Very interesting interview with Larry Kramer about the differences between the generations of Gay Men….
Hard as it is to believe, this generation really grew up in a different, safer, more accepting time …
Those of us who are older had a very different experience- and they have no idea what it was like during the AIDS Crisis or growing up when it was still, as Lord Alfred Douglas said, “The love that dare not speak its name”.
And Gay Men, like most Americans, don’t really care about or want to know their history….
Larry Kramer’s ground breaking play from the outbreak of the AIDS crisis opens on Broadway this week….
From Salon.com interview with Thomas Rogers:
Rogers: I saw a preview of the play last night with a friend. I think many of the ideas in the play will seem exotic and a little dated to a lot of young gay men.
Kramer: Like what?
Rogers: Like the idea of promiscuity as a political statement and that it would be treasonous or controversial for gay men to tell other gay men not to have sex, or to have sex with a condom. What do you think young people should take away from the play?
Kramer: It’s our history. We’re gay. This was part of our history. This was the most horrible thing the gay population ever lived through. And yet it also represented — later on, with ACT UP, and the getting of AIDS drugs — the most spectacular achievement the gay population ever had. We gays did that.
I don’t know why so many gay men don’t want to know their history. I don’t know why they turned their back on the older generation as if they don’t want to have anything to do with them. I would like us to get beyond that.
Rogers: But do you really think that lack of interest in history is particular to this generation?
Kramer: You tell me.
Rogers: Well, I’m 27, and I know that my formative images of gay life had nothing to do with AIDS. Ellen came out of the closet when I was in junior high and “Will & Grace” made gayness seem like a consumer identity more than anything else. Gayness wasn’t really linked with sickness is my mind, and so those early AIDS battles, I think, seem very alien to a lot of young people’s experiences.
Kramer: I don’t know. I could understand what you’re saying. Sometimes when I go to schools, kids say that they’re taught to be non-confrontational or non-participatory now, almost like it’s not cool to have opinions and express them, which is sad. I hope we’re coming out of all that.
MORE: The problem with gay men today – Interviews – Salon.com.
Filed under Gay, History, Uncategorized
This article gave me a lot to think about. Since Americans don’t know, don’t care about and don’t learn from their history, it’s also rather scary.
Some amazing parallels here in this article.
I encourage you to click the link and read the entire thing on CNN.com:
But you don’t have to tour a battlefield to understand the Civil War. Look at today’s headlines. As the nation commemorates the 150th anniversary of its deadliest war this week, some historians say we’re still fighting over some of the same issues that fueled the Civil War.
“There are all of these weird parallels,” says Stephanie McCurry, author of “Confederate Reckoning,” a new book that examines why Southerners seceded and its effect on Southern women and slaves.
“When you hear charges today that the federal government is overreaching, and the idea that the Constitution recognized us as a league of sovereign states — these were all part of the secessionist charges in 1860,” she says.
“Living history” on Civil War battlefields
These “weird parallels” go beyond the familiar debates over what caused the war, slavery or states’ rights. They extend to issues that seem to have nothing to do with the Civil War.
The shutdown of the federal government, war in Libya, the furor over the new health care law and Guantanamo Bay — all have tentacles that reach back to the Civil War, historians say.
They point to four parallels:
Filed under History, Uncategorized
A little known bit of history that even I had forgotten…
When Elizabeth Taylor died, Al Jazeera English reported that her greatest role was Cleopatra.
They didn’t report that she had offered herself as a hostage at Entebbe in exchange for the 100 hijack victims held by terrorists at that airport in Uganda in 1976. The terrorists turned down the deal, and then Israeli commandos freed the hostages.
“The Jewish people will always remember” Taylor’s offer—that’s what the Israeli ambassador to the United States, Simcha Dinitz said in 1977, according to CNN.
Taylor had converted to Judaism in 1959, when she was 27 years old—Time magazine reported that she had taken the Jewish name “Elisheba Rachel Taylor.” Raised as a Christian Scientist, Taylor converted in part under the influence of her third husband, producer Mike Todd—“born Avrom Goldbogen,” as Time explained, “grandson of a Polish rabbi.”
The year after her Entebbe hostage trade offer, 1977, she married John Warner, who then ran for the Senate from Virginia as a Republican—she campaigned for him actively, and her star power was credited with his narrow victory. Warner reportedly resented being called “Mr. Elizabeth Taylor.”
But life as a Republican political wife in Washington made her “a drunk and a junkie,” she later said, and in 1983 she checked into the Betty Ford clinic. The rest is history.
via Elizabeth Taylor, Al Jazeera and the Raid on Entebbe | The Nation.
Filed under Entertainment, History, Media, Politics, Religion
I posted about this tragedy earlier this week…
There is a lot of focus on the advances in work place safety since that tragic fire, but there is little awareness of all the current attempts to undo them…
The short American memory and attention span strikes again…
It always seems to take a tragedy to drive reform, then the reforms are quickly undone…
It’s a vicious cycle….
From Andrew Schneider at AOL News:
Worker safety advocates cite the painful irony that, precisely 100 years to the month after the fire, the House of Representatives has passed a budget bill that would slash nearly $100 million — about 20 percent — from OSHA’s current budget. About 40 percent of those cuts will be to the agency’s enforcement and safety inspectors — those on the front line of protecting workers.
“Lives will be lost because of these proposed cuts. They’re devastating,” Joel Shufro, executive director of the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health, told AOL News on Thursday.
“Since its founding, OSHA has been underfunded and understaffed. They currently have enough inspectors to inspect every workplace just once every 143 years. The proposed cuts will cut OSHA’s effectiveness even more,” he added.
OSHA administrator David Michaels says the House’s cutback “would really have a devastating effect on all of our activities.”
David Von Drehle wrote what many consider the definitive book on the tragedy in 1911, “Triangle: The Fire that Changed America.” He said in the book that history can run backward, and that even much-needed reforms like worker safety gains can be lost again.
“Many of the initial post-Triangle reforms were strenuously opposed by conservative businessmen … who were soon back in the saddle and able to halt, hamstring or reverse liberal initiatives,” he wrote.
The recent GOP sweep has many believing the same thing is happening again.
via The Lessons of Triangle Shirtwaist Fire May Be Lost 100 Years Later.
Great article from Nicholas Kristof in today’s New York Times.
No matter where you fall on the issue of Teacher’s Unions, it makes sense….
This is another one of those issues that just seems impossible to argue…
Who wants poor quality, under-paid teachers?
Oh, the the Republicans, who fear a well educated electorate with strong critical thinking skills….
Here is an excerpt from Mr Kristof’s column. I encourage you to click the link and read it in it’s entirety. Italics emphasis is mine…
Until a few decades ago, employment discrimination perversely strengthened our teaching force. Brilliant women became elementary school teachers, because better jobs weren’t open to them. It was profoundly unfair, but the discrimination did benefit America’s children.
These days, brilliant women become surgeons and investment bankers — and 47 percent of America’s kindergarten through 12th-grade teachers come from the bottom one-third of their college classes (as measured by SAT scores). The figure is from a study by McKinsey & Company, “Closing the Talent Gap.”
Changes in relative pay have reinforced the problem. In 1970, in New York City, a newly minted teacher at a public school earned about $2,000 less in salary than a starting lawyer at a prominent law firm. These days the lawyer takes home, including bonus, $115,000 more than the teacher, the McKinsey study found.
We all understand intuitively the difference a great teacher makes. I think of Juanita Trantina, who left my fifth-grade class intoxicated with excitement for learning and fascinated by the current events she spoke about. You probably have a Miss Trantina in your own past.
One Los Angeles study found that having a teacher from the 25 percent most effective group of teachers for four years in a row would be enough to eliminate the black-white achievement gap.
Recent scholarship suggests that good teachers, even kindergarten teachers, increase their students’ earnings many years later. Eric A. Hanushek of Stanford University found that an excellent teacher (one a standard deviation better than average, or better than 84 percent of teachers) raises each student’s lifetime earnings by $20,000. If there are 20 students in the class, that is an extra $400,000 generated, compared with a teacher who is merely average.
A teacher better than 93 percent of other teachers would add $640,000 to lifetime pay of a class of 20, the study found.
Look, I’m not a fan of teachers’ unions. They used their clout to gain job security more than pay, thus making the field safe for low achievers. Teaching work rules are often inflexible, benefits are generous relative to salaries, and it is difficult or impossible to dismiss teachers who are ineffective.
But none of this means that teachers are overpaid. And if governments nibble away at pensions and reduce job security, then they must pay more in wages to stay even.
Moreover, part of compensation is public esteem. When governors mock teachers as lazy, avaricious incompetents, they demean the profession and make it harder to attract the best and brightest. We should be elevating teachers, not throwing darts at them.
Excellent article from Robert Shrum that I originally saw on David Mixner’s site….
Worth clicking the link to read the entire thing….
America was rescued from the Great Depression by the New Deal — and then pushed back into recession when Franklin Roosevelt briefly and prematurely moved toward a balanced budget. Three-quarters of a century later, a second depression was averted by an act of government that did more and spent more to counter a collapse in consumer demand and the credit markets. It briefly seemed that we as a nation had learned the imperative that FDR expressed on Inauguration Day in 1933 — the necessity for “action, and action now.”
But FDR had come to office more than three years into a catastrophic downturn. Americans rallied to the hope he brought, but didn’t expect an instant turnaround.
Barack Obama entered his presidency only months into the financial crisis. Compounded by the pressures of a hyper-media age, the public mood didn’t accord him many months before punishing him and his party in the midterm elections for a recovery that was taking hold but not fast enough, a recovery still more a statistical artifact than a fact of people’s lives. There are now more convincing signs of economic revival, which could yield decisive and Democratic dividends in 2012 — if the results of the 2010 elections don’t stall a reverse in growth and job creation.
Filed under History, Politics, Social Justice, The Economy
This makes perfect sense since I’m beginning to believe only a few of we Gay Men are among the remaining pillars of civilization who understand the importance of protocol, pageantry and place settings…
From Jonthan Capehart at the Washington Post:
The White House is set to make news and history this afternoon when it announces the new social secretary. Jeremy Bernard, currently the chief of staff to the U.S. ambassador to France, will become the third person to hold the job in the Obama administration. But he will be the first man and the first openly gay person to be the first family’s and the executive mansion’s chief event planner and host.
Desiree Rogers was the first social secretary under President Obama and the first African American in the position. But one state dinner and three party crashers later, the exquisitely grand Rogers was gone. “She is a star,” as one friend aptly put it at the height of the Salahi controversy, “who has taken a gig in the chorus.”
Julianna Smoot swooped in at the behest of the Obamas last March. She was the engineer behind the president’s 2008 fundraising machine and a known Washington hand who focused the social secretary’s office on the fundamentals. But she resigned last month to join the reelection campaign taking shape in Chicago.
And now comes Jeremy Bernard.
Bernard and his then-partner Rufus Gifford were early supporters of Obama in California. And they raised a ton of money for him through their company, B&G Associates. Gifford went on to become finance director of the Democratic National Committee. Bernard was the White House liaison at the National Endowment for the Humanities before dashing off to his Paris post in November.
Full disclosure: Bernard and I are friends. He will bring a certain warmth and irreverence to the job that will make him a joy for his colleagues to work with. His knowledge of the Obamas and his intense attention to detail will ensure that their vision for the people’s house continues seamlessly. And he has a reverence for the presidency and the meaning of the White House that will make him an imaginative steward of their image.
The president and the first lady have made an excellent choice.
via PostPartisan – Jeremy Bernard: A historic choice for White House social secretary.
Filed under Entertainment, Gay, History, Politics
From The Onion, but not really satire…
Of course, satire always has a grain of truth…
“When I heard about Eisenhower’s presidential accomplishments—holding down the national debt, keeping inflation in check, and fighting for balanced budgets—it hit me that we’d clearly gotten their names mixed up at some point,” Priebus told reporters. “I couldn’t believe we’d been associating terms like ‘visionary,’ ‘principled,’ and ‘bold’ with President Reagan. That wasn’t him at all—that was Ike.”
“We deeply regret misattributing such a distinguished and patriotic legacy to Mr. Reagan,” Priebus added. “We really screwed up.”
Following his discovery, Priebus directed RNC staffers to inform top Republicans of the error and explain that it was Eisenhower, not Reagan, who carefully managed the nation’s prosperity, warned citizens of the military-industrial complex’s growing influence, and led the country with a mix of firm resolve and humble compassion.
And the real thing….
Filed under History, Politics, The Economy
Lost in the 21st Century 
Chapter 52: Sex in the South: Part 2- The Queen of the South | My Southern Gothic Life
New post up on my other blog, MySouthernGothicLife.com….
Here’s a brief excerpt and a link to the full post…
via Chapter 52: Sex in the South: Part 2- The Queen of the South | My Southern Gothic Life.
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