The Redesigned Rainbow Flag, Monstrously Ugly

Douglas Murray, a New York Post columnist, described the rainbow flag in his column (January 24, 2025) as "a perfectly pleasant symbol of gay liberation" that "has gotten more monstrously ugly with each year." Amen!

The flag designer Gilbert Baker's simple six-color horizontally striped flag can be put in the If-it-ain't- broke, don't-fix-it category. Redesigning the flag by adding, to quote Mr. Murray, "a triangle and a little circle" to make it more inclusive with regard to race, ethnicity, and gender makes no sense to me. The flag's colors have nothing to do with any of that because they stand for much broader meanings.

It's obvious Mr. Murray has no knowledge of those meanings when he says, "[I]f the colors of the flag were meant to represent different races, then who were the orange and red stripes meant to represent[?]. Was it gays with too much fake tan on? Or white lesbians who had been left out in the sun too long?"

He concludes this part of the column by saying, "Even thinking that the flag was about race was a demonstration of Olympic-level stupidity."  But then he fails to explain what each color symbolizes. That would have helped his readers to see the flag's universality.

 Since he doesn't seem to know about each color's meaning, I would suggest Mr. Murray get a copy of Out in All Directions: The Almanac of Gay and Lesbian America, published in 1995.

The brief entry on the flag, by Steve Vezeris, points out that the flag originally "had eight horizontal stripes, from top to bottom: hot pink for sex, red for life, orange for healing, yellow for sun, green for serenity with nature, turquoise for art, indigo for harmony, and violet for spirit."

Indigo was later replaced by royal blue. And, according to the 2006 documentary Rainbow Pride, the colors hot pink and turquoise were dropped. The reason: those colors were not on the palette of flag makers.

We Shouldn't Cherry-Pick History

 The News Briefs column in the January 17-23, 2003 issue of the Gay City News had an item headlined "We Don't Want Him." The him being referred to is none other than Adolf Hitler. The news brief, written by Andy Humm, announced that HBO was "developing a documentary called The Pink Fuhrer" that explored "whether or not Adolf Hitler was homosexual." 

Seventeen years later, the film, which I have not seen, should by now be available on DVD. I would like to see it to judge for myself if what is discussed is credible.

The thing that interests me more is the headline--"We Don't Want Him" instead of "Was Hitler Gay?" I can understand the urge to reject Hitler because of his genocidal, anti-Semitic pronouncements and behavior. But if he was a closeted homosexual, then he becomes part of gay history, like it or not.

Gay history has the tendency to celebrate only those deemed the good guys while ignoring those identified as villains like J. Edgar Hoover, Roy Cohn, Cecil Rhodes, and the murderers Leopold and Loeb.

If we're going to study gay history, it should be studied like all other histories, warts and all; the good, the bad, and the ugly; the sacred and the profane. By sanitizing and cherry-picking history, it becomes distorted and valueless. Looking at history in its fullness makes it possible for us to more accurately analyze and evaluate people, attitudes, actions, and events.

We can't do that if we hide the historical record. The history exists and we have to deal with it.

Stonewall 50 Commemoration At The New York Public Library

The Love & Resistance: Stonewall 50 exhibition is slated for viewing at the New York Public Library's Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, from February 14 to July 14, 2019. It will be on the third floor, in the Rayner Special Collections Wing & Print Gallery.

"This exhibition," announced the New York Public Library Now magazine (Winter/Spring 2019)," illustrates this history [of gay liberation] through the photographs of Kay Tobin Lahusen and Diana Davies, who captured the pivotal events of this era and changed the ways that LGBTQ people perceived themselves."

Love & Resistance: Stonewall 50 will also, continued Now, the library publication, feature "other items from the Library's vast archival holdings in LGBTQ history, including ephemera, periodicals, and more."

A Gay History Website

I just learned today of a website via 1010 WINS, an all-news radio station in New York. The website is called makinggayhistory.com. Actually, it's a podcast of past interviews with gay and lesbian luminaries such as educator and activist Joyce Hunter. The interviews are from historian Eric Marcus's archives. I intend to visit it frequently.

Cleve Jones's Former Roommate

When I read gay activist Cleve Jones's riveting memoir,When We Rise: My Life in the Movement, I was surprised to learn that he and historian Eric Garber were roommates in San Francisco at one time.

In 1982, at New York's Hunter College, I attended Garber's slide lecture on the gay and lesbian aspect of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. I later interviewed him for the New York Native, the now-defunct gay weekly newspaper.

Garber's research inspired me to do further reading on the gays and lesbians of the Harlem Renaissance like the artist/poet/novelist Richard Bruce Nugent, who I wrote about for Joseph Beam's 1986 anthology, In the Life.

Note: See my 1983 New York City News interview with Eric Garber that I posted on this blog on April 20, 2013.

A Book About Two Unsung AIDS Heroes

A book I am looking forward to reading is historian Martin Duberman's Hold Tight Gently: Michael Callen, Essex Hemphill, and the Battlefield of AIDS, published by The New Press. I had the opportunity of meeting both men in the 1980s.

I learned about this book when I saw the last two copies of the March 2014 issue of A & U magazine on a recent visit to the Gay Community Center on 13th Street in Greenwich Village. Martin Duberman's photo was on the cover, with his name in red letters and a brief description of the book.

Prejudice And Pride In Manhattan

In celebration of June as "Lesbian and Gay Pride and History Month," a series of events has been scheduled at various locations on the West Side of Manhattan.

Chief among them is a wonderfully mounted exhibit of photographs and memorabilia called "Prejudice and Pride: The New York City Lesbian and Gay Community, World War II--Present" that runs until June 30 [1988] at the Tweed Gallery*, 52 Chambers Street, behind City Hall.

This exhibit, which is sure to fill its spectators, particularly if they're gay or lesbian, with pride and awe, and at times fear and anger, is divided into 16 categories, ranging from the black-and-white photos of "Circles of Friends" ("Gay Beach at Riis Park, 1955" from the Frank Thompson collection, is one of them) to the glass-enclosed examples of "Homophobia" (newspaper headlines, handwritten hate letters, and weapons used to assault gay men, such as an assortment of knives.)

Two years in the making, and co-sponsored by four gay organizations, under the auspices of the mayor's office, "Prejudice and Pride" shows us a community emerging from the shadows of invisibility; refusing to be persecuted anymore, and announcing, with head held high, that "We are everywhere."

Although the curator, Allen Ellensweig, in the exhibit brochure, freely admits that the show can "make no claim to all-inclusiveness," I still wish there had been more representation of gays and lesbians of color, helping to destroy the myth that homosexuality is a "white disease," a notion quite prevalent in the black community.

Aside from this shortcoming, I see "Prejudice and Pride" as playing an important role in emphasizing the necessity of documenting and preserving gay history.

"If the world defines you," says the black lesbian poet Audre Lorde, in an interview in American Poetry Review (March/April 1980), "it will define you to your disadvantage. So either I'm going to be defined by myself or not at all."

*Note: The Tweed Courthouse, where the Tweed Gallery was located, now houses the city's Department of Education.


This article was originally published in the West Side Spirit (June 20, 1988).

The Rainbow Flag's Colors

In Steve Vezeris's brief entry in Out in All Directions: The Almanac of Gay and Lesbian America (Warner Books, 1995), he pointed out that "[t]he first rainbow [flag] design had eight horizontal stripes, from top to bottom: hot pink for sex, red for life, orange for healing, yellow for sun, green for serenity with nature, turquoise for art, indigo for harmony, and violet for spirit." He continued: "For  the 1979 [San Francisco Gay Freedom Day] parade, due to production constraints, hot pink and turquoise stripes were dropped and royal blue replaced the indigo stripe." According to Rainbow Pride, the documentary about the rainbow flag and its creator Gilbert Baker, hot pink and turquoise was dropped because those colors were not on the palette of flag makers.

Assotto Saint, The Impossible Black Homosexual

My favorite Assotto Saint story is the one where he boldly marches up to the pulpit at poet Donald Woods's funeral and utters what others in the church, including his two lovers, were afraid to admit in their eulogies of him: that Donald was a black gay man. This story has been retold in print by writers James Turcotte and Thomas Glave.

Assotto Saint, also a poet and publisher, called himself an "impossible black homosexual." That night he certainly was. Kudos to him for such a brave act.

Gay Bohemian Of The Harlem Renaissance

"I've always been called flamboyant," admits Bruce Nugent, the last living figure * involved with the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s."There weren't many black bohemians, I gather , at that time."

Out of the Renaissance came such literary talents as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Thurman, to name a few. A significant number of them were gay or lesbian. Nugent was the most openly homosexual of any of them.

Nugent, himself a writer and artist, wore his bohemianism and homosexuality as a badge of honor. He became quite conspicuous because he" didn't wear socks." And because he had no permanent address, surviving on financial help from friends.

His homosexuality caused him little disapproval from the Harlem community. His own attitude was that he "thought everybody was in the 'life.'" Especially if he found them physically attractive. Nugent went about Harlem with the belief that "If you can't take me the way I am, it's your problem. It's certainly not mine." Being a bohemian, he asserts, will "probably keep me alive another 79 years."

A native of Washington, D.C., Richard Bruce Nugent came to New York around 1925. It was at that time that he met and became friends with Langston Hughes. Writes Nugent: "He was a made-to-order Hero for me. At 23 he ...had done...all the things young men dream of but never quite get done--worked on ships, gone to exotic places, known known people, written poetry that had appeared in print--everything."

It was not long before Nugent himself wrote a short story--prose-poem, as one modern-day critic labels it--that is considered the first one that depicts black homosexuality. In 1926, the year it appeared in Fire!!, a short-lived black literary journal, it shocked readers, particularly members of the black bourgeoisie.

Looking back on it nearly 60 years later, Nugent can't see what all the fuss was about. Certainly the story, by today's standards, is very mild in its bedroom scene. People shunned Nugent but for only a day or two.

The story, "Smoke, Lillies, and Jade," is written throughout  with ellipses. As a staffer at Fire!!, Nugent, with his story, used the elliptical approach because he "wanted people to think" as they read each word, each phrase, each sentence. At present, he is at work on a book he describes as being "pornographic in content."

Nugent knew he was gay from an early age. In fact, his father, who died when Nugent was in his early teens, suspected him. He recalls the day when "we were playing checkers and I kept winning games. My father said to me, 'It's time for me to die when you can beat me in checkers.' We would be playing checkers and he'd say 'Never do anything you'd be ashamed of and never be ashamed of anything you do.' " That was his father's way of telling him he knew instinctually that his son was gay.

And even though he and Langston Hughes were close friends, the rumor that Hughes was gay was not apparent to Nugent. "My personal feelings about Langston is that he was asexual. I had a big argument with [Hughes biographer] Faith Berry about that. I said to her: 'How do you know?'" Whether or not, Hughes and Zell Ingram, an artist and traveling companion, were sleeping together, as is hinted at in Berry's book, is something Nugent considers "unimportant to me. I know it was unimportant to Langston what people thought about them."

Now a resident of Hoboken, N.J., across the Hudson River from Manhattan, Nugent, a septuagenarian, still has an eye for the boys. But, he readily admits, with a chuckle,  "They don't have an eye for me. I have to wait for those peculiar people who like older men. They are few and far between."

That doesn't seem to bother him particularly. After all, when he was a young man "I missed many a streetcar I was waiting for but another one always came along. Sometimes crowded."

One of those "streetcars" was Philander Thomas, "Truly named," says Nugent. "Philander was very much a playboy. He brought people together. That's what he liked to do." In other words, a matchmaker? "Not a matchmaker in that sense, but bedmates. [People who came to Harlem did so] to vent their pleasures. Harlem was the place to be. Everybody thought they could and Philander saw to it that they did. He was quite a man, quite a funny man. I liked his random freedom. Very few people have it. I had it."

(The above passages are from an early draft of the manuscript I sent to Joseph Beam for his groundbreaking anthology, In the Life. This draft was written on June 17, 1985. I sent it to Joe so he could see my progress on the profile of Nugent.)

*Note: I was unaware at the time that another Harlem Renaissance writer, Dorothy West, was still alive.

Naming Gay Names In Hollywood

The late film historian Vito Russo, in his marvelous book, The Celluloid Closet, had this to say about the mindset of film executives: "The movies await permission from the world-famous general public before they will portray gays as a fact of life. And the self-hatred of gays in the film industry is as much at fault as the ignorance of the general public."

With that in mind, a book proposal by Martin Strong (a pseudonym) is circulating through the New York book publishing world, looking for a home. This proposal, if and when it is expanded into a book-length work, will really shake up Hollywood, from top to bottom. No pun intended. It'll undoubtedly be a runaway best-seller.

It purports to name names. In a word, to out gay writers, directors, producers, and actors. The Scandal of Homosexual Hollywood, as the proposal is called, will also have "a list of straight production crew types and publicists," says the New York Daily News, "who find it hard to get work because of, among other things, their sexual persuasion."

Strong, a former TV director, has been gathering information about Hollywood's closeted gays for ten years.

This unpublished Mediawatch article was written in November 1991.

(A search on Google and Amazon.com did not list this title. Apparently the book was never published.)

Gay Bohemian Of The Harlem Renaissance

Richard Bruce Nugent, who was born in Washington, D.C., died in 1987. During the Harlem Renaissance, he frequented Georgia Douglas Johnson's soirees where he met Langston Hughes, Alain Locke, W.E.B. DuBois, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, among others. Nugent was the only writer of the Harlem Renaissance period to deal with homosexuality explicitly in his work, as in his short story, "Smoke, Lillies, and Jade," published in Fire!! Born of middle class parents in 1906, Nugent's adopted lifestyle made him conspicuous because he lacked a permanent address. He wore his bohemianism and homosexuality like a badge of honor.

This brief obituary of Richard Bruce Nugent was originally published in Black/Out magazine (Fall 1988) and was adapted from my article about him that was published in In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology (Alyson, 1986).

A Cornucopia Of Gay & Lesbian Facts

Out in All Directions: The Almanac of Gay and Lesbian America, edited by Lynn Witt, Sherry Thomas, and Eric Marcus (Warner Books)

Out in All Directions is a smorgasbord of information that is so exciting and pleasurable, it's difficult for the reader to know what to read first. As the reader browses the 600-plus pages, all sorts of illustrations, articles, lists, and marginalia vie for immediate attention.

Divided into 10 chapters, the themes in Out in All Directions include: "Myths and Facts," "The Material World" (among the topics are: "Owning Our Own: Gay and Lesbian Bookstores," "Queer Groups at Work," and "Gay Money: What Is It? Who Has It?"), and "We Are Everywhere" (the topics in this chapter include: "Gays in the Fashion Industry," "Queers in the Church," "Out of the Closet, Into the Newsroom," and "Sports Are for Sissies, Too.")

The editors have made a special effort to be inclusive, hence there is much information by and about people of color, for example.

The stated aim of the editors is to "uncover history, illuminate gay and lesbian life, explode myths, and break new ground."

One flaw in the book is the listing of famous people as gay or lesbian without corroborating evidence. How does Jim Kepner know for sure that the scientist George Washington Carver or the composer Harold Arlen were gay men? What are his sources?

Out in All Directions belongs in every gay and lesbian home library despite that flaw because it contains genuinely important information we all--gay and straight-- should know about.

Imitating Tennessee

I'm reading Christopher Bram's hard-to-put-down Eminent Outlaws (Twelve, 2012) which is about influential gay writers (Capote, Baldwin, Isherwood, et al). Bram notes Tennessee Williams's constant complaints about being "exhausted and ill." That reminded me of film critic Rex Reed's humorous imitation of Williams. Whenever Reed inquired about Williams's health, the stock reply, delivered in Williams's Southern drawl, would be "Oh, baby, I'm sick."

Assotto Saint's Videotape Erasure

Other than poet Assotto Saint and his life partner Jan Holmgren, I am probably the only person to have viewed a videotape of our mutual friend Dave Frechette's final moments as he lay in a hospital bed.

Dave, a very gifted writer and journalist, died of AIDS-related complications at New York's Roosevelt Hospital in 1991.

As he lay dying, Assotto and Jan recorded him up to the point when he took his last breaths. At the moment of death, Assotto is seen trying to close Dave's eyes. But they wouldn't stay closed.

Assotto, shortly after showing me the tape in his Chelsea apartment, accidentally erased it. An avid fan of the soap opera, All My Children, he recorded an episode of the show on the tape containing the video of Dave's death. "Can you imagine," he lamented to me, "erasing the tape for a soap opera?" Apparently, he did not label the cassette or punch out the little plastic tabs at both ends of the cassette to prevent such a catastrophe. Unfortunately, that tape is now forever lost to gay history. ( There was a recording of Dave's funeral service, which I also viewed at Assotto's home, but I don' t remember if it was on the same cassette.)

Virginia Apuzzo Speaks Her Mind

This archival interview took place in the offices of the then New York-based National Gay Task Force in 1983. Virginia Apuzzo was the executive director at the time. The interview was published in whole or in part in USA Today and the New York Native, a gay and lesbian weekly newspaper. The following is an excerpt from the interview.

Charles Michael Smith: What type of gay rights legislation do you want to see enacted?
Virginia Apuzzo: First of all, the issue of legislation unfortunately is one that is not clear and clean in terms of how we divide our responsibilities in the gay and lesbian community. Legislation on the federal level has traditionally been the jurisdiction of the Gay Rights National Lobby and I co-chaired that organization from its inception [in 1967] till [the spring of] 1978. But among those things that are on our legislative agenda right now is certainly all of the appropriations legislation that has to do with AIDS. And you see it's the nature of the American system that the budget gets presented and then the Congress approves the budget and then as we needed additional appropriations that emanates from the House and goes to the Senate for confirmation. So we have a legislation that relates to appropriations around AIDS. That's one category. Two, immigration. The National Gay Task Force has had immigration as one of its key concerns since we began. I think there are few people who realize the unfairness of immigration. A person like Elton John or Quentin Crisp can come into the country because they are of high notoriety and are successful and [have] acknowledged sexual preferences. Carl Hill tried to get into the country [and] did not bode as successfully.
The Carl Hill case was the case we just won out in the San Francisco Federal [9th] Circuit District [Court]. The Carl Hill case was decided in our favor that the federal government could not keep him out. That could conceivably be appealed. I'm not sure. We sent a letter to [U.S. Attorney General] William French Smith urging that it not be appealed and also urging that they take the rationale that was confirmed and affirmed by the courts and utilize that to look again at the question of immigration and how they might be much more realistic as far as we're concerned.
CMS: Describe the Carl Hill case briefly.
VA: Carl Hill was from the United Kingdom, Britain, and attempted to come into the country and had a button that identified himself as a homosexual and was stopped and was detained and we predicated our case on utilizing that button to keep him out and his homosexuality is a violation of First Amendment rights. You might also take note of the fact that in the State of California there was a Pacific Telephone case which was litigated and it was determined that coming out is a political act. That therefore the whole question of First Amendment to homosexuality is something we've got to look at very, very carefully. I think that we're in the embryonic stages of the federal government finally beginning to deal with that.
When homosexuality was considered a disease, the [U.S.] Surgeon General could have jurisdiction over saying the person could be kept out because he or she was mentally ill. That's why people have to understand why the American Psychiatric Association and its [statement that homosexuality was not] an illness was so important. It was because the federal government could no longer predicate its argument against [allowing homosexuals into the country] on that argument.
CMS: How active will you be at the Democratic Convention in San Francisco next year?
VA: Very active. It's not just the Democratic Convention. The proper question is, if I may, how active will the gay and lesbian community be in the presidential election in 1984? That's the larger question because we have gay Republicans.
CMS: Does association with the Democrats hurt gays?
VA: No. No. I think that it's important that the gay and lesbian rights movement recognize that our diversity also includes Republicans, Conservatives, Libertarians, Independents. We're in every conceivable political party. My sense is that to the extent that gays and lesbians talk across party lines about the issues that concern us and that's important.
CMS: Is AIDS the biggest issue in the gay community?
VA: No. I think AIDS occupies a lot of our energy and our time but you must understand some things that putting AIDS in its context it certainly has commanded our undivided attention. But we lose 2,000 gays and lesbians a year to alcohol-related deaths. We are suffering from the same health care problems that the rest of America is suffering whether it's Alzheimer's disease or diabetes or hepatitis. We lose people every year to hepatitis. I think what AIDS ought to underscore for us is the dismal state of health care in America today. Sure, my consciousness has been raised through AIDS but my consciousness isn't fenced in by AIDS. AIDS ought to get us to think about all other issues.
CMS: Do you feel the government has done enough to solve the AIDS epidemic?
VA: No, obviously I don't. I've been yelling at them for about a year now. I think government is reactive government. That's probably my chief complaint. It's reactive. It walks an inch and you have to push it to say "That's not the mile, that's an inch." Government only reacts to pressure. So there's the necessity to keep that pressure escalated.
CMS: Has the press informed the public adequately about AIDS?
VA: The press has made a lot of headlines about AIDS. But one area that I would like to see the press look at is the worried well. Do you know what it's like for gay men who have fear all their lives about their sexual identity and having come to grips with that now have to fear their sexuality? That fear is a frantic fear. We've got a problem around stress and AIDS that hasn't begun to be dealt with. There's also some young men with AIDS who have stabilized their condition I think there ought to be more attention to that so that a person who gets diagnosed today doesn't feel like the only outcome is death. The third thing I don't think the press has paid enough attention to is [the fact that] there are 144 women with AIDS. We never read about those women. 54 percent of that group fall in no known risk category.
CMS: What are lesbians doing to fight AIDS?
VA: [There is] a program in which the lesbians in San Diego called Blood Sister donate blood so that gay men who could no longer give blood or were refraining from giving blood would not be left vulnerable. I'd like to see that catch on a lot more. There's a group called Women's AIDS Network nationally that's set up to deal with our concerns about AIDS, It's not exclusively a male phenomenon. But certainly women have been involved in this issue. I've probably talked more about AIDS than just about anybody around nationally.
CMS: Has AIDS strengthened gay solidarity?
VA: I think unfortunately the human being and the community of human beings do come together closer when there is a catastrophe. I think the gay community has done an enormous reassessment of how important it is to itself and to each other.
CMS: Writer Dennis Altman, on a radio show, said that he can't understand any gay or lesbian joining the military. What are your thoughts?
VA: People say that to me all the time. And that's my personal opinion. But we live with certain socio-economic realities in this country and for some people going into the military is a step up. We have to be about choice, about affording people the choices in their life. I wouldn't subscribe to the military but for some people it's the only way out of the situation. We can't judge other people's decision. We can only support them in their choices.
CMS: What did you think of Village Voice writer Anna Mayo's article about federal AIDS research?
VA: I think it ["Grandstanding on AIDS," Voice, November 1] was a homophobic article and it was a sexist article. It was also an article that seemed much more concerned--I think Richard Goldstein answered the article well this week in the Village Voice ["Acquired Mayo Deficiency Syndrome," November 8]. I think it was an absurd article. If Anna Mayo feels that I treated the federal government unfairly, then I would hope that where she feels the federal government treats gays unfairly, she will be equally as volatile in her response to them. But clearly it doesn't bother Anna Mayo that the federal government is the largest single discriminator against gay people and lesbians around. It doesn't faze her at all. The article was a trashy article. It was. I stand by it. If I had an opportunity to do it again, the only way I would alter it is to be more emphatic in my tone.
CMS: Mayo wrote: "[Congressman] Walker (R-Pennsylvania) tried to pin Apuzzo down on her charges of homophobia. Walker asked her--since she had gone on record with such very serious charges--to please name names and identify specific incidents of antigay discrimination in the health field so that he could personally see to it that such discrimination did not continue."
VA: She said I sputtered and I squeaked and if anybody knows me, they know I never squeaked in my life. When I want to say something, I say it pretty out front. The question of institutional or systemic racism or sexism or homophobia is not a ludicrous response. It is a response that underscores the fact that when something like racism or sexism or homophobia is so deep-rooted, people have it as part of the baggage that they carry with them, their perspective, everything about the way they see these populations is viewed by that underlying prejudice. That is my statement and I stand by that statement. And if there are gay people and lesbians who feel that the federal government is not homophobic, well, fine, let them step forward. But in dealing with this issue as in dealing with every other issue, I found institutional homophobia to be a major part of the resistance on the part of the federal government, just as I have found institutional racism and institutional sexism to be the determination in why things are not functioning at a more rapid rate in dealing with issues.

The Missing Sondheim TV Interview

Stephen Sondheim is one of the four gay Jewish men who created the Broadway musical West Side Story. And he is the only surviving member of that creative team. (The others were composer/conductor Leonard Bernstein, choreographer Jerome Robbins, and librettist Arthur Laurents.) You would have thought that his comments would have been sought when a local New York TV news show did a report commemorating the 50th anniversary of the movie version of the musical. Only two cast members from the movie George Chakiris and Russ Tamblyn appeared on-camera. ( As a tie-in,the report mentioned that the investigation of fellow cast member Natalie Woods's 1981 drowning was being re-opened that week by the authorities.) For me, a fan of Sondheim 's music, I was greatly disappointed that his voice was missing from the report.

Cruising On Central Park West

"[In the early 1960s] the unmistakable gay scene on adjacent Central Park West...from 59th to 86th streets 'was one long bench from corner to corner, solid with gay men. Hundreds and thousands of them walked back and forth singularly, in couples, and in groups' [recalls gay activist Dick Leitsch]."--Celluloid Activist: The Life and Times of Vito Russo by Michael Schiavi (University of Wisconsin Press, 2011).

Learning About Stonewall

I didn't learn about the Stonewall Riots until the mid or late '70s. In 1969, I was too busy dealing with my draft board and worrying about being inducted into the army and sent to Vietnam.

I first read about this milestone in the gay liberation movement via Dr. Howard Brown's memoir, Familiar Faces, Hidden Lives: The Story of Homosexual Men in America Today (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976). (Dr. Brown, a gay man, was New York mayor John Lindsay's health commissioner. During that time Dr. Brown was in the closet.) I would love to re-read that book. It's probably out of print, so I would have to search for it online or in a second-hand book store.

Vito Russo, The Celluloid Activist

I just started reading Celluloid Activist: The Life and Times of Vito Russo by Michael Schiavi (University of Wisconsin Press, 2011). The book looks promising so far. Russo"s Celluloid Closet has long been a favorite book of mine. Now I have the chance to read about his life, activism, and how he came to write this classic about the portrayal of gays and lesbians in Hollywood.