Great Catholics

I love these people. They are the real Catholics. The ones who have their heads and hearts and souls correctly formed and guided by something much higher than their stupid, misguided and fearful bishops. CNN covered this but when I met them, I was surprised to see that they were not just a group of young Catholic activist gays. They are the salt-of-the-earth Catholics who have spent a lifetime discerning the Spirit and understanding their faith. They are bigger than their bishops. They are wonderful. Their pastor is a great man.

In Pride Magazine

By Tony Adams

This year's PRIDE, the official magazine of InterPride, is available all over the city. It contains an article by yours truly entitled NYC On A Dime in which I recommend packing only black t shirts, and staying at the Upper West Side Y.

Also in this year's issue, in the photo section that celebrates long-time couples, are our Montreal friends Serge and Richard whose venerable blog Tornwordo has been on the Perge Modo menu for years.

The Baad Lamb and I were in the couples section last year. Same great photographer, Marius Bugge.

Wisdom in The Rocks

She was the mistress of her domain consisting of a modest colonial on a corner lot in an energetic post war suburb, with a husband and three sons, the oldest of which am I. She did not like the huge old tree in the center of the yard. Its gnarled and widespread apron of surfaced roots often wrecked the mower blades.

She recruited us and a wheelbarrow and a Saturday for the creation of a rock garden that would form a ten-foot diameter circle around that tree. We entered the adjacent woods where the old stonewalls of earlier settlers demarked neighborly agreement among farmers. We took rock with veins of mica and quartz and shimmering granite, and others slathered with lichen. The ghosts of the folks who built those walls seemed to have moved on or slept through our dismantling.

She directed the placement of the rocks and the filling of the circle with ten inches of dirt from those same woods simply dumped on top of the offensive roots. She purchased a variety of flowering plants and directed their festive introduction into the circle. Within two weeks, the flowers had died, starved for direct sunlight under the shade of the huge tree and thirsty for the water commandeered by its roots.

On CNN tomorrow at 8PM

Joe took this photo and wrote about his impression of Gary + Tony Have A Baby on JMG.

On other sites that sometimes see injustice whenever a story told is not their own story or whenever a subject broached is not their own personal cause, you'll find the opinion that this show is puffery and reflective of gay white privilege. I think that is absurd. The two men at the center of this story could have done any number of self indulgent things with the money they inherited. They chose to have a child. I choose not to nitpick about their methods. Watch the show. Decide.

My photos from the screening are after the break.

Broadway Bares XX - Stripopoly!

some pics (NSFW) Read more.

March With Us

You are invited to march with the queer New York bloggers, writers and digital activists in the 2010 NYC Pride March on Sunday June 27. Let me know if you'd like to join us. I'm assembling an email list for last minute info.

Our group has been assigned an advantageous assembly point and a start time near the front of the march:

We are in Section Two, assembling on 40th Street between Madison Avenue and Park Avenue. We step off at 11AM.

Last year, in front of Stonewall:

The Feathering Of The Empty Nest

I've known men who have dedicated their lives to cock. I've known others who have inadvertently serviced alcohol for most of their adult lives. Others plan their week around their perpetual search for love without ever reaching into the pockets of their souls where they'd find the note explaining why they'll never get it. Hamsters on a wheel, rats in a maze, stevedores on the clock, we all have our predisposed distractions that, unnoticed, chew up our lives. The problem with death is that there is no preview, no rolling of the credits before the final frame. We get arrested by death with no reading of the Miranda rights and no attorney to present the justification for how we spent our days. We fuss with our hair, oblivious to the percentage of our lives devoted to the maintenance of this excretion.

 

On Tuesday, I did get a preview of a show about priorities and choices, and these thoughts came to mind as I chatted with Soledad O'Brien of CNN, Jarrett Barrios President of GLAAD and two gay men, Gary Spino and Tony Brown, who spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to become the parents of a boy with the help of an egg donor and a surrogate mother. Soledad, Jarrett, Gary and Tony are all raising children - without sacrificing great hair. (The show Gary + Tony Have A Baby, reported by Soledad O'Brien in CNN's In America series will air June 24 at 8PM ET/PT. I highly recommend it.)

I began to wonder if there is not a nest being feathered somewhere in the heart of every queer. If not for children, for what?

A Piece of Work

Today, in South Florida Gay News, the expanded edition of my interview with Joan Rivers.

Benefitting New York Marriage Equality

A delightful evening for a good cause. A star-studded collection of mini-plays on the subject of marriage equality.

And I was pleased to spend time with enchanting Fire Island drag legend Empress XIX of the Imperial Court of New York Robin Kradles (with New York Theater Workshop's Jeffrey Wallach).

Cry Me A River

The Pope is begging forgiveness. Again. You want to believe that he is sorry for something other than having become unpopular, but his are the tears of a guilty man on the stand.

And his conclusion. So sad. Just a veiled way of offering his homophobic effort to drive away gay candidates for the priesthood as the solution to pedophilia.

He added: "We too insistently beg forgiveness from God and from the persons involved, while promising to do everything possible to ensure that such abuse will never occur again."

He also promised that the Church would enact stronger controls on choosing men who enter the priesthood.

"In admitting men to priestly ministry and in their formation we will do everything we can to weigh the authenticity of their vocation and make every effort to accompany priests along their journey, so that the Lord will protect them and watch over them in troubled situations and amid life's dangers," he said.

He obviously hasn't noticed that poor but ambitious gay Catholic young men who once needed the priesthood as their only route to community leadership now have many other and better options. There are no self-respecting gay young men left for the pope to weed out of his garden of bitter herbs. Compare the pope's strategy to the Old Spice ad campaign appealing to heterosexual macho guys. It's not as if gay men bought that swill anyway. (But don't go messin' with my Aqua Velva.)

The Life and Death of a Florida Queen

Colonies are founded in the spring by a single queen that mated the previous fall and overwintered as an adult, usually under the bark of a log. Nests may be aerial or terrestrial, depending in part upon the species of the wasp. Some species may construct both types of nest. Regardless of location, each nest is a series of horizontal combs completely surrounded by a paper envelope. Initially, the solitary queen must not only construct the paper brood cells, but also forage for food, lay eggs, feed her progeny, and defend the next from intruders. When the first offspring emerge as adults they assume all tasks except egg laying. The queen devotes the remainder of her life to this task and does not leave the nest again. For most of the season the colony consists of sterile worker females which are noticeably smaller than the queen. Each worker tends to persist at a given task, such as nest building or feeding larvae, for a given day, but may change tasks if the need arises. Working habits apparently are not associated with age as they are in the honeybee. Workers progressively feed larvae a diet of masticated flesh of adult and immature insects, other arthropods, and fresh carrion. Lepidopterous larvae appear to be a favorite food. In autumn, larger cells are constructed for the crop of new queens. Larvae in these cells receive more food than do those in normal cells. At the same time, the queen begins to lay unfertilized or male eggs in either large or small cells. After emergence, the new queens mate and seek shelter for the winter. These will be the founders of next spring's colonies. The old founder queen dies, and the workers begin to behave erratically until social order breaks down. With winter's arrival, the remaining colony dies.

text from the University of Florida.

Touring Bushwick

Multiple Marys 

For the record,

she thought my one liner, "Joan Rivers - The Face That Launched A Thousand Snips" was very funny and original. We talked for half an hour. I really like her. I gave SFGN the exclusive on the interview and they may hold it for the Pride issue. Stay tuned.

Later tonight my posse from Queer New York met at a gallery opening. We were photographed with John Waters. La vie en rose.

The Fairy Tale Life of Charles L. Ross

There is so much more to his story, but here's the 950 word version.