April 3 Gay City News

Embed Doc
Copy Link
Readcast
Collections

CommentGo Back

Download

SERVING GAY, LESBIAN, BI AND TRANSGENDERED NEW YORK • WWW.GAYCITYNEWS.COM

AMERICA’S LARGEST CIRCULATION GAY AND LESBIAN NEWSPAPER!

YOUR FREELGBTNEWSPAPER

Gay City

NEWSNEWS

APRIL 2-15, 2009VOL. EIGHT, ISS. 07

FUNDING FOR AT-RISK YOUTH

■

CRIME

Hate? Politics?Or Both?

BY DUNCAN OSBORNE

tanding with openly lesbian City Council Speaker Christine Quinnat a March 3 press conference,the Brooklyn district attorney, Charles J. Hynes, denounced the killing of JoseSucuzhanay, saying “a vile and viciousmurder is made all the more senseless when it is motivated by anti-gay andanti-immigrant views.” Jose and his brother, Romel, wereallegedly assaulted by Keith Phoenix and Hakim Scott last December 7. The brothers were walking to Jose’s homein Bushwick after attending a churchparty and huddling close together in thenear-freezing temperature. Police saidthey were mistaken for a gay couple andattacked.Phoenix and Scott face multiplecounts of second-degree murder, man-slaughter, assault, and attemptedassault, with some charged as hatecrimes. If found guilty, they could facea sentence of 78-years-to-life in prison.“All of those counts, we feel confident,can run consecutively,” Hynes said at the press conference. The hate crime tag increases theminimum sentence on second-degreemurder, the top count, from 15-years-to-life to 20-years-to-life. While the pros-

■

CRIME

Are JudgesMinding theStore?

BY DUNCAN OSBORNE

On January 14, Judge Michael D. Stall-man ruled that a police department legalunit lawsuit against Unicorn DVD, a pornshop at Eighth Avenue and 27th Street,could advance to trial.Cops from the Manhattan South ViceEnforcement Squad arrested five menthere for prostitution in late 2008, thoughfour of those men pleaded not guilty andare fighting the charges. The shop was a nuisance, police charged in the civil suit,and had to be closed immediately.Either because of community outcry over questionable prostitution arrestsof gay men in Manhattan porn shops or because the evidence in the Unicorn suit was slim, police withdrew the suit, without explanation, less than two weeks later. The Unicorn suit is one of seven brought against Manhattan porn shops since 2004after police arrested at least 50 men for prostitution in those businesses. Policehandled five, and the city CorporationCounsel’s office brought the other two.Five of the suits came in 2008 or 2009,

V A D I M S H E P E L

ANDREA BATISTA SCHLESINGER AT BLOOMBERG CAMPAIGN HEADQUARTERS

BY PAUL SCHINDLER

n the early 1990s, while growing upnear Coney Island, Andrea Batista Schlesinger served as the high schoolstudent representative on the Board of Education, which oversaw New York City schools prior to the current regimeof mayoral control. During the fractiousfight over a proposed — and ultimately rejected — “Children of the Rainbow”curriculum that, among other things, would have explored family diversity,including households headed by gay and lesbian parents, she fought hard tohave students represented on a Boardcommittee weighing the best course of action.Batista Schlesinger succeeded in get-ting students appointed — but was dis-appointed that they were given no vote. After high school, she headed to theMidwest to earn a public policy degree at the University of Chicago, a sort of small-scale Harvard, except that the studentsat U of C are

really

serious about their

JUDGES P. 6HATE? P. 4

ProgressiveCred &the Mayor

■

BEST SIDE STORY

Still the most beautifulsound you’ve ever heard

■

—————————————————

■

ASENTIC BIO-POLITICS

Serbian ontology on a dance stage works!

■

—————————————————

■

POUNDS OF GOWNS

Imperial Court of New York dazzles yet again

■

—————————————————

In this issue:

PROGRESSIVES P. 8

V A D I M S H E P E L

2 - 15

APR

2009

Books

BY DOUG IRELAND

round March 1, the 15thanniversary of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT),Barack Obama’s White House began to leak that it was “open-ing a dialogue” with military leaders about lifting the ban onhomosexuals in uniform. But,in a March 29 interview on Fox News Sunday, Obama’s secre-tary of defense, Bush holdover Robert Gates, let it slip that the dialogue hadn’t really even begun, that the administrationhad other important fish to fry at the moment, and that any revis-iting of DADT would have to bepostponed. How long? “Down theroad” was as far as Gates wouldgo. Just in time to influence thedialogue that isn’t happen-ing — yet — comes NathanielFrank’s superb critical history of DADT that is also a brilliantly researched brief for opponentsof the absurd policy. “Unfriend-ly Fire” demonstrates how thepolicy was conceived based onlies and deception; why it hasincreased, not decreased, thenumber of queers being thrownout of the military; and why it is the height of inefficiency and wastefulness of human talent for a nation simultaneously fightingtwo wars. As an anti-militarist (thoughnot a pacifist), I have to admit that for a long time I didn’t havethe issue of gays in the military very high on my list of priori-ties. Then, as Bill Clinton was inthe last year of his presidency, I wrote a cover story on the issuefor The Nation magazine (a link to which appears in the online version of this story at gayci-tynews.com). What had mademe interested was that “military homophobia is also a class issue: The overwhelming majority of its victims are young recruits who joined up to get an education or career, lured by the bright prom-ises of flashy ad campaigns andaggressive high school recruit-ing, often before they admit tothemselves they’re gay.” And my reporting showed that DADT hadturned thousands of innocent and idealistic working class kidsinto victims of institutional prej-udice encouraged from the top — with the gay-baiters and gay- bashers just as much victims of the climate of fear and suspicioncreated by DADT as the gaysthemselves.In the decade since my story,Nathaniel Frank has steepedhimself in the history and work-ings of DADT and become thecountry’s foremost expert onthis failed policy from his baseas senior research fellow at thePalm Center at the University of California-Santa Barbara. Frank brings passion to his meticulousand carefully documented schol-arship and the result is a superb book that ought to be force-fedto those in the Obama adminis-tration who’ve decided that thepresident, with a 66 president approval rating, doesn’t need tospend any of his political capitalon overturning the ban. The first major purge of gaysin the services took place in 1919at the naval base in Newport,Rhode Island — with the autho-rization of then Assistant Navy Secretary Franklin D. Roosevelt — when a chief machinists materecruited a squad of comely vol-unteers from the ranks who“entrapped suspected gay sail-ors by soliciting and having sex with them.” The US Senate, which subsequently investigatedthis inquisition, condemned thepurge’s “shocking” and “indefen-sible” tactics, adding that “per- version is not a crime… but a disease that should be treated ina hospital.”But during the inter-war years, “the military took theprocess out of the hands of psy-chiatrists and relied on the most crass and degrading character-ization of gay people.” However,it was World War II that “sys-temized discrimination against homosexual people,” Frank writes, and the Cold War, withits paranoia about queers being blackmailed into spying for theCommunists, did noting to lib-eralize views on homosexuals inthe military.But a universal ban on same-sexers in uniform only came inthe final week of Jimmy Carter’sadministration, when his deputy defense secretary managed toput through a service-wide ban“removing any discretion that different branches or individualcommanders previously enjoyed”in dealing with the gays in their ranks. As a result, “in the 1980s,the military lost 17,000 troops togay exclusion.”It was a “sweeping purge of suspected lesbians at the Par-ris Island Marine training center in South Carolina in 1988” that crystallized opposition to the gay ban. “Threats, naming names,informants, revealed affairs, and broken promises of immunity… were the order of the day.” As a result, 18 women were kickedout of the Navy and three were jailed; one committed suicide while under investigation. ThisParris Island purge prompteda handful of gay and women’sgroups to launch the Gay andLesbian Military Freedom Proj-ect (MFP) at the end of 1988, thefirst organized effort to fight the ban and aide its victims. Thanksto the MFP’s agitation, the banmade its way onto the agenda of the gay citizenship movement,fueled by lawsuits by Joe Stef-fan, who’d been one of Annapolis’highest rated midshipman before being booted just weeks beforehis graduation; Lieutenant JG Tracy Thorne, an A-6 bombar-dier navigator who announcedhis homosexuality on ABCNews, as did Petty Officer KeithMeinhold, a navy flight systemsinstructor; and Colonel Marga-rethe Cammermeyer, a 50-year-old grandmother who was chief of nursing for the WashingtonState National Guard.In 1992, looking for a way to impress wealthy gay donorsand the growing gay-identifiedelectorate, Bill Clinton stum- bled almost by accident intoannouncing his support for anend to the ban when asked about it at a Harvard Kennedy Schoolappearance. Then, just a week after Clinton’s election, a federal judge in San Francisco orderedthe Navy to reinstate Meinhold. This convergence of eventsput the gay ban and Clinton’sHarvard pledge into the nationalspotlight — and was the signalfor an unprecedented mobiliza-tion in support of it by the puis-sant Christian right that hadhelped elect Ronald Reagan. The week after Clinton’s inaugura-tion, Congress was deluged with434,000 phone calls in a singleday, five times the average daily number of calls, and nearly all of them in opposition to lifting the ban.Frank’s long and detailedaccount of the tawdry story that followed should embarrass bothBill Clinton, whose spinelessnessin the face of a well-orchestratedreligious rebellion soon becameevident, and our military’s lead-ership, with Colin Powell at itshead. The generals and admirals,Frank’s book shows, admittedthey lied about the threat that openly gay and lesbian soldiersposed to “unit cohesion,” their favorite catch-word, and repeat-edly concealed or repressed stud-ies commissioned by the military showing there was no justifica-tion for the ban. They also usedpropaganda materials prepared by the religious right, includ-ing a video purporting to provethat gays would “undermine themilitary,” and stacked the work-ing group eventually tasked withexamining the military ban withtop brass who were religiousfanatics.In the end, Bill Clinton cavedin to a silent

coup d’etat

led by Colin Powell that shredded thehistoric constitutional principleof civilian control over the mili-tary — and if I have any criticismof Frank’s fine book, it’s that heskips over this anti-constitution-al angle too quickly.Frank puts all the studiesof gays in the military under the microscope, exhaustively sifts through the evidence, andcomes to the inescapable conclu-sion that “it is the pressure gen-erated by gay exclusion rules tofixate on the private lives of service members [that] is the threat to cohesion and morale” in our armed forces.Basing his account on hun-dreds of interviews with servicemembers, as well as individualcase studies and institutionalreviews, and wielding his factslike razors, Frank demonstratesirrefutably the disastrous resultsof DADT: “Gay and lesbian menand women were hauled beforedischarge boards not only whenthey chose to ‘tell’ but whenthey were outed by coworkers,ex-lovers, psychologists, chap-lains, Internet chat rooms, andeven their own parents. Pursuitsremained rampant, with flimsy evidence used as the basis of dis-charge proceedings. Mass witchhunts continued and threatsand intimidation were all tooroutine. Gays and lesbians werestill thrown in prison for privateconsensual sex; their educationand retirement benefits were vengefully snatched from themonce they were discharged; their mental health suffered as they were denied access to support services that all other troopscould use.” Just as I’d found in my report-ing for The Nation a decade earli-er, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell has con-tinued to lead to ever-escalatinglevels of harassment, abuse,intimidation, threats, physical violence, and even murder withinthe uniformed services, against which those perceived as gay have no recourse: They cannot complain to their superiors, for that would be “telling,” and they would be summarily expelled.Frank also reviews the experi-ence of the many countries that have ended their bans on gaysand the military and embracedthem; in each one, unit cohe-sion has improved, as has troopmorale. Yet, while banning gays, thearmed forces — so desperate for manpower — has put tens of thousands of criminals in uni-form. As Frank shows, “Between2003 and 2006, thanks to themilitary’s moral waivers pro-gram, 4,230 convicted felons,43,977 individual convictedof misdemeanors, includingassault, and 58,561 illegal drugabusers were allowed to enlist.”During the war in Iraq, “between2004 and 2007, the number of convicted felons nearly dou- bled, rising from 824 to 1,605.

A Timely Telling

Nathaniel Frank writes the definitive Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell exposé

UNFRIENDLY FIRE: HOW THE GAYBAN UNDERMINES THE MILITARYAND WEAKENS AMERICA

By Nathaniel FrankSt. Martin’s Press/ Thomas Dunne Books342 pages; $25.95



DON’T ASK

continued on

p.13

WWW

GAYCITYNEWS

COM

2 – 15

APR

2009

BY PAUL SCHINDLER

ith a recent city cen-sus finding that morethan 1,000 LGBT youth are homeless in New York and often have to spend the night on the streets, advocates for that population are expressing con-cerns about a number of budget cuts that could reduce servicesand even the scarce supply of emergency and transitional bedsavailable.Green Chimneys, which cur-rently provides 20 of the rough-ly 100 beds available citywideto homeless youth in settingsspecifically tailored to providea safe space for queer youth, isat risk of losing half of that total because of funding cuts at thecity Department of Youth andCommunity Development. DYCDinformed Green Chimneys itscontract funding those ten beds would not be renewed in the fis-cal year beginning July 1, leavingthe agency with only state money that pays for the other ten beds.However, according to Theresa Nolan, a senior staffer at GreenChimneys, the agency has now learned that additional statemoney going to DYCD might enable it to retain funding for as many as seven of the beds it risked losing.In the Bronx, the lack of a contract renewal is likely toprove more problematic. For the past three years, the Bronx Community Pride Center, anLGBT-focused facility on East 149th Street, has been the des-ignated borough drop-in center for homeless youth of all back-grounds, receiving funding of $300,000 annually. Accord-ing to Lisa Winters, during that period, the Pride Center hasexperienced about 16,000 youth visits, provided crisis referraland intensive case management to more than 700 youth, LGBT and straight from the Bronx andUpper Manhattan, served morethan 5,000 meals, and testedmore than 500 for HIV, identify-ing 29 positive clients. The lossof the city contract eliminatesa quarter of the Pride Center’s$1.2 million budget and elimi-nates its entire youth-specificprogramming. Though the Pride Center hadreceived Very Good ratings ineach of three annual city audits,it lost out in this year’s competitive bidding to Cardinal McClo-skey Services, a large socialservices agency that works inthe Bronx, Westchester, andRockland. Though it is osten-sibly non-sectarian, CardinalMcCloskey obviously has a Catholic background, and its website describes its missionin “support[ing] the sanctity of the family.” Winters noted that statement, and said that theCatholic Church’s historic hos-tility to LGBT people would dis-enfranchise many Pride Center clients. “My kids won’t go to Car-dinal McCloskey,” she warned.Ryan Dodge, a spokesmanfor DYCD, noted that CardinalMcCloskey specifically wroteabout serving LGBT youth inits proposal, and added that thePride Center’s loss of the con-tract was no reflection of thequality of the program it hasrun.In Manhattan, Sylvia’s Place,the homeless LGBT youth pro-gram of the Metropolitan Com-munity Church (MCC), in Mid-town, lost out in its effort to bedesignated as the Manhattanhomeless youth drop-in center. That contract, which has beenheld by the Streetwork programrun by Safe Horizon, will now go to the Door. Arguing that theDoor is not specifically geared toLGBT youth, Lucky Michaels, who directs MCC’s Homeless Youth Services, said the Sohoagency offered a “warehous-ing approach” to meeting youthneeds. Other advocates, howev-er, note that the Door has long worked effectively with queer youth among its population.Michaels said that without thedrop-in center contract, Sylvia’sPlace might not be able to con-tinue providing all 26 overnight spots that it currently offers.MCC staged a protest in City Hall Park on March 31, whereit was joined by homeless youthadvocates including CarmenQuinones from Green Chim-neys, Nancy Downing from Cov-enant House, and Margo Hirschfrom the Empire State Coalitionof Youth and Family Services. The largest provider of hous-ing for homeless LGBT youth,the Ali Forney Center, mean- while, announced this week that it is receiving new DYCDand state Department of Healthfunding of $400,000 in 2009, bringing its total annual budget to $4.3 million. The group added18 beds this year, and now provides 48 slots — 24 for emer-gency housing, and the other half for transitional living aimedat preparing youth to find per-manent housing on their own.

Judson Memorial Church

55 Washington Square South(212) 477-0351

www.judson.org

ASTER AT

UDSON

April 9 at 7:00 p.m. Contemplative Maundy Thursday ServiceApril 12 at 11 a.m. Easter CelebrationRev. Donna Schaper PreachingShared Pot Luck Meal to Follow

Noon “The Electric Slide”

and Rise Up!

Whoever you are, wherever you are on life’s journey,

you are welcome at Judson

Like to Party with

TINA

The Substance Use Research Center at Columbia University

seeks medically healthy Meth users between the ages of 21 and 45to participate in a 10-session study evaluating stimulant effects.

You can earn up to

$1,004.

For more information, please call: (212) 543-6013 or (212) 543-6545

ALL PERSONAL AND IDENTIFYING INFORMATION WILL BE KEPT CONFIDENTIAL

■

YOUTH

Budget Beefs of Youth Advocates

LGBT center in the Bronx, Metropolitan Community Church shelter cry foul

of 00

Category:	Magazines/Newspapers
Rating:
Upload Date:	05/19/2009
Copyright:	Attribution Non-commercial
Tags:	This document has no tags.

Documents

People