‘Hate crime legislation accomplishes only one thing — the notion that some people in this country are more important than others,’ said Tammy Bruce. (Photo courtesy of Bruce)

“Something has gone wrong when as gay people we are protested by other gay people for not conforming,” said Tammy Bruce last week in San Diego.

There is a major kerfuffle going on in the gay community over GOProud hosting a reception at the Manchester Hyatt in San Diego last weekend that featured Bruce. Many gay organizations are boycotting the hotel because its owner, Doug Manchester, donated $125,000 to support Proposition 8. Before any of you readers go ballistic, know that I, a GOProud board member, took a week off from work in D.C. to volunteer to fight Proposition 8. I am a passionate believer in marriage equality. I also believe in redemption.

Manchester made a mistake and offered amends in the form of equal donations to gay groups that he gave to support Prop 8. GOProud accepted a $10,000 credit at his hotel and $6,000 in cash. Five other gay organizations also accepted his gifts but none of them have gone public and I don’t know who they are.

GOProud used its credit at the Hyatt to host an event for gays who support a different approach to equality from the gay establishment, featuring Tammy Bruce, a feminist and classical liberal gay woman who ran NOW in Los Angeles for several years. And boy did we get hell for that.

I travel a lot for work and have never seen a hotel with as many gay staffers as the Manchester Hyatt. Of their 1,100 employees, 325 have come out as gay to the hotel to protest the protest against them by their own people. They wore rainbow pins while we were there to support GOProud, as the boycott is hurting them and their families.

The real story is that the gay protesters are allied with Unitehere, which is a union group that wants to unionize the Hyatt. None of the staff that I spoke with wants to be in a union; rather they love their jobs and want to do them until they retire. As a former housekeeper, I am sensitive to what a tough job that can be. But the housekeepers with whom I spoke told me that they love their job. The annual housekeeper turnover at this hotel is 1 percent while the industry average is 54 percent.

So the protesters are more aligned with unions than they are with the gay employees of the Hyatt and the housekeepers who want to keep their jobs in a bad economy. That is mission creep, in a bad way.

In San Diego I had the opportunity to meet and interview Tammy Bruce, the featured speaker at the GOProud event.

Washington Blade: The legislative priorities of gay establishment organizations have been passing a hate crimes bill and ENDA. What is your view on those priorities? Would you suggest different ones?

Tammy Bruce: Hate crime legislation accomplishes only one thing — the notion that some people in this country are more important than others. Last time I checked all the civil rights movements were based in the rejection of this notion. Yet here we are, in the warm seats of power, and now a “legislative priority” is to make sure crimes committed against us are a more serious offense and punished more aggressively. I find it an obscene reversal of what so many fought for throughout the 20th century — to establish a group of people as deserving of special treatment because of either their complexion or sexual orientation. People have died in this county to end those sorts of policies. For us to embrace them is beyond shameful.

Let’s be honest here: What crime doesn’t send a message to the whole community? What rape doesn’t frighten all women regardless of the complexion of the victim? What assault doesn’t scare everyone in a neighborhood? As a lesbian, I refuse to embrace the notion that if I get raped it somehow is more serious or more important or should be viewed as more horrific because the rapist “hates” lesbians, versus the rape of a heterosexual woman who is raped because her rapist hated her because she turned him down, or reminded him of his ex-wife, or because he hates all women. I think it’s time for many in our community to read Orwell’s Animal Farm.

Blade: What do you think explains the vitriol and intolerance of the gay left toward gays who hold other opinions?

Bruce: A few things, including the inability to deal with the details of the issues. Bullying someone can be the easiest and fastest way to end a discussion or frighten someone into retreat. It’s juvenile and petty. The Thought Police, as christened by Orwell in 1984, is actually a Marxist tenet.

We also now have a generation (or two) of gays who have been conditioned by Liberal Gay, Inc. into believing that the price of dissent is simply too high. So thoughtful gays and lesbians retreat from the debate allowing the damaged and most extreme of the community to control the public discussion. Remember, the political is personal, and many who engage in the misogyny so prevalent in the gay community should be in a psychiatrist’s office and not in a political or cultural organization. Bottom line: the most damaged tend to rise to the top in the left and we see it in their response to those of us who do not conform or refuse to pay allegiance to their leftist worldview.

Blade: How do you think that gays could best unite around common goals to achieve equality?

Bruce: History has shown us that conservative ideals improve the quality of everyone’s lives, especially those of us who are minorities. There is one thing that allows us to live lives of our choosing: to make choices that best suit us — and that is financial freedom and personal liberty. The only thing that allows us to have our political voice, to make choices in our lives free from coercion, and to live as we choose is the ability to be free from financial reliance on someone else. As long as government takes our money, gets bigger and bigger, it will continue to invade our lives and our homes. Minorities are always the first to suffer under big, unrestrained government. This time is no different. We can agree to disagree on certain issues, but we will only be able to enjoy having those debates and engaging in our lives as long as we are able to keep the fruits of our labor.

To sum up Tammy’s comments: freedom is fabulous.

Op-ed: Freedom is fabulous is a post from: Gay Bay

In a brief exchange on Capitol Hill, Ensign told the Blade he shared the views of the military service chiefs, who, prior to earlier congressional action this year on repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” wrote to lawmakers to express concern about the action they were taking.

“The problem is you can’t go out and say to the military chiefs, ‘We’re going to survey you and see what you all think,’ and then you pass the bill to repeal it,” Ensign said. “So the study should come first and then you can talk about the repeal or not of ['Don't Ask, Don't Tell']. So, yes, it is a concern simply because the study’s not done.”

In May, the Senate Armed Services Committee approved an amendment making repeal language part of the fiscal year 2011 defense authorization bill and reported the legislation to the floor. The full Senate is expected to take up the measure in September.

Asked whether he would support a substitute amendment or a motion to strike with respect to the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” language, Ensign replied, “We’ll see.”

“First of all, we’re not going to do the bill right now,” he said. “We’ll see whether we do it before we leave in October or after we leave.”

Ensign also said he wouldn’t rule out supporting a filibuster of the defense legislation as a whole when the legislation comes to the floor.

“There’s other problems in the bill as well, so I don’t know,” he said. “We’re just going to have to wait and see [under] what conditions the bill is brought up and if they keep the language in there.”

The senator said he couldn’t recall what other aspects of the bill he considered problematic, but maintained “there were several other problems.”

Ensign is among the senators the Human Rights Campaign and Servicemembers Legal Defense Network are working to influence to come out in favor of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” repeal as part of their “Countdown 2010″ initiative, according to HRC.

Sen. Ensign has ‘concern’ over ‘Don’t Ask’ repeal is a post from: Gay Bay

Sheriff Armando Fontoura halted the operation following strong objections raised by two New Jersey LGBT organizations, which demanded an independent investigation into the incident.

“On behalf of our two organizations, Garden State Equality and the Gender Rights Advocacy Association of New Jersey, we express our outrage over the tragic killing of Defarra Gaymon in Branch Brook Park … by a member of the Essex County Sherriff’s Department,” said Steven Goldstein, head of Equality New Jersey, and Barbra Casbar Siperstein, head of Gender Rights Advocacy Association of New Jersey.

Sheriff’s officials, who have declined to disclose the identity of the officer involved, said the officer explained that he shot Gaymon on July 16 after the Atlanta resident “lunged” at the officer. A statement says the incident began when the officer saw Gaymon masturbating and he propositioned the officer for sex.

Media reports have independently identified the officer in question as Edward Espisito, 29. He was recently awarded a medal of merit for assisting in the arrest of two suspects charged with shooting a fellow off-duty sheriff’s officer, according to the Newark Star Ledger.

The shooting death of Gaymon occurred in a part of the Newark park that’s recognized as a pickup spot for men seeking other men for sex, authorities said.

Gaymon, who was unarmed, allegedly lunged at the officer and tried to disarm the officer while threatening to kill the officer, according to Essex County Acting Prosecutor Robert Laurino.

At a news conference, Laurino said Gaymon apparently panicked after the officer identified himself and displayed his badge.

Gaymon was married and had four children. Originally from Montclair, N.J., he was visiting the state to help organize a class reunion at Montclair High School, authorities said.

The Star-Ledger reported that members of Gaymon’s family in Atlanta, where he worked as chief executive officer of a credit union, have accused the officer of fabricating the story. Family members say Gaymon was a peaceful person who never would commit a violent act, the newspaper reported.

Family members have called on the FBI to investigate the incident, saying they don’t believe local law enforcement agencies can conduct an impartial investigation into the matter.

Fontoura and sheriff’s officials have agreed to a request from the two LGBT groups to meet with officials of the groups to discuss ways to address alleged public sex in the park.

Goldstein and Siperstein said in a letter to law enforcement officials that targeting gay men in the crackdown could be a violation of state non-discrimination laws.

“We believe any operation targeting people based on their actual or perceived sexual orientation would be a violation of state law,” Goldstein and Siperstein say in their July 21 letter to the sheriff and country prosecutor.

“In no way do we condone any violation of lewdness statutes,” says the letter. “But any sting operation targeting gay men or LGBT people specifically, or anyone perceived as such, is unconscionable — and as we strongly believe, illegal.”

The two noted that they “make no assumption as to the sexual orientation of the victim. Our thoughts and prayers are with his wife and four children.”

In other places, including D.C., activists have called on police and other law enforcement authorities to use uniformed officers to enforce laws against public sex rather than use undercover officers who pose as men interested in gay sex.

In the D.C. area, law enforcement officials have also said they recognize that gay men and others have a legal right to meet each other in parks or other locations as long as the men don’t violate the law by having sex in public.

Last week, Fontoura told the Star Ledger he’s deployed uniformed officers to the park while the undercover operation is suspended and under review.

N.J. police kill man in park sex crackdown is a post from: Gay Bay

She lost consciousness and the woman with her was helpless to assist her. The dining room was full of peple from around the world and no one moved from their chair to help. I spit out my sausage and ran over to assist her. In my best Lauren Bacall morning voice, I tried coaxing her awake. Finally, after waving my Purell hand sanitizer under her nose, she regained consciousness.

The poor woman was horrified to find a tan white man hovering over her. I was glad I had trimmed my nose hairs that morning. She could not feel her legs and her skin was clammy, so I cried out for a wet towel. I reached for the woman’s headress, gave a nervous look to the friend, then pulled it off to apply the wet towel. Check that maneuver off my bucket list.

The paramedics eventually arrived and the woman was found to be fine. The D.C. soccer players and runners congratulated me on my performance. I may not be a doctor, but I play one on the weekends.

Gay Games blog report, Aug. 2 is a post from: Gay Bay

The money problems also prompted organizers to reassess the time of year the event should be held, leading to a permanent rescheduling of the highly acclaimed event for late April and early May in succeeding years.

Larry Guillemette, marketing and sponsorship manager for One In Ten, the non-profit group that has organized Reel Affirmations every October for the past 19 years, acknowledged that a debt exceeding $40,000 from last year’s festival and a diminishing number of corporate sponsors and donors made it difficult to pull together the festival this year.

It had been scheduled to take place Oct. 14-23 in a number of prominent city theaters, including the Harmon Center for the Arts, the Goethe Institute and the E Street Cinema downtown, the Jewish Community Center near Dupont Circle, and the AFI Theater in Silver Spring.

“As with a lot of non-profit organizations in our nation’s capital, gay or straight, we are faced with the same [monetary] challenges,” Guillemette said.

“What we found ourselves doing this year was going to various different organizations that we were hoping might sponsor us. And the economy being what it is, that kind of ability to support us wasn’t there,” he said.

Guillemete said One In Ten will screen three LGBT films this fall, including an award-winning film the group planned to announce soon. Beginning in November, One In Ten will resume a practice it previously discontinued: a monthly showing of an LGBT film in Washington at different theaters.

The group’s ability to hold the full festival in October was further hampered by last year’s resignation of Margaret Murray, who had served as One In Ten’s executive director since 2006, Guillemette said. He noted that it was Murray’s job to work on corporate and organizational sponsorships and other fundraising efforts for the 2010 festival beginning in the latter months of 2009.

“What that did for us on some levels is put us in a tiny bit of a period of flux and transition that we weren’t necessarily prepared for because that was the time of year that most festivals are putting together their proposals for funding for the following year,” he said.

Meanwhile, the group’s debt and general shortage of funds prevented the hiring of someone to replace Murray, who left to take a new job, he said.

At the time of Murray’s departure in November, Guillemette said, One In Ten had become nearly an all-volunteer organization, returning to its “roots” before its first executive director was hired in 2000.

Joe Bilancio, One In Ten’s programs manager and the person in charge of obtaining the films, is being compensated as a consultant, Guillemette said. Guillemette is serving as a volunteer and called his work on the festival “a labor of love.”

According to Guillemette, the funding problems were just one of several issues that prompted the One In Ten board to move the annual festival to the spring. He said other factors included competing LGBT events in October, such as the Human Rights Campaign’s annual national dinner and the Miss Adams Morgan drag pageant, a large event that attracts participants who might otherwise attend the film festival.

Guillemette said the problems associated with holding the festival this October led to long discussions on something the event’s organizers have contemplated for a number of years: the advantages of holding a film festival in the early months of the year.

Among other things, top-quality LGBT-related films made by independent film makers are usually first released in the early part of the year and shown at other film festivals in the winter and spring, said Guillemette and Bilancio. The two noted that by the time One In Ten’s Reel Affirmations festival is held in the fall, some of the patrons of Reel Affirmations have already seen these films at other festivals.

In recent years, a number of films shown at Reel Affirmations and other LGBT film festivals also have been shown first on gay cable television networks, with others sometimes available through Netflix, said Guillemette and Bilancio.

“It’s significantly different than what it was when we started the festival in the early 1990s, when access to independent gay film was not that easy,” Guillemette said. “And we could count on a sold-out festival because there weren’t options like Neflix and Logo and Here TV and other things.”

Although moving the festival to the spring won’t counter the competing venues for gay film, Bilancio said holding Reel Affirmation in the early part of the year will at least ensure that it’s the first opportunity for most D.C. festival goers to see the films.

One source familiar with last year’s Reel Affirmations festival, who spoke with the Blade on condition of anonymity, said the One In Ten debt stemmed from a drop in revenue compared to previous festivals. Ticket sales were down as was advertising in the festival’s lengthy program booklet, the source said.

Instead of generating seed money for the 2010 festival, which was slated to celebrate Reel Affirmations’ 20th anniversary, the revenue shortfall resulted in debts to various vendors, including the graphic artist who helped produce the program booklet. At least $20,000 to $25,000 was needed to produce the booklet for this year, a sum the group apparently did not have, the source said.

Organizers were hopeful that a special town hall meeting that One In Ten held in April at the Human Rights Campaign headquarters would persuade people to make the donations that were needed to keep the event on track for October. But less than $5,000 was raised as a result of the town meeting, the source said, an amount far less than was needed to stage the festival in October.

Guillemette, who was not among the festival organizers last year, said still other factors were at play, including foul weather during several evenings of the October 2009 festival. He also noted that an earlier decision to discontinue the festival’s VIP membership program, which provided special benefits to large donors, made the festival more reliant on single ticket sales, which were down in 2009.

He said the board this year reinstated the VIP membership program and is taking other steps to better promote the spring festival.

“We’re not burying our head in the sand. We fully acknowledge there were things that needed to be changed in the way we did things,” he said. “And I think we brought back the right team to make those changes.”

Lisa King, One In Ten’s board president, declined comment, deferring to Guillemette as the organization’s spokesperson. Murray could not be immediately reached for comment.

Money woes spur LGBT film festival’s postponement is a post from: Gay Bay

The typical bluster was on display during a fiery, steamy performance at Wolf Trap’s Filene Center in Vienna, Va. The biggest mystery is the continual non-existence of her unfathomably delayed “new” album “Aretha: A Woman Falling Out of Love,” originally slated for a 2006 release. It’s become this epoch’s “Chinese Democracy,” the decade-plus-in-the-making Guns ‘N Roses album which did finally see the light of day in 2008. Last fall Franklin announced a January QVC-exclusive release to be followed by Wal-Mart-only distribution. An April release date came and went after a listening party was held in Detroit. She’s been previewing alleged album cut “I Adore You” for so many years it feels more like a staple of her set list than a sneak preview. She said Thursday the album would be out in mere weeks.

But thankfully Franklin doesn’t always follow through with everything she says. She claimed she was retiring after her 2003 tour and, thankfully, that never happened. The unwieldily monikered “I’ll Be Seeing You With a Song in My Heart Tour” (eventually re-dubbed the “Aretha Sings her Musical History Tour” and later “The Queen is On”), was re-configured into a Dylan-like never-ending tour that has been running almost continuously for the last eight years. There’ve been highs and lows along the way — some shows, like her 2008 stop at DAR Constitution Hall in Washington, have had more empty seats than filled ones. But that now seems more like poor promotion than lack of interest as the house was packed at Wolf Trap.

And at other times Franklin’s shows have had a going-through-the-motions-like feel to them. Thankfully Thursday’s concert featured Franklin looking and sounding fabulous and in a playful, engaged mood. Yes, there were several of the usual quirks — what’s with that ever-present purse she carries on stage and does this woman ever give a concert without bitching out the sound and building staff? Wolf Trap’s outdoor setting eliminated her usual obsession with air conditioning but the sound guy didn’t get off so easily. She repeatedly asked for “a little more quality on the sound.” As if there was some giant “quality knob” on the mixing board he didn’t quite have turned all the way up for her.

Thankfully Franklin more than made up for the quirks with a nearly two-hour show (quite generous by her standards; I’ve seen her play barely an hour other times) that skipped and darted around several corners of her vast discography, often landing in expected places to the pleasure of casual fans, but keeping just as much spontaneity going to please the die-hards.

Carole King’s “Natural Woman,” a Franklin staple missing on her last D.C. stop, was a welcome addition to the evening as were other Atlantic-era staples like “Respect,” “Think” and “Chain of Fools.” Now that she records only intermittently and has barely scraped the charts since her Lauryn Hill collaboration in ’98 (“A Rose is Still a Rose,” which wasn’t performed), Franklin has filled in the dearth of recent hits with recreations of memorable live appearances, like her ’98 Grammy sub for Pavoratti (“Nessun Dorma”), and her 2009 performance at Obama’s inauguration. Thursday’s performance of the former was nearly as good as it was at the Grammys and thankfully oceans better than the lame rendition of it she turned in on her VH-1 Divas tribute show in 2001 when she turned her mic toward the audience instead of even trying the aria’s highest notes. And this week’s sticky mugginess was a welcome trade-off, vocally speaking at least, for Franklin’s inauguration appearance when she sang “My Country Tis of Thee.” Everybody remembers the crazy hat, but the performance that day was lackluster due to the cold. It sounded much better at Wolf Trap.

The evening’s best moments came during unexpected selections like a cover of “The Way We Were,” the encore “If You Believe” (from “The Wiz”) and yet another operatic selection, Handel’s “Ombra Mai Fu” from “Xerxes” during which Franklin announced another bombshell — a whole album of arias she says is coming “soon.” (I love the idea but with Franklin’s track record, I’m not holding my breath.) Purists scoff at Franklin’s soul-infused readings of the operatic standards and, of course, nobody expects her to sound like Renee Fleming, still Franklin, at age 68, deserves kudos for continuing to broaden her musical horizons and not just singing the same old songs she’s been doing for decades. And she seems not to take herself too seriously. After “Ombra,” she stood from the piano at which she’d been accompanying herself and curtsied with a deadpan expression. It was priceless.

Though it was the same gown and wig she’d worn just just two nights earlier for her appearance in Philadelphia with Condoleezza Rice, Franklin looked regal (and a tad slimmer) in a floor-length mother-of-pearl white rhinestone-encrusted gown with matching jacket/cape that came off after about three numbers. She made a great show of flipping back the long, layered jet-black wig.

The concert only lagged during non-Franklin moments such as a mid-set performance by a small troupe of hip-hop dancers who performed to a banal pre-recorded track (they also added choreography to “Respect” and “Chain”). The band’s instrumental jam was fun but a synth solo, while ably performed, was jarring for the big band style.

While Franklin is sometimes content to just let her show-closing vamp-out on “Freeway of Love” be her last number, she graciously added “My Country” and “If You Believe” to her set. It made for a deliciously full evening and one got the sense, even with the intense heat (which she commented on several times, joking that she was ready to don a bikini) that she, too, hated to see it end.

Things, as one would expect, aren’t as off-the-charts red hot as they were in her heyday. Though highly entertaining, it was a bit hard to hear numbers like “Dr. Feelgood” and “Old Landmark” Thursday and not compare them to the far-superior live versions she performed on her classic albums “Fillmore West” and “Amazing Grace” (respectively). Yet her vocals have a slightly richer, thicker timbre to them than they did even 15 or 18 years ago before she quit smoking. She lacks the breath control she had in her younger years so she doesn’t often hold the notes for very long, but she’s hitting more of them than she was even a few years ago and, approaching 70 and with all her musical siblings sadly gone, it’s great to hear Franklin in such fine form.

Aretha’s set list: /> *Overture (instrumental medley of Aretha hits; band)

1. Respect

2. Natural Woman

3. Think

4. Make Them Hear You (from “Ragtime”)

5. Old Landmark

6. Ombra Mai Fu (from “Xerxes”)

7. Baby I Love You

* hip-hop dance interlude

* Band jam (big band style with solos)

8. I Adore You

9. I Say a Little Prayer

10. Chain of Fools

11. Dr. Feelgood

12. The Way We Were

13. Nessun Dorma (from “Turandot”)

14. Freeway of Love

15. My Country Tis of Thee

16. Natural Woman (reprise; mostly band)

17. If You Believe (from “The Wiz”; encore)

* If You Believe (instrumental reprise)

Mercurial Aretha delights in steamy concert is a post from: Gay Bay

Everyone seemingly went through the same process of listening to German language tapes for three months before coming. It seemed a silly step since we were told that all Germans speak English. But it was a precaution worth taking! You can find the occasional German who will offer some instructions in English, but the rest? Nein. I became so confused on one train at all the German being spewed at me, that I inexplicably slipped into Spanish.

We eventually got our credentials and then got ready for the Team D.C. party, which was a blast. Olivia Cruise Lines joined us as a sponsor and there were teams from all over the world in attendance. Berlin, Copenhagen, Sydney, Paris, Chicago, Fort Lauderdale, New York, Atlanta and more were represented. My favorites were the Icelandic swim team. They lit the place up and were adorable. A great time was had by all. The Iceland team is bidding on the 2012 International Gay & Lesbian Aquatics World Swimming Championships and I can’t think of a better reason to go there. Hot springs? Ya.

Image of the Day

/> I was sitting in Old Town Cologne after the party, in a dark plaza where many restaurants and bars are located, when a man walked by me with a burning torch. I didn’t see anyone with a pitchfork, so I guessed he wasn’t part of an angry mob. A German flashlight maybe?

Observation of the Day

/> Cologne really does smell like cologne. Body odor and cologne.

Blog Report on Gay Games is a post from: Gay Bay

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National Stonewall Democrats Convention in D.C. is a post from: Gay Bay

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“50Faggots” Launch Party is a post from: Gay Bay