Queer

  • Kiki and Herb at the Knitting Factory

    Kiki and Herb at the Knitting Factory

    Kiki and Herb at the Knitting Factory

    Earlier in the evening we (James and I — he has more photos) saw Kiki and Herb at the Knitting Factory with Glenn, Dan and a few of their friends. Oh my heavens! Why didn’t someone drag me to see them earlier? I LOVE THEM.

    As I told Glenn, I think our drag sisters have MUCH better politics than the gay community in general. They can’t really buy into the “but if I act like a straight white middle class male I’ll be OK” version of gay politics. (I thought about linking Andrew Sullivan in that sentence, but I couldn’t bring myself to sully my web site with a link to that miserable excuse for a pundit.)

    Where to begin? As Dan said, it’s certainly not what comes to mind when one says “drag act” — it’s much more of a brilliant piece of theatre by two very talented people. Kiki’s politics are great, and political theatre that works is my favorite thing in the world. She hit on 9/11, the idiocy of Bush, his illegitimacy, our obsessions with kidnapped children, and probably some things I didn’t even catch in the whirling chaos that is Kiki and Herb.

    Favorite excerpts included:

    Shitty things happen sometimes, but that’s not an excuse to do more shitty things.

    After a song in which she says she’s tired of crying for victims of this or that, she says: because crying doesn’t change anything.

    After she talked about the shitty things that happen in the world, and about the idiot that passes for our President, and received a lot of applause, she said she was glad to hear that she’s not alone, and when they round all of us up, she’s glad she will be with people like us at Guantanamo.

    The opening act, of whom I had also heard, but never seen, was The Wau Wau Sisters. They ROCKED. I feel like such a scrawny wimp — they both had bods of death. They gave us rockin’ songs, hilarious repartee, and acrobatics! We bought the CD!

    Heard on the way out of the Knitting Factory, from an Ani di Franco-type young woman: “I’m wearing my new sweatshop free panties!”

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  • My son, the 11-year-old drag queen

    I just love this story. His drag name is “Alexis Love”.

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  • Krazy for Keithers

    Andy organized a get-together last night in honor of Keith visit from L.A. Also representing the left coast was the adorable Jessie. There were lots of attractive and smart boys there — no girls at all even though some were invited.

    I finally got a chance to talk with Dan. He’s a charming and smart guy — we talked about everything from ex-pat job opportunities in Europe to Benjamin Britten. Note to Dan: we should get together and listen to some CDs. I also listened to a discussion of font-geekitude between him and Chad.

    The always squeezable Dan’l introduced me to a cool guy named John who runs the Streetwork project of Safe Horizon. The group was the beneficiary of Dan’l’s recent blogathon. John just happened to be there to meet a friend, and isn’t one of the blog-children, at least not yet. We talked for quite a while. He’s sexy and reminds me of a classical musician I once met in South Beach at Warsaw. Top that boys! No circuit queens for me.

    I also ran into Trick/Patrick of Morplay. I met him once before through Joe Ovelman, so we talked about Joe’s art for a while. I’m a huge fan, and I think James and I are among Joe’s most enthusiastic collectors. There is a Nerve gallery of Joe’s work that’s worth the hassle of registering.

    Who else was there? I said hello to Sam and Scott, but we didn’t really talk. I met Brian, who was wearing a t-shirt reminiscent of the playing-with-logo works of Daniel Pflumm.

    James has a few photos on his site of the evening.

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  • gaytheatre mailing list

    For those that are interested, someone just told me about the gaytheatre mailing list. There seem to be a number of NYers on the list.

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  • Last weekend

    Now that I have the new blog working, I can talk about last weekend and put up a few pictures. You’ll remember that it was 95 degrees and very humid — a lovely NYC August weekend. If we hadn’t had visitors, I would not have left my a/c-blessed apartment at all. I would have ordered in everything, including ice cream. But we did have visitors — two sets!

    The first set was my friend David from high school, visiting from Chicago — a fellow “band fag” — and his friend Stacy (a charming Atlanta girl). Here is a picture of David wilting in a subway station. That orange blur on the left is James jumping out of the way to prevent having his picture taken.

    Let’s just say David has grown up a bit since I knew him in high school, and I mean that in the best possible way. He was two classes behind me, and I think I was probably about 5’7″ or 5’8″ during my senior year. David was smaller. Now we’re about the same height, but he works out more than I and is “hunkier”.

    He looked me up via Google using my real name about six months ago, and sent me an email. He was thrilled to find out that the moniker of “band fag” was truer for both of us than it was for many of the other nerdy band people. It was somewhat strange to be two homos in NYC, chatting about the world, 18 years after we last saw each other in a backward little town in Arkansas.

    We went to Big Cup to eat lunch before heading uptown to the Eakins show at the Met — which I highly recommend. Big Cup managed to surprise me, as if often does. I didn’t see Edmund White there this time, but there were two men at the next table discussing the recent news that the U.S. won’t be increasing Egypt’s foreign aid because of their persecution of a democracy activist. One of them mentioned (I didn’t put this in my post), that Bush couldn’t be bothered to say anything when Egypt tried and jailed a large number of men for homosexuality. Foreign aid discussions at Big Cup!

    Our other visitors for the weekend were James’s nephew Paul and his girlfriend Elizabeth, visiting from DC. She was fabulous. Imagine a family member dating someone who can chat about Donald Judd, British explorers in Antarctica, and is incredibly beautiful as well! I was ready for her to move in with us. We spent some time walking around downtown near Ground Zero, had lunch along the water at Southwest, and visited the Irish Hunger Memorial. I hadn’t realized that it talked about hunger on a more global level, and doesn’t just concentrate on the Irish Potato Famine alone. There are even quotes from reports on starvation in Afghanistan in 2001 (before 9/11). It’s an interesting piece of architecture, including the ruins of a stone cottage brought over from Ireland. I love the provenance of the cottage: it belonged to the family of the memorial designer’s (gay) partner. Elizabeth took a couple of pictures of us with Paul, so unfortunately she’s not in these:

    I’ll add a vacation photo of her and Paul for the curious:

    Yes, he dresses like an engineer. But he’s brilliant and speaks more languages than you do.

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  • This one’s for Philo and Chris

    In honor of Philo, Chris, and the Summer of Rock, I present:

    The Rise of the Creative Class by Richard Florida:

    Why cities without gays and rock bands are losing the economic development race.

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  • U.S. Health Secretary protested

    See the Photo.

    BARCELONA, Spain (Reuters) – Angry protesters invaded the stage and drowned out U.S. Health Secretary Tommy Thompson at the world AIDS conference Tuesday in protest at what they see as Washington’s inadequate response to the pandemic.

    The U.S. is proposing to donate only $200 million to a new international global fund to fight the disease.

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  • It’s safe for me to visit Mom now

    Arkansas’s Supreme Court has overturned the state’s sodomy law. Note that this was not some holdover from the 19th century. It was passed in 1977 as part of the horrors of the Anita Bryant era.

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  • Saturday blog gathering

    I was in attendance at the Choire / Bazima gathering on Saturday night at Dick’s Bar, so go look at some … of the … photos. I finally got to meet Sam, one of the drivers of traffic to my site and a very sweet (and tall!) boy. He was part of the Texas contingent that included the delicious and charming Glenn (aka Dan‘s roommate – another new acquaintance), who makes me remember the things I do like about that part of the country, and the adorable Dan’l. I like a boy who can mention the Radical Faeries and a book on The Origins of the Avant Garde in France on his info page.

    I can’t remember Scott wearing a tiara, but he’s wearing it in all of the pictures. Andy and I didn’t get much of a chance to talk in the chaos.

    I also met Chris — a fellow Arkansan! She and I shall have to meet and discuss this further.

    What was with the smoke in that place? Even the smokers were complaining about it!

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  • Kate Clinton on marriage

    The fabulous Kate Clinton has a column on marriage — Veiled Threats. Homos as weapons of destruction?

    On May 15, 2002, six members of the House of Representatives introduced a proposed constitutional amendment that says, “marriage shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman.” Don’t throw your rice pudding at me until I finish telling you why I’m all for this prenuptial agreement. Hint: my “We Don’t Want Your Stinkin’ Marriage” campaign never caught on.

    …

    As if heterosexuals all by themselves were not completely capable of degrading marriage through divorce, pricey annulments, child abuse, domestic violence. Straight people have been doing the aerial bombing of marriage for quite some time. Now gay people are the robot drones sent in to do the hand-to-hand combat and mop up operations in the Canna caves?

    As if homosexuals were that powerful. Although, come to think of it, we have been recently credited with the destruction of the US Catholic Church through bouts of “ecclesiastic flamboyance.” Sidebar: you just wish sometimes that the Church protected children as much as they protect fetuses.

    Add to our degradation of same-old-sex marriage, our devastation of the military and it should become clear to someone – hullo, Donald Rumsfeld – that we are an underused weapon of capital M and small m, mass destruction. We’re a veritable Triple Crown: The Priestness, The Breeder’s Cup, The Kandahar Derby.

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