Yes! Johnny Weir is going to Vancouver!

Under the colors of the American flag, he will skate for us all
here in the land of the free, home of the brave,
birthplace of DOMA, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, and Voter-Approved Homophobia.

Aren’t we lucky! The whole world wants to be us!

Ever wonder how, where, and when the vulgarities of our society got their starts?

A friend once asked me who gave the very first blowjob (I guessed one of those slutty Ancient Romans, maybe even Caligula himself), and that in turn had me positing who might have coined the slurs and filthspeak — specifically the ones centering around sex acts — that we take for granted today.

I’m sure there must be renderings of pictographic proto-porn in Neanderthal caves, and certainly the tribe had some verbal classification for the males of the clan who wanted to go all Quest For Fire on each other’s asses. The word “fuck” is often misidentified as a medieval acronym (“For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge” or “Fornication Under Consent of the King”), though it does date back to at least 15th Century Germany. “Fag” and “Faggot” had nothing to do with sexual orientation in their original British context until around 1914 in (natch) America when they supplanted “Fairy” and became common nomenclature in straight and gay circles for demarcating an effeminate man from a straight or straight-seeming one. (read the full article)

Eighth grade was a tough year for me. I was 13 years old in 1998, in an oppressive yet typical American middle school where “pack of wolves” could accurately describe the student body. I was a big-eyed late-bloomer who enjoyed class more than recess and was irrepressibly talkative. Quickly, I became a focal-point of abuse for my male peers, most of whom were bigger than me, had girlfriends and some of these guys were even shaving.

It was also the year Matthew Shepard was murdered, and the news felt personal. His death coincided with my realization that I was gay. Though I was still in the closet, bullies at my school gleefully pointed out that Matthew Shepard and I shared a first name. They taunted me as they poked fun at Shepard’s story, making clear that even murder is fair game for expressing disdain for homosexuality. (read the full article)

It is hard to discuss Bayard Rustin without noting our current moment in history, when race and sexual orientation intersect in unprecedented, tumultuous ways.

The first black American president claims positions that would make him the greatest advocate for LGBT rights ever to grace the Oval Office, more gay-friendly than any of his white predecessors. Yet President Obama is paradoxically under closer scrutiny from LGBT groups than any former president was — both because the moment is so ripe for change and because he has yet done little to fulfill his promises.

Similarly, the aftermath of Proposition 8 in California last November brought group tensions to a head, when some pro-gay commentators placed the blame for the insidious law’s passage on the votes of black Californians. Same-sex marriage advocates lamented the lack of understanding from a group that has faced similar discrimination, and LGBT people of color (who obviously did not vote for Proposition 8 ) faced a cruel backlash from their white peers at a time when they, too, were reeling from the shock that their right to marry was revoked.

Progress happens when we put aside defensiveness and focus on the truth: that all people deserve to be treated with dignity, fair judgment, and respect. The life of Bayard Rustin (pictured above with Martin Luther King Jr.) proves that LGBT Americans and black Americans are indebted to each other, and are more alike than different, having been intertwined for generations. (read the full article)

“What I am, Michael, is a 32-year-old, ugly, pock-marked Jew fairy. And if it takes me a while to pull myself together, and if I can smoke a little grass before I get nerve to show this face to the world, it’s nobody’s goddamn business but my own.”

The cutting words of The Boys In The Band’s sharp-tongued Harold aren’t just one of the most hyper-aware self-assessments in the history of filmdom — they’re a fitting tagline for a landmark movie that’s as many simultaneous things as Harold, its birthday boy is.

At once a social document, wry sexploitation flick, hissing bitchfest, repository for immortal camp dialogue, midnight movie, urban character study, bleak outsider period piece, and parlor drama run amuck, The Boys In The Band has managed to endear and repel, engage and repulse, disarm and dismay its viewers in equal measure, and as it nears the big 4-0, it’s apt that as the film reaches midlife crisis time, its target audience finds itself at a heady vantage point of not only looking back at a turbulent past, but looking forward to as precarious a future.

By now, scribe Mart Crowley’s watershed 1968 Off-Broadway production that inspired the film has become a part of New York history and Big Apple mythology beyond. (read the full article)

On June 10, 2006, just in time for her birthday, Judy Garland appeared on a U.S. stamp.

I always think of Judy at this time of year, as the rainbow flags unfurl and the floats come down the street with their glamor-girl boys and near-nude leathermen.

Hyper-real spectaculars that would not be out of place in the Emerald City — or Munchkinland!

“Are you a friend of Dorothy?” soldiers would ask each other during World War II, using this code phrase to signal that they were gay. It was only a matter of time before the brass caught wind of it, without quite understanding its significance. In a dither that Reds and homos were sneaking into their ranks, the military spent $250,000 to find out who this diabolic den-mother of the GI homos was. Yet even the nelliest civilian could have told them (in exchange, we hope, for a little buzz-cut face action).

She was, of course, our Judy. The gal who fell from a star called Kansas. So tenderly young in The Wizard of Oz, yet already empowered by that penetrating cry in her voice.

We need only hear her tearful call of Toto! Toto! as her terrier is being bicycled away in the clutches of Miss Gulch to get that old chill, the heartachy twang of childhood injustice. (read the full article)

Because the ’50s were so much more than tailfins and pointy bras.

BUT WAIT! — THERE’S MORE! (read the full article)

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.