In his March 18 speech at Philadelphia's National Constitution Center, Senator Barack Obama demonstrated convincingly that his claim to be a leader who can unite America by helping transcend our corrosive politics of division is more than just elegant rhetoric. Comment

Christophe Honoré's "Love Songs" is a poignant meditation on grief and how love - of both the hetero and homo varieties - can helps ease suffering. And it's a musical. "Love Songs" is a bold and ambitious film, and it is one that is also incredibly heartfelt and moving. Comment

Italian director Marco Ferreri named one of his films "The Future Is Female." For France's Olivier Assayas, that's a given. Comment

The Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania ruled 6-1 on March 17 against Joan Procito's bid for unemployment benefits to compensate for leaving her job to follow her same-sex domestic partner to Florida. Comment

Two HIV-positive Colombian gay men, living in New Jersey as domestic partners, have been denied refuge in the United States by the US Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit, based in Philadelphia. The court affirmed a decision by Immigration Judge Mirlande Talal, already approved by the Board of Immigration Appeals, that they had failed to meet the standard for "withholding of removal," a legal avenue for staying in this country that is an alternative to a grant of asylum. Comment

In commemoration of 20 years of volunteers, donors, and board members serving God's Love We Deliver (GLWD), a non-profit agency that provides hot, nutritious meals to New Yorkers living with AIDS, cancer, and other serious illness, potter and designer Jonathan Adler was commissioned in 2007 to create 100 tiles to recognize exceptional contributions. Comment

Leading luminaries of stage and screen gathered at New York's Marriott Marquis Hotel on the evening of March 17 for the 19th Annual Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) Media Awards. Gay UK talk show star Graham Norton hosted the evening of cocktails, silent auction, and awards honoring excellence in film, television, digital and print media, and music. GLAAD also honored Logo president Brian Graden with the Vito Russo Award, and activist Judy Shepard with the Excellence in Media Award. Comment

John Doyle's new staging of Britten's "Peter Grimes" at the Metropolitan Opera sinks without a trace - how's that for poetic irony? - but thanks to conductor Donald Runnicles and a strong cast, the score survives the shipwreck. Comment

Sarasota Opera makes a great weekend destination in February and March. Between the four operas - presented with care and textual fidelity - one can hit the beach or pool, check out manatees and dolphins, and explore the worthwhile Ringling Museums. Good seafood abounds. Comment

Spitzer got caught with his pants down and right away the Times' editorial page was lambasting our now-former governor for saying that buying sex is a "private matter." Worse, when a prostitute tried to defend her work to a journalist, the writer dismissed her as too damaged to speak for herself, no doubt abused as a child. Prostitution is anything but a victimless crime, the article said. Comment

There's a moment while you're on a roller-coaster ride, hurtling through time and space, shrieking for mercy, when you surrender to the fates and images of your meager life flash before your eyes. A moment where you feel the agony and the ecstasy collide. Where time stands still. Comment

Will somebody please, please give Mary Louise Parker a role that doesn't require her to perform it in an affectless, semi-catatonic whine? (That is, in addition to the kid-flick "The Spiderwick Chronicles," in which she's marvelous as a mom surprised by the supernatural.) Parker's idiosyncratic performance style has been commoditized to the point where it loses its impact -- in each incarnation it's basically the same thing in a different bottle. Comment

Jenna Russell, who gorgeously resembles Princess Diana, but with real talent, truly shines in her double role in "Sunday in the Park with George." Less iconically the star than Bernadette Peters was, and far more human, she breaks your heart in the crucial lovers' argument, "We Do Not Belong, Together." Real tears welling in her eyes at the March 12 performance I saw. Comment

Drawing criticism from New Jersey's leading gay rights group, Governor Jon Corzine has nominated a Municipal Court judge with an anti-gay record to become a judge in one of that state's workers' compensation courts. Comment

Governor David Paterson isn't the only politician changing seats in Albany this month. With both the governor and a new state senator assuming fresh responsibilities in March, same-sex marriage equality advocates are considering whether the current round of musical chairs will continue, in time sealing the success of their cause. Comment

Compared to those held in the 1990s, the St. Patrick's Day Parade on Fifth Avenue March 17 was not nearly as fraught with confrontation between excluded Irish LGBT marchers and the anti-gay organizers from the Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH). This year an intrepid band led by the group Irish Queers protested the parade, and their presence brought out the worst in some among the tri-state's "finest" and "bravest" - uniformed police and fire department personnel from across the region. Comment

A New Jersey Municipal Court judge who is said to have an anti-gay record and was recently nominated for a judgeship in a higher court by Governor Jon Corzine said he had no animus toward gay men and lesbians. Comment

Everything boils down to image, especially in an election year. Paying consultants millions of dollars to shape theirs, Hillary has become efficiency and experience embodied, Obama the poster boy for carefully crafted authenticity and boundless hope, and McCain the straight-shooting vet that will defend the nation in these troubled times. Comment

March 6, 2008 Comment

When "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" opened with Terrence Howard taking a shower, his gleaming bare back eliciting howls from a revved-up audience, I knew this umpteenth revival would be like no other. Comment

Federal government policy that for more than 20 years has barred nearly all travel and immigration into the United States by HIV-positive individuals may finally be overturned if legislation working its way through the Senate is approved by both houses of Congress and signed by President George W. Bush. Comment

If you ever wrapped your head in "fabulous towel hair" and came down the stairs of your parents' home pretending you were Dolly Levi returning to Harmonia Gardens, have I got a show for you. Comment

One lesson we have learned from the Democratic race so far - Hillary Clinton is one tough lady. Two weeks ago, her winning the Democratic nomination for president was as likely as David Paterson becoming governor of New York before 2014 - oops, wrong analogy. Comment

In "The Ghosts of 14th Street," lesbian playwright Barbara Kahn looks back at New York City circa 1908, when 14th Street was entertainment central. Through the lives of a pair of married actors, a dandy, a talented brother and sister, an immigrant maid and her gangster husband, and an African-American dancer, Kahn attempts to render life back when vaudeville was king, blackface was the norm, and no actor worth his salt would be caught performing in the "flickers." Comment

Even if the play is often uneven and too abstract to follow, LAByrinth Theater Company's production of Brett C. Leonard's "Unconditional," which just closed its run at the Public Theater, was nonetheless an engaging and evocative piece of theater. Comments (1)

When "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" opened with Terrence Howard taking a shower, his gleaming bare back eliciting howls from a revved-up audience, I knew this umpteenth revival would be like no other. Comment

If you ever wrapped your head in "fabulous towel hair" and came down the stairs of your parents' home pretending you were Dolly Levi returning to Harmonia Gardens, have I got a show for you. Comment

In "The Ghosts of 14th Street," lesbian playwright Barbara Kahn looks back at New York City circa 1908, when 14th Street was entertainment central. Through the lives of a pair of married actors, a dandy, a talented brother and sister, an immigrant maid and her gangster husband, and an African-American dancer, Kahn attempts to render life back when vaudeville was king, blackface was the norm, and no actor worth his salt would be caught performing in the "flickers." Comment

Even if the play is often uneven and too abstract to follow, LAByrinth Theater Company's production of Brett C. Leonard's "Unconditional," which just closed its run at the Public Theater, was nonetheless an engaging and evocative piece of theater. Comments (1)

In Aviva Geismar's poignant new dance "Line of Descent," she investigates the legacy of the Holocaust from a personal and sociological perspective. Derived from interviews with families of victims as well as those on the other side of the tragedy, Geismar, whose grandparents died at Auschwitz and whose father "did not like to talk about his childhood," wanted to find out how this history has shaped subsequent generations. Comment

The remarkable "Blind Mountain" tackles the subject of human trafficking with tremendous restraint and control. Set in the early 1990s, in northern China, writer and director Li Yang portrays how money and corruption enable men in rural villagers to buy women, for marriage and breeding, and also painfully captures the despair of the victims, who often resign themselves to their fate because given the forces of social conformity, there is, in reality, little chance of escape. Comment

Gus Van Sant has charted an interesting path in his forays in cinema and, for much of it, one that must be admired. A pioneer of New Queer Cinema with his beautifully shot mini-pic "Mala Noche," he went on to grab considerable attention with the independent films "Drugstore Cowboy" and, most notably, "My Own Private Idaho." Comment

In ruling that the agency that administers health benefits for New York State employees can recognize Canadian marriages by same-sex couples, an Albany County trial judge became the second state judge in recent weeks to cite a February 1 appellate ruling upstate mandating such a policy. Comment

On the evening of March 4, the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center kicked off the celebration of its 25th anniversary with a record haul from its annual Gala Center Dinner. Comment

Jazz has wooed the string section occasionally during the past century - "Charlie Parker with Strings" from 1949 and "Clifford Brown with Strings" from 1953; a number of albums on the CTI label in the 1960s and '70s; and just last week at Birdland, with bassist Ron Carter's Nonet. Comment

DiCapo Opera's well-appointed, intimate theater underneath a church at 76th and Lexington regularly gets termed "a church basement" by lazy local press but the reality far exceeds that. DiCapo's performances fluctuate considerably in quality but regularly provide sound stagings of works like "L'amico Fritz" and "Street Scene;" next season promises the ambitious American premieres of Janacek's "Sarka" and Honegger's "Mort de Sainte Almenne." Comment

"I like being pastor of a church that is being disciplined for its positions," Reverend Dr. Jacqueline Lewis recently announced from the pulpit of Middle Collegiate Church. The minister was referring to the fact that her congregation was under fire from members of its parent denomination, the Reformed Church of America, because Middle Collegiate came out publicly in support of gay marriage in New York State. Comment

Advocates, Mourning Eliot Spitzer, Upbeat on David Paterson | With the resignation of one of only two governors in the US elected on a same-sex marriage platform, LGBT leaders in New York are breathing a huge sigh of relief that Eliot Spitzer's successor, David Paterson, comes to office with an even stronger record of support for the community's goals. Comment

By: PAUL SCHINDLER | An all-but-final draft of the 2008 Democratic Party platform, approved by the full 186-member Platform Committee at an August 9 meeting in Pittsburgh, puts the party on record in opposition to the federal Defense of Marriage Act, in support of a "comprehensive" Employment Non-Discrimination Act, and more generally in favor of the fight to end discrimination against numerous categories of Americans, including those who are gay, lesbian, and transgendered. Comment