Unfuckingbelievable.

Obama upholds DOMA, does nothing about DADT.
Gay groups are going crazy. Aren’t you?

Twelve years before the Stonewall riots blew the gay rights movement open, an unsung hero led the charge.

Franklin Kameny (left), a World War II veteran, was fired from a U.S. Civil Service job in 1957 on suspicion that he was a homosexual. He refused to capitulate and refused to be ashamed of his sexual orientation, taking the case to the courts, suffering loss after loss. He branched out to take on the American Psychiatric Association to have homosexuality removed from its list of disorders, working with the Mattachine Society, the leading gay rights group of the time. He fought for nearly a decade before the APA reversed its position. In 1971 he ran for Washington D.C.’s nonvoting congressional delegate, hoping to be the first openly gay candidate to win public office, and lost, two years before Harvey Milk’s first defeat as a candidate for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, a position Milk finally won in 1977.

How times have changed since then. Kameny has gone from a peculiar dissident to a celebrated hero of the LGBT rights movement, and his home in Washington has been declared a D.C. historic landmark. He’s being honored this year at the Pride celebration in Washington D.C., at the age of 84, for his work. Most of the institutions Kameny took on have now been reformed in favor of LGBT rights, and the terms and arguments fought during that first push have been enriched with layers upon layers of queer liberation thought.

But it was the first leaders and activists who had to push the hardest, who struggled to maintain dignity against seemingly insurmountable odds. They fought battles they knew they were going to lose, on issues yet unclear if there could ever be a victory.

Fifty years ago, had the Internet existed, websites like this one would have been promptly shut down as obscenity. So it seems fitting to take a moment now to honor Kameny, who took one of our community’s first steps toward freedom.

The Daily Show’s John Stewart puts it best: “We’ve pushed the limits of our own
principles — from warrantless wiretapping, to building a prison out our own legal jurisdiction, to not releasing photos depicting our treatment of detainees, to the treatment of detainees itself — every asset we have must be used all in the service of keeping America safe. Is there any line we still will not cross?”

“Oh yeah, the gay line.”

After Lieutenant Dan Choi, an Arabic translator for the National Guard, publicly admitted he was gay on the Rachael Maddow show on March 19 this year, he received a letter informing him he was being discharged from his job in consistency with the military’s Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy.

The letter stated, “you admitted publicly that you are a homosexual which constitutes homosexual conduct.” Arabic translators are reportedly in high demand in the U.S. armed forces, but that need is not compelling enough to allow an openly gay man to serve. (more…)

Puritan’s Pride theatricality: whose benefit is it really for? The performer? The beholder? Maybe both?

It’s the long bandied-about open secret the gays have long given the side-eye to: the bigger the manly displays of anti-homo swagger, the gayer the self-defensive motivation behind it.

Frankly, the term “homophobia” has never really worked for me because it can’t hope to encompass the range of insecurities that heterosexuals — not just men, but the ladies too — harbor not from without when it comes to…the gay, but from within when reacting to their own same-sex impulses. (more…)

After the “first 100 days” of Barack Obama’s presidency have come and gone, some LGBT groups are calling foul on the absence of gay issues on the president’s table. The “fierce advocate of equality for gay and lesbian Americans” has failed, thus far, to significantly advance gay rights, as even the mainstream media are pointing out with comment and criticism.

I am not of one mind on this subject. I am, of course, unequivocally in favor of advancing LGBT rights, but I’m also open to the argument that political moves must be well-timed and balanced. The more ambitious items on the LGBT agenda will involve intense political battles, and it may be smarter to wait until the air is clear of more imminent issues — the economy being first and foremost — to move forward.

I am also a fan of Barack Obama: I think his presidency is an unequivocally good thing for LGBT Americans. His rhetorical abilities ensure that LGBT people have the most prominent and skilled spokesperson possible, who can help win lasting support for the movement, and regardless of the status of same-sex marriage this president can and will be the catalyst behind hate crimes bills and HIV/AIDS support and other issues of dire importance. (more…)

What’s an out-of-power, out-of-answers, out-of-date party to do?

Coherence hasn’t really been the G.O.P.’s thing for decades, and reality used to be a friend back when the party was composed of level-headed Main Street businessman, rather than snake-handling soothsayers. Now that it’s degenerated into a televangelist take on the Mansion of Madness, there’s a power vacuum left in its “permanent majority” (oy, the Rovian hubris!) wake. The Grand Old Party needs a new face.

You can’t flip this whack shack; you can only superficially paint it up all purdy-like.

Since beauty queens are as anachronistic as all the anti-gay rhetoric the party recycles with eye-rolling monomania, there’s something quaintly apt about a teased-haired, glazed-eyed stiletto doll becoming the Conservative It Girl of-the-moment. In I Shot Andy Warhol, Lily Taylor’s bellicose, up-against-the-wall-motherfucker Valerie Solanas disdainly opined that beauty queens and drag queens were the two ideal victims of male oppression. And the lady knew her shit. (more…)

It’s like this for me:

Milk is Sean Penn’s most nuanced, out-of-body performance since Jeff Spicoli (at right, Fast Times at Ridgemont High):

From rolling out of a van in a cloud of marijuana smoke and having a pizza delivered to your very spunky 15-year old self in History class to being assassinated at 48 in your office by a deranged councilman, famously high on Twinkies, and collapsing against the window in slow ghastly motion while you dreamily focus on the San Francisco Opera House across the way and hear in your dwindling head a lament from the finale of Tosca, a musical motif that crops up several times in the film as a foreshadowing device for it is the aria of a man standing before a firing squad, regretting that he will never again see the stars.

The stars, one hopes, will not only twinkle again for Sean, they will spell out his name on Oscar night, this Sunday, February 22.

Thanks to Jeff and Harvey, the stoner and the stoned, the two arctic poles of an otherwise much ballyhooed and overrated career, Sean Penn has redeemed himself at last. (more…)