Happy New Year from the Big Apple!

Like most New Yorkers, Michael and I are spending a nice quiet warm New Year's Eve at home watching on the tee vee all the miserable bastards in Times Square freeze their naughty bits off. It's very cold out tonight; in the 20sF with the wind blowing and the snow falling. And the NYPD forbids booze, and backpacks. What's more, they're all locked in there. They can't leave until the cops say they can, and no bathrooms. You can imagine what the mess is like the next morning. And they've been there since around 6PM when the cops close the Square.

The Dome of Heaven

I have an obsession that goes all the way back into my earliest childhood, an obsession with domes. Why this is, I have no idea. All I know is that at a very tender age, I made my first stroll into Dallas Hall on the SMU campus in Dallas, and was immediately captivated. I've known that building since I was 3 years old. I grew up in its shadow. For some mysterious reason, it never occurred to me as a child that the inside of the building might be something more than a collection of rooms. I remember being so surprised and astonished when I entered the rotunda for the first time around the age of 5 or 6. As I remember, it was not in good shape in those days. the paint was peeling from the faux Robert Adam ornament, and the glass in the oculus skylight was darkened with grime. But, I was still amazed to be looking at the structure from the inside.
My parents indulged my eccentric obsession with very generous side trips to state capitols whenever we did our road trips.

It's not just any dome that gets my obsessive attention. I've never been much of a fan of Bucky Fuller or his geodesic domes. They are too prosaic and centerless for my taste. The same is true of big stadium domes. The domes that have always won my love and admiration are the ones that have functioned as metaphor and proclaimed meaning to the surrounding city and countryside. That's the big problem with so much modern architecture, it doesn't even bother to try to articulate any kind of public meaning for the most part, and was never meant to do so. Modern architecture began as commercial and domestic architecture. It did not play much of a public or monumental role until after World War II. The only exceptions I can think of are just that, exceptions like Mies Van Der Rohe's monument to Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg.

The dome almost always plays the role of a metaphor for the sky or the heavens; the sky, not as it is, but as we earthbound creatures experience it, as a great arching vault far above us. And within that metaphor is a host of different and sometimes conflicting meanings. The Pantheon in Rome was one kind of sky metaphor. Hagia Sophia in Constantinople was a very different sky metaphor altogether. The domes of Islam and of Baroque art were two vastly different kinds of paradise metaphors. And the domes of NeoClassicism introduce an explicit political element into the sky metaphor, as well as a very modern literal mindedness.

I have a little time off, so I think I will just play with this a bit.

Dallas Hall, SMU, Dallas, Texas

Dallas Hall, interior of the dome.

Glass in the Dallas Hall skylight

Happy New Year Everybody!

So, Who's The Greatest American?

The whole business of making lists of greatest this and that is very arbitrary, and usually says more about the person making the list than about the items on it.
And polls to pick the Greatest this or that are nothing more than popularity contests projected into the past.

And of course, none of those caveats is going to prevent me from making my own lists.
Here are my own 4 picks for the Greatest American. One of them would be very controversial in most circles, but I'm sticking with him. Yes, the choice says a lot about me. I also think it is interesting that 3 of the 4 I picked were murdered. Maybe that says something too, and not entirely about me.

So, who do you think is the Greatest American? Feel free to pick more than one and to make lists of runners-up. Among my runners up would be Mark Twain, Frederick Douglas, Susan B. Anthony, Eugene V. Debs, Franklin Roosevelt, Sam Houston, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and Quanah Parker.

Feel free to add cultural, scientific, and religious heroes as well. I'd put Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Thomas Eakins, Mary Cassatt, Willem deKooning, Frank Lloyd Wright, Muddy Waters, Billy Holiday, Lou Reed, and Walt Whitman on the list.

*Speaking of lists of Greatest Americans, I work right next to a forgotten landmark of New York that was once nationally famous, and is now hardly ever visited anymore, even by those of us who see it daily; The Hall of Fame of Great Americans, the original Hall of Fame.  It now forms part of the campus of Bronx Community College.

Abraham Lincoln

Martin Luther King Jr.

Harvey Milk

Eleanor Roosevelt

Alexander Nevsky Wins!

Well, 50 million Russians voted in the Greatest Russian poll, and it turns out that medieval hero Alexander Nevsky, who fought back an invasion of Teutonic Knights wins as the greatest Russian.

However, Our Great Comrade Joseph Stalin placed third in the poll. He still did much better than I would have liked.

For Mimi and HM the Q.

Here is a little sampling of the Trooping of the Color. My mother would love this, all those magnificent horses. And that marching band is absolutely spectacular.
Behind the band is a Phaeton with Prince Phillip and some old lady wearing a bucket on her head. ; )

Big Daddy Stalin

The overwhelming winner of the popular poll in Russia to determine the greatest of all Russians is none other than Joe Stalin.  There is at least one priest who keeps an icon of The Father of All Progressive Ideas in his study.  Others like Pushkin and Catharine the Great came in a distant 4th or 5th.  Ivan the Terrible came in a distant second.  Tolstoy, Sakharov, Yuri Gagarin, even cranky old Solzhenitsyn, didn't even rate.

I'd like to be able to say that it's just because Russia is so weird, but I'm afraid the rest of us don't get off that easy.  I remember at least one Russian colleague back in my commercial mural days, among many other Russian colleagues, who genuinely loved Stalin.  Stranger still, he was a Russian Jew.  He was once a great star among official artists in the old Soviet Union.  His wife was a physics professor.  They were among the Soviet official elite.   When the Soviet Union crashed around their ears, they came to America to start a new life and found only humiliation. He found work as a decorative painter, and she could find work only as a hotel maid because she could not speak English. 

 I saw something similar in Italy with the crazy old  signora who rented me a room in Florence 20 years ago.  Her eyes would get moist with tears of fond nostalgia whenever she heard the name Mussolini.  Her son was a minor official in the Italian Christian Democratic Party, notorious as a hideout for unregenerate Fascists after World War II.

As much as we protest that we love Liberty, Equality, and Brotherhood, in our heart of hearts we yearn for Big Daddy to make everything right, to protect us and our kind, and above all, to revenge us on our enemies.  Maybe I'm getting cynical in my dotage, but I see this in political circles, and even more in religious circles these days.  In an age of dramatic change and upheaval, a time of great anxiety such as the present, people want clarity and certainty.  We want a holy instruction manual for getting through the world and a Big Daddy or a collection of Big Daddies to read it and interpret it for us and to tell us what to do next.  We want God to be the biggest daddiest Big Daddy of them all.  We want Him to come down in clouds of glory with loud thunder, lightning flashing, sword in hand, and wreak vengeance upon all our enemies.  We want to bind their kings in chains and see them deeply wailing.  That's what we really want in our heart of hearts.  We don't want peace and love, we want revenge.  We want power and glory.  We want to see our enemies cringing before us begging for mercy.  That's what we've always wanted if the Bible and all other ancient literature is to be believed.  

I've always thought that German idealist business of history as idea coming into being was all balderdash.  When it comes to History, I'm a complete atheist.  I don't believe in cycles of history, or "History Will Judge," or zeitgeist.  History is the biological struggle for survival and domination projected into the social sphere.  The historical record is mostly a record of crime.  If there is a providential plan in any of it, then it is known only to Providence.

And God did come down to earth; but, we didn't get that Big Daddy we always wanted.   Instead, we got  a tiny helpless baby completely at our mercy and dependent upon us.  So much for Big Daddy.

UPDATE:

And what a coincidence!  December 29 is Holy Innocents' Day when we remember all the little ones slaughtered by Big Daddy Herod in his rage and paranoia.

A Year Older and Deeper in Debt

I was born Christmas Day in the year this happened:

"Schlaff in himmlische ruh." Happy Holidays from Waltraut Geburstag

Post Christmas: "It's A Wonderful Life," The Lost Ending

Somehow, this seems remarkably appropriate this year.  Only Mr. Potter took $50 Billion this time, not $8 thousand.   And he's still trying to leave George Bailey holding the bag.  George's response to this should be a lesson to us all.




Heartwarming isn't it?

My Favorite Christmas Music: Once In David's Royal City

A Blessed Christmas to All.

My Favorite Christmas Music: No Room in the Inn

Another Incarnational Picture

Rembrandt, an etching showing the entire 19th chapter of the Gospel of Matthew, known as "The Hundred Guilder Print."

Emanuel, God With Us

An Incarnational Picture

Jan Van Eyck, The Dresden Triptych

"And the Word became Flesh and dwelt among us."

Some of My Favorite Nativity Pictures

Rembrandt

Caravaggio

Albrecht Dürer

Hugo Van Der Goes

Fra Angelico

Giotto

Duccio

Even More Xmas from New York

Saint Eartha Kitt, pray for us.



Shout out to Pope Benedict XVI, do you wear lederhosen under your cassock?

UPDATE:

Eartha Kitt, Rest in Peace.

More Merry Xmas from New York

I also posted this for my students as a holiday sendoff for the end of the semester.

Working For a Purer More Wholesome America

A lesbian was brutally gang raped in San Francisco December 13.

Ride on ye Knights of Christ!

UPDATE: 

The Pope says that these guys really are doing God's work.  Thanks guys for keeping the world "normal."

And we all know that spikes in anti-gay violence are in no way connected to anti-gay political initiatives and public pronouncements by powerful religious figures, right?

sure.

Keep fighting for a 'Normal' World!

Damn Workers!

Let's put the blame for the economic collapse right where it belongs, on autoworkers, and their unreasonable demands to be employed and paid decently.  And it was Fannie and Freddie loaning out all that money to black people who ruined the housing market, right?  It certainly is not the fault of all those executives in the financial industry who stole or lost billions, and are now using government money to fund their golden parachutes!  It certainly isn't the fault of all those executives who turned the whole financial industry into one big casino, and now no one knows who's honest and who's a crook.

What are you, some kind of a communist?

(Irony off)

Why are there so few Hannukah songs and so many Christmas songs?

Because all the Jewish composers are busy writing Christmas songs. I'm beginning to think that Christmas is like the rest of the entertainment industry, a creation of Jews and gay men for the consumption of heterosexual gentiles. Exemplum Gratia, this number written by George Wyle (id est Bernard Weissman), and performed by Johnny Mathis:

Merry Xmas from New York!

Happy Hannukah!

What a lovely coincidence! Today is the shortest darkest day of the year, and the beginning of the Feast of Lights, Hannukah. A happy one to all!

All This, and Heaven Too!

Enjoy!

It's Over

The ACN Bishops in palmier days

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the great Coup d'Eglise is over.

The schismatics played their last hand. Four dioceses, Quincy, Fort Worth, Pittsburgh, and San Joaquin, broke apart rather than march out in lockstep behind their departing bishops. The great tidal wave of defections from the Episcopal Church never happened and probably won't.
Canterbury threw cold water on the idea of a Third North American Province, saying that it requires a process that takes years, and that the applications haven't even been submitted yet.
Unless some right wing billionaire provides funds for endless litigation (not likely), then the lawsuits over the properties in those 4 dioceses will end in settlements before they go to trial.

I'd say that the Coup is over and it failed.
The splitters will join the throng of tiny schismatic former Episcopal congregations who spend as much time quarreling among themselves as with their former church.
The Episcopal Church will continue, and I predict not much altered by the experience. It will still be faction-ridden with conflicting constituencies. The Presiding Bishop and her successors will still have the awkward and stressful task of holding everyone together at the same table.
The Episcopal Church will continue to be one of those rare churches that says, "No, we don't have all the answers. We're still trying to figure it all out and we're doing the best that we can with what we have and God provides. Care to help out?"

The Academic Life

I've just spent the past 2 days reading 32 student term papers with more piles to go. I'm so afraid of turning into Miss Anne Elk someday.

This is one of my favorite Python sketches, so weird and so spot on at the same time.

Every Cloud Must Have a Silver Lining

And I'm trying to find it with the choice of Rick Warren.  I suppose it was politics that drove the decision.  Obama said explicitly and frequently that he wants to be President of all the people of the United States, and not just of the people who elected him.  That's fair enough, but Warren is a very divisive figure in a very focus-grouped carefully marketed wrapper.  It's the old combination of prosperity gospel and parochialism dressed up in suburban franchise packaging.

Hell, why not go for a twofer and have +Gene Robinson give the benediction; piss off the left on one end and the right on the other.  And the irony is that on certain matters of history, theology, and doctrine, Bishop Robinson is actually  MORE conservative than Warren.

I would even prefer to see the elderly Billy Graham wheeled out on a gurney to the inauguration than listen to Warren.

Despite the inevitable Democratic Party leadership tone-deafness to the feelings of its most inconvenient but reliable constituency, LGBTs, I'm still "punched as pleased" to see Obama become the 44th President of the United States of America.

UPDATE:

Elizabeth Kaeton has a very good, measured, and thoughtful post on Rick Warren at the Inauguration here.

Further Thoughts on Rick Warren at the Inauguration

(Above is the dreaded cartoon that was too much for Grandmere Mimi, a woman of taste and refinement. I found a perfect use for it here)

America's Pastor

Rick Warren is to give the invocation at Obama's inauguration.

Everyone is blathering on about what a politically astute move this is, since the only people complaining are the dirty fucking hippies and the fags.

And as we all know, punching out hippies and beating up queers (all while declaring that you're not really a homophobe, that breaking his face is really just "tough love") is the politically moderate and and mainstream thing to do.

Sarah Posner has some good thoughts on Rick Warren.

I hate how everyone is tiptoeing around Rev. Warren.

He's a douchebag.

Oh My God! I Love Her Even More!!

Margaret Cho comes out! She's a Christian, and always has been. She says so herself, "I'm a Christian, you fuckers!" 

 Life couldn't possibly get more fabulous! (Well, maybe President Obama officiating at a great mass gay wedding might).

Remember when you used to remember the '80s?

I have a huge wave of term papers breaking against my shore, so blogging will be light for the rest of the week.

In the meantime, here's some '80s nostalgia!



Fond Republican memories! Reagan ruled. All the pop stars looked like closet sisters (see above). The Woodstock Generation discovered greed. All the kids wanted to be Ivan Boesky. Jerry Rubin went Republican. Abbie Hoffman killed himself. AIDS was killing off the gays. Greed and piety rose up and kissed one another on all the TV evangelist shows. Liberals were as scarce as whooping cranes. The newly rich were buying just about anything out of the art market. The clothes! The hair! The blue martinis!  Jesse Helms!  Color me puce and teal!

I was in grad school living like a monk in libraries, and Michael was in high school getting beat up every week and changing his hair color every time Cindi Lauper changed hers.

Could it be that the '80s are finally over?

Wooo! Dude! Way to set the world on fire!

The Madoff scandal is now threatening global banking according to the BBC.

British banking officials have harsh words for American regulators today.

  What regulators?  We don't need no stinkin' regulators!  

  It was supposed to be the mysterious workings of the amazing grace of the free market that would make everything right, right?  

We're just so shocked that the crooks would run riot after we fired all the cops.

It looks like what we got was not market utopia but wild swine loose in the corn crib.  And it looks like we are all now subsidizing those swine with our tax dollars.

Look!  Now see what you've done!   You made Ayn Rand cry!

There's No Crime Like White Collar Crime

Josh Marshall has a very interesting take on the whole Madoff case.  What Madoff was doing may not have been much different from what all these over-leveraged financial firms holding lots of worthless paper may have been doing for the duration of the real estate bubble.

Duncan Black over at Eschaton points out that the high rollers may not have been the only victims.  A lot of charitable funds and non-profits may be badly hurt or ruined by this.

The Madoff scheme so far amounts to $50 billion in losses and is expected to get bigger.

$50 BILLION!  

How many decades worth of the annual total number of armed robberies in the USA does that add up to?

"It's Good to Be the King."

As we all go apoplectic over a certain Illinois governor, Frank Rich in his column today reminds us that he's really just a small time hood. Our corporate and political leaders have committed really big time crime on the scale of billions of dollars and thousands of lives. And will they ever see any kind of reckoning for it all? 

Hell no. 

It's all the rest of us wage slaves who will pay for the clean up and be left standing holding the bag. The world is so admirably arranged for those who already have everything. It really is good to be the king.

And what do the people who own and run the United States really think of all the rest of us?
"Sire, the peasants are revolting!"
"You said it! They stink on ice."

Class war?  Damn right!  And guess which class has been winning that war for the last 30 years?

"Thanks for Nothing, M***** F*****!"

An Iraqi journalist throws his shoes at Bush's head.

Sadly, he missed.

For the 3rd Sunday of Advent, Giovanni Bellini

Madonna of Doge Agostino Barbarigo

Below is a generous selection of Madonnas by Giovanni Bellini, the last great master of the Italian Quattrocento, and the founder of Venetian oil painting. While Raphael's Madonnas are much better known, and formally more sophisticated, I've always preferred Bellini's more distant melancholy Madonnas to Raphael's treacle. Bellini's paintings are filled with homages, obvious and subtle, to the Byzantine heritage of his native Venice. God is always kind in Bellini's work. There is an almost musical concord among differences in his paintings; between very different saints, between very different colors, between humanity and nature, and between the material and the spiritual. And just in case we still don't get the point, Bellini frequently provides angel musicians in his paintings. His work is very much about the "peace which passes all human understanding."
Few things are more truly incarnational than Renaissance painting where the objects of our prayers come down to meet us on our own terms. The painting becomes a kind of threshold where the inhabitants of the material and spiritual realms meet and face each other. It's no accident that the frames of so many Italian Quattrocento pictures resemble door and window frames. I've always argued that Renaissance art is more genuinely religious than most people suppose.
Bellini was probably the first artist to understand the connection between color and mood. He was one of the finest colorists of the Quattrocento able to create the color effect of a warm summer evening in the Barbarigo Madonna, or a cold November morning in the Meadow Madonna.
It was through Venice that oil painting, invented in Flanders, entered Italy. It was Bellini and his successors in Venice who transformed oil painting with its rich color effects into monumental painting.

Madonna degli Alberetti

Madonna with Saints, the Frari Triptych

The Meadow Madonna

The San Giobbe Altarpiece

Bellini's largest surviving work, painted for the high altar of San Giobbe. The presence of Saint Sebastian and Job in this painting points to a sad fact of Venetian life, the constant threat of the plague. Both Sebastian and Job were invoked in Venice in times of plague.

Madonna with John the Baptist and a Female Saint

The San Zaccharia Altarpiece.

Bellini's last major work, painted when he was in his 80s. John Ruskin wrote of this painting in the 19th century that it is "beyond all description and above all praise."

Landscape detail from the Barbarigo Madonna at the top.

The First Cat

Socks, the former First Kitty, is gravely ill and is not expected to live

"Klatu Barata Nikto!"

I can't imagine a remake of this movie, the 1951 sci fi classic The Day The Earth Stood Still. And yet, just such a remake starring Keanu Reeves as Klatu opened yesterday here in New York and presumably around the rest of the country. I haven't seen it, but the previews don't look promising. It looks like the 1951 classic remade into a video game for teenage boys from what I can see in the ad clips.

Most of the original movie was taken up with the drama of Klatu hiding out among us frightened earthlings and negotiating his way around our terror and paranoia. I'm sure this was riveting for the audiences of 1951. Frances Bavier ("Aunt Bea" from the old Andy Griffith Show) as a frightened fellow boarder at the incognito Klatu's residence was far scarier than Gort the robot. I doubt audiences today would have much patience for that. And that would be the aspect of the movie most worth updating, not the special effects (which by 1951 standards were remarkable).

The Day The Earth Stood Still was an anti-paranoia tale for a very paranoid age, the Red Scare era. Most sci fi movies of the 1950s capitalized on that paranoia, including great movies like Invasion of the Body Snatchers. For it's day, this was a very brave movie, even more bravely intended for the popular market. It came out right on the eve of the Korean War. The worst of the hysteria and the witch hunts were still in the future. This movie turned out to be prophetic as popular paranoia whipped up by political demagogues and the press proceeded to ruin the lives of thousands of people who just happened to be perceived as different and therefore threatening.

I've always loved this movie.  I love the brave plucky young Patricia Neal as she faces down Gort.  Gort may look hokey by today's standards of special effects, but the way he is lit and photographed in scene after scene makes him look far more ominous and menacing than most of the drooling realistic monsters of today.  Special effects will never be a substitute for imagination and good cinematography.  I love the interior of the space ship in this movie, a very minimal set.  Its alien creepy quality is almost entirely a creation of artful lighting and camera angles.  For me, the movie's now very dated aspects only enhance its appeal and the strangeness of the alien visitation.

I hope I'm wrong about the new remake.  This could be a great story for today's paranoid age.

UN Human Rights declaration for LGBTs anyone? Anyone?

Toujoursdan over at Culture Choc directs us to this article by Peter Tatchell in the Guardian about something momentous struggling to be born over at UN headquarters, a UN resolution calling for the world wide decriminalization of homosexuality.  It is being sponsored by Canada and most of the Western European nations.  It has some surprising support from countries like  Mexico, Ecuador, Guinea-Bissau, and Israel.

The Vatican, in league with the Islamic countries, is leading the opposition, to no one's surprise.

The USA is not endorsing the resolution, and neither is Australia.

Curiously (or not), our leftist comrades in Cuba and Venezuela are silent on this resolution.

It is strange that this is stirring not a peep of notice in the press, not even in the gay press.

Betty Page Escapes from Mortal Bondage and Feels the Lash of Mortal Necessity No More

The great Betty Page dies at 85 (!) (You go girl! Who says kink ain't good for you?)

Artist friends of mine younger than me used to fantasize about her. One of them said that her smile was the sexiest in history, as if to say, "So, what else do you want to do with me?"

"May she rest rest in chains, and rise in feathers!" -- JCF

"And when you're gay you dress that way, there's nothing wrong with that!"

Continuing my Busby Berkeley fixation now with this big wonderful fruit salad of a number featuring Carmen Miranda:



Let's face it, this number from The Gang's All Here set the international gold standard for camp for all time.

Apologies to Luiz where ever you are.

And who would you really rather spend time with?
a bunch of fat old bishops singing praise music? all those vinegar drinkers over at Titus, Firm, and Virtue?

Or with Carmen Miranda and her legions of admirers in a paper mache banana plantation on a 1943 Hollywood sound stage?

So, Who Gets to Be A Minority? Where Do We Go to Apply?

There has long been an argument over whether or not LGBTs "qualify" as a minority, as though we have to fill out some kind of government form and list historical antagonists and grievances in order to qualify. There are some LGBTs who have trouble with the idea that they are in a minority status, that it's only their sexual orientation that sets them apart from "normal" society. Sorry, but the Club will never let you or your boyfriend/girlfriend be a member ever, no matter how straight your tie looks.

Minorities are the creations of majorities. A group of people singled out from the general population for any reason -- eye color, skin color, political opinions, religious creed, no creed, left handedness, ethnicity, language, impairment, gender, no gender, attracted to the same gender, stars on their bellies, whatever the majority finds unusual and alienating -- joins the ranks of the vampires.

I Love Newsweek!

It looks like all the email servers over there at Newsweek are crashed or taken offline with the sheer volume of angry right-wing mail. The comments sections are loaded up with long angry hyperventilating comments filled with Scriptural proof-texts written in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS. If any of my comments that I sent in thanking Newsweek got posted in the midst of all that toxic mess, I didn't see them, and I wasn't willing to wade through that swamp to go look for them.

So, if there are any Newsweek employees, or anyone even remotely connected with Newsweek who just happen by accident to stumble across this obscure blog out of the thousands upon thousands out there, I just want to say,

THANK YOU

Thank you for your courage in taking so clear and unequivocal a stand on this issue. Thank you especially to Lisa Miller for her fine essay, and for basing her arguments in religious, and especially Christian, testimony.

Michael is not the least bit religious. Anything church related, even empty churches, make him phobic. And who can blame him? Look at the way churches have treated our kind since the days of the Church Fathers. Look at the latest regulations coming out of the Vatican intended to weed out gay applicants to seminaries, even those who intend to be celibate. Look at the levels of vitriolic hatred spilled all over the comments sections at Newsweek like a big oil slick, coming from "good" "Christian" people.
I church for both of us regularly on Sundays. Why? because I know that my Redeemer liveth. Because Emmanuel, God With Us was always with us nelly queens, bull daggers, tranny kings and queens, and bis through all of our sufferings and struggles, public and private. He was there with the victims and families of the Upstairs Lounge fire in New Orleans in 1973 when all the city's churches (except one Episcopal congregation) closed their doors to funerals for the victims. The Lord who hung dying alone and despised on the Cross was there with Matthew Shepard when he died hanging alone and despised on that fence in Wyoming. He was there with the thousands upon thousands of others named and nameless who died at the hands of the haters throughout the ages. And as His death was not the end, so neither will their deaths be the end of their story. God is always with us in love and solidarity, yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

So Thank you again Newsweek and Lisa Miller!

Here are some more reasons from your competitor Time showing why I love Newsweek:

Time, 1969,
One of the newly formed Gay Liberation's first acts was to pickett Time's offices for this one. What a hatchett job!

Time, 1975
And the price for that acceptance was to join the military, act "normal," and endorse the established order.
Poor Leonard Matlovich!

Time, 1987
From back in the days when people were worried about everyone except the gay victims of this plague.

Thanks for nothing Time.

Newsweek gets roasted over gay marriage.

As you might expect, Newsweek is taking a beating for their cover story this week on gay marriage.

I sent them a letter of support, though so far it hasn't been posted.  Go there and send them a note, even it it says nothing more than "thanks."  And be sure to thank their religion reporter, Lisa Miller, who wrote the article.

Nothing works better to wash out the taste of shame and humiliation than a big dose of anger.

Gay Anger in 1970: Marty Robinson shakes the hand of then Governor Nelson Rockefeller, and refuses to let go until Rock hears the full story on gay rights in New York State. Robinson was a founding member of Gay Activists Alliance in New York, a veteran of the Stonewall riot, and a union carpenter all his life. He also invented the "zap," of which this is a good example.


The gay kids are getting angry again. A whole new generation of activists is springing up in the wake of Proposition H8.

The work remains unfinished, and thank God there's a whole new generation eager to continue the fight, and perhaps do a better job at it than we did.