Proceed at your own risk

LISTENING TO HIS OWN MUSIC

    
       

AT LEAST WE'LL ALWAYS HAVE BROADWAY

Last Thursday night I attended a performance of the spanking new Broadway musical, MEMPHIS.  The story concerns the birth of rock & roll off Beale Street but mostly focuses on the "theft" of rock & roll from the black clubs of Memphis during the late 1940s and early 1950s.  One of the climactic moments in the show occurs when a white man kisses a black woman in a very public place.  Rage, violence and a media frenzy ensue.  The woman ends up in a hospital; she survives but is traumatized for quite some time and seems afraid to even breath in public. 

The mixed raced couple at the center of this story talks a lot about leaving their roots in Memphis and heading up north to New York where they can be legally married and walk down a street without fear of bashing.  The woman finally flees to New York, a lynch mob at her heals over that kiss, where she can at long last live as an openly gay man a fully realized black woman.

There's also a lot of talk throughout the show about how good Christians should not tolerate "coloreds" stepping out of their place.  According to Jesus, coloreds are not equal to decent white folks.

Why does everything these days seem to me like a metaphor for the plight of the gay man in America today? Maybe because everything is...

During intermission, an acquaintance of my theater companion, a young heterosexual woman in her mid-20s (the acquaintance, not my companion) loudly expressed relief that she "wasn't alive during those awful times."

"Can you imagine," she continued, "people reacting with such outrage and even violence over a simple kiss between two people in love."

I felt diminished, angered and stunned by this statement.  I quietly responded, "Don't you think a gay man might feel differently about that?  Gay men and women are being viciously attacked nationwide for public displays of affection by that very same brand of bigotry. You are living in 'these times'" I hissed at her.  My companion kicked me the ankle.

But the acquaintance pretty much shrugged me off and starting talking about her bad back and what a wonderful therapist she had found and how her insurance company will not reimburse the full amount. 

I wandered off to lasciviously ogle the dozens of gorgeous show queens and wait for the second act. 

I hate intermissions--during sex, during shows, during anything.  If I'm enjoying myself, let's keep going until it's done.  Not a very patient boy here. 

But at least this particular intermission allowed me the opportunity to look around and realize that the white man may have stolen rock & roll from the black man, but Broadway still belongs to the gay man. 

And as I watched two hunky ex-stars from The Guiding Light exchange a kiss and a nose rub just a few seats away, I wondered if the young girl with the bad back knew or even cared that in Salt Lake City those two men might be arrested or even assaulted over a kiss by Mormon thugs in white shirts and black suits.  In most of these United States, they could be legally thrown off campus, fired from their jobs, evicted from their homes or drummed out of the army.  And they would have to go way up north to the snowy hills of New England to marry.  They might even have been beaten to a bloody pulp by a gang of young black men in the borough of Queens.

Lucky for my friend's heterosexual acquaintance that she doesn't have to live in these "awful times."

MEN WHO MAKE MUSIC

MEN WHO MAKE MUSIC

     

SHOCKED!

The ongoing Michael Jackson saga has become my guilty pleasure. 

Since he died, I wake up each morning trembling with delicious anticipation over the next revelation.  His children were fathered by his Jewish dermatologist has so far been my favorite morsel. 

But as much as I'm enjoying the unfolding of MJ saga truth, I was shocked by the shock now being expressed over the "revelation" that Michael Jackson was gay. 

Was there really someone out there who thought otherwise?  We're talking about the man/girl who mainstreamed drag, made Betty Boop sound butch, made Liberace look like a plain Jane and had a secret shrine adjacent to his bedroom dedicated to Macauly Culkin's used white jockey shorts.

 

Here's my challenge to the straight world:  Tell me one thing about Michael Jackson other than you're own moronic homophobia that led you to believe that he was straight. One thing.

DESPERATE TO BE DIFFERENT

Virginity, tweens, sterilized music and Disney PR having failed them, the Jonas Brothers hope to revive their rapidly failing career pandering to queers.  Thanks for the video, but I'm still not going to listen to your music.

MUSIC LOVER

 

MERRY CHRISTMAS

Yes, the long Thanksgiving weekend is drawing to a close; so now we can slide straight into Christmas--that time of year when the nation reminds those of us who are not Christian that we are, after all, just guests in the land of the free and the brave.

Well, like any good subservient Jew who is ever so grateful to be tolerated by the Christian majority, I'm in the spirit and want to share.  Please enjoy a selection of my favorite Christmas songs.  My cockles are a awarming.

REMEMBER WHEN SIR ELTON WAS IN THE CLOSET?