Category: Queer

Geesh, these people must think we’re all really stupid!
New York Republican neanderthals have finally decided to let the New York Senate vote on gay rights, but only in order to secure more votes for Republican candidates in November.
The Democratic candidate for governor said it best.

Asked about [Senate Majority Leader Joe] Bruno’s promise, [Carl] McCall replied, “If that’s true, these people really have no principles, do they?”
“For eight years, George Pataki has been promising it, Joe Bruno has been stopping it,” said McCall, the state controller. “Now, what, two weeks before an election … all of a sudden Joe Bruno and George Pataki come up with a little gimmick to try to buy off an endorsement? Most of the endorsements they have, they bought.”

But we shouldn’t get too excited yet, since they are telling us that the vote will come after the November elections.

What an amazing world! And what an amazing city! (Paris, this time) In an earlier post I described Bertrand Delanoe, the Mayor of Paris, as queer, green and a socialist, and nothing much was yet know about the man who stabbed him on sunday. Today I read, in the Daily News, that the Mayor is muslim, as is his alleged assailant, who is said to have told police he doesn’t like politicians, and especially doesn’t like homosexuals [it’s more than probable that he used some other noun when speaking to the police].

The queer green socialist Mayor of Paris [just try using those adjectives anywhere in this country to describe a town executive!] was stabbed, apparently by a deranged man, in the midst of the all-night party he had given to the City of Light. But Delanoe, a Socialist elected last year, insisted to aides while he lay bleeding on the parquet floor that the French capital’s festival continue until dawn.

“He told me the Nuit Blanche should continue unchanged and not to dramatize what had happened,” [Deputy Mayor Christophe Girard] told journalists. “He was completely conscious and determined that an isolated incident should not affect what was supposed to be a nice festival of Paris for the Parisians.”

…. Officials said Delanoe, a soft-spoken man with a grass-roots image, had wanted City Hall as open as possible. “There was no checking at the door,” one woman at the party told French radio.

Pshew! What a guy. But we do know how to party. And I do mean socialists, greens and queers!

The ornate City Hall, decorated as a 1930s nightclub with soft lounge music, was such a popular feature of the “Nuit Blanche” festival that many people could not get in during the evening. Some outside chanted “Bertrand, Bertrand!”
The Louvre museum, Eiffel Tower, Arc de Triomphe and other city landmarks were open for free visits all night. Jazz and reggae bands played at bistros and Vietnamese models put on a fashion show at the historic Palais Royal.
One glass facade of the National Library was turned into a giant interactive light show that passers-by could operate by sending messages with their mobile telephones.
During the summer, Delanoe’s “Paris Plage”(Paris Beach) brought sand, potted palms and beach sports to the highway along the Seine River. He wants to repeat both festivals next year.
But Delanoe, who with his Greens partners wants to make the city more livable, has also angered small businessmen and taxi drivers by creating bus lanes to cut down traffic congestion.

Yup. It appears on the “Styles and Fashion” page of the paper’s site. It’s the first for the NYTimes and it’s a nice story, so here it is.

The couple met in October 1992 in Washington, where Mr. Goldstein was working as a television news producer and Mr. Gross as a consultant. Mr. Goldstein was one of 35 respondents to a personal ad that Mr. Gross had placed in Washington City Paper. It read: “Nice Jewish boy, 5 feet 8 inches, 22, funny, well-read, dilettantish, self-deprecating, Ivy League, the kind of boy Mom fantasized about.” They arranged to meet one evening at Kramerbooks & Afterwords, and had their second date the next night.
That Thanksgiving, Mr. Gross went home to visit his parents. “My mom said, `You seem like everything’s great,’ ” he recalled. ” `You seem like you’re in love.’ I said, `I am.’ They said, `That’s great.’ I said, `His name is Steven.’ My mother said, `Oy,’ and was silent for a while.”
Both sets of parents now support the relationship.
While Mr. Gross was in Thailand, Mr. Goldstein had a $1,500 telephone bill one month. They were apart again while Mr. Gross was in graduate school. Finally, in 1998, they moved to New York together.
They postponed a commitment ceremony until leaders of Reform Judaism had voted to support rabbis who perform same-sex unions and Vermont had given legal recognition to civil unions, both events in 2000.
“Sept. 11 accelerated the process,” Mr. Goldstein said. “We all began to think of our own mortality.”

[The print version on sunday included a double photo of the couple.]

I’m not a fan of marriage in any form, but queers have a right to be as conventionally careless and silly as anyone else. Still, let’s not make it a requirement.
The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune and San Francisco Chronicle, among major U.S. newspapers, have been publishing gay and lesbian unions for some time already.
So what the hell took the Times so long?

Besides biting the hand that feeds you, it’s just plain wrong!
Madison Square Garden and the New York W.N.B.A. team, Liberty, continues to ignore, if not just plain snub, lesbian fans of women’s basketball.

[One lesbian fan, Robyn Overstreet,] says Liberty and Garden management suppresses the presence of gay fans at games. Overstreet alleges that cameramen from the MSG network, which broadcasts many Liberty games, have told lesbian fans that they are forbidden to film lesbian couples showing public displays of affection.

Not all W.N.B.A. teams operate this way however.

The Los Angeles Sparks have signed a deal with Girl Bar, a popular social club. The Seattle Storm and the Sacramento Monarchs each had a Gay Pride event this year. The Washington team works with the Human Rights Campaign, a gay political organization, and other teams offer discounts for gay groups.

But in New York we are still shy about sex, right?

Some heterosexuals remain sorely uncomfortable with public displays of affection by homosexuals. Gays are often the victims of a double standard. Would anybody care if a banner was raised that read “Latinos for Liberty”? Probably not.
Some of the arguments against what the protesters did are just silly, such as how children who attend Liberty games and see lesbians will be traumatized or want to be become gay.
What would affect children more? Going to a Liberty game where fans are amicable or a Jets game where kids are exposed to violent, drunken brawls in the stands between male fans and the kind of language that would make Martin Lawrence blush?
Besides, while watching the Atlanta Braves in the playoffs in the 1990’s, I saw Ted Turner and Jane Fonda kiss each other while they were sitting in the stands.
Now that is something no one wants to see.

Activists are planning a protest outside the Garden on Sunday, the last day of the regular season.

–and a derogation. Yes, it’s nice to know I’m no longer the only homo in Chelsea (as it so seemed to me when I first moved here fifteen years ago), but can’t we attract at least some people who look like they might read a book once in a while or be able to discuss a social issue other than brunch, spotting or clubs? Guy Trebay writes about New York fashion as expressed during the recent extended heat wave, and he ends up in Chelsea:

“Society,” Thomas Carlyle observed in the 19th century, “which the more I think of it astonishes me the more, is founded on cloth.” Manhattan society, which the more one thinks of it astonishes one the more, is increasingly founded on no cloth at all. And few neighborhoods illustrate that better than Chelsea, where some people are so heavily armored in muscle that clothes can sometimes seem beside the point.
“There is definitely the gay ghetto stereotype of the muscle queen in Chelsea, but that stereotype is being broken,” said Jesus Echezuria, a salesman at a popular Chelsea men’s wear shop called Nasty Pig. Mr. Echezuria was referring to a group of men whose calendars are often marked in steroid cycles and for whom “liposculpting” and “abdominal etching” are by no means alien terms. If, however, the stereotype of Chelsea as a magnet for such men is dated, you couldn’t tell it from the volume of cartoon action figures strutting the streets on a torrid Saturday night.

Conformity and uniformity is stupid and oppressive regardless of the form it takes. Sometimes I think I see hope for the neighborhood in what appears to be the growing visibility of non-whites, women, young kids and even straights, of all ages, but I’m not sure it’s anything more than wishful thinking, so I still worry about the sea of dumb muscle. Help, we’re drowning here!

“The male ego is not a hardy perennial;
it’s a very delicate flower.”

–David Rudgers, a 22-year veteran of the CIA, and author of Creating the
Secret State, speaking about the U.S. military’s pricklish attitude toward gays and lesbians in its midst, in one of a number of interviews conducted recently by the Center for the Study of Sexual Minorities in the Military at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Are we dizzy yet? Some people were just beginning to sort out the old categories, but new species seem to be popping out all over, contributing to a delightful confusion for those who welcome life, and a nightmare for the half-dead.

MEET THE METROSEXUAL
He’s well dressed, narcissistic and bun-obsessed. But don’t call him gay.
….
For some time now, old-fashioned (re)productive, repressed, unmoisturized heterosexuality has been given the pink slip by consumer capitalism. The stoic, self-denying, modest straight male didn’t shop enough (his role was to earn money for his wife to spend), and so he had to be replaced by a new kind of man, one less certain of his identity and much more interested in his image — that’s to say, one who was much more interested in being looked at (because that’s the only way you can be certain you actually exist). A man, in other words, who is an advertiser’s walking wet dream.

Mark Simpson‘s essay concludes with a caution however.

The final irony of male metrosexuality is that, given all its obsession with attractiveness, vanity for vanity’s sake turns out to be not very sexy after all.
But then, it’s much too late for second thoughts. Metrosexuality is heading out of the closet, and learning to love itself. Even more.

One of the founders of the modern British gay movement reminds us that in the first years after Stonewall we wanted to change society, not conform to it.

There would be sexual freedom and human rights for all – gay and straight. Our message was: “innovate, don’t assimilate.”

That dream has faded, and even the noisiest activists today are more likely to be content to settle for equal rights within the status quo than to question sociey as it is.

However, [equality] isn’t the panacea that many claim it to be. Equal rights for lesbians and gay men means parity on straight terms, within a pre-existing framework of institutions and laws. Since these have been devised by, and for, the heterosexual majority, equality within their system involves conformity to their rules. This is a formula for gay incorporation, not liberation.
….
Oscar Wilde once wrote: “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” Thirty years after the first Gay Pride march, the gay community needs to rediscover the vision thing. That means daring to imagine what society could be, rather than accepting society as it is.