Over the past two decades, no corporation has done for the musical than Disney. With its animated films such as “Aladdin” and “The Little Mermaid,” they have not merely preserved the form but attracted generations of kids to it. Now, with “Tarzan,” Disney takes what has been filmic and creates an entirely new dimension in Broadway entertainment. Comment

James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” the chronicle of a hapless schlub’s Homeric one-day odyssey through Dublin, is widely regarded as the finest English-language novel of the 20th Century. It’s also notorious for being fraught with dense, stream-of-conscious prose, rendering the work virtually unreadable. Comment

Seaport culture awash in “Hope & Anchor” “Do you think a few sailors will join in?” one woman asked the guy handing her a program. It was Fleet Week, after all, and we were […] Comment

Hans Bellmer (1902 – 1975) was born in Germany but moved to Paris when Hitler came to power, and lived there for the rest of his life. Historically, Bellmer figures as one of the great Parisian Surrealists. He is best known for his photographic project entitled “La Poupée,” a psychologically intense body of work dating from the 1930s that became his obsession for 40 years. Comment

Poland’s state prosecutor last week announced a government investigation of all Polish gay groups for illegal financing, criminal connections, and pedophilia. This crackdown on gay groups is only the latest in a series of disturbing developments in Poland during the last month that illustrate the continuing rise of political homophobia under the country’s new gay-hostile government led by the duo nicknamed the Terrible Twins: President Lech Kaczynski and his twin brother Jaroslav, who controls the Polish Parliament. Comment

With the final shape of the federal Ryan White AIDS Care Act’s reauthorization likely to be hammered out on Capitol Hill within a matter of weeks, if not days, New York AIDS advocates and congressional representatives are scrambling to pull off a “fix” to the legislation to avoid a loss of funding here that could total $80 million dollars over the next three years. Comment

“A Prairie Home Companion” is one of the sweetest, most cheerful films Robert Altman has ever made. Paradoxically, it’s also obsessed with death, both figuratively—in the form of a radio show’s last broadcast—and literally. It represents a clash of sensibilities, with screenwriter/star Garrison Keillor—who’s not exactly known for edginess—meeting Altman, whose work has always contained at least a tinge of misanthropy. Comment

The House of Representatives in Pennsylvania voted 136-to-61 for a state constitutional amendment that would limit marriage to man-woman couples and ban state and local governments from providing any recognition to unmarried gay or heterosexual couples. The bill now goes to the Senate. If approved there, it would still have to pass the next session of the Legislature as well to qualify for the 2007 ballot. Pennsylvania law already bans same-sex marriage. Comment

David, 46, a gay New York City flight attendant diagnosed with HIV in 1997, first started doing crystal meth in 1993. It wasn’t until 1999, though, that he injected it—and not until late 2004 that he shared a needle with a fellow user. Comment

The last weeks of Joseph Volpe’s regime at the Metropolitan Opera featured revivals of productions strong and weak. Carried over from last year, “Rodelinda,” still lovely to see (May 10) and a worthwhile evening, suffered from a less invigorating and stylish conductor (Patrick Summers) who allowed its puzzlingly unmoving leading lady (Renée Fleming) even more space for self-indulgent mannerisms. Stephanie Blythe recreated a strong performance, and did Kobie van Rensburg, though his tenor seemed receded on top. Comment

Moore, in the ‘80s the founding director of the Estate Project for Artists with AIDS, has a long history on both coasts as an activist and author having written extensively on issues related to gay men’s emotional well-being as challenged by loss and self-destructive impulses. This memoir follows two novels, GLAAD Award-nominated journalism, and a nonfiction treatise on the inter-generational divide between gay men who witnessed the pre-AIDS, sexually-stoked gay liberation movement and the younger crowd who reduce those heady days to a period of hedonistic hubris followed by, what is to them, the inevitable crash. Comment

May 26, 2006 Comment

In 1988, George H.W. Bush, the first President Bush, introduced Willie Horton’s name into the American political lexicon. Four years earlier, after a vice presidential debate in which her husband claimed to have “kicked a little ass,” Barbara Bush, asked her impression of Geraldine Ferraro, responded, “It rhymes with witch.” Comment

The Florida 5th District Court of Appeal rejected an attempt by a lesbian co-parent to maintain contact with her former partner’s child through a dependency proceeding. Ruling on June 2, the court said that there was “no legal basis” for finding that the psychological harm a child might suffer by being deprived of contact with a person “to whom the child has no legal connection” would constitute “the level of abuse needed to support a finding of a dependency.” Comment

A spirit of experimentation can and does exist in a well-appointed establishment. Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet is proof. This is unique, given the difficulty of the dance artist’s life that is the norm in this country. Comment

People find ways to get through life, cope with its disappointments, and somehow muddle through it all. Some see things how they want it to be, not how it is. For Agnes and her two brothers, there seem to be no dearth of rose-colored glasses. Self-delusion and image control seem to be the default preferences for uptight legislator Werner and his sex-addicted librarian brother Hans-Jörg. The third brother, now a post-op woman named Agnes, seems far better adjusted. Comment

Volume 5, Number 23 | June 8 - 14, 2006 Comment

Gay Men’s Health Crisis—which was formed by a group of gay men in Manhattan less than a year after the first cases of what would later be known as AIDS were reported and well before doctors and scientists had even the most preliminary notions of the scope of the sudden scourge—marked the 25th anniversary of the epidemic on Monday, June 5. Comment

Reflecting national data showing that HIV continues to impact gay and bisexual men more than any other U.S. population, a city health department report shows that new HIV diagnoses among New York City men who have sex with men (MSM) have increased. Comment

More than 250 corporate activists turned out for the third annual Empire State Pride Agenda luncheon honoring efforts at improving workplace conditions for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered New Yorkers. The luncheon, held June 7 at the Park Avenue headquarters of JPMorgan Chase honored Merrill Lynch, Eastman Kodak Company, and Kym Ward Gaffney of PricewaterhouseCoopers for their contribution to workplace fairness. Gaffney is a straight human resource professional who worked successfully with the LGBT employee group at PricewaterhouseCoopers to solve an interesting conundrum—even at a company with positive employment policies, many workers can still feel reluctant to come out and truly be themselves on the job. Comment

“Send Me” by Patrick Ryan will stay on my shelf for two reasons. First, the book’s simple structure—the slow dissolution of a the Raggazino/Kerrigan family, product of a divorce and remarriage, with four children, two each from different fathers—belies the skill and complexity of Ryan’s prose. Secondly, Ryan’s characters are authentic, realized people; I couldn’t help but be amazed at how much I cared about what happened to them. Comment

“The issue of gay marriage is important because it’s a fundamental civil rights issue, and it’s an institution along with which comes hundreds and hundreds of rights and responsibilities, but an institution some Americans are allowed access to, and other Americans—LGBT Americans—are not allowed access to,” said City Council Speaker Christine C. Quinn, who vowed to press the fight for marriage equality. Comment

This month marks three years that Kris Hayashi has been at the helm of the Audre Lorde Project, the community organizing center for lesbian, gay, bisexual, two-spirit, and transgendered people of color located in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene. During that time, ALP has earned a reputation for unstinting commitment to promoting inclusion and the sharing of power. The organization’s TransJustice initiative, a political group of gender non-conforming activists of color, is only one example of an ALP program that has challenged the greater LGBT community to examine its own orthodoxies and prejudices. Comment

Watching the documentary “Source (Zdroj),” you’re bound to ask at one point, “What’s that cow doing grazing right next to that oil spill?” A farmer, tenanted on a patch of Azerbaijan’s Apsheron Peninsula, one of the world’s richest oil reserves, tells the Czech filmmakers that his family subsists on and sells the heifer’s dairy goods, as the camera pans to the farmer’s tender son, then back to the animal lowering its muzzle. Comment

Recently Noted. Comment

/ Dance Comment

Recently Noted: 4 (CHETYRE) An instant sensation upon its premiere at the 2004 Venice Film Festival, Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s debut feature bagged a Tiger Award in Rotterdam last year and floored ’em […] Comment

The Culture Of Queer Comment

Volume 5, Number 23 | June 8 - 14, 2006 Comment

Despite heavy rain, more than 500 marchers with a rainbow of umbrellas streamed across the Brooklyn Bridge into Lower Manhattan on Saturday, June 3 to demand the right of same-sex couples to marry in New York. The Marriage Equality/ New York demonstration, matched by one over the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, came just three days after the final appeal in four same-sex marriage cases was heard before the state’s highest court in Albany. A decision is expected this summer. Comment

On Wednesday, the U.S. Senate rejected the Marriage Protection Amendment that President George W. Bush and Republicans hope to use to rally voters in the upcoming November elections. Comment

Facing aggressive questioning from six judges on the state’s highest court, advocates for same-sex marriage said the court should require that gay and lesbian couples be allowed to marry while opponents argued that the court should leave the state’s marriage law undisturbed and allow the Legislature to take up the issue. Comment

President George W. Bush is set to make a presentation from the White House Rose Garden on June 5 to once again call on Congress to pass an amendment to the United States Constitution to ban same-sex marriage and bar judges from granting any marriage-like benefits to gay couples. Joe Solmonese, president of the Human Rights Campaign, is calling on opponents of the measure to call the White House comment line at 202-456-1111 “and let him know that discrimination has no place in the U.S. Constitution.” Comment

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“Gay audiences are the greatest audiences in the world!” announced Debbie Reynolds, who is bringing her one-woman show to Lehman Center for the Performing Arts on June 4. “Because they really appreciate the divas and they love drag and people who are funny. Every friend of mine who happens to be gay is very creative—designers, dancers, singers, or someone with great talent, especially in the arts.” Comment

Recently Noted. Comment

/ Dance Comment

Recently Noted: 4 (CHETYRE) An instant sensation upon its premiere at the 2004 Venice Film Festival, Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s debut feature bagged a Tiger Award in Rotterdam last year and floored ’em […] Comment

Health Forum Comment

Volume 5, Number 22 | June 1 - 7, 2006 Comment