ARTICLES
Stonewall's Gift: 50 Years Ago Queer Fury Erupted and Changed the World
Rolling Stone | Jun. 25, 2019 | In the spring of 1968, weeks before the start of her final year of life, Judy Garland met with a biographer to discuss collaborating on her memoir. The author, Gerold Frank, was a journalist well-known for ghostwriting the life stories of celebrity women, including Zsa Zsa Gabor. The meeting, arranged through Sid Luft, Judy's manager and third ex-husband, was set for 10 p.m. at New York's St. Moritz Hotel. But at the appointed hour, Frank and Luft, who were dining at the Plaza nearby, got word that the superstar needed more time.
A match made in heaven
WASHINGTON POST | JUN. 21, 2019 | This month's 50th anniversary of Stonewall, the Greenwich Village uprising that launched the modern LGBT movement, was always going to be complicated. What may seem like a straightforward chance to celebrate LGBT progress actually masks a fault line that has divided our movement since its start: whether our goal is equality or liberation, a fight for the right to be treated like everyone else or the freedom to be authentically ourselves. Do we seek belonging in the world as it is (including the military, marriage and parenting) or the chance to transform the world, by throwing off repressive norms, into a place where all of us — queer and non-queer alike — can be more free?
A Gay Inmate's Last Chance, and the Weight of History
MEDIUM | Nathaniel Frank | Apr. 10, 2019 | In 1974, a lonely 17-year-old boy named Charles Rhines, who lived in a small town in South Dakota, joined the Army. Rhines had grown up closeted, and probably autistic, in rural America, and like many gay boys of that era, he hoped military service would prove his manhood and give him somewhere to belong. Instead, just months after enlisting, and days after a playful twirl in the barracks appeared to rile up a fellow soldier who accused him of showing off his back side, Rhines was struck from behind while in an open bay shower. He was hit so hard his forehead bounced off the hard tile wall and he fell to the ground. Through the mental fog appeared his accuser and three other soldiers, who held him down and took turns anally raping him.
The freedom of Fire Island. The rebellion of Stonewall. And now, the WorldPride of New York.
CNN | Apr. 2, 2019 | New York (CNN) — The first generation of lesbian, gay and all manner of gender-dissident New Yorkers who flocked to the tiny spit of land named Cherry Grove came largely from the city's bohemian theater and arts world. Here, just 60 miles east of Manhattan, this despised and misunderstood community built a utopian outpost where they could not only be themselves, but could create a model culture -- one of expressive freedom, chosen communities and pleasure-seeking -- that the rest of the world would soon emulate.
The military's new transgender policy is a ban, no matter how the Pentagon spins it
Los Angeles Times | Mar. 20, 2019 | The Pentagon last week released its latest policy memo on transgender military service, an effort to bring President Trump's tweeted ban in line with court rulings that had blocked the administration from implementing it. There are numerous problems with the policy, but one, in particular, ought to bring the entire edifice tumbling down: It is based on the wholly deceptive claim that allowing transgender individuals to serve would mean giving them "special accommodations" — a reprise of the religious right's strategy of opposing gay rights by calling equal rights "special rights."
Trump's Shutdown Is a Historic Opportunity for Democrats
SLATE | Jan. 16, 2019 | With Democrats now in charge of the House of Representatives, and the country nearing a fifth week of the disastrous Trump shutdown, progressives are beginning to feel new momentum. But while Democrats may be poised to win the short-term political argument over the shutdown, the pain and suffering it has inflicted are part of a long-term right-wing strategy that's older and broader than many people realize. That strategy involved a decades-long campaign to turn everything from the courts to the Congress to the country's overall cultural character sharply rightward by stigmatizing forms of collective action—government, unions, even voting—that history shows are necessary counterweights to the greed of the powerful.
Six Reasons to STOP Trump, Six Months until Election Day
Medium | May 8, 2018 | After a year spent absorbing the shock of Donald Trump's election to the White House, and watching to see if the world would sputter off its axis instantly or work its way to a slow, rolling boil before scorching the universe and everything in it, my husband and I felt ready to do what we could to keep the earth spinning. We discussed how to add the most value to the effort to stop Trump and the GOP from ruining our country. And we wanted our friends and family to be able to join the effort in a strategic way. Most were appalled by everything Trump said and did, but many didn't necessarily view themselves as activists. They cared deeply, but felt powerless to effect electoral change because they already lived in Democratic districts, where their votes seemed not to count.
The Pentagon Is Wrong. Gender Transition Is Effective.
NEW YORK TIMES | Apr. 9, 2018 | What does it mean to be transgender? A Pentagon report released last month, recommending that most transgender Americans be disqualified from military service or forced to serve in their birth gender without full health care, has renewed debate over this question.
How Clueless Straight White Guys Excuse Religious Homophobia
Slate | Dec. 8, 2017 | Why does it seem that, every time a national debate erupts about the place of minorities in American life, a gaggle of Straight White Guys with little connection to or understanding of these minorities holds forth on how they should or shouldn't resolve their grievance about unequal treatment? This week's version came in response to Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Division, the Supreme Court case of Jack Phillips, a Christian baker who refused to sell a wedding cake to a gay couple, Charlie Craig and David Mullins. Phillips is seeking a license to discriminate based on artistic and religious freedom.
The Supreme Court wedding cake case isn't about cake
Washington Post | Dec. 4, 2017 | The Supreme Court will hear arguments Tuesday in the case of a Colorado baker, Jack C. Phillips, who refused to make a wedding cake for a gay couple. Although Colorado law bans discrimination in public accommodations, some may feel tempted to sympathize with Phillips, who argues that the First Amendment protects both his religious and expressive freedom to choose who buys his cakes.
