Class for Class

And the performance to beat over the weekend was the luminous atleticism of Roger Federer winning his first French Open and only the 6th man to win all grand slams.

LOTD

Dave & Charles blogging the Tonys realtime for the NYTs

D.I. Doing her best impression of Liza Minnelli: Liza Minnelli. “This is exquisite,” she says. No way there’s a dry eye in that house.

potn by Jan Carroll

‘Finished wishin’

Stage

‘I’ve got to get to New YOork’

Those fabulous society cave-ins Edith Bovier Beale and Little Edie Beale have decamped in high style (turned low rent) East Hampton environs in an inventive multi-tech set at the Roberts Theatre. The Philadelphia Theatre Company opens the creaky shutters of the musical version of Grey Gardens.

I finally figured out why the documentary film and now this musical has such a gay following- its camp appeal, Kennedys and Bouviers natch, but also because it is Whatever Happened to Mommie Dearest.

potn by Jan Carroll

‘fern dive’

Call to Arms

Johnny Symons’ new documentary ‘Ask Not’ is a potent j’accuse against the military’s ban on gay Americans serving openly. The film couldn‘t be more timely, just as gay America waits for President Obama to dismantle DADT as he had promised to do. It will be broadcast in most PBS markets on the Independent Lens series June 9.

Gay audiences know Symons from 2002 festival circuit hit ‘Daddy & Papa’ his own gay adoption parent story. ‘Ask Not’ is less emotional in its dissection of the flashpoints of gays serving in the US military.

Interviews with retired officers to active duty boots on the ground in Iraq, the film not only illuminates the hateful absurdities of the military policy, it presents the real lives of the gay soldiers.

“The army doesn’t want me because I’m gay, and my gay friends don’t want me because I’m a soldier.” An African American San Franciscan stoically observes as he prepares to deploy to Iraq. His reality encapsulates what gay American soldiers have to suck up.

Symons’ ground video from Iraq that speaks volumes about the real conditions soldiers face on the line. Summed up movingly by a gay soldier who said. “You can turn off your emotions, you definitely can turn off your sexual feelings.”

And that is just the starting point. Since DADT, more than 12,000 military have been oppressed, harassed, brutalized, slandered and eventually kicked out under DADT. “These aren’t abstract numbers, these are real people.” another soldiers says standing in protest on the Capital Mall.

But, Symons’ tries not to preach to the choir, this is a call to arms. He follows volunteer inductees from ‘Right to Serve’ that stages sit-ins at recruitment centers, challenges GLBT Americans to return to GLBT activism.

The opposition presents the same tired arguments- unit cohesion, morale and men being stalked in the showers- reasons that are more out of touch with reality than ever before. Yet the same arguments are being put forth and may succeed in keeping DADT in place.

Symons follows several soldiers and recruits trying to cope with DADT, victims of discrimination and the cesspool of homophobic politics. Summed up by a soldier this way “A policy that protects …homophobes.”

LOTD

Overheard at Sweat Gym when that international news story Susan Boyle was on tellie about how she was rushed to the hospital for ‘nervous exhaustion’

“She went from zero to Diva in three shows.”

maybe those moonbeams shooting out of her head were too much to bear.