Month: August 2007

Quote for the Day

"Gay people who are raised in a religious environment, a conservative religious environment are basically told, "You’re not good enough / you don’t belong here / you need to change / you need to be something else." And so, in a lot of our lives, we end up leaving the church and hating God or hating Religion or hating the whole nine yards. But an inherently spiritual person doesn’t really lose the core of their being. So it’s going to come out somewhere.

I think that what we discovered is that it comes out of Theatre, because Theatre and Church are essentially the same thing. They are story-telling, they are inspirational, and they are true. Theatre brings an even higher truth sometimes. Church basically repeats the same old story over and over again. I often wonder if that’s not one of the reasons so many Gay people wind up getting into Theatre. We’re always told that the reasons are because we’re used to hiding and wearing masks and being somebody else. But I think there’s something more profound," – Steve Schalchlin, San Francisco Sentinel.

Gerecht on Obama, Ctd.

A reader writes:

Did I miss something? Did I skip right over the parts where Gerecht proposes something more effective than Obama? If someone is trying to figure out a suitable response to an ugly situation, and another someone shreds, at length, those responses, he’d best have something better to propose or shut up.

At some point, some brave soul will come forward and just flat out tell the US that this is the way it is, the way it will be for decades. Women have checked over their shoulders for eons, to be sure the enemy is not approaching. Now the entire free world must adopt that behavior.  We will never be without the threat of terrorism and death in our lifetimes.

We can either cower in fear, or live and be cautious and observant. Waiting for someone to make us "safe" is fruitless.

Capehart on Marriage

The Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehart was selected as a questioner of the Democratic candidates by the Human Rights Campaign. He did a good job, I thought. He also fit the bill: a Democrat, and a pliant member of the gay establishment. But it seems to me that he represents something that plagues gay elites. To put it bluntly, they have limited conviction about their own equality, especially if it means challenging those who give them access to power. Capehart is an openly gay journalist with wide access to the media. He is of the same generation as the rest of us who have forged a revolution in public attitudes about homosexuality. He is of the AIDS generation. He is a black man wirting and working at a time when gay black men need all the support they can get. But I have never seen a piece of his, an editorial or a speech defending or advancing the case for marriage equality – for his own equality as an American and as a human being. I wanted to make sure so I emailed him to see if I’d missed something. He wrote back:

Except for two editorials for the Washington Post (one on New Hampshire’s civil unions law [Gay Gains] and the failure to derail Massachusetts gay marriage law [The Sky Didn’t Fall]), I have not written a signed piece in favor of marriage.

But he did manage to write a signed op-ed Monday defending the Democrats’ decision not to support gay equality. He wote that he didn’t "fault them" for their decision. He also played the usual card of defending Democratic cowardice and illogic because the GOP is worse. Sigh. Capehart’s one of the good guys, he’s an excellent journalist, and he played a role in getting Bloomberg to back marriage equality. But sometimes movements are too pragmatic for their own good. Sometimes, a writer is called to stand up for something, rather than defend those who cannot stand for what’s right. Too many gay activists in Washington have flunked that test. If we are not passionate about our own equality, how do we expect straight politicians to be?

Face of the Day

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An Iraqi boy looks through a broken windshield of a damaged car, following an alleged early joint Iraqi and US forces raid on the predominantly Shiite Baghdad suburb of Sadr City, 12 August 2007. Five American soldiers have been killed in fighting around Baghdad, including four in one attack, the US military said today, as Iraqis mourned an assassinated provincial governor and police chief. By Wissam Al-Okaili/AFP/Getty Images.

Gerecht on Obama

Reuel Marc Gerecht tackles Obama:

To the senator’s credit, he sees that Iraq and al Qaeda do not define Muslims and Islam. What he does not seem to grasp – and the Bush administration is no better – is that America is the cutting edge of a modernity that has convulsed Islam as a faith and a civilization. This collision will likely become more violent, not less, as Muslims more completely enter the ethical free fall that comes as modernity pulverizes the world of our ancestors. Barack Obama’s newly devised "Mobile Development Teams," which will bring together "personnel from the State Department, the Pentagon, and USAID … to turn the tide against extremism" are unlikely to make America more attractive to devout Muslims who know that America is the leading force in destroying the world that they love. The senator can leave Iraq, shut down Guantánamo, apologize for Abu Ghraib, and build "secular" schools all over Pakistan, and he will not change this fact. This is the deep well from which al Qaeda draws.

I think Gerecht is right here. But what exactly is the alternative? Permanently occupying a Muslim country with US troops is clearly not a way to reconcile Islam with modernity either. Doubling down in Iraq compounds this problem. It shows no signs of alleviating it. Perhaps our greatest delusion is believing we can do anything much about the internal convulsions of Islam in grappling with modernity. The forces behind this are far deeper and greater than any foreign policy initiative from the distant US can reverse or channel. We may just have to endure, with prudential defenses of nascent democratic life in Afghanistan and Kurdistan, and make sure we do not violate our own constitutional freedoms in the meantime. Or we can hope that the nascent Muslim civil war brings the world of Islam to its senses. Either way, it’s going to be a long and grueling struggle.

Music and Age

Has popular music gone from rewarding the long careers of perfectionist strivers to embracing the unvarnished genius of youth? David Galenson thinks so:

Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, and other songwriters of the Golden Era wrote popular songs that treated common topics clearly and simply. During the mid-1960s Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and Paul McCartney created a new kind of popular music that was personal and often obscure. This shift, which transformed popular music from an experimental into a conceptual art, produced a distinct change in the creative life cycles of songwriters. Golden Era songwriters were generally at their best during their 30s and 40s, whereas since the mid-’60s popular songwriters have consistently done their best work during their 20s. The revolution in popular music occurred at a time when young innovators were making similar transformations in other arts: Jean-Luc Godard and his fellow New Wave directors created a conceptual revolution in film in the early ’60s, just as Andy Warhol and other Pop artists made painting a conceptual activity.