California Supreme Court Approves Same-Sex Marriages

SAN FRANCISCO — Gay and lesbian couples in San Francisco rejoiced Thursday over a California Supreme Court decision affirming their right to marry even as political leaders on both sides of the issue girded for an extended fight in the courts and at the ballot box.

“It’s just amazing to feel like I am a full citizen — I am not a second-class citizen,” said Christmas Laubrile, a nurse, who was with her partner, Alice Heimsoth. “I don’t have to sit in the back of the bus, and I don’t have to take second best.”

Among those celebrating were Gavin Newsom, the city’s mayor, who had set off a fair amount of the national debate over gay marriage in 2004 when he ordered the county clerk to issue licenses to same-sex couples. More than 4,000 couples married, though those unions were later invalidated by lower court decisions.

“What a day for San Francisco, what a day for California, what a day for America, what a day for equality,” Mr. Newsom said before a crowd of several hundred jubilant supporters at San Francisco City Hall.

Photo by Jim Wilson.

To read the rest of Jesse McKinley's NY Times article, click here.

Dumbledore Is Gay

TIME: Outing Dumbledore
By JOHN CLOUD
Thursday, Oct. 25, 2007
Illustration by John Ueland

When J. K. Rowling said at Carnegie Hall that Albus Dumbledore--her Aslan, her Gandalf, her Yoda--was gay, the crowd apparently sat in silence for a few seconds and then burst into wild applause. I'm still sitting in silence. I feel a bit like I did when we learned too much about Mark Foley and Larry Craig: you are not the role model I'd hoped for as a gay man.

Yes, it's nice that gays finally got a major character in the sci-fi/fantasy universe. Until now, we had been shut out of the major franchises. J.R.R. Tolkien wrote a rich supply of homoeroticism into The Lord of the Rings--all those men and hobbits and elves singing to one another during long, womanless quests. The books and their film versions feature tender scenes between Frodo and Samwise. But in the end, Sam marries Rosie and fathers 13 children. Thirteen! Got something to prove, hobbit?

Other fantasy worlds have presented gay (or at least gay-seeming) characters, but usually they are, literally, inhuman. George Lucas gave us the epicene C-3PO and the little butch R2-D2, and their Felix-Oscar dialogue suggests the banter of a couple of old queens who have been keeping intergalactic house for millenniums. But their implied homosexuality is quite safe. There is no real flesh that could actually entangle. Similarly, there was a girl-on-girl plot in 1995 on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, but let me spare you a fanboy summary by noting merely that the two girls weren't girls--they were gender-complex aliens called Trills--and they only kissed.

So along comes Rowling with Dumbledore--a human being, a wizard even, an indisputable hero and one of the most beloved figures in children's literature. Shouldn't I be happy to learn he's gay?

Yes, except: Why couldn't he tell us himself? The Potter books add up to more than 800,000 words before Dumbledore dies in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, yet Rowling couldn't spare two of those words to help define a central character's emotional identity: "I'm gay." We can only conclude that Dumbledore saw his homosexuality as shameful. His silence suggests a lack of personal integrity that is completely out of character.

I had always given the Potter books a pass on the lack of gay characters because, especially at first, they were intended for little kids. But particularly with the appearance of the long, violent later books, Rowling allowed her witches and wizards to grow up, to get zits and begin romances, to kill and die. It seemed odd that not even a minor student character at Hogwarts was gay, especially since Rowling was so p.c. about inventing magical creatures of different races and species, incomes, national origins and developmental abilities. In a typical passage, Blaise Zabini is described as a "tall black boy with high cheekbones and long, slanting eyes." Would it have been so difficult to write a line in which Zabini takes the exquisitely named Justin Finch-Fletchley to the Yule Ball?

And then there's Dumbledore himself. Sure, he's heroic. His twinkling eyes, his flowing manteau, his unfailing wisdom--Rowling made it impossible not to revere him. But here is a gay man as desexed as any priest--and, to uncomfortably extend the analogy, whose greatest emotional bond is with an adolescent boy: scarred, orphaned, needy Harry. Rowling said that in her conception of his character, Dumbledore had fallen in love with Gellert Grindelwald long ago, when the two were just teenagers. But Grindelwald turned out to be evil--Rowling's Hitler, in fact--which apparently broke Dumbledore's heart.

As far as we know, Dumbledore had no fully realized romance in all his 115 years--just a lifetime spent around children and, for the seven years we know him, a fascination with the boy Potter. That's pathetic and frustratingly stereotypical. It's difficult to believe someone as wise and sane as Dumbledore couldn't find at least one wizard his age to take to the Three Broomsticks.

Am I making too much of this? Undoubtedly. Some of the best Star Trek fan fiction involves steamy Kirk-Spock love affairs. So it will be with the Potter world, as Rowling has acknowledged. We are now all free to imagine a gay life more whole and fulfilling than the one Rowling gave Dumbledore. But it would have been better if she had just let the old girl rest in peace.

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I'm not sure I see much point in revealing the sexual orientation of a fictional character when (I'd say) it doesn't have any real bearing on the story. Why bother? I don't have a problem with gay characters, but this feels pretty arbitrary to me at this point. Why not write another story where it's pivotal, or explicit (or becomes explicit) in the text?

I think a big part of what makes storytelling an art is knowing what the audience needs to know and what they don't. Unfortunately, there's plenty of examples these days where fandom pressures creators to keep spinning and spinning the same tale until it unravels.

'Buster' Stays The Course

NY TIMES: Censured PBS Bunny Returns, Briefly
By DENNIS GAFFNEY
Published: December 18, 2006

What happens to a children’s public television show after it has been attacked by the secretary of education, pilloried by conservatives, then abandoned by its underwriters? In the case of “Postcards From Buster,” it manages to return, belatedly but unbowed, for a second season.

“We were proud of ‘Postcards From Buster,’ and we are proud of ‘Postcards From Buster,’ ” said Brigid Sullivan, vice president for children’s programming at WGBH, the Boston PBS station that produces the show. “It’s a children’s show dealing with diversity by showing real kids in real-life situations. That’s not being done by anyone else.”

In “Postcards From Buster” documentary footage of children from different cultures is combined with animation of Buster and his friends. This season includes only 10 episodes, which began in November and will run through February, a far cry from the 40 produced for the show’s first season.

Children first came to know Buster Baxter, the animated bunny who is the show’s star, as the best friend of Arthur, the animated aardvark who is the title character of another PBS series. But most adults probably first heard of Buster in January 2005, midway into the show’s first season, when word got out that an episode about maple sugaring, called “Sugartime!,” would feature children in a Vermont family with two moms.

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings attacked the episode in a letter to Pat Mitchell, the former PBS president, dated Jan. 25, 2005. “Many parents would not want their young children exposed to the life-styles portrayed in this episode,” she wrote. The same day PBS removed “Sugartime!” from its lineup. In the days that followed, the American Family Association, a major Christian conservative organization, orchestrated a campaign of more than 150,000 e-mail messages and letters to Ms. Spellings supporting her position, said Ed Vitagliano, a spokesman for the association.

WGBH responded by independently offering “Sugartime!” to each PBS station. It said that 57 of 349 stations broadcast the episode in March 2005, making it available to more than half of PBS viewers. But the “Sugartime!” controversy made finding funds for a second season difficult.

“All the traditional funding sources backed away,” said Jeanne Jordan, the series producer for the second season of “Postcards.” The Education Department’s Ready-to-Learn program, which had largely financed the first season of “Postcards” with $5 million through PBS, rewrote its grant to eliminate the call for cultural diversity, and PBS did not pursue that grant for Season 2. Neither the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which is controlled by Congress and provided funds for Season 1, nor the traditional corporate sponsors of PBS children’s programming would underwrite the show.

The producers, musicians, editors and writers of “Buster” were let go from the show for almost a year; under normal circumstances the second season would have begun in fall 2005. That fall PBS decided to provide most of the money needed for a season of 10 shows.

“We’re very committed to ‘Buster,’ ” said Stephanie Aaronson, a PBS spokeswoman. “Buster is a popular character. Kids love him. We feel there’s not enough programs for the early elementary-age set, and we like the mix of animation and live action.”

With PBS on board other underwriters, among them the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations and the Annenberg Foundation, pitched in. WGBH also found about a half-dozen nontraditional donors, like the Gill Foundation and the Small Change Foundation, which support gay and lesbian causes.

Perhaps surprisingly, this season continues to deal with hot-button issues. In an episode being shown today, Buster visits Fort Leonard Wood, an Army post in Missouri, to meet the family of a father who is stationed in Iraq. On Jan. 29 Buster will learn about the Mexican border, traveling with children to Tijuana from San Diego to meet their pen pals. And in the last show of the season, scheduled for Feb. 19, Buster revisits some children from the first season, whose homes in Louisiana were damaged or destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.

Pierre Valette, one of the executive producers of “Postcards,” said that the show managed to approach even intensely political topics, like the war in Iraq and the aftereffects of Katrina, in an apolitical manner. Buster does this, he said, by looking at the world through a child’s eyes.

In the episode from Fort Leonard Wood, for example, Buster must be shown where Iraq is on a globe, and he worries about being asked to do push-ups.

A main purpose of the episode, Ms. Jordan, the producer, said, is to reveal what life on a military base is like, especially for a family that has a member serving in a war. Erin Munoz, a 10-year-old featured in the show, never expresses her opinions about the war. Neither does her mother, Cheri Munoz, or the other adults who were filmed.

In one sequence the cameras catch a phone call from Erin’s dad, Steve, who at the time had been in Iraq for only a week. “We’re happy to talk to him,” Mrs. Munoz tells Buster afterward, “but then we’re sad ’cause we remember we miss him.”

Mrs. Munoz, who watched the episode in a preview screened at the Army base, said she believed it was important for others to see what her family was experiencing. “If you’re a military family, it will give you an opportunity to discuss how you may feel, especially if someone is deployed,” she said. “If you’re not a military family, you can see how you might feel to be in this situation.”

Next season producers are planning to do three specials, sending Buster to Africa, the Middle East and China. Ms. Sullivan of WGBH said the hope was that his travels abroad would attract international supporters, who weren’t interested in providing funds for the first two seasons, which focused on American children.

“The strategy is to aim high,” Ms. Sullivan said. “And if you do the right thing, the money will come. And eventually the controversy fades.”

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You gotta hand it to 'em - WGBH isn't backing down. That's a nice closing statement, too.

Epithets And Slurs In Current Comedy

NY TIMES: Anti-Gay Slurs: The Latest in Hilarity
By CHARLES ISHERWOOD
Published: December 17, 2006

THE predilections of Sebastian Venable, the gothic ghost who haunts Tennessee Williams’s “Suddenly Last Summer,” were so unspeakable that they essentially went unspoken in the text of the play. Dark hints about his taste for young men bloom all through the lyrical foliage of Williams’s dialogue, but the actual subject of homosexuality is never explicitly mentioned.

Nobody would have called the doomed poet a gay man, although that’s what all the tortuous innuendo essentially amounts to. The play, which was teamed with a curtain-raiser actually called “Something Unspoken” when it had its premiere in 1958, was written in an era when the word “gay” had not come into common parlance, and the word “homosexual” had a clinical and disreputable ring. (The “something” in “Something Unspoken” was lesbianism, by the way.)

The coyness about the subject in “Suddenly Last Summer,” written by a playwright who was famously uncoy about matters of sex and sexuality, firmly dates the play. Today neutral terms describing homosexuality are commonplace, having long since joined the vocabulary list deemed fit and proper to be spoken in front of the footlights. But as “The Little Dog Laughed,” “Regrets Only” and “Borat” have lately shown, old-school mockery, refitted for a new, post-politically-correct era, is making a comeback.

In “The Little Dog Laughed,” Douglas Carter Beane’s Hollywood satire at the Cort Theater, the central character, a ruthless female agent played with verve by Julie White, uses the following terms, among others, to refer to her client, a closeted gay movie actor: “that pansy,” “Mary” and “Miss Nancy,” “little fairy Tinkerbell” and “little fruit.” Coining her own variation on derogation, she calls another character “St. Francis of the Sissies.”

At the performance I recently attended, virtually every one of those lines got a laugh. As they were meant to. For the character’s noxious vocabulary isn’t meant to mark her as a bigot. The epithets, generally employed in acerbic monologues addressed to the audience, are meant to establish her as a funny gal, if maybe a little soulless. It seems for most people they do.

Little notice has been taken of Mr. Beane’s comic exploitation of what is, in other contexts, called hate speech. But he seems to be aware that he is treading on tender turf: how else to explain the agent’s opening announcement that she’s a lesbian? Her sexuality then disappears until a passing reference in the last scene. But it’s enough to inoculate her (and perhaps him) against accusations of homophobia: she’s on the team, so she’s allowed, and we’re allowed to chuckle. (For the record, Mr. Beane is an openly gay man.)

The play raises a question that has been brought to the forefront of the cultural chatter recently in another context: Who is and is not allowed to use — and to laugh at or milk laughs from — derisive names for minorities? On a Broadway stage, Ms. White is warmly applauded for tossing out those nasty words. At a multiplex near you, Sacha Baron Cohen, playing a fictional anti-Semite, has ’em rolling in the aisles. But Michael Richards, also an entertainer, repeatedly uses a derogatory term for African-Americans in a stand-up act that queasily devolves into a fit of pique, and his offense makes headlines and cripples his career, possibly for good.

Is it all about context? Certainly Mr. Richards’s ghastly rant was not a scripted piece of entertainment, nor was it designed to provoke a discussion of slang and semantics. In savaging a heckler, he used the word the only way it was once used: as a weapon meant to demean and hurt. (Likewise, Mel Gibson got into trouble for his anti-Semitic rant because it appeared to be an expression of personal animus.) But at some point in his tirade Mr. Richards also tried to frame his attack as a political challenge. Muttering grimly in response to the audience’s obvious displeasure, he said, “You see, there’s still those words, those words.”

Lenny Bruce was the first comic to start a conversation about “those words” on the nightclub stage. In one of his most famous, and controversial, routines, he asked if there were any African-Americans in the house — using the usual offensive term. He went on to run down a litany of bigoted epithets. His point was that by keeping the words taboo, we unwittingly preserve their power to hurt. He ended the bit by suggesting that if they were allowed to fully enter the cultural conversation, their batteries would go dead.

History has proved him to be at least half right. Gays and blacks took the language meant to demean them and put it to sly new use when speaking among themselves. Lately, as attitudes have relaxed, it has become easier for the rest of America to join the parties. (The character of Jack in the popular sitcom “Will & Grace” was pure minstrelsy, but by the time he minced onto the airwaves, in the context of a gay-friendly show, his dizziness and effeminacy hardly raised an eyebrow.)

What is disappointing about Mr. Beane’s flippant use of provocative language in “The Little Dog Laughed” is how provocative it isn’t. Mr. Beane is not pushing boundaries to get his audiences to examine their own prejudices, or jolt them into an awareness of its lingering prevalence in the culture. He’s just pushing the classic put-down button, used to garner laughs on sitcoms — and in life — from time immemorial.

Because he knows his audience is overwhelmingly made up of the gay and the gay-friended, Mr. Beane can safely use words that in other contexts would still call down opprobrium. But it doesn’t make the humor any smarter, and as the snipes kept coming and I stopped counting, the barking of those words in viperish tones began to push a few of my buttons. (Let’s just say that, as a gay man, I don’t look back on my suburban junior high school years with unalloyed fondness.)

“Regrets Only,” the new comedy by Paul Rudnick at Manhattan Theater Club, similarly exploits our new comfort with old stereotypes for some easy laughs. (Mr. Rudnick is also an openly gay playwright.) The plot turns on the notion that a Manhattan wedding would be stopped in its tracks if the city’s gay men went out on strike. No flowers, no one to pin the baby’s breath in the bride’s hair and tell her she looks fabulous. Mr. Rudnick includes lawyers and doormen and elevator operators in his legions of gay protesters, but mostly the humor turns on the sudden absence from the city’s working populace of florists and hairdressers and dress designers, occupations that haven’t made for clever antigay jokes since the days of “Match Game.”

Wrapped in a comfy pashmina of preachment about the issue of gay marriage, the conceit is hardly going to offend, but the general mediocrity of “Regrets Only” suggests that Mr. Rudnick may have played with gay stereotypes a little too long: the play has far fewer good gags than his riper efforts in this sphere, like “The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told” and the short solo plays “Mr. Charles of Palm Beach,” about a quintessentially queeny cable-access host, and “Pride and Joy,” about a matron from Massapequa laying claim to the title of “most accepting, most loving mother of all time, bar none.”

For a dose of truly discomfiting — and provocative — comedy trading on man’s universal tendency to sort by group and sneer at the guys in the other camp, you’ll have to look not to the stage but to the movies, where a certain boob from Kazakhstan reigned this fall. In contrast to the tame, middlingly funny and rather retrograde flavor of “The Little Dog Laughed” and “Regrets Only,” the often uproarious “Borat” has the harsh sting of just-distilled vodka.

Mr. Cohen is himself Jewish, so Borat’s smiling anti-Semitism is a con mostly used to seduce the clueless rednecks and drunk frat dudes. But I wonder what would happen if Borat trained the cameras on a cross section of the audiences delighting in his easy evisceration of the all-American boob. Do the millions of people in on the Borat joke really think they’re immune from even the smallest trace of bigotry? Unless they are among the unlucky few who meet Mr. Cohen’s next alter ego, they may never have to acknowledge their laughter’s unfunny origins.

When we are done laughing at Ms. White’s nasty cracks and Borat’s victims, and clucking at Mr. Richards’s freakish tirade, we should recognize the uncomfortable truth of that peppy homily sung in the Broadway musical “Avenue Q”: “Everyone’s a little bit racist sometimes.”