A couple of weeks ago: close encounters with facets of healing.
Continue reading “Sexual Healing”Sexual Healing
The Red Roots of Modern Gay Liberation
It’s 1953. Founders of the first viable gay civil rights group the Mattachine resign due to their Communist pasts. Meet the players whom the FBI know are gay and Red. Uncover the parallels between activism in the 1950s and 2020s.
Continue reading “The Red Roots of Modern Gay Liberation”81 Days, 81 Years
Last year I wrote that I might wait a few months before listening to John K. Samson’s last two songs in his serial of the cat named Virtute. I finally bought the album containing them, Winter Wheat. I didn’t cry, tho’ I should have. “Virtute at Rest,” ambiguously, maintains the cat’s nagging, I swear you can do it, while the human marks the 21st day at the “17th Street Treatment Centre.”
Like I said, I should have cried because today is my own 81st day drinking nearly nothing, sans treatment, centre or self-help, and I’m not white knuckling. On May 21 I had a pivotal CT scan that, unlike previous borderline liver scans, nudged me to regroup. Like a cocktail, the scan was the sum of its parts: ostensibly requisitioned for a kidney stone but with seven further findings. I’m haunted by what a listener said about Virtute, quoted in my comment: “This song series might have saved my life, more than once, over the last two decades.” It didn’t save mine, because I heard only half its parts until today, but, as the commenter says, it “might have” or, rather for me, “still might.”
Continue reading “81 Days, 81 Years”Oh, Equality, up yours!
—with apologies to Poly Styrene
Eleven years ago, the Against Equality (AE) collective published a compilation of its three anthologies, critical of myopic topics of “gay pride.”1 As writers for AE note in the collection’s introduction, the day before SCOTUS trashed the Defense of Marriage Act (the ban on gay marriage signed by Bill Clinton) and California’s Prop 8 (the people’s ban on gay marriage), in 2013, the Justices had trashed the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Continue reading “Oh, Equality, up yours!”The Wind and the Fury
A look at Wild Is the Wind, the film and its theme song.
Continue reading “The Wind and the Fury”There are Redactions and… Redactions
Today the Department of Justice will submit proposed redactions to the affidavit in support of the search warrant issued for the, well…, search of Donald Trump’s Florida estate in, well…, search of documents that should have been deposited with the National Archives upon Trump’s departure from the White House in early 2021. What could those redactions conceal or reveal? is the question on everyone’s mind.
Continue reading “There are Redactions and… Redactions”A Taste of Honeycombs
Five years ago this month I posted a lengthy review of Martin Aston’s encyclopedic Breaking Down the Walls of Heartache: How Music Came Out.2 Last week one of Aston’s subjects came to life as it was pushed my way courtesy of YouTube: 1964’s “Have I the Right?” by the Honeycombs. Lyrically it’s reminiscent of Sixties songs that became gay and lesbian bar hymns. Think Sinatra’s “Strangers In the Night” (1966), Bobby Darin’s version of “My Buddy” (1962), Connie Francis’s “Where the Boys Are” (1961). Such songs were appropriated by this social set, but its membership included a few of the hymnists as well.
Picture-Perfect
Ten days ago Rob Berg and I rounded out the Bachelors Anonymous studio catalog with The Big Picture. Rob came up with the album title and the cover design: a rainbow emerging behind us as we frame ourselves (at a 1990 New Year’s Eve party held at the home of Anne Atwell-Zoll, who sang backup with Ann Russell). My first thought was that the rainbow is passé, but with the resurgence of a loathing that never left, I’m reminded of those peace symbol posters from an earlier era: Back By Popular Demand.
Continue reading “Picture-Perfect”I’m Dreaming of a White Bicycle
While searching for half-remembered short films on the theme of public restrooms last month (see In the Can), I ran across a parody of “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen” posted last fall as a commentary on the trans* bathroom con-troversy.
The performer, Christopher Trautman, explains:
This song was recorded in North Carolina. The only State in the United States that passed a law specifically directing that the restroom you use must be based on the junk you possess. It was later repealed after a national embarrassment campaign [led] by Comedy Central where they opened a food truck called Bone Brothers Barbecue in downtown Raleigh and discriminated against everybody who they determined to be gay… which was everybody.
That barbecue pi—er—bit, which aired on The Daily Show in 2016, was by Roy Wood Jr., assisted by Jordan Klepper. It’s hilarious and is, mm…, cued up below.
In the Can
My introduction to the public restroom would have been in kindergarten, 1960–61. There were issues.
Continue reading “In the Can”