This post from one of our most dedicated contributors marks a departure from our stated editorial focus so let us know what you think. If you want to to read more arts, entertainment, or travel posts of a general nature without a queer slant please let us know by posting a comment below.


The Metropolitan Opera’s 2009-10 season is anything if not eclectic, representing a judicious mix of old warhorses and operatic rarities. The new season will feature eight new productions – four of which are being billed as "company premieres" – and 18 revivals.

Among the "tried and true" are new productions of two of the most popular operas in the repertoire: Bizet’s Carmen and Puccini’s Tosca. From the French repertoire, the Met will be offering new productions of Jacques Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann (The Tales of Hoffmann) and Ambroise Thomas’s Hamlet, the latter based (somewhat loosely) on the Shakespeare play of that name.

But perhaps most interesting to veteran operagoers will be the four new productions of operas never before heard at the Met: Rossini’s Armida, Verdi’s Attila, Janáček’s From the House of the Dead, and Shostakovich’s The Nose – all of which deserve the appellation "rarity."

Update (8/20/2009): You can now download "Transgender Health Care Provider Directory" in PDF (8MB).

On July 21, the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA) will distribute copies of the first public directory of transgender-sensitive providers in the New York City metropolitan area ever published. The Gender Identity Project (GIP) of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center (208 W. 13th St. in Manhattan) will host a special event from 7-9 p.m. at which hundreds of copies of the provider directory will be distributed to members of the transgender community. The directory – which includes of physicians, mental health professionals, acupuncturists, and AIDS agencies as well as other health care providers – is a project of the Transgender Health Initiative of New York (THINY), a community organizing project whose goal is to ensure that transgendered and gender non-conforming people can access health care in a safe, respectful and non-discriminatory manner. THINY was established by the Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund (TLDEF), NYAGRA, and the Center GIP in 2004 and has been coordinated by TLDEF staff since then.

I listen to the Brian Lehrer Show almost every morning on WNYC (the New York City affiliate of National Public Radio) and I'm a huge fan of Brian's, so I was excited to get a call from one of his producers inviting me to the Greene Space on June 23 to participate in a panel discussion with a live audience on the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots and the future of the LGBT movement (From Stonewall to Gay Marriage, 6/23/09).

Because there were so many people on the panel, I only managed to get in three sentences during the whole segment. But Brian had me back on the show for a solo appearance on June 26 to talk about transgender rights (Follow-Up Friday: Transgender Rights and Cell Phones and Planes, 6/26/09). In the course of the 20-minute interview, I took the opportunity to talk about the need for enactment of the Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act (GENDA) as well as the Dignity for All Students Act (DASA) -- both of which are pending in the exceptionally dysfunctional New York State Senate. In addition to pending state legislation, Brian and I discussed local issues, including the failure of the openly lesbian New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn to support a progressive and LGBT-inclusive legislative agenda in the City Council.


Chris Quinn represents the 3rd Council district, which includes Greenwich Village and Chelsea. Quinn is facing a strong challenge by another 'out' lesbian, community activist Yetta Kurland. More about that race later.

“The ongoing detention without trial of over 400 individuals in the U.S. base at Guantánamo Bay has rightly been decried as an ongoing human rights scandal by everyone from Amnesty International to the Vatican,” British human and medical rights activist Dr. David Nicholl has written.

Other than the Iraq war, there is nothing more effective as a recruiting tool for terrorists than the policy of indefinite detention at Guantanámo without trial and the allegations of torture and extra-judicial killings there, which have provided Al Qaeda with a propaganda coup.

But for all the crimes against humanity that George W. Bush and his administration are guilty of, the legal precedent for the extra-judicial regime of indefinite detention without trial was established not by the current administration but by the previous administration led by Bill Clinton.

Hillary Clinton likes to take credit for every success of her husband’s administration — including, rather incredibly, helping bring about peace in Northern Ireland. The question I would pose to the junior senator from New York is this: whatever foreign policy successes that Hillary likes to claim credit for, is she also willing to accept responsibility for the establishment of the illegal regime at Guantánamo?

On Super Tuesday, I voted for Barack Obama. The decision to support the Illinois senator for president came about only after a long and somewhat difficult process of elimination.

To begin with the Republican field, it is clear that none of the Republicans have even a plausible claim to being LGBT-supportive and none deserve serious consideration by members of the LGBT community. Any of the Democrats would be significantly better on our issues than John McCain or Mike Huckabee, not to mention an improvement over the homophobic and disastrous presidency of George W. Bush; but it would be an unacceptably low standard indeed for a candidate simply to be an improvement over the worst president in the history of the United States.

As for the Democrats, the most LGBT-supportive candidate in the field was Dennis Kucinich, who supported same-sex marriage and full transgender inclusion in the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) and the Local Law Enforcement Enhancement Act (LLEEA) (the federal hate crimes bill); but he dropped out after New Hampshire, having won not a single delegate. John Edwards, who spoke passionately about poverty and class issues, dropped out after a dismal third-place finish in South Carolina, the state of his birth. And the others — Joe Biden, Chris Dodd, and Mike Gravel — barely registered on the radar screen. That has left Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama to battle it out for the nomination.

To her credit, Hillary Clinton has a command of the details of policy that matches or surpasses that of any of the candidates, Democratic or Republican. She is clearly a skilled politician and — as she herself never tires of reminding us — has executive experience in her husband’s White House as well as legislative experience in the Senate.

But the argument that one should automatically vote for the more experienced candidate is one that would have favored Richard Nixon over John F. Kennedy in 1960, George H.W. Bush over Bill Clinton in 1992 and Ronald Reagan over Walter Mondale in 1984, not to mention George W. Bush over John Kerry in 2004. As Obama himself has noted, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld brought decades of experience into the Bush administration in 2000, and the latter became the first secretary of defense ever to have come into office with previous experience in that same position; we can see the unfortunate results of the application of that experience in Iraq and in Afghanistan.

Furthermore, the one incontrovertible instance of executive experience that Hillary Clinton can claim was leading the administration’s health care reform initiative, with disastrous results. As even the most cursory review of the history of the Bush presidency will show, experience is worthless without the good judgment to utilize that experience productively and effectively. And on the central issue facing the country in 2003, Barack Obama had the good judgment to see that the invasion of Iraq could have potentially catastrophic consequences, while Hillary Clinton demonstrated the quality of her judgment in supporting the Bush administration’s ill-advised rush to war.

And so experience alone simply is not a persuasive argument when one examines the historical record. Neither is “having the experience to bring about change,” given the absence of a clear commitment on Hillary Clinton’s part to progressive and transformational change.

There is yet another compelling argument against Hillary’s experience mantra, as I see it, and that is the pattern of dynastic condominium that her election as president would cement. Even the most enthusiastic supporter of another Clinton presidency should consider the deleterious effect on American democracy of the regular alternance of Bush/Clinton/Bush/Clinton. Were Hillary to be elected to two consecutive terms, the United States would have been under 28 years of unbroken rule by the Bush/Clinton dynasties — more than an entire generation — and that kind of dynastic politics is one that any progressive must reject as elitist and profoundly undemocratic.

Even putting that issue aside, the record of the Clinton administration was a distinctly mixed one. While there were a few successes (such as the federal budget surplus) — none of which can be attributed to the First Lady’s direction — Bill Clinton’s was a mediocre presidency at best, eight largely wasted years of indirection and lowest-common-denominator politics. And as is evident with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and its implementation, Clinton administration economic policies were based on a misguided neo-liberal free trade dogma and oriented to serving the needs of the big corporate interests that have funded the Clintons for over three decades, from Perdue to Wal-Mart (on whose board of directors Hillary sat and from whom she has taken campaign contributions). Indeed, it was the explicit aim of the Clintons to use the Democratic Leadership Council to shift the party to the center, at the expense of the progressive values that are, in my view, its only raison d’etre. But for me, the most disturbing episode in the Clinton presidency was the administration’s willful refusal to intervene to prevent what they knew was a genocide in Rwanda, at the cost of nearly a million lives.

As First Lady, Hillary Clinton was apparently directly responsible for all of the innovations and successes of the Clinton administration but none of its or ethical lapses or mistakes; at least, that’s what one is supposed to conclude from Hillary’s interviews with the media. This is especially the case with the the Rwanda genocide, the former First Lady's role in which is almost never subject to media scrutiny or public scrutiny of any kind.

The genocide was dramatized in the film “Hotel Rwanda,” with Don Cheadle playing the role of Paul Rusesabagina, the manager of the hotel who displayed extraordinary courage in his efforts to save hundreds of Tutsis from certain death at the hands of machete-wielding death squads. Rusesabagina established the Hotel Rwanda Rusesabagina Foundation to provide “support, care, and assistance to children orphaned by, and women abused during, the genocide in Rwanda.”

The issue of transgender inclusion in the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) has been debated within the community for over a decade now. Up until last week, the battle lines drawn seemed to be between transgender activists on the one hand and U.S. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) -- the lead sponsor of ENDA in the House -- on the other.

The Human Rights Campaign is the largest, wealthiest, and by all accounts, the most influential LGBT rights organization in the country, and for years, HRC supported the transgenderphobic Barney Frank in his insistence on limiting ENDA to protection from discrimination based on sexual orientation. But in 2004, HRC changed its tune and came out openly in support of adding gender identity and expression in order to protect transgendered and gender-variant people from discrimination in employment as well.

By Dennis DeLeon and Pauline Park, originally published on the September 07, 2007 issue of New York Blade

Transgendered people who live in a gender different from the sex assigned to them at birth face pervasive discrimination in employment, housing, social services, health care, and public accommodations as well as travel when their personal identification documents appear inconsistent with their gender presentation.

In 2002, New York City became the 43rd jurisdiction in the United States to enact a statute explicitly prohibiting discrimination on the basis of gender identity or gender expression; today, there are 95 such jurisdictions, including 86 localities and nine states.

However, non-discrimination legislation does not address one important aspect of public policy: issuing new birth certificates to those who are living in a gender other than that assigned to them at birth. The birth certificate is the governing identity document in our legal system, and those who cannot get the legal sex designation on that document changed still face the possibility of discrimination even if they have been able to get that “gender marker” changed on other documents.

So here's one of my pet peeves: the term 'herstory.' According to Wikipedia,

"Herstory is a neologism coined in the late 1960s as part of a feminist critique of conventional historiography. In feminist discourse the term refers to history (ironically restated as "his story") written from a feminist perspective, emphasizing the role of women, or told from a woman's point of view. (The word history (from the Ancient Greek ιστορία, or istoria, meaning "a learning or knowing by inquiry") is etymologically unrelated to the possessive pronoun his.) The Oxford English Dictionary credits Robin Morgan with coining the term in her 1970 book, Sisterhood is Powerful..."

'Herstory' has been institutionalized in the names of a number of organizations, including the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brooklyn and the neologism is wildly popular among feminist historians (excuse me, 'herstorians'). Now, I understand perfectly well the origin of the term and it is certainly true that history, as written largely by white men – not to mention conventionally gendered, heterosexual white men with class privilege and the 'right' academic credentials – woefully ignored the lives and perspectives of women (with the exception of a few prominent women, mostly ruling monarchs such as Cleopatra, Elizabeth Tudor, Cixi, and the like).

As Rudolph William Louis Giuliani pursues his candidacy for for the Republican nomination for president of the United States, the former mayor of New York City is almost invariably described by the mainstream media as "pro-gay rights." That reputation is largely based on a few high-level appointments to his administration and his signing a domestic partnership bill into law while mayor. But as Giuliani attempts to court the religious right in his drive for the Republican nomination, he seems to be retreating from his support even for such limited measures as domestic partnership. And there is nothing in his record as mayor to suggest that he was or is supportive of transgender rights, despite his now-famous (if not notorious) appearance in drag as 'La Rudia.' As members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community evaluate Giuliani's candidacy they should carefully consider his opposition to Int. No. 24, the transgender rights bill ultimately enacted by the New York City Council as Local Law 3 of 2002 after he left office.