The West's Hidden Histories

The "Out West" series at the Autry Center of the American West showcases the histories of gay men and lesbian women. It's sponsored by Tom Gregory, HBO, the Gill Foundation and the Small Change Foundation in association with the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) and the Courage Campaign.

Last year, the Autry displayed the two entwined shirts from Brokeback Mountain.

The first Out West event was titled "Whatever Happened to Ennis del Mar?"

On May 13th "Hidden Histories", the second event in the series, will focus on "the untold stories of the Western GLBT community. Scholars and Autry curators tell the hidden histories behind the objects on display. Complimentary refreshments to be served with dinner available for purchase."

Speakers will include Gregory Hinton, creator and curator of "Out West"; Blake Allmendinger, professor of Western literature at UCLA; Stephen Aron, professor of history (UCLA) and director of the Institute for the Study of the American West at the Autry National Center; Carolyn Brucken, Associate Curator of Western Women's History at the Autry National Center; Jeffery Richardson, Assistant Curator of Film and Popular Culture at the Autry National Center; Patricia Nell Warren, historian and author and Jim Wilke, scholar and historian.

Call 323.667.2000, extension 389 for tickets and reservations.  Visit the Autry Center website for more details.

The 10,000-lake State: National Geographic's portrait exhibit

In Focus: National Geographic Greatest Portraits, published in 2004, showcases personal glimpses of people all over the world from the early 1900s to the 1990s. A collaboration of National Geographic and the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, the book’s images range from glimpses of tribal leaders and rural farms in a world long gone to Steve McCurry’s now-famous 1985 portrait of an Afghan girl.

"In 2002, National Geographic relocated Sharbat Gulu, now in her 30s with three children, in the remote Pushtun region of Afghanistan." Photo by Steve McCurry, 1985

A touring exhibit of 51 images from the book started in late 2005 and was originally scheduled to end early in 2009. The tour has been extended through 2010, and Midwesterners will get a chance to see it this spring and summer at the Duluth Art Institute in Duluth, Minnesota.

"Young women of the steppes in central Asia" by Maynard Owen Williams, 1932

The exhibition’s Duluth run will begin on March 20th and end on July 18th, with subsequent stops in Canadian, Texas and Kalamazoo, Michigan. The Duluth Art Institute will host a special opening night event, urging attendees to “Come with friends and come with your camera, we’ll have stations set up for you to play with portrait photography. Post the evening’s results on our Facebook page and see if you took the best shot!”

The exhibition will be at the DAI’s “Depot” branch at 506 W Michigan Street. Admission is free to members of the Duluth Art Institute and affiliated organization.  Non-members: $12 for adults, $6 for children 3-13, and children under 3 free. Ask about AAA and senior discounts.



Contact the DAI at 218.733.7560.

Anti-Gay group apologizes for not being homophobic enough

In May of last year Greg Sargent, host of the Washington Post's "Plum Line" blog, reported that a spokesman for the anti-gay Focus on the Family told him the group would not necessarily oppose a gay Supreme Court nominee. Focus' judicial analyst Bruce Hausknecht had stated that “The issue is not [a gay judge's] sexual orientation. It’s whether they are a good judge or not.." Sexual orientation, Hausknecht added “should never come up. It’s not even pertinent to the equation.” In the same month, Focus' federal policy analyst Ashley Horne told  One News Now that sexual orientation should not be a litmus test and that "decisions based on precedent under the law [and] practice judicial restraint" were the most important considerations.

The statements attracted some opposition, with Gary Glenn of the American Family Association (AFA) in  Michigan accusing Focus of a "moral retreat." However, Peter Sprigg of the Family Research Council expressed qualified agreement, although he referred only to a hypothetical judge "who has experienced same-sex attractions."

Sound too tolerant to be true? Well, of course it was. Last Thursday Peter ("Porno Pete") LaBarbera  commended Focus on the Family for "wisely correct[ing] their statements."  Tom Minnery, Vice President of Public Policy at Focus on the Family, characterized Hausknecht's remarks in "The Plum Line" as "one of those conversations we’d like to 'do over.’ We can assure you that we recognize that homosexual behavior is a sin and does not reflect God’s created intent and desire for humanity."
Not to be outdone, LaBarbera added that " Judicial nominees who practice [homosexuality] -- or worse, practice it proudly -- have a mark against their character that absolutely should be considered as a potential source of bias, and even anti-religious animus, in their future rulings."

Gainesville, Florida elects first out gay mayor

Election officials eventually gave Lowe 7 additional votes

Poll workers at the Supervisor of Elections training facility in Gainesville, Florida spent most of Friday afternoon doing a recount after Mayoral candidate Craig Lowe's narrow 35-vote victory on Tuesday. Lowe ended up with a 7-vote bump, and was declared the official mayor-elect a little after 3:00 p.m. Anti-gay activists had distributed phoney campaign fliers and the "Dove World Outreach Center" briefly displayed a sign reading "No Homo Mayor", later shortened to "No Homo" after the ACLU and various media outlets brought up the slight matter of tax exemptions.

Brokeback Mountain - The "Other Jack Twist"

Novelist Dean Koontz keeps a low profile, rarely granting interviews and doing book signings even more rarely. However, Koontz’ bestselling paranoid suspense thrillers have made him the world’s sixth most highly paid writers. When I started re-reading the book Strangers last year, I noticed that one of the major characters was named “Jack Twist,” one of the two main characters in Brokeback Mountain. For a Brokie who’d first read the book years before, it amounted to seeing a good friend show up in a very unexpected setting.

Cover art of Strangers

Strangers is reminiscent of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, with the addition of a deranged villain and with a somewhat different, though still benign, role for the interstellar visitors. Jack Twist is similar to many of Koontz’ characters: an essentially decent person whose life has gone seriously awry and whose view of the world has been thrown into chaos as a result.

Jack Twist’s life begins to unravel when he leads a special operation in a fictional Central American country with a group of fellow US Army Rangers. Jack and three other men are captured and imprisoned for about a year in a concentration camp "that had no official existence. . . . in true Orwellian tradition, because the four-story complex of cells and torture chambers had no name, it did not exist." For a long time they cling to hope that "they would be freed by commandos or through diplomatic channels before realizing that if they are to escape, they'll have to do it themselves."

The escape is successful but on returning to the US, Jack discovers that the spin on the failed special operation was that it had actually been “a terrorist act, a mass kidnapping, a provocation meant to spark a war.” He then learns that the Congressional committee appointed to 'investigate' “wasn’t interested in his viewpoint and that the televised hearing was merely an opportunity for politicians to do some grandstanding in the infamous tradition of Joe McCarthy."

Worse, in his absence his wife, Jenny, has been sexually assaulted and savagely beaten and the attack has left her permanently brain-damaged. The back story reflects a common theme in Koontz' books: that at any time, anyone's life can be blasted away by forces as impersonal as a tornado or an earthquake. In order to get the best medical care for his wife, and to survive in a country that has made him an outlaw, Jack uses his experience and training with martial arts, weapons, explosives and survival techniques to become a master thief.

Koontz’ Jack Twist is not much better-looking than Annie Proulx's:

Not one feature or aspect of his face could be called handsome. His forehead was too broad, ears too big. Although he had 20-20 vision, his left eye had a leftward cast, and most people could not talk to him without nervously shifting their attention from one eye to the other, wondering which was looking at them when in fact both were. When he smiled he looked clownish and when he frowned he looked sufficiently threatening to send Jack the Ripper scurrying for home and hearth.

But Jenny had seen something in him. She had wanted, needed and loved him. In spite of her own good looks, she had not cared about appearances.

Strangers was published in 1986, 11 years before Brokeback Mountain.

On the Horizon

The dust hasn’t yet settled on the Right’s reaction to health care reform. Proclamations are still going out about the end of America as we know it; talk radio hosts are still proclaiming the coming apocalypse of "Obamacare" and spinning tales of the left-wing “plants”, allegedly the real conveyors of epithets and expectoration, in between plugs for the “Take America Back Tour.” But the practitioners of politicotainment know how to fill the GOP's big tent and as Barnum knew, you have to keep the acts coming, always having something going on in the side ring while the center ring is between attractions. For that reason, if you haven’t heard of Goodwin Liu yet, you might be hearing a lot about him in the next month. In February, President Obama nominated him to fill a vacancy on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

The son of immigrants from Taiwan, Liu graduated from Yale Law School and was the first in his family to earn a law degree. He worked as an appellate litigator in Washington for O’Melveney & Myers, clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and for Judge David S. Tatel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Currently Liu is Associate Dean and Professor of Law at University of California-Berkeley, specializing in constitutional law, education policy, civil rights and the U.S. Supreme Court. He is co-director of the Berkeley law school's Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Race, Ethnicity and Diversity, which focuses on civil rights law and policy.

Liu served on President Obama’s transition team in the areas of education policy and agency review, teams of the Presidential transition of Barack Obama, and has served on boards of directors for the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California; the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy in Washington, D.C.; and Chinese for Affirmative Action to name a few. In March, the American Bar Association gave Liu its highest "WQ" (well qualified) rating, by a unanimous vote of its committee.

In short, some of Liu’s affiliations alone could set tinfoil hats a-tingle, and he’s already attracting opponents on the Right: National Review contributor and former Scalia law clerk Ed Whelan, Tony Perkins of the American Family Association, the Heritage Foundation and Senate Judiciary Committee’s Jeff Sessions, R-Alabama. But it isn’t Liu’s connections, his opposition to “strict constructionism” interpretations of the Constitution or his history of support for marriage equality for gays that's drawn the most ire so far. It’s his previous opposition to the appointments of Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito and John Roberts.

Well, that and the embarrassing fact that Liu was right.

Liu wrote that while Roberts had "a brilliant legal mind", a Supreme Court nominee "must be evaluated on more than legal intellect," and gave examples of how Roberts' "legal career is studded with activities unfriendly to civil rights, abortion rights, and the environment."

Testifying in Justice Alito's confirmation hearing in 2006, Liu considered Alito’s record to be "at the margin of the judicial spectrum, not the mainstream"; and commented on "Judge Alito's lack of skepticism toward government power that infringes on individual rights and liberties. Throughout his career, with few exceptions, Judge Alito has sided with the police, prosecutors, immigration officials, and other government agents, while taking a minimalist approach to recognizing official error and abuse." Liu also noted a "disturbing pattern of deference toward the use of government power against individuals."

While President Obama hasn’t hinted at considering Liu for the Supreme Court, Justice John Paul Stevens’ recent confirmation of rumors that he intends to retire has fueled speculation that Liu’s current nomination could be a prelude to a nomination as Stevens’ replacement.

A hearing was scheduled for Liu's confirmation on March 24th; however, it was postponed due to Republican objections on procedural grounds; and has been rescheduled for Friday, April 16, 2010. This could get interesting.

Welcome

Welcome to "Talking With Coyotes"!

'The Coyote’ grew up in south Florida and Atlanta, Georgia and currently lives with her husband, four dogs, two cats, two goats and a flock of chickens including a pet housechicken, in rural west-central Missouri not far from Kansas City.

This is a blog devoted to current events, particularly gay civil rights, from a left-leaning perspective; spirituality and occasional junkets into the New Age; animals particularly dogs and the Midwest including my own state of Missouri and my spiritual second home, Lake Superior and Minnesota’s North Shore.

I’m a fan of Brokeback Mountain (a “Brokie”), and will regularly post about related videos, screenings, books and my own fanfiction project.

There will be occasional posts about cooking, quilting, rural life in general and favorite online stores and websites. I do not solicit nor accept free merchandise or any other payment for recommendations.