While I love the above knitted Divine sweater (I’d probably wear it) by designer James Long, I hate the one below. The sleeves! Oh gawd those hideous sleeves!
And when I say “I’d probably wear it,” I’d probably wear it if I had an extra $1300 to burn ‘cause that’s how much these “high-fashion” sweaters cost. Holy crap!
Via WOW
According to the Los Angeles Times, Cassidy Lynn Campbell, a 16-year-old trans girl who attends Marina High School in Huntington Beach, was elected its 2013 homecoming queen. Campbell won the title on Friday night. When her win was announced at the football game’s halftime show, students in the bleachers chanted, “Cassidy! Cassidy!” and a numner of her friends rushed the stage to wrap her in a group hug.
Before the game started, Cassidy Campbell told the media assembled for the event that she wanted to make a statement:
“If I win it would mean that the school recognizes me as the gender I always felt I was. But with all the attention, I realized it’s bigger than me. I’m doing this for the kids who can’t be themselves.”
“She was stunned. She kind of broke down on the podium,” school district spokesperson Tom Delapp told the LAT. “She was shocked. She cried a lot.”
Cassidy told reporters after the ceremony:
“I was so proud to win, not just for me but for everyone out there, I think it really shows the progression of the times.”
Yes, it most certainly does!
Imagine one of those annoying TV commercials for The Villages retirement community in Florida… but with fit, active, happy-looking, well-groomed, silver fox gay and lesbian couples frolicking in the sunshine, on golf courses, tennis courts, boats, and beaches.
The U.K.-based Villages Group (not connected to The Villages in Florida), has planned the world’s first LGBT-friendly retirement community, Le Village – Canal du Midi, in the South of France in Salleles-d’Aude near Narbonne. They received official permission to build a generic £20 million gated community of 107 eco-friendly homes for seniors this year, with a hotel, restaurant, bar, indoor and outdoor swimming pools, golf, saunas, gym, jacuzzis, tennis courts, housekeeping service, and concierge. That development didn’t receive much initial interest, thanks to the lackluster real estate market…that is, until the company added rainbow flags to the marketing literature and wording specifically targeting the British and French LGBT communities.
Then the inquiries started flooding in at thousands of e-mails a day.
It’s illegal in France to market solely to a particular sexual orientation, so the company was quick to point out that heterosexuals are welcome in the village. (This would make Le Village one of the few places where one could boast about being “the only straight in the village,” a la Little Britain).
The town’s mayor, Yves Bastie, who only learned about the change in marketing after the construction was approved, said he was “flabbergasted” and was worried the effect Le Village would have on the image of the town. On the other side, the secretary of the Association of Retired Gays (l’association Les Gais Retraités) disapproves of the idea of LGBT’s self-segregating. “Gays must fit into society and not go it alone.”
The outrage following France’s legalization of gay marriage this year and the fact that anyone is surprised by this brilliant marketing plan shows how deeply ingrained homophobia still is. And perfectly illustrates why an aging LGBT couple would want to choose such a place to retire.
Or, should I say, a rather wealthy retired LGBT couple: the house prices start at €236,000 (about $320,000), not including €70 ($95) weekly service charges.
The Villages Group’s promotional video for its “rainbow village,” below:
The New York Historical Society recently obtained some great “Old New York” photography—beautiful shots of the ladies from New York’s formerly infamous Meatpacking District. Though it’s now one of the trendiest (and most expensive) neighborhoods in the city, in the 1980s, the Meatpacking District was the most notorious destination for sex clubs, drugs and prostitution, particularly from trans people. Many of the sex clubs were even forcibly shut down during the height of the AIDS scare by the Koch administration.
It’s a contentious part of the city’s history, and although the characters who populated that part of town at night are long gone, Jeff Cowen’s photographs are proof that they once existed. From The Historical Society’s website:
When New-York Historical acquired these images, Jeff Cowen included a typewritten, four-page narrative he titled “The Drag Queen Stroll.” In it, the artist details his subjects from their first-hand accounts and his point of view, utilizing an abrupt writing style that’s reminiscent of the Beat Generation.
Cowen maps “The Stroll” from 17th Street and 9th Avenue, running west to the Hudson River, to the southern edge of the Meatpacking District on Gansevoort. His writing draws on the rampant homelessness, drug use, prostitution, theft, and assault in this area at night, which serves as a sharp contrast to the union workers and family men who work in the meat markets and warehouses during the day. Cowen calls this area “a haven for the largest transvestite subculture on the east coast.” And with the advent of crack and HIV/AIDS in the 1980s, he says “the cost of sin has never been higher.”
Via Animal
Okay, that’s not the only reason Bill de Blasio will be the next mayor of American’s greatest city. He advocates for paid sick leave, he’s spoken out against the racist “stop and frisk” NYPD tactic, and he’s been incredibly frank about raising taxes for the rich, all while wishy-washier Democrats faltered (or embarrassed the hell out of themselves). In fact, current NYC Mayor (and resident rich billionaire asshole) Bloomberg has referred to his campaign as “class warfare and racist,” so you know he’s gotta be doing something right!
But let’s talk about what (and who) has to be the first drag queen in a campaign commercial for a major political race! It’s Wigstock founder and and all arounf drag legend, Lady Bunny, who’s never shied away from politics (her Sarah Palin-themed parody of Harper Valley PTA is brilliant). While de Blasio’s biggest competition, Christine Quinn, is the first openly gay Speaker of the New York City Council, her race and class politics are absolute shit, and don’t fool savvy radical queer folk like Lady Bunny! What’s more, Bunny is featured in the ad as a dignified, concerned citizen, and not some socially liberal window-dressing to indicate how socially progressive the candidate is.
Fun fact: While jabbering moron and New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has mistakenly portrayed de Blasio’s wife Chirlane McCray as somewhat homophobic, McCray self-identified as lesbian until meeting de Blasio. (She was even a member of the black feminist lesbian organization, the Combahee River Collective. So there, Maureen Dowd!)
A satirical painting of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev dressed in frilly ladies’ lingerie, Travesty, was confiscated by officials from the Museum of Power art gallery in St. Petersburg a week before the G20 summit started. Putin is shown combing Medvedev’s hair.
Other paintings of authority figures in the “Rulers” exhibit that “violated existing legislation” and were confiscated included depictions of two evil politicians, Vitaly Milonov (deputy mayor of St. Petersburg) and Yelena Mizulina, the ones responsible for recent vicious anti-gay legislation, with a rainbow flag, and conservative, homophobic Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill, who was painted with skull tattoos and busts of Stalin and Lenin. The government won’t say which existing laws were violated, but they could always point to the one prohibiting insulting state authorities or the new one banning alleged homosexual propaganda aimed at minors. It would be hard to argue that seeing the equivalent of a political cartoon in a newspaper is going to give young people “The Gay.”
Milonov, who may be the last male on the planet who has never seen actual pornography, had already complained about the paintings being displayed and described them as being “of a distinctly pornographic character.”
According to gallery owner, Alexander Donskoy, the paintings were seized with no formal warrant for their removal, the director was detained by police but not charged, and the museum was closed for a few days. Donskoy has been a thorn in the side of the Russian government since announcing his intention to enter politics in 2006. He also owns the G-Spot, a gallery of erotica, where a painting of a nude Putin and Barack Obama (with multiple massive dayglo penises) by artist Vera Donskaya-Khilko was seized by police yesterday. The G-Spot was shut down.
The artist who painted the Putin-Milonov Travesty piece, Konstantin Altunin, has fled to France and is planning to seek asylum. Maybe he and Femen’s Inna Shevchenko, the two members of Pussy Riot who fled Russia in 2012, and the upcoming diaspora of Russian artists can all be housemates.
Oh, and he wants his painting back. In an open letter to G20 leaders, Altunin wrote, “I ask [you] to mention the topic of censorship in [a] personal conversation with Putin and ask him to return my paintings seized from the Museum of Authority.”
So, hey, just in case G20 leaders or their staff members are actually reading Dangerous Minds during boring meetings, instead of playing poker on their phones (hi guys!), here are two other paintings they’re not supposed to see:
Reuters report on confiscated paintings, below:
Happy Birthday to Sylvester, the “Queen of Disco,” who would have been 66-years-old today.
As m’colleague Niall O’Conghaile has previously written:
If there’s any one artist who represents everything that was revolutionary about disco music, it was Sylvester. It doesn’t matter how many Bee Gees, Ethel Mermans, Rod Stewarts, Boney Ms et al you can throw at the genre as a reason to hate it, the fact is that if it wasn’t for disco there is no way that a linebacker-sized, black, openly gay, outrageous, gender-bending performer like him could have reached the top of the world’s charts.
Sylvester broke every taboo going. In fact he didn’t just break them: he tore them up, threw them on the floor and stamped on them with uproarious glee, all while dragging you out to dance with his irresistable energy. He didn’t have to shout about any of his social or political inclinations because he was already living them, out in the open, for everyone to see.
Sylvester didn’t make “political music” because he didn’t have to: Sylvester’s very existence was inherently political.
Sylvester James jnr. was born in Watts, Los Angeles, on September 6th 1947. He started his singing career with the choir at his local Pentecostal Church. Openly gay from a very early age, Sylvester quit the church allegedly aged 13, after being persecuted by the Jesus-lovers, who it has been said would beat him, punch him and spit on him, for having a consensual relationship with a much older “man of the cloth.” Even so, Sylvester would retain a deep love of the church and Gospel-singing.
By 16, Sylvester was homeless and living by his wits. But his desire to sing eventually led him to start a band of black cross-dressers and trans-women called The Disquotays—this at a time when it was possible to be arrested in LA and charged with “masturbation” for cross-dressing in public. After The Disquotays disbanded in 1970, Sylvester joined the legendary, radical, hippie, drag troupe The Cockettes, performing with them in San Francisco, where he became a major sensation—receiving standing ovations whenever he performed. When The Cockettes toured New York to negative reviews, Sylvester quit the band (famously making his announcement to quit onstage) and began his solo career - performing and recording his first album with backing group The Hot Men, then gigging with three of The Pointer Sisters as his backing.
However, it was his teaming with Two Tons of Fun (later known as The Weather Girls of “It’s Raining Men” fame), that Sylvester became the major star of Disco and Soul. As his biographer Joshua Gamson wrote in The Fabulous Sylvester: The Legend, the Music, the 70s in San Francisco:
“Something clicked and sighed into place when Sylvester and the Tons got together – something that wasn’t there with the Hot Band white boys, for all that they could cook; something that wasn’t there with Peter Mintum, for all the beautiful oddness that he and Sylvester shared; something that wasn’t even there with the black drag-queen singers, for all the fierceness they projected. Izora and Martha were whom he came from and who he was… They were women who got their own. They sounded right with Sylvester, and looked just right, one on either side of him. Plus, next to them, Sylvester, who had grown quite round, looked positively svelte.”
In 1977, Sylvester relased his self-titled album, followed by the superb Step II in 1978, from which came his best known single (originally a Gospel tune) “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real).”
Happy Birthday Sylvester—supreme singer, performer and “Queen of Disco”!
John Cage, the musician, musical theorist, artist, composer, philosopher, avid mycologist, writer and one of the leading lights of the 20th century avant garde was born on September 5, 1912. Cage’s iconoclastic approach to music—and everything else he did—is neatly summed up in this short comment:
After I had been studying with him for two years, [Austrian composer Arnold] Schoenberg said, “In order to write music, you must have a feeling for harmony.” I explained to him that I had no feeling for harmony. He then said that I would always encounter an obstacle, that it would be as though I came to a wall through which I could not pass. I said, “In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall.”
Superb! I hate to admit it, but I’d rather read John Cage than actually listen to his music. Like most people, the only song of his that I can sing in the shower is “4′33″ although I have a shelf full of his books, books about him and anthologies of his interviews.
I do have a slightly funny John Cage anecdote: Sometime in the mid-1980s, Cage, along with Winona Ryder and several other cultural notables, was photographed for an ad campaign for The GAP. These black and white ads were in magazines and on bus shelters in major cities. New York was just plastered with them at the time (Sadly I can’t find Cage’s ad on Google Images).
Part of the pay, apparently, was a rather large GAP gift certificate and on a day that I happened to be in a GAP store on Seventh Ave and 23rd Street—and had literally just passed his ad on the way into the store—John Cage decided that he was going to spend his. I heard him explaining this to the employees—that he had $1000 to spend—and could they please assist him spending it? They at least seemed to recognize Cage from his GAP ad, if not his actual achievements and the staff was happy to help out the cool old guy in the ad.
Cage didn’t stay long because he seemed to know exactly what he wanted. I recall that he walked out with a winter corduroy coat, a big stack of black “pocket tee” shirts, some denim shirts and some blue jeans. His style of shopping was extremely utilitarian. He left nothing to chance…
Below, the fascinating ‘American Masters’ documentary on John Cage, ‘I Have Nothing to Say and I Am Saying It’:
Below, a seldom-seen cable access program with Cage with his friend, writer Richard Kostelanetz. The pair discuss James Joyce and more:
Lord forgive them for they know not what they do…
There’s an amusing—and not at all subtle—lesson to be learned from the travails of the “Christian” bakers in Oregon who claim that they’ve been the victims of harassment from gay activists—who they compared to the Mafia—but don’t expect the target of these efforts to understand what that (you’d think) hard-fought wisdom might entail…
As reported by the Christian Broadcasting Network and all across the rightwing blogsphere, Aaron and Melissa Klein closed the doors of their “Sweet Cakes by Melissa” bakery this past weekend and moved their wedding cake business into their own home. The Kleins, who earlier this year declined to make a wedding cake for a lesbian couple because they view gay marriage as “wrong,” seem to think that God supports their idiocy on all levels, even on the most mundane level, as stupid business owners.
So far though, looking at the matter objectively, God doesn’t really seem to have their backs…
“My attorney likens this — he calls it economic terrorism,” Aaron Klein told The Blaze. “These people, they have literally tried to cut any business ties off through harassment.”
If God did support the Kleins, you know, personally, I mean, wouldn’t he have just done some kind of supernatural shit to make all the straight couples buy wedding cakes from them? Maybe he could have made it so the gay mafioso army wouldn’t have been able to get phone reception to ask local wedding planners not to do business with bigots? Something like that? He’s God and all, that should be a total cinch! Snap your fingers kinda stuff for an all powerful deity who intervenes in human affairs ALL THE TIME.
Well… the Kleins didn’t just lose their gay clientele, clearly they lost most of their customer base across the board. If God supports the Kleins, then why did God let this happen to them???
This must prove very confusing for the Kleins. No wait! Maybe not: Aaron Klein’s statement goes to show just how deluded this dude truly is:
“It’s a sad day for Christian business owners and it’s a sad day for the First Amendment. The LGBT attacks are the reason we are shutting down the shop. They have killed our business through mob tactics.”
Well, that’s one way to look at it. Not a very intelligent point of view, mind you, but it’s all Aaron’s got and he’s the one who just saw his business go belly up, so he’s stickin’ with it!
I’d wager that God had nothing to do with any of this low IQ kerfuffle. Or maybe, just MAYBE, Aaron and Melissa, GOD IS TRYING TO TELL YOU SOMETHING?
YOU! Yes, YOU!
Is it even possible that Aaron and Melissa are on the wrong team and that God’s not even rooting for them?
Nah…
When news of the LGBT activists’ actions became public, many local Christians decided to support the Klein’s bakery, giving them, briefly a sort of Chick-fil-A-ish windfall. They were unable to keep up with the demand… for a few days.
This message was posted on the “Sweet Cakes by Melissa” Facebook page in February, but was hurriedly removed. THIS is who the local Christians were supporting:
Glenn Beck, CBN, Fox News, all of them, are supporting the guy who sat down, typed THAT up and posted it for all the world to see!
The beauty of it is, this is exactly what the First Amendment and the free market are all about. This exemplifies what conservatives are always blathering on about: The Kleins exercised their First Amendment right to be morons, the word got out and now nobody wants their baked goods anymore because they don’t want to do business with assholes. It’s our God-given right as American consumers to vote with our money.
Besides, it’s not like it’s their “right” to discriminate. In some states, maybe, but not in the one where they live. Last month, Oregon’s Bureau of Labor and Industries announced it has launched a formal discrimination investigation against the Kleins. Oregon’s Bureau of Labor commissioner, Brad Avakian told The Oregonian that he was committed to a fair investigation to determine whether the Kleins’ bakery violated the Oregon Equality Act of 2007 by discriminating against the lesbian couple.
“Everybody is entitled to their own beliefs, but that doesn’t mean that folks have the right to discriminate. The goal is to rehabilitate. For those who do violate the law, we want them to learn from that experience and have a good, successful business in Oregon.”
It’s predictable, but still so ridiculous, that the rightwing blogs and freepers tore into this statement like red meat. In some quarters, Avakian’s remarks have been “augmented,” shall we say, by a certain kind of paranoia to imply that “re-education” gulags are the next stop on the train for Christians who refuse to toe the “militant” LGBT line.
It’s always the Christians who are the victims, but would anyone feel sorry for the Kleins if this was over them refusing to serve Jews?
Oh, right, there’s no comparison because Jews are born Jews and gays are born… straight?
“Better is a poor man who walks in integrity than a rich man who is crooked in his ways,” from Proverbs, was posted on the “Sweet Cakes” bakery’s Facebook page.
Well, welcome to being poor, Aaron and Melissa. You’ve definitely earned it.
PS Good luck passing that home health inspection, it looks like you’ll need it. With your luck, God will send a member of the velvet mafia over to review your kitchen.
Below, a CBN report supportive of Aaron and Melissa Klein:
Tammy Faye at a pride event
A lot of folks outside of the Bible Belt have trouble understanding Tammy Faye Bakker’s status as a gay icon. I mean sure, the make-up is befitting the most punk rock of drag queens (the documentary The Eyes of Tammy Faye is narrated by RuPaul), but her affiliation with Evangelical Christianity would seem to preclude her from “queer ally canonization.”
What most people either don’t know or don’t remember is that prior to Jerry Falwell’s near-monopoly on white working class Christian evangelism in America, celebrity churches were actually quite diverse, socially and politically and far less judgmental. It was Rev. Falwell who founded the Moral Majority, the organization that jump-started the extreme right-wing politicization of the Evangelical movement during the Reagan era, and it was Falwell who publicly accused Tammy’s husband Jim Bakker of homosexuality and of embezzling from his ministry. While Jim most certainly misappropriated funds (Tammy was legally determined to be ignorant of his misconduct) and had an affair, Falwell’s character assassination seemed entirely motivated by his plan to consolidate power.
Prior to the scandals, Tammy Faye Bakker ran a cable-access children’s puppet show, preaching messages of acceptance and love. As their ministry grew, she and Jim started the Christian talk show, The PTL Club, and eventually a world-wide Christian cable network of the same name. Far from being the right-wing cabal we now associate with Christian TV, The PTL Club was more about spreading the love—and passing the collection plate, natch. Below, you can see one of the very first television interviews with an AIDS patient, and a gay man, at that. Far from being a mere spectacle for gawkers, the interview is a frank discussion and a plea for acceptance and sympathy. (Steve Pieters, by the way, has had AIDS for the last 30 years, he’s a minister himself, and he is still singing in the acclaimed Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles.)
The Tammy Faye backlash was in many ways a reaction to the shyster churches that scandalized the era. But it was also partially snobby bullshit. For all the make-up and crying and and bad taste in men, Tammy Faye truly seemed to be, at her core, a sweet, loving person who stood beside the maligned and took risks to live by the principles she espoused.
More after the jump…