Recent Writings

Supporters of GEHO in Jinja, Uganda

After a long dry spell, I've been doing some more writing, all of it over on the Kasama website. Working with other members of the editorial collective, I've been helping to flag and introduce interesting articles from outside websites, as well as generating original content.

First up, I'm most proud of a long piece I spent a week researching and writing. Entitled "Real Enemies, False Friends: Imperialism and Homophobia in Africa," it covers the causes behind the wave of terrifying anti-gay repression in Africa. I've coined the phrase "weaponization of gay rights" to describe the hypocritical embrace of LGBT rights by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama as a neocolonialist cudgel in the arsenal of US imperialism. It's pretty timely in the context of the orgy of hypocrisy during the Sochi Olympics in which anti-gay, repressive Russia is being pilloried by the professedly pro-gay, but still repressive US. I take aim at local demagogues, American evangelicals like Scott Lively, imperialist politicians, and the worst alleged gay rights organization ever, the Human Rights Campaign.

Next up are a bunch of short introductions meant to frame and introduce articles for discussion:

"Sochi Olympics — stop anti-gay violence in Russia" is a Human Rights Watch report  on the disturbing increase in antigay violence following the passage of Russia's gay propaganda law. My introduction just presents some of the issues for those not familiar. I'd like to follow this up with a discussion of the attempted gay boycott of Sochi and its corporate sponsors, addressing some of the same issues of hypocritical imperialism as in my Uganda/Nigeria piece.

"East Baltimore — What the fuck is a selfie?" is an article about life in a world where social media doesn't reign supreme. My introduction is a call to examine the bubbles and presumptions leftists inhabit when thinking about interacting with the real world.

"Atlanta, unfit rulers should get out of the way" is an article about the calamitously unusual snowstorm that swept the south. My introduction talks about the clash of extreme weather and capitalist crisis.

"American Studies Association penalized by NY Senate for Israel boycott" talks about the attempted retaliation against supporters of the BDS movement in New York. My introduction introduces the BDS movement as a way of materially supporting the Palestinian struggle.

Since Kasama front paged my fairly critical piece on Peter Seeger, we chose another article that was more personally laudatory as a counterpoint. I introduced "Music journalist Dave Marsh remembers Pete Seeger" in the hopes of keeping a discussion going.

My personal life is still quite unsettled, but it feels good to be speaking my mind again and keeping up with the writing. I'd love feedback from readers.

World AIDS Day 2012: In Memory of Joe Galanti

"He Kills Me": AIDS activist art from Gran Fury. Ronald Reagan, burn in hell!

I wish I had a picture of my late friend and comrade Joe Galanti. I have a vivid if incomplete memory of a specific photograph: taken at a revolutionary counterprotest of some KKK/Nazi rally in the midwest in the late 1970s, it shows Joe and other comrades charging forward against the enemy lines. The comrades are wearing painted football helmets and bearing shields: the anti-fascist confrontations of those days were serious business. I remember the expression on Joe's face in this photo, yelling some warcry: it's like a battlefield photo, which I guess indeed it was. I don't remember if Joe was charging the fascists directly in this photo or up against their police protection. I vaguely remember this action ended in arrest, but it was taken right before I got to know Joe, and the details are lost to time.

Joe was born Joe Alongi, but in the ways of the revolutionary left of those days renamed himself Joe Galanti, picking an old family name for his nom d'guerre. The Chicago left wasn't so huge that he was a stranger to me when we finally became friends in 1978 or 1979: I had surely seen him around at demonstrations or events. His party, the Revolutionary Socialist League (RSL) was notorious for its anti-Klan/anti-Nazi work. While not quite as notorious as the Communist Workers Party who had comrades literally martyred by fascist killers down in Greensboro, North Carolina, at the end of that period, the RSL was definitely committed to building counterprotests that could literally stop the fascists in their tracks. Others on the left called them adventurists for their tactics, and remembering that photo there are certainly grains of truth in that argument. Chicago's segregated suburbs were infested with fascist vermin, of both the home-grown Klan variety and swastika-bearing, uniform dress-up German-style nazophiles. These were dangerous situations: I remember coming back from one suburban confrontation, must have been 1979 or 1980, when our car was followed from a counter-rally by a carload of Nazi sympathizers who tried ramming us off the highway: we escaped at high speed through a maze of suburban streets. The RSL had given up the football-helmeted charges by then but not the war itself.

The funny thing was that Joe was a pussycat. If he could be dynamic in action and a deft speech maker, he was soft-spoken and goofy in person. He was brilliant, with a great grasp of revolutionary politics and obviously a real commitment to fighting for his vision. Joe was also proudly out and gay, at a time when the left's relationship with the gay struggle was marked by great deals of ambivalence or even hostility.

Even though I had been warned off their adventurism, when I came out those many decades ago it was only natural that I would be forced to reevaluate the RSL since I was looking to integrate my communist politics with my newly open self-identity. I don't remember when I decided to treat Joe as something other than a raving lunatic, but at some point we began talking politics, and he really rocked my world.

He gave me a lot of space: he introduced me to another person in the RSL periphery, Michael Botkin, who would shortly become my roommate and also Joe's lover. We formed a sort of transitional organization, the boldly named Gay Revolutionary Discussion Group (GRDG, which we pronounced "Grudge"), and drew others toward the RSL from the gay activist world through this nominally independent core. Eventually I was ready to return to the hardcore left, formally joined the RSL, and GRDG folded into the League. It was smart organizing on Joe's part: and all the time we were studying the issues and organizing protests and intervening in the community. We organized protests against the movies "Cruising" and "Windows" and got involved in a fight against police repression of the Chicago gay community. I was really won to the RSL by Joe, who built a bridge between the critical Leninism of the RSL, community activism, and personal expression and identity.

Joe was fiercely charismatic: if he was intimidating at first, everyone who knew him soon fell in love with him. Having lived in New York City now for over thirty years, it's easy to forget how novel New Yorkers like Joe seemed to us quaint midwesterners back then. His New York accent and his dark Italian good looks were charming and compelling. I was happy when he and Michael became an item. We, sometimes with other comrades, would socialize frequently, going out to gay bars and discos or holding houseparties. Partying, Joe became a kind of psychedelic hippy, and warmly touchy and feely in ways enticing to those of us who grew up in Chicago's icy urbanity. He was an apostle of free love, and adored the icons of early gay counterculture.

It turned out Joe also had a personal secret dark side. He would sneak off to leather bars where he lived a whole different kind of life, one that even Michael didn't learn about til months after they had started becoming involved. This proved a bit of a challenge for Michael who didn't share the seriousness of the leather/S&M world, but he was game at least for a while. I remember sitting in our living room listening to music when Michael came out of his bedroom looking thoughtful and a little perplexed. "Hey I just fistfucked Joe." He announced before turning around and going back to his room off the kitchen in the back of the apartment. Joe seemed even happier having come out of this sort of second closet, though the intensity of Joe's sexuality became a tension on their relationship.

I was sad to leave Joe and Michael behind when I moved to New York in the late summer of 1981. I moved here to work for the League itself, and soon lived and breathed politics 24 hours a day. I stayed in touch with them, and saw them occasionally at national gatherings. But then that world just ended.

I remember several disturbing phone calls a couple years later. Calls from Joe, or Michael, or a mutual RSL friend. Joe was sick. Michael was sick. There was some weird factional trouble in the Chicago RSL. Michael left. It's confused in my memory... I remember a difficult conversation with Joe over the phone when he seemed deeply panicked...he had indeed been diagnosed with AIDS. Not a brand-new disease by then but still always a death sentence. He was discussing his plans: "If I live long enough..." the rest of this terrible pronouncement is blotted out of my memory by a rush of noise.

I saw him one more time. He came home to NYC on a sort of last pilgrimage...this was somewhere between 1985 and 1987. He seemed well, but much thinner.  He had a list of things to do. He wanted to feast on Nathan's oysters: he was shocked that they had become so expensive. Shortly thereafter I fell away from the League myself: personally terrified by AIDS and demoralized by the Reagan era, I was in political retreat and heading for hibernation. I don't even remember when the call came, or who it came from, that Joe had sickened again and succumbed to the disease. I'm guilty as hell that I was nowhere to be found. I miss him still: I miss his passion, his commitment, his courage, his ability to synthesize revolutionary politics into a compelling narrative. There's so much Joe didn't get to see. What a terrible terrible loss.

Joe loved to dance. He loved disco, and loved the adventurous new sounds that crept into the music after its r&b/funk base seemed to tire. One song I remember he loved to no end was "Pop Muzik," by M. This one's for you Joe.




I have been trying to honor my friends lost to AIDS each World AIDS day. Click here for my previous writings about them and the struggle against AIDS.

Annual Candy Samples Video Break!

Yes it's that time of year again! A new video from my favorite drag queen, the immortal Candy Samples, actress. This year's video is a tribute to the gay "bear" world, with a new song entitled "Bear Season." Once again yours truly has several background color roles, though my adorable boyfriend may be seen here as the guitar player. The videos are always a hoot to make, and this one was no different, though the extensive "green screen" filming meant that those of us in the cast had no idea whatsoever what the final product would look like. Bonus points to Candy for the Sarah Palin references!

This Is Not Gay Liberation

 

It's gay pride season. This weekend is New York City's big gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender pride parade. I've gone almost every year since I've lived in New York City, over thirty years. My first Pride was 1977, before I lived here. In the middle I went to Pride in Chicago. I marched many of those years. For a while I was even a member of the official planning coalition, before it became a nonprofit corporation. Back in those days we called it a gay pride "march."

The gay world has been abuzz with what would seem to be a slew of victories. The repeal of DADT has brought gay pride to, of all places, the Pentagon, where the masters of war plot how to subvert and attack people around the world. Apparently they will be taking a few moments from piloting child-killing drones over Pakistan and Yemen to celebrate "our rich diversity," as the flyer above reads. Later this year there will be a celebration of the end of DADT at the Intrepid, the aircraft-carrier turned museum floating in the Hudson off a New York City pier. That is, if they can swab the decks free of the bloodstains of thousands of Vietnamese killed by the Intrepid's planes in its period of service in the American war of aggression against Vietnam in the 1960s. Look! A rainbow flag!

Corporate sponsors are big news this year: a whole bunch of dubious corporations from Wells Fargo to Target have rolled out those rainbow flags, and the gay community rejoices, apparently turning a blind eye to the actual, you know, business practices and social role of these corporations. Hey, they're pro gay!

And speaking of taking time off from piloting drones, President Obama, er, came out in support of marriage equality. Well, he came out personally as a supporter of gay marriage. The day after the lesbian and gay community of North Carolina was devastated by a brutally anti-gay referendum that the President failed to comment on. Did I mention he thinks marriage equality is a states rights issue so his personal opinion doesn't mean he will intervene in such state struggles in the future? Oh sure I understand the limits of his executive power. He has certainly made clear the limits of his moral authority. It might come as no surprise that the gay community, deeply distrustful of Obama, immediately jumped full force on his reelection bandwagon. Seemingly, the only gay voices continuing criticism of the president are those on the right tainted by the dogwhistle racism of the Republicans.

Oh and a new book came out, which I can't imagine myself reading, by a heterosexual woman I'd not heard of before named Linda Hirshman entitled "Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution." Yes, it seems we have won. The struggle for our civil rights is over! No doubt we are now approaching the same state of grace as all of "post-racial" America.

This needs to be said: This is not gay liberation.

I'm finding myself surprisingly pissed off this year. Lesbian and gay pride always seemed like an opportunity to take our star turn: to celebrate our place in the fabric of the city, in the fabric of society. To walk about openly without worry, armed with great numbers in mutual solidarity. It seemed to me that while it was not always an overtly political event, it certainly had the political subtext of bringing our own struggle for social justice to the same field of battle where all the other struggles are waged.

But this year it feels to me like the gay community is saying, "hey, we got ours!" I think the community understands the threat from the religious right: it's clear a large minority of people in the United States have no love for the gays. But I think the gay establishment, and hence a large segment of the community, has also been utterly seduced by those fluttering rainbow flags. Gay pride has literally been sold to corporations. And those who question the sale, or suggest that a pinkwashing sleight of hand is at work, are being silenced or marginalized.

What a sham it is that corporations are waving rainbow flags at the same time they're busting unions, taking back basic benefits like paid healthcare and time off, and generally engaging in the looting of society for their own financial gain.
 
For me, "gay liberation" has always been intimately tied to "the revolution." That is, one social justice struggle among many that got at the core nature of capitalist society and its divide-and-rule strategies and materially-based oppressions inherent in that politico-economic system. I always argued that victory for our struggle as gay people — deeply connected to the role of women in capitalism — was not possible in a capitalist society. I don't feel equipped to address that huge question head-on in this essay, but I have to say that what the gay community is experiencing right now doesn't feel like a victory to me. I suppose the end of certain forms of legal discrimination are an advance for a certain privileged layer of the community that may benefit many gay people up and down the class spectrum, but something feels hollow.

While semi-covert gay organizations quietly existed for years before the  legendary Stonewall rebellion, the mass gay civil rights movement has its roots in the social uproar of the 1960s and the radical movement against American involvement in Vietnam. It's no accident that the first militant gay organization, the Gay Liberation Front, was named in the spirit of the South Vietnamese National Liberation Front, more commonly known as the Vietcong.

  

At its beginning the queer movement was a revolutionary movement. Perhaps the theory was undeveloped but the impulse was clear. One early group was even called STAR, or Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries. And in its earliest days gay liberationists united with others who recognized the connections. While shamefully some forces on the left were slow to embrace the gay struggle, black and Latino revolutionaries in the same gritty urban centers as the multi-racial gay community understood a natural alliance. The Occupy movement neighborhood assembly I work in, Occupy/Ocupemos Sunset Park, just showed the extraordinary documentary film "Palante, Siempre Palante" about the Young Lords Party, roughly the revolutionary Puerto Rican equivalent of the Black Panther Party. The film tells how the Young Lords openly and proudly supported gay liberation.

The gay movement went on a long journey toward moderation and respectability. A trans-class movement, it's no particular surprise that today's mainstream "LGBT" organizations are solidly in the pocket of the Democratic Party. But when I see today's pride parades built around corporate sponsorship or the narrow focus on "what's good for the gays" to the exclusion of any other social justice concerns, I am reminded over and over that it hasn't always been this way. Once upon a time gay people were protesting militarist monstrosities like the Intrepid. Now our political leaders are throwing a party on it.

It's not widely enough circulated, but back in 1970 the Black Panther Party's Huey Newton gave a speech in which he touched on the women's and gay liberation movements. The Black Panthers are sadly maligned in historical memory: virtually massacred by government COINTELPRO terrorism, the Panthers are misremembered as being violent, misremembered as some kind of glorified retrograde gang. Nothing could be further from the truth and Newton's far-thinking words from 1970 help reveal this:

"Remember, we have not established a revolutionary value system; we are only in the process of establishing it. I do not remember our ever constituting any value that said that a revolutionary must say offensive things towards homosexuals, or that a revolutionary should make sure that women do not speak out about their own particular kind of oppression. As a matter of fact, it is just the opposite: we say that we recognize the women's right to be free. We have not said much about the homosexual at all, but we must relate to the homosexual movement because it is a real thing. And I know through reading, and through my life experience and observations that homosexuals are not given freedom and liberty by anyone in the society. They might be the most oppresed people in the society.... And maybe I'm now injecting some of my prejudice by saying that "even a homosexual can be a revolutionary." Quite the contrary, maybe a homosexual could be the most revolutionary. When we have revolutionary conferences, rallies, and demonstrations, there should be full participation of the gay liberation movement and the women's liberation movement." 

The whole text is quite remarkable, far more advanced than the politics of much of the left at the time. This history of connected revolutionary struggles needs to be revisited.

In New York and San Francisco #OWS contingents will be marching in the parades. They'll be pointing out all the corporate pinkwashing that's going on. Mainstream gays have already suggested this act of elementary and obvious political education is "disruption." They have accused Occupy people of being "outsiders," as if no actually queer person could possibly reject the sale of gay pride to corporate America.

"Not gay as in happy, but queer as in fuck you."

Fighting civil discrimination is good. But fighting for the liberation of society is better. Let's not lose sight of the prize at the end: it's not about queer people being free just to be like suburban "middle-class" heterosexuals, it's about freeing society from all forms of oppressive relations.

The celebration of that victory will take place on the ruins of the Pentagon and at the site of the Intrepid being broken down into scrap.

Happy gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and queer pride. The struggle continues.

Donna Summer: She Said It Really Loud on the Radio

LaDonna Adrian Gaines, 1948 – 2012

Donna Summer was a phenomenon. Everything she did was on a grand scale. When her career broke through it was an explosion that lasted a decade, changing everything in its wake: our ears are still ringing.

When "Love to Love You Baby" hit the airwaves in 1975 I was in high school. The short version was a ubiquitous hit. The abbreviated moans and groans on the radio edit made it a novelty song: just naughty enough to make me slightly uncomfortable on weekend drives with my mom in the suburbs where we were briefly stranded. Minnie Riperton had already introduced the eargasm to the radio the year before with "Lovin' You," which was no doubt catchy but altogether different in scale. This song's slinkily suggestive groove was impossible to resist. But it was late at night as I lay in my bed reading and listening to the radio when I heard the full 16 minute glory of the song. It turned out not to be a few moans and groans but an extended symphonic orgasm, an intense aural documentary of ecstasy and passion. The guitar, the keys, the sweeping strings, the breathy voice, that funky long screw of a groove. I was a virgin but I knew what that song was about. I felt it. To not feel it, to not be swept up by its sensuality, one would have to be dead. It's the kind of song still, today, that makes me want to reach for a cigarette when it ends. And I haven't been a smoker in 25 years.

Two years later I had finished my first year of college and was spending a couple weeks in New York City. It's a longer story I've told parts of elsewhere on this blog, but I ended up late one weekend night down in the Village, the pre-gentrification Village, a block from the darkness under the still-standing elevated West Side Highway and the mysterious darkened ruin of riverside piers. It was Christopher Street Liberation Day 1977, and this incredible song was blaring from a soundtruck near the armory at the end of the street in the midst of a gay street festival. It was a synthesized beat like nothing I could have ever imagined, with dancing electric lines of crackling noise weaving in and out against a relentless pulsing beat. And there was that same breathy voice, singing once again about feeling "love" but clearly meaning raw, fiery sex. "I Feel Love" grabbed me like the superheated thick New York City night air. I wasn't yet out as a gay young man, and wouldn't be for a little while, but this magic moment cemented in my mind everything I imagined about future possibility.

A year or so later I was finally out, and as I gathered gay friends and learned to navigate the subterranean world of that long-ago hidden gay world, Donna Summer's music remained a constant. There were other artists I found more interesting, but none I ever found more compelling. Her sound was huge. I remember discovering her two-LP concept album "Once Upon a Time." Sure I listened to jazz and soul the rest of the time, but this amazing disco symphony was impossible to ignore. I first heard these songs on a dance floor somewhere in Chicago, probably at the Bistro. Lyrical, romantic, with a dramatic, almost operatic sweep: compositions with a pop catchiness but a furious grandiose ambition to seize the listener not in a heady idyll but in an ecstatic fury of dance and motion. As "Rumour Has It" segued into "I Love You" the lights in the disco would shimmer, the rhythms percolating against that insistent base drum and the sweep of the strings; the dance floor would fill with emotion. It was the happy ending of a fairytale come to life. I don't think I have ever listened to "I Love You" without feeling the memory of tears for the lost bliss of those fleeting otherworldly moments. I loved that record.

I also loved the song she recorded for the B-movie "The Deep," about as close as she ever got to doing a James Bond song (which would have been great!). I had that soundtrack with "Down Deep Inside" on otherworldly transparent blue vinyl. Her 15-minute version of Serge Gainsbourg's "Je T'aime" from Thank God It's Friday? To die for. And hearing her duke it out with Barbra Streisand on the 11-minute version of "No More Tears" is priceless.

I'm not sure that I heard Donna Summer's 17-minute cover of Jimmy Webb's lyrically obtuse epic of loss "MacArthur Park" dancing at the Bistro, but I know that it played the night that my friend Joe announced he had scored a few hits of windowpane acid. Let's just say this song is fried into my brain. Who turns a strange and melancholic song about a cake melting in the rain into a 17-minute disco song? I don't know if it was Summer herself or her producers who came up with this audaciously insane bit of genius. It's like an opera's mad song: beginning with a slow piano against stately strings, like something out of a drama queen's handbag, it takes almost two minutes even to understand what's happening. Suddenly Summer gives a theatrical laugh and it's on. That unforgettable horn-laden hook. It's ecstatic nonsense but it works: anyone who heard this song at that time surely knows what I mean. These songs were all huge at the clubs. Everyone jumped up from their banquettes and bar stools and filled the dance floor to catch the wave.

I remember when her triumphant double album "Bad Girls" came out. I remember the shiny shiny gatefold on extra-thick stock. Unlike the anonymous cooing female voices of so many disco acts, here was Donna Summer the star. While she had always flirted with musical styles beyond disco, "Bad Girls" was her successful power-grab for pop fame. Disco, soul, rock, even country. She not not only did it all, she did it all well. She understood in 1979, well ahead of many of us, that the disco genre she had pioneered couldn't sustain her indefinitely. She did amazing things with disco concept albums — there were several — and with giving new disco life to  Barry Manilow songs, but she knew when she needed to reinvent herself.

Well, we all seem to need to do that now and again. I note how Donna Summer was around (again!) a few times at significant moments in my own life. When I moved to New York City there was her ambitious eponymous album produced by Quincy Jones. It wasn't her biggest commercial success but it's a great record.

I remember her 1983 record "She Works Hard for the Money" with some ambivalence. This was a super big pop hit for her, and certainly the songs were grandly envisioned. But I didn't love this new Donna Summer, and her new openly born-again Christian identity was hard to reconcile with the Donna Summer who helped a generation of gay men dance out of their closets on to the streets. I am prepared now to accept that the fading of her reputation among gay men was the product of inaccurate malicious rumor, but there was a moment when we felt a sting of betrayal. I've said it before but the 1980s were a terrible decade.

Her later records were never huge, though the ones I know have a few magic moments. To my great regret I never saw her perform live.

But eventually all was forgiven. She didn't take back what she gave us, even if for a moment there was uncomfortable silence. Donna, we loved you, we really loved you.

Another one gone too damn soon; this part of growing up and older is hard, to see the people who helped shaped us, even from the other side of speakers and wires, drop away. Dim all the lights, sweet darling.... Love it don't come easy. But when you find the perfect love, let it fill you up. 

Thank you Donna. Thanks for being the soundtrack to my growing up.

Ken Russell Made Me Gay

Well, that's not really true. But exposure to the famous nude wrestling scene from Ken Russell's 1969 film "Women In Love" in my later teens certainly provided my developing prurient mind with much fodder for the imagination, and planted all sorts of romantic and not-so-romantic notions in my young head. This scene featuring Alan Bates and Oliver Reed is one of the most sensuously homoerotic of all-time classic cinema. Neither actor was gay, of course, and Oliver Reed seems to have been anything but a gay icon in his personal life. But the screenwriter of "Women in Love" was none other than decades-later legendary gay activist Larry Kramer, who undoubtedly crafted the slow burn of this scene with his own aesthetic bent in bringing D.H. Lawrence's novel to life. Speaking as anything but a film connoisseur, the whole film is sort of a textbook late 1960s art film: moody and striking and not really the kind of thing you want to watch for light viewing. This one scene, not exactly pornographic but not exactly in the safe for work category either, certainly pushed the edge. Even when I first saw it I appreciated how it derives its homoeroticism from two burly manly men rather than from angular elven blondes like Michael York, whom it seems was featured in every art film of that era with a male character of ambiguous sexuality, and yet who did nothing for my own developing gay identity.

Director Ken Russell has just passed on at the age of 84. On behalf of once-young gay men everywhere who grew up in a time without openly gay role models and without gay reality TV basic cable, let me say "thank you thank you thank you" for these immortal four minutes of cinema. Rest in peace.

Sunday Night Schmalz: A Taste of Honey

Remember Herb Alpert doing his early-sixties signature song "A Taste of Honey"? It's the hit track from the album showing a model covered in "whipped cream" with a seductive look on her face, and it's a sort of cliche of swinging sixties pre-rock bachelor pad music. Well now forget about that. Here's a version of that song from Andy Bey and the Bey Sisters, the singing group that launched the career of the amazing honey-voiced singer Andy Bey, who is quite still around. Recorded in 1964, this version slows the tempo way down and takes the song from the height of the party to late night at the bar. What is in other hands almost cloyingly perky is transformed into something else altogether. All of a sudden it's introspective melancholia, the perfect accompaniment to a neat glass of booze, some dim lights, and, like tonight, a chilly evening with dark streets that may or may not lead you to where you expect them to.

I didn't know it before looking it up for this entry, but it's originally from a 1960 Broadway show and was also popularized by... The Beatles. When I was younger I didn't get this kind of slow, bittersweetly lush vocal music. But as a middle-aged gay man this stuff seems to get right under my skin.

"I will return...
I'll come back for the honey and you."

A Trip Down Disco Memory Lane

I'm not sure what kind of nostalgic melancholia influenced me to wallow in this song and ones like it this past weekend, but this I did. Musique was a studio assemblage, the brainchild of Patrick Adams, one of the pioneering geniuses of the disco art form, based out of New York. It's the product of a room full of semi-anonymous studio musicians, including the later-to-become-a-diva Jocelyn Brown among the cooing female singers, most assuredly not the same trio of models seen cavorting on the album's cover. The album "Keep On Jumpin'," released way back in 1978, spawned one huge hit, the precocious ode to, depending on your perspective, pubic hair or public-park sex or perhaps a daringly risqué confusion of the two, "In The Bush" (as in "Push, push, in the bush"). Ironically I first heard the tune as a young gay man at a Chicago gay bar equally precociously named The Bushes. You had to rely on context to know if someone's "I'll meet you later at the Bushes," was a call for a midnight rendezvous in Lincoln Park or merely an invitation to a trendily accoutremented pub on Halsted Street. The ads for this bar in the local gay bar-rag happily evoked the possibilities. I personally didn't experience the joys of night-time park-going until I moved to New York, but that is a different story.

If "In The Bush" is promiscuously propulsive and funky (do track it down if you've not heard it), its album-mate "Summer Love" was the kind of tune reserved for the later hours of the disco near closing time when its sugary-sweet first taste would soon dissolve into bittersweet self examination and a veritable tidal wave of stoically repressed tears on the dancefloor.

Patrick Adams understood how clearly good disco music had to manipulate not only a listener's feet and pelvis, but his emotional inner life as well. Listen to what vocal arranger and singer Christine Wiltshire has done with the vocals here: the playful sexiness of "In The Bush" is abandoned in favor of an almost somber and restrained harmony, wondering whether the Summer Love — past or present dancing partner, presumably — would stick around through thick and thin or wander off into an autumn dawn, never looking back. In 1970s gay disco dancing there was not a lot of conversation: each dancer is alone with the sensory overload of the experience and with the feelings conjured up in the musique, er, music. Here Adams gives us something to think about...to feel about. On the floor, and I remember it well, pain is transformed into catharsis and when the flashing lights and the sound of pounding loud drums are left behind in the night, so much painful emptiness has been healed by hearing hope and worry and love or lack thereof strummed away, as it were, by the dj's fingers. Your body's a little sore, and if you're coming down off some good psychedelic drugs, you're feeling like you may have just fought a battle but you emerged victorious, having traveled to the far realms of the innerverse. At least that was what 1979 was like for me.

The heroes of this music are the strings, giving real definition and substance to the cliché "heartstrings." Even the instrumental "Love Theme" version of this song, also on Youtube, manages to convey the same bittersweetness without the presence of the voices and the modest lyric. Give the funky drummer some, sure, but it's that real old-fashioned analog string orchestra that makes this music so human, and at least to me, maintains a certain emotional impact thirty-plus years later. They don't make disco music like this anymore. But maybe you had to be there.

(Apologies for the unbelievably horrible visual accompanying this video. It was the best-sounding clip of this song I could find on Youtube. This album has stayed in print on CD and download.)

NY State Victory: Divorce Equality!

In a brilliant display of political maneuvering, and a stunning defeat for anti-gay bigots, New York's governor Cuomo succeeded last night in getting a marriage equality passed in the state's Republican-controlled State Senate. The previous governor had been unable to get a similar bill through two years ago when the State Senate was controlled by Democrats; this year's effort involved a massive behind the scenes push from marriage equality advocates, and the addition of somewhat redundant language that absolutely positively guaranteed religious institutions could hang on to bigoted practices if they so desired. Cuomo signed the bill into law almost immediately upon its passage.

Despite the massive lobbying efforts of hateful organizations like the National Organization for [sic] Marriage and New York's wretched Conservative Party, and despite rallies organized by bigoted religious fundamentalists (including one led by the lone Democratic Senate opponent Ruben Diaz, who is also a Pentacostal preacher), the bill passed with a several-vote majority: four brave Republicans bucked their party line and crossed over to support it. The NOMbies and their ilk tried again to inflict their backward beliefs and questionably selective interpretation of religion on our secular society and failed. Thank God decent people with a greater respect for the law and a more loving spiritual/religious philosophy prevailed.

And all of this on the Friday of Gay Pride Week, two days before one of the world's largest lesbian and gay pride parades takes to the streets of Manhattan. It's certainly something to celebrate, even if it's a local victory. This makes only six states where marriage of same-sex partners is recognized, and federal laws like DOMA and numerous state constitutional bans on marriage equality make anti-gay statutes still the law of the land as a whole.

According to friends, the streets of the Village were full of celebration last night, even though the uber-gentrified neighborhood is the shadow of the gayborhood it once was: only investment bankers and celebrities can afford to live there these days. I'm looking forward to more street partying tonight, and to a triumphant pride parade tomorrow. But as real and joyful as this victory is, I feel called to qualify the celebratory tone.

While as long as the marriages of straight people are recognized and legally advantageous, it's only just that the marriages of gay people be treated equally under the law. But what about that institution of marriage? Those of us of a certain age can remember a time when marriage was rightfully derided as a outdated relic of the past. Its origins as a tradition are not actually in the glorification of love or the holy sanctification of family relationships, but in a bourgeois property relationship where women were turned into the property of men.

And for many of us, a fairytale picture of marriage as the pinnacle of human fulfillment does not jibe with reality. My parents divorced after fifteen or so years of marriage before I was ten. My mother's second marriage lasted a little over a year; and my father once described his second marriage as an "on-again off-again" thing. My father's father divorced my father's wife when he (inaccurately) questioned my father's paternity. My mother and my grandmother were both forced to retool their lives completely upon finding themselves single. While my mom worked when she was married, she had to find a new career that would support the two of us independently. My grandmother was forced to find work in the mid-1930s, no easy feat. And yet despite hardship and disappointment, I don't think either my mother or grandmother would have described their lives as lesser for having spent the greater parts of their lives unmarried.

Closer to home and modern times, I love my boyfriend very much and feel very lucky to be with him for the six or so years we've been together, but our relationship is what we make of it: I'm not sure how recognition by the state would change its trajectory or legitimize our intimacy.

It's not that I'm heartless: I've read those stories of many-decades-long gay partners finally being able to marry with a tear in my eye. During the brief period when marriage equality was the law in California, lesbian activist pioneers Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon were able to marry in 2008 after being a couple for fifty-six years, a few months before Del Martin passed on at the age of 87. And yet I wonder what are the ramifications of the gay movement, which once described itself as the "gay liberation movement," now aiming at the much more earthbound target of equality through marriage rights.

As I recently wrote, I grew up knowing I was gay. I never fantasized about getting married. Since I was never interested in meeting "the right girl," that ritual held no power for me. While the times I have been single I usually longed for a steady relationship; but what I longed for was companionship and intimacy and deep friendship, not a ceremony of bells and lace, and not a piece of paper from the government. How will little gay boys in the future grow up? Will they feel unfulfilled if they're not married in white by their early twenties? And what about our new gay divorcees? Will gay people get married too often? Everybody thinks straight people who get married and divorced too often are losers. How will that change gay male culture, where promiscuity and serial monogamy seem more accepted as alternatives to life-long commitment?

There's a collective of queer activists called "Against Equality." While I don't endorse their views as a whole, I think they ask provocative, important questions. Here's an excerpt from their statement on marriage:

"When it comes to gay marriage, the times, they are a-confusing. For instance, we recently overhead some people extolling the virtues of marriage, and how it allowed them to finally join in family gatherings as respectable married people, instead of skulking in as shamefully unmarried partners. They reminisced about the joys of being able to walk up to coworkers and introduce their husbands, the sparkle of their wedding rings legitimizing their socially sanctioned and forever-to-be unions....

Gay marriage apes hetero privilege and allows everyone to forget that marriage ought not to be the guarantor of rights like health care. In their constant invoking of the “right” to gay marriage, mainstream gays and lesbians express a confused tangle of wishes and desires. They claim to contest the Right’s conservative ideology yet insist that they are more moral and hence more deserving than sluts like us. They claim that they simply want the famous 1000+ benefits but all of these, like the right to claim protection in cases of domestic violence, can be made available to non-marital relationships.

We wish that the GM crowd would simply cop to it: Their vision of marriage is the same as that of the Right, and far from creating FULL EQUALITY NOW! as so many insist (in all caps and exclamation marks, no less) gay marriage increases economic inequality by perpetuating a system which deems married beings more worthy of the basics like health care and economic rights."

It's food for thought. Marriage equality is an important social victory, but when it turns to divorce equality, perhaps we should remember that civil rights and the liberation and fulfillment of human spirit are not equivalent. What is that prize we're keeping our eyes on, anyway?

(That art above is a quick ten-minute Photoshop cut and paste job by me, courtesy of Google images and modern technology. That's Barbie's Change-of-Heart Ken and Marx's Sam Cobra tying the rainbow ribbon!)

Gay Pride Week 2011: Flashback to 1989 - What a Riot!

This is a flyer from back in 1989, issued by the Radical Faeries in New York City on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Stonewall riots. The Stonewall Riots — some call it the Stonewall Rebellion — was the mythic beginning of the modern gay liberation movement when New York City police on a routine bar raid were met with resistance. You can click on the picture to see this flyer in its glory, but here's the first paragraph:

"Twenty years ago, on the night of Judy Garland's funeral, New York City cops went about their usual routine of harassing gay-bar patrons. But on that extraordinary night, an unorganized rabble of fed-up drag queens, dykes, radical street queers, and their friends at the Stonewall Inn Bar in Greenwich Village began to harass the cops back. They went on a rampaging riot giving birth to a new spirit and consciousness."

The Radical Faeries are free-spirited gay hippies who exist in a sort of parallel universe to mainstream gay society. They play with gender, politics and spirituality (and frankly, hygiene) in very creative ways: they're sort of modern day holy people, even twenty years after this flyer. This celebration planned a dramatic reenactment of the riot itself, which my memory fails to clearly remind me if I attended. I'm pretty sure in 1989 the Stonewall Inn, while today again a gay bar, was a take-out bagel restaurant.

I think it's important, even as the gay community changes and its priorities morph, to remember that back in 1969 it was not the accommodationists and assimiliationists of the gay world who took us on a journey to our civil rights, but the gay salt of the earth. If history books are full of famous people and "great men" leading the world to new places, reality reminds us it's the common people who really get it done.

Gay Pride 2011: Happy Gay Me!

That's my high school yearbook photo, from the year I graduated, 1976. Fortunately by then I had abandoned the really awful long stringy hair that had guaranteed I would be asked if I was a boy or a girl at least once a week. I was very serious. That's a quote from a 20th-century Chinese poet, Lu Hsun: "From the clay of life abandoned on the ground grow no lofty trees, only wild grass. Wild grass strikes no deep roots, has no beautiful flowers and leaves, yet it imbibes dew, water, and the blood, and flesh of the dead." Jesus, lighten up, dude! There's a more light-hearted photo of me in the Compass also: I'm dressed as a monk in my satirical rewrite of Shakespeare's Othello that was produced as a segment of the senior class variety show in the public high school in the incredibly privileged Connecticut suburb I had abruptly been made to call home for the previous three and a half years. If you've ever seen Ang Lee's brilliant film "The Ice Storm," minus the parental swingers at the key party you've seen my Connecticut life. I remember that ice storm.

I was not a light-hearted teenager, though I was not completely miserable either. Actually I loved school, and did well in it. Straight A's. I had friends in my classes, and a couple friends for after school and summers, but I spent most of my free time in High School sitting in the teachers' lounge hanging out with my English teachers. Mr. Economou and Ms. Burroughs were amazing teachers who challenged me to think clearly. They were great fun also. It wasn't that I was a teacher's pet, though I probably was. It was that I was deeply in physical love with the boy who I thought was the smartest, handsomest boy in the world, who was first invited to hang out on those comfy sofas, and after befriending me, invited me there with him. I'll call him T (having Googled him in adulthood he doesn't look like he'd enjoy being featured here).

I enjoyed cracking jokes with the teachers and learning so much, but most of all I enjoyed the opportunity to stare at T's crotch for hours and hours on end. It's how I spent a good portion of school season for the years 1974, 5 and 6. I didn't have particularly elaborate fantasies about T, but he filled out his corderoys and khakis very very well, if you know what I mean.

I thought about T a lot, even when I was home; though he lived in the very rich part of town and I lived in the very modest working-class section. We were not after-school friends. My mother loved books; she owned a lot of them. My father loved books, and he owned a lot of them. When they divorced the bulk of their combined book collection wound up in boxes that eventually made their way to our tiny attic in Connecticut. I made a nest in those books, and I had discovered all the good parts. I had also discovered that if I read the good parts and rubbed myself in a certain tremendously strange and exciting way, a disturbingly good sensation would occur sometimes involving, well, moisture that was most definitely not pee. Anyway as much as I loved the good parts of these books very few of them offered clues as to why I might find T so terribly intoxicating, and none really helped me turn my fantasies about him into particularly specific lurid scenarios, though I do remember that I had one particularly vivid dream involving reaching into his pocket for some keys. It was a terribly adult book collection, but avant garde literature from the 1950s and early 1960s rarely seemed to do more than occasionally mention queers.

Oh I knew what I was, without ever daring to put it into words. I was probably seven years old and playing with my little friend Herbie in Chicago when his father arrived home from work. His father proceeded to change out of his suit into his casual clothes in front of us. To be fair to Herbie's dad this was done completely unlasciviously without a tinge of impropriety. It was not what I saw when his father dropped his drawers — nothing actually, cause the tails of his dress shirt maintained his modesty — but what I felt. I certainly had no words for it, but here I am forty-five years later still remembering my absolute voyeuristic attraction; what I felt then as a seven-year-old boy is conjured up every time I see an unbelievably handsome man just out of possible reach in the middle age of my adulthood. It was stomach-thumping desire.

I didn't lose my virginity til I was nineteen, picking up a drunken Mexican man one cold winter night at a Chicago gay bar chosen because it was far from where I lived. He had a statue of the Virgin Mary on top of his TV set and a stack of porn in the tray underneath it. To my dismay he fell asleep in the middle of this momentous milestone. As Dan Savage says, "It gets better." So it wasn't like the hormones I discovered gestating inside me at age seven sent me on a ruinous or dissolute adolescence. I made a couple vague sexual overtures to friends in Junior High School before we left Chicago for Connecticut, but they were rejected good-naturedly and off-handedly. No friendships were lost. I developed a very dirty mind, but I was a very good serious boy.

After staring at T all year, he went off sailing for summer break. Which turned his skin a wonderful tan and bleached all the golden blonde in his hair to pure white by the start of school each fall. My last summer at home before senior year mother took me on a summer road trip. In Washington DC I passed by the hotel newsstand, my eyes widening at the copies of Playgirl arrayed beneath the cash register. I remember breaking out in cold sweat and the shakes as I grabbed a couple dollars out of my mother's purse later and went downstairs to make that magazine mine. The first time I jerked off to that magazine I imagine I lasted about thirty seconds. It was a very well read magazine by the time I finally tired of hiding it and guiltily threw it away by cramming it the bottom of a garbage bag.

I've never asked my mother when she figured out I was gay — she didn't confront me with it until after we had both (separately) moved to New York in the 1980s. But jesus the seventies were so fucked up she had to see it. I still remember the awkward evenings we spent sitting on the couch together watching TV movies of the week. There was "That Certain Summer," which history remembers as a ground-breaking movie: what I remember about it is my inability to meet my mother's gaze for hours afterward. And then there was "Born Innocent," starring Linda Blair. Yes, of Exorcist fame. Anyway, Linda is a bad girl, sent to reform school, and she gets dragged off by even worse girls into a storage closet where they rape her with the handle of a bathroom plunger. I can also still remember the loud crinkle of our TV dinner trays as my our running conversation during TV time turned into mortified silence. Well, in my mind I am a little confused whether it was a bathroom plunger in the film or some other utility object just as I'm a little confused at which I tried sticking up my own butt somewhat later. My bad! There was certainly a half-hearted and excruciatingly fumbling birds-and-bees talk from my mother. Fortunately school had covered all those details so it was mercifully brief.

I never confessed my lusts to T. Perhaps if I had been a teenage drinker things might have been different, but alas. I'm pretty sure he knew I worshiped the ground he walked on, or rather, the couch he spread his legs on as he propped them up on the low coffee table in that teachers' lounge. I'm pretty sure he enjoyed the attention. Who doesn't want worshipers, after all? But as though we were living out a curiously inverted "Brideshead Revisited," T's Sebastian act was a kind of private show for me never meant to have an actual pay off. Our friendship didn't last past graduation: He grew up to be the staid suburbanite, inheriting the respectable family mantle and I to be the raging gay liberationist/communist/pagan lost in the gritty big city. For what it's worth, my adult taste in adult men is nothing like T.

When I got to college back in Chicago in the fall of 1976, I felt very unsteady on my feet. There was actually an out gay couple, Marcus and Stuart, if the names don't escape me. Bravely for that time of decade they would hold hands as they crossed the school quad. And I would cross the street rather than be caught dead interacting with them. And that's what surprises me, because as a little gay seven year old, or a little gay Junior High School student or a bigger gay High School Student, I didn't know enough to feel shame at who and what I was. It was only with the passage into adulthood and the dissipation of my happy daydreams of T, that it occurred to me I was not necessarily like other people, and that the deep dark reality of the real me was not necessary something that would be welcomed and accepted by those around me. The next two years would be in some ways the hardest of my life as I strove to become somebody. I discovered I had somehow learned to be afraid of who I might be.

And that's what Gay Pride, a profoundly political holiday, ultimately gave me: the tools to conquer that fear; fear that didn't come from inside me, but was placed on me. I've written elsewhere on The Cahokian about my fruitful steps to coming out. I made it. I had to leave a lot behind, but I made it. I could do a lot more oversharing and talk about sexually maturing through the 1980s amidst the terrifying rise of AIDS, and perhaps I will someday. But the point I wanted to make here, now, was that once I was an innocent child, growing into the only person he knew how to be. Nobody made me gay, except perhaps God Him or Her self. My life was hard and easy, full of joy and pain, like most people lucky enough to make the journey through childhood.

When all of today's anti-gay marriage bigots say "think of the children," I do. I think of the gay child I was. I think of how lucky I was avoiding too harsh an eye of judgment. No parent ever told me not to be who I was. I thrived on tremendous unconditional love. I made my own mistakes. I had my own disappointments. I had my own successes. Every child, destined to be gay or destined to be straight, deserves that opportunity to discover who he or she can become. How afraid people are! And how sad that is, especially for the children who might be falsely protected from having the opportunity to discover who they are, free of condemnation and judgment.

Life is still sometimes scary. But I'm proud to be... me.

"How To Survive a Plague"

This week marks the thirtieth anniversary of the medical establishment realizing that a new and virulent killer was in our midst. Back in 1981, HIV/AIDS was not yet understood, nor even accurately named. It would be years before scientists and doctors understood what they were dealing with, or could name it correctly, much less treat it; but back then they recognized that the disease killing a small number of gay men seemed to be something new and dangerous. Now, thirty years later, millions of lives around the world have been lost to the disease; millions more people live with the virus in their systems, and while expensive treatment seems to have greatly reduced its mortal danger, HIV/AIDS remains without an actual cure. I remember 1981 like it was yesterday. I remember the faces no longer here. I remember the fear that gripped us as AIDS spread.

"How To Survive a Plague" is the name of an exciting new documentary film being created by David France, a journalist, activist, and now filmmaker with thirty years of experience bearing media witness to the AIDS years. (He's also a dear friend referred to obliquely throughout this blog; our friendship began that same 1981, the year we both moved to New York City from the Midwest.)

Still in production, "How To Survive a Plague" uses archival footage and modern interviews to tell a truly miraculous story. It tells how a small group of activists not only waged a political struggle around the disease and its disregard by American political authorities, but more than that also: How they resolved to help themselves survive by pushing the scientific edge, leading an unfocused and uncaring scientific establishment to the medical breakthroughs that since the early 1990s have saved so many lives. The film reveals how central and crucial the activism of the gay community and people with AIDS themselves was to transforming HIV from an automatic death sentence to something that could be survived. The state of AIDS/HIV today is shown to be the result not of medical or scientific luck, but the result of the determination to survive of people the U.S. government considered entirely expandable.

A trailer for the film is not yet public; when one is available I will post it here. I can tell you what I have been privileged to see privately is absolutely stunning: it's moving and simply beyond inspiring. You can "like" the film's facebook page for updates and more information.

Please Dawn, Not on Christmas!

In honor of Christmas shopping, most of which I finished doing today, here's a brilliant clip from the John Waters camp classic film "Female Trouble." This is one of my favorite scenes from one of my favorite movies, a cautionary tale for gift-givers everywhere. That is, of course, the late Divine as Dawn Davenport. If you're partaking in this sort of holiday tradition this year, pay attention!

The closest I came to holiday drama as a child was when I was given a sort of rag doll I must have asked for (yes, I had progressive parents!), and the poor thing's head fell off within minutes of unwrapping, spilling sawdust everywhere. I can still remember what felt like hours of shrieking horror at the grisly tragedy that befell my new doll. I was inconsolable. The next day my parents exchanged it for an unbreakable plastic baby doll, the kind you filled with water which would soon dribble out of a tiny hole between its legs. There are many of life's lessons right there.

World AIDS Day: In Memory of My Friend John

I met John Moroney in the early 1980s at the Beacon Baths on the east side of midtown in New York City. Although I was proudly out, I was terrible at dating. I met guys at gay bars which led to the occasional hookup, the rare date, and the occasional friendship, but the place that holds a special memory for my mid-1980s social/sexual life is that pit of gay bathhouse. It was two random floors of a random office building. If you stayed overnight on Sunday, you found yourself leaving on damp-smelling elevators as the building's other tenants arrived for their regular office jobs. The Beacon was legendary for catering not to the downtown pretty-boy type but to closeted commuters and regular guys; it also proudly had the market cornered on the pre-bear world chubby-chaser scene: big guys like me could go there and feel welcome and desired. As though a study in contrasts the place was staffed by mostly straight immigrants from Bangladesh: they would hand you a towel and escort you to eiher your locker on the first floor or your little cubicle on the second, occasionally copping a feel.

Calling it a bathhouse is generous: there was a steamroom and a shower but this was a place not for spa-like recreation nor sporting activities but for sex. It was dimly lit and divided up into plywood cubicles with small little platform beds in each room. They played music from an extraordinarily small collection of cassette tapes; I still have flashbacks every time I hear Diana Ross's "Touch Me in the Morning" album with its cover of John Lennon's "Imagine." Imagine, indeed. I certainly didn't go every weekend, but when I went I almost always had a great time. And to my surprise, along with some great sex and occasional STD I also picked up quite a number of friends there. That was the way of things in that era of gay male culture. AIDS was unknown the first time I went there, and I believe the Beacon was among those closed in 1986 or so by public health officials. By then we were all pretty freaked out about AIDS and had stopped going to such places with such wanton enthusiasm.

Anyway one night I went and this incredibly handsome man with a bushy red beard started cruising me. This was a bath, not a bar, and there was no social chit-chat. I went into his room and we had what I recall being an incredibly hot encounter. In the way of such things and such places the social interaction was saved for afterwards. We were making out when I asked him what he did for a living. "I'm a cop!" he barked out and left it like that, almost as though it were the script of some kind of porn-movie fantasy scenario. Which meant we immediately had sex again.

I don't remember if it was that first time or the second time we happened to meet there, but we walked out together in the morning and he gave me a ride home. He wasn't, it turned out, much of a tough guy at all. He was a pussycat, actually. He really worked as a "corrections officer," ie, prison guard, in a career that shortly after we met went south. There was some accusation of something or other; and while John had some trouble finding worthwhile work for the rest of his life, that job hadn't been a good match for him. He was a working-class Irish-American native New Yorker but what John really loved was big guys and Broadway shows. I remember when he went to see "Cats," he explained every bit of that show to me despite my protestations that it sounded awful. He lived with his partner in an open relationship down in Chinatown; Randy was a playwright, and the two were completely open and tolerant of each other's busy social lives. I became one of John's many friends with benefits, and was lucky enough to be introduced to Randy; their relationship was strong and loving.

By 1987 or so John started getting sick, and soon enough he was diagnosed with AIDS. In a couple years he appeared to age twenty. He became gaunt, his hair got all wispy, and he was hospitalized repeatedly for pneumonia. He and Randy lived in a co-op John had inherited from his father. At one point his mother, a bitter harridan who hated John being gay but who lived in the same apartment complex, asked Randy what he was going to do when John died, where he would live. John was furious, the only time I'd ever seen him lose his temper. He raged at his mother assuring her that they had had papers drawn up to prevent Randy being turned into the street after John was gone. I visited John the last time in the hospital; he was comatose, still and silent. He died a day or two after my last visit.

At his funeral his mother and her relatives refused to acknowledge Randy or any of John's friends. We who had all known John as he really was, intimately even, were relegated to a corner of the funeral chapel. I have never seen such horrible cold-hearted people in my life. And true to her word, his mother immediately tried to force Randy out of the home they had shared together. Surrounded by the memories of their life together, Randy chose to leave the apartment rather than spend years engaged in a legal battle with such an evil human being.

I wish I could say John was the first or the only friend I lost that decade. Sadly neither is true. It seemed strangely commonplace back in the 1980s, when some acquaintance or friend of a friend disappeared from common sight, to assume the worst; how terrible that so often it was true, that another gay man had succumbed to the mysterious and awful AIDS.

I miss them all, and I feel like we owe it to all of them to keep their memories alive.

Sadly I have no photos of John. Graphic snagged from The Renaissance Society's website; that's a neon treatment of the old ACT-UP silence equals death icon.

Grrrrrr!

Directed by director Doug Langway, Bear City is a sweet portrayal of romance and friendship in the "bear" subculture of New York's gay community. Described by one of its writers as a "chick flick without chicks," it's the story of a group of friends dealing with relationship issues, body acceptance issues, sexual identity issues, social acceptance, and the standard movie fare of love and sex. While that might sound like a dry mouthful, it's not only frequently funny and occasional touching and quite moving, it's also full of heart. There's ribald and risque nudity, albeit tamed and not full frontal. I've seen a fair number of would-be commercial gay independent films, and this was the first time I felt more than a passing identification with the film's subjects and characters. While of course this is a fantasized movie not a realistic documentary of bear culture, it manages to depict the bear world successfully straddling realism and idealism. While any movie like this is by definition filled with cliches, it avoids being cloying or over-idealized. And crucially for me, the bear heroes of the film, including ones shown in varying stages of undress, range from svelte to plus size and from young to old.

For the uninitiated, "bears" are big and/or hairy gay men. In the super-objectified sexually-charged urban gay culture, identification with big, lumbering, furry animals was a way of disarming a dominant culture that seemed to value only skinny, hairless boyishness. Copping a certain exaggerated hyper-masculinity from the gay leather culture, the bear community grew into a recognized subculture in the early 1990s. It has spawned sub-subcultures like muscle bears, daddy bears, chubby bears, and bear admirers, or chasers.

Full disclosure: I am a bear!

I've always been a big guy, and when I found the developing bear culture my experience of the gay community around me changed qualitatively. I found myself no longer shunned but desired. It was great for my sex life, great for my love life, and it was a great community to become part of and make friends in. It was liberating to find an accepting home outside of the world of body-fascist pretty boys. Over time calling oneself a "bear" has peaked and valleyed as a social trend, and there are plenty of gay men who call themselves bears without embracing its openness and warmheartedness. Some of today's bears, for instance, deny the place of fat guys at the foundation of the community. But two of the things I really appreciated about Bear City are that one of its sympathetic characters is a middle-aged fat guy--with a super hot smaller man as his lover--and that the revisionist exclusivity of "muscle bears" is portrayed as a kind of "mean girl" snobbishness.

Among the actors in the film are Gerald McCullouch, Brian Keane, the Big Gay Sketch Show's Stephen Guarino, Gregory Gunter, and Joe Conti. There's even a quick cameo from Randy Jones of the legendary Village People disco group. It's a great cast. And I won't be giving away the ending to say this is a lovely gay movie that ends happily: there's no tragically self-destructive main character and no drawn-out deathbed plea for sympathy.

I saw the movie last weekend with my boyfriend; I can be a grouch about movies and I was really blown away by how much fun this one was. The director, the producer, the cowriter and many of the movie's stars appeared for a Q&A afterwards. The audience at the packed theater was pretty much all bear. Woof!

Bear City is currently on a very limited run in New York City at the Quad Cinemas. The DVD will be released by TLA Releasing in November. Check out the film's trailer here.