Tuesday, July 6th, 2010 Iceland's Prime Minister First World Leader with Same-Sex Spouse | Iceland's Prime Minister is now the world's first national leaders with a same-sex spouse. On Sunday Prime Minister Johanna Sigurdardottir, 68, married her long time partner, writer Jonina Leosdottir. The marriage fell on the international day for gay rights, which was also the first day Iceland legalized same sex marriage as a "union between two consenting adults regardless of sex."
Sigurdardottir and Leosdottir celebrated their union with a Lutheran church ceremony. The Prime Minister's office said she sent a message to the gathering calling the new law a "cause for celebration for all Icelanders."
She added "I have today taken advantage of this new legislation."
Read more. Source: examiner.com | | | |
A ‘Kagan Doctrine’ on Gay Marriage | ELENA KAGAN uttered neither the word “gay” nor “marriage” in her opening statement at the Senate confirmation hearings on her nomination to the Supreme Court, but she addressed the issue nonetheless. No, she didn’t say how she will vote when gay marriage comes before the court, as it may soon. What she did say was this:
“The Supreme Court, of course, has the responsibility of ensuring that our government never oversteps its proper bounds or violates the rights of individuals. But the court must also recognize the limits on itself and respect the choices made by the American people.”
Ms. Kagan may not have had gay marriage in mind when she made that statement, but it could not be more relevant. She seems to be saying that protecting minority rights is the Supreme Court’s job description, but also that a civil rights claim doesn’t automatically trump majority preferences. This is something absolutists on both sides of the gay marriage debate don’t like to hear, but it has the virtue of being right.
Jonathan Rauch, a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution, is the author of “Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights and Good for America.”
Read more. Source: nytimes.com | |
A Stonewall Veteran, 89, Misses the Parade | | | At noon on Sunday, thousands of marchers filled Fifth Avenue for New York City’s annual gay pride parade. Nearly six miles away, on the sixth floor of a nursing home in Brooklyn, the frail, white-haired woman in beige pajamas and brown slippers in Room 609 sat motionless at the edge of her bed, staring out her window.
She touched the medallion on her necklace — an image of St. Jude, the patron saint of lost causes — and fiddled with one of her rings.
“This one,” she said of the ring on a pinky finger, “I hit a guy so hard I knocked the stone out, and I hadn’t gotten around to put it back yet.”
She had forgotten that the gay pride march was Sunday. Her mind and her memory are not as sharp as her wit and her tongue. She said she had been living there, at the Oxford Nursing Home, for years (she arrived in April). She was not sure how old she was (she will be 90 in December).
The woman in Room 609, Storme DeLarverie, has dementia. She is but one anonymous elderly New Yorker in a city with thousands upon thousands of them. And many of those who marched down Fifth Avenue on Sunday would be hard pressed to realize that this little old lady — once the cross-dressing M.C. of a group of drag-queen performers, once a fiercely protective (and pistol-packing) bouncer in the city’s lesbian bars — was one of the reasons they were marching.
Read more. Source: nytimes.com | |
Los Angeles Film Festival 2010: Coffee Talk -- Film Composers | "A film can be beautifully written, directed, acted, and filmed, but until there is music, the true heart and emotion will be always missing. Music is a powerful tool, especially when paired with images, which makes the use and placement of it incredibly important.
"The three musicians that made up the Los Angeles Film Festival’s panel of composers were BT (THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS, MONSTER), Moby (SOUTHLAND TALES, GO), and Gustavo Santaolalla (BABEL, BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN). Before getting involved in contributing music for film, all three were already successful in the music industry in a variety of different outlets. Because of this, getting involved with a film project was based on their connection to the film itself or the people involved with it, rather than the need or overall desire to compose.
"Each is a unique personality and artist unto themselves, but when it came to the reasons each would (and has) agreed to work on a film, their answers were surprisingly similar. Santaolalla noted that he has to have an emotional connection to a film and feel that he could create music to accompany that feeling. Moby agreed, noting that for him, an emotional or creative connection happens with more odd and idiosyncratic films as he finds unconventional juxtaposition the most compelling. Moby joked that he is actually terrified of people in general (directors especially) and preferred to just make his music based on the film itself rather than interacting with the film’s director. BT said his reasoning fell somewhere between Santaolalla and Moby in that he needed to see that “point of connection between cinema and music” as well as enjoy the people working on the film to want to commit to spending that kind of time working together.
"The “courtship” process was a bit different for each, but related back to their original desires to get involved with a film. Santaolalla first got involved in composing when the director of AMORES PERROS (Alejandro González Iñárritu) tracked him down and begged him to watch his film because Iñárritu felt Santaolalla’s musical style would be the perfect compliment to it. Upon watching the first scene, Santaolalla readily agreed and signed on to the project. Santaolalla had his recorded work used in films before, but this was the first time he actually scored a film. | |
| | | "Moby claims he would say yes to working with anyone, as long as the interaction could be mainly via email and he could just send the tracks he creates in his home studio to the director, rather than creating alongside them. Moby prefers to get involved at the beginning or the end of a project, refusing to get involved in the middle because he has found that is often when a director makes decisions based on fear rather than the original intent of the film. Moby explained that at the beginning of a film, he can just send off his work and let them use it how they see fit and at the end of a film, there is usually not enough time for the filmmakers to “fuck with” the music.
"Santaolalla works in slightly similar way as the projects he has worked on were either completed by the time he came on board or were only at the script stage when he began composing. He explained that his approach to creating music for a film is to go simply off the emotion of the story itself. He composed all the music for BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN prior to filming, which allowed director Ang Lee to play the music on set for the actors to help them get in the emotional mindset of the scene. Santaolalla prefers minimalist music and hates when music manipulates the emotion of a scene. Although he wrote specific cues for certain scenes in BROKEBACK, he was not sure where Lee would end up placing them (although he ended up agreeing with Santaolalla and used the majority of the cues as Santaolalla had originally intended)."
Read more. Source: gordonandthewhale.com | |
A Life in 100 Films: Brokeback Mountain |
| | There’s very little that comes close to the wondrous, disorienting feeling we experience when emerging from a darkened movie theatre into the brutal light of a sunny day, our bodies fooled into nocturnal reflexes by the artificial darkness and, perhaps, the dream-like nature of film projection. We advance half-blind into a dangerous world rich with demands – gone is the passive anonymity of the cinema - and possibility. We adjust, feeling our way cautiously, to an environment where narrative is not pre-determined, and begin again the difficult process of writing our own life story.
Exiting a movie theatre in the morning – more so than late at night when the responsibility of debrief can be surrendered to sleep, delegated to the subconscious - is an invitation to take a cold hard look at one’s life (in light perhaps of the lives freshly depicted on screen) and remind oneself that unlike a character in a film, the screenwriter's puppet, one is largely responsible for one’s destiny.
In the fall, industry delegates flock to the Toronto International Film Festival from around the world in the thousands, hunting for unseen cinematic treasure to buy, distribute, promote, review or program. I’d come from Sydney as a festival programmer, on behalf of Manchester’s 2006 Commonwealth Film Festival (the program of which I’d agreed to research while a replacement of myself was being sought) and of my own festival production company, which I’d newly moved to Australia to create.
Films at the festival have both public and private screenings. Armed with a Sales & Industry pass, a delegate often catches 5 or 6 films in a row, with press & industry screenings beginning as early as 8 in the morning. It was at such an untimely hour that I saw Brokeback Mountain for the first time.
When Ang Lee’s film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2005, it did so discreetly, unencumbered by the buzz (and its corollary, expectation) it would later carry on the road to worldwide release and the holy grail of so called quality American cinema, the Oscars.
Read more. Source: mattriviera.net | |
Pride Films and Plays: Anyone interested in tackling these projects? | We are excited about fine writing for films like ‘Brokeback Mountain’, ‘Milk’, and “A Single Man” to name a few.
And we hope to foster excellent writing with our Great Gay Screenplay Contest, produced in association with Chicago Filmmakers. Plays with GLBTQ themes have had a major impact on our cultural identity. To remind both our artists and our audiences of great gay writing throughout history, we launched our play reading series "Five Decades of Great Gay Plays" in May and June 2010. Featuring works from the '60s to the '00s, the series included Mart Crowley's Boys in the Band, Lanford Wilson's Fifth of July, William M. Hoffman's As Is, and Jonathan Harvey's Beautiful Thing, and Richard Greenberg's Take Me Out.
In August and September, we explore the “Great Plays of Terrence McNally” including The Lisbon Traviata, Love! Valour! Compassion!, Corpus Christi, The Ritz, and the Chicago premiere of one of his newest plays, Some Men.
Later we will be doing staged readings of great screenplays including Brokeback Mountain, Milk, Gods and Monsters, and A Single Man to name a few, and we are looking for help to put this series together.
And we have gotten many requests for readings of works with lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered themes. Anyone interested in tackling these projects?
Read more. Source: pridefilmsandplays.com | | | |
San Francisco Celebrates PrideCheck out last weekend's
40th Annual San Francisco LGBT Pride Celebrationin photos taken by
BayCityJohn.
Ryan McGinley Interviews GILLES LARRAIN | I can’t remember when I first saw the book Idols by Gilles Larrain. All I know is that ever since I got it, it’s been a huge influence on me. Idols is one of the best photography books I’ve ever seen. It was published in 1973 and it’s a collection of studio portraits of trannies, gender-benders, and just generally awesome-looking people in New York City. It’s an incredible time capsule. There are Warhol people, Taylor Mead and Holly Woodlawn, and members of the San Francisco–based psychedelic drag-queen performance troupe the Cockettes. The,re’s a photo of the artist Al Hansen, aka Beck’s grandfather, covered in silvery paint and dressed up like some kind of Roman soldier, and an unrecognizable teenage Harvey Fierstein, looking like a young pretty Jewish lady (well, almost). Most important, these people all had the best style. The greatest fashion always originates with drag queens. The outfit you’re wearing today was probably invented by a drag queen ten years ago.
I recently visited Gilles in his huge studio on Grand Street in Soho. You can walk by it and see his photos of Jack Walls and Robert Mapplethorpe arranged in the window. Inside, it’s a cavernous converted warehouse stuffed with his artwork. Photos from his series on flamenco dancers, elaborate collages of nudes covered in fruits and tattoos, and many photos of musicians taken mostly in the 80s, ranging from Sting and Billy Joel to Nina Hagen and Miles Davis. Propped up in one corner is a large photo of Phoebe Cates and Jennifer Jason Leigh, circa Fast Times at Ridgemont High, snuggling nude under a blanket together.
We sat down in his kitchen, surrounded by hanging copper pots, and I tried my best to decipher what the hell he was saying in his low, raspy voice with its thick French accent. | | | |
| Vice: The photos from Idols were first published in a French magazine called Zoom in 1972. Did you shoot them as an editorial for the magazine?
Gilles Larrain: No, I never shoot anything for any purpose. I shot them because I found those people crazy enough and fascinating enough to be photographed. I saw some of them at Max’s Kansas City and I thought, “I have to get those guys in the studio.” I became friends with Taylor Mead and John Noble. One came, then they all came.
Read more. Source: viceland.com | |
Happy To Be Gay! |
| | T-shirts with witty one-liners, an e-bookstore and a dedicated gay travel boutique - customised products have become increasingly popular among India's gay community looking at new ways to assert its identity a year after the Delhi High Court decriminalised homosexuality.
Sanjay Malhotra founded Indjapink, India's first dedicated online gay travel boutique, nearly two years back and has catered to around 500 high-end foreign and Indian tourists.
The Delhi-based firm organises special tours to holiday spots in Himachal Pradesh, Rajasthan and Kerala among others and charges approximately $200 (over Rs.9,000) a day.
Asked if the July 2, 2009, Delhi High Court verdict had resulted in more customers for him, Malhotra replied in the affirmative.
"Yes, definitely it has. The Indian queer community is free from discrimination and India is an inviting place now. The verdict has improved India's image and we should use this tourism potential," the 40-year-old told us.
Read more. Source: timesofindia.indiatimes.com | |
Which Shirtless Guy Would You Take to a Fourth of July Beach Party?At the end of the day on the Fourth of July, Jakey
was the winner in this
POPSUGAR poll:
Who's That Boy?"You're nineteen, guess you can do whatever you want."
Click
image. Source:
viceland.com Fun Question of the Week | | | This week's question: Which country's flag is just a solid rectangle of color? What color is it and what does it mean?
Let us know your answer in the Response Thread.
Last week's question and answer: Which of these popular fast food restaurants boasts the most outlets in North America -- McDonald's, Subway, or KFC? garyd got it right when he chose Subway. Subway boasts 33,067 restaurants in 91 different countries, and 23,353 of them are in the United States. | |
Post of the DayBy
michaelflanagansf in
The Cullen Café | "When I was in high school and in 'therapy' through Catholic Social services to 'turn' me they recommended that I go on dates. I was actually very popular with the girls, because I was a complete gentleman.
"But regarding breaking the engagement - when I was in college a pal of mine from high school who knew my story came to me shortly before his wedding and 'confessed' that he thought he might be bisexual. I said - loudly and firmly - STOP THE WEDDING!!! He was very worried that he would hurt his fiance. I explained that he would be hurting her more if he married her and was confused about his sexual orientation. He followed my advice and is now married to a man in Massachusetts." | | | |
The Forum ImagePosted by
Trigger Hippie in
Life Through The Lens 4Quote of the Day"I had been to New Mexico many times. I loved it. It's a very exotic,
interesting, severely crazy environment. I don't know if I could
live there all year. It's such an intense place."
~ Campbell Scott ~
Photo Caption of the DayPosted by
CellarDweller115 in
Photo Captioning Fun 5
Jack: Uh, nice set up here, Ennis. So which trailer is yours?
Ennis: The one on top, of course.
Contributors: BayCityJohn, killersmom, michaelflanagansf, Trigger Hippie, CellarDweller115
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