PhillyStage

epic radical faerie realness =

judy

Taylor Mac

judy

A 24-Decade History of Popular Music

judy

at the Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts

 The undisputed house down performance at Philadelphia International PIFA was Taylor Mac’s A 24 Decade History of Popular Music at the Merriam Theater.

Mac’s opus features over two centuries of hit songs as a cultural document & interpreted through a social justice lens/ GLBTQueer fantasia by ‘judy’ Mac’s preferred pronoun because “my gender is performer.”

the nomenclature perhaps an homage to the great Judy Garland, who used to be called leather lungs, because of her versatility and vocal stamina, qualities that can certainly apply to Taylor Mac, previously performed in the uncharted time zone of 24 continuous hours, but for PIFA a still staggering 12 hour installments.Popular songs and music that annotate the cultural history of America, from decorous baroque of the late 17th century to our tumultuous and perilous times.

Part 1 covered 1776 to 1896 on June 2 covering music from 1776 to 1896 and on June 9, Philly Pride weeken spanning music from 1896 to the present. judy was joined at various times by over 30 musicians and other guests including Philadelphia Temperance Choir, dance troupes Urban Bush Women, Tangle Movement Arts, Camden Sophisticated Sisters/Distinguished Brothers and drag diva bestie Martha Graham Cracker. And working both shows onstage and in the audience the corps of ‘Dandy Minions’ of dancers, aerialists, burlesque performers and superdivas stomping the aisles.

The 246 song cycle showcasing among other things Machine Dazzle’s devastating radical faerie drag realness with judy transitioned into (with the help of dressers) in front of the audience.

I was only able to attend a chunk of four hours+ spanning the 60s-through the 80s~

by that time, judy had been on the Merriam stage for six or so hours- Here are just a few random highlights

First kudos to the incredible vocals of backup singers-soloists Steffanie Christ’an and Heather Christian.  judy’s blazing version of the Stones ‘Gimmie Shelter’ the scorching  duet with Christ’an was the house down as ‘judy’ turning it into a GLBTQueer anthem of liberte.

Bringing girl group realness to the Supreme 60s gay jukebox DL song “You Keep Me Hangin’ On.”  From “I’m Just a Soul (whose intentions are good)” to Nina’s Simone’s “Mother Goddamn” her searing j’accuse against racism in America.  judy gave the backstory of Simone appropriating an essentially minstrel tune structure in a searing  j’accuse against racism in America.

Judy mused on the parallels (and differences) of the black civil-rights movement of the 60s and the gay rights movement. judy providing local history about a son of West Chester PA, black gay activist Bayard Rustin organizing the march on Washington in 1963 and kept in the background by the movement leaders because he was an out black gay man.

judy talked about the protests in San Francisco and historic Stonewall riots, the queens who fought back on the weekend that Judy Garland died. He sang ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’ finished off with “over the rainbow” on piano.  A member of the audience portraying dead Judy Garland, was carried out in a spontaneous cortege over the stage and down the aisles with the Dandy Minions in fab funeral drag.

The gay sexual liberation of the 70s transitioned to the catastrophic decade of death, survival and solidarity in queer America.  Judy inspired by the uncompromised gay firebrands of ACT-UP Larry Kramer and Maxine Woolf as inspiration to create unapologetic confrontation through civil action and public performance art.

Judy exalted the soundtracks sex in 70s gay club backrooms, where between hookups “one minute you could be talking about Foucault, the next Cher.” Refusing to be shamed about anonymous sex, joking that it was indeed an intimate experience, consider the truism “a stranger knows something about you that your mother will never know.”

Looking for songs specifically composed by out gay men during the worst years of the AIDS epidemic in New York, when record producers were blocking any GLBTQ expression. judy found a searing testament of courage with out gay British songwriter Marc Almonds’ dirge ballade about grim realities of the disease and the inhumanity that PWAs faced in the 80s.

judy’s raucous survival manifesto through the AIDS years a mash-up of Led Zeppelin’s titanic Kashmir with the static disco frenzy of ‘Stayin Alive.’ judy’s vocal prowess seems almost in a category by itself, judy can turn something like the musically static ‘Addicted to Love’ turned into a polemic against the ‘moral majority’ movement of Christian evangelists and political hypocrites who demonized the gay community and called for PWAs to be put in camps and branded.

judy was loathe to learn his “Snakeskin Cowboy” (about “fag bashing” Nugent proudly said publicly) judy nevertheless turned the song into an ironic cautionary tale about washed up homopanicked fossil rockers.

Judy slipped into a blinding Purple sequined jumpsuit with a glitter Mohawk headdress to perform “the best make out song ever” singing Prince’s “Purple Rain” perched on the Merriam Theater balcony ledge.

Even after eight hours of performance, perfect pitch, even in an air pocket or two. balladeer, B’way belter, soulful chanteuse, art song artiste. judy’s muscled baritone on Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain is Going to Fall” the song reaches dramatic heights that Dylan’s limited vocal ability could not and all of Dylan’s poetry is realized.

On Bowie’s “Pretty Things” judy is the equally powerful falsetto queen and is the baritone crooner on ‘Heroes’ a manifesto of sexual freedom, and accompanied by the burlesque troupe in leather in the balconies, for some acrobatic sex,

Inflatable Macy’s Day Parade size penises of the American and Russian flags are floated & come together.  judy weighs in with scathing editorial as the gasbags deflate.

The transitions from era to era with judy being changed in Extravaganza symbolic costumes in front of the audience, when judy is near naked, it was symbolic too, of this full throated, thrilling performance. She evokes the ghost of Judy at Carnegie Hall, who told  the audience in 1962, that they can stay all night and she can sing them all. In Philly for Pride Weekend judy took everybody over and back through the GLBTQueer rainbow, not only singing the history of pop music, but reclaiming our history through theater, music and drop dead diva drag.

 

 

 

 

LGBTQ=+PridePoetries

endlessly, from last night

   fr Right Before I Met Vincent

the pulse
blue echo

the concussive
murmurings earlier
spying my belly button
in a drawer between
with shredded  biker socks

still molting at 7:42

rusty gaze

as marble sinews pulse
from vodka/quaalude
vision

geometric ink

butterfly on your left shoulder

(that you don’t remember getting when

you were stationed in San Diego

the day you burned your dress blues)

danced the night away out of our minds
lusting off
to eternity
this trail of

whispers
ending in a
glitteringly butch
shadows
dreamt only once before now hover in
diamond movement
tattoo

à l’après-midi d’un faune
Angling over a
busted wall
-when did you
share me
with candy-
from the other club last night
it is time to go out to dance, no?
is it still 3:20

1972 drenched
In sex forgotten in a flash with  all the
beautiful ones inhabiting the
Atlantis galleria
busted open

in the rumbling
strata of debris or the glorious
basilica liberated from any former crime
in faith knowing we
we are giving our bodies to each
other

resplendent sweated mighty

unlost

human havoc

sane all the same
sounds of falling onyx
& crystals
dripping
cracks below
Leaves scrapping  branches
of blue mercury

running through
Fingers onto
the temples
we hear
sonic psalms
La la la Sacre du Printemps
to escape the sound
Of the blood pulsing together

of the blood of ancestors

of the blood of ideas

of the blood of body

the blood of mind

the blood of soul

witness to live

inside a
Coldest room
waiting for scarred
voices down here

behind
Flamingotangerinefucshia
Dahliadarling ascendent
souls’ blood dancing

from the  indigo  sea

Andy-was-here-once&
Paul&Assotto
Larry&Timmy&
Keith&Ted&Pearl&SarahVaughan&Joey&Christopher
Georgio&Alberto&Michael&Marcel&Menage

&PeterMiguelJimmy&Sylverster&JohnAnthony=et. fuckin’ al. baby
nobody walked away
empty hearted
the corners
of the rooms folded up
not inside shadow
on bluer shadow
pulsing resonance
concussive dissonance
as the body starburst

endlessly through that smashed atom
still dancing with Shiva we dance for you&we dance for with you perpetuo molto

on ink-night beholden to our rainbow warriors
                                                                                                                          so mighty real

for Sylvester & all warriors

Political Theater~ GOP doubletalk edition

(LW pic from Philly Pride Parade, June 2014)

Sen. Paul courting gay votes or is it the same two-steppin’ GOP moves?

Earlier this month, at an event in Iowa, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky) sent his first gay weather balloon up, sort of regarding his position(s) on marriage equality — he DID support a constitutional amendment defining man/woman only, but if the GOP wanted to win elections they had to have to be more inclusive… that they might, as a party have to at least be willing to agree to disagree.</p>

“I mean, many of these people joined the Republican Party because of these social issues. So I don’t think we can completely flip.” Paul said. Fred Sainz, vice president of the Human Rights Campaign, told MetroWEEKLY that Paul’s comments have proved puzzling. “I can’t decide whether to be disturbed or pleased, so I’ve settled on confused,” he said. Fred is more diplomatic than I am. I’m just pissed at Sen. Paul’s smug ambiguity. His song has been sung with different verses so many times before by politicians of both parties, but the GOP has the worst record on saying they want a ‘bigger tent’ and collapsing that tent once they get in.

In 2000, for instance, at the Republican Convention in Philadelphia, at a press event hosted by the Log Cabin Republicans ostensibly to congratulate itself on the headway it had made courting the GOP, who in turn was starting to count gay votes for George W. Bush. David Greer, then head of the PA Log Cabins who I interviewed for an oped piece in the Advocate (Who’s Afraid of Gay Republicans?) told me that a Bush campaign would welcome qualified personnel who happened to be gay into the “highest echelons of the administration.” Meanwhile, across town on the convention center floor the party was scrubbing an suggestion of pro-gay civil rights language from their platform. Even the loyal and deluded Log Cabin Republicans have given up on believing GOP’s lies about acceptance and tolerance.

Sen. Paul may think he courting a more moderate voting bloc, but, it is in the most cynical way and gay America knows it. If he really feels non-condemning toward gays why isn’t he railing against the 63 Texas GOP legislators who just endorsed “conversion therapy” methods to de-gay youth. Bet they still have those electro-shock kits from the ’50s stashed away.

The GOP makes much fodder out of Barack Obama’s “evolution” on gay marriage, to cover any charges that their party alone is homophobic. The president has turned his page big time and has done more to advance GLBTQ civil-rights initiatives starting with the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and a host of other gay rights initiative. Yet in 2014 we have to hear from the crazed right wing of your party theories about the ruination of straight marriage, indeed, the collapse of America if marriage equality goes national . Wait, I just remembered, I thought that was supposed to happen with the repeal of D*A*D*T*?

Paul’s two-stepping is bad enough, but the soon to be retired, rabidly antigay Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (R-MN) isn’t so cautious anymore. In an interview with a Christian radio station she proclaimed that the gay “agenda” is to do away with consent laws and that we will promote pedophilia. For this statement alone, Bachmann should be answering to the American people on the floor of Congress. But, because she is viewed as a religious conservative, she gets a pass from her colleagues of both parties.

I wonder if Bachmann or even Paul ever heard of decorated Marine Eric Alva, the first soldier wounded in Iraq, or would care that he is gay and fought for their freedoms on the front line? I wonder if they know that before Edith Windsor won her DOMA case, she took care of her lover Thea, who had progressive multiple sclerosis for 30 years. Windsor had to sue to keep the assets that they had earned together because they were not recognized at the time as a couple in New York.

Course, Bachmann and Paul don’t want to talk about any achievements contributions of GLBTQ artists, writers, scholars, lawyers, doctors, teachers, community leaders, police, senators or even their own colleagues in a respectful way. GLBTQ American citizen who contribute inestimably every day while bigoted ‘preachers’ and politicians are feverishly working to marginalize us.

What would Bachmann have to say face to face to Sgt. Alva? Would she be just as condemning as when she is spouting hate speech from a radio booth wrapped in her barbed – wire flag, bible in hand? And what nerve for you Sen. Rand Paul to think you can politically frame a civil-rights movement that started over 50 years ago? Can you tell us what you have ever put forward that expressed any truth about GLBTQ Americans that you should expect even one vote from us

Stage

more from GayFest!
GayFest! is running plays in repertory and all four of the full-productions are on this week. Not a small feat on limited budgets, and the festival’s corp of designers, directors and performers have been willing to wear more than one hat. .Last weekend, some of the directors were onstage themselves, showing their acting chops, in the staged reading of Standing on Ceremony a benefit for Equality PA. And MVP GF! actor Calvin Atkinson is not only is starring in one of Daniel Talbott trio of plays as the young bullied man who knows baseball and Beyonce moves also did a great job directing Geoffrey Nauffts’ play Next Fall about Luke, a devout young gay Christian/waiter-actor in New York, who falls in love with Adam, a writer/retail worker and devout agnostic in the middle of a midlife crisis. They have great sex and are simpatico if they just avoid religion, but their world really gets turned upside down and Luke’s divorced parents appear on the scene after Luke is in an accident. The ultra-conservative dad and Adam fight over their respective right to speak for Luke when he is unable to speak for himself. The tragic plot leads to exploring weighty themes that Nauffts’ appropriates without didactic conclusions. Peter Zielinski and Richie Sklar have palpable chemistry as the lovers. Craig Copas brings all the necessary grit to the dad, and crucially, does not over do the character’s morbid bigotry. Peggy Smith as the mom steals your heart with humor, grace and lilting southern accent, who knows she talks too much and says more with her silences and tender gestures.

Next Fall runs through 8.22 at Adrienne Theater’s Skybox 

 

Stage

Director Rich Rubin has been bringing the work of dramatist Daniel Talbott, of the Rattlesticks Playwrights Theater out of NY&LA, to GayFest first with Slipping and then with commissioned work Mike and Seth, and last year’s post NY apocalypto drama Somebody Brought Me, all distinctly different. This year it was Rubin’s concept to put three short works of Talbott’s together, that not only display Talbott’s incredible versatility as a writer, but a chance for four fine young actors to work with great material.

In Break My Face on Your Hand Calvn Atkinson (who can by now be called a seasoned Talbott actor, appearing in all of his festival plays) plays a teen named Bear who can dance and is comfortable with watching baseball, wearing dresses to rehearse very balletic Beyonce moves. He has been bullied by Trev, who has been ordered by the school to be more sensitive to him. Talbott gets under the surface of all of the bullying buzz phrases. Atkinson and Mark Cooper as the popular kid who is hostile to anger management get under the skin of these young men. Cooper is also in ‘You Know My Name’ as Guy 2 who sits on a bench in the nude, with just his groom’s socks on (he left everything else at the altar) and a strategically placed radio, he listens to ’Disco Lemonade’ and Guy 1, played by Mark Sherlock joins him and they strike up wending conversation that ends up changing both of their lives. Framed with a nod to Albee’s Zoo Story and even has a wry line about Albee & his naked highway adventure, meanwhile, Talbott’s naturalized poetic dialogue is beautifully delivered by these actors. What Happened When is a dark family drama about two brothers and each escaping an abusive father, but one having to relive the pain as he tries to make his way in the world. Sherlock plays the older brother who gets him to face truths and Connor Feimster is the younger man who must somehow bring hope to his dreams that have been completely smashed. Hard stuff, sensitively played. Fine direction by Rubin showcases another Talbott hit for GayFest! 

You Know My Name: A Daniel Talbott Trio plays at the Skybox at the Adrienne Theater thru 8.22

Booksbooksbooks

Singer Michael Callen died in 1993. He may be most remembered as a member of the a cappella group The Flirtations, but that not was what first put him in the national spotlight.

Poet Essex Hemphill died in 1995 and may be remembered from the infamous PBS broadcast of Marlon Riggs’ documentary Tongues Untied, but he was already a famous out poet-performer in his own right. The achievements of these two artists turned AIDS activists, fighting on the front lines during the height of the epidemic, are chronicled in Martin Duberman’s moving dual biography Hold Tight Gently.

The title in fact comes from Hemphill’s groundbreaking book Brother to Brother, a collection of stories, essays, and poems by and for gay black men. Callen and Hemphill were fearless activists and were among the inestimable number of American gay male artists lost in the first 15 years of the AIDS epidemic.

Duberman not only has complete command of the social and political landscape of the AIDS era, he was intimately involved with advocacy himself and writes from the inside track of the heroic and sometimes desperate measures of gay organizations in fighting for medical and civil rights of people living with AIDS.

Time has not softened Duberman’s scalding assessment of the governmental indifference, medical politics, and prevailing homophobia that cost so many gay lives.

The author also doesn’t pull back from revisiting the often-counterproductive infighting of a community overwhelmed with loss and at war with the straight world. His perspective and analysis of this monumentally important movement of AIDS activism, is, from several angles, rescued history. Strategically, Duberman includes some of his own diaries entries the grimmest years of the epidemic.

Callen and Hemphill were artists at the height of their creative powers when they were diagnosed with HIV-AIDS. As different as they were in background, careers, families, and relationships, they were on some parallel tracks with a selfless and fierce commitment to AIDS activism, despite personal sacrifices.

Callen, a gay white man from the Midwest moved to New York to perform and after his diagnosis fought for AIDS patient advocacy. He was first diagnosed with AIDS in the early 80s and early on worked to get information about diagnosis, treatment, and prevention to the gay community in New York. He was a long-term AIDS survivor and fierce advocate for getting explicit information out about safe sex, working tirelessly for advocacy of people with AIDS being part of the medical and social response to the epidemic.

He appeared before congress to bring AIDS awareness and expose political hypocrisies and homophobia. Callen knew as much or more about the medical facts and theories of AIDS and worked with everyone from Dr. Mathilde Krim to gay citizens and all minorities dealing with AIDS.

Hemphill, a black gay man from Washington, DC, worked to bring together the disparate voices of black gay men, lesbian writers and artists in performance and print in DC, Philadelphia, and eventually on a national level, artists and activists reaching out for visibility, dialogue and inclusion, in what was to become dubbed the Second Harlem Renaissance. He fought for recognition of gay identity, challenging national African American civic and religious leaders to deal with acceptance of GLBTQ minorities within hetero-normative minority communities.

Both Callen and Hemphill retreated from activism and returned to the sanctuary of their creative lives as their health declined and creating some of their best work evocative of their artistic, political, and gay lives. Callen writing and recording songs that would result in his finest vocal collection of his material as a solo artist and his collaborations with the Flirtations. Duberman includes some of Hemphill’s most stirring poetry from his final book Vital Signs.

At the height of the AIDS epidemic, Duberman founded CUNY’s Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies to further LGBT scholarship and curriculum. This book stands among his finest achievements, as impressive, in different ways, as his masterful 2007 biography of American art and ballet curator Lincoln Kirstein.

Like it is in that work, Duberman’s objective analysis, as well as his activist voice, is incisive, passionate, and poetic.

– See more at: http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/hold-tight-gently-michael-callen#sthash.3GdjIaGk.dpuf

Booksbooksbooks

Dan Savage’s latest

Columnist Dan Savage, the gay author, activist and relationship guru to a large straight readership via his syndicated column Savage Love, is also a media hottie, seen frequently on CNN and HuffPost.

He is, happily, anathema to the religious right and the GOP hacks, who want to diminish his clout. They are wasting their sanctimonious breath. He is after all the perpetrator of the infamous cyber bomb that will forever, link politician Rick Santorum to…a byproduct of…well you know the rest. He weighed in on many of the words and deeds of all of the toxic spawn of the GOP primaries and he is more popular than ever.

Savage pulls few punches on a whole range of issues in his new book American Savage, a collection of essays about sex, politics, religion, media, gay-parenting, social-networking, realpolitik and homophobia. The book is also a snapshot memoir of Savage’s 17 year marriage with his husband Terry and their 15 year old son DJ, who they adopted at birth. His essays are witty, personal and economic in detangling complex social issues past buzzwords or media scenarios.

Whatever methods Savage uses to expose hypocrisies, he is in fact never more eloquent, lacerating or witty when he goes after anti-gay politicians with facts, history and logic that eviscerates the anti-gay myths, lies and aspersions leveled toward gays and minorities.

For GLBTQ Americans, Savage is no less than a hero, for his most inspired It Gets Better Project, his anti-bullying campaign. His and Terry’s outreach to GLBTQ teens who live in oppressive or abusive circumstances or are struggling with their sexual identity. Everyone from President Obama to the San Francisco ball team have made IGB videos.

In one of the book’s most poignant pieces My Son Comes Out, Savage turns his son’s announcement that he is straight into a snapshot of how normal such a scene now is. A normal a scene as a Norman Rockwell painting. Meanwhile, it is also routine for MJ to get dropped on his grandparents so his parents can attend the Folsom Street Fair in San Francisco for a day in the sun for s&m carnivale.

Savage is an absolutist about safe, consensual sex, no matter what kink is explored. He has given tutorials to many a straight young man on the location of the clitoris. Savage writes about sex not only in healthy, practical and clinical terms, but as a vital pursuit of remaining a happy, healthy and fulfilled human being.

His uninhibited scholarship of sex education spills over into politics. Savage, is nonetheless, just as frank in exposing right wing political machinations as they apply to issues not only about gay civil rights, but about physician assisted suicide for terminally ill patients. In his essay ‘Extended Stay’ he writes movingly about his mother’s right to die with dignity and her stated desire to be kept out of pain. “It wasn’t a choice that the Catholic Church, Pope Benedict, or Joel Connelly had a right to make for her.” he writes.

In ‘Bigot Christmas’ recounts Savage’s now infamous ‘dinner table’ debate with Brian Brown, head of the antigay group YouTube debate with Savage faces down the antigay dragon with logic and a money shot provided not by Savage this time, but his husband Terry, who had had enough of suffering fools gladly (even for the famous husband) Terry asked Brown “Do you think our son should be taken away from us?” Let’s just say that the bigot’s answer did not sit well with the gay father, husband and homeowner. Huh… cue Jaws music.

Booksbooksbooks

Who’s Yer Daddy? 
Gay Writers Celebrate Their Mentors and Forerunners

Inaugural Poet Richard Blanco shaking hands with the President (photo: RichardBlanco)

Terrace Books | http://uwpress.wisc.edu
Hardcover, $26.95, e-book $16.95

Jim Elledge and David Groff, the editors of Who’s Yer Daddy? Gay Writers Celebrate Their Mentors and Forerunners note in their introduction that some contributors had bristled at the bawdy implications of its title and explained that they chose it for a sense of fun and for those offended few to focus on the subtitle.

The book appears almost a year after Christopher Bram’s vital history Eminent Outlaws, which tracks the gay male writers who busted open the literary closet vis-à-vis the post-WWII gay civil rights movement. This anthology is a great companion volume.

39 authors weigh in on their “daddy’s” from the semi-closeted world of Walt Whitman, Thomas Williams, Gore Vidal, James Baldwin and Truman Capote through The Violet Quill revolution and the era of out-and-proud gay writers. Some influencers and mentors are not gay men. Richard Blanco, President Obama’s inaugural poet weighed in with Making a Man Out of Me, an essay about his grandmother as his main literary influence by trying to butch Blanco up. Her harshness drove Blanco to escape in his literary world that would validate his dream of being a gay writer.

Just as present in these essays, are straight men and women, as well as GLBTQ icons Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf, among others, are cited by several of their gay male literary decedents.

Stage artist-writer Tim Miller’s Jumpstart ruminates on having the literary DNA from Nijinsky to Allen Ginsberg and everybody in between. Meanwhile his longtime husband (unofficially) Australian writer Alistair McCartney’s essay Teenage Riot charts his booky puppy love with Tennessee Williams, Oscar Wilde and Jean-Paul Sartre, among other usual suspects.

Kenny Fries’ How I Learned to Drive, The Educations of a Gay Disabled writer is a condensed, but no less moving account of Fries connecting with other writers, notably his 20 year friendship with poet Adrienne Rich, facing the prejudices and isolation of writers with disabilities. Like many of these essays, you hope the author considers expanding to memoir. so compelling , writes of being isolated as a disabled American and his connection to the poetry of Adrienne Rich, connecting him to his brethren of writers facing the same hostile and disconnected world.

The pre-Stonewall stars icons are present (including Judy). Editor Groff threading the ballsy camp of Bette Midler as an invaluable literary persona in the same essay as he writes of the towering elegies of Paul Monette’s ‘Love, Alone’ particularly his poem ‘Buckley’, where he eviscerates William F. Buckley’s diatribe that called for tattooing PWAs as diseased humans. Indeed, a repeated theme in the essays is the profound impact of the AIDS era.

“There was a lot of work being done in the gay community to heal the pain of AIDS and how it affected us.” Noël Alumet (author of Letters to Montgomery Clift) states in Vanity Fairey Interviews sites everyone from Shel Silverstein’s children’s classic The Learning Tree to Arnie Kantrowitz’s Under the Rainbow as literary passions.

The universal theme of reconciled loss is an eloquent, quiet theme through many of these essays. Saeed Jones’ hauntingly poetic Orpheus in Texas is a memoir of a father he never knew, but presence he still feels. The raw emotional loss poetically told through the Orpheus and Eurydice myth against the Texas landscape with the coda “Well aware that this rejection may be my equivalent of looking over my shoulder and trying to ask loss one more question.”

Brian Leung’s tremulously fab of The Seismology of Love and Letters tracks his stability handling earthquakes in San Diego, but growing up Chinese-American he sought the comfort of Edmund White and Elizabeth Bishop, when it came to earth shattering gay romance. As a budding writer he was told that he wasn’t gay or Chinese enough. By the time the earth shifts everyday at the height of the AIDS era, he is an artist chronicling his times- powerfully, poetically and on solid ground.

This anthology is a joyous, unexpected book, so full of drama, comedy and lessons learned. The landscape of gay literati that is connected vitally to personal liberation as the beautiful open rooms of the every expanding GLBTQ library.

Film

J’accuse, then & now, David France’s powerful documentary about AIDS activists

1980s HIV-AIDS activist organizations ACT-UP and TAG (Treatment Action Group) are the subjects of director David France’s visceral and stirring documentary “How to Survive A Plague.”

Along with tracking the lives of the men and women who put themselves on the line for these causes,France has assembled amazing archival footage of the group’s epic demonstrations in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, confronting the Food and Drug Administration over the release of AIDS drugs, pouring ashes of their lovers on the White House lawn and even the infamous ’condomming’ of antigay Jessie Helms’ home.

The power of these images and the thought-provoking interviews in the film take you inside the unprecedented activism of these groups. Most moving in revealing the high wire act these activists were walking, most of them battling the disease themselves. The members, with ACT-UP founder Larry Kramer leading the charge, saved lives and galvanized gay activism. It is also a history of the solidarity of gays, lesbians, and straight allies in a perilous time.

The private stories of those who fought and died as well as those who lived long enough to received effective drug treatment, is the heart of the film, but France doesn’t pull back for revealing the internal struggles of ACT-UP as well. As the movement becomes more effective, organizers disagree on the mission for quick AIDS drug trials and bypassing FDA approvals. This reaches a fevered pitch in the early 90s when AIDS deaths were cresting, even as they have to grapple with the fact that they might be chasing so much snake oil.

The end of the film reveals that, even with effective drugs, AIDS is still a worldwide epidemic. France has reasserted a powerful message that we must always be ready to fight for justice for our people wherever they are being silenced, ignored, harassed or, as it was expected then by politicians, just dying off.

France is an award-winning journalist and New York Times best-selling author who has been writing about AIDS since 1982 and will release a book in 2013 with a history of the AIDS epidemic. Meanwhile, don’t miss this film.

Film

at Qfest

Out director Scud is part of a new wave of film auteurs who makes stylish,, sexually explicit, often violent but character driven films. Born in China, Scud has produced, written and directed four films in four years. At Qfest he looked more like an international star than a director, presenting his last two features- “Amphetamine” and “Love Actually…Sucks“which was premiering at the festival because of censorship in Asia.

 Scud admitted to a few drinks at Tavern on Camac, but held a lively talk with the audience after the screening.  Later, I got a chance to speak to him for a few more minutes.

“ I was a little disappointed that “Amphetamine” was not sold out. Because it has been doing so well at the other festivals, but the audience response was overwhelming and I was happy that we sold out “Love Actually“last night.

“Amphetamine” starts with a naked man on the ledge of a building and “ Love” starts at a wedding where the bride shows a celebratory film that includes the groom having oral sex with another man. It gets bawdier from there, even though in both cases the sexual content is so natural showing the sexual lives of his characters as well as their social and family lives. Because, or despite that, he is censored in China

Although both films have completely different cinematic looks with a lot of outdoor locations and elaborate effects. Scud shot Love in 19 days, but there was a year of postproduction. “Depending on the content and the story I want to tell. I will try to find the best person to do it. Even for music, it depends.” Along with high concept cinematography, the director is very careful with the music and sound effects he uses for his movies. In fact, he said he wish he would have been a composer.

The filmmaker is just starting to take “Love“ on the circuit. The film is a mash of characters plots overlapping ala Robert Altman. “The Hong Kong audiences are looking forward to “Love Actually.” I have the biggest line-up for my films, even with censorship. If I give in enough, I can still screen it. I was born in China in 1966, when there was a huge change there, I moved to Hong Kong, after Mao died, because my mother was a citizen there. I don‘t mean to be a Chinese filmmaker- or not a Chinese filmmaker- this is a universal language. ”

Scud (his name meaning swift moving in Chinese) he has won awards in Hong Kong, his films face censorship there. “Hong Kong is become more and more conservative. That has more impact on the censorship. We were the most open society in Asia. That is changing” but he said, “His films “don’t have much political content.” even though the social backdrop in Amphetamine’s central gay love story is the international financial crisis set off by the 2008 US stock market crash and Obama election.

Scud told the audience that his many overlapping stories could be confusing to American audiences “several people have told me they preferred “Amphetamine” because it focuses on one story. I wanted to tell many stories with “Love Actually…Sucks“, but it becomes more demanding on the audiences. But…I had so many stories to tell with this subject.“