Author: jameswagner

wow! wow! wow!

[“Queer” and “Culture!”]
Beautiful.
Wonderful art, theatre and activism and love. We should all be so fortunate as to be as creative and bold as Patricia Cronin and Deb Kass!
For more, see the three links in the highlighted names above.
Bill Dobbs’ email report to friends included the additional information on the New York Post‘s coverage of the sculpture project:

Those who popped fifty cents for the paper’s print edition (or acquired a copy from the trash) were treated to a nearly half-page pic of the sculpture along with a shot of the artist and her partner. Those not so lucky will have to settle for a small photo by using the link below [JAW–see “beautiful” above]. The Post also deprived its online readers of the sidebar story concerning “The Beautiful Women of Woodlawn” cemetery, illustrated by three fascinating photos.

scouts’ dishonor

So it’s not good enough to be straight if you want to remain in scouting; you also have to be religious.

[Eagle Scout] Lambert, who is 19 and has been an atheist since studying evolution in the ninth grade, was told to abide by the vow of reverence by next week or get out.
As Mr. Lambert described it, he was given a week to find God.
“They say that I should think about what I really believe and get back to them,” he said. “I have thought about this for years. Can they expect me to change my beliefs in seven days?”

Two years ago the Supreme Court said it was ok for the Boy Scouts to discriminate against homosexuals. It’s unlikely anything will stop the organization from discriminating against the un-American belief that there is no god.
A national spokesman for the Boy Scouts, Gregg K. Shields, describes this latest assertion of the organization’s right to bigotry and superstition as simply a matter of doing the right thing for its members.

Mr. Shields said for the Boy Scouts to insist on anything less would be unfair to the five million members. “It would be a disservice to all the other members to allow someone to selectively obey or ignore our rules,” he said.
As for the other 11 points of the Scout Law, Mr. Shields could not say whether anyone had been ejected for being untrustworthy, disloyal, unhelpful, unfriendly, discourteous, unkind, disobedient, cheerless, unthrifty, cowardly or sloppy.

The last paragraph above is the NYTimes editorializing. It would be nice if the paper, in its usual reporting of political news, showed even half the courage it shows in this article.

guarding the coasts

Maybe the big story in the arrival of hundreds of Haitians on the Florida coast is not just the interruption of traffic or even the clear preference of our laws for Cuban refugees over their Haitian counterparts. A letter in the Daily News states the obvious.

Open shores
Forest Hills: Where is homeland security when hundreds of Haitians run aground feet from our land, swim ashore, crowd a U.S. highway and hitch rides in broad daylight?
Tom Mortensen

One right-wing pundit, who shall not be otherwise dignified with an identity here, has pointed out that most potential terrorists can read newpapers and have access to television. It should also not be necessary to point out that boats are almost as easy to access as guns in this country.
But the Bushies are keeping us safe, right?

the bird

No name yet.
This little guy (gal?) essentially flew into our apartment this afternoon.
I was in the kitchen when I heard a soft thump at the window of the breakfast room. I looked up and saw a bright little fuzzy splotch in sort-of-a-chartreuse hue clinging desperately to a tiny steel muntin.
Fully aware that my next move might determine both of our fates, I opened the abutting window to the very cold air with very mixed feelings. He/she didn’t need much encouragement at all, and soon ended up inside. An hour later it was sitting on my shoulder. By all appearances and movements, our guest is a very healthy young adult.
No one knew of any budgerigars in the building. I checked.
By the end of the afternoon all three of us were in posession of a parakeet home starter set, complete with, and this is my favorite, a colorful playgym combination abacus, mirror, feedcup and perch.
I mean, we didn’t go out and buy a pet; the beautiful little creature dropped in on us.
When I explained to Douglas, our neighborhood pet store clerk, why I needed just a few ounces of seed, I still thought I had a choice. Maybe so, but he at least cinched my decision with, “Hey, it’s got to mean something. Besides it’ll bring all that serenity.”
But I don’t think it’s working that way yet.
A better picture soon.

“Can I carry it on the subway?”

I’ve always called it my magic carpet, for the, to me, obvious reasons of its magical appearances (usually) and ease of operation (also only usually), but for many New Yorkers it’s a truck as well. It’s the subway!

While other Americans may arrange their purchases neatly in capacious car trunks, New Yorkers are towing theirs mightily through the turnstiles. While other Americans may strap surfboards atop PT Cruisers, New Yorkers are dragging theirs onto the A train to Far Rockaway. And while other Americans try to lock in a good radio station on the highway, New Yorkers are trying to figure out how to hang onto the pole in a packed train without losing control of the briefcase, the overcoat, the gym shoes, the large box of Pampers and the Big Brown Bag from Bloomingdale’s.

The article includes a modest but impressive list of cartage phenomena sited in the last hundred years.

for the love of one’s countrymen!

Headline of the day:
British navy ‘bursting with gay seamen in 1960’

[London, October 31] – A strict enforcement of the Royal Navy’s policy of banning homosexuality would have rendered the fleet ineffective in the 1960s, according to Britain’s Public Records Office.
“Senior naval officers have warned me that about 50 percent of the fleet have sinned homosexually,” the navy’s senior legal officer wrote in the reports. He wryly remarked that it was “only the paucity of the director of naval security’s investigating resources that prevents paying off a good many ships”.

[This comes from a South African news site, and thanks to Otto.]
But there’s much more in these just-released naval papers to amuse and delight us sophisticates of the twenty-first century (after all of the hurt produced in the last one). The BBC delights in the story, of course.

One sailor reportedly picked up a prostitute who he believed to be female. Realising he wasn’t who she appeared to be, the sailor reportedly declared: “Blimey, you’re all there!” Nevertheless, he apparently became “infatuated”.
This kind of incident led admirals to argue that most of the men accused were only inadvertently homosexual, rather than dangerous “perverts”.

In London, the head of the Western Fleet in London wrote to all commanders,

“I have a strong [belief] that many of the men are not perverts but basically normal men whose standards of behaviour are thoroughly lax.”

The then head of naval law, quoted in the South African site’s story at the top, seems to have had a fairly reasonable attitude about the imagined threat to national security.

While the policy of discharging offenders involved in public acts of indecency in front of “hand-clapping audiences” was valid, there should be more flexibility in the rules, he argued.

In Britain, the ban on homosexuals serving in the armed forces was lifted in January 2000 after a protracted human rights battle, but unfortunately even the “more flexibility” of the Royal Navy 1960s is still alien in the benighted precincts of the U.S.

a shenere un bessere velt

The just-about-legendary, yet historical, New York socialist community, The Workman’s Circle, or Der Arbeter Ring celebrates over one hundred years of caring. Now exhibiting the effects of its success, or at least those of its age, it looks for ways to attract the young. With the humor and optimism which its members have always exhibited, the director of fund-raising efforts explains the strategy, “I don’t want to say younger people are smarter, however there is one thing: they’re going to be around longer.”
It’s a wonderful story.
The beginnings:

It was started in a tenement on the Lower East Side.
A handful of immigrant socialists, most of them Yiddish-speaking laborers, gathered in the Essex Street home of Sam Greenberg, a cloak maker, wanting to find a way to take care of one another through sickness and death as they tried to gain footholds in a formidable country. In the process, these newcomers hoped to ease their loneliness.
Quickly their idea, the Workmen’s Circle, caught on. People seemed to like joining a group that helped tide them through an illness yet allowed them to sit with friends over a glass of tea and argue a fine point of radical politics. Within 30 years, the organization gained 80,000 members around the country, joined with the garment unions to broaden the rights of American workers and started an early and absurdly cheap version of health insurance and dozens of Yiddish schools.