in love. Today Shamim Sarif's new movie was released starring Lisa Ray and Sheetal Sheth as lesbians in love. Is this a movie theater or an echo chamber? Why Regent Releasing thought it was smart to put out The World Unseen and I Can't Think Straight fourteen days apart is anyone's guess. It didn't seem to win over NYT critic Jeannette Catsoulis, who wrote:

Will Tala once again dump her betrothed? Will Leyla’s nosy parents find her k.d. lang CD? Before these and other burning questions can be answered, the plot must plod through a confetti storm of obstacles — religion, ethnicity, overbearing mothers — all of which are overcome in dewy, unsmudged close-up. This isn’t a movie, it’s an alternative-lifestyles campaign for Maybelline.

Born November 18: Emanuel Sandhu

Half Italian and half East Indian, Toronto native Emanuel Sandhu enrolled in dance school when he was three and won a spot in Canada's National Ballet School when he was eight. He stayed for ten years before devoting himself full-time to ice skating, winning his first Canadian Men's Skating Championship three years later with a perfect score. He has won it twice more since then, placing first or second each of the nine years between 1998 and 2006. In 2007 he was third. In the Q&A on his official website, four of his first ten answers are Madonna (music, movie, hero, desert island companion), so don't be surprised that on his MySpace page Sandhu identifies himself as "future pop superstar of the world." Both sites play his song Burn Up the Floor. Today he turns twenty-eight.

The clip from his audition for So You Think You Can Dance Canada features his coach saying "The ego! Sometimes too big!" followed by an earnest Sandhu announcing, "Dancing is my favorite language. It's body language. And I love it."

Born October 8: Urvashi Vaid

Born in New Delhi, Urvashi Vaid moved with her family to Potsdam, New York when she was eight, in 1966, attended her first anti-war rally when she was eleven, and gave her first political speech, supporting McGovern, when she was twelve. Basically, she's never stopped working for broad issues of peace and social justice, especially for LGBT rights within a larger vision of fairness and equality. After receiving her law degree, she joined the ACLU's prisons project, then began her long association with the NGLTF, whose Policy Institute she headed for many years, both before and after a break to write her essential book Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay and Lesbian Liberation. For five years earlier this decade, she was deputy director of a unit of the Ford Foundation's peace and social justice program. For the past three years she has been Executive Director of the Arcus Foundation, whose dual missions are, I kid you not, rights and protections for Great Apes and LGBT humans. She also is a board member of the Gill Foundation and has been partners for a long, funny time with Kate Clinton.

On Sale Today: The Indian Clerk, Two Lives

If you missed them in hardcover, two popular books from last fall are available in paperback today. David Leavitt's historical novel, The Indian Clerk, tells the story of a closeted Cambridge don who encourages a poor, straight mathematics genius in Madras to emigrate to England in 1913. While some reviewers found the novel too ambitious, The New Yorker said Leavitt used the math metaphor "to superb effect, demonstrating how the most meaningful relationships can defy both logic and imagination." Janet Malcolm's Two Lives, about Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein, is, in critic Meryle Secrest's words, "not so much a joint biography as a meditation on literature and morality, built around the disquieting fact that Stein and Toklas, both Jewish [and lesbians], remained in Europe throughout World War II without either hiding or being swept up in the Holocaust." How they lived openly in such catastrophic times is interesting; while Malcolm's ruminations on biography, biographical sleuthing, and biographers "using" their subjects are fascinating. The good news is she doesn't degay anyone in the book, including the villains. The bad news is she seems to stack her deck against Alice. The book won the Publishing Triangle award for nonfiction and was a NYT notable book of 2007.

Born September 5: Freddie Mercury

Whose band has spent more weeks on the UK album charts than any other musical act, meaning more than the Beatles, Pink Floyd, or the Rolling Stones? Who wrote the song chosen by the Guinness Book of Records poll as the greatest song of all time? Who wrote a different song chosen as the best ever by another major poll conducted by Sony? That’s right, Farrokh Bulsara, born in Zanzibar, and later founder and frontman of Queen and composer of most of their hits including those two greatest, Bohemian Rhapsody and We Are the Champions. The band is said to have sold more than 300 million albums worldwide. Never a darling of the critical press, Queen was universally considered to be electrifying in concert, in part because of their high camp and theatrics, but also because of Mercury’s mighty four-octave range and mesmerizing flair. They were the first band ever to play South American stadiums and the first to play behind the Iron Curtain (in Budapest), yet they also played Sun City, which put them on the United Nations’ blacklist. Their gig at Live Aid 1985 was later voted by music industry honchos to be the greatest live performance in the history of rock. Below, watch one gay man —in complete clone gear, ultra tight jeans, tank top, and studded armband proudly signaling that the pop charts are the only thing he’ll top—transfix 72,000 people and get all of them waving and singing in unison.
       Exuberantly gay in everything his band did from its name onward, Mercury was not out offstage. He also tried to hide his one-hundred-percent Indian ethnicity—both his parents were Parsis from India—even from his bandmates, and he denied having HIV, for which he tested positive in 1987—until the day before his death on November 24, 1991, when he was 45.
       The Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert for Aids Awareness, performed at Wembley Stadium on Easter Monday, April 20, 1992, starred everyone from Elizabeth Taylor, Annie Lennox, Elton John and George Michael to Metallica, Def Leppard, Guns n Roses, and David Bowie. It was seen on television by 1 billion people, which in 1992 was just under twenty percent of the planet’s population.

Proud

My governor is better than your governor. And not just because he was rocking Under Armor. Yesterday David Patterson became the first New York governor to march in pride, walking with City Council Speaker and open lesbian Christine Quinn. It wasn't another case of political tokenism; he gets it:

The most significant move Mr. Paterson has made toward broadening gay rights in New York was an order he issued in May that directed state agencies to recognize same sex marriages performed outside of New York.

That order built on the policies of the Spitzer administration, which had been planning to issue the same directive before Mr. Spitzer resigned in March. David Nocenti, who was Mr. Spitzer’s legal counsel and now holds that role in Mr. Paterson’s administration, drafted the order earlier this year. It was to be issued once the state’s highest court ruled on a February decision by an appeals court in Rochester that said the state must recognize same-sex marriages performed in other jurisdictions, even though New York does not itself allow gays and lesbians to marry.

Responding to the purely evil Arizona group's attempt to sue to prevent the order from going into effect in New York, Paterson defended his actions to the New York Times

“It is the law and it is the right thing to do. I stand by it,” he said. “If someone would like to go to court and waste their money and prove me wrong, they can do that. And I welcome that.”

Compare that with Obama, who "doesn't believe in gay marriage." The Times neglected to mention crowd size, which British press reports put at one million. A nice warmup for next year, the 40th anniversary of Stonewall.

Elsewhere: San Francisco celebrated with renewed passion thanks in part to legalized same-sex marriage, Seattle's parade drew 400,000, Paris had at least half a million, and Berliners took a harder, longer pounding of rain than we had. Also at a million spectators, Toronto's pride included active duty Canadian servicemembers in uniform for the first time; nice, but by far the day's bigger firsts belonged to Bulgaria and to India, which saw Delhi's first ever gay pride parade as 500 people marched through the city of 14 million. Remember, homosexuality is still illegal for the 1.1 billion people who live in India, another legacy of the British Empire, which introduced a "crimes against the order of nature" law with its infamous Section 377. It was drafted in 1860. On Wednesday, India's High Court will finally hear a challenge to it. Long time coming.

Right wing extremists urged followers to disrupt pride parades by throwing eggs and fireworks at the legal gay marches in the Czech Republic, where police in the second largest city Brno had to use tear gas on the crowd, and in Sofia, where marchers celebrated Bulgaria's first ever gay pride. Let's make sure we spend less time promoting the intolerance of the sixty skinheads arrested and take more time to celebrate the pioneering bravery of the one hundred fifty Bulgarians marching for their pride.

"A Jihad for Love"

Tired of your queer movies being about white Pottery Barn gays in Los Angeles? Get into the lives of devout gay Muslims trying to reconcile their faith and their sexuality in Parvez Sharma's documentary A Jihad for Love. Nathan Lee, writing in the New York Times, noted the film "ranges from Johannesburg to Istanbul, from doubt to despair (with a happy detour among the drag queens of India). He does manage to locate a headstrong lesbian in Paris, albeit one whose face, like those of many of the subjects here, has been digitally blurred." Playdates into September are:
New York   IFC Film Center   May 21 - June 4
Salt Lake City   SLC Film Center    June 15
Norfolk   Naro Cinema    June 18 - 22
Houston   Angelika Houston    June 20 - 26
Ft. Lauderdale   Sunrise Gateway    June 27 - July 3
Brookline    Coolidge Corner Theatre   June 27 - July 3
San Francisco   Frameline Film Festival   June 28
Los Angeles   Outfest    July 17
Santa Rosa  Rialto Lakeside July 17
Chicago   Siskel Film Center     July 25 - 31
Columbus   Wexner Center     July 25 & 26
Los Angeles    Laemmle Sunset 5   August 1 - 7
Palm Springs    Camelot Theaters   August 1 - 7
Denver    Starz Denver    August 1 - 7
San Diego  Landmark Ken   August 8 - 14
San Francisco   Landmark Lumiere   August 22 - 28
Philadelphia  Landmark Ritz at Bourse   August 22 - 28
Washington DC   Landmark E Street   September 5 - 11
Seattle  Landmark Varsity     September 5 - 11
Berkeley    JCC of the East Bay     September 18, 2008

Born October 8: Urvashi Vaid

Born in New Delhi, Urvashi Vaid moved with her family to Potsdam, New York when she was eight, in 1966, attended her first anti-war rally when she was eleven, and gave her first political speech, supporting McGovern, when she was twelve. Basically, she's never stopped working for broad issues of peace and social justice, especially for LGBT rights within a larger vision of fairness and equality. After receiving her law degree, she joined the ACLU's prisons project, then began her long association with the NGLTF, whose Policy Institute she headed for many years, both before and after a break to write her essential book Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay and Lesbian Liberation. For five years earlier this decade, she was deputy director of a unit of the Ford Foundation's peace and social justice program. For the past two years she has been Executive Director of the Arcus Foundation, which was founded by Michigan billionaire Jon Stryker and last year awarded $16 million in grants. She also is a board member of the Gill Foundation and has been partners for a long, funny time with Kate Clinton.

Born September 5: Freddie Mercury

Whose band has spent more weeks on the UK album charts than any other musical act, meaning more than the Beatles, Pink Floyd, or the Rolling Stones? Who wrote the song chosen by the Guinness Book of Records poll as the greatest song of all time? Who wrote a different song chosen as the best ever by another major poll conducted by Sony? That’s right, Farrokh Bulsara, born on Zanzibar, and later founder and frontman for Queen and composer of most of their hits including those two greatest, Bohemian Rhapsody and We Are the Champions. The band is said to have sold more than 300 million albums worldwide. Never a darling of the critical press, Queen was universally considered to be electrifying in concert, in part because of their high camp and theatrics, but also because of Mercury’s mighty four-octave range and mesmerizing flair. They were the first band ever to play South American stadiums and the first to play behind the Iron Curtain (in Budapest), yet they also played Sun City, which put them on the United Nations’ blacklist. Their gig at Live Aid 1985 was later voted by music industry honchos to be the greatest live performance in the history of rock. Watch one gay man—in complete clone gear, ultra tight jeans, tank top, and studded armband proudly signaling that the pop charts are the only thing he’ll top—as he transfixes 72,000 people and gets all of them waving and singing in unison. YouTube has the complete performance in four parts. Below are a highlights clip with commentary and a 90-second blast .
       Exuberantly gay in everything his band did from its name onward, Mercury was not out offstage. He also tried to hide his one-hundred-percent Indian ethnicity—both his parents were Parsis from India—even from his bandmates, and he denied having HIV, for which he tested positive in 1987—until the day before his death on November 24, 1991, when he was 45.
       The Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert for Aids Awareness, performed at Wembley Stadium on Easter Monday, April 20, 1992, starred everyone from Elizabeth Taylor, Annie Lennox, Elton John and George Michael to Metallica, Def Leppard, Guns n Roses, and David Bowie. It was seen on television by 1 billion people, which in 1992 was just under twenty percent of the planet’s population.