Sue Katz: Consenting Adult

Hey to any New York friend – can you shoot me under glass?

I want to ask a friendly New Yorker a favor, but first here’s the back-story. My friend Charles Coe, poet and mensch extraordinaire, called today to ask if I knew that something I had written was featured at the Stonewall anniversary exhibition at the New York Public Library. He said he heard that the piece was under glass, accompanied by a plaque with my name. I actually knew a bit about it because my Google self-alert had picked up a mention of me on a rather cool gay blog called Band of Thebes.

The writer was describing the exhibition called 1969: The Year of Gay Liberation. He said:

Other artifacts on display include issues of The Ladder, copies of the newspaper Gay (featuring a movie review called "The Bores in the Band"), and Sue Katz's mimeographed essay "Smash Phallic Tyranny."

In fact, the published piece was ultimately titled “Smash Phallic Imperialism” and was illustrated by a drawing I had done of a stars-and-stripes dick, upside down in a trash can. Ahh, those were the days. It first appeared (1970?) in a queer newspaper that was the collaboration of two Boston groups: our Stick It In The Wall MotherFucker Collective of revolutionary, working-class feminist lesbians, and a collective of radical faeries, some lovely gender-bending guys who mixed mustaches with tutus and ball gowns with beards. If you held the newspaper in one direction, it was a dyke front page; if you flipped it over and turned it around, it was a gay boy front page.

We named our rag “Lavender Vision” after Betty Friedan’s homo-terrified assertion, on the eve of International Women’s Day, that, “We will not be cowed by the lavender menace.” She had heard the (accurate) rumor that for the first time lesbians were going to be “out” at the march in NY, Boston and LA. Perhaps in other places that I can’t recall. Our newspaper lasted all of two issues, I believe. (Disclaimer: All of the above are shards of memory I’m dredging up and I cannot personally swear by any of it.)

I’m not sure how a mimeograph ended up in this prestigious exhibition, but I suspect that the venerable Allen Young – who included me in the early (first?) queer anthology, Out of the Closets: Voices of Gay Liberation, which he edited with Karla Jay – is behind it. I’m sure Allen will weigh in when he reads this.

In any event, the exhibition ends on June 30th and I’d be ever so grateful to any New York friend who can make it over to the library and take a couple of photos of me under glass.

Farewell, Ed McMahon

If you're around my age, then you grew up with Johnny Carson in the background, if not the foreground. In fact, have I mentioned that when we used to sit around in the 60s fantasizing about what our roles would be after the Revolution, while others wanted to be Minister of Peace or Secretary of Education, I planned to replace Johnny Carson. I'd have my cousin Sandy as my sidekick, just as Carson had Ed McMahon, who died today. A Facebook friend posted this clip and I think it shows the essence of their relationship.

Film Review: Four Seasons Lodge

Over 50 families established a Catskills summer community in 1979 with two basic shared realities: they were all Holocaust survivors and they all agreed with Fran Lask, 82, a survivor of Bergen-Belsen, that, "This is our revenge on Hitler. To live this long, this well, is a victory." Some knew each other from their original Russian or Polish villages, some from the concentration camps and some from their beloved Four Seasons Lodge.

This remarkable documentary follows their reduced numbers in 2006 – the 25th anniversary of the founding of the Lodge. Most of them are now in their 80s and 90s. The aged president and the vice-president are tired of all the work involved in maintaining the camp and the residents must make a decision about its future.

Central to this exceptional and emotional film are the wonderful ways in which these people – some of them the sole survivors out of hundreds of extended family members – have become family for each other. They dance, they sing and they love with a passion that slaps the Final Solution upside the head.

And oh, what romantic stories! Victor and Regina Lewis have remained together since their youth in Krakow, Poland over 65 years ago, straight through separate camps and on to America. Olga and Genya are two women who have been close for the same amount of time and, in this film, come out about their special relationship.

The bittersweet intimacy of the Lodge’s residents is based on a common tragedy and built out of a shared hunger for life. On the assumption that no one would really be interested in their story, the producer told us during the Q&A after showing the film, they continued their squabbles, their revelations (one man finally tells his friends that he was experimented on by Mengele) and their tears without self-consciousness in front of the camera. We feel we are getting the real deal – a peek into the world of the last surviving survivors and we come away with the sense that this film is simply not to be missed.

My advice? Find a film festival that is showing Four Seasons Lodge, take a hankie and a friend and join their party.

For a taste, here’s the trailer.

Film Review: A Pop Star on Ice

This documentary follows Johnny Weir, the brilliant ice skater, through his achievements, his under-achievements and his bubble baths.

There is a long tradition of male dancers putting on their tutus and toe shoes and dancing as swans in gender-bending Swan Lake ballets. Johnny Weir is famous for having put the male swan into ice-skating.

Weir has been hovering at the edges of men's ice-skating superstardom for some time. Despite big achievements in USA competitions, including three successive gold medals in the Nationals, he just hasn't been able to nail down world titles, not the least the Olympics.

The documentary Pop Star On Ice, filmed between 2006 and 2008, has been featured at a number of gay film festivals, despite the fact that the very camp Johnny Weir quite explicitly refuses to discuss his sexuality. He struts fashion show runways, does photo shoots in stilettos and is filmed taking a bubble bath with his best boy-pal Paris Childers. This is enough to provoke open horror from the skating officialdom, the executives of which like their men butch and their women sweet. While any gay person can spot Weir as a friend of Dorothy's from a mile away, he clearly feels his behavior alone, without coming out in words, gets him in enough trouble.

He misbehaves in other ways, too. There are his erratic press conferences where, instead of giving the canned comments expected of sports stars, he mixes rebellion with inappropriate comparisons that puzzle or offend. He is not a simple lad: he can be a petulant spoiled brat one moment and a generous, gracious star to his fans, known as Johnny's Angels, the next.

The two central relationships in the documentary are between Johnny and Paris - he says they're so close they're like a married couple without the sex, and between Johnny and his coach from age 12, Priscilla Hill. From his late start in skating at age 12, Hill spent many years cajoling him to train with discipline, but when he loses his Nationals title to his very "masculine" rival Evan Lysacek, he leaves Hill for Galina Zmievskaya, the Russian who worked with Oksana Baiul, Weir's first skate idol.

For a film that opens with caressing close-ups of his naked legs, his nipple, his back and his pelvis, there is a vacuum where Johnny Weir's candid discussion of his sexuality and its impact on his career could be. He is a complex mix of diva and athlete, of costume designer and technician, but in Pop Star On Ice we never learn from him what makes his heart do a triple axel.

This piece first appeared on Edge Publications portals.

Cambridge, Massachusetts? Watch me on TV

Cambridge, MA?

If so, I'm going to be on the Michael Koran show on CCTV, live, at 7:00pm Sunday, June 14. Just talking. Later it may be shown on MichaelKoran.Blip.TV, apparently.

Suggestions about what to wear - welcome.

Collaborate or Die

More bad news from Gaza. With this spate of murderous hate crimes by the far right in America, important elections around the world and a global economy that is masking a radical shift of wealth to the ruling classes from the rest of us, it’s important not to forget what is going on in Gaza.

The UK daily The Guardian gives us an important seven minutes of film that looks at what is happening to those who are ill. The medical infrastructure has been decimated and medical supplies are prevented from getting to Gaza. For many their only hope is treatment in Israel. Besides the usual wretched barriers Gazans face when trying to move from one place or another, not the least the ubiquitous checkpoints (at left), The Guardian finds evidence that patients are being forced between becoming informers and their own survival.

I can’t figure out how to insert this clip, so please click here to watch it.

Pure Entertainment: A Mind-Expanding Dance Clip

What a week. A man of principle assassinated. Obama in Cairo and Buchenwald. The British Labour Party in the poo-poo. Unemployment figures ascending. Any personal impact from this elusive Stimulus Package missing in inaction.

What a day. Dr Tiller is being buried. Obama is speaking at D-Day Ceremonies. And a friend (you know who you are, SW) has complained that my blog is too often a bummer. So to lighten things up, here is one of my all-time favorite auditions from last year's So You Think You Can Dance. (The judges' comments aren't that interesting and the camera-work sucks - gotta show the whole body all the time.) Thank you Robert Muraine.

What Was Obama Really Saying about Israel/Palestine?

Obama is an eloquent and effective speaker. His long-awaited speech in Cairo today was no exception. I’m restricting my observations to just one of his seven main points, for as someone who formerly lived and worked in the Middle East for 14 years, and who continues to support the fight for justice there, I was moved by what he had to say about The Conflict.

Obama addressed “the situation between Israelis, Palestinians and the Arab world” with a level of understanding far exceeding his unfortunate comments during the presidential campaign. Today he began by countering Holocaust deniers (he means you, Ahmadinejad) and contextualizing anti-Semitism in history, stressing the “unbreakable” bond between the States and Israel. This is not a new message from American leaders, but it was well-put.

And then: “On the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people - Muslims and Christians - have suffered in pursuit of a homeland.” He talked about “the daily humiliations – large and small – that come with occupation,” calling the situation “intolerable.” Yes!! It is so important that this occupation be called an occupation, especially in our country where international political understanding is so minimal that at least one professor of media found that the majority of his students believed that the Palestinians were brutally occupying poor Israel. Obama also called on Hamas to “recognize Israel's right to exist”– a concept I have yet to comprehend, despite it being a daily mantra of those who like Israeli military policy. Would Obama expect this to be a mutual recognition?

“Palestinians must abandon violence,” Obama said, without mentioning the unspeakable levels of violence Palestinians have been the victims of. But then Obama did something I suspect no American president has ever done: he compared the struggle of the Palestinians to that of African-Americans and others who have fought for righteous freedom:

“For centuries, black people in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation. But it was not violence that won full and equal rights. It was a peaceful and determined insistence upon the ideals at the center of America's founding. This same story can be told by people from South Africa to South Asia; from Eastern Europe to Indonesia. It's a story with a simple truth: that violence is a dead end.”

Settlements (at left) have been on Obama’s mind, especially since the present Israeli Prime Minister provocatively refused to stop further building on occupied land. “The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements,” Obama said – leaving me wondering if he is taking the bold, necessary step of acknowledging the illegitimacy of all settlements in occupied territories

He touched on the nature of the relationships America has with Arab countries and Israel. “We will say in public what we say in private to Israelis and Palestinians and Arabs.” This would be another profound change in American conduct, which has long been winking conspiratorially to the Israelis behind the backs of the Palestinians.

The reception in Arab countries has been mixed, says Al Jazeera. This piece lists a variety of reactions, from excitement to complaints that it was non-committal.

Israeli reaction, too, has been mixed. Akiva Eldar, writing in the daily paper Haaretz, noted in a piece titled “Obama put Arabs and Israel on an equal footing” that

“U.S. President Barack Obama declared before the entire world, upon an Arab-Muslim stage, that the time has come to end the era of Israeli occupation in the Palestinian territories.”

Behind all of Obama’s statements stands the assumption that peace and security for Palestine and Israel will only be achieved through a two-state solution. Many scholars and activists in the region now think that this occupation – the longest running forced occupation on earth – has so changed the reality on the ground that establishing two states side-by-side is unfortunately no longer a viable option. They see no way around a single, democratic secular state. That, however, is a discussion for another day.

Today we can say Obama has made rhetorical history and we can hope that it is backed up by some concrete progress. Like allowing the import of such forbidden items (thanks to Amira Hass for the list) into devastated Gaza as “car parts, fabrics, threads, needles, light bulbs, candles, matches, books, musical instruments, crayons, clothing, shoes, mattresses, sheets, blankets, cutlery, crockery, cups, glasses and animals.”  Being able to repair one’s bombed-out home and put shoes on one’s child seems like a legitimate pre-condition to conducting serious negotiations.

Diversity Wins; Susan Boyle Doesn’t

Britain’s Got Talent was won by a dance crew named Diversity, not by Susan Boyle, the Scottish woman whose lovely singing voice was successfully fetishized by the Simon Cowell publicity machine. There have been plenty of commentaries on how Susan Boyle, by singing quite nicely, confounded the assumptions (“spinster,” “dowdy,” asexual “virgin,” “simple”) that accompanied her first appearance on the competition show. More astute observers have pointed to the sexism, ageism and classism inherent in those assumptions.

Anyway, I always thought Boyle’s performances were quite “pitchy” – as Randy Jackson, a judge on competitor American Idol says when some notes don’t quite get where they are going. But her voice has never been the issue. Building on hundreds of millions (!) of YouTube views of Boyle’s debut, the show’s producers have kept her well in the spotlight, happily increasing their audience.

I didn’t want her loss to go unremarked, although the whole saga has ultimately been just another p.r. exercise based on distasteful condescension. Boyle has been very useful –Britain’s Got Talent has received huge international attention since the video of her first appearance went viral – but her job (and the season) is done.

British tabloids did their share by questioning her mental health. “The singer's increasingly strange behaviour has sparked fears that she may suffer a breakdown - or be axed from tomorrow's final,” the sleazy Sun wrote the day before the final. Even the quality papers couldn’t resist a post-performance judgment: “Oozing confidence and betraying none of the nerves that had reportedly seen her throw public tantrums in the days leading up to the final, Boyle nevertheless appeared more subdued than on previous appearances.” (You can see her final performance here, if you’d like.)

What was the nature of Boyle’s freak-out and temper tantrums? First, she apparently swore at police officers and then was reported to have “screamed "f*** off" and flicked a V-sign at the TV in the hotel bar as she watched judge Piers Morgan tell Shaheen Jafargholi, 12, he had given the ‘best singing performance so far.’”

If swearing at the cops and giving your television the finger are signs of madness, then reserve me a padded room immediately.

Piers Morgan (at left), one of the three judges, meanwhile, nicely fanned the fires on his blog. “Susan is finding it very difficult to cope, and to stay calm. She has been in tears many times during the last few days, and even felt like quitting altogether and fleeing all the attention."

Duh. The woman is ridiculed and then awarded for not living down to the most mortifyingly low expectations, based on all the dumbest of stereotypes about who best deserves to be onstage and onscreen. What's to be upset about? 

[NOTE: Strangely enough, as I’m writing this blog, there’s a “breaking news” story on cable news that Susan Boyle has been admitted to the hospital with an “emotional breakdown,” complete with the continuing condescension of Piers Morgan who expressed his relief that Boyle came in second, saying “a victory would have ‘just carried on the mayhem’ for the unworldly Scottish spinster.” Sigh.]

But what about the winners? Diversity is a 10-guy dance crew comprised of three sets of brothers and their friends. Cowell liked them as soon as he learned that the older members were in college or working as IT engineers. Their energetic, creative routines were a lot of fun and their obvious affection for each other heart-warming. For anyone who follows America's Best Dance Crew, produced by Randy Jackson, has seen many astounding examples of this kind of street dance, combining hip-hop, gymnastics and synchronization. Here’s the winning performance.