News: Civil Disobedience, Mariah Carey, iPhone 3GS, O.J.

Savage: One year Civil Disobedience plan for gay rights.

Schwarzenegger: Prop 8 challenge should be decided by the courts.

End sign?

Listen: Mariah Carey's new single "Obsessed".

Portland Mayor Sam Adams woes continue: home payment default.

Gizmodo's review of the iPhone 3GS.

Madonna's new kid Mercy and her peeps.

Biologists: Same-sex relationships may drive evolution. "Same-sex sexual behaviors are flexibly deployed in a variety of circumstances, for example as alternative reproductive tactics, as cooperative breeding strategies, as facilitators of social bonding or as mediators of intrasexual conflict. Once this flexibility is established, it becomes in and of itself a selective force that can drive selection on other aspects of physiology, life history, social behaviour and even morphology."

Australian poll: 60% support marriage equality.

It's the 15th anniversary of the O.J. chase.

Thousands flock to Banksy show. "During the show’s opening weekend, almost 8,500 people flooded the Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery, about eight times what the venue would normally expect."

Sex change in China could require permission from the police: "The proposed guidelines, posted Tuesday, say candidates for surgery must show an agreement from police to change their sex on their identification cards once the procedure is complete. The ministry posted the draft guidelines to invite public and professional opinions before July 10. China has no laws against sex change surgery, and the ministry says the guidelines are necessary to regulate the procedure."

Jamie Dornan all buttered up for new Calvin Klein campaign.

Anti-gay attack on College Street in Toronto: "Around 2:30am on the morning of Jun 7 — after a night out at El Convento Rico dance club on College St — Corey John and Takonda Majikwa were walking west toward Ossington when a group of men approached them. 'They were drunk and had open beer bottles in their hands,' says John. 'When they approached us they were making remarks as 'faggot,' 'fudge packer' and 'you and your girlfriend.'"' 

Why people tend to enjoy Cristiano Ronaldo's time off best.

Larry Kramer praises book on pre-Oscar Wilde gay sex in Britain: "Certainly nothing like this has appeared in America, thus allowing queer and gender studies to pretty much swamp, nay drown, the gay history field with their gobbledygook theorizing of what might have happened. This ludicrous state of affairs prohibits making statements such as: "they did then what we do now," without the wrath of queer theorists raining down insults of an uncommonly vitriolic nature. You don't have a right to say that! say they. You can't prove it! say they. It's been here all along since the beginning of history, say many others of us. Well now it can be said, and proved, in Britain at any rate, thanks to Upchurch."

Larry Kramer Takes Historians to Task for Denying Gays a History

In a new piece published in the Huffington Post, author, activist and playwright Larry Kramer takes historians (particularly Richard Godbeer and his new book The Overflowing Friendship: Love Between Men and the Creation of the American Republic) to task for attempting to wipe gays from history: "In this new book, Godbeer is hell-bent on convincing us that two men in colonial America could have exceedingly obsessive and passionate relationships (he calls them, variously, 'sentimental,' 'loving,' 'romantic') replete with non-stop effusive correspondence that rivals anything in Barbara Cartland, and spend many a night in bed together talking their hearts out, without the issue of sex arising in any way."

Adds Kramer: "Gay people are victims of an enormous con job. An awful rip-off. A tragic heist. This has been going on for too many years. It is time to call its bluff and grow up. This means recognizing that we have been here since the beginning of the history of people. This means accepting that men loving men, men having sex with men, has been here since the beginning of history. Period and Amen. And that every single correspondent quoted by this Professor Godbeer knew what I am talking about. If they didn't write about it, well who knows why not. I must say that many of these young men sound to me like what we used to call weenies, wimps, sissies, wusses, whatever expression you want to use for the guys who never got chosen for the team. There is not a butch, or masculine sounding fellow among them. Read enough of their endless platitudinous meanderings and you long for some real men to come along and stop their whining and grab their crotches and plant a deep long kiss, avec tongue. Yes, IT SEEMS REASONABLE TO ASSUME they knew how to do this then. We have known how to do all this from the very start of... well anything and everything. And please don't tell me that I'm guilty of applying today's 'sensibilities' to something that happened over 300 years ago. You bet I am, and so what?"

Homo Sex in Colonial America [larry kramer]

The HuffPost notes: Larry Kramer has been writing his [current project] The American People since 1978. His first draft, just completed, is some 4000 pages. He and his editor are now rolling up their sleeves.

Larry Kramer Rails at Yale's 'Conspiracy of Silence' on Gay History

Gay activist and playwright Larry Kramer was invited back to Yale last week to receive the first Lifetime Achievement Award from the university's Gay and Lesbian Association.

Kramer used the opportunity to rail at Yale's "conspiracy of silence" on gay history, criticizing an endowment offered to the school by his brother to set up the Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian and Gay Studies because it was misdirected, he says, and used for gender theory and 'queer 'studies (Kramer despises the word "queer", calling it adolescent and demeaning). Kramer wishes the school taught more about gay people in history and talks a bit about his new book, The American People.

Here's an excerpt of Kramer's speech:

Here are some of the things that I have uncovered about our history in writing my new book, The American People:

That Jamestown was America’s first community of homosexuals, men who came to not only live with each other as partners but to adopt and raise children bought from the Indians. Some even arranged wedding ceremonies for themselves.

That George Washington was gay, and that his relationships with Alexander Hamilton and the Marquis de Lafayette were homosexual. And that his feelings for Hamilton led to a government and a country that became Hamiltonian rather than Jeffersonian.

That Meriwether Lewis was in love with William Clark and committed suicide when their historic journey was over and he wouldn’t see Clark anymore.

That Abraham Lincoln was gay and had many, many gay interactions, that his nervous breakdown occurred when he and his lover, Joshua Speed, were forced to part, and that his sensitivity to the slaves came from his firsthand knowledge of what it meant to be so very different. And that the possibility exists that Lincoln was murdered because he was gay and John Wilkes Booth, who was gay, knew this.

That Franklin Pierce, who became one of America’s worst presidents, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, who became one of our greatest writers, as roommates at Bowdoin College had interactions that changed them both forever and, indeed, served as the wellspring for what Hawthorne came to write about. Pierce was gay. And Hawthorne? Herman Melville certainly wanted him to be.

That most of the great actresses who endlessly toured America during the 19th century bringing theater to the masses were lesbians and occasionally dressed as men. Just like Katherine Hepburn.

That the plague of AIDS was allowed to happen because much of the world hates us and most of the world knows nothing about us. They don’t know we are related to Washington and Lincoln.

I needed no queer theories, no gender studies, to figure all this out.

Why can’t we accept that homosexuality has been pretty much the same since the beginning of human history, whether it was called homosexuality, sodomy, buggery, hushmarkedry, or hundreds of other things, or had no name at all? What we do now they pretty much did then. Period. Men have always had cocks and men have pretty much always known what to do with them. It is just stupidity and elite presumption of the highest and most preposterous order to theorize, in these regards, that then was different from now.

Read the full speech at The Daily Beast.

(image david shankbone)

Larry Kramer Slams Gay Orgs: 'Lazy, Torpid, Unimaginative, Useless'

In a follow-up to his interview with actor Rupert Everett, in which Everett spewed a vitriolic rant about gays who want to be surrogate parents ("It is utterly hideous. I think it’s egocentric and vain.") and get married, Kevin Sessums talks to AIDS activist Peter Staley, comedienne Kate Clinton, and longtime activist and playwright Larry Kramer on those topics.

Here's part of Kramer's reaction on marriage and the state of the LGBT movement:

“I don’t think we are going to win anything federal—which is really the only important place where it counts—until a few of these Supreme Court justices expire (including that homophobe Anthony Scalia) and Obama replaces them with people sympathetic to our side. This, of course, is by no means a sure thing. I have high hopes for Obama, but I do not feel all warm and fuzzy that he is going to be enough of a friend when push comes to shove. I hope I am wrong. I have never believed in patience, but I do not see that we have either the leaders or the troops enough—a la ACT UP—to go out there and fight. We continue to be a passive population. It drives me nuts. It has always driven me nuts. I do not think the gay population has been all that rabid for gay marriage. Note that I do not use the words ‘gay community.’ Expunge that expression from your vocabulary. We are not a community. There are too many of us to qualify for that word, which connotes something much smaller and more intimate than the huge multipeopled grab bag of our rainbow coalition...

"The work, as it was done for AIDS, has been done by relatively few warriors. And we are losing sight of the HIV/AIDS battle. What is not being done about HIV/AIDS in the United States is shocking. It is more than shocking. It is tragic. Three percent of the entire population of Washington, D.C., is infected. One in ten of its residents between the ages of 40 and 49 is infected. Seven percent of its male African-American population is infected. Gay politics? What gay politics? I don’t see any gay politics. I see a few lazy, torpid, unimaginative—certainly passionless—‘organizations’ that maintain they fight for us when what they do is relatively useless. It has never been otherwise. I am afraid we have never ever had a decent gay organization, outside of ACT UP, that accomplished what we need to accomplish—which is to free ourselves from the tyranny of THEM!”

'Awful Middle-Class Queens' [the daily beast]

(image source)

NYT Looks at the Graying of the AIDS Epidemic

For those living with HIV long-term, scientists are seeing a "second wave" of health issues, the paper reports:

"...experts are coming to believe that the immune system and organs of long-term survivors took an irreversible beating before the advent of lifesaving drugs and that those very drugs then produced additional complications because of their toxicity — a one-two punch."

For people living long-term with HIV, the research into drug combinations' effect on the body can't happen fast enough, but unfortunately, medicine, like so many things, is reactionary: "One theory about why research on AIDS and aging has barely begun is 'the rapid increase in numbers,' Dr. Emlet said. The federal disease centers’ most recent surveillance data, from 33 states that meet certain reporting criteria, showed that the number of people 50 and older with AIDS or H.I.V. infection was 115,871 in 2005, nearly double the 64,445 in 2001."

The paper adds: "Those explanations do not satisfy Larry Kramer, founder of several AIDS advocacy groups. Mr. Kramer, 73 and a long-term survivor, said he had always suspected 'it was only a matter of time before stuff like this happened' given the potency of the antiretroviral drugs. 'How long will the human body be able to tolerate that constant bombardment?' he asked. 'Well, we are now seeing that many bodies can’t. Once again, just as we thought we were out of the woods, sort of, we have good reason again to be really scared.'"

AIDS Patients Face Downside of Living Longer [nyt]

ACT UP Marks 20 Year Anniversary with Health Care Protest

Between blog posts yesterday I slipped down town to Wall Street to check out what was going on at a protest marking the 20th anniversary of ACT UP. Larry Kramer coordinated the event, which sprung out of a speech he gave earlier this month at the Gay & Lesbian Center in New York, and a smaller protest against "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" in Times Square.

Five hundred people marched yesterday to call for universal health care. Twenty-seven were arrested. I shot these few photos, but Rex Wockner has more extensive coverage on his blog. And Good As You has posted some video.