Bay Windows
Harvard Lambda conference to focus on trans issues
Harvard Law School Lambda, the law school’s LGBT student organization, will host its third annual Harvard Lambda Legal Advocacy (HaLLA) conference Feb. 29-March 1. This year’s conference will focus on transgender legal issues.
Raya Yarbrough performs debut album
You’ll find this disc in the jazz section, as good a categorization as any for this quixotic album. Yarbrough has a jazz singer’s precise phrasing and rhythm and the album’s many moods call to mind a tight band doing playful improvisations through a variety of styles.
Media missed chance to explore violence against LGBT youth
Writing about the murder of 15-year-old gay Oxnard, California resident Lawrence King, blogger Waymon Hudson asked in a Feb. 15 post on The Bilerico Project, "Where’s the outrage?" A more pressing question, one that Waymon also posits, is, "Where’s the coverage?"
A Twist in My Story
You know how sometimes an unremarkable Top 40 song has a moment when the chorus soars and the guitars go into overdrive and cheese is briefly transformed into something good?
Gay and bi men’s health forum addresses MRSA, HIV and increasing syphilis rates
A panel of medical professionals discussed MRSA, HIV/AIDS and syphilis at a Feb. 13 forum for gay and bi men at Club Caf?. The news wasn’t all good.
All These Brilliant Things
With my desk always buried in CDs of dull dance music (I’m looking at you, Colton Ford) it’s nice to get a reminder that the queers can rock out too. Ariel Aparicio isn’t exactly the Great Cubano Hope of rock n’ roll, but he’s not too shabby either, and this album is a lot of fun.
Advocates disagree on HIV/AIDS lobby strategy
Following AIDS Action Committee’s decision last month to withdraw from Project ABLE (AIDS Budget Legislative Effort), the statewide coalition that lobbies Beacon Hill on HIV/AIDS funding issues, more members of the coalition have begun speaking out about their dissatisfaction with Project ABLE’s efforts to increase state funding for HIV/AIDS programs. The state’s AIDS budget has yet to recover fully from the nearly $20 million dollars in cuts it sustained between fiscal years 2002 (FY02) and FY05.
Openly gay Patrick appointee to be arraigned on sexual assault charges
Carl Stanley McGee, assistant secretary for policy and planning in Gov. Deval Patrick’s administration and one of Patrick’s first openly gay appointees, will be arraigned Feb. 25 in Fort Myers, Fla., on suspicion of committing sexual assault on a 15-year-old.
City of light
John Rechy stands amongst the most significant of American gay writers of the 20th century. His landmark debut novel, City of Night, caused a sensation in 1963 with its frank - and semi-autobiographical - account of working as a gay hustler in several cities across America. The book’s evocative, slangy prose earned it a place in literary as well as gay history. In his recently published About My Life and The Kept Woman (Grove Press), Rechy looks back on his life and sheds a different light on his City of Night.
Romney’s unraveling
Mitt Romney ended his presidential campaign last week the same way he began it: by gay bashing. In the course of telling the audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington, D.C. on Feb. 7 that he was stepping aside for the good of the GOP and the country, Romney threw this hunk of red meat to the Republican base: "The development of a child is enhanced by having a mother and a father. Such a family is the ideal for the future of the child and for the strength of the nation. I wonder how it is that unelected judges, like some in my state of Massachusetts, are so unaware of this reality, so oblivious to the millennia of recorded history. It’s time for the people of America to fortify marriage through a constitutional amendment, so that liberal judges cannot continue to attack it."
For the Bible Tells Me So
Are there really irreconcilable differences between Christianity and homosexuality, or has someone been the victim of a bad PR campaign? That’s the basic question behind this documentary that looks at Bible passages like Leviticus 18:22 and the story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.
Advocates talk of past, present state of black community’s response to HIV/AIDS
To mark National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day (NBHAAD), about 30 advocates and healthcare providers gathered at AIDS Action Committee’s Boston headquarters Feb. 7 to discuss the history of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and how it impacted black communities in the Boston area.
Kiki and Herb Live at the Knitting Factory
Thanks to the wonders of home video, viewers across the country can now enjoy the compellingly bizarre act - part cabaret and part trainwreck - of Kiki & Herb, long the darlings of New York City hipsters.
MassEquality begins board recruitment campaign
Wilson said the board and MassEquality campaign director Marc Solomon have began reaching out to community organizations to recruit prospective board members. The board hopes to attract new members with a commitment to MassEquality’s mission and experience in fundraising. Wilson said MassEquality is also working to expand the board’s diversity, adding new members from the transgender community, from communities of color, and from youth and elder communities.
Good riddance: LGBT pols, activists happy to see Romney’s campaign sputtering to a halt
With just 51 percent of the vote in Massachusetts, former governor Mitt Romney barely squeaked out a win in his home state - well, one of his three home states, that is - on Super Tuesday. That tells you about all you need to know about the state of his presidential campaign: Mitt Romney laid an egg. It might be a $35 million Faberg? egg, but it’s still an egg. Not surprisingly, members of the local LGBT community certainly aren’t shedding any tears over Romney’s likely exit from the presidential stage, which is expected to come sooner rather than later.
Just a girl in the world
After spending years traveling the globe to entertain audiences from Provincetown to Australia, what’s a songbird to do? Put on a show about the experience, of course. At least that’s what big girl Varla Jean Merman (big as in larger than life, natch) has done. The hilariously ditzy drag queen’s new show, Varla Jean Merman Loves a Foreign Tongue, will take you around the world and back (or is that on Varla’s back?) with a masala of chansons from surtout le monde. Ne c’est pas dankeshoen?
A shot at love with Calpernia Addams
Add another impressive credit to the resume of indomitable actress, author and activist Calpernia Addams. The very out trans woman stars in Logo’s new dating reality show, Transamerican Love Story. With the help of host Alec Mapa (from Ugly Betty and Desperate Housewives) and her business partner and best gal pal Andrea James, Addams will choose a boyfriend from a stable of eight eager hunks.
South End video store with big LGBT collection succumbs to Internet rentals
The latest casualty of the Internet revolution is a local. Mike’s Movies on Tremont Street in the South End is closing its doors for good this spring, proving that the days of chatting up your neighbor at the local video store are just about gone for good.
Absolute Brightness
Reading this mystery about a gay teen who moves to a small town in New Jersey, where he has a positive impact on his new family but becomes the target of violence, I was frequently reminded of Judy Blume. That’s a compliment of the highest order.
The endless war
The marriage amendment fight may have ended last summer, but the amendment’s prime sponsor, the Massachusetts Family Institute (MFI), is still waging an anti-LGBT culture war on Beacon Hill.