Innehållsförteckning för October - November 2015 från The Advocate

A SINNER IN MECCA In an act of potentially deadly defiance, a gay filmmaker questions and reclaims his faith while exposing Saudi Arabia’s violent conservatism. For many, Mecca is a city in Saudi Arabia shrouded in mystery: impenetrable, unknowable. But for devout Muslims, the hajj, a pilgrimage to Mecca, one of Islam’s holiest sites, is a journey one must make in their time on earth. Photographing or videotaping the hajj is strictly forbidden, so to see the swirling masses at the Kaaba, the sacred cuboid building in the middle of Mecca, as seen in Parvez Sharma’s intensely personal documentary, A Sinner in Mecca, gives audiences a voyeuristic thrill. We feel the claustrophobia, the danger, the violence as the camera—strapped secretly to Sharma’s neck—approaches the sacred object. Many fundamentalist Muslims already…

24 Leonardo Da Vinci’s age when he was arrested on charges of sodomy in 1476 1987 Year the Leslie-Lohman Museum, the first art museum dedicated to LGBT art, was opened in New York City $87,000,000 Annual ticket revenue of visitors to the Sistine Chapel, painted by gay artist Michelangelo 30% Percentage of the 20 most expensive paintings done by gay artists Andy Warhol Jasper Johns Francis Bacon 1,500 Number of existing Polaroids taken by Robert Mapplethorpe 54 tons Weight of NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt 3,000–7,000 Number of homoerotic photographs taken by Wilhelm von Gloeden in Sicily between 1878 and 1910 $ 105 MILLION Highest price paid for an Andy Warhol piece [Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster)] 1962 Year the United States Supreme Court ruled male nudity in photographs to…

AS I ENTER the set of the film Stonewall, a sense of surrealism immediately sets in. The cast and crew are standing on a Montreal soundstage in an industrial warehouse on a hot, muggy night in July of last year. They’re here to recreate a crucial bit of gay history. I have to look up as a reminder that what I am seeing is not real. The surrounding set is a meticulously reconstructed Christopher Street in Greenwich Village, circa 1969. The offices of the original alt-weekly newspaper the Village Voice are here, as are a number of local businesses. At the center of it all is the Stonewall Inn, the drinking hole now widely regarded as ground zero for the contemporary LGBT civil rights movement. And this, as it turns…

In an ironic twist of fate, the two issues our community has fought most ferociously for are the last two things I’d ever want for myself. A perennial bachelor, I was always horrified by the idea of marriage (and always used my gayness as a convenient excuse for not being hitched). And being in the military? I’d sooner chew on cut glass after a lengthy visit to Chick-fil-A. I remember a co-employee years ago who told me he’d pretended to be gay to get out of the military. Now we were fighting to be able to be out and proud and holding a machine gun! (We won the right in 2011, when “don’t ask, don’t tell” was finally repealed.) Writer-wit Fran Lebowitz echoed some of my thoughts when she addressed…

A mention of Log Cabin Republicans in some queer quarters will elicit a response similar to the invocation of Jews for Jesus or Uncle Tom: a derisive snort. Or worse. LCR celebrated nationwide marriage equality with the rest of the LGBT community, after having worked hard to bring it about. But the party to which it pledges allegiance has pitched a rearguard action against marriage for years, surrendering no ditch without a skirmish. The GOP and the greater conservative movement sometimes seem to want little to do with LCR. To wit: While some GOP presidential contenders have met with LCR, they all condemned the United States Supreme Court’s marriage equality decision in June, some in floridly apocalyptic terms; most immediately seized the banner of the next battle, “religious freedom.” LCR…

When you hit that great brick wall that hopefully breaks through to heaven, where will you be? My dear friend and mentor, novelist and linguist Ursule Molinaro, had her “brick wall” all planned out. A “graduate” of the Nazi-run prison of Fresnes in France for hiding a Jewish couple, she decided forever after to escape all institutions. Hospitals were at the top of that list. Making her future departure foolproof and pill-enabled didn’t prevent her from conjecturing endings that could happen before her well-planned exit. Once I flagged down a New York taxi for the two of us. To the dangerous swerves of the clumsy cabbie she conjured the following: What would happen to us if we left this level together in the company of this whistling, gap-toothed Haitian chatting…

Ayesha Harris Barber, Entrepreneur, 35 LOS ANGELES The African-American barbershop community is a tough place to be a woman. It’s an even tougher place to be a lesbian—just ask Ayesha Harris. After years of working at traditional and “high-value” barbershops, Harris needed more than just a change of scenery. “I’m always the only woman,” Harris says of her past experiences. “Any other female barber I talk to, they’re always the only woman.” So the Long Beach, Calif., native took matters into her own hands. In 2013, she opened Ninth Chapter Barbershop in the Fairfax district of Los Angeles, just a few blocks north of the strip of restaurants and shops known as “Little Ethiopia.” “We’re a collective of all female barbers,” Harris says proudly. “We’re all lesbians.” That distinction makes…

Laurel Hester is a New Jersey police detective so closeted at work that she drives several towns over just to socialize with other lesbians. When her cop partner Dane arrives at her new home unexpectedly with a housewarming present, he sees her girlfriend Stacie tooling around with plants on the front lawn. Dane assumes Stacie is the gardener, but Hester corrects him. Hester tells him that Stacie is her “roommate.” Stacie rolls her eyes and huffs away. It’s a scene so common as to be mundane, and yet so symbolic. Though Hester eventually does the right thing by Stacie—becoming one of the most visible advocates for LGBT equality in her state along the way—that moment cuts right to the heart of every queer person over a certain age who has…

“Why am I gay?” The question reverberates through every homosexual at least once in his or her life. While potentially confounding as a personal question, when one applies a little science, this question becomes an intriguing evolutionary puzzle. Homosexual behavior has been observed in more than 1,500 species. If the point of life, from an evolutionary standpoint, is to pass on useful genes, why is anyone gay? Humans have been trying to answer that question since we began applying scientific principles to human sexuality. Unfortunately the first of those humans were Victorians who considered the “nameless offense of great enormity” so dangerous to society that they regularly sent gay men to the gallows or locked them away forever. The Victorians passed their prejudices on to later generations. As late as…

Though her work has been shown in countless exhibitions worldwide, Mickalene Thomas was a student at Yale when she first began taking pictures of herself and her mother. The large-scale portraits in Muse: Mickalene Thomas Photographs (Aperture) which publishes this autumn, combines aspects of classical odalisque paintings with those of fashion photography of the 1970s “Black is Beautiful”-era (when her mother was a model), among other influences, to examine race, sexuality, the artist’s gaze, and the construction of images.…

Forty-seven years ago, The Killing of Sister George revolutionized the way lesbians are portrayed in the movies, changed the way films are advertised, and, thanks to a sex scene that was considered “startling” at the time, earned one of the Motion Picture Association of America’s first X ratings. It’s mentioned in every serious history of queer cinema, but these days, because it isn’t available on a streaming service and because video stores have become almost as rare as lesbian bars, it is seldom seen. That needs to change. In 1968, the film was mocked by straight critics and vilified in the lesbian press, but those harsh judgments reflected the attitudes of the time. From the perspective of 2015, The Killing of Sister George is both a fascinating chronicle of lesbian…