Ladybird Bachmann’s taxpayer-supported counseling practice was descended upon by a flash-mob of over 100 “barbarians” this morning:

A local actor posing as Marcus Bachmann was “baptized” with glitter after dancing with the barbarians to Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way.”

“Let’s be clear: Marcus Bachmann is the practitioner of an unhealthy, unscientific and dangerous practice,” event organizer Nick Espinosa told Columbus Go Home.

“The American people have a right to know: does the Bachmann family profit from bogus ‘gay reparative therapy’ or not,” he added. “The medical evidence against the practice aside, the Bachmann’s subversive marginalization of the LGBT community is despicable.”

In July, a smaller group threw glitter in the lobby of the clinic after staffers said that Bachmann was not available.

The LGBT activists were inspired by Bachmann’s claim that homosexuals are “barbarians” who “need to be disciplined.”

One of the staffers at the Bachmann business was seen driving away in a purple car. Not that there is anything wrong with purple cars. Just saying…
 

 
Via Raw Story

 
Indiana state Republican Rep. Phil Hinkle, the hapless gay marriage opponent who made headlines earlier this month when he hired an 18-year-old rent boy via Craigslist using the email address from his legislative website, is resisting pressure from fellow Republicans to resign. Hinkle, who clings to the fig-leaf he’s not gay (why even bother with this nonsense?), has already been stripped of two committee chairmanships he held, but he’s not budging. Via The Indy Star:

State Rep. Phil Hinkle admitted Tuesday that he paid a young man $80 to have a good time. But Hinkle insisted he isn’t gay and doesn’t know why he did it.

He said that he understands why he’s being stripped of his committee chairmanships and that he won’t seek re-election. But he said he will not resign, despite House Speaker Brian Bosma’s call Tuesday to do so.

And he said he did nothing illegal with—or to—the young man and that he himself was the victim of a crime. But he said he would not file a police report.

—snip—

Hinkle’s version of what happened that night in Room 2610 at the JW Marriott hotel differs greatly from the version provided by the young man and his sister.

Kameryn Gibson, the 18-year-old who said he was looking for a “sugga daddy” in the Craigslist posting, told The Star that he tried to leave the room that night and called his sister Megan after Hinkle identified himself as a lawmaker. He also said Hinkle tried to keep him from leaving, exposed himself and then—after his sister arrived—offered them $100 cash, an iPad and a Blackberry to keep quiet.

Hinkle’s version: He never exposed himself and never offered anything to the Gibsons to keep quiet. Instead, he said, Kameryn Gibson stole those items when Hinkle was in the bathroom.

“These people,” Hinkle said, “are lying through their teeth.”

Kameryn and Megan Gibson stood by their story Tuesday.

 
House music has gotten a bit of a bad rep over the last ten to fifteen years, and it’s not difficult to hear why. Between the overbearing repetitiveness of trance, the none-more-overdriven sound homogenisation of French “electro” and the simply boring minimalism of, yes, minimal, it’s very easy to forget that house was once a marginal art form that dripped pure funk.

The new album by Azari & III looks set to dress that balance, taking the sound back to its underground roots in the black, gay dance scenes of Chicago. Back in the mid 80s the original house-heads would congregate and wig out at Frankie Knuckles’ Warehouse club and Ron Hardy’s Music Box, to a soundtrack of European disco and proto-techno mixed up with American funk and electro and augmented by drum machine loops. Some of those kids went on to release seminal records on the legendary Trax imprint, among them Marshall Jefferson, Larry Heard, Jamie Principle and even Knuckles himself.

Azari & III are the next logical progression of House music, as it inevitably gives up the gloss and returns to its rawer starting points. The synths and drum machines are raw and dirty, the vocals are ambiguous and androgynous but full to the brim with soul, and the songs are druggy, sleazy, and catchy as hell. The Toronto based four piece have just released their self-titled debut album, and the buzz built by their earlier singles is beginning to pay off with glowing critical reviews and a growing cult status. If you’re a fan of Hercules & Love Affair, then I can’t recommend this band and album highly enough. This is music designed to make you sweat, to jack your body, to vogue.
 
This is the video for Azari & III’s debut single, the highly catchy “Hungry For The Power”, featuring coke snorting yuppies, S&M vixens, murder and cannibal voguing zombies (NSFW):
 

 
Azari & III - “Manic”
 

 
You can buy Azari & III’s debut album here.
 
More Azari & III videos after the jump.

 
Let’s face it - with the Nineties revival beginning to build up steam, it’s only a matter of time before Friends becomes re-evaluated as not just mere trash TV but something deeper, something representative of the culture of the time. And who knows - maybe it was. If the culture of the time was utterly vacuous and so bland and white-washed that having bleached hair was somehow “edgy” and the most rock and roll thing one could do was attend a Hootie And The Blowfish concert. But that wasn’t the 90s I lived through.

Before we go hailing Friends as the voice of a dispossessed generation, let’s take a minute to pause and reflect on how the show represented gay people, and how much of the humor was based on a premise that being gay in and of itself was just so strange and unusual that it’s inherently funny. And that’s not even touching on gender roles as shown in the show - as a friend of mine commented on this clip:

I always thought Friends’ gender policing was outrageous - it seemed like every other episode centred around how hilarious it was that a man was doing things that normal men didn’t do.

Homophobic Friends is a re-edit compilation by Vimeo user WayOutEast, that compiles all the gay-based humor in the show and that runs for over 40 minutes. Bitch Magazine has an excellent feature on this video and its creator, real name Tijana Mamula:

Mamula found that the homophobic and transphobic jokes in Friends tend “to avoid provoking either aversion or anger, and instead prompts the viewer to be swept away by the hilarity of the situations.” Seeing theses moments altogether, one after another, you can see how the audience was presumed to just chuckle and move on. (I couldn’t help but be reminded of the site Microaggressions, which documents the little, caustic everyday incidents that add up to much more).

And wait, there’s more! “I noticed all sorts of other problematic content, some of which I found even more upsetting, like the place of women and foreigners…You could do a whole series of videos, like Misogynistic Friends and Xenophobic Friends.” (See also: this zany montage of the few black characters that have appeared in the show. The overwhelmingly white cast—including the extras, despite the show taking place in New York City—has often been pointed at as one of the show’s shortcomings.)

You can read the rest of that feature here. This is Homophobic Friends:
 

 
Thanks to Niall Ferguson.

 
Sonny and Chastity Bono (“in her concert debut”) do “I Got You, Babe” on the TV special Rockin’ The Night Away which aired in 1988.

It’s rare to see Sonny with Chastity after she had grown out of her “cute” phase and become an adult. Chastity told her parents she was gay in 1987 right around the time Sonny was running for Mayor of Palm Springs. This TV appearance may have been a calculated political move on Sonny’s part to create the image of an adoring father when, in fact, he had turned his back on his daughter. Chastity’s gayness alienated one of pop culture’s most visible hippie icons. But Sonny in reality was as much a hippie as Al Jolson was Black.

After a half an hour of searching the Internet, I gave up trying to find a picture of Sonny with an adult Chastity. So this video is some of the only existing footage of father and daughter together. Sonny’s good vibes seem about as authentic as one of his old wigs while Chastity is doing her best to be a dutiful daughter. And she does sound a lot like Cher.

A Youtube premier from our good friends at Bubbling Over.
 

 
(via Towerload)

 
The Queen is a fascinating document of a drag beauty contest held in 1967, the lead-up to the pageant and the backstage goings on. It’s a little-known film that is still hard to find on torrent trackers and has been out of print for many years.

The “Miss All-American Camp Beauty Pageant” was shot with hand-held cameras by director Frank Simon (who later produced the Marc Bolan concert film Born to Boogie). The year was 1967. Before the Stonewall riots. A time when cross-dressing could have gotten you arrested for vice, even in New York City. The film provides an interesting look at an event which was simultaneously rather risqué and underground, and at the same time served as a fundraiser for Muscular Dystrophy, co-chaired by Jerry Lewis and Lady Bird Johnson!

Artists Jim Dine and Larry Rivers, writers Bruce Jay Friedman, Terry Southern and George Plimpton, photographer Mary Ellen Mark, Warhol superstars Mario Montez and Edie Sedgwick, and Andy Warhol himself were among the judges of the event, although they are glimpsed very fleetingly in the film (Bobby Kennedy dropped out when he realized what he’d been signed up for).

But these luminaries of that era aren’t the main attraction here, that distinction would go to the hostess, “Flawless Sabrina” (Jack Doroshaw), contestant “Rachel Harlow” (aka Richard Finnochio, who Larry Rivers and allegedly also Warren Beatty hit on) and the film’s equivalent to Snookie, snarling, pissed-off Crystal LaBeija who reads everyone within earshot to filth when she suspects the contest has been fixed in favor of the Caucasian Harlow. As LaBeija went on to be the first “house mother” of the voguing clan House of LaBeija, this scene might well have captured a pivotal moment that led—not indirectly, either—to the Harlem voguing balls celebrated in Paris is Burning a few years later (In other words, the Harlem balls were a reaction to the perceived white-bias of the 1967 contest).

There’s not a lot I could find about The Queen to point you towards except for quite a few information rich pages from Trippin’ with Terry Southern: What I Think I Remember, Gail Gerber’s memoirs. Read from pages 81 to 84.
 
Below, Crystal LaBeija’s legendary “reading” session from The Queen:”
 

 
A video montage from The Queen set to the sounds of “What Makes a Man a Man?” by Charles Aznavour.
 

 
Via Lady Bunny Blog

Robert Mapplethorpe image for The Saint’s “Black Party” 1981 via OrangeMercury.

Thanks to Tony Dunne for the sterling work on this - stitching together various tapes to create a four-and-a-half-hour continuous mix of the DJ Warren Gluck from the closing night of the legendary New York nightclub The Saint in 1988. Tony says:

“There may be slight differences from the originals because of the tape endings. Sound quality could of course be better but the recording was taken from cassette tapes.”

The Saint was a members-only gay club opened in 1980 by New York club owner Bruce Mailman (St Mark’s Baths), and the architect Charles Terrell. It gained legendary status almost immediately, due in no small part to the huge planetarium-style dome over the dancefloor (which hosted massive light shows and also served to hide and amplify the club’s sound system) as well as the notoriously permissive attitude to sex in the club, in the upstairs areas and at special events like “The Black Party”. Unsurprisingly the AIDS epidemic decimated the club’s clientele, leading to its closure in May 1988 (a year after both Studio 54 and the Paradise Garage). The Saint never received the acclaim for its music in the same way the Garage did, despite mixes like this proving it was just as excellent (the music may have been different but gays were raving long before acid house). University of East London lecturer, disco historian and author Tim Lawrence sums it up in his thesis “The Forging of a White Gay Aesthetic at the Saint, 1980-84” (a must read for fans of disco, gay history and New York nightlife):

...whereas historians of dance culture have hailed the Garage’s Larry Levan to be the most influential DJ in the city during the 1980s, the shifting roster of selectors who worked at the Saint have merited barely a single mention—an unlikely scenario given that privileged white groups often receive more attention than disadvantaged subaltern groups. Based on numerous interviews with key protagonists, documentary material held in the Saint’s archive and recordings of DJ sets from the Saint, this article redresses the imbalance by outlining the contributions of Jim Burgess, Alan Dodd and Roy Thode, the Saint’s principal DJs during the opening 1980–81 season, as well as Shaun Buchanan, George Cadenas, Michael Fierman, Michael Jorba, Robbie Leslie, Howard Merritt, Chuck Parsons, Terry Sherman and Sharon White… their collective impact was considerable, even if their very collectivity also meant that each was ultimately disposable.

For more information on the history of The Saint, and the ongoing “Saint At Large” reunion parties, visit Saint At Large.com. But for now lose yourself in Warren Gluck’s awesome final dj set at the club:
 

  The Saint Closing Party - Warren Gluck continuous mix by Tony Dunne
 

 
Supercut from the geniuses at Everything is Terrible of Christian “humorist” Barbara Johnson’s uh, “routine” I’d guess you’d call it, about her gay son.  The late Mrs. Johnson was the author of Stick a Geranium in Your Hat and Be Happy.
 

 
H/T to Christian Nightmares

 
Yes, Sister Sunshine, I think you’re on to something. The next step IS for the California school system to educate our children about folks who like to have sex with chickens. Good grief. 

 
(via BuzzFeed)