Tuesday, September 27, 2005
by Wayne Besen
If only the coffee shop Big Cup had changed its name to the Luxurious Latte it might have survived. Instead, the cornerstone of New York's gay Chelsea neighborhood closed shop earlier this month after the landlord raised the rent from $16,500 to $21,500. The downfall of the Big Cup is indicative of dramatic changes taking place in gayborhoods across America, where artists are pushed out, as art dealers move in.
From San Francisco's Castro District to Provincetown, the hard bodied and cool are displaced in favor of cold hard cash. Gentrification is having a dramatic impact on everything from the GLBT bar scene to politics. The question is, can the GLBT Community survive and thrive without the cocoon of the traditional gay ghetto?
Sure, remnants of the gay ghetto exist, but it is fast becoming the exclusive playground of the very wealthy. As prices rise, heterosexual families are also moving in, further changing the unique character of these neighborhoods. I have nothing against these heterosexual families who are often our friends and allies. But, as the number of heterosexuals increases, the safety net grows smaller and gay people who once freely kissed, suddenly have to look over their shoulders.
For example, demographic changes may be affecting South Beach, a magnificent Miami neighborhood blessed with bountiful sunshine, gorgeous beaches, and scantily clad models. I first started club hopping in South Beach in the late eighties when it was a scary ghost town infested with prostitutes and drug dealers. The gay community opened a few nightclubs in old theatres and by the early nineties the city was booming. For the next decade, working class gay men flocked to this Mecca from all over the world. Eventually, prices skyrocketed as the gay glitterati and sybaritic straights moved in.
The loss of majority status for gay people has seemingly emboldened gay bashers. On July 4, according to the Express Gay News, Carl Zablotny, the gay publisher of Wire, a Miami Beach gay newspaper, was slugged in the mouth and knocked unconscious by two thugs who hurled anti-gay remarks. In January 2003, Earnest Robinson left a popular gay pub and was shot in the shoulder by two men who shouted anti-gay slurs. In another incident, three men attacked and beat a victim who left a gay bar dressed as a belly dancer.
And, this month Miami Heat basketball star Shaquille O'Neal called police after he witnessed gay bashers yell anti-gay slurs and throw a beer bottle at a gay couple. South Beach is still an incredible place to be openly gay. The outbreak of recent bashings is not representative of the community. However, these attacks do suggest that as our numbers decrease, so does the safety zone.
The decline of the gay ghetto also may have political implications. In the past, gay activists had a critical mass of young people who could be organized to protest abuses. It is much more difficult to convince older wealthy gay people to hit the streets chanting slogans.
Meanwhile, the younger, and often angrier, homosexuals can't be mobilized because they are dispersed in isolated, lower income neighborhoods. Perhaps, this dynamic helps explain the tepid response in California this month following Gov Arnold Schwarzenegger's announcement that he would veto legislation allowing gay couples to marry. When Gov. Pete Wilson vetoed pro-gay legislation in the early 90's, there were riots throughout the state, particularly in areas with high concentrations of gay people.
As the ghetto becomes more exclusive, regular gay and lesbian Americans are forced to search for new neighborhoods that are inclusive. For gays who enjoyed living in the traditional gayborhood, moving dramatically changes their quality of life. Instead of living in vibrant areas where one can walk to the grocery store and the gay bar, many gay people today must live in rundown neighborhoods that are quite far from centers of gay culture and the convenience of upscale urban life. For some, this represents a degraded standard of living and a diminished sense of community.
Those looking for solutions to this conundrum may be out of luck. History suggests that neighborhoods are in constant flux and there is little that can be done to reverse changing market and social forces. For example, New York's Lower East Side used to be predominantly Jewish, but that is no longer the case. Before gay people claimed The Castro in the early 1970's, it was primarily a neighborhood of Irish Catholic families.
Gay neighborhoods throughout America are in transition, however, as old communities disappear, new ones are born. In Brooklyn, the areas of Williamsburg and Park Slope have gone from hideous to hip. Back in Manhattan, the once rundown Hells Kitchen is looking more like heaven each day for young gay people. Meanwhile, in Washington, working class GLBT people have moved out of prohibitively pricey DuPont Circle and have rebuilt their lives in nearby Logan Circle, which was not too long ago a place one would not walk at night.
Nothing in life is static. Even as we mourn the blooms falling off the old roses, we can celebrate the flowering of new GLBT-friendly communities.
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Monday, September 19, 2005
by Wayne Besen
Ellen DeGeneres strode up to the stage as this year's Emmy host with the Herculean task of brightening the nation's somber mood following the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina.
"New Orleans is my hometown, and I have family in Mississippi," Ellen said, striking the right note at the awards ceremony. "It's times like this we really, really need laughter."
Ellen could just have easily been talking about her career, which was derailed by the storm of controversy that followed her very public coming out in 1997. In the oddly named "Puppy Episode" of her hit sitcom Ellen, the actress announced to an enormous audience of forty-two million viewers that she is a lesbian. This monumental eruption of honesty introduced a lesbian to one out of every six Americans.
The positive impact her coming out had on the lives of gay people cannot be overstated. However, it came with a huge personal price for Ellen. Even fans questioned the affect the comedian's forthrightness would have on her future.
"Ellen should be concerned about her career," a supporter told E-Online following the episode. "Where will she go from here?"
Indeed, the storm came, the levees broke and it seemed like Ellen was washed up on the rocky shores of the Isle of Has Been, located three knots west of the center seat on Hollywood Squares. Ellen quickly fell from her perch as Hollywood's darling and was virtually banished overnight from the entertainment world.
Meanwhile, she also had to deal with the public meltdown of her voluptuous blond girlfriend, Anne Heche, who claimed that she was an alien named Celestia, and then left Ellen for a man. Adding to the tumult, was a right wing smear machine led by Rev. Jerry Falwell who derisively referred to her as "Ellen Degenerate".
We can only wonder what was going through Ellen's head during this bleak period in her life. The self-doubt and pain she must have endured in her lonesome walk through the desert surely would have crushed a lesser person.
But, Ellen didn't fold.
She coped with her personal tribulations the same way she deftly handled the unenviable task of hosting the Emmy's following both 9-11 and Hurricane Katrina.
"It's times like this we really, really need laughter."
Ellen kept cracking hysterically funny jokes with her gift of suburb, quirky timing. Eventually, Hollywood honchos could not help but burst out in uproarious laughter. It didn't matter if Ellen were gay, straight or even an alien, like her ex gal pal. She was simply funny and her talent could no longer be denied.
The perseverance of DeGeneres paid off. She provided the wildly popular voiceover for "Dory" the fish, in the 2003 animated film Finding Nemo. In September 2003, she launched The Ellen DeGeneres Show, which was nominated for eleven Daytime Emmy Awards in its inaugural season, winning four, including Best Talk Show.
There are literally tens of thousands of gay and lesbian actors and actresses who have rolled into Hollywood with dreams of fame and fortune. Yet, only one of these individuals, Ellen, had the courage to come out at the height of her success. To the GLBT Community, she is a one in a million shining star.
Without Ellen's bold step into the unknown, there would likely be no Will & Grace or gay characters sprinkled throughout network and cable television. Rosie O'Donnell, would probably still be rhapsodizing about a dream date with Tom Cruise. The new gay MTV cable network, Logo, would likely have never made it past the drawing board.
After coming out, Ellen continued to shatter barriers. Who will ever forget her tension-breaking joke while hosting the Emmy's in 2001: "We're told to go on living our lives as usual, because to do otherwise is to let the terrorists win, and really, what would upset the Taliban more than a gay woman wearing a suit in front of a room full of Jews?"
What amazes me about Ellen is that she has developed a huge following among housewives in mainstream America, while unapologetically remaining true to her lesbian sensibilities. What other female entertainer, for example, would host the Emmys in a black tuxedo?
From a guest appearance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno to the cover of The New York Times TV Guide, it seems Ellen is more ubiquitous than ever. This is not just a personal triumph for Ellen, but a larger victory for the entire GLBT Community.
Surely, this is the way Ellen wanted it when she jumped off the cliff in 1997. After all, she was already rich and famous when she graced the cover of Time Magazine under the blaring headline, "Yep, I'm Gay." This was always about us, and making our lives better.
It was fitting that Ellen left Hollywood, returning home to Louisiana to help with the relief effort. She is the rare superstar who has reached the pinnacle of success, yet has never forgotten who she is or where she came from. Ellen DeGeneres is a living legend and a true American hero.
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Tuesday, September 13, 2005
by Wayne Besen
I look out of my window in Brooklyn and see a beam of light soaring skyward from the World Trade Center site. Following the tragedy of 9-11, I found this luminous image greatly inspiring, as it represented America's steely determination to rebuild the Twin Towers and defeat Al Qaeda.
Four years later, this grand incandescent spectacle is just as symbolic. This time, however, it highlights George W. Bush's utter failure to capitalize on the catastrophe to unify America and build a stronger nation. Like the President's lofty post 9-11 promises and patriotic speeches, if one looks past the shimmering light, there is a big empty, hollow pit of nothingness.
Mirroring the Bush presidency, the beam is an illusion, distracting America from substantive public policy. In the most powerful nation in world history, four years have slipped by and Ground Zero stands for the amount of work that has been done at the vacant site. Not a brick has been laid. It is a painful black hole of broken dreams and meaningless rhetoric.
If we travel from the Big Empty to the Big Easy, we find another barren hellhole that this administration promises to rebuild. However, with no credibility, who can believe what Bush, Condi and Rummy have to say? If one thing New Orleans and New York have exposed, it is that modern conservatism is an ill-conceived experiment that has failed. It is an amoral, elitist political propaganda machine that is consumed with nothing more than achieving power and rewarding the friends of the powerful.
For example, ABC News discovered that the federal government listed
Operation Blessing only second to the American Red Cross as a charity Americans should donate to following Hurricane Katrina. This happens to be Bush friend and televangelist Pat Robertson's personal "relief agency".
"It could be worth tens of millions of dollars," Richard Walden, president and founder of Operation USA, a non-governmental organization specializing in disaster relief, told ABC News.
With such a lucrative endorsement, one might suspect that Operation Blessing was a top-notch organization beyond reproach. But according to the Internal Revenue Service, Operation Blessing gave more than half of its yearly cash donations to Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network. Even in a time of crisis, the shameless Bush never misses an opportunity to reward his shady friends. Perhaps Robertson will use some of your Katrina money to plot the assassination of a meddlesome dictator in South America.
His approval rating plummeting to 39 percent in an
Associated Press poll, Bush is resorting to his old parlor trick of invoking God, as a ruse to distract the nation from his God-awful performance. The President has declared Friday a National Day of Prayer and Remembrance. I support the event, but it might not be necessary if it weren't for the unholy political events that preceded it.
Perhaps, we would not have to pray for the homeless if the President hadn't cut the budget for the levee system in New Orleans. Maybe, if Bush hadn't named the embarrassingly unqualified Michael Brown as the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, we wouldn't be gathering to remember the dead. Like Pat Robertson, who uses prayer to guide hurricanes to dens of iniquity, Bush dangerously misuses, and even abuses, prayer for political gain.
Healthy prayer is when one humbly asks God for the wisdom and strength to create emergency plans in advance that might save lives. Prayer becomes unhealthy, however, when one decides preparation is not a priority because God will take care of everything.
Praying to God does not mean that one can ignore God's laws of nature. If you don't shore up the levees, New Orleans will eventually flood. If you start a war of choice in Iraq and then fail to send in enough troops, the war effort will eventually unravel. If you cut taxes in a time of war, you will incur large deficits. If you don't make rebuilding the World Trade Center a priority, it will remain an empty pit in the heart of downtown Manhattan.
I think America should also have A National Day of Competence where Bush purges his legions of hacks and patronage pals and replaces them with trained professionals. Prayer is fine, but it is not a substitute for experience and job qualifications. Until this crony cleansing occurs, don't bet on your prayers being answered.
As I look out my window at the light shooting out of the darkness, I'm reminded that for all of Bush's tough talk and squandering of our nation's treasure we are less safe than ever. Last year, there were 651 "significant terrorist attacks", triple the year before and the highest since the State Department began keeping statistics more than twenty years ago. I turn on my television and the haunting images of dead bodies floating in one of America's most unique cities still fill the screen.
Whether it is in the Big Empty or the Big Easy, George Bush has consistently come up small. In his second-term, he had desperately hoped to avoid lame duck status. Thanks to a failed stew of policies, reality has taken control of the Bush presidency and he is now paddling for his political life in the sewage-filled duck pond that was once known as the city of New Orleans.
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Wednesday, September 07, 2005
by Wayne Besen
This may be politically incorrect, but I'm having serious qualms about writing a check for Hurricane relief. The way I see it, I already gave my fair share for the effort on April 15. This is Tax Day, the painful moment where we surrender a large chunk of our hard earned change to the federal government, so they can fix levees and plan for national emergencies.
President George W. Bush, however, decided to squander this money on tax breaks for Cappuccino Conservatives and attacking a nation in the name of 9-11 that had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks. In the run-up to our superfluous war, the Pottery Barn rule was often invoked: "You break it, You own it."
Now we own it and we are broke.
Of course, the conservative game plan was always to starve the beast, meaning cut taxes to run up a massive debt, which would then give them an alibi to cut popular federal programs. But efforts to replace the New Deal with a Raw Deal meant that "Big Government" would be ill prepared to help with disasters such as New Orleans becoming Atlantis.
The President's solution to this shortfall is rallying what he terms, "the armies of compassion". Americans have always been extraordinarily altruistic and kind in the face of tragedy and perhaps that is what I love best about my country.
However, make no mistake about it, this is not charity, this is a backdoor tax and the privatization of disaster relief. Americans are reaching into their wallets to write checks to generously pay for what the federal government should have unquestionably funded in the first place.
What rankles me the most is that this was not a natural disaster. This was a political apocalypse that should have been prevented. In 1998, a $14 billion master plan was put together called Coast 2050 that addressed how to prevent such a tragedy in New Orleans. Thanks to the fiscal shortage created by Bush's tax windfall for Rolls Royce Republicans during a time of war, the plan to protect the city was scuttled.
In a feeble attempt to seek absolution from culpability, Bush pleaded ignorance saying, "I don't think anyone could have anticipated the breach of the levees." Bush brags that he does not read the newspaper. Anyone who does read on a regular basis was likely aware of the catastrophic problems New Orleans faced if it encountered a major hurricane. Instead of writing a check for Hurricane victims, perhaps my money would be better spent buying the president a subscription to The Washington Post.
Bush's cavalier attitude towards disaster preparedness is best illustrated by the way he has handled the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Scientists have warned that global warming may lead to an increase in the frequency of violent storms. While Bush may not believe in global warming, there aren't many scientists these days who are predicting fewer storms. So, it was perplexing that the president folded FEMA into the Department of Homeland Security, an agency that is likely to prioritize terrorists over tornadoes.
New York Times columnist Paul Krugman pointed out that Bush's first appointee to run FEMA was a political buddy, Joseph Allbaugh, whose main experience in natural disasters was once leaving his umbrella at a restaurant. Allbaugh's successor, Michael Brown's chief qualification was that he was Allbaugh's roommate.
With people having a difficult time believing the Bush administration could be this astoundingly incompetent, charges of racism are natural. I don't think for a minute that Bush is a racist. However, if there was bias, it was likely based more on class and politics than race. Put the cowboy act aside, and one sees that Bush grew up as a wealthy prince. Having such a privileged background combined with an incurious mind can be lethal. Did Bush know that some people can't afford cars and must rely on public transportation to escape?
Politically speaking, this is a long-term boon for Republicans and there was an incentive to let New Orleans sink. Poor blacks and whites will not be able to afford to move back. Notice that they got a one-way ticket to Texas. New Orleans will likely be rebuilt as a rich, white Disneyfied imitation of the original. Without a diverse New Orleans, Louisiana becomes a monolithically Republican state. Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu, for example, can kiss her career goodbye.
In the face of backlash, Republicans temporarily shelved their plans this week to repeal the Estate Tax, which they adroitly renamed the "Death Tax". This was a smart move because the charitable checks we are all paying to cover the destitution and carnage caused by Bush's policies, is a "Death Tax" if I've ever seen one.
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