It’s been some time since we’ve last heard from iconic feminist rockers, Le Tigre. A new DVD titled Who Took the Bomp? Le Tigre on Tour has just been released with a mix of footage from their 2004 world tour and conversations with band members JD Samson, Johanna Fateman and Kathleen Hanna. It was directed by Kerthy Fix.

Spinner.com interviewed Hanna about the project:

How did the documentary come about?
We were about to go on tour in 2004 and I was thinking how there was no good documentation of the projects I’ve done, and about how weird we all were in the ‘90s, like “Don’t photograph me!” We were so freaked about being sucked up by the mainstream that we didn’t even document ourselves. I didn’t want that to happen to me, as a grownup. We put some money into a camera to shoot our shows, just to have it, not really thinking that we’re making a movie. Then we started filming stuff on the bus or backstage. After, we stopped touring, revisited some of the material and slowly started putting it into the project and finally it’s done, six years later.

What’s your favorite part of the movie?
I like a lot of the stuff that Johanna says about JD in the interview part. There is some stuff that we never really say to each other because it’s too corny. Like, you don’t actually sit in a room and go, “Here’s what you brought to the band.” It was interesting to hear Jo say these sweet, sentimental things about JD. She talked about a lot of stuff that happened in terms of JD’s gender and presentation, how that did change how people perceived us as a band. I definitely got an education by seeing the way a journalist would treat her and not know how to treat her. I don’t know, I guess it just brought this issue to the fore. It felt really good to have that spoken out loud.

Was there anything that you might have forgotten about or were surprised to see?
Just how goofy we were. I don’t think people think of us as being that goofy and I don’t think of us as being that goofy, but looking back at the footage I was like, “Oh my God.” Every time the camera went on we were totally goofy and I know when the camera went off, we were equally goofy. I sort of forgot about that, that everything was kind of a joke and lighthearted and it was really in contrast to some of the other things that were going on that were really heavy. It was either really heavy, like “We’re being boycotted!” and then trying to put a Band-Aid on everything with humor, all the time.

Read more of Kathleen Hanna Looks Back on Le Tigre, Praises Lady Gaga’s Gay Pride, Dismisses ‘Boring’ Odd Future (Spinner)
 
Below, a live “Deceptacon” from Who Took the Bomp?
 

 
The Vintage Lesbian Tumblr Blog is dedicated to well, wonderful vintage photographs of lesbians. The blog writes: “Vintage lesbians. Affectionate women. Boston marriages. Lesbian innuendo. Antique erotica. Women being nude together. Lesbian history. Vintage drag. Women who may not be lesbians but we wish they were.” BTW, some of the images on the website are NSFW. 

 
More images after the jump…

 
This story is do distasteful, twisted and nasty, it’s hard to know where to begin…

There was a piece on Anderson Cooper 360º last night that was so shocking to me, I was simply dumbfounded by what I was seeing. It’s sad. Oh, is it sad. And infuriating. It’s that in spades.

Fundamentalist Christian leader, anti-gay activist and infamous hirer of male prostitutes, Dr. George Rekers, who foundered the Family Research Council (with Dr. James Dobson) was the lead in the grotesque mind-rape of an innocent child—not just one child, several—in a bizarre psychological experiment at UCLA in the 70s called the “Feminine Boy Project.” Boys as young as 4-years-old were trusted with this creep by parents who were worried that their sons would turn out to be “sissies,” looking for a “cure” for this behavior.

When you watch this, you’ll want to cry. It was child abuse, pure and simple, under cover of “science” and administered by a self-loathing gay man with severe psychological issues of his own. When Rekers was caught in his “rent boy” scandal, with male prostitute Jo-Vanni Roman in 2010, Frank Rich of The New York Times wrote: “Thanks to Rekers’ clownish public exposure, we now know that his professional judgments are windows into his cracked psyche, not gay people’s. But…his excursions into public policy have had real and damaging consequences on a large swath of Americans.”

Like young Kirk Murphy, whose life was ruined by Rekers’ sick Pavlovian “therapy.” From CNN:

Kirk Andrew Murphy seemed to have everything to live for. He put himself through school. He had a successful 8-year career in the Air Force. After the service, he landed a high profile position with an American finance company in India.

But in 2003 at age 38, Kirk Murphy took his own life.

A co-worker found him hanging from the fan of his apartment in New Delhi. His family has struggled for years to understand what happened.

“I used to spend so much time thinking, why would he kill himself at the age of 38? It doesn’t make any sense to me,” said Kirk’s sister, Maris Murphy. “What I now think is I don’t know how he made it that long.”

After Kirk’s death, Maris started a search that would uncover a dark family secret. That secret revealed itself during a phone conversation with her older brother Mark, who mentioned his distrust of any kind of therapy.

“Don’t you remember all that crap we went through at UCLA?” he asked her. Maris was too young to remember the details, but Mark remembered it vividly as a low point in their lives.

It’s a pity Kirk didn’t live long enough to see Rekers’ disgrace, downfall and the complete discrediting of his life’s work by the scientific community. He is a pariah now, even in the Christian conservative community, something he so richly deserves, but. humiliation isn’t enough for a guy like George Rekers. Humiliation is too kind for a monster of his caliber.

Imagine what it’s like to Google your own name and see yourself compared to Josef Mengele THOUSANDS of times? I hope that more of his victims and their families come forward like the Murphy family has and publicly denounce this evil man. He should be investigated, his degrees should be stripped from him, and I sure hope that he’s wrapped up in expensive lawsuits from his victims that will ruin what is left of his time on this planet.

Perhaps it’s impolite to say this, but it’s too bad that Kirk didn’t take George Rekers with him when he killed himself, but I doubt that I was the only one thinking it, watching this.

Maris Murphy,  said it best:

“The research has a postscript that needs to be added,” she said. “That is that Kirk Andrew Murphy was Kraig and he was gay, and he committed suicide.”

“I want people to remember that this was a little boy who deserved protection, respect and unconditional love,” his sister said. “I don’t want him to be remembered as a science experiment. He was a person.”

This is some powerful reporting. Anderson Cooper and his team did a great job with this explosive story.
 

 
Therapy to change ‘feminine’ boy created a troubled man, family says (CNN)
 
Via Little Green Footballs

 
This summer in downtown Los Angeles there’s a photography show at the drkrm/gallery that explores the history of the acid-gobbling, show-stopping star-children of the infamous Cockettes drag troupe. From Frontiers:

For those who neglected to Netfix their eponymous 2002 documentary, here’s the skinny on the Cockettes—they debuted on New Year’s Eve 1969, as part of a midnight showcase in San Fran’s Palace Theatre. Combining Broadway parody, cross-dressing and LSD-fueled choreography, their performances soon gained high profile media attention in Rolling Stone and the Village Voice. In the Chicago Tribune, critic Rex Reed described the show as “a nocturnal happening comprising equal parts of Mardi Gras on Bourbon Street, Harold Prince’s Follies and movie musicals, the United Fruit Company, Kabuki and the Yale Variety Show, with a lot of angel dust thrown in to keep the audience good and stoned.” Kitsch aficionado John Waters recounted, “It was complete sexual anarchy. You couldn’t tell the men from the women. It was really new at the time, and it still would be new.” On the Tonight Show, novelist and professional dandy fop Truman Capote simply stated “The Cockettes are where it’s at.”

Cashing in on this unexpected fame, the Cockettes moved their show to New York. Unfortunately, the troupe’s free-spirited hippie aesthetic was perceived by elite Manhattanites as unprofessional and sloppy. John Lennon, Liza Minelli and Angela Lansbury were some of the many celebrities to walk out on the opening night performance. Gore Vidal hammered the final nail in their patchouli-scented coffin when he infamously proclaimed, “Having no talent isn’t enough.” The group returned to the West Coast and disbanded in 1972.

The photographs in Children were shot before the East Coast snafu. Consisting solely of black and white portraiture by longtime Cockettes member Fayette Hauser, the exhibit depicts her various castmates flower-powering around ‘Frisco—bearded men in boas and evening gowns performing on ramshackle stages; women with theatrical beat smeared across their face lounging in antiquated Haight-Ashbury houses; fierce tranny geishas frolicking through Golden Gate Park. Each picture is a crystalized moment from an artistically and culturally groundbreaking epoch.

Children of Paradise: Life With The Cockettes. Photographs by Fayette Hauser, drkrm/gallery, 727 S. Spring St., Downtown L.A. June 4-July 2

Below, the trailer from the excellent 2002 documentary, The Cockettes,
 

 
Via World of Wonder

 
A terrific teaser trailer for I Am Divine, the upcoming documentary about Divine was released the other day and it looks great. I can’t wait to see this. Divine, in my opinion was a truly great American and deserves, at long last, a decent doc to be made about him.

In 1984, at the massive Hippodrome nightclub in London, I saw Divine absolutely WOW an audience of several thousand people with her high-energy Eurodisco set. The place was packed to the gills with adoring—and very glamorous—people who were there to be bathed in her divinity… if not her flop sweat. Looking around the audience that night, it occurred to me what a personal triumph this event must have represented for someone who was so marginalized growing up. Let’s face it, Harris Glenn Milstead was a full-blown freak (in a good way), and John Waters is absolutely right when he says in this trailer, “Divine stood for all outsiders. A young person could be inspired because anything is possible.”

Divine’s life and rise to worldwide fame and unlikely icon-hood was the ultimate “It Gets Better” story, whether you are gay or straight!

I met Divine once at a Manhattan nightclub I was working at during the mid-80s. I took up a tray of food to his dressing room. You’d expect maybe that he would have been intimidating, but he was absolutely a total sweetheart. I still have the autographed invite for the event (a “Father’s Day Party” themed-party if you can believe it, Divine wrapped in an American flag on the front). In marked contrast to the London appearance, Divine had, just a few years years later, become morbidly obese. I saw him when he walked offstage and he was out of breath, sweating profusely and it took him some time before he was breathing normally again. Later my friend remarked that he didn’t expect that Divine would be “long for this world.”  A little over a year later, Divine was dead, but his legend will live on forever.
 

 
Are there any readers of Dangerous Minds in France? If you do live there, then I would recommend getting your hands on the next edition of the well known rock magazine Les Inrockuptibles, which comes with a free cover mount CD featuring the best of the renowned post-punk and mutant disco label ZE Records.

ZE has been a longtime favourite label of mine, since I first started getting deeper into collecting disco and realised not all of the genre was dripping cheese with a boner for a chart placing. The releases were smart, weird, original, sleazy, camp, funny and funky as hell. The records came in a distinctive sleeve featuring the label’s iconic logo and a graphic featuring a New York City taxi cab. You didn’t even have to listen to tell that they were dripping in the atmosphere of that place and that time - hell, it may not even have been real, it may just have been the disco/punk New York of my imagination, but it sure did sound great.

Founded in New York in 1979 by British entrepreneur Michael Zilkha and the French publisher Michel Esteban (hence the name), ZE specialised in releasing both “Mutant Disco” for the uptown set, and more downtown experimental sound of “No Wave”, both co-existing side by side in a way that kinda made perfect sense. What united them was an attitude born of not giving a fuck. ZE acts spanned the gamut, from the noise-fests of Mars to the ground-breaking Lydia Lunch, from the proto electro of Suicide to the more rock output of Alan Vega, from the twisted dance punk of James White & Blacks to the sassy boy-baiting of The Waitresses, from the new wave Euro pop of Lio and Garcons to the veteran Velvet drone-meister John Cale, from the geeky freak funk of Was (Not Was) to the dancefloor experiments of Bill Laswell and Material.

My favourite ZE associated act is one August Darnell, better known by his stage name of Kid Creole. He worked with many different acts and under a variety of different names, including Cristina, Coati Mundi, Gichy Dan, Don Armando’s Second Avenue Rhumba Band and Aural Exciters, not to mention being the driving force behind two other seminal disco acts, Machine and Dr Buzzard’s Original Savanah Band. He brought to the music a heavy influence of golden era jazz and Cab Calloway. And it wasn’t just a a sly wink to the past - beneath his sometimes quite strange arrangements lurked classic Broadway songwriting chops and killer one liners (check “Darrio” below). I feel August Darnell has been overlooked in the history of popular music, and I hope to cover him more in depth in the future.

We have already covered a couple of ZE Records acts in the past few months here on Dangerous Minds, namely Cristina and Lizzy Mercier Descloux. it seems only right now to introduce the label to people who may not have heard of it, and/or to remind others who have of just how good it is. As I have mentioned before, it is worth signing up to the label’s mailing list to keep abreast of what they are up to (the next release is a remastered re-issue of John Cale’s Sabotage/Live LP recorded at CBGB’s in 1979 and featuring the Animal Justice EP). To sign up, visit the label’s official website. The entire ZE catalog (with info on how to obtain what is available) is on Discogs. This is the Les Inrockuptibles cover mount CD streamed from the ZE Records Soundcloud page - a pretty good summation of the label’s vast and influential output:
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
‘Is That All There Is?’: No Wave cult singer Cristina covers Peggy Lee in 1980
From Heaven With Love: Download the best of Lizzy Mercier Descloux for free

 
Divine in a 1987 episode of Tales From The Darkside.

In this bizarre tale called “Seymourlama,” Divine portrays the mysterious Ambassador Chia Fung, the Dalai Lama of a country known as Lo-Pu (a sly reference to Poodle poo?).

“Does this throne vibrate joyously upon the insertion of a quarter?”

Divine is the world’s first Dalai Lama with a Baltimore accent.

Seymour’s dad is played by the fabulous David Gale from Re-Animator.
 

 
It is the best of times. It is the worst of times. A must-watch clip.

Representative John Kriesel was one of only four Republicans to vote against the amendment. He seems like a stand-up guy, so why is he a Republican? (I’ll bet he’s asking himself that very question today).
 

 
Via Joe.My.God

 
This is, of course, appalling but entirely predictable: Conservative Christian hate group “Save California” is starting to make waves with an online advertisement titled “Protect Your Children from Harvey Milk Day in California.”

I’d far rather see children protected from tiresome, ignorant religious fanatics than the memory of a slain civil rights leader…

Three quotes from Harvey Milk:

Somewhere in Des Moines or San Antonio there is a young gay person who all the sudden realizes that he or she is gay; knows that if their parents find out they will be tossed out of the house, their classmates will taunt the child, and the Anita Bryant’s and John Briggs’ are doing their part on TV. And that child has several options: staying in the closet, and suicide. And then one day that child might open the paper that says “Homosexual elected in San Francisco” and there are two new options: the option is to go to California, or stay in San Antonio and fight. Two days after I was elected I got a phone call and the voice was quite young. It was from Altoona, Pennsylvania. And the person said “Thanks”. And you’ve got to elect gay people, so that thousand upon thousands like that child know that there is hope for a better world; there is hope for a better tomorrow. Without hope, not only gays, but those who are blacks, the Asians, the disabled, the seniors, the us’s: without hope the us’s give up. I know that you can’t live on hope alone, but without it, life is not worth living. And you, and you, and you, and you have got to give them hope.

All over the country, they’re reading about me, and the story doesn’t center on me being gay. It’s just about a gay person who is doing his job.

We must destroy the myths once and for all. We must continue to speak out and most importantly every gay person must come out. As difficult as it is, you must tell your family, you must tell your relatives, you must tell your friends, you must tell your neighbors, you must tell the people you work with, you must tell the people in the stores you shop in, and once they realize that we are indeed their children and that we are indeed everywhere, every myth, every lie, every innuendo will be destroyed once and for all. And once you do you will feel so much better.

Why does it bug these people so much to see this man honored? Not only that, Harvey Milk Day, each May 22, falls on the weekend this year. So much for protecting the kids!

I’m always of two minds when it comes to embedding idiotic videos like this, although I do tend to side with the “point and laugh” approach every time! I doubt that many—if any—DM readers would be swayed by what they see in this clip. The thing is, “Save California” can see where their traffic is coming from, so they will see a link to this post in their YouTube user stats and they’ll read it and see themselves as the object of scorn and ridicule. I encourage everyone to let them have it in the comments, because rest assured they will read it. If you want to flag their YouTube clip as “hate speech” you can do it here, where it says “Flag” just above the title.

Harvey Milk is a man who will never be forgotten. No matter what these ultimately impotent hate groups like “Save California” think or what they may say or do, nothing is ever going to change that. It’s called American History and it’s not on their side.

I’d be remiss in my duties as a liberal scold if I didn’t ask the members of “Save California” how they will feel in the future when their own children and grandchildren—who they tried so, uh, valiantly to “protect” from the legacy of a heroic man like Harvey Milk—come to realize what monstrous, hateful, small-minded assholes their parents really are?
 

 
The trailer for Rob Epstein’s Academy Award-winning documentary The Times of Harvey Milk. You can watch the entire film on YouTube here.
 

 
Via Joe.My.God

 
“If you look at Doric Wilson’s work of the last fifty years, you will see that he knows more words than most people and knows how to use them, but there’s one word that he’s never heard, and this is “compromise.” Doric has always told it as it is. He has never believed in playing it safe and the word “sugar-coating” is not in his vocabulary either. His theater is tough, funny and right on target. No pussyfooting for Doric: he doesn’t write gay theater; he writes queer theater.’
- Edward Albee

Playwright, director, producer, critic and gay political activist, Doric Wilson, died over the weekend of undisclosed causes, at the age of 72.

Playbill said of Wilson:

Mr. Wilson was one of the first resident playwrights at the legendary Caffe Cino in Greenwich Village, where many fledgling Off-Off-Broadway playwrights cut their teeth. His comedy And He Made A Her opened there in 1961. Only two years in New York, and not wanting people to think the work was his first produced play, he attended performances in three-piece suits with a trench coat tossed over his shoulders. “I also drank brandy and soda,” he recalled.

The success of that play and the three that followed, including Pretty People, Babel Babel Little Tower and Now She Dances!— which dealt head on with the trail of Oscar Wilde—helped establish Joe Cino’s hole-in-the-wall cafe as an offbeat theatre mecca. Later in the 1960s, Mr. Wilson was one of the first playwrights invited to join the Barr/Wilder/Albee Playwright’s Unit and, with fellow Cino alum Lanford Wilson, Circle Repertory Theatre. His other plays included In Absence, Turnabout, The West Street Gang, A Perfect Relationship and Forever After.

Doric Wilson was present on June 28, 1969, when riots broke out at the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Greenwich Village. The rebellion of the bar’s gay denizens against harassing police is generally recognized as having signaled the beginning of the gay rights movement. Mr. Wilson had already been an active participant in the anti-war and civil rights fights of the 1960s. Following the riot, he became active in Gay Activist Alliance and, as a “star” bartender, helped open post-Stonewall gay bars like The Spike, TY’s and Brothers & Sisters Cabaret.

In 1974, Doric Wilson, along with Billy Blackwell, Peter del Valle and John McSpadden, formed TOSOS (The Other Side of Silence), the first professional theatre company to deal openly and honestly with the gay experience. “I was involved with Circle Rep at the time,” he later recalled, “when it suddenly occurred to me that I could use the Cino experience to combine my talents with my politics. I could focus my life and abilities to promote a theatre dedicated ‘to an honest and open exploration of the GLBT life experience and cultural sensibility.’”

The company produced new plays and revivals by Noel Coward, Joe Orton, Terrence McNally and Lanford Wilson. In June 2001 Wilson and directors Mark Finley and Barry Childs resurrected the company as TOSOS II. “Wilson has devoted his life to the once-radical notion that gay lives deserved true representation,” observed playwright Craig Lucas.

In 2004 Doric Wilson was honored to be one of the Grand Marshals of the 35th Anniversary Pride Day Parade in New York City. He is featured in the documentary film “Stonewall Uprising” (2010).

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Charles Ludlam and the Ridiculous Theatrical Company
 

 
Via Joe. My. God.