Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte

Go Orange

2007-02-01T06:07:00.000-05:00

Anthony Castro, R.I.P.

2007-01-28T18:14:00.000-05:00

A tribute to a friend and an athlete

By Jim Buzinski
Outsports

It's hard to write about a friend who has just died, but people need to know about Anthony Castro, killed in a crash in the Southern California mountains on Jan. 21. He was 19.

Anthony was that rarest of people – an athlete out to his team. In Anthony's case, he was out in high school to his football and wrestling teams, our two most macho team sports. It took guts to take such a step but Anthony never thought too much about it – he was not ashamed of who he was and if you were uncomfortable, that was your problem.

My favorite Anthony story involves his senior year of wrestling. A fellow wrestler used to make snide homophobic remarks to Anthony.

Rather than file a complaint with the school, Anthony addressed the problem head on – he challenged the wrestler to a put-up-or-shut-up match. It didn't take very long, as Anthony had the guy pinned in about 20 seconds. That stopped the heckling and Anthony told me the guy quit the team.

Anthony was not a student in some L.A. Westside hotbed of tolerance. Rather, he lived in Banning, two hours east of L.A. in the desert and a rather "red" part of a very "blue" state. Being out in Banning, a pretty rough place, takes some big cojones.

I first met Anthony in November 2005, when I received an e-mail from him about playing for our L.A. Motion gay flag football team.

"Hi, I'm Anthony. I live in Banning, California. I am a gay athlete and still in high school. … With no other gay jocks, I feel like I am the only one and it sucks cause I don't know any other guys that are gay and like me. I play football, basketball, track, cheerleading and swim. I have been playing football since I was five. I am the tight end for my high school, free safety and kickoff and punt returner. I don't know why I told you this but there you go. LOL. You guys are the closest to me and I figured if I was going to be moving down there, I should find out about things that are going on what are the age limits that you guys need to join."

At first I thought the letter was a prank – the odds of an openly gay high school player in Banning seemed remote and Outsports does get the crank e-mail from time to time. But I wrote him back with sincerity and was surprised when he showed up, as promised, a few days later. He had a build more like a linebacker than quarterback, but in just a few plays I could tell he had great skills. I could also tell he was a bit awed to be playing football with a bunch of openly gay guys.

"It was really fun," he wrote me a few days after his first game. "I told my wrestling coach that we better not have practice on Saturdays. He said why, so I told him I joined a gay flag football team. So he said don't worry we won't. So he was cool and I like it because it is fun playing with all you guys."

We then saw him virtually every week from then on and he showed a commitment that is rare. He was always the first to arrive despite driving two hours to get there. He especially liked the fact that he could be himself, flirt if he wanted and not have to worry about it. He took a liking to one of our players, JP, and they used to kid each other all the time about JP being a senior citizen (32 looks like that to an 18-year-old).

"Hey, Mr. Hit Young Guy in the Nuts," he wrote JP after one game when JP guarded him and things got a bit rough. "Well, it was fun playing football, even though you hit me in the nuts. By the way, they still hurt like hell. Hope your boyfriend hits you in the nuts or something."

Like most single 18-year-olds, Anthony was always on the prowl and would write me "woe is me" e-mails as he pined for someone new who showed up at football. "I am not going to let him score on me unless it's in bed," he wrote about one lust object who was guarding him one week. His e-mails were always a highlight for me and I felt like a big brother to him.

He also had a turbulent upbringing. He told me his mom rejected him for a time because he was gay, even though she lives with a woman (I never figured that one out). He wrote about seeing his dad in jail and having a relative with AIDS. He wound up living with a legal guardian, Phil, who had a tremendously positive influence on him and was a key support for Anthony on and off the field.

Football was always a refuge for him, even as he endured tragedy. "I am not doing so good," he wrote me last winter. "Two of my friends were shot and killed 2 days ago and another friend was jumped badly. I don't know what the world is coming to these days. I have been trying to not think about it, but it is hard. I mean, those are guys I helped out and had them play football to stay out of trouble. I wish I could have been there for them. The guys came from rough lives and they told me playing football helped them out a lot to not think about drugs or anything. I am a little sad. Hopefully football will help take my mind off it."

One day at football last spring, he introduced me to a friend he had brought, Cody, a handsome, athletic 24-year-old. "He's straight," Anthony whispered to me. Minutes later, I saw Anthony lying on the sidelines in Cody's lap, soaking up the SoCal sun. Straight, my ass! Cody was Anthony's new boyfriend and I could tell he was beaming. They were perfect for each other and quickly fell in love.

I knew things were serious when Anthony called me one Saturday to say he was going to miss football – he and Cody were going to Disneyland. A second time when they skipped football, JP wrote me sarcastically but with affection: "Lame excuse. I'm a lawyer and I can smell BS stories a mile away. This kid was sitting at home with his new love."

Anthony and Cody quickly became fixtures at football and the other players gravitated towards them. They were fun and full of life and love, and Anthony (who could be grumpy at times) was a much looser person with Cody. When Cyd and I picked our Outsports flag football team for the 2006 Gay Games, Anthony was one of the first people invited.

The Gay Games were something special for Anthony. He was going to play in a tournament with other gay athletes and he could bring his boyfriend along without fear or shame. Younger than everyone else by six years, he became our team's little brother.

On the field at the Gay Games, Anthony was a star. Playing receiver and defensive back, he caught the go-ahead touchdown in the gold medal game, and added an interception in the end zone to boot. In a close win a day earlier he made a catch on fourth down that was so amazing that people just screamed "that's sick!" when he came down with it. Watching Anthony receive his gold medal from teammate Esera Tuaolo gave me goose bumps; two out jocks, separated by a generation but bonded nonetheless.

Anthony loved USC football, his 1999 Mazda Miata 10th anniversary edition, his No. 10 jersey and postgame trips to Tommy's burgers with Cody. I will miss him terribly.

Scotland

2007-01-22T08:28:00.000-05:00

Anatomy of an Insult

2007-01-22T08:11:00.000-05:00

Anatomy of an Insult: ABC Is Stung by an Actor’s Anti-Gay Slurs

By EDWARD WYATT
January 22, 2007
New York Times

LOS ANGELES, Jan. 21 — Executives at ABC and its parent, Disney, are mulling the future of the actor Isaiah Washington, a star of the hit series “Grey’s Anatomy,” after Mr. Washington last week publicly used an anti-gay slur for the second time in roughly three months, a Disney executive said Friday.

The situation has potentially great implications for ABC, which is reaping millions of dollars in advertising revenues from a show that, in its third season, is among the highest rated on television.

The executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because company officials were instructed not to go beyond a prepared statement, said that Mr. Washington’s behavior could be considered grounds for dismissal under Disney’s corporate antidiscrimination policy.

ABC and Touchstone, Disney’s television studio, called Mr. Washington’s behavior “unacceptable” in a statement issued on Thursday, three days after Mr. Washington’s most recent remark, which occurred in the backstage press room at the Golden Globes ceremony last week.

Mr. Washington later apologized for the remark and said that he was seeking help for “issues I obviously need to examine within my own soul.” But the damage might be done for Mr. Washington, 43, who portrays Dr. Preston Burke on “Grey’s Anatomy,” which this season has attracted an audience of more than 18 million viewers each week, according to Nielsen Media Research. On Thursday, the first broadcast since the show won for best dramatic television series at the Golden Globes, the audience numbered nearly 22 million, according to ABC.

Mr. Washington first got into trouble for using the same slur during an off-camera dispute on the set of the show in October. The remark was aimed at T. R. Knight, who portrays Dr. George O’Malley on the series and who had not previously talked publicly about his sexuality. It followed a brief fight between Mr. Washington and a third actor on the show, Patrick Dempsey. After that incident became public, Mr. Washington apologized, and Mr. Knight publicly acknowledged that he was gay. The October fight has continued to be the subject of gossip around the show, and after the Golden Globe victory for “Grey’s Anatomy,” the show’s actors and creator gathered backstage to answer reporters’ questions. One asked about the fight and the remark.

Mr. Washington moved to the microphone and denied that he ever used the slur to describe Mr. Knight, at the same time repeating the word. Fellow cast members who were with Mr. Washington appeared shaken, quickly going from jubilant to solemn. After the awards show another “Grey’s” actor, Katherine Heigl, publicly repudiated Mr. Washington’s remarks.

Mr. Knight appeared on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” on Wednesday and disputed Mr. Washington’s denial of using the slur in October.

As discussion of the incidents grew, Mr. Washington remained silent until after ABC issued a statement chastising him.

“We have a longstanding policy to create and maintain respectful workplaces for all our employees,” the ABC statement said. “We dealt with the original situation in October, and thought the issue resolved. Therefore, we are greatly dismayed that Mr. Washington chose to use such inappropriate language at the Golden Globes, language that he himself deemed ‘unfortunate’ in his previous public apology. We take this situation very seriously. His actions are unacceptable and are being addressed.”

An ABC spokeswoman declined to comment on how the issue was addressed in October and what steps were being considered now.

After ABC issued its statement, Mr. Washington again apologized, after first firing his publicist. He expressed his regret to Mr. Knight, colleagues, fans “and especially the lesbian and gay community for using a word that is unacceptable in any context or circumstance.”

The statement appeared to acknowledge that Mr. Washington had used the slur before, despite his most recent denial. “By repeating the word Monday night, I marred what should have been a perfect night for everyone who works on ‘Grey’s Anatomy,’ ” the statement said. “I can neither defend nor explain my behavior. I can also no longer deny to myself that there are issues I obviously need to examine within my own soul, and I’ve asked for help.

“I know the power of words, especially those that demean,” the statement continued. “I realize that by using one filled with disrespect I have hurt more than T. R. and my colleagues. With one word, I’ve hurt everyone who has struggled for the respect so many of us take for granted. I welcome the chance to meet with leaders of the gay and lesbian community to apologize in person and to talk about what I can do to heal the wounds I’ve opened.”

Mr. Washington added: “T. R.’s courage throughout this entire episode speaks to his tremendous character. I hold his talent, and T. R. as a person, in high esteem. I know a mere apology will not end this, and I intend to let my future actions prove my sincerity.”

Neil G. Giuliano, the president of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, told CNN on Friday that he expected to travel to Los Angeles this week to meet with ABC executives and Mr. Washington.

Kelly Mullens, Mr. Washington’s new publicist, declined to comment on Mr. Washington’s plans for a meeting or his expected future with the show.

“Grey’s Anatomy” ranks fifth overall among prime-time shows. It ranks second overall among viewers ages 18 to 49, the demographic group for which networks charge the highest advertising premium.

Showtime

2007-01-09T00:14:00.000-05:00

Second Thoughts on Gays in the Military

2007-01-03T21:46:00.000-05:00

Op-Ed Contributor
New York Times
January 2, 2007

By JOHN M. SHALIKASHVILI
Steilacoom, Wash.

TWO weeks ago, President Bush called for a long-term plan to increase the size of the armed forces. As our leaders consider various options for carrying out Mr. Bush’s vision, one issue likely to generate fierce debate is “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the policy that bars openly gay service members from the military. Indeed, leaders in the new Congress are planning to re-introduce a bill to repeal the policy next year.

As was the case in 1993 — the last time the American people thoroughly debated the question of whether openly gay men and lesbians should serve in the military — the issue will give rise to passionate feelings on both sides. The debate must be conducted with sensitivity, but it must also consider the evidence that has emerged over the last 14 years.

When I was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, I supported the current policy because I believed that implementing a change in the rules at that time would have been too burdensome for our troops and commanders. I still believe that to have been true. The concern among many in the military was that given the longstanding view that homosexuality was incompatible with service, letting people who were openly gay serve would lower morale, harm recruitment and undermine unit cohesion.

In the early 1990s, large numbers of military personnel were opposed to letting openly gay men and lesbians serve. President Bill Clinton, who promised to lift the ban during his campaign, was overwhelmed by the strength of the opposition, which threatened to overturn any executive action he might take. The compromise that came to be known as “don’t ask, don’t tell” was thus a useful speed bump that allowed temperatures to cool for a period of time while the culture continued to evolve.

The question before us now is whether enough time has gone by to give this policy serious reconsideration. Much evidence suggests that it has.

Last year I held a number of meetings with gay soldiers and marines, including some with combat experience in Iraq, and an openly gay senior sailor who was serving effectively as a member of a nuclear submarine crew. These conversations showed me just how much the military has changed, and that gays and lesbians can be accepted by their peers.

This perception is supported by a new Zogby poll of more than 500 service members returning from Afghanistan and Iraq, three quarters of whom said they were comfortable interacting with gay people. And 24 foreign nations, including Israel, Britain and other allies in the fight against terrorism, let gays serve openly, with none reporting morale or recruitment problems.

I now believe that if gay men and lesbians served openly in the United States military, they would not undermine the efficacy of the armed forces. Our military has been stretched thin by our deployments in the Middle East, and we must welcome the service of any American who is willing and able to do the job.

But if America is ready for a military policy of nondiscrimination based on sexual orientation, the timing of the change should be carefully considered. As the 110th Congress opens for business, some of its most urgent priorities, like developing a more effective strategy in Iraq, share widespread support that spans political affiliations. Addressing such issues could help heal the divisions that cleave our country. Fighting early in this Congress to lift the ban on openly gay service members is not likely to add to that healing, and it risks alienating people whose support is needed to get this country on the right track.

By taking a measured, prudent approach to change, political and military leaders can focus on solving the nation’s most pressing problems while remaining genuinely open to the eventual and inevitable lifting of the ban. When that day comes, gay men and lesbians will no longer have to conceal who they are, and the military will no longer need to sacrifice those whose service it cannot afford to lose.

John M. Shalikashvili, a retired army general, was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1993 to 1997.

Birds do it, bees do it . . .

2007-01-03T19:51:00.000-05:00

Is homosexuality natural?
Martin Fletcher
Timesonline.com

Our correspondent reports from Oslo on a new exhibition that appears to debunk the theory that homosexuality is an exclusively human preference

Dr Linda Wolfe
The author is Chair of the Department of Anthropology at East Carolina University

It is not what you would expect to see when you take your children on a Sunday outing to the natural history museum: a giant photograph of one male giraffe humping another, or two whales sparring with giant penises. This, however, is Norway, where — for better or worse — the normal rules do not apply. Three years ago the Government told the country’s museums and libraries that they should do more to contribute to social debates and dare to tackle taboo subjects.

The results of that order are now coming through. One museum is staging an exhibition that debunks the national myth that every Norwegian was an heroic Resistance fighter in the Second World War. A second is planning an exhibition on Vidkun Quisling, the ultimate Norwegian collaborator. A third has an exhibition showing how badly Norway has treated Gypsies.

But the Natural History Museum in Oslo has gone one better. As America’s religious right fulminates against homosexuality, Europe embraces gay marriage, and leading homosexuals such as Martina Navratilova denounce scientists in Oregon for attempting to make gay sheep straight, the Naturhistorisk Museum is stepping squarely into the heart of a controversy that dates back to at least AD1120 when the Church Council of Nablus described homosexuality as a “sin against nature” .

It is staging a government-financed exhibition in its august halls that shows that homosexuality — far from being unnatural — is actually rampant in the animal world. Against Nature? is the first exhibition in the world dedicated to gay animals, claims Petter Bockman, its bearded and ponytailed scientific adviser, who also happens to be the University of Oslo’s leading — and only — frog expert (there are not many amphibians, gay or straight, this far north).

The facts have been staring scientists in the face for years, Bockman says, as he stands in front of the gay giraffes. “It’s fairly easy to see because the giraffe’s sex organs are not what you’d call modest.” The problem, he contends, is that when researchers are confronted by such behaviour, they choose to ignore it. They claim it is irrelevant to their work, or fear ridicule or the loss of their grants if they draw attention to it. They prefer to describe two animals of the same sex frolicking with each other as “competition, a form of greeting, ritualised combat, things like that — even when we are talking full anal intercourse with ejaculation”.

The taboo was finally broken in 1999 when Bruce Bagemihl, a gay biologist at the University of Wisconsin, published a book entitled Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity.

Bagemihl had scoured every scientific journal and paper he could lay his hands on for references to homosexuality in animals. Tucked away at the end of long and erudite texts, or consigned to footnotes and appendices, he found that homosexuality had been observed in no fewer than 1,500 species, and well documented in 500 of them. The earliest mention of animal homosexuality probably came 2,300 years ago when Aristotle described two female hyenas cavorting with each other.

Bagemihl’s book provided the inspiration for this exhibition, and any notion that homosexuality is a uniquely human trait is quickly disposed of. You are greeted by a pair of swans — the very symbols of romantic love — who turn out to be a female couple. “Up to a fifth of all pairs are all male or all female,” reads the accompanying text.

Then you come to the photograph of the whales “penis fencing” above which hang — for no apparent reason — two actual whale penises, both several feet long and looking like stretched and desiccated turnips. Some of the male whales meet year after year, says Bockman, while their relations with females are fleeting at best.

A model — the one that invariably draws most giggles from the exhibition’s younger visitors — shows a male Amazonian river dolphin penetrating another’s blowhole. “This is the only example of nasal sex we have in nature,” Brockman observes.

Up to a fifth of all king penguin couples kept in captivity are gay, we learn from a display of stuffed penguins wearing pink scarves. Hooded seagulls, sea otters, fish, kangaroos, fruit bats, blue jays, storks, pine martens and owls make guest appearances. So does the lowly hedgehog (ouch).

Male and female bighorn sheep apparently unite during the rutting season, but the rest of the year the males stick together and homosexuality flourishes. “The females are boring. Only the males do it,” says Brockman. Insects, spiders, molluscs, crustaceans — they’re all at it. There is an 1896 sketch of two male scarab beetles enjoying each other. There are even gay gutworms; we know that, Brockman says, because “ they have sex organs and since they are translucent, it’s easy to find out what sex they are”.

Round a corner and you are confronted by a photograph of two female bonobo chimpanzees lovingly rubbing their swollen genitalia against each other while their offspring look on. “Their whole life revolves around sex,” Brockman explains with his trademark enthusiasm. “They will throw themselves into group sex and gender doesn’t seem to be relevant. Even children will give a helping hand.”

The exhibition then uses macaques and apes to introduce the unsuspecting visitor to the practice of “diddling”, in which the primates gently hold each other’s scrotums. It is a way of establishing trust, Brockman suggests. Certainly you would not allow yourself to be diddled by someone you did not trust. The exhibition gives short shrift to the idea that animals have sex simply to reproduce, and they manifestly do not consider gay sex sinful. They do it, Brockman suggests, partly for fun and partly because it serves as a “binding mechanism” for herds and flocks.

The more social the species, the more likely it is to engage in homosexual activity, the exhibition argues. “Many social animals have complex social systems where individuals seek out allies for help and protection. Sex is an important way of strengthening the alliance, also between animals of the same sex. In some animals, the whole species is bisexual, and homosexual relationships are prerequisite for joining a pack, making heterosexuality a disadvantage.” As with humans, the homosexual partnerships of some animals are often for life, not fleeting dalliances. Male flamingoes, swans and other birds will sometimes have one-night stands with females to produce eggs, then chase off the mother and rear the offspring with another male.

There is only one known example of animals rejecting homosexuals. Blacktail deer will drive away those of their species known as perukes, who do not shed their antlers because of a hormonal condition and tend to be homosexual.
The exhibition ends, predictably, with humans — though it rather prudishly refrains from showing pictures of gay men or women in the act. “Compared to the other apes, human homosexuality is neither extremely frequent, nor particularly rare, and in our species too the practice varies from one culture to the next,” it says.

There is also, prominently displayed, a quotation from Magnus Enquist, a professor of ethology at Stockholm University: “There are things that are more contrary to nature than homosexuality, things humans alone do — such as having religion or sleeping in pyjamas.” Bockman says he believes the exhibition should end the debate about whether homosexuality is unnatural. He readily admits it is “political” in intent, and even in Norway, where shoolchildren are taught about homosexuality from the age of 13, it has attracted huge publicity. But apart from a few lone voices on the religious right — one preacher hoped the organisers would “burn in hell”, another priest said the money would be better spent on curing gay animals — the public’s response has been overwhelmingly positive.

The museum’s attendance figures have soared in the month since the exhibition opened. It has received hundreds of e-mails from around the world, many from foreigners lamenting their own countries’ repressive attitude to homosexuality. The exhibition’s visitors book is full of similar sentiments. “Very interesting themes you are bringing up,” read one unsigned message, before adding: “PS, We had sex in the hall on the top floor of your museum.” Brockman was delighted. “Apparently someone got inspired,” he chuckled.

‘IT GIVES THEM PLEASURE’

It looks like a good exhibition, though Against Nature? is an unfortunate name. Homosexual behaviour is not against nature, it is part of the repertoire of what animals do. That does not necessarily mean that you can compare it directly to human homosexuality.

Technically, a homosexual person is someone who has homoerotic fantasies and engages in homosexual sex. The distinction between what goes on in the brain and the behaviour itself is important: just seeing human behaviour does not necessarily say anything about the thoughts or fantasies behind it. There are people whose fantasies are homoerotic but who engage in heterosexual behaviour. There are people who have heterosexual fantasies but engage in homosexual behaviour — that happens in prison, particularly the men who do the penetrating: they never see themselves as homosexual and when they get out of prison they go back to heterosexual behaviour.

When we are talking about animals, because we don’t know the eroticism behind it, all we can say is they are engaging in homosexual behaviour. Even then, people have tried to explain away homosexual behaviour in animals as something else entirely. Homosexual behaviour between male mammals has been dismissed as boisterous; as for females, people have argued that they don’t know what they are doing, that they are just advertising their availability to males. There is a million of these sorts of explanations out there but not one holds water if, for example, you study Japanese macaque monkeys.

I studied a transplanted colony in Texas, and later a colony in Japan. Homosexual behaviour occurred during the mating season and followed the same rules as heterosexual behaviour. You don’t see brothers doing it, or grandmothers and granddaughters — there is the same avoidance of incest.

But I have seen males with erections sit next to females and be ignored, the female going off with another female. I have also seen female monkeys in early stages of pregnancy engaging in homosexual and heterosexual behaviour, which indicates that their sexual behaviour is not strictly controlled by hormones, and must be conscious behaviour.

Mammals have larger brains than other vertebrates, which means their behaviour is more complicated. It allows them to engage in more conscious behaviour, and to act on their desires. It allows them to seek pleasure, and this is what they are doing when they engage in homosexual behaviour. Trying to explain this behaviour as something other than homosexual behaviour is just another part of our prudishness.

Theater District Will Get Taller, if Not Richer

2006-08-08T12:14:00.000-05:00

August 6, 2006
By PATRICK McGEEHAN
Via NYTimes.com

The hottest thing on Broadway these days may be the air above some of its most famous theaters.

During the city’s real estate boom, theater owners have started capitalizing on a special zoning arrangement created eight years ago that lets them sell their unused rights to add to their buildings’ height. Developers can transfer these air rights to other sites in the theater district and construct taller buildings than would otherwise be allowed.

Two pending transfers of air rights promise an added benefit that was crucial to the original approval of that arrangement: As much as $1.4 million is supposed to be set aside to help the theater community, by attracting new patrons or underwriting serious drama.

But there’s a snag. Though two developers — who are buying the air rights for more than $20 million — are ready to hand over the special payments, the city government is not prepared to accept them. It never created the fund to hold the money or the council that is supposed to oversee it. As a result, it is not clear if the theater community will ever directly benefit from the windfall.

Others, meanwhile, are maneuvering to get the money. The Board of Education has raised its hand for the first payments from developers, most of which it would use to improve auditoriums in public schools, city officials said.

Jack Goldstein, who was working for Actors’ Equity Association, a union of actors and stagehands, in 1998, when the arrangement was set up, said diverting the money to schools would violate pledges made to bolster what was then a fragile theater economy.

“There was a promise that was made to the theater community and the public, and I think it should be kept, and I think it can be,” Mr. Goldstein said.

Neighborhood leaders in the vicinity of the theater district are also wary that the money may be sent elsewhere.

“Our community has a big proportion of working actors, so we want this to go to people who actually work in and support the theater,” said J. Lee Compton, the chairman of Manhattan Community Board 4, whose territory includes one of the theaters that is selling its unused development rights.

The long-running debate about how to spend this potential stream of revenue from developers illustrates how much the theater business and the New York City real estate market have changed since the late 1990’s.

Back then, theater owners and Broadway luminaries, including Stephen Sondheim and Tony Randall, campaigned for financial aid for an ailing industry. They feared that empty theaters and a paucity of new plays signaled worsening prospects for high-quality drama.

The city’s response was to change zoning rules in 1998, allowing the owners of 25 Broadway houses to transfer their air rights anywhere within a 34-block zone north of 40th Street between Avenue of the Americas and Eighth Avenue. (Normally, air rights can be transferred only to contiguous building sites.)

To transfer development rights from a theater to a distant site, the buyers were required to pay an extra $10 per square foot on top of the regular purchase price for the air rights. The money was to be administered by a new Theater Subdistrict Council, with 20 percent to be set aside for monitoring the physical condition of the theaters. The rest was to be used to benefit the theater community by subsidizing tickets to shows for poorer city residents or by offering loans or grants to producers of serious plays.

But until this year, no theater owner had taken advantage of the air-rights provision. In the past eight years, attendance has rebounded as the public appetite has grown for serious shows like “Doubt” and “The History Boys.” The Broadway Initiative, a theater-advocacy group Mr. Sondheim presided over, disbanded and the movement to find alternative sources of financing for plays faded out.

At the same time, demand increased for places to build apartment buildings close to Times Square. Few lots in the theater district can accommodate big buildings without a transfer of air rights. So, lately, developers have been knocking on the doors of the theater owners.

At the northeast corner of 46th Street and Eighth Avenue, a New Jersey-based builder, S.J.P. Residential, plans to erect a 42-story condominium tower on the former site of McHale’s pub. To do that, S.J.P. arranged to acquire about 140,000 square feet of air rights from two Broadway theaters, the Brooks Atkinson around the corner and the Al Hirschfeld, which is more than a block away.

The deal with the Brooks Atkinson, which is owned by the Nederlander Organization, did not fall under the special zoning rules created in 1998, but the pending purchase of the Hirschfeld’s air rights does. This week, the City Planning Commission is scheduled to vote to authorize the second of two transfers of air rights from the Hirschfeld, which is owned by Jujamcyn Theaters, to the McHale’s site.

If approved by the Planning Commission and then the City Council, the sales of the Hirschfeld’s air rights would yield about $580,000 for the Theater Subdistrict Fund. A third piece of the Hirschfeld’s air rights, along with a larger bundle of air rights from another Jujamcyn theater, the St. James, are being acquired by the developer of a site on 54th Street between Broadway and Eighth Avenue. Combined, the transactions would produce about $1.4 million for the theater fund.

“This is a unique transaction,” said Paul Libin, producing director of Jujamcyn. “They could have come and knocked on our door earlier, but there was no reason for them to do it.” But now, he added, “There’s a boom going on in New York, and I suppose that’s why people knocked on our door.”

After these sales, whose terms Mr. Libin declined to disclose, Jujamcyn would have no significant development rights left to sell, he said. The air rights for the company’s other theaters were sold before the 1998 zoning change took effect, he said.

“Selling the air rights is all about perpetuating the Broadway theater,” Mr. Libin said.

But, he added, “circumstances have changed so dramatically” that using money from developers to finance productions now “doesn’t make any sense at all.”

Alan Eisenberg, the executive director of Actors’ Equity, noted that the original promise made in 1998 could still be met by giving the developers’ payments to the Theater Development Fund, which sells discounted play tickets to attract a broader audience.

The City Planning Department’s staff, however, favors giving most of the money expected from the special transfers — more than $1.1 million — to two programs run by the city’s Board of Education, said Edith Hsu-Chen, deputy director in the department’s Manhattan office. One, known as Arts Space, makes grants to public schools to upgrade their performance facilities. Another aims to stage summer musical productions starring public high school students.

“One of the key purposes of the theater subdistrict zoning is to develop new audiences,” Ms. Hsu-Chen said. “What better way to accomplish this than to link kids directly to Broadway as active participants?”

The school programs are pet projects of Gerald Schoenfeld, chairman of the Shubert Organization, which owns or operates 17 Broadway theaters.

Still, Meile Rockefeller, co-chairwoman of the land-use committee of Manhattan Community Board 5, said the schools proposals were “fine as a short-term remedy for a problem that caught the city unprepared.” But, she added, “It’s not a long-term solution.”

Same-Sex Marriage Wins by Losing

2006-08-01T13:38:00.000-05:00

By DAN SAVAGE

Seattle

THERE were community meetings in Seattle on Wednesday. Some of the couples who had sued to overturn Washington’s ban on same-sex marriage, a case they lost before the state’s Supreme Court earlier that day, were going to appear. Gay and straight elected officials who support “marriage equality” were going to make speeches. I probably should have been there too.

But I had a previous engagement.

The Seattle Mariners were playing the Toronto Blue Jays at Safeco Field. My 8-year-old son — adopted at birth by my boyfriend and me — loves the M’s almost as much as he hates the way a breaking news story can keep me late at work. He would never have forgiven me for skipping the game.

I didn’t feel too bad about missing the meetings. Washington’s high court rejected same-sex marriage for much the same reason the New York Court of Appeals did earlier this month. The speeches in Seattle would no doubt be similar to those made in New York, and I didn’t need to hear them again.

Basically, both courts found that marriage is like a box of Trix: It’s for kids.

In New York, the court ruled in effect that irresponsible heterosexuals often have children by accident — we gay couples, in contrast, cannot get drunk and adopt in one night — so the state can reserve marriage rights for heterosexuals in order to coerce them into taking care of their offspring. Without the promise of gift registries and rehearsal dinners, it seems, many more newborns in New York would be found in trash cans.

At least the New York court acknowledged that many same-sex couples have children. Washington’s judges went out of their way to make ours disappear, finding that “limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples furthers procreation, essential to the survival of the human race, and furthers the well-being of children by encouraging families where children are reared in homes headed by the children’s biological parents.” Children, the decision continues, “tend to thrive in families consisting of a father, mother and their biological children.’’

A concurring opinion gave the knife a few leisurely twists: due to the “binary biological nature of marriage,” it read, only opposite-sex couples are capable of “responsible child rearing.”

These stunning statements fly in the face of the evidence about gay and lesbian parents presented to the court. Similar evidence persuaded the high court in Arkansas to overturn that state’s ban on gay and lesbian foster parents.

What the New York and Washington opinions share — besides a willful disregard for equal protection clauses in both state Constitutions — is a heartless lack of concern for the rights of the hundreds of thousands of children being raised by same-sex couples.

Even if gay couples who adopt are more stable, as New York found, don’t their children need the security and protections that the court believes marriage affords children? And even if heterosexual sex is essential to the survival of the human race (a point I’m willing to concede), it’s hard to see how preventing gay couples from marrying increases heterosexual activity. (“Keep breeding, heterosexuals,” the Washington State Supreme Court in effect shouted, “To bed! To bed! To bed!”) Both courts have found that my son’s parents have no right to marry, but what of my son’s right to have married parents?

A perverse cruelty characterizes both decisions. The courts ruled, essentially, that making my child’s life less secure somehow makes the life of a child with straight parents more secure. Both courts found that making heterosexual couples stable requires keeping homosexual couples vulnerable. And the courts seemed to agree that heterosexuals can hardly be bothered to have children at all — or once they’ve had them, can hardly be bothered to care for them — unless marriage rights are reserved exclusively for heterosexuals. And the religious right accuses gays and lesbians of seeking “special rights.”

Even if you believe that marriage plays a special role in the lives of heterosexuals with children (another point I’m happy to concede), can it not play a similar role in the lives of homosexual couples, whether they’re parents or not? Marriage, after all, is not reserved for couples with children. (Perhaps it will be soon, if courts keep heading in this direction.)

When my widowed grandfather remarried in his 60’s, he wasn’t seeking to further the well-being of his children, who were grown and out of the house. He was seeking the security, companionship and legal rights that marriage provides. The survival of humankind was the furthest thing from his mind.

These defeats have demoralized supporters of gay marriage, but I see a silver lining. If heterosexual instability and the link between heterosexual sex and human reproduction are the best arguments opponents of same-sex marriage can muster, I can’t help but feel that our side must be winning. Insulting heterosexuals and discriminating against children with same-sex parents may score the other side a few runs, but these strategies won’t win the game.

So I’m confident that one day my son will live in a country that allows his parents to marry. His parents are already married, as far as he’s concerned, as my boyfriend and I tied the knot in Canada more than a year and a half ago. We recognize, even if the courts do not, that it’s in his best interest for us to be married.

And while Wednesday was a dark day, the M’s beat the Blue Jays 7 to 4, so it wasn’t a total loss.

Dan Savage is the editor of The Stranger, a Seattle newsweekly.

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Thoughts on Gays

2006-06-28T18:31:00.000-05:00

Homer Simpson's Thoughts on Gays

Little Brother

2006-06-28T18:30:00.000-05:00

Scoring during the Bingham Cup

More Guthrie Theater

2006-06-28T18:29:00.000-05:00

McGuire Panorama

Four Season Centre

2006-06-28T18:27:00.000-05:00

Canadian Opera House Interview with Joshua Dachs

Guthrie Theater

2006-06-28T18:25:00.000-05:00

Wurtele Panorama

Theatre with Soul

2006-06-23T10:11:00.000-05:00

At a time when science, technology and virtual reality exist alongside meditation, yoga and oxygen bars, Joshua Dachs (theatre designer for the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, the COC’s new home) has struck a fine balance when it comes to designing theatres. This renowned partner of the acclaimed New York firm Fisher Dachs Associates, not only incorporates the tangible necessities in theatre layout but is also compelled and fascinated by the intangible – the soul of a theatre.

He played violin as a child and went to the High School of Music and Art in New York (the film Fame took place in that school). “I somehow got it into my head that I wanted to go into architecture,” Dachs says. “I went to Cornell University and while there I decided to take an elective course, which involved assisting the theatre department in building scenery for class credit. I thought I would try building instead of just drawing all the time. It was tremendously satisfying and I found myself designing lighting and scenery. During that time I took a course in which the lecturer—who happened to be Jules Fisher – talked a lot about architectural lighting design and showed slides of Broadway shows and Rolling Stones tours, etc. as well as some theatres that his firm had been associated with.

“After the lecture I asked if he had any summer work and I spent the summer working for Jules Fisher Lighting (now Fisher Dachs Associates). I worked on the revival of Hair on Broadway, Pippin in Chicago and Beatlemania, but also the lighting of the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts and the Boettcher Concert Hall in Denver. When I graduated I came back to work at the firm and I have been there ever since.” The company now has three components: Fisher Marantz Stone only designs architectural lighting; Fisher Dachs only designs theatres; Dachs’ partner, Jules Fisher, who has won seven Tony Awards, continues to light shows on Broadway and rock and roll tours with co-designer Peggy Eisenhauer under the name Third Eye.

Dachs has thought a lot about opera during his 25 years as a theatre designer. “Opera houses, as a building type, have a very long and rich tradition originating in the early days of the Italian renaissance, as early as about 1608,” says Dachs. “There were rooms in Italy that were horseshoe-shaped and had picture frame openings that we would recognize today as a precursor to opera halls. Opera houses essentially developed side by side with the art form of opera, and over the centuries those rooms developed into the grand theatres that we all know and love today—like La Fenice in Venice and La Scala in Milan. They spread around the world quite quickly and by the middle of the 19th century they were everywhere.

“Some of the auditoriums that we looked at together with Richard (Bradshaw) were those that I mentioned, La Fenice and La Scala, but also Munich which has a long, rich tradition to draw upon. In designing our opera house, we are looking for something that is completely contemporary but at the same time shares the most important qualities of the great opera houses of the world.

“What is it that people love? Certainly we want wonderful acoustics but we want a lot more than that. We want to create a room that is a marvellous place in which to share a live performance. Architecture, the geometry that you choose, the colours, the materials; everything about it can either make people feel like they are together in a small room sharing an event, or the opposite, where they feel a great chasm between themselves and the performers.

“Peter Brook, a famous British director who is also one of the few theatre people who have written eloquently about creating theatre spaces, once said, ‘the science of theatre building must come from studying what it is that brings about the most vivid relationship between people.’ That is really foremost in our minds. Every choice that we make in creating a room has to support this idea of bringing people closer together and making their experience in the theatre vivid and alive.”

Several things must be accomplished in order to bring the audience as close as possible to the performance. “That’s one of the reasons why we’ve got a vertically organized room in the same way that you do at La Scala or Munich,” says Dachs. “We have several layers, or ‘rings,’ of seating. By organizing people vertically, we bring them closer.

“The second thing that we need to do is to ‘wallpaper’ the room with faces. If you look at traditional opera house models, the audience is not sitting as they are in a movie theatre with everybody on one or two levels, facing front between two blank sidewalls. Rather, the audience wraps around in that wonderful horseshoe-shape and comes right up to the stage. As you sit in the house looking at the stage there are always people in your peripheral vision. You never forget that this is a completely live experience—these moments will never happen again. The wonderful thing about an opera house is that it reflects fundamental human impulses. We always gather around a storyteller or a juggler on the street and the live theatres that we create need to allow us to do that as well.

“The other thing that the geometry does is cause the audience to literally embrace the singer. When performers stands on stage and that wonderful audience rings around them, they feel totally encompassed and it changes how they perform. It truly is a living thing.”

Dachs goes on to say that the room needs to look and feel as small as possible. There are a certain number of seats that have to be accommodated and each one needs to have good sightlines. The room needs to feel a third or a half of the actual size. “One of the ways that we do that,” says Dachs, “ is by architecturally emphasizing the idea that the space contained by those rings of balconies is the actual size of the room. Although all four walls stretch to the front, back and sides, we want everybody to feel that the theatre space is only as big as the space embraced by the balconies.
“We are reinforcing that idea in the way the ceiling is designed. It is not a dome, it is actually an inverted dome, but there is a circular gesture in the ceiling that corresponds to the rings of the balconies. There is even a gesture made on the main floor level, which we call the ‘parterre,’ where a railing wraps around and follows the line of the balconies above. By repeating this horseshoe-shape on the floor and on the ceiling, and by making the outer walls relatively darker and the balcony fronts brighter, we were able to emphasize the intimacy of the room.

“We learned in the ‘bad days’ of the 1950s and '60s that when you put large, blank surfaces around a stage, the stage seems very small and the performer on the stage even smaller. But if you break down the scale of all of the surfaces surrounding the stage, then the stage seems large—it seems like the largest thing in the room. The architectural game that we are playing is to try to do everything possible to make it clear that the stage is the most significant part of the room and that the singers can fill that room with their presence. They are in no way diminished by the architecture, but the architecture enhances their scale. In the end, every plane, every surface, has something that breaks it down in some way closer to the scale of the human face, the human form.

“In the geometry of the room, the materials we choose, the colours, and in the way that we light the room, we’re trying to accomplish the same thing—make the performer seem big, make the stage seem big, make the room seem small, make the audience feel close. I view that as the most important task for the theatre consultant.”
Beyond that, Dachs is also responsible for the seating layouts and the sightlines so that this carefully contrived geometric machine provides extraordinary sightlines. “We have proprietary software that we have developed in our office that enables us to study many alternatives with the design team. We had meetings with Robert Essert (acoustician) and Jack Diamond (architect), his staff and the COC staff and box office personnel. We sat ‘virtually’ in each seat of the auditorium so we could note at what point the seats were not providing the best view and eliminate or correct them. There is no seat in this room that has not been carefully reviewed by us, previewed with the box office personnel and approved as being appropriate to include. We have worked very hard to ensure this.”

Dachs and his staff are also responsible for the efficiency of the production “engine.” Along with the artists, there are a myriad of staff backstage—wardrobe, wigs, stagehands, and production staff. Meticulous thought has to be given to storage, truck loading and unloading, backstage circulation, and dressing room layouts, not only for comfort, but also for maximum space and ease of movement. “For instance,” Dachs says, “the backstage corridors must have extra width because, at times, they will be lined with wardrobe racks. At the same time we are dealing with how the audience amenities are accommodated – how to deal with catering, what happens with the food garbage that shouldn’t clutter up the backstage entrance. You don’t want the corps de ballet in their tutus to be crossing past drippy spaghetti trash in a garbage bag. Careful thought has to be given to the logistics backstage.
“We deal with the rigging system and the stage lighting system—the design of those systems, as well as stage machinery that lifts the orchestra pit and moves the variable acoustical draperies. We have got our finger, one way or another, in a lot of different areas in this building.

“There is a side to what we do which is logistical and functional as well as a side that is all about technology and the integration of technology into the building. Then there is a side which is really more spiritual—making this room feel right. Robert is interested in ensuring that it sounds right and I am interested in how it feels. The entire team is working to ensure that the audience and the performer have the best theatrical experience possible.”

By Suzanne Vanstone, Editor of Publications at the COC.

The Urban Etiquette Handbook Part 7

2006-06-22T17:43:00.000-05:00

Friends
When can you send a thank-you via e-mail?
A mass e-mail is actually preferable when thanking people who combined to put together a work project or totally rockin’ party, as it emphasizes the communal nature of the achievement and offers the opportunity for public praise. Everything else (e.g., weddings, gifts, anniversaries, job promotions or interviews, etc.) still goes on nice, high-fiber stationery or a store-bought card.

How do you handle it when you, in full party panic, can’t remember the name of someone you know?
Blame the panic! In fact, don’t just blame the panic, inflate it. Begin talking about how flustered you are: You thought it was Thursday for a second, you put your drink down five minutes ago and can’t find it, you are so out of it that you’ve forgotten the name . . . of someone across the room whose name, in reality, you do remember! Then, conspiratorially ask the person whose name you can’t recall to introduce herself to the third party—as you laugh all the way to the First National Bank of Knowing Everybody’s Name.

How do you bring up the subject of a friend’s serious medical problem?
The simple answer is, you don’t. If someone has a medical condition that’s serious but not visually detectable, and he hasn’t broached the subject with you, chances are it’s because he doesn’t want it broached at all. People have all sorts of legitimate reasons for wanting to keep health issues private. You can let your friend know you’re concerned—without embarrassing him—with an earnest gaze and a sincere “So, how are you doing?” which communicates empathy without raising the subject out loud if he really doesn’t feel like talking.

How do you acknowledge obvious plastic surgery?
If the intentions were subtle, pretend you don’t know exactly what change your friend has undergone, even if she looks like a convenience-store thief masked in Saran Wrap. Something like, “Oh, wow . . . you look great. I can’t put my finger on what’s different, but you look years younger.” If the operation was done expressly to garner attention—say the former B-cup is now a DD with the top three buttons undone—well, then just let it rip: “Wow! Those hooters are like big twin Hindenburgs!”

What’s the best response to a racist remark at a dinner party?
Nervous laughter is the inevitable reflex. But the failure to respond will certainly add to your hangover, no matter how much gin has been consumed. The first line of defense against bigotry is to assume that it’s a joke, and say so. “You must be joking . . . though it’s not really that funny.” Try to smile as little as possible while holding out the possibility of forgiveness. You could also accuse the person of being drunk, which is almost always the case. But if someone is offering an entire line of argument that is clearly bigoted or otherwise beyond the bounds of civilized discourse (“I don’t want them in my neighborhood”), someone is honor-bound to make an Atticus Finch–like declaration of belief.

Should the wealthier half of a friendship be expected to give more-expensive gifts?
In an ideal world, no. But in the real world, yeah, pretty much. A rule of thumb: Give according to your means, not the recipient’s. If you’re the richer friend, your impoverished friends will appreciate your generosity infinitely more than a cheap trinket you purchased so as not to embarrass them. If you’re the poorer friend—and you’re worried about being outclassed—get together with other friends of lesser means to pool resources on an item of greater value. Better still, spend extra effort on a thoughtful but nevertheless affordable gift that shows you’ve actually paid attention to your friends’ most obscure tastes and interests.

What’s the best way to avoid awkward crossed-signals handshake-meets-cheek-kiss encounters?
Remember: You can usually get away with unwarranted familiarity if your intended recipient sees it coming. Strike early:
• If you or the person you’re greeting is a woman, start telegraphing your intentions before you make eye contact, either extending your hand or opening your arms according to whim. (Under no circumstances should you give a woman a fist pound.)
• If it’s a masculine pairing, make eye contact and form your hand into the appropriate shake/fist pound/gangster-style-clasp shape before raising your arm. (And never give an elaborate handshake to the uninitiated.)

What do “I’ll call you” or “Let’s have lunch” mean?
In a non-dating situation, these hollow parting comments often translate roughly to “In all likelihood, I won’t call you” and “Let’s not have lunch, though I have generally positive feelings about you.” (Though the recipient has no choice but to be agreeable in the moment and assume the phone won’t ring.) If you’re prone to such phrases, consider deploying “It was good to see you,” which, while perfectly pleasant, won’t confuse anyone.

Can you reject a Friendster, Facebook, or MySpace friend request from someone you know?
No. It’s not as though adding someone to your online social network costs anything: The only potential damage is to the perceived quality of your accumulated friends. And if you know someone who judges you based on your Friendster network, then, well, like Mom said, he’s not your real Internet friend anyway.

How do you end an exchange of witty, flirtatious e-mail banter?
The exchange of witty, flirtatious banter is admittedly the e-mail quagmire with the fewest number of obvious exit strategies. Nonetheless, it should be resolved like real-time witty, flirtatious banter: with one party either summoning the courage to ask for a date or ending the quasi relationship by means of unexplained unresponsiveness.

What do you do when you’ve attended a performance by your aspiring actor/singer/comic friend—and you were driven to tears by its utter banality?
Always lie, but try to do it in ways that aren’t so liar-y. Gush about aspects of the show that weren’t horrid (“Such exquisite costuming!”), compliment the very particular elements of his performance that were adequate, or say something not-technically-false like “That’s exactly what we’ve come to expect from you!” Long-term encouragement of delusional artistic aspirations, though, is impolite: If the invites are repeated, let your nonattendance send a message.

If you accept a dinner invitation and have a miserable time, must you reciprocate?
If someone treats you to dinner at a restaurant or in their home, you owe them the same honor. But if you really can’t stand the inviting individual/couple, a good compromise is to invite them to your next big party. This sends the message that you are thinking about them while minimizing the probability of actual contact.

How far are you obligated to go to accommodate vegetarians and vegans in your home?
If it’s a dinner party, you should have at least one option for each course that suits everyone’s dietary needs, though restricted eaters have the responsibility of letting you know what they can and can’t eat. If you’re the guest, you should politely inform the host of your regimen by way of offering to bring a dish that suits your needs that everyone will “enjoy.” (The less appetizing it sounds—e.g., seaweed dogs—the more likely your horrified host will come up with something better.)

How do you pick restaurants and other social activities in circles that involve widely varying incomes?
Inviting the whole gang over for dinner solves some problems—the poor people won’t have to choose between missing a credit card payment or being treated, and the richer folk get a nice meal if you’re a generally decent cook. Of course, it creates an altogether new problem: In your sensitivity to everyone’s income issues, you alone wind up underwriting the entire evening. That’s fine some of the time, but for another alternative, choose an under-the-radar, inexpensive restaurant where everyone will feel cutting-edge— self-congratulatory hipsterdom knows no class boundaries.

What’s the best way to split the check in a group?
At a group meal, an equal split should be the baseline expectation: It falls to those who ordered more-expensive dishes to offer to pay more, not to others to pay less. Failure to partake in the appetizers or the wine can be cited as a reason to cut one’s contribution only if there was some socially sanctioned reason for declining (veganism, Islam, pregnancy). If you just got the soup and you don’t think that’s fair, well, think about whether it’s “fair” to make your friends eat dinner with a buzz-killing cheapskate.

WHEN IS IT ACCEPTABLE TO BLACKBERRY DURING A CONVERSATION?
When it’s a “conversation” in the sense of “The New School Presents a Conversation With Harold Bloom” and you’re there. Otherwise, never. This remains one of society’s most frequent breaches of basic human decency. Seriously, what is wrong with those people?!?

HOW DO YOU TELL SOMEONE HE’S BEEN MISPRONOUNCING YOUR NAME FOR THREE MONTHS?
Tell him a story in which you use your own name, clearly enunciating where he’s got it wrong. For example, if you were Ralph Fiennes, you’d say, “I called him and said, ‘Hi, this is Raaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaafe Fines.’ ”

IS IT EVER OKAY TO DRIVE A HUMMER?
Yes! If you’re leading a nighttime raid in Tikrit. Otherwise, Hummers have returned to their rightful place as a semi-obnoxious, semi-absurd rarity. Accepting a ride is different: In New York, being a passenger in any vehicle, matter how gauche or fuel-inefficient, is a rare treat.

VIA NEW YORK MAGAZINE

The Urban Etiquette Handbook Part 6

2006-06-22T17:42:00.000-05:00

What the Waiter Wants
How to give orders the nice way.

Only four Manhattan restaurants still require jackets—but good manners are de rigueur everywhere. During a noon round table at Pravda, our six food-and-drink-service vets drew up a list of dos and don’ts for restaurant dining.

Kathleen Flanagan, waitress, the Mermaid Inn; 12 years’ experience
Troy Daigle, beverage director, Le Bernardin; 20 years
“Chops,” bartender and owner, King’s County Bar; 10 years
Jim Hutchinson, wine director, Centovini; 23 years
Adrian Murcia, waiter, Chanterelle; 18 years
Daryl Dismond, maître d’, Pravda; 18 years

Is there a best way to order?

Dismond: Acknowledge the server and look at him. You don’t have to make eye contact the whole time, but it’s very offensive to give your order and never even look up. Flanagan: I am a big fan of “May I?” “I’d like to . . . ” “Could you please?” I don’t need to be bowed down to, but I don’t like “I’m gonna take the . . . ,” “Could you get me the . . . ” Murcia: I don’t need “please” and “thank you”; just don’t be rude.

Is it okay to send back a bottle of wine?

Flanagan: When you order a wine you are not that familiar with, you’re taking a risk. If you don’t love it, you don’t get to send it back. But if I suggest something and you don’t like it, then that’s my fault. Daigle: Because we have over 800 labels on our list, we have to guide people and allow them to try something different. If they’re not ecstatic about it, I’m taking it away and bringing something else.

What about food?

Daigle: Do it politely, but let them know how it’s different from what you expected. Flanagan: It’s not that big a deal to send something back. It’s not offensive. Dismond: Remember your server didn’t cook it.

How can I signal that I don’t want to be hurried through my meal?

Murcia: Put a fork on the left-hand side of your plate and the knife on the right, leaving them half on the plate, half on the table. To show that you are done, put the fork along with the knife parallel, bottom right to top left. When you want your wine glass cleared, put it in the center of the table.

Is it ever appropriate to tip less than 20 percent?

Flanagan: Not unless something goes terribly wrong. Daigle: A bad tip is counterproductive for everyone. There’s no excuse. Chops: Say yes to 20 percent tipping. We remember good tippers. Dismond: Fifteen percent is not a shabby tip. Anything less—especially under 10 percent—should happen only if your server continues mixing up orders, bringing out the wrong food, and is generally rude and inattentive. But if the food comes out prepared incorrectly, that’s the chef’s fault.

How should I calculate the tip when an expensive bottle of wine or caviar radically pumps up the price without requiring extra service?

Hutchinson: If you spend that much money, the restaurant probably merits that gratuity. If you’re just eating a sandwich and opt for the $200 bottle of wine, then you might not leave the full 20 percent. Tips depend on context.

How do you tip when you are treated to something on the house?

Murcia: Add the amount of the free food or drink as if you paid for it, and calculate the tip based on that. If you get a full comp, tip based on the full amount. Chops: What I do is send a cocktail to the whole kitchen.

Is there anything else one can do to express appreciation?

Murcia: Send a card. It’s such a nice gesture: Letters are read aloud at staff meetings—the good ones and bad—and nothing feels better. Flanagan: Next time you’ll be recognized and treated even better.

VIA NEW YORK MAGAZINE

The Urban Etiquette Handbook Part 5

2006-06-22T17:41:00.000-05:00

Breaching Subway Decorum
When it’s okay to annoy strangers on a train.
By Adam Sternbergh

THE SEAT HOG
Crime: Not offering one’s seat to an obviously pregnant woman or obviously elderly person.
Rudeness Factor (out of 10): 10
Why It’s Inappropriate: If there’s one thing we can all agree on, it’s the continued propagation of the species (within reason). And if you don’t give your seat to an elderly person, when you grow old you can expect to be cast out and set upon by wild dogs. It’s called karma.
When It’s Appropriate: Maybe if you have a serious, demonstrable impediment. Such as a wooden leg. Although even then—she’s pregnant! On your feet, pirate.

THE GAWKER
Crime: Staring.
Rudeness Factor: 7
Why It’s Inappropriate: It’s a subway, not a bar.
When It’s Appropriate: Let’s face it—this is a city full of beautiful people who sometimes wear noticeably revealing clothing. But always observe the two-second rule: Never let your eyes linger longer than a two-count. It’s a fine line between flirt and perv.

THE DOORMAN
Crime: Holding the closing doors.
Rudeness Factor: 2
Why It’s Inappropriate: It’s the perfect illustration of Spock’s famous tenet: Sometimes the needs of the many (people already on the subway) outweigh the needs of the few (person rushing to catch the subway).
When It’s Appropriate: When you’re the person rushing to catch the train. Hold that door!

THE GROOMER
Crime: Plucking eyebrows, curling eyelashes, flossing teeth (!), or clipping fingernails (!!) on the subway.
Rudeness Factor: 8
Why It’s Inappropriate: Because a civilized society is measured by the delineations between its public-transit vehicles and its bathrooms.
When It’s Appropriate: If it’s your absolute last chance to freshen up before a job interview, funeral, or proposal of marriage.

THE GOBBLER
Crime: Eating messy food or consuming a perilously sloshing drink.
Rudeness Factor: 9
Why It’s Inappropriate: Because subways were practically invented to send your sloppy foodstuffs onto the shirts and laps of the people around you.
When It’s Appropriate: Only if your drink container has a cap and you’re eating a type of food—say, the vacuum-packed chicken NASA prepares for astronauts—that, in the event of a sudden subway lurch, won’t leave a splatter pattern on the people around you.

THE SHERPA
Crime: Riding with a large, space-consuming backpack or suitcase or stroller.
Rudeness Factor: 4
Why It’s Inappropriate: The smooth operation of the subway requires that people be able to (a) board the car, (b) disembark the car, and (c) ride and not get smacked in the face by the travel mug lashed to the back of your pack as you traverse the continent.
When It’s Appropriate: Packs should be kept on the floor between the legs. Strollers are granted extra leeway, though people with extra-large models that include cup holders should consider a more crowd-friendly mode of transporting their young.

THE TURNSTILE HOPPER
Crime: Turnstile hopping
Rudeness Factor: 6
Why It’s Inappropriate: If you need to ask, we’ve already lost you.
When It’s Appropriate: Hopping, never. Ducking under the turnstile if you are short enough and under 5 years of age, all right. But we’re watching you, junior.

VIA NEW YORK MAGAZINE

The Urban Etiquette Handbook Part 4

2006-06-22T17:39:00.000-05:00

City Living

How do you walk into your apartment building behind a woman while letting her know you’re not a mugger/rapist?

First, know what you’re dealing with: She fears getting into the elevator with you, she fears your walking up the stairs on her tail, and she fears appearing like she’s rattled by either. The gentlemanly thing to do, then, is to make a concerted effort to avoid all of the above. In an elevator building, find a reason to hang back and let the doors close on her alone. In a walk-up building, however, fiddling at your mailbox will just force her to adopt a more panicked pace. Consider answering a pretend cell-phone call: “Hi, Mom!”

If mentioning your connection to a famous person is relevant in a conversation, how do you do it without being a jerk?

Don’t mention it at all, of course, unless it’s necessary to preempt a question about how you got a piece of information you otherwise wouldn’t have known, and acknowledge the details of your connection immediately after the drop. As in, “I actually heard from Steven Spielberg—I met him at a Tribeca screening last year that my friend was doing publicity for—that Munich was originally conceived as a farce . . . ” Never first-name-drop (“I heard that from Dave . . . what? Oh, David Letterman”), a reprehensible behavior whose legality is one of the few universally acknowledged downsides of the First Amendment.

Is it okay to smoke pot at a party?

Marijuana is considered by most New Yorkers under a certain age (and over a certain age) to be harmless at the least, and at the most a public good that belongs equally to all people, like radio airwaves and the national parks. Nonetheless, it is always imperative to ask the host before lighting up any sort of THC delivery system, and consumption is always forbidden if there are children or teenagers present, or if anyone in the room is 30 years older than someone else in the room. An exception to the latter rule exists, however, if the elder reveler is overheard discussing a “gig” or relating an anecdote involving Janis Joplin.

What’s the best way to hush someone in a movie theater?

Before actually speaking, you’re obligated to make two meaningful glances or clearly intentioned throat clearings, the second directed at the disruptive viewer’s embarrassed cohorts, if that’s physically possible (and they actually seem embarrassed). Then you can ask, politely, once. After that, if you haven’t received a groundswell of support from surrounding patrons, you really have no choice but to just move, because an argument is only going to inflict the disruption on everyone else. Or, to ensure that you can avoid the situation completely, limit your moviegoing to midday, midweek screenings at the UA Battery Park City 16 cinema.

How should you indicate to a cabdriver/person sitting next to you on a bus that you don’t want to chat?

Give a few polite yet terse one-word answers delivered with a tooth-free smile. If that doesn’t work, try—again with a demure smile—inserting your iPod earphones and then staring somberly out the window, or closing your eyes and rubbing your temples as if you have a migraine. Consider telling a little white lie: You’re sorry, but you’re coming up on an important test/presentation/audition that you need to think about. If all else fails, pretend you have fallen asleep or died.

What do you do when you find money/a purse/a phone in a cab?

Return the purse or phone yourself. If you find loose bills, leave them for the cabdriver, who probably needs the cash more than you. Unless you’re the star of a blockbuster thriller about an ordinary man forced to take extraordinary action by the hand of fate, you’re not going to find more than $20 in a cab anyway.

Is it okay to use wireless if your neighbors don’t password-protect it?

Yes—free wireless is a karmic gift bestowed by the rental gods to make up for all the times you’ve experienced your neighbors’ sexual encounters, arguments, and guitar practice in startling sonic clarity, gotten roaches because you live in the same building as a restaurant, and sampled the tapestry of malodorousness that is the ethnic-food/cigarette-smoke/pet-by-product–scented apartment hallway. Your only obligation as a wireless sharer is to avoid massive bandwidth-hogging downloads.

How do you break up with your stylist?

The concept of breaking up with a stylist is going the way of breaking up with a casual romance. Nowadays, you don’t. Instead, you do what the best daters do: You don’t break up, you take a break. Just don’t call back for a while. For all your stylist knows, you’re in London or L.A. for a bit.

How do you make appropriate donations when you’ve got 30 friends asking you to buy tickets to their fund-raisers?

Close friends and bosses get yeses no matter what: If that many people are asking, either you can afford it or you’re social-climbing and it’s time to pay the piper. For everyone else, feel free to offer to write a check directly to their charity, which will test whether they are genuinely philanthropic or just looking to ostentatiously fill three tables and move up the fund-raiser-scene totem pole. And if you really can’t afford it, tell them you limit your giving to [insert a group of charities you actually give money to].

What’s the best way to get someone off the treadmill/bike/elliptical when they’ve gone over the 30-minute limit?

Unless it’s a known repeat offender who feels like he owns the gym, face-to-face is the first course of action. Cardio-trainers can enter a trancelike state of intense Just Do It–ness that leaves them unaware of the time, and will be perfectly obliging when snapped out of their cardio-delirium. But if you ask and are rebuffed, it’s perfectly acceptable to notify the front desk, which is usually staffed by someone with intimidatingly large pectoral muscles for this very reason.

How much locker-room nudity is acceptable?

Nudity is allowable, nay, inevitable, while changing and during showers. Otherwise, if you’re holding something that could easily be used to cover your genitals, cover them.

Is it okay to hit on someone at the gym?

Only on men, and only under the following circumstances: if you’re a gay man, and you know he’s gay too, or if you’re a straight woman and he’s a straight man. And never suggestively lick sweat off a treadmill.

When is it okay to ask a stranger about something in the newspaper he’s holding on the train?

Paper-snooping is acceptable in only two situations: (1) if it’s a news story of sufficient importance that the next people you see outside the train will be talking about it, or (2) if it’s sports news with commiseration potential. (“Traded who for hot-dog-concession equipment? Fuckin’ Isiah.”) Even in the random event you see an article mentioning your own name, you probably shouldn’t say anything: Either it’s in a flattering light and you’d be boastfully massaging your own ego, or it’s in a non-flattering light and the person reading the paper probably doesn’t want to know that he’s just met the Park Avenue Pervert.

If you see someone litter on the street, should you let it go because he might be crazy and kill you if you say something?

It depends on where you are—if the surroundings are unfamiliar, keep to yourself. If it’s your neighborhood, say in a forceful, faux-friendly tone, “I’m sorry, sir, you dropped something. Can I get that for you?” In all likelihood, he won’t pick it up, and you probably won’t want to, either, but the proper message has been sent.

How do you ensure the silence of your doorman after he witnesses an indiscretion on your part?

Don’t do anything rash like offering him a bribe the next day. If he’s a gossip or a snitch, you’re toast anyway and a bribery attempt will only worsen matters (“Then he tried to give me 50 bucks . . . ”). But chances are he’s not, and you gain points for exhibiting trust. Simply give him the usual nod when you see him again, and maybe a slightly extended bit of polite eye contact to acknowledge your new familiarity. Then, at the next natural opportunity, reward his loyalty. Maybe the firm’s Yankees tickets are available. Or, if Christmas isn’t too far off, slip him an additional 30 percent in the bonus envelope. Nothing needs to be said—it’s his job.

VIA NEW YORK MAGAZINE

The Urban Etiquette Handbook Part 3

2006-06-22T17:38:00.000-05:00

The Four Levels of iPod Interaction
Whom you do and don’t have to unplug for.

LEVEL ONE
Continue at full blast. Consider increasing the vigor of your head-nodding and/or humming.
• Guys passing out bargain-electronics-store flyers.
• Idealistic-looking whippersnappers holding clipboards.
• Scientologists.

LEVEL ONE AND A HALF
Subtly turn down volume.
• People in the elevator you don’t know.
• Someone attractive who sits down next to you on the train while you are listening to the Goo Goo Dolls.

LEVEL TWO
Make a big show of pressing PAUSE.
• Anyone who approaches you while you’re working out.
• Non-panhandlers on the subway (may be helpfully pointing out that your bag is open, may be distracting you in a Gangs of New York–style pickpocket ruse).
• Co-workers you hate.
• Friends.
• Your parents, if you’re a teenager.

LEVEL THREE
Remove headphones, toss them jauntily over shoulder.
• People in the elevator you know.
• Anyone taking your money or instructions about how to prepare your food.
• Co-workers you don’t hate.
• Your parents, if you’re an adult.
• Police officers.

LEVEL FOUR
Completely remove and enclose in nearest pocket/bag/ purse.
• Co-workers who could have you fired in less than an hour.
• Anyone who’s crying.
• Police officers standing next to someone who’s pointing at you and saying, “That’s him!”

VIA NEW YORK MAGAZINE

The Urban Etiquette Handbook Part 2

2006-06-22T17:37:00.000-05:00

The Office

What do you do when someone asks you for help getting a job you don’t think he deserves?

If this individual is not a close- enough friend that you can tell him the truth, you may have to resort to one of the following humanely disingenuous approaches: (1) Respond enthusiastically with information of limited value: “Would it help if I gave you the name of the human-resources person? I think I might even have his e-mail!” (2) Issue a self-deprecating disclaimer of helplessness: “I don’t know how much my word counts on this one . . . ” (3) Technically do the favor, but warn off the prospective employer either explicitly or between the lines: “An acquaintance of mine is looking for something. I’ve known him ever since we went to Bennington! He dropped out though.”

What do you say to someone who’s just been fired?

Handle the situation as you would a friend’s breakup: Immediately disparage the ex-job. Remind the firee of his many highly employable talents and cast the job as an anchor keeping him from either success in his field or his true dream of becoming a novelist-restaurateur. Do not allude to unemployment benefits, which conjure up images of Soviets waiting in line for sugar, or the possibility of escaping the careerist New York rat race, which conjures up images of trite cinematic journeys to Middle American hometowns.

Is it ever acceptable to talk to a stranger on an elevator?

If there are six or fewer people on the elevator, no. However, if the group is larger than six, you have achieved an Elevator Humor Quorum and someone must make a remark about the elevator’s lack of size or speed in order to relieve the tension created by standing in a tiny space with six or more strangers. If another member of the group makes the remark first, Elevator Humor Solidarity obligates you to chuckle mildly.

Which officemates are you required to invite to your wedding?

Allot invitations in the following order: (1) officemates you consider close friends and genuinely like and want at your wedding, (2) your direct managers or those one position higher with whom you interact on a daily basis, and (3) people who can fire you. The issues often come from those who straddle those lines, like co-workers you merely deem acquaintances and direct managers you simply don’t like. In the former case, don’t lose sleep over losing their invitations in the mail; if you don’t think they’re worth $150 a plate, consider this a perfect opportunity to establish the parameters of your relationship. In the case of a disliked manager or a boss, it’s actually in your best interest to suck it up and invite them; if you don’t, you’ll have to spend months skulking around and hoping no one mentions the wedding around them, and if you do, the most you’ll have to do is pay a tiny amount of attention to them on the day itself.

What do you do if you see someone crying at work?

Rather than approaching your co-worker with concern or consolation (a further imposition) or ignoring the tears entirely (a sign of coldheartedness or contempt), ride the line with a reaction that has become a mark of just this occasion: the Unobtrusive, Empathetic Wince. Cast a second glance toward the weeper (who will be looking at you to gauge the damage). Scrunch your face as follows: Push your bottom lip up toward your upper gums to create a combination smile-frown, add some worry brows while nodding or tilting your head, then glance down and away. That sends the message “I understand, I will not interfere, and your secret is safe with me.”

When does an e-mail exchange end?

At the office, acknowledging receipt of requested work or information is entirely appropriate and necessary, but acknowledging receipt of receipt-acknowledgment is superfluous.

What if you see someone from work in a compromising situation elsewhere?

Immediately remove yourself from the situation and pretend it never happened.

The Urban Etiquette Handbook

2006-06-22T17:35:00.000-05:00

Love & Sex

What obligations does one have after a one-night stand?

They correlate directly to the expectations raised the night before. If you wooed your one-nighter to bed with promises of Central Park picnics and weekends in the Hamptons, you are obliged to follow through. But if you made no false promises in order to close the deal, then you simply need to be polite. If the liaison takes place in your own apartment, let your new friend stay the night and offer to cook/pay for a quick breakfast, but don’t dilly dally in your effort to get to that place you “need to be” the next day. If the tryst is at the other person’s place and you wish to depart, engage in light caressing and conversation for at least twenty minutes. If you decide to sneak out at 5 A.M. instead, leave a YOU WERE GREAT LAST NIGHT note on a Post-it or napkin. Don’t ask for a phone number if you have no intention of dialing it, and don’t leave yours if you plan on accidentally making the “6” look like a “0.”

How do you politely determine the level of commitment of a gay couple?

One approach, of course, is to do it the same way you would for a straight couple: Ask how long they’ve been together; determine where Party A lives and, later in the conversation, ask Party B if he lives in Chelsea/Park Slope/Hell’s Kitchen, too; ask one of them if he has a dog and listen to see whether the other speaks about it with a tone of ownership. Cohabitation isn’t necessarily a sign of commitment, though: Many gay men have open relationships, so the only surefire way to know the level of commitment is to offer to go home with one of them.

Who pays the bill on a date?

The asker pays, unless the woman does the asking—then the man should pay. If the check’s on the table and her suitor hasn’t moved for it, a woman should allow him a one-bathroom-trip grace period. If it’s still there when she comes back, she should split the bill but is entirely free to silently ruminate about what a cheap jerk he is. (For same-sex couples, the asker really does pay.)

When can you get together with your friend’s ex?

The simple answer is never, for the sake of simplicity, good karma, and world peace. However, if you suspect this could be a case of Romeo-and-Juliet love without the suicide, there are certain requirements that should still be met:
• The statute of limitations has passed on your friend’s right to be possessive (three months for every year they were together). A man should wait longer to do the asking, not out of politeness to his ex but so he doesn’t come off as a dog. A woman can always pretend she needs a shoulder to lean on when what she really needs is a tumble in the hay.
• The uncontrollable feelings have been discussed in a considerate and sensitive conversation with the friend. Initiating said conversation falls to the pursuing friend, not the ex.
• The friend has moved on and is in a wholly satisfying, happy, healthy relationship.

If you start dating someone you met online, at what point should you take down/hide your personal ad?

Taking down your personal ad, like referring to someone as your “boyfriend” or “girlfriend,” is a step that should be taken once you have reached Mutually Acknowledged Monogamy. You can’t make any assumptions until you’ve had The Talk: Until you utter or hear the words “Let’s be exclusive,” you can’t expect your partner’s ad to come down.

How do you respond to an online personal message from someone whose picture you don’t like?

If you’ve established an e-mail connection before seeing the other person’s photo, which then reveals a mullet or other disturbing feature, you must suffer the consequences of jumping the gun. Set up a very brief coffee date and hope that the person doesn’t photograph well.

At what point in a flirtatious conversation should you mention you have a significant other?

If you have a suspicion that your conversation partner would take his clever remarks elsewhere if he knew you were officially off the market, then it’s only fair to release him to said market. Casually mention your boyfriend/girlfriend/husband/wife in passing, but don’t belabor the point: No single person will miss that sign, and if he continues, it probably means he’s actually interested in having a conversation, but not one in which he’s battered over the head with reminders of his partnerlessness. (If you keep chatting for upwards of an hour, it’s well within his rights to forget about your boyfriend/girlfriend—because it appears that you have, too.)

How do you decide who gets what restaurants, bars, and friends post-breakup?

Distinguish between those acquired before and during the relationship. What was yours before remains yours afterward—the same goes for your ex. As for items, book clubs, pets, and dining preferences acquired as a couple, the person being dumped gets first dibs on everything—as a general rule, the one whose heart has been put through the blender claims the social detritus of the relationship. Except for friends, of course—they make their own decisions which side to choose. As for that mythical unicorn, the mutual breakup? Those freaks of nature clearly don’t need any help.

How do you respond if you’re straight and a gay person asks you out?

Laugh and say, “I don’t think my girlfriend/boyfriend would approve.” It won’t become awkward unless you become patronizing. (“Oh, that’s so sweet! I would love to go out with you. It’s so unfortunate that I’m straight. I wish I were gay! I mean, not like that, but . . . ”) If you’re not sure if you’re being asked out, just drop an unmistakable hint into the conversation referring to your heterosexuality.

VIA NEW YORK MAGAZINE

Ungainly yet sexy, the new Guthrie Theater

2006-06-22T12:04:00.000-05:00

Minneapolis gets a taste of French style

Ungainly yet sexy, the new Guthrie Theater is a singular addition to the city's skyline.

By Christopher Hawthorne
LA Times Staff Writer

June 21, 2006

MINNEAPOLIS — When the Guthrie Theater chose French architect Jean Nouvel to design a new building along the Mississippi River, at least a few Minnesotans probably paused to wonder what the company had gotten itself into.

The Guthrie's old thrust stage, a 1963 design by Ralph Rapson, might have been rickety and cramped, but it was beloved here. And Nouvel, who had never worked in America, was hardly a natural fit for Minneapolis. The city has a vital cultural scene but in general — Prince notwithstanding — doesn't have much use for pretense.

Probably best known for his 1987 Institute of the Arab World in Paris, among the most successful of Francois Mitterrand's Grands Projets for the French capital, Nouvel is given to statements about his work that are opaque and grandiose even by the standards of avant-garde architecture.

"From now on," he declared last year in a manifesto written for the opening of a retrospective of his work at a Danish museum, "let architecture rediscover its aura in the inexpressible, in the cloudy." He added that "architecture has to be impregnated and to impregnate."

By the time the manifesto arrived in print, Nouvel had already informed Joe Dowling, the Guthrie's Irish-born artistic director, and the board of trustees that he wanted to lift all three of the building's new theaters at least four stories into the air. Oh, and cantilever a 175-foot-long "Endless Bridge" out toward the Mississippi. And add gigantic, ghostly portraits of actors and playwrights to the exterior and interior walls. And cover the entire facade with dark-blue panels, to evoke the magic of twilight — or, as Nouvel insisted on calling that time of day, using a French idiom, "entre chien et loup," the moment between the dog and the wolf.

Between the dog and the wolf and the Endless Bridge, the whole budget was pretty much spoken for by that point. Guthrie officials would have been forgiven for worrying that they were the impregnable ones, knocked up by a sweet-talking Frenchman with very expensive taste.

The surprise of the building, which opens to the public Sunday, is therefore not that its architectural symbolism, particularly the actors' portraits, is labored — which it is — or that it proves also to be a practical design, even efficient in its way. The 60-year-old Nouvel, whose firm already has to its credit well-regarded performance venues in Lyon, France, and Lucerne, Switzerland, has a talent for solving knotty architectural problems with cleanly decisive architectural gestures, and for mixing luxe elements with bare-bones spaces.

What is surprising is that the pretension and the practicality merge to create a captivating building that is a singular presence on Nouvel's resume, not to mention on the Minneapolis skyline.

If ever a building deserved to be called sexy-ugly, it's this one. Somehow sleek and ungainly at the same time, a brooding, preening pile of geometric forms that could hardly be less photogenic, particularly on the outside, the design manages to slide naturally into its industrial riverbank context and feel utterly up-to-date. In a manner that is truly French, the fact that the building seems aware of its imperfections doesn't keep it from exuding a palpable vanity.

Its completion caps off a mini-boom for the city's cultural institutions, which began with a remarkable addition to the Walker Art Center by Herzog & de Meuron, which opened in April 2005, and has continued this spring with a pair of disappointing buildings: Cesar Pelli's mall-like central library and an entirely forgettable new wing for the Minneapolis Institute of Arts by Michael Graves.

The Guthrie's three excellent performance spaces — an almost literal re-creation of Rapson's hall that holds 1,100, a 700-seat proscenium theater with blood-red walls, and a black box at the very top of the building — differ not only in size but in character, and give the Guthrie a programming flexibility it has never before enjoyed.

The site for the building is stunning and was clearly a lure, as well as an inspiration, for Nouvel. Built for $125 million, the Guthrie occupies a wide swath of land along the Mississippi, a few blocks northeast of the downtown core and just down-river from the churning St. Anthony Falls.

All around are bridges and hulking industrial buildings. Immediately to the west is an old flour mill, now a museum, that Walter Gropius included in "The Evolution of Modern Industrial Architecture," an essay that helped fire Modern architects' fascination with factories and grain elevators. Along with the river and the bridges behind it, the mill turns the Guthrie site into a perfect backdrop for Nouvel — a kind of stage set for his own stab at theatricality.

The building is wrapped in metal panels that, at certain times of day, read as purple. (Prince again!) It is attached to a parking garage, which was designed by a local firm, by a windowless second-story bridge that is covered in the same panels. As you approach the front doors, you can see the undersides of the curving rows of seats that make up the thrust stage. Directly under that half-bowl are a series of billboards with pictures of famous playwrights and a large glass-walled restaurant.

The main entrance flows into an atrium space that is narrow and deep and rather plain, revealing, at the rear of the building, views of trees and a narrow slice of river. Two very long and very thin escalators lead up to a sky lobby that holds the Endless Bridge, with its remarkable views, along with bars, another restaurant and the entrances to the theaters.

It's on your way up those escalators that the logic of Nouvel's decision to lift the theaters so high in the air begins to make sense, even though it rather absurdly requires that the Guthrie find a way to get its sets and other stage equipment up there too. American theater companies have been trying for more than a decade to make their buildings not only auditoriums but destinations, to lure the public through the doors at times other than 10 minutes to 8 in the evening. In part they've begun to do so by taking a cue from museums and hiring well-known architects to produce iconic buildings. They've also added cafes and gift shops, introduced classes for children that will keep the building busy during the day, and varied their curtain times.

The Guthrie has done all of that in its new home, and indeed the building seems likely to attract plenty of people who come primarily to check out the architecture or meet for dinner in the ground-floor restaurant. But the danger of that arrangement, as Nouvel seems to understand, is that by inviting the city in you lose the sense of escape, of detachment from the everyday, that makes a trip to the theater appealing in the first place. By raising the theaters and connecting them to the lobby by slow-moving escalators, the architect not only preserves that detachment but makes it impressively literal.

And in the end there's something refreshing about Nouvel's insistence that architecture is, in some fundamental way, a poetic exercise. The field has grown not just practical but downright actuarial in the last couple of years, and not only when it comes to corporate projects. Rem Koolhaas still designs with a formally innovative, otherworldly touch, but he's become obsessed with winning jobs by convincing his clients that his work is purely, bloodlessly rational. (Amazingly enough, they seem to be buying it.) Frank Gehry can't have much time for creative contemplation now that he's hashing out FARs and EIRs, and picking out bathroom fixtures, for his mega-projects in Los Angeles and Brooklyn.

Perhaps most disappointing of all, Daniel Libeskind, who won the ground zero master plan competition with rapturous rhetoric about death and rebirth, now spends his time building predictably eccentric condo towers for aspiring Trumps in places like Sacramento and suburban Cincinnati. So as long as Jean Nouvel is producing buildings as compellingly, humanely flawed as the Guthrie, we'll forgive him the manifestos.

Behind the scenes at the Guthrie

2006-06-22T12:03:00.000-05:00

Behind the scenes at the Guthrie

The new Guthrie complex promises not only stunning theatrical playing spaces, but backstage places marked by their efficiency, size and general ergonomic improvement. This is where stage magic is made.

Graydon Royce, Star Tribune

Frank Butler, the Guthrie's production manager, was walking through the new theater's public lobby recently and came up to a large wall of dark-blue glass. If you squint, you can see through the glass and make out the large skyway where sets are rolled up to the backs of the thrust and proscenium stages.

"I wish this was a little darker," Butler said. "I don't want the audience thinking about how the magic is done."

The public spaces and theaters are what most of us will see at the new building, but backstage, the transformation is arguably more profound. This is where the illusions are created, and the Guthrie offers a marked contrast from its previous digs on Vineland Place.

Costumers accustomed to working on several different levels including the basement are collected in a bright, airy room. Set construction actually happens on site, in a space that looks big enough to hold a Roman Coliseum. There's a kitchen where food is prepared for on-stage use, a state-of-the-art sound system and an expanded prop shop.
Butler walked through the building the other day and showed us some of the places we rarely get to see.

Standing on the thrust stage, he pointed to a maze of overhead catwalks, where lighting designers work to shade mood and drama. The old Guthrie was built for 200 lighting units in 1963. This space has capacity for double that number. Walking over to the first row, he pointed below the seats at small heating and cooling vents. This new system, he said, should be far quieter than the old ceiling blowers and compete less with the voices of actors.

Below the stage, Butler pointed up and noted that the stage floor can accommodate a trap door at any spot (remember Marley's Ghost arising in "A Christmas Carol"?). All the aluminum I-beams and framing are constructed so they can be removed.
Huge space for building sets

The scene shop might be the crown jewel in Butler's empire. It has 24-foot ceilings and one section entirely for painting. (If the theater needs money, it might consider auto-body work). This huge space is 30 percent larger than the old shop -- which was across town from the theater -- and raw materials can be shipped in through a 10-by-24-foot freight elevator. The Guthrie had to get a variance from the city to build the large skyway across 2nd Street and for the air rights above the municipal parking ramp.

The costume shop has a wall of windows looking out on what will be a 7-acre park. "It's great to have windows for the staff," said Butler. "We didn't see the light of day for many years."

Here, on large draping tables, costumers cut and sew and tailor all the elegant fashions, the smart uniforms, beggars' rags, period dress, armor and robes. The real beauty of this new building is that everything is in one place. It used to be that the costume shop and the fitting rooms were on different floors. Here, the fitting room is right next door, and the costumes are kept in a wardrobe when they're finished.

Nearby are the wig shops, where those glorious stands of hair are built. There are two dye rooms where, Butler said, an enormous amount of electrical energy is spent on vats, plumbing, two kinds of lights (one to approximate stage lighting so colors look true) and special ventilation for dry pigment. One dye room is just for costumes, another for large fabrics.

The craft shop is an interesting collection of boxes and plastic tubs, each labeled to a humorous level of specificity: "belt buckles, western,"belt buckles, military,"feathers, military,"feathers, turkey,"feathers, black." These pieces are stacked floor-to-ceiling and meticulously catalogued.

In the prop shop, furniture, hand props and set decorations are designed and created. The Guthrie does not haunt rummage sales or secondhand stores for pieces that might fit. They're made fresh or recycled from a previous production. For example, Butler pointed out a chandelier that was used in "Hamlet," sitting in the prop shop and awaiting a slight retooling so it can adorn the set of "The Great Gatsby." The work can be as small-scale as a jewelry box or as large-scale as the full-size 1925 Rolls Royce that is being made for "Gatsby."

In another room, soft goods are made, such as pillow cases, curtains and other props made from fabrics.

The magic factory extends not only to the nuts and bolts, but to people places, too. For example, Butler walked us through three rehearsal rooms, one for each of the upstairs stages. All three have mirrored walls and are wired for sound.

Lastly, the new building has its own recording studio, where atmospheric musicscapes, voice-overs and sound effects can be tailored specifically for productions.

When it all works, an audience shouldn't even be aware of it. That's what makes it magic.

Graydon Royce • 612-673-7299
©2006 Star Tribune. All rights reserved.

New Guthrie is industrial

2006-06-22T12:00:00.000-05:00

Commentary: New Guthrie is industrial on the outside, dazzling on the inside

In his Guthrie Theater on the Minneapolis riverfront, architect Jean Nouvel has created a powerful play of illusion and reality. The design pays homage to its industrial neighbors while capturing the magic of theater.

By Linda Mack

One building can define a generation's legacy.

For the last generation, it was the Guthrie Theater on Vineland Place. Ralph Rapson's facade of rhythmic openings framed people moving inside the theater lobby and created a surge of anticipation.

For this generation, it will once again be the Guthrie Theater, the new one opening next weekend. The powerful building establishes a cultural anchor on the formerly blighted Minneapolis riverfront. In homage to its environs, French architect Jean Nouvel's monumental blue box looks industrial on the outside. Inside, it's dazzling.
Blue and yellow windows color reality. Faint images of Guthrie actors cover lobby walls and ceilings. More actors appear in holograms recessed into walls and lurk in mirrors. Framed views recast the Mississippi riverfront. These optical effects create a cinematic experience -- before the plays have even begun.

"We're going to have to match it, play by play," said Guthrie artistic director Joe Dowling one day as he waited for Nouvel to meet him on the already famous cantilevered bridge, the epicenter of jaw-dropping experiences.

The new Guthrie, 10 stories at its tallest, is more than imposing. Seen from the Stone Arch Bridge, its scale matches that of its once-industrial neighbors. Stand close and it's huge. In an age of architectural highjinks -- roof forms that slide over each other, eccentric angles and curves, odd materials -- the exterior is surprisingly straightforward, except for that half-block cantilevered bridge jutting toward the river, of course. The powerful geometric forms wrapped in blue metal panels recall the shapes of the nearby historic mills and grain elevators.
"A building is always an echo -- it's always part of a long story," Nouvel said on a recent tour of the building.

The midnight blue color is part of another story. After a false start in yellow, Nouvel searched more than a year for just the right color to convey the mystery of theater.

"I looked at cars all day and finally found one," he said. "To find the right color is very, very important."

The theatrical activity inside is hinted at by intriguing exterior elements: the semi-circular form of the thrust stage, which softens the building on the corner facing downtown; the orange glass box perched high on the tower, which locates the third or black-box stage; the ghostly images of Guthrie productions glistening in the blue walls; the scrolling LED roof towers and the supersized faces of playwrights, including George Bernard Shaw, Tennessee Williams and August Wilson, on the restaurant terrace.

A heart-throbbing interior

The pow-bang comes inside, but not right away, when you walk into the two-story ground-floor lobby that cuts through to the equally big doors on the Mississippi side. The space is a palate-cleanser for what's to come: a long, claustrophobic escalator ride that disgorges you on the fourth-floor lobby, right in front of a huge window highlighting a riverfront view.

"You go from one world to another world," Nouvel said.

There in the dark, seemingly low-ceilinged lobby, faint images of Guthrie actors loom overhead and on the walls. The sound of people in the fifth-floor lobby floats down through two backlit semicircles cut in the ceiling.

"You feel the other people above, and the warm color," Nouvel said. "You feel the magic of the theater."

Instinct draws you to the bridge, which functions as an elaborate extension of the lobby. Like an architectural scissors, the ramp up from the fourth floor meets the ramp down from the fifth floor toward the end of the bridge. Odd-shaped windows with deep, mirrored sides reflect and literally turn riverfront views upside-down. A 10-foot high window opens to capture the sound and sight of St. Anthony Falls.
Then the blue glass doors and panels at the end of the bridge draw your attention.
"The color flattens the view, makes it abstract," Nouvel said. "You want to go through and see the next adventure."

And, when you do, the whole riverfront is laid before you. Broad steps invite you to sit and soak it up. You're suspended four stories in the air.

"This is the fourth stage," Nouvel said, as he soaked up the sun.

Captivating stages

The other three stages are equally captivating. The 1,100-seat thrust stage, the old Guthrie's signature, feels like a crisp, warmer version of the familiar Vineland Place stage. Rapson's groundbreaking layout and vibrant scheme of 10 seat colors have been kept, but details have been tweaked for better sightlines, comfort and acoustics. (Leg room, for one thing, has been increased.)

The 700-seat proscenium stage -- this theater's signature -- is lipstick red with velvet seats, sensuous chain-mail curtains cascading down the walls and two narrow balconies perched above the raked floor. If color can whet the theatrical appetite, patrons will be ravenous.

The flexible black-box theater on the ninth floor is actually deep charcoal gray. Its cantilevered orange-glass lobby, which sports both a glass ceiling and a glass floor, is another optical game.

"It's like a projector on the landscape. It's always sunny," said Nouvel.
Visual play before the plays

Will all this visual play compete with the theatrical experience itself? Will the plays seem dull in comparison? Will patrons eating in the fifth-floor restaurant feel they're being watched by Guthrie actors in the mirrored walls? We'll only know when people begin to fill the lobbies and theaters.

But it seems that Nouvel has succeeded where so many avant-garde architects fail.
He's transformed the way we see the city's iconic natural asset -- the Mississippi River. And he welcomes us to share the fun he had doing so.

He's masterfully manipulated our experience of the building. But he's done so by inviting us through it rather than forcing us.

Like the old Guthrie, the new one beckons us to the theater. That invitation, even more than the resurrected thrust stage, continues a compelling cultural legacy.

Linda Mack • 612-673-7124 lmack@startribune.com
©2006 Star Tribune.

Dream Factory for Guthrie Theater

2006-06-22T11:59:00.000-05:00

Architect Nouvel Conjures a Dream Factory for Guthrie Theater

June 20 (Bloomberg)

When the light is just right on the midnight-blue panels of the new Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, a ghostly image of Shakespeare's Henry V fades into Othello carrying his doomed bride Desdemona. More actors' faces gaze out from overscale billboards and appear as wispy LED images that electronically climb zipper-sign towers rising like high-tech smokestacks.

Paris architect Jean Nouvel, 60, uses architecture -- the most enduring artistic medium -- as a scrim to project the essence of that most ephemeral of arts, theater. Nouvel succeeds in this subtle endeavor while creating a spectacular civic landmark.
The Guthrie has long enjoyed an enviable reputation by focusing on inventive interpretations of Shakespeare and other stage classics. This eye-popping, $125 million, three-venue building reflects the health of live theater, according to Guthrie Artistic Director Joe Dowling, 57, as well as the growing artistic impact of cities outside New York.

After a fund-raising gala and public opening June 25, the Guthrie will stage premieres of Simon Levy's adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's ``The Great Gatsby'' and ``The Falls,'' a new play by Jeffery Hatcher, as part of the 2006-07 season that begins July 15.

On the banks of the Mississippi, Nouvel (with Architectural Alliance, a local firm) has erected a blocky mass that resembles a humming factory, a sensible choice when neighbors include 12- story grain elevators and massive stone mills. Once derelict, these have been brilliantly revamped as a museum, condominiums and a Mississippi riverfront park in which industrial ruins resemble ancient Roman ones.

Suspended Spaces

To take full advantage of the riverside setting, Nouvel placed the two main stages 50 feet above the street. The idea seems perverse, but the payoff for patrons, after an escalator ride up a dark, shaftlike space, is a lobby bridge that projects 178 feet out of the building to hang in the air high above the riverbanks.

Like a crafty stage director, Nouvel discloses the glory of the bridge a bit at a time, through strips of tiny windows lined by mirrorlike panels. They pick up fragments of the Saint Anthony Falls with snatches of clouds drifting overhead, or an oblong of lawn below. It's just a visual trick, but Nouvel understands that these collage views raise the audience's sensory antennae -- a nice warm-up for a performance.

The bridge ends in space with a plane of blue glass that opens onto a tiny, stepped amphitheater perched high above the river's swirling waters. Nouvel has built in many such effects; the bridge is only the most spectacular. As patrons wander the lobbies, for example, they encounter more ghostly stage scenes on ceilings and walls.

Setting the Stages

So much architectural bravura has the potential to overwhelm what's on stage. Instead, Nouvel unveils the theaters in a dreamlike way that feels attuned to theatrical experience.

In the 1,100-seat Wurtele theater, Nouvel replicates (while subtly enhancing) the thrust stage that has defined the organization since its 1963 founding. Lacking a proscenium, the asymmetrical stage penetrates deeply into the audience, which forms an excitingly intimate semicircle around the actors.

It's a stage type that legendary founder Tyrone Guthrie pioneered and refined in the Guthrie's original hall. The new version retains the original's autumn-leaf colors but feels closer to the action. (It's 198 seats smaller, with better sightlines.)
The Guthrie now has its first conventional auditorium in the 700-seat McGuire proscenium stage, and Nouvel takes the audience back to the theatrical womb by bathing the room in red light. Veils of shining, stainless-steel mesh read as the thickest, most luxurious velvet. The mesh has an un-velvet translucence, though, as if the room were mysteriously borderless. Nouvel has the heart of a production designer.

Traditional Addition

The Guthrie added the proscenium because, as Dowling explained, ``we needed to get beyond the limitations of the thrust stage'' -- which include props that can block views and actors who must constantly move around so that no one misses what's going on.

So Dowling and Nouvel built the thrust's antithesis. All the seats are lined up in straight rows perpendicular to the stage, not in the usual amphitheater-bowl shape. Though the rows look regimented, it's what Dowling wanted. ``The great 20th- century works of psychological realism,'' he said, ``like those of Arthur Miller or Eugene O'Neill, demand to be seen by everyone as if no other audience members are present.''
In the thrust arrangement, by contrast, viewers are always aware of the audience beyond the stage
.
Audiences First

The 200-seat Dowling Studio Theater is the kind of flexible black box that's intended to develop new work and hone actors' skills. Nouvel put it on display by hanging it on the outside of the ninth floor and wrapping the lobby in floor-to-ceiling yellow glass (echoing a vintage neon sign atop a neighboring grain elevator). It offers patrons awesome but vertigo-inducing panoramas.

Though such gestures are self-dramatizing in the manner of much architecture these days, Nouvel never loses sight of the audiences he's serving. The recurring images of actors and the architectural devices that tingle the senses dissolve the physical reality of the building into sensation, memory, dreams: the world playwrights and actors conjure from the stages within.

(James S. Russell is Bloomberg's U.S. architecture critic. The opinions expressed are his own.)

Building makes a dramatic impact

2006-06-22T11:57:00.000-05:00

Building makes a dramatic impact on the riverfront

LARRY MILLETT

French architect Jean Nouvel's large, dark and rather mysterious new Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis is certainly not your old Guthrie.

Yes, the thrust stage theater within is closely modeled (albeit with wider seats) on Ralph Rapson's acclaimed 1963 original, but that's pretty much where the resemblances end.

Rapson's soon-to-be-demolished theater was small, funky and rather cheaply built — not exactly a flower child of the 1960s but definitely possessing some of that old hippie spirit.

The new Guthrie, by contrast, conveys a sense of power and mass, and, despite the inevitable IKEA jokes, its midnight blue exterior makes the theater a striking presence along the Minneapolis riverfront.

It's a building that some people will undoubtedly like a great deal but that others may find, well, a bit strange.

The building's deep blue exterior, which features scenes from old Guthrie plays screen-printed on more than 500 steel panels, has already provoked much discussion. It's certainly not a color you see every day, and it conveys a dusky, noirish quality, which presumably is what Nouvel was after. In fact, the building as a whole, with its dark metal skin forming a background for carefully staged lighting effects, seems designed to celebrate the night, which is when most theatrical performances will take place.

The building's rather hard, industrial look is also appropriate, despite "power plant" comparisons.

"This building is part of an environment," notes Bertram Beissel, project architect for Nouvel's firm, which affiliated with the Architectural Alliance of Minneapolis in designing the $125 million theater.

The new Guthrie stands next to the old Washburn-Crosby A Mill (now home to a museum as well as new housing) in the heart of what was once the greatest flour-milling complex in human history. A "pretty" new building here would have seemed out of place, as would one that tried to imitate old-style stone and timber mill construction. Nouvel and his team avoided these pitfalls by creating a building that's undeniably modern but that, by virtue of its size and massing, complements the historic structures around it.

LOBBY FAILS TO IMPRESS

Inside, of course, is where all the action will take place, and it's also where Nouvel's design becomes especially interesting — and, in places, disappointing. Perhaps the least satisfactory aspect of the theater is its ground-floor lobby, next to a sleek restaurant space on Second Street.

The lobby can only be described as underwhelming. Although it extends all the way through the building (so as to provide river views as well as access to the box office), it's a low, hall-like room with a blandly utilitarian feel. To put it another way, it lacks drama and excitement, two qualities you'd expect to find upon entering a theater building.

To reach the two main theaters (the 1,110-seat thrust and 700-seat proscenium-arch stages), most people will take an escalator ride to the fourth floor. The escalators, placed between two solid walls to either side of the entrance lobby, are undoubtedly the lengthiest in Minnesota, and as you proceed up them, it's like being in a very long and narrow hallway. Some may find this to be a dramatic experience; for others it may induce claustrophobia.

At the top of the escalators, you'll arrive at a great internal intersection formed by four hallways. This is truly the heart of the building, its center of circulation.
Go left, and you'll reach what's called an ante-lobby for the 1,100-seat thrust-stage theater, which promises to provide the same intimate experience as the original Guthrie, only without being quite so jammed in by narrow aisles and small seats.
Go to your right, and you'll arrive at an ante-lobby for the 700-seat proscenium arch theater, a very nice auditorium with red draped walls and red velvet seats.
Turn around past the escalators, and you'll be in what's called the "orchestra level" lobby, off which are located large men's and women's restrooms (which will come as a great relief, so to speak, for theatergoers accustomed to a shortage of such facilities at other venues).

Your fourth choice is to go forward and, if you have the time, you should do so immediately. This will lead you to another of the building's much talked- (and joked-) about features — the so-called "endless bridge" that thrusts out toward the Mississippi in a most spectacular fashion. At the end of this mighty cantilever is an open balcony offering a vista of St. Anthony Falls and the Stone Arch Bridge so utterly fabulous that you may be tempted to skip whatever play you've come to see and simply soak in the view.

ROOM WITH A VIEW

Nouvel, in fact, has cunningly placed windows throughout the building to exploit river views. The best vantage point of all may be from what's called the "amber box," a small glass enclosure that juts out from the top of the building and serves as part of the lobby for a 200-seat studio theater.

Despite inconvenient sloping floors, the "endless bridge," like almost every other corridor in the building, is designed to do double-duty as a lobby. How this will all work out as a practical matter may prove interesting. In any event, the lack of what might be called a "great lobby" is one of the new Guthrie's most unusual features. It means theatergoers will have a variety of places to idle between acts, but it may also prove confusing until people have "learned" the building.

Aside from the "endless bridge," most of the lobby spaces aren't particularly memorable. One exception is a snazzy lobby on the fifth floor with food and drink service. It features plenty of mirrors and long upholstered benches along the walls. If you've ever been in a wise guy's cocktail lounge on Long Island, say, you'll feel right at home here.

All buildings have secrets, and perhaps the Guthrie's is that, for all of its modern gestures, it in many ways adheres to classic French notions of design. The Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris was, in the 19th century, the most renowned school of architecture in the world. It taught a way of design that called for architects to plan on a large scale, to express a building's inner workings on its exterior and to arrange the parts of a building in a clear, rational manner. The Guthrie does all of this (so that, for example, the thrust theater's curves are expressed on the outside).

Still, it's a large and complex work of architecture, and it's difficult to know exactly how it will work once it formally opens next Sunday. The three theaters themselves should be fine, but figuring out how everyone will circulate through the building is another matter. It won't be perfect — buildings never are — and you have to believe there will be some surprises, both good and bad, when the crowds arrive and the drama begins.

Larry Millett is a retired architecture critic for the Pioneer Press.

Guthrie Q&A

2006-06-22T11:56:00.000-05:00

Q. How many theaters are in the new Guthrie?
A. Three. The Wurtele Thrust Stage is essentially a recreation of the old Guthrie at Vineland Place and seats about 1,100. The McGuire Proscenium Stage is configured more like a conventional theater and seats 700. The Dowling Studio, an experimental theater at the top of the building, seats as many as 200.

Q. It looks quite a bit bigger than the old place …
A. It is. The Vineland place facility was about 87,000 square feet. The new Guthrie is 285,000 square feet — more than three times the size.

Q. What takes up all the room?
A. There are two more theaters, of course, as well as more room for rehearsal, a state-of-the-art sound studio and more classrooms. There's also space for building sets and administration. Before the move, the Guthrie development department and scene shops were off-site.

Q. How much did it cost, and is it paid for?
A. The complex cost $125 million. The Guthrie received $25 million in bonding money from the state, planned to raise $85 million and intended to borrow the remaining $15 million. Guthrie officials will announce progress on the fund-raising campaign on opening weekend.

Q. Will tickets to plays be more expensive?
A. By a couple of bucks. Tickets to most productions on the two main stages will be $52 to $22. For "1776," "A Christmas Carol" and "The Great Gatsby," single tickets will be $57-$27. Last season, the top ticket for most shows was $50; "Christmas Carol" was $55.

Q. What about parking?
A. There's a 1,000-space parking ramp just across the street. It'll cost $8 to park in the city-owned ramp for Guthrie shows. (The light rail Metrodome stop is five blocks to the south if you want to pass on the parking.)

Q. It's cool that there's a skyway between the ramp and the theater.
A. Um … that's not a skyway. It's a link to the scene shop, which is built into the ramp, and it's not public. You'll have to go outside to get from your car to the ramp, but the link should be wide enough overhead to shield you from all but the most ferocious blizzards.

Q. And bathrooms? The bathrooms at the old Guthrie were terrible.
A. There were 15 public "fixtures" for men and 29 for women at the old Guthrie. In the new place, there are 33 men's fixtures, 59 for women and two "family" restrooms.
Q. Can I get something to eat?

A. Cue is a full-service, white-tablecloth restaurant on the street level, and there's a cafeteria on level 5, both headed by renowned local chef Lenny Russo.

Q. What about a drink?
A. No problem. There are 11 full-service bar stations in the building. Hiccup!

Q. What can you tell me about that funny appendage sticking out of the building toward the river?
A. Architect Jean Nouvel calls it "the endless bridge." It's 178 feet long (about the height of a 14-story office building), it uses enough steel to construct two Eiffel Towers and it offers some pretty spectacular views of the Mississippi River and the Stone Arch Bridge. It's enclosed except for the very tip, which is open to the elements.

Q. I get woozy looking at it.
A. Don't worry: The bridge — which can accommodate as many as 1,600 people — can support a weight of some 2,000 tons. But if you want a real vertigo experience, go up to level 9, where that big amber box hangs off the top of the building. There's a large transparent panel on the floor that looks alllll the way down to the roof of level 5. Brrrr!

— Dominic P. Papatola, Theater Critic

MINNEAPOLIS: DESIGN CITY

2006-06-22T11:55:00.000-05:00

Newsweek
June 26, 2006 issue

MINNEAPOLIS: DESIGN CITY

Minneapolis took root on the Mississippi where St. Anthony's Falls powered the city's early industries. A French missionary had named the falls after his favorite saint—and now another Frenchman has laid claim to the riverbank with the spectacular Guthrie Theater. Thanks to that and other stunning new buildings, the city's become a design boomtown.

THE GUTHRIE THEATER: French architect Jean Nouvel was so excited by the Guthrie site—"The Mississippi is mythic in France," he says—he insisted the theater be built 50 feet off the ground, for clear views of the river and those falls. His clients thought the idea was crazy. When Nouvel wouldn't give in, they rented a crane. Up swooped the Guthrie's director, Joe Dowling, in a cherry picker with the architect to check out the vistas. "I was quivering," recalls Dowling, while Nouvel, a bear of a man, puffed a cigar and sang "Old Man River"—in French. "Jean was absolutely right," says the director. "It was extraordinary." Nouvel got his way, but his daring didn't end with the theater's levitation. He designed a huge drum shape to house the main arena stage, an "endless bridge" that cantilevers 175 feet toward the river and an elevated passageway that connects to the scenery shop built atop a nearby garage. Then he wrapped it all in midnight-blue steel. The result is brazen, outrageous and wonderful—a building as drama queen.

Founded in 1963 by the great British director Sir Tyrone Guthrie, the original theater was famous for its asymmetrical thrust stage, re-created here in the 1,100-seat main theater. Nouvel added an elegant proscenium theater—in luscious reds—and a "black box" space for experimental work. "For the artistic community," said actor Sally Wingert, arriving at the Guthrie one recent day on her bike, "it's a giant, gorgeous playground." For the public, too, it's as inventive inside as out. Whether you're cruising up the escalators, strolling the lobby bar and cafés or wandering along that "endless bridge" with a glass of wine, you'll glimpse surprising reflections and views of the city and the river. Nouvel plays with color—one vast window is tinted ski-goggle yellow—and with illusion. At the end of the cantilevered "bridge," you encounter a big glass rectangle in the floor where, far below, you see the ground. It's a heart-stopping moment: at the new Guthrie, theatrical experiences won't be confined to the stage.

Nouvel's big blue monolith sits easily among its old industrial neighbors, its curved shape echoing the grain silos. The building evokes the Guthrie's history, too. "I proposed putting ghosts on the walls," says Nouvel—and there they are: huge wispy images of past productions screened onto the exterior steel. Hokey? A little. But like much in this amazing building, the images are subtle and unexpected. Monsieur Nouvel, please take a bow.

French 'starchitect's' debutante

2006-06-22T11:54:00.000-05:00

French 'starchitect's' debutante is a Minneapolis knockout

By Blair Kamin
Tribune architecture critic
Published June 18, 2006

MINNEAPOLIS -- He's big. He's bald. He wears black. And he's brilliant, a four-star impresario of space and light.

Neither a hard-core modernist nor a soft-minded postmodernist, Paris architect Jean Nouvel has long been willing to use traditional forms. The results have been beguiling, from the jewel-like Arab World Institute in Paris to his unbuilt Endless Tower, a competition-winning design for a glassy, cylinder-shaped Paris skyscraper that was meant to fade into the sky. The tower looked so good (and so real) in photomontages that bewildered tourists would call Nouvel's office, asking where it was.

Now Nouvel has come up with another stunner, but this one's no mirage. It's the new home of the Guthrie Theater, the renowned resident theater company, set to open Saturday. Soaring above the banks of the Mississippi River, the $125 million building is vintage Nouvel, echoing the muscularity of nearby grain elevators and flour mills while delivering a jolt of modernity with its sleek blue and yellow walls.

The project, Nouvel's first in the United States, is by far the best of three new buildings here, including a downtown library by Cesar Pelli and an art museum addition by Michael Graves. Coming on top of last year's adventurous addition to the Walker Art Center by Pritzker Architecture Prize winners Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, they give this city, best known for its frigid winters and chronic niceness, a $370 million burst of construction devoted to culture and the arts.

While the Guthrie may disappoint those who think every project should possess the edginess and technological inventiveness of Frank Gehry's exuberant jumbles of metal, it compensates with spectacular features of its own, including (shades of the Endless Tower) a raised lobby called the Endless Bridge. Like an outstretched finger, the bridge cantilevers the equivalent of 12 stories toward the Mississippi, offering drop-dead views of the river valley.

Engaging the past

Only time and audiences will tell how the Guthrie's three theaters, including a new version of its signature thrust stage, fare as performance spaces. But the project already stands as one of the finest marriages of building and site since Gehry's Guggenheim Museum revitalized the waterfront of the old Spanish shipbuilding city of Bilbao nine years ago. The Guthrie seems both utterly new and as if it was always there. This is the essence of Nouvel's refreshingly thoughtful stance -- which is not about novelty for novelty's sake but about newness made newer by a complex, rather than saccharine, engagement of the past.

"Modernism is a friend of history," Nouvel said during a recent tour, "because history is a succession of modernities."

The theater's surroundings, a short cab ride from the glistening skyscrapers of downtown Minneapolis, form a scene that could be called "post-industrial picturesque:" tumbling waterfalls, an arched stone bridge, and massive grain elevators and flour mills topped by industrial signs bearing storied names such as Gold Medal Flour and Pillsbury. They recall the days, from 1880 to 1930, when Minneapolis was the nation's flour-milling capital, processing heaps of grain brought by rail from the Dakotas and Canada.

Today, the shutdown mills are grist themselves -- for loft conversions that stand alongside new apartments and the usual signs of gentrification, such as yuppies walking their pampered pooches. The smell in the air is of money, not flour. And the risk is that the new gentry will grind down and Martha Stewart-ize the area's toughness.

Nouvel, thankfully, is having none of it.

His steel-frame building, completed with the Minneapolis firm Architectural Alliance, is imaginatively based on the idea that theater itself is a kind of production, a manufactured spectacle of rigging and stage sets and scripts. Throughout, the building expresses the spectacle of theater and creates its own spectacle.

To catch the best views, Nouvel makes the unusual move of lifting the three theaters -- a 1,110-seat thrust stage and a 700-seat proscenium theater entered on the 4th floor and a 250-seat black box entered on the 9th floor -- into the air. Public lobbies, back-of-house facilities and theater equipment occupy the other floors. Across the street is a 1,000-car parking garage topped by the Guthrie's setmaking shop. Sets will roll across the bridge like widgets on a factory's assembly line. Nouvel makes the process visible to theater-goers in the 4th-floor lobby with a wall of shockingly bluish glass.

"It's like a good restaurant," he quipped. "You can look into the kitchen."

He shapes these functions with appropriate directness, simultaneously communicating the building's uses and relating to its surroundings but never with that tricked-up Ralph Lauren retro look of the New Urbanists.

On the one hand, the Guthrie suggests the massive scale and brute shapes of the old industrial landscape with the expressed curve of the thrust stage and the blocky rectangular structure that houses its proscenium and black-box theaters. On the other hand, the building deftly separates itself from the past with such elements as three LED-equipped sign masts and its tough but elegant dark blue steel cladding. Nouvel calls the color "twilight blue," saying it represents "l'heure entre chiens et loups," the hour that separates the dogs from the wolves. (Ah, the French. You don't hear that kind of talk in Chicago.)

Coming alive

The outcome is immensely captivating. The Guthrie manages to be tough and welcoming, its sense of mystery and anticipation accented by eight large-scale images from previous Guthrie productions screen-printed in pale white on the building's blue facade. By day, in truth, the images are dull. By night, according to the media kit, they're supposed to float "like ghosts in the dark." However they come off, the building is an instant landmark, one where the drama starts long before the show begins.

Nouvel being Nouvel -- an architect whose work has been called cinematic because of its ever-shifting effects of space and light -- the drama continues inside, sometimes coming close to being purely theatrical.

Still, a theater is not a church, nor is it a Miesian temple of less-is-more. It's supposed to be festive and dramatic, and Nouvel certainly delivers those qualities without lapsing into old-fashioned movie palace fantasy.

From a spare, well-proportioned lobby, visitors ascend a pair of steeply pitched, tightly framed escalators to the 4th-floor lobby, the walls around them bathed in dancing colored lights. Another lobby, with seating for preshow dining, is directly above on five.

The lobbies, which serve both the thrust and proscenium theaters, are low-ceilinged and feel compressed. Nouvel relieves them by punching a sleek semi-circular opening between them and by teasing you out onto the Endless Bridge. More about that experience in a moment.

The theaters themselves are strikingly beautiful, though they do not quite match the curvaceous, wood-paneled auditorium of Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, which is among the finest rooms in America.

In the asymmetrical, two-level thrust theater, a dazzling range of autumn colors brightens both the seats and the hovering acoustical panels. The theater is surprisingly intimate for its considerable size. Best of all, it maintains the democratic attitude of architect Ralph Rapson's original Guthrie Theater at the Walker Art Center, which is scheduled to be demolished this summer despite objections from preservationists. A tier of "alpine slope" seats smashes the hierarchical distinction between orchestra and balcony.

Nouvel sets up a deliberate contrast in the proscenium theater, which is as rectilinear and frontal as the thrust theater is organic and almost-in-the-round. Its hot-red velvet seats and mesh side walls manage to be both spare and rich. Red, a traditional theater color, communicates intensity as opposed to the soothing "green rooms" where performers relax before going on stage.

While the nicely -proportioned black box black-box theater near the Guthrie's summit is nothing to write home about, the lobbies leading to the three theaters are showstoppers.

The Endless Bridge is anything but an "on-steroids" version of Minneapolis skywalks, those glass-enclosed steel tubes that protect office workers from the ferocious winter cold. From the 4th-floor lobby, Nouvel leads you up a ramp whose walls are punctuated by narrow windows. Then -- boom! -- you arrive at a large picture window on the side of the bridge that will open (in warm weather, at least) like a jet door.

As a result, you not only see the great river valley panorama, you sense it, feeling the freshness of the waterfront air. Outside, there's a steeply pitched balcony from which you can take in the view.

The cantilevered 9th-floor lobby presents its own eye-popping drama: You emerge from the elevator and are temporarily stunned by the hyperbright yellow light created by floor-to-ceiling, amber-colored glass walls. The effect seems potentially tiresome. But as Nouvel intends, it freeze-frames views of both the riverfront and the skyline, elevating the experience beyond a conventional glass-walled office building. And it is by no means coincidental that the bright-yellow color matches the yellow hues of the "Gold Medal Flour" sign next door. Even as he's bringing you to Future World, Nouvel isn't entirely letting go of the past.

The new Guthrie is all about these balances of old and new, yet it never descends to the level of limp compromise. Instead, old and new energize each other. And so do form and function. The fit between the two is remarkably tight here, though the Endless Bridge is something of an over-the-top appendage -- the wow-inducing folly that just about every cultural project must have today. Still, on the whole, this is what Louis Sullivan called organic architecture: an expressive interpretation of modern realities. For France's architectural impresario, it's a most impressive American debut.

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bkamin@tribune.com

Opening bow

2006-06-22T11:50:00.000-05:00

Looking out from the new proscenium stage as workers attend to last-minute details before the Guthrie's opening.

By Michael Metzger

Guthrie Theater set to debut with celebration and plays

The new cultural constellation is complete. Minneapolis has been reconfigured, broadened and brightened with a generation's gifts to the future: the expanded Walker Art Center, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Children's Theatre, as well as a new Central Library, and now, the star beside the river, the new twilight-blue Guthrie Theater.

The $125 million, three-theater complex is already one of the most remarkable landmarks in the city; that's as clear as a view of the Guthrie itself from across the Mississippi River Downtown.

Up around the bend

The celebration of the opening of the new Guthrie, 818 S. 2nd St., is Sunday, June 25 beginning at noon and lasting until 2 in the morning. The gala features a dedication by Guthrie artistic director Joe Dowling at 1 p.m., and performances by musician Peter Himmelman, In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre, and South Minneapolis punk/hip hop artist P.O.S., among others, scattered throughout the afternoon and evening. (See “Guthrie Festivities” sidebar for complete schedule.)
The artists and dignitaries will gather around and inside the striking addition to the city's arts scene designed by French architect Jean Nouvel. His big, blue bend of steel is nestled among the old concrete grain silos and new condos sitting in the shadow of the neon Gold Medal Flour sign in the Mills District on the west bank of the river.

Construction of the 285,000-square-foot theater center began in September 2003 and has been brought in on time and on budget, said Director of Communications Melodie Bahan.

The new Guthrie features a 1,100-seat thrust stage with seating on three sides - it's a slightly smaller recreation of the theater at the old Guthrie. Its seats echo the autumnal colors of the original theater's seats, while curved acoustic panels above allow the unamplified stage voices to carry to the back of the intimate, steep space.
Named after Margaret and Angus Wurtele, the thrust has wider seats than the original, more legroom and better sightlines and acoustics. There's also a 700-seat Proscenium Theater with seats covered in a vibrant, deep red, and a 200-capacity studio with flexible seating. The two main theaters are both on the fourth floor, while the studio is up on the ninth floor. The old Guthrie, which sat next to the Walker on Hennepin Ave., had a single 1,400-seat theater.

Bahan said when Nouvel saw the site for the new Guthrie along the Mississippi, he said, “I'm going to put the theaters and the lobbies 50 feet in the air.” She said there was immediate opposition to the idea. “It's like, ‘Oh, that makes no sense at all. How do you get materials and scenery up?' But he insisted and we trusted and he brilliantly designed our scene shop across Second Street on top of the parking ramp.
“The sets get built over there, rolled across, and they're right on the stage floors for the Thrust and Proscenium.”

The Guthrie folks' trust in Nouvel has paid off with an astonishing array of grand architectural gestures, including the cantilevered bridge reaching out the equivalent of 12 stories to the river.

The inside of the “Endless Bridge” serves as a lobby for the two main theaters, while the outside far end of it serves as a midair balcony with stunning views of the river and city. Bahan said, as far as they know, it's the largest occupied cantilever in the world, held up by two Eiffel Towers' worth of steel connecting it to the rest of the building as well as the planet (tons of steel were driven deep into the bedrock below).

As you walk along the inside of the bridge, your eyes are repeatedly lured from the quiet gray of the walls decorated with ghostly images of past Guthrie productions to the living paintings of Minneapolis along the walls. These paintings are thoughtfully positioned windows framing the silos, Stone Arch Bridge and other elements of the outside world.

Nouvel clambered up on a crane before he began his planning, Bahan said, to scope out the views and figure out just which outlooks he wanted to capture.

The Guthrie also has two restaurants, Cue, the main eatery, has a street entrance on the ground level and will be accessible to diners regardless of whether a play is in production or not. There's a lobby restaurant as well, offering preshow eats and light lunches.

Other amenities include bar service at 11 - yes, that's eleven - locations throughout the building, as well as a 1,000-car city-owned parking garage (done up in deep blue glass and bright aluminum), a street-level gift shop, four classrooms, costume and scenery shops, and an audio recording studio.

It's a startling upgrade from the old place; with nearly three times as much space, twice as many public bathrooms, a third more dressing rooms, and a building that will serve as a visual exclamation mark for generations.

Backward, forward

The original Guthrie opened in May of 1963 with a production of “Hamlet” - the same play it closed with earlier this year. The new Guthrie's season features 11 - yes, that's 11 - plays, including the world premiere of Simon Levy's adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's “The Great Gatsby” on the Wurtele Thrust Stage. (Fitzgerald was, of course, a native of St. Paul.) The McGuire Proscenium Stage (named after UnitedHealth Group CEO William McGuire and his Powerball-sized paycheck) opens with Tom Stoppard's “The Real Thing,” and the Dowling Studio (named for the Guthrie's artistic director, Joe) debuts “The Falls,” by Jeffrey Hatcher.

Later in the season, the thrust features Shakespeare's “The Merchant of Venice,” and the musical ᅓ,” while the proscenium stage is home to productions of George Bernard Shaw's “Major Barbara” and Tennessee Williams' “The Glass Menagerie.”
The Studio is scheduled to feature “Boats on a River” by Julie Marie Myatt in its inaugural season.

A fine accomplishment

2006-06-22T11:49:00.000-05:00

A fine accomplishment … and a long road ahead

DOMINIC P. PAPATOLA

Well, it's over.

After years of planning and cajoling and dealing, the new Guthrie Theater finally opens next weekend. Following the grand opening of the new wing at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts earlier this month and last year's formal unveiling of the expanded Walker Art Center and Children's Theatre Company, Minnesota's first great cultural building boom of the 21st century is complete.

There are a few stray millions to be raised here and there, so it's not quite time to hoist the 'Mission Accomplished' banner. Still, what were mere twinkles in the collective eyes of board members and arts administrators a handful of years ago have become reality. Glistening new theaters. More and better gallery space. Endowment money set aside to help ensure artistic excellence into the future.

How did we get here?

Vision, for one thing. The leaders and the boards of the area's largest arts organizations already sat at or near the first tier of their respective peer groups. But each knew that growth was required to maintain that excellence and that pursuing growth was a risky economic and artistic proposition.

Sitting in his sun-splashed office at the new, riverfront Guthrie Theater, artistic director Joe Dowling was asked how he managed to stay sane through an arduous political, developmental and fundraising process.

He said he tried to think of putting together a $125 million facility in the same way he tried to put together a play. He knew how to work with a diverse group of designers, he knew about staying within a budget, and he knew that a creative endeavor frequently requires a certain amount of diplomacy with prickly personalities.

But vision without execution is nothing more than pretty words. Though we saw flashes of temper and frustration throughout the process, few people outside the institutions themselves will ever really know the sweat and agony that went into completing these projects. Maybe that's for the best.

What we do know is that it took upward of $350 million to complete the Walker, Guthrie, CTC and MIA projects. And while kudos go to the arts groups themselves for getting out there and raising the money, the community itself deserves a bundle of the credit. More than 4,000 donors contributed to make the new Guthrie a reality, for example.

That all four of these projects — operating essentially at the same time and with overlapping pools of contributors — managed to succeed is nothing short of astonishing and speaks very well of this region's support for arts and culture.
So, congratulations to the pillars of our arts community, and congratulations to ourselves.

But while it's all over, we should also remember that it's just beginning. The aftershocks of the first cultural building boom can already be felt.
The Minnesota Shubert Performing Arts and Education Center still has a long way to go on its $37 million capital campaign, and the Ordway Center for the Performing Arts is looking to bolster its endowment.

The MacPhail Center for Music is closer to its $25 million goal but is still toiling for contributions to build its next home near the Guthrie. And such smaller groups as St. Paul's SteppingStone Theatre for Youth Development have fundraising campaigns waiting in the wings.

While the Legislature and Gov. Tim Pawlenty have been generous to individual arts organizations in the past several years — the Guthrie, CTC, the Ordway, the Shubert and MacPhail have all been beneficiaries — the state's funding for the arts in general is still wanting.

The Minnesota State Arts Board, which funds arts groups from Grand Marais to Fairmont, is operating with a fraction of the budget it had a few years ago, and a plan to designate a portion of the state's sales tax for cultural initiatives died in the Legislature for a second year.

The arts community and its supporters have time to rest on their laurels. But not much. There's still a lot of work to be done.

Dominic P. Papatola's "Culture in Context" column appears Sundays in Life. He can be reached at dpapatola@pioneerpress.com .

The beauty of three stages

2006-06-22T11:48:00.000-05:00

The expansion to three stages is not merely a mathematical addition for the new theater. The change could result in theatergoing experiences we have never had at the Guthrie.

Graydon Royce, Star Tribune

Could we imagine the Guthrie Theater without the thrust stage jutting its chin into our consciousness? Tyrone Guthrie had built the bold design at Stratford, Ontario, in 1953 to invigorate his directorial conceptions of Shakespeare, so it was natural for him and designer Tanya Moiseiwitsch to build their Minneapolis theater around that asymmetrical playing space. Guthrie proclaimed it could work well not only for Shakespeare but contemporary drama as well.

"By and large he was right," said artistic director Joe Dowling, who has overseen the remaking of the thrust in the new building -- a smaller auditorium but a stage that is within inches of Moiseiwitsch's original. In a time when the theatrical pendulum is swinging away from the free-form 1960s and '70s, Dowling recognizes the thrust's signature meaning for the Guthrie and for a generation of theatergoers who have become accustomed to it.

But Dowling also has come to believe that Guthrie's belief in the versatility of the thrust and the conventional wisdom that grew from it is not entirely true.
"The thrust stage is magnificent for classic works of epic scope," Dowling said recently. "But by the late 19th century and 20th century, plays were influenced by realism that demands the audiences see the same thing at the same time -- to see it from the same perspective."

This is why the new 700-seat proscenium stage promises to become the most transformative space in the new building. More than the thrust (with which we're familiar) and the black-box studio (a model we've seen around town for years), the proscenium offers a distinctly new way for the Guthrie to present classic and contemporary drama.

"Take a work such as 'Virginia Woolf,' " Dowling said, referring to the 2001 Guthrie production of Edward Albee's play, directed by David Esbjornson and starring Patrick Stewart and Mercedes Ruehl. "David did a marvelous job but it could have benefitted from a proscenium. Because of the thrust, the actors had to keep moving around."
"The Glass Menagerie," which Dowling will direct next year, is another example. Even though it has been done three times at the Guthrie, Dowling contends the work needs to be seen from the same perspective.

"You want everyone to see the same room, not three different rooms," he said, referring to the various views one gets in a thrust. In a proscenium, "everybody captures the same psychological moment."

The proscenium makes it easier to import and export productions. Staging a show is an intricate puzzle. It is as difficult to put a show built for a thrust into a proscenium as it is to put a square peg in a round hole. It can be done, but at great cost and time. Since few other theaters have a thrust, the Guthrie is likely to originate touring shows on its new proscenium stage.

Dowling said he is particularly optimistic about the future of the "World Stages" program, which brings in foreign and diverse theater troupes that generally work with prosceniums.

"These are companies we otherwise wouldn't see," he said. "The proscenium is the natural currency of those shows."

Far from obsolete

Even in 1963, it was daring for Guthrie to build a theater with only one option -- the thrust. Based on his experience in Stratford, though, and his convictions of the thrust's muscularity, he forged on and for better or worse it has shaped productions for 43 years. For all of Dowling's fondness for the proscenium's uniform perspective, he never dreamed for a moment of building a new theater without the emblematic stage. Well, perhaps a moment. But only a moment.

"I remember standing over at Vineland and looking out at this magnificent room and thinking, 'What kind of fool am I?' " he said, laughing at the memory.

Even through the thrust is renowned for its capacity to stage Shakespearean plays, with all their pageantry and direct address, Dowling said the stage has other applications. For example, this season Gary Gisselman will direct "Lost in Yonkers" on the thrust. The Neil Simon play has only seven characters and clearly fits the "contemporary theater" category. Yet, as Dowling and Gisselman discussed the production, they decided the thrust gave them a chance to "shake it up, and redo it. It could benefit from the nature of the staging."

This season's musical, "1776," is a large work that proclaims history so it, too, makes sense on the thrust.

"There's a practical reason for that, too," Dowling said. "It's eleven hundred seats versus 700 in the proscenium so that's a consideration."

Bottom line, Dowling said, is that it's not impossible to stage O'Neill, Chekhov, Shaw, Simon, Ibsen or any other modern playwright on the thrust. Visuals, mood, directorial intent, content, economics all figure into each decision.
The playground

Part of the old Lab's mission was to give the Guthrie a venue in which to experiment with new work. The new studio, high above the proscenium and the thrust, allows the company to expand that program and offer a venue for partnerships with other Minnesota troupes. Mu Performing Arts, Mixed Blood and Commonweal are all producing work in the first season. It is, at this point, the least defined of the three spaces, although the appointment of literary director Michael Bigelow Dixon clearly signals the intention of launching new plays.

Dixon was a leading light at Actors' Theater of Louisville, home of the Humana Festival of New Plays, so it makes sense that he would use this portfolio to expand the Guthrie's forays into new play development.

The studio became inevitable, Dowling said, after the thrust and prosceniums fell into place.

"The flexibility allows young writers to grow and change the art form," he said. It is the final piece in a three-stage approach that Dowling said was planned "a long time in advance."

Minneapolis riverfront's star to debut

2006-06-22T11:36:00.000-05:00

New Guthrie Theater completes transformation of downtown

BY ARON KAHN
Pioneer Press

It's big and blue and has more curves than Dolly Levi — and when the new Guthrie Theater opens next Sunday in Minneapolis, it will stamp an exclamation point on the city's shift to the riverfront.

Like the lead character in Thornton Wilder's "The Matchmaker,'' staged by the Guthrie 30 years ago, the theater's new home brings various characters together. It unites the Mill City Museum, thousands of condos and other waterfront elements into a powerful draw on the Twin Cities landscape.

The Guthrie and other recent developments are tipping the city back to its origins, where flour milling pioneers of the 19th century launched corporate empires with names like Pillsbury and General Mills. Businesses and homes advanced to the south, creating the Loring Park neighborhood and the lake district, but the Mississippi once again is making a splash.

Spurred by a huge influx of public and private money — estimates approach $2 billion — the city has returned to its roots, escorted, perhaps appropriately, by a pioneer of Twin Cities theater, the Guthrie.

Its $125 million theatrical palace will change the face of an area that 30 years ago was marked by deserted rail yards, litter and broken bottles, the unhappy wake of the city's move away from home.

"It will be the iconic piece of architecture on the downtown riverfront,'' said Lee Sheehy, the city planning and economic development director.

It also will be a common thread that sews together a mixed bag of elements, such as the Mill City Museum, the MacPhail Center for the Arts, the Stone Arch Bridge, the riverfront park system and condominium homes on both sides of the river.

But there will be little doubt about the Guthrie's prominence among the others. At 285,000 square feet, the new building is more than three times larger than the old Guthrie. Its bends, bows and cantilevered, 12-story-high "Endless Bridge" render the architecture of Frenchman Jean Nouvel unmistakable along the riverfront.

Three theaters within will draw thousands of people to the area, but the Guthrie also will be open day and night, whether or not "The Great Gatsby,'' "The Glass Menagerie'' or "The Merchant of Venice'' is onstage. Two restaurants and two bars will be available for those who prefer lingering over a beer to sitting through "Hamlet." On performance days, up to nine other locations will serve drinks.
David Nasby, retired vice president of the General Mills Foundation, sat in his riverfront condo and gazed through a 12-foot window at the Guthrie's "twilight-blue'' metal façade and large, subtle images of past productions. With wife, Karen, he moved from the Nicollet Mall because, as he said, they sought the artistic glow of "the greatest performing space in the United States.''

Their linkage to the Guthrie is complete. Their broad kitchen countertops, backsplashes and seat covers intentionally match the Guthrie-blue of their eastern vista. Down on the street, they walk amid outdoor concerts that spring up here and there, and investigate emerging restaurants tucked into small spaces within the multiplying condo buildings, whose top-end units go for $3 million.

Karen Nasby had a salad with goat cheese-stuffed apricots at the recent opening of Spoonriver, a bistro swaddled into the first floor of the Humboldt Lofts, built from the ruins of the old Humboldt Mill, a 30-second walk from the Guthrie. The restaurant was started by the owner of Minneapolis' well-known Café Brenda, and it likely will overflow on theater nights.
Not everyone will cheer the Guthrie's opening, mainly because the swing to the riverfront could siphon home buyers and entertainment businesses from other parts of the city. The magnetism of the riverfront "will draw some development potential from somewhere else,'' said David Lanegran, an urban geographer at Macalester College in St. Paul.

For example, the new Minnesota Twins ballpark will be built in the Warehouse District, an area foreseeing sizable residential and commercial growth around the stadium.

Peggy Lucas, an executive of Brighton Development, a firm building many of the condos along the river, said the drain could flow the other way, hurting housing activity in her area somewhat.

"The market is softening, but I think people will still come to the river,'' she said.

Lanegran, co-author of "Where We Live," a book about St. Paul and Minneapolis neighborhoods, thinks that neither the riverfront, on downtown's northeast edge, nor the Warehouse District, on downtown's northwest perimeter, will suffer much.
"I think downtown can accommodate both,'' he said, adding that the city's overall downtown strategy is "one of the best plans made in the country."

It was a long time in coming. The general plan, laid out in the 1970s, advanced sporadically as the economy ebbed and flowed and as large Minnesota employers changed ownership. Downtown's development also varied as developers wagered money on when and where baby boomers would move, and as the boomers' children decided where to live.
Although condos along the riverfront generally cost between $300,000 and $3 million, some small one-bedroom condos start in the $200,000 range and some rental units are subsidized under affordable-housing guidelines.

In all, more than 4,000 apartment homes, most of them owned, liberally sprinkle the riverfront district on both sides of the Mississippi, as part of the estimated $2 billion of investment in the area. The ratio of private to public spending is about 5 to 1, said Ann Calvert, the city's head of riverfront development.

As for that big, blue phenomenon facing St. Anthony Falls, the $125 million Guthrie is financed through $85 million in private donations, $15 million through loans and $25 million from state bonds.

It's a world of money. But as Shakespeare wrote, "All the world's a stage."

Aron Kahn can be reached at akahn@pioneerpress.com

In Praise of Boxer Briefs

2006-06-09T17:22:00.000-05:00

An underpants manifesto.
By Seth Stevenson
Posted Thursday, June 8, 2006, at 5:11 PM ET

It's come to my attention that there are some men out there—even a few friends of mine—who've not yet switched to boxer briefs. These are otherwise intelligent fellows who, either through ignorance or recalcitrance, begin each day by pulling on (shudder) traditional boxers or (double-shudder) briefs. I feel great pity for these men. Because the irrefutable truth is that boxer briefs—a knit, mid-thigh-length compromise between boxer and brief—are the ultimate male netherwear. The sooner you accept this, the happier your crotch will be.

It's not too late to change. We humans have a terrific capacity for adapting to new underpants. I know, because I've switched styles twice now. Consider my first (though ultimately misguided) underwear revelation:

The time was the mid-1980s, and I was an impressionable tween. I'd worn briefs all my life—those classic, white-cotton Y-fronts—without giving the issue much thought. And then one evening I saw an episode of Moonlighting in which Bruce Willis (as detective David Addison) was somehow de-pantsed (an event which occurred with some frequency on the show, as I recall). He was shown wearing a pair of generously cut, broadcloth boxer shorts, emblazoned with large red hearts.

The billowy boxers were meant to look anachronistic and silly. But this joke was lost on me. Compared to my briefs—which revealed my pale and scrawny pre-teen upper thighs—those modest, roomy boxers looked positively dignified. And cutting-edge, too: My father didn't wear them, thus by definition they were modern and stylish. (I didn't realize at the time that baby-boomer men had switched to briefs in large part to tack away from their own boxers-wearing fathers.)

Soon after, I made the leap. And by the end of high school, in the early 1990s, every teenager I knew was wearing woven cotton boxers. (Often carefully showcased—allowed to peek out below the hem of a pair of shorts.) It's still not clear what sparked this large-scale boxer rebellion. Surely not every young man of my generation was so profoundly affected by Moonlighting. (Though underwear fashions do seem particularly pegged to pop culture. There's that old saw about Clark Gable killing undershirt sales in 1934, when he unbuttoned his shirt in It Happened One Night to reveal a bare chest. Likewise, it was Monica Lewinsky's thong flash that seemed to really galvanize women's rejection of the granny-panty. Theory: Since underwear is concealed in day-to-day life, and we can't see what our neighbors and co-workers are wearing, we have only pop culture to give us our cues.) Nonetheless, boxers remained the near-universal choice of my generation throughout college and into the years beyond.

I now realize, of course, that those were wasted years, groin-comfort-wise. All that time, a better option had awaited. Although by 1993 those iconic Mark Wahlberg print ads for Calvin Klein boxer briefs were in heavy rotation, the famous query put to Bill Clinton in 1994 ("boxers or briefs?") didn't even acknowledge a third possibility. I was aware that the boxer brief existed, yet my naive understanding held that it was a choice open only to the European or the gay.

It wasn't until a forward-thinking friend clued me in ("It's the best of both worlds," he enthused) that I was made aware of the cut's functional superiority. Soon enough, I switched again—this time for good. After just a few days, I could see the boxer brief's profound advantages:

Support. The obvious, yet oft-unspoken flaw with traditional boxers is their lack of cuppage. They are useless for athletic events, and can even be a hindrance. (An acquaintance refers to the "tunnel" created by wearing boxers under soccer shorts. Via this tunnel, one's testicles can gain sudden and direct access to the world outside.) Boxer briefs hold your goods in place and out of sight.

Stability. Traditional boxers never sit still. They are forever riding up above the waistband of your pants, or slipping down below it. That loose fabric tends to twist, and bunch, and wedgify. Constant realignments are required. (This is especially true with the "bubble-butt" cut of boxer, which uses a spinnaker-like central back panel. The idea is to avoid having any seams line up with the butt-crack, but all that extra cloth just crawls up in there anyway, to disastrous effect.)

Containment. That simple slit of a fly on traditional boxers encourages a phenomenon I will term "flop-out." Some boxer shorts seek to rectify this with a button enclosure, but a button is the last thing you care to deal with when you urgently need to urinate. Boxer briefs use the much more effective and user-friendly Y-front.

Aesthetics. My unscientific polling suggests that ladies dig 'em. While it has all the comfort, support, and fit of a knit brief, the boxer brief's full-cut thigh lends it the modesty of a traditional boxer. And that thigh is functional, too—its snug, ribbed cuff serves to hold the garment in place. This prevents the boxer brief from riding up or (worse) burrowing into one's posterior cleavage. (The Calvin Klein boxer brief is particularly well-tailored, and is my personal choice. I own one pair of boxer briefs from 2(x)ist, bought at the little store in my gym when I forgot to bring a change of underwear, but I find they take an overly presentational approach to the genitalia. Sort of a push-up effect.)

I'm confident there's really nothing the boxer brief can't do better. But just to make sure, I recently revisited the other underwear alternatives, to see if I was missing something.

Step 1 in my research was to buy a pair of Brooks Brothers briefs in a lovely, mercerized white cotton for $14.99. When I first slipped them on, I found them incredibly comfortable. And even a bit stylish, with that racy curve tracing the cup of the buttock. But all the old problems pertained. I felt naked, and also like a 7-year-old. I could tell that the bright white cotton would quickly dull to beige. Worst of all, the briefs crept way up over the course of a long day. Verdict: Too tighty, and too soon not-whitey.

Next, I picked up a pair of plaid boxers from Burberry's for $45. I felt as dapper as anyone can feel when dressed only in underwear. But the boxers simply wouldn't remain in place under my pants, always migrating 30 degrees around my waist in one direction or the other. The leg-openings would ride up and accordion, leaving weird marks on my thighs. And while Burberry's model prevented "flop-out" with a button enclosure, I found myself leaving the button undone. Who wants the bother? Verdict: Classic preppie choice—looks sharp, underachieves.

I've also tried trunks. There seems to be some disagreement as to what this term means, but my understanding is that trunks have an abbreviated thigh-length and no fly opening at all. I bought two pairs that qualify while traveling in the Netherlands last year. (I'd run out of clean underwear. The vast majority of men's underwear purchases, I suspect, are born of desperate and immediate need.) Trunks have many of the same benefits as boxer briefs, but I can't understand the lack of a fly opening. Standing at a urinal, you're forced to reach through the fly of your trousers and pry the trunks' elastic waistband down with your thumb. Should you lose your purchase on the waistband, it will snap back violently—with messy and painful results.

Some men endorse going commando. I find it thoroughly unhygienic. Also rife with potential for injury. No dice.

I couldn't bring myself to try on a thong. I realize this is a viable choice for some men these days, but it's just not for me. I have no need to prevent panty lines. And, more fundamentally: Half of what I'm looking for from underwear is wedgie avoidance. What is the thong if not a permanent wedgie? No doubt, future generations of men will adopt the thong as a comfortable, minimalist alternative and will urge me to ditch my fusty old boxer briefs.

Until then, I beseech you: Make the boxer-briefs switch. You, and your groin, will not be sorry.

Sealed with a best kiss

2006-06-06T15:53:00.000-05:00

Gyllenhaal and Ledger's "Brokeback" smooch wins an MTV Movie Award.

By Geoff Boucher
June 5, 2006

It's a bit loopy to search for cultural commentary in the MTV Movie Awards — the trophy looks like shellacked popcorn for a good reason — but there was an honest-to-goodness moment of gravity at the taping Saturday in Culver City when Jake Gyllenhaal accepted the award for best on-screen kiss for his lip-lock with Heath Ledger in "Brokeback Mountain."

There had already been plenty of jokes made at the film's expense before pop star Justin Timberlake opened the envelope and read out the names ("Oh, it's the fellas...." the singer said in a faint voice) and Gyllenhaal arrived at the microphone a bit grumpy. But then he seemed to realize that the award meant that the show's voters, which is MTV's viewers, might be (gulp) more mature and tolerant than Oscar voters. "It's a big deal," the actor said.

The show, which will air on Thursday, quickly returned to its familiar vibe, celebrating film with awards — based on fan votes — in such categories as best villain and sexiest performance. There were countless lewd references to the anatomy of host Jessica Alba and an extended celebration of the lifetime cinematic achievements of Jim Carrey, and Chewbacca the Wookie played drums during a performance by Gnarls Barkley. Last summer's "Wedding Crashers" was the night's big winner, collecting three trophies.

The show also made clear the staggering influence of comic books on Hollywood right now. At one point, the new Superman and Lex Luthor (actors Brandon Routh and Kevin Spacey) handed an award to the new Batman (Christian Bale), who proceeded to thank his fiancée, whom he referred to, without irony, as "my Wonder Woman." The show went back to Alba, who was nominated for her work in two comic book films, "Fantastic Four" and "Sin City."

A look at some behind-the-scenes moments from the Sony Pictures Studios gathering:

How do you spell that? One of the first to arrive on the blue carpet was bleached blond amazon Brooke Hogan — "Hulk Hogan's daughter," as her publicist consistently reminded the press, who seemed to need reminding.Where's a stylist when you need one? Hogan looked spectacular in a fitted leopard-print gown, but the dress code was specifically inconsistent. The girls from "The Hills" (whom the media largely ignored) were dressed for prom, while the comedian Andy Milonakis, whom everybody wanted to talk to, was dressed like a 12-year-old in jeans and a camouflage shirt. By contrast, Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly were dressed as NASCAR drivers and doing interviews in character to promote their new movie "Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby."

She needs support? Brett Ratner, flush with the success of his new movie, "X-Men: The Last Stand," arrived with a looker on his arm and not much to say. "I'm here to support Jessica Alba," he said. Then, a button popped off his jacket and fell into the press area.She doesn't need support, either: When Jessica Simpson arrived, the crowd began to chant her name as Andrew Daly of "The Showbiz Show With David Spade" tried in vain to get the star's attention. Instead she did a quick interview with MTV's SuChin Pak, who was wearing a short magenta dress designed by "Project Runway" antihero Santino Rice. "Look at the two of us," said Simpson, who was also wearing a short dress. "Saucy."Sorry, gotta fly: One of the last people to come down the carpet was Routh, the star of the upcoming "Superman Returns." "Hey, look, it's Superman!" said "American Idol" contestant Kellie Pickler.

"Not too many questions," said Routh's publicist as he ushered him along. Superman was running late.

Are Straight Republicans Fit to Be Parents: Where Do Gay Babies Come From?

2006-06-06T12:16:00.000-05:00

By Hilary Rosen

Oiy. Clearly President Bush doesn't know where gay babies come from. In his radio address yesterday promoting the discriminatory amendment which would write gays and lesbians out of the United States Consititution, he said "Ages of experience have taught us that the commitment of a husband and a wife to love and to serve one another promotes the welfare of children and the stability of society."

Let's review. What do Phyllis Schlafly, Randall Terry, Sens. Arlen Specter and Richard Shelby, former Vice President Ford, and countless other prominent Republicans have in common with Dick and Lynne Cheney? They are parents of gay and lesbian children. And despite some high hopes for the Cheneys during Mary's recent book tour, they have all remained silent this month while their President and their party leadership deem their children unworthy of equality in their relationships.

What is the matter with these parents? My kid scrapes her knee, I hurt for a week. DON'T MESS WITH MY KID. My mother, who admittedly is outraged over almost everything this president does, is fit to be tied over this constitutional battle. Why? Because someone is messing with her kid.

What are these parents afraid of? In fact, what is any Republican afraid of in speaking out against those who are threatened by same-sex relationships? That James Dobson will attack their family values? If Dobson had a gay child would people admire him if he turned his back on that child? No, most people would think he was a cruel and insensitive jerk. I really admire John McCain and John Sununu for opposing the Federal Marriage Amendment even though they do so on the conservative principles of federalism. Yet it would be nice to see a prominent parent oppose this thing based on sheer parental instinct. DON'T MESS WITH MY KID.

Straight people make most of the LGBT people in this world. Sure more of us are having our own kids, but statistics prove that 94% of them will turn out to be heterosexual too. And there are far fewer of us.

So if the radical right, their friends George Bush, Bill Frist and the rest of the Republican leadership are so threatened by the increasing demand that gays and lesbians have for equality, they are just going to have to stop having babies.

Change is inevitable. Gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered Americans are not going to stop seeking equal protection and treatment under the law. It seems obvious that same-sex marriage that is based on a civil government license and not the church is inevitable in this country. And Mr. President, like the many other things that we as parents must accept in order to experience the privledge and joys of parenthood, so must we all accept this. Please go back to work and STOP MESSING WITH OUR KIDS.

Extra Extra! Three-Headed Elvis Found on Mars! Huge Spider Devours Cleveland! Straight Person Supports Gay Rights!

2006-06-06T12:14:00.000-05:00

By Gene Stone

There was a time (and frighteningly, it wasn't so long ago) when straights supporting gay rights was about as prevalent as Republicans with a sense of humor. While many gays have been fighting tirelessly for their civil rights, it's been hard to enlist heterosexuals in the struggle.

For example, for years the National Organization of Women has been accused of homophobia, partly dating from co-founder Betty Friedan's open scorn of lesbians, and also from their recent support of homophobes such as Elizabeth Vargas.

And straight men have been reluctant to support gays--it took a very confident man to do so at a time when people assumed that only gay men supported gay rights, which is one reason why Rob Reiner, Paul Newman, Tom Hanks, and Phil Donahue will always be heroes.

Things have changed, however. Today President Bush is announcing his plans to codify bias in the American Constitution by urging the Senate to vote for an amendment banning gay marriage. And across the country, in newspapers, on the radio, and around office water coolers everywhere, straight men and women are speaking out against it.

Part of this stems from the fact that a certain percentage of the public will speak out against everything Bush does. Part of this is due to the realization that if the religious far right gets its way here, its next step may be to institutionalize a ban on abortion, or divorce, or ways people can have sex in the bedroom--who knows where the far-right might stop.

But part of these protests arise from the growing realization by straight people that gay men and women aren't some ominous demographic they've never met. Gays are their sons, daughters, fathers, mothers, cousins, teachers, friends, bosses, assistants, and peers. Gays are the exact same people as straights, except when it comes to sex. And when Congress decides that it should legislate how Americans should act in the bedroom, this country is surely in a very bad place.

Today is both a day of shame and pride. On the one hand, President Bush's pandering to the far right is reprehensible, and it will be a major part of his historical legacy, just as Strom Thurmond, Trent Lott, and George Wallace's reputations will always be contaminated by their positions on civil rights.

In some ways, George Bush has been a blessing for gays. His biased and cynical actions have created a stage where straight people feel comfortable opposing his positions on gay rights. Today, while the President is posing in the Rose Garden with some of the country's most hateful bigots, a majority of the country opposes him. And finally, gays don't feel so alone.

Bush and the Ugly Face of Tolerance

2006-06-06T12:12:00.000-05:00

By Chris Durang

President Bush, having nothing better to do yesterday, has decided to fire up his right-wing base and sally forth with his call for a constitutional amendment to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman.

Without that clarification, and if state courts keep not finding a reason in the written law to deny same sex couples the legal right to marry, Bush is afraid that something dreadful will happen to the American Family.

'm not quite sure what. Something about if... ummm... if gay people get married then... heterosexuals will.... not get married. Or they'll become sad and not feel special.

Or maybe they'll experiment with gay sex when they're teenagers and they'll get into pornography and our whole country will go to hell in a handbasket, which will have been manufactured by people in China, since we don't make anything anymore. We make money, we make messes. But we don't manufacture.

And we're at the mercy of oil suppliers who hate us. And we're in a war that's not ending, and the poor troops are often there for their third or fourth tour of duty in that harrowing place. And the weather is crazy, global warming is real. And we don't have a leader who does anything except invade the wrong country without international support, making us further hated, and....

Oh I'm sorry, I've forgotten to talk about the more important matter of gay marriage.

Gay marriage. Yes, yes, the President's base is very worried. And their desire to enforce their morality on everyone else is thwarted at every turn in this secular world so different from the 1950s, not to mention when Adam and Eve lived and wrecked paradise for us.

President Bush's base wants to return to solid values. When men were men, and women were obedient, and where gay men got married to women because society made it clear how unacceptable homosexuality was.

Oscar Wilde was married, and then he was put in prison for being gay. And then he died. That's how life was back in the good ol' days. But then the ugly face of tolerance started to intrude among the happy housewives and their Eisenhower husbands.

I'm reminded of a 1961 British film called Victim. Or rather I'm reminded of a line Pauline Kael wrote when she reviewed it. The film was about a married barrister (Dirk Bogarde) who is blackmailed because he had a homosexual affair. It was an early step in popular culture's being sympathetic to gay people, though it also had lines like "nature played me a dirty trick!"

When Kael reviewed the film, she said, "it's a cleverly conceived moralistic thriller...various characters are able to point out the viciousness of the English laws, which, by making homosexuality a crime, make homosexuals the victims of 90% of the blackmail cases."

However, others were less comfortable with the film's mostly sympathetic stance. Kael went on: "A number of the reviewers were uneasy about the thesis that consenting adults should be free from legal prosecution for their sex habits; they felt that if homosexuality were not a crime it would spread. (The assumption seems to be that heterosexuality couldn't hold its own on the free market.)"

It's that last line - about not holding its own on the free market - that I always remembered and found funny in her review.

Can heterosexuality hold its own on the free market? Yes, it can! Because you don't CHOOSE to be heterosexual, do you? If you're a heterosexual man, you don't look at a woman and go, hmmm I think I will choose to be attracted to her. Here I go, it's starting. Here I go... there!

Why do people think gay sexual preference is a choice, and heterosexual sexual preference is an innate instinct? It's very stupid, and lacking in empathy and common sense, to think one is a choice, and the other an instinct. Stop it! Would you?

Among those uncomfortable with gay people, there does seems to be this fear that if homosexuality is tolerated, somehow heterosexuality will suffer, be lessened, a Pandora's Box of polymorphous perversity would be unleashed, and... all sorts of people would experiment with sex, the flood gates would be opened, Rick Santorum would start having sex with goats. Which I only say because he claimed that would be the next step if the Supreme Court anti-gay decision Bowers v. Hardwick from 1985 was overturned, which indeed it was, in 2003. And no goats were interfered with, so Santorum was wrong.

Bowers was overturned 6 to 3, with Kennedy, O'Connor, Stevens, Breyer, Ginsberg and Souter the six voting to overturn it; and with Scalia, Rehnquist and Thomas voting not to overturn, wanting to retain the decision, which said it was fine and dandy to criminalize consensual gay relations, just as it was in the movie Victim, and as it was in Oscar Wilde's time.

With the new justices, I would think Alito would probably have voted with the Scary Threesome (since he SO identifies with and is deferential to those in authority). I don't know Roberts enough to guess how he would've voted; but I'm not confident he might not have been with the Threesome too.

Just so long as no one has a threesome! Good God, but sex is disgusting. If you learn nothing today, I hope you'll learn that.

Sorry I just had a walk-in. Now let me go flagellate myself in order to calm down. Excuse me.

Hello, I'm back. Ow. It's hard to sit. But Opus Dei really helps me center myself.

Well, yesterday was a proud day for Bush and Senator Bill Frist. Is there a stupider person in America than Bill Frist? Just a rhetorical question. There probably is.

Bush was also very existential yesterday - he was chatting up the anti-gay, pro-Marriage-for-Men-and-Women-Only amendment KNOWING he doesn't remotely have the votes to get it to pass.

So you see, he's basically wasting our time, back in his daily routine of being in constant campaign mode, never in governing mode. He doesn't know how to govern, only how to campaign.

However, as long as Bush and the Republicans are in an amending-the-constitution sort of mood, I thought I would suggest some other amendments we could make.

Though unlike President Bush, I think there should be some amendments to please Democrats, as well as some to please Republicans. After all, he never won in a landslide. Both stolen elections were very close.

So here's an amendment bon-bon for the Dems:

No President shall be allowed to lie or mislead in order to take the country to war. Neither shall he be allowed to release certain intelligence supportive of his wish to go to war if AT THE SAME TIME he knowingly suppresses intelligence contrary to or contradicting the supporting intelligence. If the President should be found guilty of doing this, he shall be kicked down a long flight of stairs, and then imprisoned for life. By constitutional amendment, the only visitors allowed to him would be Arianna Huffington and Al Franken, Jr. Maybe Janeane Garofalo on special holidays.

Now here's a bon-bon for the Republicans:

No law now or in the future may forbid school children from beginning their school day by acknowledging the existence of the Almighty Deity. The prayer need not be silent. The prayer can be out loud, in English. It may not be in Spanish. In English. It may use the Christian terms of belief, as long as "and others" or "et cetera" is said in brief acknowledgments of the couple of non-Christians in the school. The wording of the prayer may be decided on the state level but must include these sentences: "Oh God, creator of the universe, guide us as we begin this school day. You are the all powerful God, and you sent your Beloved Son Jesus to die for our sins. We are puny, you are mighty. Oh, God, how we love you. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, you are the only true God. Et cetera."

Then another for the Dems:

There should be no so-called signing statements whereby the President signs a bill into law, thereby indicating he intends to uphold said law, but meanwhile he signs some cockamamie "side letter" that that weasel Alfonso Gonzalez has concocted, in which the President says he won't necessarily follow the law if he doesn't want to. If Alfonzo Gonzalez, or rather Orlando Gonzalez, or is it Adolpho Gonzalez, is not Attorney General at the time President Bush or some later President tries to sign one of these tricky and probably illegal things, neither the Attorney General nor the President shall be allowed to circumvent the law in this disgraceful and disgusting manner. And if they do, they shall both be kicked down a long flight of stairs, they will be waterboarded so we can see if they think it's torture or not, and then they shall be locked up in a dungeon with the key thrown away.

Then one more for the Republicans Let's call it Amendment 18:

AMENDMENT XVIII (18)

After one year from the ratification of this article the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited.

Surprise - that was the actual wording of the Prohibition amendment to the Constitution. Did you remember that Prohibition was an AMENDMENT to the constitution? And a pretty darn good one, too, no? It, of course, made all alcohol forbidden, and it was a great success in the country.

That amendment was passed by Congress December 18, 1917, and ratified January 16, 1919. It went on for 14 years, from 1919 to 1933, during which time most of the American public got wildly drunk on bootlegged liquor and hung out in mysterious and sundry speakeasies, and everyone had a marvelous time except when they were all shot dead by the gangsters who got involved in selling the illegal liquor. This was an earlier example of Moral Absolutists of their time writing a stupid amendment.

It was repealed by passing another amendment in 1933, the 21st amendment which succinctly expresses itself thus:

AMENDMENT XXI (21)

The eighteenth article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States is hereby repealed.

Here's hoping that the Marriage amendment never gets passed and ratified, so we don't have to wait 14 years before overturning it.

And here's hoping that SOMEONE will start governing the country.

Would President Bush consider taking a long, long vacation in Crawford, and let Laura run the country? She's nuanced, people like her. She's more conservative than I am, and she married him, which I would never do (plus he's trying to stop that kind of thing, I forgot)... but really, she probably could govern. I mean I bet she'd try to improve something, and not just be on some endless campaign. Though I'd only want her to finish his term, and then I'd want never to hear of any of the Bushes ever, ever again.

Oh for a leader somewhere. Al, I'm not giving up on you yet.

Base Assumptions

2006-06-06T12:09:00.000-05:00

Why Should the Faithful Believe Bush Now?

By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Tuesday, June 6, 2006; Page A15

This month's offensive by President Bush and his allies in Congress against gay marriage and flag burning proves one thing: The Republican Party thinks its base of social conservatives is a nest of dummies who have no memories and respond like bulls whenever red flags are waved in their faces.

The people who should be angry this week are not liberals or gays or lesbians, but the president's most loyal supporters. After using the gay-marriage issue shamelessly in the 2004 campaign, Bush and Republican leaders left opponents of gay marriage out in the cold as they concentrated on the party's real priorities: privatizing Social Security and cutting taxes on rich people.

When Bush was at his position of maximum strength after the 2004 election, did he use his political energy on behalf of a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage? Not at all. In an interview with The Post on Jan. 14, 2005, he dismissed the question, arguing that since many senators felt that the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) was already an effective bar to the spread of gay marital unions, there was no point in fighting for a constitutional change.

"Senators have made it clear that so long as DOMA is deemed constitutional, nothing will happen," Bush said then. "I'd take their admonition seriously."

On Jan. 24, 2005, Republican Senate leaders announced their top 10 legislative priorities. The marriage amendment was nowhere to be seen.

At the time, social conservatives knew they were getting rolled. In mid-January, a group of them expressed their dismay in a letter to Karl Rove, Bush's top political adviser.

"We couldn't help but notice the contrast between how the president is approaching the difficult issue of Social Security privatization . . . and the marriage issue," they wrote. "Is he prepared to spend significant political capital on privatization but reluctant to devote the same energy to preserving traditional marriage? If so it would create outrage with countless voters who stood with him just a few weeks ago."

The marriage amendment is unlikely to pass (and it shouldn't, since marriage is an issue for the states to decide). What's changed is that the president and his friends in the Senate fear that their disillusioned base will stay home on Election Day. So they are about to engage in an exercise that George "Nothing Will Happen" Bush once acknowledged to be meaningless.

The constitutional amendment to ban flag burning is also about electoral politics. As a Senate Republican leader said happily, a vote against the amendment "would make a good 30-second spot." An official of the National Republican Congressional Committee said that "if Democrats choose to vote against a Constitutional amendment" banning flag desecration, "I think they'll pay a price."

Both quotations appeared in a New York Times story that ran 16 years ago -- from Bob Dole, the Republican leader, and Ed Rollins, the GOP official. Does wedge politics have to be so boringly predictable?

At least Scott Reed, Dole's 1996 campaign manager, has a sense of humor about all this. He told Knight Ridder's James Kuhnhenn last week: "If you're a gay who likes to burn flags, it's going to be a long year."

Ah, but there is one issue in the Republican Senate's June Pandering Trifecta that the party really cares about: the repeal of the inheritance tax on large fortunes. The Republicans go hot and cold on the social conservatives, but they're always solicitous of the really, really privileged.

Current law would keep the estate tax falling (eventually to zero) until the end of 2010, so there is no urgency to act now. Or is there? The Los Angeles Times quoted Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) this weekend as acknowledging that the position of the estate tax abolitionists is "eroding" and "could be dramatically negatively impacted this fall and after the next presidential election."

So the real question is whether moderate Democrats and Republicans choose to hand the friends of the truly wealthy a victory at the very moment the tide is starting to turn toward fiscal sanity. The one thing worse than opportunistically using wedge issues is cravenly selling out the nation's financial future to appease the powerful.

Social conservatives, who are a lot smarter than their leaders think, should watch the Senate closely this month. My bet is that their so-called champions will fight much harder on behalf of the interests of the affluent than for the "values" that conservative politicians proclaim with such pious urgency whenever they're in danger of losing an election.

Ahmed’s Story

2006-05-05T16:13:00.000-05:00

Ahmed’s Story – A Cruel, Barbaric Death
Ali Hili

May 5, 2006

Ali Hili, of OutRage! and Iraqi LGBT UK, was told about the execution of Ahmed Khalil by gay friends in Baghdad. They knew Ahmed and his family, and have collected eye-witness accounts from Ahmed’s neighbours, which they have relayed to Mr Hili in London.

This is Mr Hili's story about the execution of Ahmed, based on firsthand accounts given by eye-witnesses and neighbours

Ahmed Khalil was a likeable, playful 14 year old boy, born in the southern Iraqi town of al-Ammara.

The eldest child, he came from an uneducated family who lived in great poverty.

After the 2003 US-led invasion, the Iraqi economy collapsed, causing widespread unemployment and the disintegration of social services.

With no income or welfare support in al-Ammara, Ahmed’s family moved to Baghdad a couple of years ago, after the fall of Sadaam Hussein.

His father wanted to find a job to support his wife, two sons and daughter. The family settled in al-Dura, a very poor southern district of Baghdad.

Ahmed’s father worked as a night watchman on a building site for the pitiful wage of 10 dollars a month, plus permission for him and his family to live on the site until the construction of the new houses was completed. They lived in the shell of the unfinished buildings. It was a life of desolation and destitution.

Ahmed was often bullied by the neighbourhood boys for being poor. He had no one to protect him.

It is unclear whether Ahmed was gay or not. He had sex with men, often in exchange for small amounts of money and food. He did this in order to help his family financially. Sometimes they were so desperate, he had sex for a few potatoes or some bread.

Ahmed’s 'gay’ reputation spread all over his neighbourhood, causing great scandal. His behaviour was reported to the police by informants in the community.

In early April 2006, Ahmed was found dead on the doorstep of his house. He had been shot, with two bullets in the head and several bullets in the rest of his body.

According to a neighbour, who saw Ahmed’s execution from his bedroom window, four uniformed police officers arrived at Ahmed's house in a four-wheel-drive police pick-up truck. The neighbour saw the police drag Ahmed out of the house and shoot him at point-blank range.

Several other neighbours confirm this account, although they did not see the actual shooting. They say they heard gunshots and saw the police leaving the scene. They then found Ahmed’s body lying on the ground outside his house. It is believed by these neighbours that Ahmed was executed by the police.

Two days before Ahmed’s execution, his father was arrested and interrogated by the police. They demanded to know what he knew about Ahmed’s sexual activities and blamed Ahmed for corrupting the community. Officers eventually released Ahmed’s father. His son was killed soon afterwards.

Both Ahmed's mother and father wept over their sons’ brutal killing. Even though homosexuality is taboo, they did not agree he deserved to die. The family see him as a victim of poverty and police murder.

Because they are so poor, the family could not afford a funeral for their son.

The day after Ahmed was murdered, his family moved out of the area, fearing police retribution and denunciation within the local community. The family’s whereabouts and fate is unknown.

Ahmed is one of many hundreds of teenage boys and girls in Iraq who sell their bodies to survive and support their impoverished families.

Via www.uruknet.info

Greenpoint Market

2006-05-05T16:09:00.000-05:00

What a Psychologist Learned from Jane Jacobs

2006-05-05T16:04:00.000-05:00

By Seth Roberts
Huffington Post

Was Jane Jacobs, who died last week, disappointed by her obituaries? Sure, she was a genius who changed how we think about cities. Yes, it was fantastic how she won a battle against Robert Moses to preserve the livability and economic vitality of a large piece of Manhattan. But she wrote three books about economics (The Economy of Cities, Cities and the Wealth of Nations, The Nature of Economies) and only one about city planning (The Death and Life of Great American Cities).

Since the city-planning book was anti-city-planning, it was like (on a much smaller scale) Renata Adler being remembered for her attack on Pauline Kael. I had lunch with Jacobs a few years ago. She told me her favorite book of hers was The Economy of Cities. Her long New York Times obituary gave this book one sentence.

No doubt she saw it coming. I'm a professor of psychology at Berkeley. One day I had lunch with faculty in the public policy school. Most of them are economists. I said I really liked her work. "What do you like about it?" someone asked. Uh-oh! At a college class reunion (I graduated from Reed) several years ago I sat next to an economics professor. What do you think of Jane Jacobs's work? I asked. "Who's Jane Jacobs?" she replied. Double uh-oh!

That I, an experimental psychologist, could learn so much from her work shows there is much more to it than city planning. Much of my research involves self-experimentation, and I usually tell my students about it. Sometimes they say their other professors have said that self-experimentation is bad. In response, I turn to Jacobs. In Cities and the Wealth of Nations, she wrote about an isolated small town in North Carolina. Her aunt had been sent there in 1923. One of her aunt's goals was to build a church. Her aunt suggested to the townspeople that the church be built from the many stones that were lying around. Not possible, the townspeople replied -- you can't make buildings from stones. "These people came from a parent culture that had not only reared stone parish churches from time immemorial, but great cathedrals," wrote Jacobs. "But having lost the practice of construction with stone, people had lost the memory of it, too, over the generations and having lost the memory, lost belief in the possibility." Experimental psychology started with self-experimentation, I tell my students. It was built on self-experimentation. Your other professors have forgotten that.

I started college as an economics major, under the influence of John Kenneth Galbraith (who also died last week). I switched to psychology because I believed psychology was the basis of economics. Now this view is popular -- "behavioral economists" do psychology-like experiments to understand economic phenomena. But I've moved on: I now believe economics is the basis of psychology, at least human psychology. This is entirely because of Jacobs. She -- not Galbraith, not Veblen, not Samuelson, nor any of several dozen other economists I've read -- taught me the fundamentals of economics. This is her great achievement, in my opinion. She described how city economies work. And city economies are the basis of national economies.

After reading Jacobs, I saw that many hard-to-explain features of human psychology made sense as evolutionary adaptations to promote trade and economic growth. If two crickets or two pigeons or two octopus met at a party, neither would ask, "What do you do?" Because they would already know. All crickets make their living the same way, all pigeons make their living the same way, etc. Humans are the only animals that specialize -- for whom the job question makes sense. First came specialization (which began with hobbies). Gains from specialization led to many other features of human behavior.

1. Language. Language began with single words. These words helped "buyer" and "seller" find each other, as single words still do at a Guatemalan market where a seller shouts "toothpaste" repeatedly. Early language was the first advertising.

2. Procrastination. The mechanism behind procrastination promoted diversity of specialization because it magnified random differences. On Monday you do X and I do Y, for purely random reasons; on Tuesday we will tend to continue along our different tracks, eventually becoming expert in different things. As Jacobs said over and over, a healthy economy is a diverse economy.

3. Decoration. Our love of decoration caused us to support those who made decorations -- the first artists, who were also the first material scientists. Their discoveries, first used for art, later had more pragmatic uses.

4. Rituals/ceremonies/gifts. Most gifts involve purchase of something that neither the giver nor the recipient would otherwise purchase. Gifts are usually something "nice." Thus they help support artisans who make "the finer things"—and who by working at the edge of what's possible improve the state of their art. Rituals and ceremonies, with their special requirements (e.g., fine cloth, ornamentation), do the same. Collectors and collections, connoisseurship, music, fashion, and the poor quality of American college education can be explained in similar ways.

This theory of human evolution owes everything to Jane Jacobs.

Building and Demolishing in The Architect

2006-05-05T16:00:00.000-05:00

BY Tobi Elkin
Huffington Post

In The Architect, Anthony LaPaglia gives a subtle yet textured performance as Leo Waters, a self-important middle-aged architect who lives with his quietly dysfunctional family in the suburbs of Chicago. Waters, who designed the low-income Eton Court Homes at the start of his career, has moved on to bigger and better projects of course, as the buildings deterioriate over decades of abuse and neglect in a tough South Side neighborhood. The conditions of the drug- and gang-infested buildings leave Tonya Neeley, played by Viola Davis, no choice but to organize the tenants to support her mission: she wants the city to tear the buildings down. No amount of sprucing up will amount to anything; the only answer is to wipe them away completely.

Tonya's rage simmers beneath the surface as she plies her neighbors with homemade banana bread and steely determination. Gangs run the elevators, and mold, asbestos, and rats, along with other social ills are part and parcel of daily existence for the tenants of the blighted buildings. Tonya, played masterfully by Davis, is tortured by her own demons: her teenage son jumped to his death from the top of one of the buildings. She has sent her 15-year-old daughter to live with an affluent family in the suburbs while an older daughter and a granddaughter remain with her at Eton.

Tonya does her research and tracks Leo down, landing in his architecture class at Northwestern where she confronts him about the campaign she's mounted to tear the buildings down. Leo, coming off of a lecture on Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of human needs, seems genuinely shocked that Eton Court Homes, a project inspired by the architecture of Le Corbusier, could have slid into such disrepair.

Speaking of Le Corbusier, the concept of architecture as a social force played a major role in the French riots last year as HuffPo's Rachel Sklar points out, but seriously, is there any doubt that oppressive architecture breeds insufferable social conditions from which people feel there is no escape? The New York Times Magazine took up the topic as well, exploring the ways in which architecture has a direct influence on people's behavior and social interaction. A film called The French Democracy dramaticized the French riots, portraying the lives of three black French citizens.

In The Architect, while initially, Leo offers to help Tonya speed up requests for repairs, he ultimately decides to rethink the buildings and what might be done to update and improve them. Meanwhile, Leo's sexually conflicted son Martin, played by Sebastian Stan, decides to check the neighborhood out for himself, a journey that will inexorably jar his senses and identity.

Tonya visits Leo's gorgeous home to check out Leo's new model for Eton, a series of cosmetic tweaks that don't address the fundamental problems. When Leo's wife Julia, played by Isabella Rossellini, discovers that he hasn't visited Eton Court to see for himself what the conditions are, we are treated to the full extent of her anguish and marital unhappiness. Julia's indignant eruption catches Leo off-guard, and in a rare display of traditional role-playing that I haven't noticed in a contemporary film for quite some time, Leo exclaims: "You're my wife, you're supposed to support me." Right.

The always luminous Rosselini is awash in despair, anger, and alienation and we see she has lost herself in marriage and will come clean shortly thereafter, announcing her plans for separation. For his part, Leo is fully out of touch with his wife, yearning for the happy-go-lucky early days of their marriage. Their kids, however, see it all coming.

Gay Cowboy

2006-05-02T18:53:00.000-05:00

Friend of mine
You've been a friend some time
And I'd like to tell you a tale

Well I have been watching you walk
And I'd like to do a little bit more than talk

Friend of mine
You've been a friend in kind
And I'd like to buy you a beer

Well I have been waiting all night
And I hope my moment is right

I wanna be your gay cowboy
I want a homo on the range
I want to hear some other spurs on the floor
When I walk in the door for a change
'Cuz my woman, she has been driving me insane

Friend of mine
You've been a friend this time
And I'd like to offer you this dance

There's nobody left at the bar
And I like where this is going so far

I wanna be your gay cowboy
I want a homo on the range
I want to feel some other hairs on the back
When I climb in the sack for a change
'Cuz my woman, she has been driving me insane

Bob turned to Bill
With a sad sudden thrill
They both closed their eyes
As they unzipped their flies
And began love man to man

I wanna be your gay cowboy
I want a homo on the range
I want to ride up in that saddle again
Where a friend is a friend without shame
And my love it is daring to speak it's name
'Cuz my woman, she has been driving me insane

Wetback Mountain

2006-05-02T18:39:00.000-05:00

From the Mind of Mencia

Sprite

2006-05-02T18:32:00.000-05:00

An ad for Sprite...Cute Little Bugger.

Virus

2006-05-02T18:31:00.000-05:00

Apple's "Virus" TV Ad.

Since Adam was a Boy

2006-05-02T18:29:00.000-05:00

Heath Ledger's "Gay" Cowboy Friend from Australia.

Gay Flamingos

2006-05-02T18:28:00.000-05:00

Carlos and Fernando....5 years and counting.

Gay Old Time Over a Little Fairy Bird

2006-05-02T18:26:00.000-05:00

Political Correctness at its worst.

The Science Of Sexual Orientation

2006-03-13T12:41:00.000-05:00

March 12, 2006(CBS)

There are few issues as hotly contested — and as poorly understood — as the question of what makes a person gay or straight. It's not only a political, social, and religious question but also a scientific question, one that might someday have an actual, provable answer.

The handful of scientists who work in this under-funded and politically charged field will tell you: That answer is a long way off. But as Lesley Stahl reports, their efforts are already yielding tantalizing clues. One focus of their research is twins.

The bedrooms of 9-year-old twins Adam and Jared couldn't be more different. Jared's room is decked out with camouflage, airplanes, and military toys, while Adam's room sports a pastel canopy, stuffed animals, and white horses.

When Stahl came for a visit, Jared was eager to show her his G.I. Joe collection. "I have ones that say like Marine and SWAT. And then that's where I keep all the guns for 'em," he explained.

Adam was also proud to show off his toys. "This is one of my dolls. Bratz baby," he said.

Adam wears pinkish-purple nail polish, adorned with stars and diamonds.

Asked if he went to school like that, Adam says, "Uh-huh. I just showed them my nails, and they were like, 'Why did you do that?'"

Adam's behavior is called childhood gender nonconformity, meaning a child whose interests and behaviors are more typical of the opposite sex. Research shows that kids with extreme gender nonconformity usually grow up to be gay.

Danielle, Adam and Jared's mom, says she began to notice this difference in Adam when he was about 18 months old and began asking for a Barbie doll. Jared, meanwhile, was asking for fire trucks.

Not that much has changed. Jared’s favorite game now is Battlefield 2, Special Forces. As for Adam, he says, "It's called Neopets: The Darkest Faerie."

Asked how he would describe himself to a stranger, Jared says, "I'm a kid who likes G.I. Joes and games and TV."

"I would say like a girl," Adam replied to the same question. When asked why he thinks that is, Adam shrugged.

"To me, cases like that really scream out, 'Hey, it's not out there. It's in here.' There's no indication that this mother is prone to raise very feminine boys because his twin is not that way," says Michael Bailey, a psychology professor at Northwestern University and a leading researcher in the field of sexual orientation.

Bailey says he doesn't think nurture is a plausible explanation.

Psychologists used to believe homosexuality was caused by nurture — namely overbearing mothers and distant fathers — but that theory has been disproved. Today, scientists are looking at genes, environment, brain structure and hormones. There is one area of consensus: that homosexuality involves more than just sexual behavior; it’s physiological.

Bailey and his colleagues set up a series of experiments in his lab at Northwestern University. In one study, researcher Gerulf Rieger videotaped gay and straight people sitting in a chair, talking. He then reduced them visually to silent black and white outlined figures and asked volunteers to see if they could tell gay from straight. The idea was to find out if certain stereotypes were real and observable.

Based on physical movement and gestures of the figures, more often than not, the volunteers in the study could tell a difference.

"So, is the conclusion that gay people do in fact move differently?" Stahl asked Rieger.

"Yeah, absolutely," he replied.

It's not true 100 percent of the time; it is true on average. The researchers also studied the way gay and straight people talk, and they found differences on average there too.

This research is controversial. Some say it is reinforcing stereotypes. But to Bailey, the stereotypes suggest there's a feminizing of the brain in gay men, and masculinizing in lesbians. Ironically though, when it comes to their sex lives, he says gay and straight men actually have a lot in common.

"Straight men tend to be shallow in terms of focusing on looks. Gay men are shallow, too. Straight men are more interested than straight women in having casual, uncommitted sex. Gay men are like that, too," says Bailey.

"One has the impression that gay men are much more inclined toward casual sex than straight men," Stahl said.

"They're just more successful at it, because the people they're trying to have sex with are also interested in it," Bailey explained.

"But don't you find this interesting that the one big area where gay men are more like straight men is in sex? I mean, that is…both amusing and odd," Stahl said.

"It suggests that whatever causes a man to be gay doesn't make him feminine in every respect. There must be different parts of the brain that can be feminized independently from each other," Bailey replied.

But how and when does this feminizing occur? If the differences were already apparent in childhood, that would point to an early, perhaps even genetic origin — and that's what Bailey and Rieger are testing in a new study using childhood home movies.

In the study, volunteers were asked to rate each child's femininity or masculinity. Stahl took the test and rated two girls highly feminine.

When shown video of a toddler girl running a truck off of a table, Stahl observed, "She's really not girly. Isn't that interesting? She’s not girly."

She also observed differences in two boys, one of whom would grow up to be straight, while the other is now gay.

If you can spot a child's future sexual orientation before the child even knows he or she has one, doesn't that prove it's genetic? Studies have shown that homosexuality runs in families. So genes must be the answer. But then the researchers tell you identical twins can have different sexual orientations.

60 Minutes found identical twins Steve and Greg Lofts in New York. They had the same upbringing, have the same DNA — and yet Greg is gay and Steve is straight.

When people meet the twins and find out one of them is gay, Greg says people have asked if he's sure, and how it can be. "Everyone is curious about that," he says.

There were signs, even when they were little kids. Their mother told Stahl that Steve loved sports and the outdoors while Greg liked helping out in the kitchen. But it wasn't until high school that Steve became convinced Greg was gay.

Asked if he said anything to his brother, Steve says, "I did actually. And I think the way I worded it was something like, 'You know, Greg, if you're gay, it's OK with me. And I'll still love you the same.' And he gave a very philosophical answer. He said something like, 'Well, I love the soul of a person and not the physical being.' And in my mind, I was like, 'Yep, he's gay.'"

"I wasn't ready just yet," Greg added.

Does this prove that it's not genetic?

"What it proves is it's not completely genetic. They have the same genes," says Bailey.

Asked if that brings us back to the mother and the father, Bailey says no.

"But that's environment," Stahl said.

"That's environment. But that's not the only environment. There's also the environment that happens to us while we’re in the womb. And scientists are realizing that environment is much more important than we ever thought it was," Bailey explained.

A newborn rat pup in the lab of Dr. Marc Breedlove at Michigan State University, may, oddly enough, hold important clues to what happens in the womb.

Dr. Breedlove says he can take a male rat and make it behave like a female for the rest of its life, and vice versa for a female, just by altering the hormones it's exposed to at birth. Because rats are born underdeveloped, that's roughly the same as altering a third-trimester human fetus in the womb. But first, he said, Stahl would need a crash course in rat sex.

Dr. Breedlove explained that male rats, including one he showed Stahl called "Romeo," will mount any rat that comes their way. In the mating process, the female performs something called lordosis, where she lifts her head and rump.

If Romeo goes after a male, Dr. Breedlove says the male will seem profoundly indifferent.

But Breedlove says he can change all that. He gave a female rat a single shot of the male sex hormone testosterone at birth. Now grown up, she will never perform lordosis.

But a male rat did. He was castrated at birth, depriving him of testosterone.

"So you created a gay rat?" Stahl asked.

"I wouldn't say that these are gay rats. But I will say that these are genetic male rats who are showing much more feminine behavior," he explained.

So the answer may be that it's not genes but hormones.

"That's exactly the question that we're all wondering. This business of testosterone having such a profound influence. Does that have some relevance to humans?" Breedlove said.

While biologists look at hormones for answers about human sexuality, other scientists are looking for patterns in statistics. And hard as this is to believe, they have found something they call "the older brother effect."

"The more older brothers a man has, the greater that man's chance of being gay," says Bailey.

Asked if that's true, Bailey says, "That is absolutely true."

If this comes as a shock to you, you’re not alone. But it turns out, it’s one of the most solid findings in this field, demonstrated in study after study.

And the numbers are significant: for every older brother a man has, his chances of being gay increase by one third. Older sisters make no difference, and there's no corresponding effect for lesbians. A first-born son has about a 2 percent chance of being gay, and the numbers rise from there. The theory is it happens in the womb.

"Somehow, the mother's body is remembering how many boys she's carried before," says Breedlove. "The favorite hypothesis is that the mother may be making antibodies when she sees a boy the first time, and then affect subsequent boys when she carries them in utero."

"You mean, like she's carrying a foreign substance?" Stahl asked.

"And if you think about it, a woman who's carrying a son for the first time, she is carrying a foreign substance," Breedlove replied. "There are some proteins encoded on his Y chromosome that her body has never seen before and that her immune system would be expected to regard as 'invaders,'" he added.

It’s still not a proven theory and it gets even stranger.

"One of the things we've only found out lately is that older brothers affect a boy only if the boy is right-handed," Breedlove said. "If the boy is left-handed, if his brain is organized in a left-handed fashion, it doesn't matter how many older brothers he has, his probability of being gay is just like the rest of the population."

You can give yourself a headache trying to apply all the theories to real people. Greg and Steve Lofts both are right-handed, and they do have an older brother, so maybe that's why Greg is gay. But they also have several gay relatives, which suggests it could be in the genes, except where does that leave Steve?

Adam and Jared, fraternal twins, have older brothers, but they're ambidextrous.

Then there's the question of how something in the womb could affect one twin but not the other. There are many more questions at this point than answers, but the scientists 60 Minutes spoke to are increasingly convinced that genes, hormones, or both — that something is happening to determine sexual orientation before birth. Adam has come up with his own theory.

"I was supposed to be a girl in my mom's stomach. But my mom wished for all boys. So, I turned into a boy," Adam explained.

Asked if he wished he was a girl, Adam nodded.

"Do you think there was anything that you could have done that would have changed Adam?" Stahl asked Adam and Jared's mom Danielle.

"I could have changed Adam on the outside to where he would have showed me the macho boy that I would want as a boy. But that would not change who he is inside. And I think that would have damaged him a lot more," she said.

Stahl asked both boys if they are proud of the way they are, and both boys gave her big nods.

"Yup," Adam replied.

By Shari Finkelstein ©MMVI, CBS Broadcasting Inc.

"Brokeback" rides into US popular culture

2006-02-27T19:34:00.000-05:00

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - It began as a simple love story between two gay cowboys that movie critics wondered whether America would embrace.

But in three short months, "Brokeback Mountain" is not only an Oscar front-runner but has found its way into U.S. popular culture, inspiring parodies, jokes and cartoons across the spectrum from politics to pop music.

Seen the "Kickback Mountain" poster parody reflecting the corruption scandal sweeping the U.S. Congress? Laughed at TV comedian David Letterman's "Top 10 Signs You're a Gay Cowboy" (10."Your saddle is Versace")? Heard Willie Nelson's new recording "Cowboys are Frequently, Secretly Fond of Each Other?"

Actually seen the movie? Probably not.

"I wish I knew how to quit you" might have become the coolest phrase to throw around during a lovers' tiff but with a mere $72 million U.S. box-office, "Brokeback" is hardly a blockbuster.

"Many, many more people have told a 'Brokeback Mountain' joke than have seen the movie. It's one of those things that has really transcended itself and gotten way more attention than its box office indicates," said culture expert Robert Thompson, director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television.

As an astonished Jake Gyllenhaal said this week after winning a British Film Academy award for best supporting actor, "Who would have thought this would happen?"

In 2004, voters in 11 U.S. states backed amendments to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman, making movie industry watchers nervous about "Brokeback's" reception outside the liberal East and West coasts.

COMEDIANS CAN'T RESIST

Those outside the gay community have responded to the movie's universal love theme. But its niche in popular culture owes much to the fact that the story turns the 195Os and 60s Western -- a showcase for the manly American cowboy -- on its head.

"The idea of taking this very modern 21st century story of tender love between two cowboys and putting it into the time period of an old Western opens up the floodgates for telling jokes," said Thompson. "Comedians can't resist because we all know what a cowboy movie is and this challenges it."

Two of the shirts worn by the men in the movie sold for $100,000 on the Internet this week.

The gay activist buyer called them "the ruby slippers of our time," a reference to the most famous item worn by Judy Garland in "The Wizard of Oz."

TV's ratings hit "American Idol" got in on the act with its own "Brokenote Mountain" spoof last week.

The New Yorker magazine, whose cartoonists have had a field day with the movie's theme of forbidden love in the wilds of Wyoming, gave readers "Watch Your Back Mountain" this week. The two protagonists were accident-prone hunter and Vice President Dick Cheney and President George W. Bush.

"That poster is a template to project so many different pairings with so many different meanings. It is an image that captures the imagination but begs to be remade," said Marty Kaplan, director of the Norman Lear Center, which examines the impact of entertainment on society.

Spread quickly by the Internet and by bloggers, much of the fun at "Brokeback's" expense has been affectionate and, as such, mostly welcomed by the gay community.

Paul Levinson, professor of communication and media studies at Fordham University, said there was already a growing interest in gay relationships in mainstream heterosexual culture.

"'Brokeback' came along at the right time. It was a popular culture success waiting to happen," he said.

'Life not for sissies'

2006-02-17T17:16:00.000-05:00

'Brokeback' point? 'Life not for sissies'
Screenwriter Larry McMurtry says film has no agenda

NEW YORK (AP) -- Larry McMurtry, who co-wrote the Oscar-nominated screenplay for "Brokeback Mountain," says the film's meaning can be summarized: "Life is not for sissies."

McMurtry, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author whose books include "Lonesome Dove," adapted Annie Proulx's story with Diana Ossana for "Brokeback Mountain." The film, nominated for eight Academy Awards, has elicited some controversy for its gay cowboy plot -- something McMurtry thinks is off-base.

"It doesn't present any kind of agenda, any politics at all, one way or the other at all. It just says life is not for sissies," McMurtry says in an interview with "CBS News Sunday Morning," to air Sunday (9 a.m. EST).

"Brokeback Mountain" stars Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal as two cowboys who maintain a secret relationship in difficult circumstances. As the years go by, one is more willing to sacrifice than the other.

"You need strength; love is not easy," says McMurtry. "It's not easy if you find (it), it's not easy if you don't find it. It's not easy if you find it but it doesn't work out. It merely says the strong survive, but not everybody is strong."

McMurtry, 69, was nominated for an Oscar in 1972 for co-writing the screenplay (adapted from his novel) of "The Last Picture Show" with Peter Bogdanovich.

Overcoming ‘gay fatigue’

2006-02-17T11:05:00.000-05:00

OPINION | washingtonblade.com

Overcoming ‘gay fatigue’
Gay, gay, gay. Gay dinner parties, bars parades, books, movies and friends. Just when I’d had enough, it hit me.

By K. PEARSON BROWN
Feb. 17, 2006

I HAVE NAMED the malaise from which I suffered: "gay fatigue."

No, it’s not an allusion to the camouflage pants that shirtless gay men donned with combat boots to look macho in the disco era; it’s a thoroughly modern feeling of being tired of the whole gay thing.

That’s right. I was burned out on GLBT.

Gay, gay, gay.

Over the years, I have joined any number of gay clubs and volunteered for gay causes. I co-founded a networking group for lesbians in the entertainment industry, which was an endless gala of gay mixers with gay gals.

Then of course, in my private life I held gay dinner parties, went to gay bars, marched in gay parades, read gay books and saw gay movies.

After nearly a decade and a half of community activism, I wanted out of being out.

THE MOUNTAIN OF hype surrounding the gay cowboy movie that needs not speak its name was the straw that broke my back. It seemed that the film and its gay theme had become the topic of every coffee chat, news report, TV talk show, radio program, magazine article and late-night monologue.

As I was striding on my elliptical trainer in my bedroom one morning watching the "Today Show," yet another commercial came on for this groundbreaking love story that was destined to become a classic.

I suddenly felt exhausted, and it wasn’t the elevation to Level 9 on the Himalayan Trek: I was suffering from gay fatigue. I was tired of all of the fuss over homosexuality.

As I cruised into a virtual valley on my stepper, I imagined Katie Couric cooing about romantic Valentine’s outings for same-sex couples. "Guys, take your boyfriend out for a candlelight dinner," or "Ladies, how about an Olivia cruise for the two of you?" Why not?

I fantasized about us as gay people being considered not as queer but as ordinary folk; not defined or pigeonholed by our sexual orientation, not seen by straight society first as gay and second as relatives, neighbors, co-workers, doctors, teachers, shop clerks, Pilates instructors or whatever.

Rosie O’Donnell defended staying in the closet so long because she didn’t want her name preceded by an adjective for eternity. "Lesbian Rosie O’Donnell," she said, "It’s like ‘Aries Rosie O’Donnell’ or ‘size-10-shoe Rosie O’Donnell."

I couldn’t agree more, I thought. And then I thought, "That’s a pretty big foot."

As I hit a plateau and strode at Level 7, I realized I had no choice but to accept that despite millions of TV-watching middle-American housewives welcoming a big dyke into their living rooms everyday-—-Ellen, not Martha-—-they still view us differently than themselves.

THEN I WONDERED, just how do they think we are different? Well, everyone knows that gay men-—-think Fab Five-—-dress, groom, decorate and cook better than straight men, and way better than gay women.

Gay women-—-think Martina-—-are better athletes than straight women, and way better than gay men-—-think Fab Five. Gay men are excellent dancers, and gay women are good talk show hosts.

It occurred to me that being gay makes an average Joe or Joely more interesting, more individual. It’s like having a hip, cool style without having to work at it.

I thought about how we as gay people have formed alternative, extended families. We take care of each other, support each other, spend holidays together, and host potlucks and throw Academy Awards parties together. And despite the common saying, "You can’t pick your family," we did.

With that, I started to feel a little sorry for those people that my gay old friends Richard and Tucker-—-partners for 58 years-—-refer to as "non-gay."

As the machine beeped and congratulated me on a great workout that burned 432 calories in 45 minutes, I no longer felt weary. Instead, I felt energized. Light in my loafers, so to speak.

Suddenly I felt like a gay cowboy myself. A trailblazer. I had taken the road less traveled, less common and less ordinary. While the truth is that we do our daily dozen, go to work, come home and microwave our leftovers just like everyone else, if straight people want to think that we are different, in fact fascinating, then let them.

Like those bumper stickers ask, "Why Be Normal?" After all, different is good. Some might even say extraordinary.

© 2006 The Washington Blade | A Window Media Publication

THE WAR WITHIN

2006-02-16T18:28:00.000-05:00

The war WITHIN Islam rages

Via http://theantipath.com

Islamists in Bangladesh are demanding the government “ban” Ahmadiyya Muslims because they are not “real” Muslims. 4,000 radical Islamists took to the streets of the Muslim neighborhood, scaring many Ahmadiyya Muslims out of their homes. They want to “capture” the Mosque. They have threatened violence if the Bangladeshi authorities intervene. This has been going on for some time now; there is some background here.

Well, to their credit, the authorities did intervene. They stood up for religious freedom and blocked these fundamentalist Islamists from bullying the other local Muslims.

To everyone who was so keen on plastering the media with Mohammad cartoons to show “solidarity”, how about giving some credit to the Muslims around the world who are fighting against religious bigotry and bullying just like we are. Where is the west when it is time to stand up and show some actual solidarity with Muslims and the principle of religious freedom? Will this story rocket through the blogosphere? Will it make it onto the cable news shows?

Or will so many Americans and Europeans keep insisting on characterizing this struggle as” Islam” vs. “The West”?

Protests rise against Muslim sect

By Roland Buerk
BBC News, Bogra, northern Bangladesh

The protesters had gathered to hear their neighbours denounced as heretics and infidels.

"Kaffir, kaffir," the mullah shouted into his microphone again and again, looking over the crowd from the makeshift stage set up on the back of a truck. "Infidel, infidel."

And he led the demonstrators in a chant: "Ahmadiyyas are not Muslims."

For four hours, the leaders of the International Khatme Nabuwat Andolon exhorted their followers in the main square of Bangladesh's northern town of Bogra.

The crowd swelled to far more than 5,000, most wearing skull caps.

At times the voices of the speakers cracked with emotion and they sobbed into the microphone.

There were tears among their audience too, and shouts of rage.

Scattered

The target of this passionate hatred was the Ahmadiyya community, sometimes called Ahmadis.

"They don't obey our prophet as the last prophet," shouted one supporter.

"We'll force the government to ban them," added the protester next to him.

Another vowed: "We'll continue our jihad against them, we'll continue our marches."

There are 100,000 members of the Ahmadiyya community in Bangladesh.

They are scattered in pockets in cities, towns and villages up and down the country.

The campaigners of the International Khatme Nabuwat Andolon Bangladesh has organised a series of rallies demanding that the government formally declare that members of the sect are not Muslims.

Pakistan ruling

In Bogra, the protesters had threatened to lay siege to the Ahmadiyya mosque.

For the members of the community in the town it was a day of real fear.

Inside their compound, behind police barricades, they were sitting in their tiny prayer hall.

Just a few dozen pairs of sandals were lined up outside.

In Bogra, as throughout Bangladesh, the Ahmadiyyas are a tiny minority.

They were having a lesson in their religion, sitting on the floor, listening to a teacher.

The sect was founded by Hadhrat Mirza Ghulam, who was born in the town of Qadian in Punjab in 1835.

The Ahmadiyyas believe he was the Imam Mahdi, or the Promised Messiah.

The more orthodox are still waiting for his arrival.

It is a doctrine that has led to their movement being persecuted in some countries.

In Pakistan, legislation was passed in 1974 declaring the Ahmadiyya community non-Muslims after a series of riots.

But until recently they were allowed to worship without interference in traditionally tolerant Bangladesh.

Signboard

"We did not think that we would have to face such a situation because we believe in Allah and we pray for Allah," says Khandker Azmal Haq, the president of Rajshahi Ahmadiyya Muslim Jamaat.

"So in this praying house, why do these people come to crush us?"

Already the government has bowed to some of the protesters' demands.

In January 2004, the home ministry issued a notice announcing that books published by the Ahmadiyya community were outlawed.

A statement said the ban "was imposed in view of objectionable materials in such publications that hurt or might hurt the sentiments of the majority Muslim population of Bangladesh".

Human rights lawyers are challenging the ruling in the courts.

They believe an important principle is at stake.

"There is a tendency to establish a monolithic, mono-religious strain in the political situation in Bangladesh," says Sultana Kamal, a lawyer with the human rights organisation Ain o Salish Kendra.

"We think this is just one of the cases, that there will be very many cases if this is not stopped right now."

In the end the protesters were kept away from the Ahmadiyya mosque in Bogra.

But later in the evening, after they had dispersed, the police replaced the signboard on the building.

It read: "The Qadiani upasanalaya (place of worship) in Bogra town: Muslims, do not be fooled into thinking it is a mosque."

Watching, some members of the Ahmadiyya community burst into tears.

It was a small concession by the local police to the demands of the International Khatme Nabuwat Andolon, but the campaigners want much more.

They have given the government until 23 December to declare the Ahmadiyyas are not Muslims, otherwise, said one speaker in Bogra, there will be blood in the streets.

Ledger: 'Brokeback' exceeded my hopes

2006-02-16T12:27:00.000-05:00

BERLIN, Germany (AP) -- Heath Ledger says "Brokeback Mountain," which is nominated for eight Oscars, has already exceeded his expectations for the film.

The Ang Lee-directed movie about a longtime affair between two cowboys is nominated for best director, best picture and best actor for Ledger.

Other nominations include best supporting actress for Ledger's fiancee, Michelle Williams, and best supporting actor for co-star Jake Gyllenhaal.

"The movie's already exceeded any expectations I had," Ledger told reporters Wednesday at the Berlin International Film Festival. "I think pleasing Annie Proulx, the writer, and getting her nod of approval was the biggest success for me, for us."

Ledger said he felt the movie "will surprise people."

"Unfortunately people are very quick in life to label something that they're uncomfortable with," he added. "It transcends a label. It's a story of two human beings that are in love; get over the fact that it's two men -- that's the point. ... If you can't understand it, just don't go see the movie."

Ledger was in Berlin to promote "Candy," a film that saw him return to his native Australia and star as a man who joins his girlfriend on a downward spiral into heroin addiction.

"It was incredibly liberating in the sense that it was the first film I've done using my own accent in about eight years," he said.

"Candy" is one of 19 films competing for the annual Berlin festival's top Golden Bear prize. Directed by Neil Armfield and based on a novel by Luke Davies, it also stars Abbie Cornish and Geoffrey Rush.

Why Doesn’t He?

2006-02-15T19:36:00.000-05:00

Exerpts From Miles Mogulescu Blog on Huffington Post:

President Bush and his surrogates have proclaimed many times that opposition to the Iraq war is dangerous, demoralizes the troops, encourages the enemy, and threatens America’s chances for victory.

If Bush believes that opposition to the war threatens national security, why doesn’t he have the right to act against opponents to the Iraq war to protect national security? Apparently government agents have already spied on a small Quaker peace group.

Why then shouldn’t Bush have the power to wiretap the phones of Iraq war opponents from Rep. Murtha to Cindy Sheehan?

Why shouldn’t he have the right to infiltrate anti-war groups with government informants?

Why can’t he place agent provocateurs in anti-war groups to incite violent demonstrations in order to discredit the anti-war movement which is harming national security?

Since the President has the right to take all actions he thinks necessary to protect national security, why couldn’t he censor newspapers that oppose the Iraq War?

Why couldn’t he arrest Iraq war opponents, and hold them without charges and without the right to a trial until he decides that the “War on Terror” is over?

Taken to the extreme, why couldn’t he torture Iraq war opponents based on his signing statement to the McCain anti-torture Amendment which states that the President can bypass this law if he believes doing so protects national security?

I’m not saying that these things will happen. I’m saying that Bush’s theory of President’s unilateral war time powers could justify such actions and more.

Make up your mind, Dick

2006-02-15T19:27:00.000-05:00

Q Would you describe him (Mr. Whittington)as a close friend, friendly
acquaintance, what --

THE VICE PRESIDENT: No, an acquaintance.

Later....

THE VICE PRESIDENT: What happened to my friend as a result of my
actions, it's part of this sudden, you know, in less than a second, less
time than it takes to tell, going from what is a very happy, pleasant
day with great friends in a beautiful part of the country, doing
something I love -- to, my gosh, I've shot my friend. I've never
experienced anything quite like that before

Ummm.... No

2006-02-15T19:23:00.000-05:00

Brit: "....There's some sense -- and perhaps not unfairly so --
that you kind of hung him (Scott McClellan)out to dry. How do you feel about that?

Dick: ".....I had a bit of the feeling that the press corps was
upset because, to some extent, it was about them -- they didn't like the
idea that we called the Corpus Christi Caller-Times instead of The New
York Times. But it strikes me that the Corpus Christi Caller-Times is
just as valid a news outlet as The New York Times is, especially for
covering a major story in south Texas."

One Word

2006-02-15T18:55:00.000-05:00

"Vajayjay"

'gay vultures' return to the closet

2006-02-15T12:40:00.000-05:00

Jerusalem Biblical Zoo's 'gay vultures' return to the closet
By Varda Spiegel, Haaretz Correspondent

Jerusalem's conservative religious population may welcome the news that the city's legendary "gay vultures" have "returned to the closet."

Yehuda, the remaining "gay" vulture in a pair of male Griffon vultures that built nests, mated, and raised three adopted chicks for a period of three years, has finally chosen a female partner, Jerusalem Biblical Zoo director Shai Doron said Wednesday.

The first stirrings of Yehuda's new relationship coincided with Valentine's Day, Tuesday.

Last year, Yehuda's longtime partner, Daishik, took up with a new female partner and was subsequently moved to the Tel Aviv-Ramat Gan Zoological Center.

In 1997, zookeepers first noticed that the two male Griffin vultures in the zoo's flagship breeding and reintroduction-to-nature program were exhibiting all of the signs of mating behavior, including building a nest and copulating.

They also rejected all female overtures.

The zoo decided to provide the "gay couple" with a plaster-filled dummy egg to see what they would do. Yehuda and Daishik astonished their keepers by brooding in turns. Impressed by their devoted "incubation" of the artificial egg, keepers decided to introduce a chick and, once again, the male vultures' superb parenting skills exceeded all expectations.

The decision to let the male vultures raise chicks was not merely motivated by curiosity. Female vultures lay only one egg a year, unless that egg is removed from the nest - in that case, the mother will lay another egg in a process called "double clutching."

Allowing Yehuda and Daishik to step in as "surrogate mothers" presented the potential of increasing the numbers of nearly extinct Griffin vultures.

Despite the fact that Yehuda showed all the signs of depression one would typically expect from a scorned lover when Daishik opted for a lifestyle change, zoo director Doron was happy to see first Daishik and then Yehuda choose female partners. "We have no intention of making any attempt to reintroduce the male vultures.

"The Griffon vulture breeding and reintroduction program is one of the zoo's most important conservation projects, and we prefer to see the new couples go on to breed so that we can release their nestlings in nature."

Via Haaretz.com

Seasoned to within an inch of his life.

2006-02-14T13:27:00.000-05:00

"The Daily Show With Jon Stewart" (Comedy Central)

A partial transcript:

Jon Stewart: "Yes, as you've just heard, a near-tragedy over the weekend in south Texas. Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot a man during a quail hunt at a political supporter's ranch. Making 78-year-old Harry Whittington the first person shot by a sitting VP since Alexander Hamilton.

"Hamilton, of course, shot in a duel with Aaron Burr over issues of honor, integrity and political maneuvering. Whittington? Mistaken for a bird.
* * *

The other player in the drama? Ranch owner and eyewitness Katharine Armstrong.

Katharine Armstrong: "We were shooting a covey of quail. The vice president and two others got out of the car to walk up the covey."

Jon Stewart: "What kind of hunting story begins with getting out of your car? As I sighted the great beast before us, my shaking hands could barely engage the parking brake. Slowly, I turned off the A/C and silenced my sub-woofers…"
* * *

Katharine Armstrong: "A bird flushed. The vice president took aim at the bird and shot and unfortunately, Mr. Whittington was in the line of fire and got peppered pretty well."

Jon Stewart: "Peppered. There you have it. Harry Whittington, seasoned to within an inch of his life.
* * *

Jon Stewart: "I'm joined now by our own vice-presidential firearms mishap analyst, Rob Corddry. Rob, obviously a very unfortunate situation. How is the vice president handling it?

Rob Corddry: "Jon, tonight the vice president is standing by his decision to shoot Harry Wittington. According to the best intelligence available, there were quail hidden in the brush. Everyone believed at the time there were quail in the brush.

"And while the quail turned out to be a 78-year-old man, even knowing that today, Mr. Cheney insists he still would have shot Mr. Whittington in the face. He believes the world is a better place for his spreading buckshot throughout the entire region of Mr. Whittington's face."

Jon Stewart: "But why, Rob? If he had known Mr. Whittington was not a bird, why would he still have shot him?"

Rob Corddry: "Jon, in a post-9-11 world, the American people expect their leaders to be decisive. To not have shot his friend in the face would have sent a message to the quail that America is weak."

Jon Stewart: "That's horrible."

Rob Corddry: "Look, the mere fact that we're even talking about how the vice president drives up with his rich friends in cars to shoot farm-raised wingless quail-tards is letting the quail know 'how' we're hunting them. I'm sure right now those birds are laughing at us in that little 'covey' of theirs.

Jon Stewart: "I'm not sure birds can laugh, Rob."

Rob Corddry: "Well, whatever it is they do … coo .. they're cooing at us right now, Jon, because here we are talking openly about our plans to hunt them. Jig is up. Quails one, America zero.

Jon Stewart: "Okay, well, on a purely human level, is the vice president at least sorry?"

Rob Corddry: "Jon, what difference does it make? The bullets are already in this man's face. Let's move forward across party lines as a people … to get him some sort of mask."

That's never stopped them in the past.

2006-02-14T11:03:00.000-05:00

"Late Show with David Letterman," CBS

# "Good news, ladies and gentlemen, we have finally located weapons of mass destruction: It's Dick Cheney."

# "But here is the sad part -- before the trip Donald Rumsfeld had denied the guy's request for body armor."

# "We can't get Bin Laden, but we nailed a 78-year-old attorney."

# "The guy who got gunned down, he is a Republican lawyer and a big Republican donor and fortunately the buck shot was deflected by wads of laundered cash. So he's fine. He took a little in the wallet."

"The Tonight Show with Jay Leno," NBC

# "Although it is beautiful here in California, the weather back East has been atrocious. There was so much snow in Washington, D.C., Dick Cheney accidentally shot a fat guy thinking it was a polar bear."

# "That's the big story over the weekend. ... Dick Cheney accidentally shot a fellow hunter, a 78-year-old lawyer. In fact, when people found out he shot a lawyer, his popularity is now at 92 percent."

# "I think Cheney is starting to lose it. After he shot the guy he screamed, 'Anyone else want to call domestic wire tapping illegal?' "

# "Dick Cheney is capitalizing on this for Valentine's Day. It's the new Dick Cheney cologne. It's called Duck!"

"The Daily Show with Jon Stewart," Comedy Central

# The show's segment titles included "Cheney's Got a Gun," "No. 2 With a Bullet" and "Dead-Eye Dick."

# "Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot a man during a quail hunt ... making 78-year-old Harry Whittington the first person shot by a sitting veep since Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton, of course, (was) shot in a duel with Aaron Burr over issues of honor, integrity and political maneuvering. Whittington? Mistaken for a bird."

# "Now, this story certainly has its humorous aspects. ... But it also raises a serious issue, one which I feel very strongly about. ... Moms, dads, if you're watching right now, I can't emphasize this enough: Do not let your kids go on hunting trips with the vice president. I don't care what kind of lucrative contracts they're trying to land, or energy regulations they're trying to get lifted -- it's just not worth it."

"Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson," CBS

# "He is a lawyer and he got shot in the face. But he's a lawyer, he can use his other face. He'll be all right."

# "You can understand why this lawyer fellow let his guard down, because if you're out hunting with a politician, you think, 'If I'm going to get it, it's going to be in the back.' "

# "The big scandal apparently is that they didn't release the news for 18 hours. I don't think that's a scandal at all. I'm quite pleased about that. Finally there's a secret the vice president's office can keep."

# "Apparently the reason they didn't release the information right away is they said we had to get the facts right. That's never stopped them in the past."

Top Ten

2006-02-14T11:00:00.000-05:00

Top Ten Dick Cheney Excuses

10. "Heart palpitation caused trigger finger to spasm"

9. "Wanted to get the Iraq mess off the front page"

8. "Not enough Jim Beam"

7. "Trying to stop the spread of bird flu"

6. "I love to shoot people"

5. "Guy was making cracks about my lesbian daughter"

4. "I thought the guy was trying to go 'gay cowboy' on me"

3. "Excuse? I hit him, didn't I?"

2. "Until Democrats approve medicare reform, we have to make some tough choices for the elderly"

1. "Made a bet with Gretzky's wife"

Did You Hear the One About 'Brokeback'?

2006-02-07T10:38:00.000-05:00

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 6:51 p.m. ET

NEW YORK (AP) -- Some of the ''Top Ten Signs You're a Gay Cowboy,'' courtesy of David Letterman:

--You enjoy ridin', ropin' and redecoratin'.

--Instead of a saloon, you prefer a salon.

--Native Americans refer to you as ''Dances With Men.''

Is the bottomless font of ''Brokeback Mountain'' humor -- late-night monologues, fake Internet movie trailers, movie poster imitations -- harmless and fun, or insulting?

Most gay groups find it fairly benign, and note that in any case, the movie's overwhelming publicity can only be a good thing.

''Some of the humor may be insensitive, but even that has spurred positive conversation,'' says Susanne Salkind of the Human Rights Campaign, the largest national gay rights group.

But Matt Foreman, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, says he's sick of it: ''It may be funny, but there is a real element of homophobia. It's making jabs about sex between gay men.''

Jay Leno made at least 15 ''Brokeback'' jokes in January. Many were references to gay sex. One that wasn't: ''The cold weather continues to spread across the United States. In fact, down south it was so cold people were shaking like Jerry Falwell watching ''Brokeback Mountain.''

The Internet is saturated with ''Brokeback'' imitations. One of the best is a fake movie trailer called ''Brokeback to the Future,'' which uses deftly edited shots from Michael J. Fox's ''Back to the Future'' to make it look like Marty McFly and that wacky Dr. Emmett Brown are falling in love. There's also ''Top Gun 2: Brokeback Squadron,'' with Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer.

And then there are the poster imitations. Like ''Kickback Mountain,'' with the faces of indicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff and Rep. Tom DeLay superimposed over those of Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal.

Andy Borowitz, author of The Borowitz Report.com, says people get insulted by everything -- ''so the safest bet is to make jokes about everything.''

Besides, he says, ''I run into so few gay cowboys in Manhattan. So I think if I'm at a cocktail party and I make a good 'Brokeback' joke, I'll be safe. I guess if I were on a ranch and there were a few strong, silent types, I'd be careful.''

Of the movie's iconic line, ''I wish I knew how to quit you,'' Borowitz says he's ''hoping it'll become the new 'Show me the money.'''

Paul Rudnick, a playwright and comedy writer, sees the humor as coming from heterosexual men who are both fascinated and very uncomfortable with the content of the movie.

''They're not quite sure what to make of it,'' says Rudnick, who is gay. ''They know their wives are going to fall in love with the movie, and with the men in it.''

Rudnick hasn't written about ''Brokeback'' yet -- but only because he'd have to find something really original.

''Just joking about a gay cowboy isn't enough anymore,'' Rudnick says. ''If you're going to joke about it now, you really have to be up to the challenge.''

An Affair to Remember

2006-02-06T13:39:00.000-05:00

New York Times Book Review
By Daniel Mendelsohn

Brokeback Mountain
a film directed by Ang Lee, based on the story by E. Annie Proulx

Brokeback Mountain—the highly praised new movie as well as the short story by Annie Proulx on which the picture is faithfully based—is a tale about two homosexual men. Two gay men. To some people it will seem strange to say this; to some other people, it will seem strange to have to say it. Strange to say it, because the story is, as everyone now knows, about two young Wyoming ranch hands who fall in love as teenagers in 1963 and continue their tortured affair, furtively, over the next twenty years. And as everyone also knows, when most people hear the words "two homosexual men" or "gay," the image that comes to mind is not likely to be one of rugged young cowboys who shoot elk and ride broncos for fun.

Two homosexual men: it is strange to have to say it just now because the distinct emphasis of so much that has been said about the movie—in commercial advertising as well as in the adulatory reviews—has been that the story told in Brokeback Mountain is not, in fact, a gay story, but a sweeping romantic epic with "universal" appeal. The lengths to which reviewers from all over the country, representing publications of various ideological shadings, have gone in order to diminish the specifically gay element is striking, as a random sampling of the reviews collected on the film's official Web site makes clear. The Wall Street Journal's critic asserted that "love stories come and go, but this one stays with you—not because both lovers are men, but because their story is so full of life and longing, and true romance." The Los Angeles Times declared the film to be

a deeply felt, emotional love story that deals with the uncharted, mysterious ways of the human heart just as so many mainstream films have before it. The two lovers here just happen to be men.
Indeed, a month after the movie's release most of the reviews were resisting, indignantly, the popular tendency to refer to it as "the gay cowboy movie." "It is much more than that glib description implies," the critic of the Minneapolis Star Tribune sniffed. "This is a human story." This particular rhetorical emphasis figures prominently in the advertising for the film, which in quoting such passages reflects the producer's understandable desire that Brokeback Mountain not be seen as something for a "niche" market but as a story with broad appeal, whatever the particulars of its time, place, and personalities. (The words "gay" and "homosexual" are never used of the film's two main characters in the forty-nine-page press kit distributed by the filmmakers to critics.) "One movie is connecting with the heart of America," one of the current print ad campaigns declares; the ad shows the star Heath Ledger, without his costar, grinning in a cowboy hat. A television ad that ran immediately after the Golden Globe awards a few weeks ago showed clips of the male leads embracing their wives, but not each other.

The reluctance to be explicit about the film's themes and content was evident at the Golden Globes, where the film took the major awards—for best movie drama, best director, and best screenplay. When a short montage of clips from the film was screened, it was described as "a story of monumental conflict"; later, the actor reading the names of nominees for best actor in a movie drama described Heath Ledger's character as "a cowboy caught up in a complicated love." After Ang Lee received the award he was quoted as saying, "This is a universal story. I just wanted to make a love story."

Because I am as admiring as almost everyone else of the film's many excellences, it seems to me necessary to counter this special emphasis in the way the film is being promoted and received. For to see Brokeback Mountain as a love story, or even as a film about universal human emotions, is to misconstrue it very seriously—and in so doing inevitably to diminish its real achievement.

Both narratively and visually, Brokeback Mountain is a tragedy about the specifically gay phenomenon of the "closet"—about the disastrous emotional and moral consequences of erotic self-repression and of the social intolerance that first causes and then exacerbates it. What love story there is occurs early on in the film, and briefly: a summer's idyll herding sheep on a Wyoming mountain, during which two lonely youths, taciturn Ennis and high-spirited Jack, fall into bed, and then in love, with each other. The sole visual representation of their happiness in love is a single brief shot of the two shirtless youths horsing around in the grass. That shot is eerily—and significantly—silent, voiceless: it turns out that what we are seeing is what the boys' boss is seeing through his binoculars as he spies on them.

After that—because their love for each other can't be fitted into the lives they think they must lead—misery pursues and finally destroys the two men and everyone with whom they come in contact with the relentless thoroughness you associate with Greek tragedy. By the end of the drama, indeed, whole families have been laid waste. Ennis's marriage to a conventional, sweet-natured girl disintegrates, savaging her simple illusions and spoiling the home life of his two daughters; Jack's nervy young wife, Lureen, devolves into a brittle shrew, her increasingly elaborate and artificial hairstyles serving as a visual marker of the ever-growing mendacity that underlies the couple's relationship. Even an appealing young waitress, with whom Ennis after his divorce has a flirtation (an episode much amplified from a bare mention in the original story), is made miserable by her brief contact with a man who is as enigmatic to himself as he is to her. If Jack and Ennis are tainted, it's not because they're gay, but because they pretend not to be; it's the lie that poisons everyone they touch.

As for Jack and Ennis themselves, the brief and infrequent vacations that they are able to take together as the years pass—"fishing trips" on which, as Ennis's wife points out, still choking on her bitterness years after their marriage fails, no fish were ever caught— are haunted, increasingly, by the specter of the happier life they might have had, had they been able to live together. Their final vacation together (before Jack is beaten to death in what is clearly represented, in a flashback, as a roadside gay-bashing incident) is poisoned by mutual recriminations. "I wish I knew how to quit you," the now nearly middle-aged Jack tearfully cries out, humiliated by years of having to seek sexual solace in the arms of Mexican hustlers. "It's because of you that I'm like this—nothing, nobody," the dirt-poor Ennis sobs as he collapses in the dust. What Ennis means, of course, is that he's "nothing" because loving Jack has forced him to be aware of real passion that has no outlet, aware of a sexual nature that he cannot ignore but which neither his background nor his circumstances have equipped him to make part of his life. Again and again over the years, he rebuffs Jack's offers to try living together and running "a little cow and calf operation" somewhere, hobbled by his inability even to imagine what a life of happiness might look like.

One reason he can't bring himself to envision such a life with his lover is a grisly childhood memory, presented in flashback, of being taken at the age of eight by his father to see the body of a gay rancher who'd been tortured and beaten to death—a scene that prefigures the scene of Jack's death. This explicit reference to childhood trauma suggests another, quite powerful, reason why Brokeback must be seen as a specifically gay tragedy. In another review that decried the use of the term "gay cowboy movie" ("a cruel simplification"), the Chicago Sun-Times's critic, Roger Ebert, wrote with ostensible compassion about the dilemma of Jack and Ennis, declaring that "their tragedy is universal. It could be about two women, or lovers from different religious or ethnic groups—any 'forbidden' love." This is well-meaning but seriously misguided. The tragedy of heterosexual lovers from different religious or ethnic groups is, essentially, a social tragedy; as we watch it unfold, we are meant to be outraged by the irrationality of social strictures that prevent the two from loving each other, strictures that the lovers themselves may legitimately rail against and despise.

But those lovers, however star-crossed, never despise themselves. As Brokeback makes so eloquently clear, the tragedy of gay lovers like Ennis and Jack is only secondarily a social tragedy. Their tragedy, which starts well before the lovers ever meet, is primarily a psychological tragedy, a tragedy of psyches scarred from the very first stirrings of an erotic desire which the world around them—beginning in earliest childhood, in the bosom of their families, as Ennis's grim flashback is meant to remind us—represents as unhealthy, hateful, and deadly. Romeo and Juliet (and we) may hate the outside world, the Capulets and Montagues, may hate Verona; but because they learn to hate homosexuality so early on, young people with homosexual impulses more often than not grow up hating themselves: they believe that there's something wrong with themselves long before they can understand that there's something wrong with society. This is the truth that Heath Ledger, who plays Ennis, clearly understands—"Fear was instilled in him at an early age, and so the way he loved disgusted him," the actor has said—and that is so brilliantly conveyed by his deservedly acclaimed performance. On screen, Ennis's self-repression and self-loathing are given startling physical form: the awkward, almost hobbled quality of his gait, the constricted gestures, the way in which he barely opens his mouth when he talks all speak eloquently of a man who is tormented simply by being in his own body—by being himself.

So much, at any rate, for the movie being a love story like any other, even a tragic one. To their great credit, the makers of Brokeback Mountain—the writers Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, the director Ang Lee—seem, despite the official rhetoric, to have been aware that they were making a movie specifically about the closet. The themes of repression, containment, the emptiness of unrealized lives—all ending in the "nothingness" to which Ennis achingly refers—are consistently expressed in the film, appropriately enough, by the use of space; given the film's homoerotic themes, this device is particularly meaningful. The two lovers are only happy in the wide, unfenced outdoors, where exuberant shots of enormous skies and vast landscapes suggest, tellingly, that what the men feel for each other is "natural." By contrast, whenever we see Jack and Ennis indoors, in the scenes that show the failure of their domestic and social lives, they look cramped and claustrophobic. (Ennis in particular is often seen in reflection, in various mirrors: a figure confined in a tiny frame.) There's a sequence in which we see Ennis in Wyoming, and then Jack in Texas, anxiously preparing for one of their "fishing trips," and both men, as they pack for their trip—Ennis nearly leaves behind his fishing tackle, the unused and increasingly unpersuasive prop for the fiction he tells his wife each time he goes away with Jack— pace back and forth in their respective houses like caged animals.

The climax of these visual contrasts is also the emotional climax of the film, which takes place in two consecutive scenes, both of which prominently feature closets—literal closets. In the first, a grief-stricken Ennis, now in his late thirties, visits Jack's childhood home, where in the tiny closet of Jack's almost bare room he discovers two shirts—his and Jack's, the clothes they'd worn during their summer on Brokeback Mountain—one of which Jack has sentimentally encased in the other. (At the end of that summer, Ennis had thought he'd lost the shirt; only now do we realize that Jack had stolen it for this purpose.) The image —which is taken directly from Proulx's story—of the two shirts hidden in the closet, preserved in an embrace which the men who wore them could never fully enjoy, stands as the poignant visual symbol of the story's tragedy. Made aware too late of how greatly he was loved, of the extent of his loss, Ennis stands in the tiny windowless space, caressing the shirts and weeping wordlessly.

In the scene that follows, another misplaced piece of clothing leads to a similar scene of tragic realization. Now middle-aged and living alone in a battered, sparsely furnished trailer (a setting with which Proulx's story begins, the tale itself unfolding as a long flashback), Ennis receives a visit from his grown daughter, who announces that she's engaged to be married. "Does he love you?" the blighted father protectively demands, as if realizing too late that this is all that matters. After the girl leaves, Ennis realizes she's left her sweater behind, and when he opens his little closet door to store it there, we see that he's hung the two shirts from their first summer, one still wearing the other, on the inside of the closet door, below a tattered postcard of Brokeback Mountain. Just as we see this, the camera pulls back to allow us a slightly wider view, which reveals a little window next to the closet, a rectangular frame that affords a glimpse of a field of yellow flowers and the mountains and sky. The juxtaposition of the two spaces—the cramped and airless closet, the window with its unlimited vistas beyond—efficiently but wrenchingly suggests the man's tragedy: the life he has lived, the life that might have been. His eyes filling with tears, Ennis looks at his closet and says, "Jack, I swear..."; but he never completes his sentence, as he never completed his life.

One of the most tortured, but by no means untypical, attempts to suggest that the tragic heroes of Brokeback Mountain aren't "really" gay appeared in, of all places, the San Francisco Chronicle, where the critic Mick LaSalle argued that the film is

about two men who are in love, and it makes no sense. It makes no sense in terms of who they are, where they are, how they live and how they see themselves. It makes no sense in terms of what they do for a living or how they would probably vote in a national election....

The situation carries a lot of emotional power, largely because it's so specific and yet undefined. The two guys—cowboys—are in love with each other, but we don't ever quite know if they're in love with each other because they're gay, or if they're gay because they're in love with each other.

It's possible that if these fellows had never met, one or both would have gone through life straight.

The statement suggests what's wrong with so much of the criticism of the film, however well-meaning it is. It seems clear by now that Brokeback has received the attention it's been getting, from critics and audiences alike, partly because it seems on its surface to make normal what many people think of as gay experience— bringing it into the familiar "heart of America." (Had this been the story of, say, the love between two closeted interior decorators living in New York City in the 1970s, you suspect that there wouldn't be full-page ads in the major papers trumpeting its "universal" themes.) But the fact that this film's main characters look like cowboys doesn't make them, or their story, any less gay. Criticisms like LaSalle's, and those of the many other critics trying to persuade you that Brokeback isn't "really" gay, that Jack and Ennis's love "makes no sense" because they're Wyoming ranch hands who are likely to vote Republican, only work if you believe that being gay means having a certain look, or lifestyle (urban, say), or politics; that it's anything other than the bare fact of being erotically attached primarily to members of your own sex.

Indeed, the point that gay people have been trying to make for years—a point that Brokeback could be making now, if so many of its vocal admirers would listen to what it's saying—is that there's no such thing as a typi-cal gay person, a strangely different-seeming person with whom Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar have nothing in common—thankfully, you can't help feeling, in the eyes of many commentators. (It is surely significant that the film's only major departure from Proulx's story are two scenes clearly meant to underscore Jack's and Ennis's bona fides as macho American men: one in which Jack successfully challenges his boorish father-in-law at a Thanksgiving celebration, and another in which Ennis punches a couple of biker goons at a July Fourth picnic—a scene that culminates with the image of Ennis standing tall against a skyscape of exploding fireworks.)

The real achievement of Brokeback Mountain is not that it tells a universal love story that happens to have gay characters in it, but that it tells a distinctively gay story that happens to be so well told that any feeling person can be moved by it. If you insist, as so many have, that the story of Jack and Ennis is OK to watch and sympathize with because they're not really homosexual—that they're more like the heart of America than like "gay people"—you're pushing them back into the closet whose narrow and suffocating confines Ang Lee and his collaborators have so beautifully and harrowingly exposed.

Gay flamingos are both family men

2006-02-05T20:59:00.000-05:00

By Richard Savill The Telegraph
(Filed: 04/02/2006)

Carlos and Fernando, male flamingos at the Slimbridge wildfowl reserve in Gloucestershire, are inseparable.

They have been together for more than five years and have even reared foster chicks.

Twice a year they perform the elaborate courtship dance usual to males and females, before building a nest.

Homosexual activity is not unknown within the animal kingdom but few people know about it, according to zoologists. Keepers at Slimbridge said it was unique among their flamingos.

Nigel Jarrett, the reserve's aviculture manager, said: "They seem very happy. They will probably stay together for the rest of their lives.

"They are not picked on by the other birds. If anything they are afforded more respect because two males together can be a pretty fearsome prospect for the other flamingos."

The pair have reared three generations of adopted flamingos, by making off with the freshly laid eggs of their heterosexual neighbours.

Mr Jarrett said: "They have been known to fight the heterosexual birds and steal their eggs. There is usually a 'handbags-at-10 yards' moment where they scrap with the couple before stealing the egg.

"They are very good parents though and behave just as the heterosexual birds do when rearing their young."

The pair are Greater Flamingos, native to the Mediterranean and Africa, and live on algae and small fish.

As well as male flamingos that mate, there are male ostriches that only court their own gender. Film-makers recently caught female Japanese macaque monkeys engaged in intimate acts.

Male penguins have been known to pair up and engage in sexual activity, while ignoring potential female mates.

Adrian Walls, a bird keeper at London Zoo, said: "Homosexual behaviour is often seen amongst birds in captivity, but it is not often long-lived. If they go a long time without chicks, they often search out a different sex partner."

Gay in the NFL

2006-02-03T16:28:00.000-05:00

Super Bowl star's new book reveals gay-bashing threats, locker room dangers, discrimination and the power of faith and love to overcome

By Jan Stevenson
Originally printed 2/2/2006 (Issue 1405 - Between The Lines News)

Esera Tuaolo struck fear into the hearts of every opposing National Football League quarterback. As one of the best defensive nose tackles in the NFL, it was his job to attack the quarterbacks, and he was excellent at his job.

Looking at him, it is hard to imagine that he could ever fear anyone. At 6 foot three inches tall and a solid, 260-pound wall of muscle, he is quick, aggressive and athletic. But Tuaolo was scared in the NFL - all the time because Esera Tuaolo is gay. Throughout his successful nine year NFL career that culminated in a trip to Miami for Super Bowl XXXIII, he was terrified that if someone discovered his secret he would lose everything he had worked so hard to achieve.

Tuaolo announced he is gay in 2002, only after he retired as a player. His former Green Bay Packers teammate Sterling Sharpe, an all-Pro receiver, confirmed Tuaolo's worst fears in an interview with HBO's Real Sports. Bryant Gumbel asked him how he felt about Tuaolo being gay. Sharpe said, "If the guys found out another player was gay on Monday, he wouldn't be able to play on Sunday," essentially admitting that a gay player would be gay-bashed by his own teammates. "Question my heart, question my ability, but do not question my machoism," said Sharpe.

"Sterling just confirmed what I already knew," said Tuaolo in a telephone interview with BTL from his home in Minneapolis. "We were friends, and I don't hold it against him. He was just saying it like it is."

Tuaolo's new book, "Alone in the Trenches," chronicles his remarkable rise to the pinnacle of professional sports, all the while hiding his true identity. The first chapter, titled "The Torments of Success," captures how he struggled with his extraordinary fame and his fear of being found out as a gay man.

"It's so hard," said Tuaolo. "We live in a society that is so unaccepting of gays in sports. I look back, now that I'm out, and I see game films and I say, 'Wow! I was an incredible athlete.' It just got more difficult, the more I was in the limelight, the more I would pull back. I was afraid that someone would recognize me and it really took a toll on me. Working in such a homophobic environment, I realized it could all be taken away. All the success, my career - everything. And it wasn't just me who would suffer. I support not only me, but my mom, and my sisters, too."

One of Tuaolo's toughest moments came right after the 1999 Super Bowl in which the Denver Broncos defeated his team, the Atlanta Falcons. The team bus returned to their hotel and all the players' wives and families were out waiting for them. Tuaolo's life-partner, Mitchell Wherley, was there, but they did not dare approach each other in public.

"It hurt," said Tuaolo. "Seeing the smiles of the other families, how the players held their wives and being able to be free to be themselves. Here we were in the closet, running in the shadows. Coming off that bus, and seeing all the wives and families come up and hug the players, because that was what we needed. We had just lost a game we should have won. The Super Bowl - something that important, you can't get that back."

But since he has come out as a gay professional athlete, he is experiencing a new freedom and joy that he could only dream of before. Wherley and Tuaolo live together with their two adopted children, five-year-old Samoan twins named Mitchell, Jr. and Michelle.

"They are only five, but they are big, like almost eight year olds, and they have a lot of attitude," said Tuaolo who was able to adopt with Wherley as co-parents under Minnesota law. "To have kids who call us Big Daddy and Little Daddy, it just melts you. I have been waiting for it my whole life and it's here. I can't wait to have a bunch of grandkids so I can tell them my 'war stories.'"

Faith and Family

Family and faith mean everything to Tuaolo. He was born on the island of Oahu, Hawaii as the youngest of eight children in an immigrant Samoan family. They were desperately poor, living in a dirt floor hut on the family's small banana farm. Esera ran freely on the beautiful sandy beaches of Hawaii, and as he grew bigger and stronger he struggled with his awakening sexuality. He felt it was a burden and a curse. He is a devout Christian and turned to prayer, but at night he would lie awake terrified that God was going to cast him into a lake of fire because of his curse.

"Later in life I came to realize that God loves me the way I am - as a gay man," said Tuaolo. "I am a Christian, and a Christian has respect for other people."

Tuaolo said he has lots of issues with NFL players who wear their religiosity on their sleeves, and who even use it to segregate their teams into Christian cliques. Especially when he played for a year with the Jacksonville Jaguars he was turned off by the pompous attitudes of some players in the Champions for Christ group.

"Christianity does not turn me off. The love of God doesn't turn me off," said Tuaolo. "The CFC segregation didn't work for me. I went to a Bible study, and 'lo and behold' it was about homosexuality. I was thinking, 'Is this a sign?' That was what really turned me off."

So which team does Tuaolo think will win the Super Bowl in Detroit this weekend?

"I'm rooting for the Steelers," he said. "[Steelers' Strong Safety] Troy Polamalu is a distant cousin, so I have to root for his team. We played together as kids. He's my family, and family sticks together."

Tuaolo has a burgeoning new career in singing and acting, but he hasn't ruled out a possible return to the gridiron.

"I'm 36 years old and in the best shape of my life. In fact I'm even better than when I retired, because I'm not banged up. If I got an offer from a Canadian team - maybe. I would sure consider it," said Tuaolo, who would love to be able to play football in front of his kids.

"The best part of being an ex-NFL star is that my son looks at my jerseys and says, 'I wanna be a football player like Big Daddy.' I would definitely play for a few seasons for sure."

Who knows - Tuaolo may yet become the first out, gay, professional football player in action. If Mitchell, Jr. has any say in the matter, it could happen.

Coretta Scott King

2006-02-01T15:36:00.000-05:00

Via Andrew Sullivan:

"I still hear people say that I should not be talking about the rights of lesbian and gay people, and I should stick to the issue of racial justice. But I hasten to remind them that Martin Luther King Jr. said 'Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.' I appeal to everyone who believes in Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream to make room at the table of brother- and sisterhood for lesbian and gay people.

Homophobia is like racism and anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry in that it seeks to dehumanize a large group of people, to deny their humanity, their dignity and personhood. This sets the stage for further repression and violence, that spreads all too easily to victimize the next minority group.

Gays and lesbians stood up for civil rights in Montgomery, Selma, in Albany, Georgia, and St. Augustine, Florida, and many other campaigns of the civil rights movement. Many of these courageous men and women were fighting for my freedom at a time when they could find few voices for their own, and I salute their contributions." -

Coretta Scott King, in 1999 at the 25th Anniversary luncheon for the Lambda Legal Defense Fund.

Love makes ‘Brokeback’ Oscar favorite

2006-02-01T12:51:00.000-05:00

COMMENTARY

By Erik Lundegaard
MSNBC contributor
Updated: 10:35 a.m. ET Jan. 31, 2006

Tale of star-crossed lovers attracts audience, Academy votes

I first saw a trailer for “Brokeback Mountain” during an opening night showing of “The Constant Gardener” at the Lagoon Theater in self-consciously liberal Minneapolis. There were titters from the crowd (possibly from the line “I wish I knew how to quit you!”), and afterward my friend Laurion leaned over and said, “Gay cowboys: I’ve never seen it before and it’s already a cliché.” I thought, “Well, so much for that. If it can’t win over this crowd it can’t win over anyone.”

That was in September.

A few months later my friend Jim in Seattle asked me about “Brokeback.” Jim’s a movie buff, always intrigued by the Oscar candidates, but he said he wasn’t interested in “Brokeback.” He couldn’t articulate why. My sister’s husband, Eric, in Detroit, another movie buff, was similarly uninterested. I had assumed both Jim and Eric within “Brokeback’s” demographic: liberal city-dwellers with gay friends. I thought, “Well, so much for that. If it can’t win over these guys it can’t win over anyone.”

That was in November.

As I write this it’s nearly February and while many people are still tittering — “I wish I knew how to quit you” gags, movie poster parodies, Pres. Bush’s press conference — the film is the furthest thing from a joke. “Brokeback” has been chosen the best picture of the year by The Golden Globes, The Producers Guild of America, Boston Film Critics, Broadcast Film Critics, L.A. Film Critics, N.Y. Film Critics and (big surprise) San Francisco Film Critics. It’s got nine BAFTA (British Academy Award) nominations, and the Directors Guild of America tapped “Brokeback’s” Ang Lee as best director. What should be its biggest awards rival, “Munich,” has largely been forgotten (zero BAFTA nominations, for example), leaving only smaller films like “Capote” and “Good Night and Good Luck” as competition. A win at the Academy Awards on March 5th already feels like a fait accompli.

More startling than its critical reception, it’s selling. Focus Features played the numbers game correctly. When “Brokeback” showed in only five theaters they talked up its huge per-screen-average of over $100,000. When it opened wider and its per-screen-average dipped to normal levels (less than $10,000), they talked up its weekly and overall take. It debuted December 9th at no. 15 and hasn’t dropped lower since. It was no. 8 the following week and then 14, 13, 8, 9, and 5. Early estimates for this weekend place it sixth, with an overall gross of $50 million. Where are the other best picture contenders? None are in the top 10, and none except “Walk the Line” and (just barely) “Crash” have grossed as much as “Brokeback.” No, not even Spielberg’s flick. Think about that for a minute.

All of this in a country that annually passes laws outlawing gay marriage or denying “special rights” (or what the rest of the civilized world calls “rights”) to gay people.

What the hell happened?

Here’s the short answer. “Brokeback Mountain” is a spare, powerful film about star-crossed lovers.

That’s it.

We love our love stories. The only love stories we love more are the ones where the lovers are kept apart by forces beyond their control, such as family (“Romeo and Juliet”), class (“Titanic”), or war (“The English Patient”). Anticipation is better than consummation — particularly in drama. Keep the lovers apart! Tease us! Frustrate us! There’s nothing more boring than happy loving couples — in drama or in life.

But how to keep the lovers apart? That’s the question for dramatists everywhere. “Brokeback” offers a new take on an old subject. It’s the ultimate forbidden love — because part of the population is ready to kill you for acting on it.

Thus the question that everyone was asking before the movie’s release — Is “Brokeback” too much for middle America? — turned out to be the wrong question. The real question was: Is “Brokeback” too much for middle-American women? It’s women who drive these types of stories, after all. They had to twist their boyfriends’ arms just to see “Titanic” — and that one offered a topless Kate Winslet. “Brokeback” offers us topless women, too, but in sadder circumstances, and with that still-squeamish-for-straight-men front story. No amount of arm-twisting, it seems, can get many of these guys to head up Brokeback Mountain. But women are so broad-minded, or so in need of a love story, that they’ll go even when their gender isn’t part of the equation.

All of the awards haven’t hurt either. “Brokeback’s” got so much buzz it’s vibrating, and women have never shied away from things that vibrate.

The personal answer

I have to admit that “Brokeback” didn’t look particularly appealing to me from that September trailer. A hopeless, doomed romance. Yay. I also admit to some straight-guy trepidation — but of the general rather than the Larry David “it might make me gay” variety. If the number of times I got screwed over by women in my youth didn’t lead me to consider an alternative, there’s nothing Heath Ledger can do now.

But when I finally saw “Brokeback” I found it nearly perfect. It’s more than a love story; it’s really about loneliness, which is a more universal emotion anyway. Some of us haven’t been in love; some of us don’t believe in love. Everyone’s been lonely.

It’s ambiguous enough to argue about endlessly. Heath Ledger’s Ennis del Mar feels like the man in the film — in the one sex scene, he gives rather than receives — and he’s taciturn and bottled-up in the way of men. He talks with his fists, and sometimes he talks too much, but he’s gentle with women and never has a harsh word for his daughters. One could argue he’s what we want the American man to be. As Manohla Dargis wrote in The New York Times, “I don't know a single straight woman who hasn't been involved with a man as emotionally thwarted as Ennis, the man who can't tell you how he feels because he may not honestly know.” Exactly. Tease us! Frustrate us!

But Jake Gyllenhaal’s Jack Twist actually outmans Ennis. Jack won’t be circumscribed by society. He stands up to his father-in-law, he stands up to his father, he stands up. He tries to live his dreams. Forget everyone else. Forget Ennis, too. If Ennis won’t have the ranch with Jack, Jack will just have it with someone else.

Ennis isn’t strong like that. He’s so scared of who he is he begins to disappear within himself. An early shot shows him leaning against the boss-man’s trailer, head down, cowboy hat covering his face. It’s cowboy cool a la James Dean. Throughout the film Ennis keeps that cowboy hat covering his face but with each frame it becomes more tragic — a man too scared to be seen. Don’t look at my face because you might see who I am. He gives himself a smaller and smaller spot on which to live his increasingly shrunken life. The movie begins with youth and wide-open vistas and ends in middle-age in a tiny trailer. The one scene that broke my heart is wholly ordinary: Ennis, alone in a cafeteria booth, head down, picking at a piece of pie. He’s alone, and will remain alone, no matter how many waitresses try to drag his ass onto the dance floor.

This is why the movie is striking a chord with the non-gay community. Ennis resonates because he reminds us of some part of us. Life has such possibilities, and from lack of courage or weariness or outright fear we allow it to shrink us into this small, sad space doing this small, sad thing. Don’t look at my face because you might see who I am. The film does what it’s supposed to do. It’s specific but it’s universal.

A coupla straight guys sitting around talking

As for my friends Laurion, Eric and Jim? They’ve all changed their minds. Everyone’s talking about “Brokeback” and they want to be part of that conversation. Laurion hasn’t seen it yet but will. Eric thought it good if slightly overrated. Jim thought it one of the best movies of the year.

So no matter what happens March 5th, “Brokeback” has already won.

Erik Lundegaard can be reached at: elundegaard@mn.rr.com

Milk

2006-01-31T18:14:00.000-05:00

Creepy...in a Sixth Sense Sort of Way

Sharks with Freak'n Laser Beams

2006-01-31T18:13:00.000-05:00

Who's Got the Biggest Boobs?

2006-01-31T18:12:00.000-05:00

Wilmer Valdarama

2006-01-31T18:09:00.000-05:00

And the Winner is......

2006-01-31T18:05:00.000-05:00

Is was Just a Movie, Right?

2006-01-31T18:04:00.000-05:00

Out & about, but still some doubt

2006-01-30T18:26:00.000-05:00

After years of struggling with sexuality,
ex-Giant tells his story

By MICHAEL O'KEEFFE
DAILY NEWS SPORTS WRITER

Roy Simmons finally got the chance to let some sunshine into a life darkened by drugs and dishonesty. It was 1992 and Simmons, the former offensive lineman for the Giants and Redskins from 1979 to 1984, appeared on national television to tell Phil Donahue - and millions of viewers, including friends, relatives, ex-teammates and former girlfriends - a truth that he had been concealing for decades.

Simmons said he was gay. He said the pressure that came from concealing his sexuality for so long had cost him a promising career. It had prompted him to lie to loved ones, to cheat, to steal. It had turned him into a dope fiend, a thief, a gay prostitute.

But by 1992, Simmons had gone through a rehab stint and found religion, and he felt he was finally ready to tell the world the truth. The revelation didn't make him whole, though. It didn't magically establish a relationship with the daughter he had abandoned years before. It didn't make peace with the loved ones he had conned for so many years. And it sure didn't revive his NFL career.

So just weeks after his "Donahue" appearance, Simmons was back home in California, standing on the Golden Gate Bridge stoned on crack, trying to muster enough courage to throw himself into the San Francisco Bay.

Simmons didn't jump. Instead, he spent the next decade living in anonymity, sometimes binging on drugs, sometimes seeking help for his addictions. But things just seemed to go from bad to worse: In 1997, he learned he was HIV positive.

"My life, man, I wouldn't wish it on anybody," Simmons says.

Now Simmons, 49, wants to share the story of that life with the athletes who are still in the closet. Simmons is one of only three NFL players who have publicly announced their homosexuality - all after retirement (David Kopay came out in 1975 and Esera Tuaolo in 2002). Simmons estimates two or three members of every NFL team are gay, but sports remains America's last bastion of homophobia, and the NFL doesn't appear to be in any rush to make its homosexuals feel welcome.

"In the NFL," Simmons says, "there is nothing worse than being gay. You can beat your wife, but you better not be gay."

That's why so many gay athletes, Simmons says, live on the down low, having anonymous and often unprotected sex with other men. Those secret lives increase the chances they'll become infected with the AIDS virus and pass it on to lovers, male and female. It also makes them more susceptible to alcoholism, drug abuse, anything that might numb their pain.

Simmons says he has contacted the NFL and its union to share his story with the players, but neither has taken him up on his offer. "I know I can help stop someone from going through what I went through," Simmons says. "I've been there. I've had two jobs in my life - football and running. Mostly running."

NFL spokesman Greg Aiello says he isn't aware of any specific offer from Simmons, adding that the league might consider bringing him in for its annual rookie symposium. But Simmons has already found a much broader audience: He's written a book with author Damon DiMarco, "Out of Bounds," that tells the story of his tortured life.

Simmons has been sober and celibate for several years now, he says, and he's healthier than he's been in decades. His longtime friend, Jimmy Hester, introduced him to a naturopathic healer in Martha's Vineyard, where he lives with Hester, who put him on a strict detoxification program and vitamin regimen. But the doctor, Roni DeLuz, says Simmons carries so much pain in his psyche that he'll never be completely right.

"I don't think Roy will ever be okay," she says. "Every day will be a struggle for him. He could relapse into drugs or other self-destructive behavior. But every time he tells his story, it helps him heal. You can't heal yourself until you are honest with yourself."

* * *

To be Roy Simmons is to live in a world of contradictions. Simmons was a fast, strong athlete who played the most macho position in pro sports; he was also a drag queen in size 16 shoes who loved to strut up and down the streets of San Francisco. Simmons was paid big money to play football; he was also a homeless prostitute who earned $15 a trick. Simmons says he accepts that he is gay; he also told televangelist Pat Robertson and his "700 Club" audience just last year that homosexuality is against God's will.

"If you've been through what Roy has been through, you'd be conflicted, too," says Hester, an entertainment publicist who became friends with Simmons when Hester was 13 and working as at a Jersey restaurant popular with the Giants.

Simmons grew up up in Savannah, Ga., raised mostly by his grandmother. His father lived nearby but wasn't a factor in his life. The family was poor so his mother moved to New York to work as a domestic, and although she regularly sent money home, she was absent for large chunks of his life, too.

Simmons was 11 when he says his life began to spin out of control. A neighbor hired him to do some chores around her house, then left him alone with her husband. The husband, "Travis," called Simmons into a bedroom and pulled down his pants. Then he raped the boy.

Simmons says that it was the moment that has defined his life. He writes in his book that he hated Travis, but he says he was also attracted to him. Simmons and his neighbor had other sexual encounters after that rape; years later, after his first season with the Giants, Simmons says he and a buddy ran into Travis at a Savannah gay bar and had "revenge" sex with him.

"Maybe a part of me saw him as the person I'd sensed I was missing all along," Simmons writes.

Simmons spent his teen years having sex with boys even as he cultivated a relationship with the girl who would eventually become the mother of his child. "In my head I had this vision of my girl dressed up all pretty in white on our wedding day," he writes.

But there was one thing Simmons wasn't confused about: football. He was a big, strong all-city football player who worked hard to master the game. His skills attracted recruiters from big-time programs who offered him girls, clothes, cars and envelopes full of $100 bills. In the end, Simmons signed on with Georgia Tech, even though the only thing that school offered was an education and an opportunity to play ball.

At Georgia Tech, Simmons - now nicknamed "Sugar Bear" because of his sweet personality - proved to be an outstanding football player. He joined a fraternity, smoked a lot of pot and fooled around with girls. He also became a regular at a gay bathhouse near campus.

Simmons was drafted by the Giants in the eighth round of the 1979 draft and moved into New York's gay scene, becoming a regular at the city's gay clubs and bathhouses. He'd hire hustlers and take them to hotel rooms; he says he even had a Tanqueray-and-Quaalude-fueled fling with a teammate one night.

Simmons suspects they weren't the only teammates who got together: "I suspected that two of my teammates were fooling around with each other," he writes in his book. "They were way too buddy-buddy with each other for it to be a purely heterosexual friendship."

Drugs, he says, were everywhere. He says he saw one teammate snort coke just before a game; he saw others freebasing at a party. Simmons became a fixture of what he calls the Giants' drug clique and threw wild dope and sex parties. One party drew not just teammates but members of the Jets, Nets and now-defunct New York Cosmos and New Jersey Generals as well. "Cocaine, reefer, uppers, downers, you name it," Simmons writes, "it was on the coffee table, laid out like a buffet."

Simmons was juggling affairs with several women, including one who became pregnant and gave birth to a girl she named Kara. He began a serious relationship with a man he met at a bathhouse. The alcohol and the drugs diminished his performance on the field, and he was demoted from starter to sub. Simmons finally snapped, worn out by the pressure of his hidden sex life and the demands of his family, the drinking and drugging. Just before the 1982 season, he told coach Ray Perkins he wanted to take a year off.

He spent the year as a baggage handler at JFK and tried to come back the following season. But new coach Bill Parcells had no use for Simmons and he was cut. The Redskins picked him up and he went with the team to Super Bowl XVIII in Tampa, where the Skins got waxed by the Los Angeles Raiders.

Simmons was cut by the Redskins in '84 - the freebasing habit he says he picked up in D.C. didn't help his career - and had a brief stint with the USFL's Jacksonville Bulls. The USFL might have been second-tier, but it was big league when it came to drugs and drinking, Simmons says. "On some occasions I was blowing a grand or more a day on drugs," he writes.

But the Bulls folded and Simmons' career was over by the end of the 1985 season. Simmons retired from football with nothing to show for it except a voracious drug habit and a hidden sex life.

* * *

Simmons moved to Newark after his football career ended and although he was still drinking heavily and using drugs, he fell in with a group of professional gay men. It was a community that looked after each other and though Simmons was still in the closet, he felt at peace.

But in 1990, Simmons confided to a cousin that he was gay. The cousin told one of Simmons' former girlfriends. The word spread to other relatives and friends. Simmons, angry and humiliated, withdrew $10,000 from his bank and flew to San Francisco. He became a regular in that city's bathhouses and gay clubs. He even started dressing up in drag - all 290 pounds of him.

Simmons finally bottomed out in California. He blew his money on booze and drugs and went on welfare. He spent five months in prison for shoplifting. He prostituted himself for $15, $20 or a few lines of cocaine.

He became a large, mean drug addict who lashed out at anyone who slighted him. He says he beat and stabbed one guy who ripped him off in a drug deal, leaving his bleeding, wheezing body in a filthy alley. He still doesn't know if the man lived or died.

Simmons finally entered a drug rehab program and started attending a church. Then he appeared on "Donahue," tempted by the prospect of a free trip back East. But Simmons was not prepared for the consequences of his national outing. Friends and relatives who were not aware of his sexuality were shocked. Former teammates asked if he was high. None of them congratulated Simmons; none of them said, "What you did took guts."

A month later, he had traded most of his possessions - and his roommate's - for crack. He drove to the Golden Gate Bridge and prepared to jump. But then he heard his grandmother's voice telling him that people who commit suicide go straight to hell.

He called Jimmy Hester, who arranged for Simmons to return to Long Island, where Simmons' mother and other family members lived, and he entered an intensive drug program. He had relapses and he contracted HIV, but Simmons says he feels better now than he has in decades. The book has been cathartic, he says, and he hopes his message might get through to other struggling athletes. He's even established a relationship with his daughter, Kara, who is now 24 years old and recently graduated from college.

"I feel good," he says. "Not wonderful. I'm working with a therapist. I'm hoping if I can understand what I went through and I can explain it to other guys, maybe those other guys won't have to suffer like I did."

Originally published on January 29, 2006

Secrets and lies

2006-01-30T18:22:00.000-05:00

Belinda Oaten has suffered the very public outing of her husband's gay affair. But she is not alone. Diane Taylor talks to the women whose spouses hid their homosexuality

Friday January 27, 2006
The Guardian

The political fallout from revelations that Mark Oaten spent time with a male prostitute was swift and brutal. Even before the News of the World, which exposed him, had hit the streets last Sunday, he resigned as the Liberal Democrats' home affairs spokesman. But the extent of the damage to his 13-year marriage is less clear.

Holed up somewhere snowy in Europe, Oaten's wife, Belinda, 37, is saying little apart from the fact that she is "incredibly angry" and views her husband's behaviour as "the ultimate betrayal". One newspaper report yesterday quoted "a friend of the couple" saying that the marriage is at an end as far as Belinda is concerned.
But what of couples who do not find themselves in the public eye when disclosures about extramarital gay dalliances surface? For a wife who has had no inkling that her spouse was anything other than heterosexual, is it better or worse than finding out that he has been unfaithful with a woman? And is it possible to sustain a marriage after her husband's proclivities are revealed, or is parting inevitable?

There are no statistics on the fate of such marriages in the UK, but according to the Straight Spouse Network, which has its headquarters in the US, where, it estimates, about two million gay men and lesbian women are married to straight partners, roughly a third of couples break up immediately, a third remain together for a year and then split, while the remaining third try to stay together. After three years, half this latter group are still together.

Women who have found themselves in Belinda Oaten's situation say that there can be fleeting relief when they discover that another man is involved if they had suspected their husband was having an affair with a woman, which they would have found more threatening. In the longer term, however, the feeling of being doubly deceived can be overwhelming. Not only have they been fooled about a relationship they thought was monogamous, but they have also been fooled about their partner's sexuality.

Helen, 58, discovered that her husband, Tom, was gay eight years ago. They had been married for 24 years before she found out where his sexual preferences lay. But the problems in her marriage predated that discovery by some time. "The gay partner may blame the straight partner if things aren't going right in the marriage," she says. "The straight partner can be made to feel deficient or unattractive.

"I tried to fix things but floundered because I didn't know what I was supposed to be fixing. It's like asking a doctor to cure a headache when what you've got is a broken leg."

Helen found an amorous email he had written. She assumed it had been written to another woman and, when she confronted him, he allowed her to carry on thinking that. Then she discovered links on the computer to gay chatrooms. Even then, she didn't realise her husband was gay. But during a subsequent row, she shouted: "And you visit gay chatrooms too!"

"At that moment I knew," says Helen. "The colour drained out of his face. 'What do you think?' he said. 'Are you telling me you're gay?' I asked. He nodded and I felt strangely relieved."

In fact, Helen felt they were able to communicate honestly for the first time in years: "He told me that he had known from the age of nine that he was gay but didn't want to be gay."

At the time of Helen's discovery, Tom had never had a relationship with a man. They have since parted amicably and Tom has had a couple of short-lived relationships with men. After some initial distress, their two adult children have accepted the situation.

"Tom said that when he met me, he didn't feel the need to be gay, but he was always very distant. Our sex life was more a celebration of the male body than an expression of emotional closeness between us," says Helen. "I think women who are secretly lesbian in a straight marriage have a harder time having sex with their husbands than gay men in a straight marriage. Men are more able to separate the emotional from the physical and are turned on by the idea of sex even if they're not turned on by the woman's body."

Max, a 30-year-old male prostitute, says that the vast majority of his clients are, like Tom, married with children. "Occasionally, I'll get a call from an openly gay man who wants to meet up for sex, but most of my clients are married with children.

"I had one client who told his mother that he was gay. She was so upset that he got married to keep his mother happy. I think that some of the married men who come to me are not only responding to pressure from society to conform to a straight lifestyle, but are also in denial about their sexuality. With men like me, they can express themselves openly."

Interestingly, Max's secretly gay clients don't only seek him out for sexual release, he says, but also for emotional succour. "I have lost count of the number of married men who have cried when they visit me. I've done a basic skills course in counselling so that I can offer them support," he says. "People are saying that men like Mark Oaten are bastards, but in fact they're victims. They're pressurised by society into conforming to a sexuality they don't want to be a part of. I feel sorry for Mark and his wife, and I condemn the man who went to the News of the World with the story. I would never spill the beans on a client."

Amity Pierce Buxton, who heads the Straight Spouse Network (which has a UK branch), is happily remarried after her first husband came out after 25 years. They remained friends until he died three years ago. "The important thing is to go slowly when these situations arise," she says. "Couples need to communicate with each other honestly so that, even if they separate, they can have a relationship based on truth."

Like Helen and Amity, Pat had no idea that her husband, Mike, was having affairs with both men and women, which began within a year of marriage. Both in their late 50s, they recently separated after 27 years. She began picking up clues six years ago when she caught him downloading gay porn. "He told me he was downloading gay rather than straight porn because it was less likely to have viruses in it. His behaviour is similar to that of an alcoholic who will say and do anything - and then believe it," she says.

The legacy of the revelations about her husband's behaviour, when she accepted the truth after an initial period of denial, has been very difficult. "Apart from the emotional cost, the ramifications are pretty unbelievable," she says. "If a man is unfaithful to his wife with another man, it doesn't count in law as adultery. I had always thought that we would have a certain amount of money for our retirement. But now he's moved out, there are two separate households to run so there's less disposable income."

Worst of all, says Pat, is the awareness of what has gone: "When your husband dies, you lose your future with him. But when something like this comes out, you lose your past because it was all based on lies."

Moving on is often far from straightforward for the woman. While her husband can begin a new life in the gay community, she is faced with whether or not to explain the the real reason for the marital break-up. "As our partners come out of the closet," says Helen, "they slam the door on a new closet inside which we straight spouses find ourselves trapped".

· Some names have been changed. Information from straightspouse.org or contact ever@str8s.org for UK branch details.

Military Officers Discharged under Gay Policy

2006-01-25T13:20:00.000-05:00

Hundreds of military officers, health care professionals discharged under gay policy

WASHINGTON -- Hundreds of officers and health care professionals have been discharged in the past 10 years under the Pentagon's policy on gays, a loss that while relatively small in numbers involves troops who are expensive for the military to educate and train.

The 350 or so affected are a tiny fraction of the 1.4 million members of the uniformed services and about 3.5 percent of the more than 10,000 people discharged under the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy since its inception in 1994.

But many were military school graduates or service members who went to medical school at the taxpayers' expense _ troops not as easily replaced by a nation at war that is struggling to fill its enlistment quotas.

"You don't just go out on the street tomorrow and pluck someone from the general population who has an Air Force education, someone trained as a physician, someone who bleeds Air Force blue, who is willing to serve, and that you can put in Iraq tomorrow," said Beth Schissel, who graduated from the Air Force Academy in 1989 and went on to medical school.

Schissel was forced out of the military after she acknowledged that she was gay.

According to figures compiled by the Pentagon and released by the Center for the Study of Sexual Minorities in the Military, Schissel is one of 244 medical and health professionals discharged from 1994 through 2003 under the policy that allows gays and lesbians to serve as long as they abstain from homosexual activity and do not disclose their sexual orientation. Congress approved the policy in 1993.

There were 137 officers discharged during that period. The database compiled by the Pentagon does not include names, but it appears that about 30 of the medical personnel who were discharged may also be included in the list of officers.

The center _ a research unit of the Institute for Social, Behavioral and Economic Research of the University of California _ promotes analysis of the issue of gays in the military.

"These discharges comprise a very small percentage of the total and should be viewed in that context," said Lt. Col. Ellen Krenke, a Pentagon spokeswoman. She added that troops discharged under the law can continue to serve their country by becoming a private military contractor or working for other federal agencies.

Opponents of the policy on gays acknowledge that the number of those discharged is small. But they say the policy exacerbates a shortage of medical specialists in the military when they are needed the most.

Late last year Army officials acknowledged in a congressional hearing that they are seeing shortfalls in key medical specialties.

"What advantage is the military getting by firing brain surgeons at the very time our wounded soldiers aren't receiving the medical care they need?" said Aaron Belkin, associate professor of political science at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

Overall, the number of discharges has gone down in recent years.

"When we're at war, commanders know that gay personnel are just as important as any other personnel," said Nathaniel Frank, senior research fellow at the Center. He said that in some instances commanders knew someone in their unit was gay but ignored it.

The overall discharges peaked in 2000 and 2001, on the heels of the 1999 murder of Pfc. Barry Winchell, who was bludgeoned to death by a fellow soldier at Fort Campbell, Ky., who believed Winchell was gay. About one-sixth of the discharges in 2001 were at that base.

Officials did not provide estimates on the cost of a military education or one for medical personnel. However, according to the private American Medical Student Association, average annual tuition and fees at public and private U.S. medical schools in 2002 were $14,577 and $30,960, respectively.

Early last year the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, estimated it cost the Pentagon nearly $200 million to recruit and train replacements for the nearly 9,500 troops that had to leave the military because of the policy. The losses included hundreds of highly skilled troops, including translators, between 1994 through 2003.

Opponents of the policy are backing legislation in the House sponsored by Rep. Marty Meehan, D-Mass., that would repeal the law. But that bill _ with 107 co-sponsors _ is considered a longshot in the Republican-controlled House.

Copyright 2006 Associated Press.

A Man and his Horse

2006-01-23T19:42:00.000-05:00

A Spoof on the Brokeback Mountain Trailer

Phoebe and Evolution

2006-01-23T19:41:00.000-05:00

Monkeys...Darwin....It's a nice story..........Just don't get her started on gravity.

To Serve Man

2006-01-23T19:40:00.000-05:00

Ten Reasons Gay Marriage is Wrong

2006-01-23T19:39:00.000-05:00

Dear Social Grace

2006-01-23T19:38:00.000-05:00

JOHN KERRY HAS FALLEN....

2006-01-20T13:24:00.000-05:00

JOHN KERRY HAS FALLEN…AND KEEPS GETTING UP
Too bad people in his own party want to put him on ice
By Michael Crowley

"He’s under the illusion that over 50 million Americans voted for him, as opposed to the reality that they voted against George W. Bush.”

In late November, George W. Bush went on the political offensive over the state of the war in Iraq. Determined to get his groove back after weeks of being pummeled by revitalized Democrats, Bush delivered a major speech outlining his “plan for victory.” Democrats, smelling blood, carefully plotted their response. The party’s Senate leadership decided that Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island would deliver their rebuttal. As a former member of the Eighty-second Airborne who had opposed the war from the start, Reed had the perfect credentials to remind Americans about Bush’s mismanagement of the war and of the grim realities the president had refused to acknowledge in his speech. All things considered, it looked like a banner opportunity to inflict more damage on the reeling president.

There was just one problem: John Kerry.

Without checking with his party’s leaders, Kerry scheduled his own response to Bush, which was to take place at 11 A.M., precisely the time that Reed was scheduled to respond. In Senate strategy meetings, mild panic ensued. “It was ‘Oh shit, we can’t have two competing press conferences at the same time,’ ” a senior Senate aide told me recently. “Many calls were made between offices in an effort to make sure we didn’t have two competing events with two messages, because we had ours pretty well ﬂeshed out.” Rather than make way for Reed, though, Kerry agreed to appear with him at a joint press event. Plenty of Democrats predicted what came next: Kerry was “droney and repetitive,” the aide says, but the press nevertheless overlooked Reed and went with the story line of Kerry, yesterday’s Democrat, still taking swings at the guy who beat him. “Jack Reed did a great job, but in the end he was overshadowed by John Kerry,” said the aide. “The story fell into the lazy narrative of John Kerry versus George Bush on Iraq, and that’s not where we wanted to go.”

The bitter clincher came on that night’s Daily Show. After riffing on the Bush speech, Jon Stewart turned his attention to the Democrats. “Naturally, the political opposition would pounce on the president’s vulnerability by choosing as their spokesman an inspiring rhetorical speaker with the proven ability to defeat the president,” Stewart said. Cut to a shot of Kerry stammering, then back to Stewart. “Kerry? You went with Kerry?”

After more footage of Kerry rambling incomprehensibly, Stewart stared at the camera and screamed, “No one understands you!” The next day, a link to the clip bounced among the e-mail accounts of angry Senate Democratic staffers.

So it goes for the man who, a year ago, was 60,000 Ohio votes short of learning the nuclear codes. His party is ﬁnally ﬁnding its voice and tormenting Republicans on everything from Katrina to Iraq to the seedy corruption revealed in the Tom DeLay/Jack Abramoff/Duke Cunningham scandals. But Kerry—who Democrats almost unanimously say is keenly interested in running for president again in 2008—keeps reminding people of the bad old days, when the country had a choice and chose Bush. “There was so much pent-up anti-Bush anger that has not dissipated,” says Carter Eskew, former chief strategist to Al Gore in 2000. “There was no catharsis, and he’s a reminder of that frustration and anger.”

Don’t think Republicans fail to get this. When Bush delivered an earlier Iraq speech, he took a conspicuous swipe at Kerry, quoting from the senator’s remarks just before he voted to authorize the Iraq war. (Kerry had said that “a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in [Saddam Hussein’s] hands is a real and grave threat to our security.” Not very convenient for Democrats saying the WMD threat was a White House lie.) But Kerry’s office was delighted by the attention. “Republicans are going after him because they are scared of the support he has inside the party,” says Kerry consultant Jenny Backus. But that reaction is like a battered wife who’d rather be abused than ignored. Clearly, even though Kerry came oh so close in the election, Republicans don’t think he stands up well in the public’s memory, and they’re more than happy to address him as the face of the Democratic Party.

Which is why, as another frustrated senior Democratic strategist puts it, “congressional Democrats are spending an awful lot of time trying to ﬁgure out how to maneuver around him. They want some new ground. They want the basis for a new conversation. And Kerry’s very much stuck in reverse. It causes a lot of resentment.”

*****

For a brief golden October afternoon in Washington, D.C., precisely ﬁfty-one weeks after the 2004 presidential election, the past was indeed present, at least in the mind of John Kerry. A crowd ﬁlled Georgetown University’s Gaston Hall for what had been billed as a “major address” by Kerry on Iraq. There was the battery of TV cameras, the stand of American ﬂags, Teresa in the front row, and Marvin Nicholson Jr., Kerry’s “body man” from the ’04 campaign, adjusting the mike the way he’d done a thousand times before.

In came Kerry, slim and straight as an ironing board, with that rectangular coif of silver hair. But there was something else, too, a subtle sheepishness in the body language, a certain lilt to his grin, something intangible that seemed to say, I’m sorry, folks.

“Whatever else might be said about the campaign,” said the Georgetown professor introducing Kerry, “he certainly fought it hard and honorably.” Whatever else might be said? There’s plenty else that might be said. On that day, in fact, in that very room, people were saying it. “So he’s ﬁnally come up with an Iraq policy!” one reporter sitting in the back offered with a grin.

As Kerry took the podium, you couldn’t help but wonder how he’d break the ice and cut through the unavoidable awkwardness. Al Gore was surprisingly expert at this back in 2001, cracking that he used to be the next president of the United States. But Kerry seemed incapable of mustering a good joke. “I had thought about coming back here in a different role,” he said with a wan look on his face. “But I’m honored to be back.” Clang. Maybe the wounds are still too raw for self-effacing humor. Or maybe self-effacing just isn’t his thing.

To be fair, Kerry’s speech wasn’t half bad. “For misleading a nation into war, they will be indicted in the high court of history!” he thundered, and then he referred to Iraq as “one of the greatest foreign-policy misadventures of all time.” It made you wonder where this guy was back in 2004. But then the Georgetown kids lined up to ask questions, and the pain of it all came rushing back. Kerry’s responses were brutally long-winded, as if he were intent on slowly suffocating their earnestness with leaden ﬁlibusters. Eyes glazed. Yawns unfolded. Even the kids at the mike shifted their weight impatiently. Afterward, a few dozen students swarmed around Kerry, and he momentarily shifted into high glad-handing mode, soaking up the attention. Alas, the mutual love, such as it was, had to be cut short because of pressing business back in the Senate. “The senator’s only got twenty minutes on the vote!” announced Marvin, the genial body man, as he shooed people away. “He’s gotta go!” A budget amendment to increase spending on home-heating oil awaited him.

In presidential politics, defeat is usually total. Salvaging dignity and honor is no easy task, and by historical standards John Kerry has actually had it pretty good. Better than an instant punch line like Dukakis or Viagra salesman Bob Dole.

But it can’t be fun, either. “He’s gone from being the guy in the bubble entourage of 150 to being one of a hundred senators,” says one former Kerry aide. “That transition is not an easy one, I wouldn’t think.”

A Senate staffer adds, “There is this weird cognitive dissonance. You see Kerry in the Dirksen [Senate Office Building] cafeteria getting a salad, and you think, You were inches from becoming president, and now you’re getting your own salad. And it’s not even a good salad!”

Kerry was never much of a team player in the Senate, and staffers there say that hasn’t changed. When he returned to the Senate after the election, his Democratic colleagues respectfully thanked him, but they didn’t ask him to be their spiritual leader. He was just…back. Since then he’s been reserved in meetings with his fellow Democratic senators, and off the Senate ﬂoor reporters generally let him pass unmolested. The smallness of the job must hound him. Back in October, massive ﬂooding that threatened to burst a dam in the industrial Massachusetts town of Taunton forced him to ﬂy up there and help oversee his constituents’ crisis. Kerry’s aides say this is to his credit—it shows he believes in his work. “He didn’t need to come back to the Senate,” says David Wade, Kerry’s press secretary. “He likes his job.”

But never mind the present. Kerry, it seems, is still living in the past. He remembers the 59 million votes he received, more than any other presidential candidate in history—except for the guy who got 62 million that same day. He remembers the hours on election day when exit polls had him winning easily. He remembers his media guy, Bob Shrum, in a regrettably heady early-evening moment, addressing him as “Mr. President.” Mr. President. To hear those words must be something like an acid trip that went too far. You’re just never quite the same again.

Instead, Kerry has become just one of a slew of Democrats cluttering up the party’s message, complicating efforts to present a uniﬁed opposition against the president. “Normally, he would be the titular head of the opposition, but he’s not, so we have this kind of ten-headed monster that’s out there,” says Mike McCurry, a former Clinton press secretary and senior adviser to Kerry in the late days of his campaign. McCurry, who remains fond of Kerry, says of him (and of the various other Democrats who seem to be already running for president): “People have to stop freelancing. The reason people think Democrats have nothing to say is that we have ﬁfty people saying ﬁfty different things.” Kerry’s not the only offender, McCurry notes. But plenty of other Democrats say he’s the main one.

Party leaders might be warmer to Kerry if there were much evidence that Democrats still considered him their standard-bearer. But there isn’t. When asked in a November NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey whom they would support in the 2008 primaries, Kerry was Democratic voters’ fourth choice. Hillary Clinton blew everyone away with 41 percent. Kerry’s former running mate, John Edwards, got 14 percent. Even Al Gore, who’s almost surely not running, tallied 12 percent. Kerry? He clocked in at a measly 10 percent—lower even than the number of people who said they deﬁnitely would not vote for him again in the next Democratic primary.

Kerry aides consider such polls “utterly meaningless,” insisting he is still loved outside the Beltway. “People in airports walk up to him saying, ‘I should have voted for you’ or ‘I’m so glad you’re still out there,’ ” Backus says.

But it’s in the sanctum of strategists, moneymen, and influential activists who control the party that Kerry fares the worst. These are the people who feel Kerry blew his best chance and that he’s “delusional,” as I repeatedly heard, to think he’s still wanted.

“He thinks it’s about him,” says a former Kerry campaign aide who had signiﬁcant responsibilities in a key swing state. “He thinks all those people worked so hard and gave so much of their time because of him. And that is a gross misreading of the situation. I think he’s under the illusion that over 50 million Americans voted for him, as opposed to the reality that they voted against George W. Bush.”

Joe Lockhart says, “I don’t think there have been many people in the last year who have been sitting around saying, ‘Now that he has this practice under his belt, boy, in 2008 he’s gonna blow the doors off!’ ”

Another big-name Democrat who is close to party activists and donors, and who worked hard for Kerry in 2004, is even harsher: “Nobody has enthusiasm for him. We should have won that last time. He was running against that idiot.” (“We were running against an incumbent president in wartime,” counters Backus. “It was a challenge for any Democrat.”)

Kerry aides admit their man has never been loved by Washington insiders, but, Wade says, “I think you have to distinguish between inside Washington and outside Washington.” And there are those who insist you can’t underestimate how much he learned from running once. It’s a point Kerry himself makes. “If I get into that race,” he told CNN last November, “having learned what I’ve learned, and the experience I had last year, I think I know how to do what I need to do, and I will run to win.”

Kerry does have a Rolodex thick with the names of rich Democrats. And he’s got an e-mail list of 3 million Democratic activists. “Anybody who writes him off is a fool,” says Jim Jordan.

Several Democrats told me that they worry that Kerry doesn’t have anyone around who is willing to give him a candid assessment of his chances. “I don’t think John Kerry has a lot of really close friends in politics,” says a former adviser to Kerry’s campaign. “I don’t see a lot of people going to him and saying, ‘John, for the sake of your own pride, don’t do this.’ ”

“My guess,” says another veteran Democratic strategist, “is that a bunch of those money guys are telling John that they’re with him—and they’re waiting for Hillary Clinton to call.”

*****

Proof that God is a comedian: In November of last year, Kerry was called for jury duty in Boston’s Suffolk Superior Court. Somehow he actually made it onto the jury, for a case in which two men were suing the city for injuries sustained in an accident involving a school principal. Kerry was even chosen to be jury foreman. Thus were born dozens of snickering headlines noting that, one year after November 2004, John Kerry had ﬁnally won an election. Such are the indignities of life for a defeated nominee.

It’s enough to make you feel sorry for the guy. But then you remember the $87 billion quote, and the turgid speeches, and the Swift Boat debacle, and your empathy turns to anger.

Clearly, Kerry’s fellow Democrats aren’t about to forget any of that soon. Even a media strategist who likes and sympathizes with Kerry concedes: “People inside the Beltway want him to, like they say in Harry Potter’s world, disappearate.”

Sometimes they act like he already has. I vividly recall a moment on the Senate ﬂoor one afternoon in the spring of 2005. A dramatic showdown was under way over judicial nominations, with Republicans threatening to invoke their dreaded “nuclear option” and change the Senate’s rules so Democrats couldn’t ﬁlibuster judges. A large circle of Democrats had formed on the Senate ﬂoor, including key party leaders like Harry Reid, Richard Durbin, and Hillary Clinton, and there they held an animated conversation. Kerry ambled up and stood just outside the circle a couple of feet behind Reid, clearly wanting to join in. But like a cocktail-party clique that rejects a dullard, the group didn’t part to welcome him. In fact, no one paid him any attention at all.

Perhaps it was an insigniﬁcant moment. Or maybe it symbolized something important: a general sense among Democrats that no one is particularly interested in hearing from John Kerry anymore.

Either way, the circle of senators remained closed, and after a few more moments, John Kerry, the man who for a few hours on November 2, 2004, believed he was president of the United States, looked around awkwardly and tugged at his shirtsleeve. Then, ﬁnally, he did the thing that he hasn’t been able to bring himself to do on the larger stage. He put his head down and walked away.

MICHAEL CROWLEY is a senior editor at The New Republic.

White Leather? Gayest....Pope...Ever....

2006-01-20T13:20:00.000-05:00

Joey

2006-01-20T13:08:00.002-05:00

Do You Know That Girl?

2006-01-20T13:08:00.001-05:00

Got Milk?

2006-01-20T13:08:00.000-05:00

Julie White, Killer Agent

2006-01-20T13:03:00.000-05:00

Julie White, Killer Agent, in 'The Little Dog Laughed'
By ANITA GATES NYTimes January 20, 2006

In a way, Julie White owes it all to a stomach ulcer. It kept her home a lot in the third grade, and acting in the movie musicals she saw on television looked like great fun. But "growing up in Texas," she says, "I didn't realize it was a viable career choice."

It has been viable. Today she is basking in the kinds of reviews most actors only pray for.

From the first minute of Douglas Carter Beane's delicious comedy "The Little Dog Laughed," at Second Stage Theater, Ms. Wilson owns the stage. Her character, Diane, is a brash, fast-talking, infinitely sure-of-herself Hollywood agent determined to save her client, a closeted gay actor, from himself.

"Please, for me, as a favor, butch it up, Mary," she tells that client (Neal Huff) in Act 1. He has decided to come out just as he is about to play a gay character in a film. Bad timing.

Ben Brantley, writing in The New York Times, called Ms. Wilson's work "an irresistible adrenaline rush of a performance." He said of Diane, "When she's hammering out the clauses in a contract (taken to the last delicious degree of absurdity by Mr. Beane), she's Scheherazade."

Over steak frites and iced tea at Le Madeleine, a restaurant down the block from the theater, Ms. White is certainly compelling but much gentler. A dentist's daughter born in a naval hospital in San Diego and brought up in Austin, Tex., she can even be self-deprecating.

"I'm about as deep as a Dixie cup," Ms. Wilson announced during a discussion about acting approaches. When Method actors are backstage connecting with primal memories, she's reading Us magazine, she said.

With four hours between last Saturday's matinee and evening performances, she talked about her life and career so far. She wore a turtleneck and tan cords but Diane's hairstyle; her own is usually curlier and looser.

At 44, she is enviably thin. Good metabolism, she said, but also mentioned "three floors of stairs between the dressing room and the stage." That helps. And she smokes, although it's her New Year's resolution to quit.

Ms. Wilson said she never had a master plan for success. Growing up, she did local shows, driving herself to auditions as a teenager. She acted in "Two Gentlemen of Verona" and "Company" in Austin community theater and attended Southwest Texas State University. (The University of Texas was "too big.")

Joseph Stein and Stephen Schwartz saw her in their musical "The Baker's Wife" and suggested she move to New York. She did, enrolling at Fordham University, but she started getting work and never graduated.

Ms. Wilson made her New York stage debut in 1988 in "Lucky Stiff," an Off Broadway musical. Her subsequent credits include Wendy Wasserstein's "Heidi Chronicles" (a small role) and "Spike Heels" with Kevin Bacon and Tony Goldwyn. She originated the role of Beth in Donald Margulies's "Dinner With Friends." Theresa Rebeck wrote "Bad Dates" for her.

During the 1990's, she also played the wacky neighbor on the sitcom "Grace Under Fire" for four seasons. More recently, she was a memorable funeral home owner in several episodes of "Six Feet Under." She's headed to the West Coast again soon, even though "The Little Dog Laughed" may have a life beyond its current extended closing date, Feb. 26.

She will be going with her husband of four years, Christopher Conner, an actor. Her 19-year-old daughter, Alexandra (from an early marriage to a New York restaurateur), is a freshman at the University of Southern California.

With the flurry of attention being paid to her, Ms. Wilson said she was a little suspicious of real fame because "people become big Macy's balloons of themselves."

There is certainly the danger of becoming typecast as a tough-agent type. She and her current character have some things in common, Mr. Beane said. "Julie is a motormouth," he said. But she didn't fit his original concept of Diane. "I had somebody completely different in mind," he recalled. "But I decided to let go and let Julie."

Shifting Attitude Toward Gays

2006-01-19T15:34:00.000-05:00

Advocate.com
January 18, 2006

New military publication signals shifting attitude toward gays

A new four-volume series on the cultural and psychological dimensions of American military life includes, for the first time, a chapter on the service of openly gay troops. The chapter describes social and institutional changes needed to lift the U.S. armed forces' ban on openly gay members.

Experts say the inclusion of the topic in a publication endorsed by major military scholars reflects a shifted landscape on the question of military service by gays. Because a majority of junior enlisted service members now say that gays and lesbians should serve openly, according to an Annenberg poll, and because the vast majority of service members now say that they feel personally comfortable around gays and lesbians, integration is seen as a much less difficult option than would have been the case 12 years ago, when President Clinton tried to lift the gay ban.

Described by scholars as a "path-breaking analysis" of the military experience and a "comprehensive review" of factors influencing military performance, the compilation addresses the emotional impact of combat, methods of coping with war, the role of spirituality in military life, issues affecting family life, cultural diversity within the armed forces, and more. Its authors include military officers, academic experts, health care professionals, and others who have taken part in primary research about the personal and institutional qualities of military life.

"The decision of the editors and publisher to include analysis on how to modify military culture to accommodate this policy change is an important milestone," said Nathaniel Frank, senior research fellow at the Center for the Study of Sexual Minorities in the Military. "It reflects an evolving understanding that the current exclusionary policy on gay troops is harmful and outdated and that change is inevitable."

The chapter authors explain that compliance with new regulations—in this case nondiscrimination toward gays—will be most stable and enduring if strong leaders enforce new expectations by creating high costs for noncompliance. The initial focus of change in this case, they explain, should be the behavior, rather than attitudes, of heterosexuals; but over time, it is reasonable to expect that personnel will conform to new policies because they believe their conduct reflects their identity as members of the institution.