Breaking News
BY ARTHUR S. LEONARD
In an opinion issued on April 10, a New York Family Court judge confronted the question whether there can be a third parent — an adult with legal rights to seek custody and visitation of a child who already has two legal, biological parents. In a case involving a married gay male couple and the woman who agreed to have a child with them and share parenting, Judge Carol Goldstein concluded that the “non-biological father” in this triad has “standing” under New York’s Domestic Relations Law to seek custody and visitation of the child, but not necessarily to be designated as a “legal parent.”
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Breaking News
BY ARTHUR S. LEONARD
A federal court has rejected the Trump administration’s argument that the four existing preliminary injunctions issued last year against President Donald Trump’s transgender military ban are moot because they we
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Breaking News
BY PAUL SCHINDLER
David Buckel, a former longtime attorney at Lambda Legal who had led the group’s Marriage Project and advanced LGBTQ rights on a broad range of fronts, was found dead in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park early in the morning on April 14, the victim of a suicide.
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Theater
BY ANDY HUMM
First things first. This splendid production of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s “King Lear”— directed by artistic director Gregory Doran with Sir Antony Sher as Lear in what he says will be his last Shakespeare performance (because what’
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Breaking News
BY SYDNEY PEREIRA
The Revolting Lesbians were back on the steps of the American Museum of Natural History on Friday, and they weren’t afraid to get kicked out or even have the cops called on them. In fact, that was partially their goal.
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Politics
BY PAUL SCHINDLER
For the past several decades, Melissa Sklarz has amassed a wide-ranging portfolio in local LGBTQ and Democratic activism. An out transgender woman, Sklarz served on the Police Commissioner’s LGBT Advisory Committee that established standards for police interactions with the trans community; she’s been a co-president of the Stonewall Democratic Club of New York City and a board member at the
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Film
BY GARY M. KRAMER
The Tribeca Film Festival, unspooling at half a dozen Lower Manhattan venues April 18-29, features several LGBTQ films and filmmakers. While not every queer-focused title was available for preview, a handful of features, documentaries, shorts, and special programs were.
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Politics
BY DUNCAN OSBORNE
For the second year in a row, Heritage of Pride (HOP), the organization that produces New York City’s annual Pride Parade and related events, may be facing demands that it admit a resistance contingent to the march.
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Theater
BY DAVID NOH
Unbelievable as it seems, genius campmeister Charles Busch has never tackled pre-Code women’s pictures, namely those soaked-hankie epics of beleaguered mother love like “Madame X,” “Blonde Venus,” or “Frisco Jenny.” Consider that genre now officially done, to a side-splitting
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Politics
BY DUNCAN OSBORNE
With leading LGBTQ groups supporting gun control measures since the 2016 killings of 49 people in a Florida gay nightclub, a major US bank that was once strongly allied with the community is loaning tens of millions to Remington Outdoor as part of the gun manufacturer’s pre-packaged bankruptcy.
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Legal
BY ARTHUR S. LEONARD
Ruling on a custody contest between a birth mother, Kimberly Jayroe Strickland, and her former same-sex spouse, Christina Strickland, on April 5, the Mississippi Supreme Court blocked K
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Politics
BY DUNCAN OSBORNE
Historian Martin Duberman asks a provocative question in his soon to be released book, “Has the Gay Movement Failed?”
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New York City
BY PAUL SCHINDLER
At a splashy April 10 fundraiser at the Plaza Hotel, the Point Foundation, the nation’s largest scholarship fund for LGBTQ college students, honored journalist Ronan Farrow, who last October broke open the Harvey Weinstein scandal with investigative reporting he published in The New Yorker.
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New York City
BY PAUL SCHINDLER
Bella Savitzky Abzug, who with her election to the US House of Representatives in 1970 from a West Side district became the embodiment of the rising political voice of America’s women, was honored in March, the 20th anniversary of her 1998 death, with a street naming at the corner of Bank Street and Greenwich Avenue in the West Village. Abzug, who
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Kelly Jean Cogswell
BY KELLY COGSWELL
I’m trying to remember what school was like. Having to beg permission to pee. Grades that seemed almost arbitrary. Hallways where boys regularly grabbed or pinched my ass. I didn’t know if they did that to all the girls, or just me, because I never to
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Media Circus
BY ED SIKOV
"Mike Pence Being Accused of Having Sexual Relationship with Gay Pornstar Is Fake News” is the attention-grabbing headline of a piece in an online rag called ̶
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Theater
BY CHRISTOPHER BYRNE
Who knows where inspiration comes from? For master puppeteer Basil Twist, it came accidentally in the form of a small, broken aquarium found outside his East Village studio. He patched it up, filled it with water, attached a bit of fabric to a coat hanger, and started swirling it around in the water. And then he thought, “What else can I do?̶
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Film
BY GARY M. KRAMER
How does anyone approach the inimitable, indomitable Grace Jones? The singer/ actress/ model turns 70 this year and still has impeccably sculpted legs and cheekbones, a distinctive, throaty voice, her androgynous appearance, and an outré sense of fashion. She is utterly unconventional and totally alluring. In a remarkable documentary, “Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami,̶
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Books
BY DAVID EHRENSTEIN
“Bisexuality immediately doubles your chances for a date on Saturday night.” So joked Woody Allen back in the day. That was almost as glib as Mike Nichols’ similarly “classic” quip that “homosexuality us
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Film
BY STEVE ERICKSON
Two things describe Argentine director Lucrecia Martel’s characters: they’re never really alone and the help others offer them is rarely truly benign. Her debut, “La Ciénaga,” showed an extended family going to seed and placing themselves unknowingly in danger over the course of a humid summer. It borrowed from Renoir and Altman in its choice to avoid settlin
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Music
BY DAVID SHENGOLD
The Little Opera Theatre of NY offered a very pleasant surprise at Baruch’s impressive Performing Arts Center March 24 with “Piramo e Tisbe” by Hamburg-born Johann Adolf Hasse (1699-1783), a local premiere. One thinks of Hasse as Handel without the psychology; but the music (under harpsich
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Health
BY PAUL SCHINDLER
New York-Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital has joined only 417 others hospitals nationwide in winning designation as a Leader in LGBTQ Healthcare Equality by the Human Rights Campaign Foundation.
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Theater
BY DAVID KENNERLEY
Broadway’s ravenous addiction to sourcing popular movies for the stage and setting them to music shows no signs of abating. In recent seasons we’ve seen “Legally Blonde,” “Bring It On: The Musical,” “Kinky Boots,” and “Groundhog Day,” among others. And let’s not f
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