"a state of war is not a blank check for the President when it comes to the rights of the Nation's citizens" --US Supreme Court

Today the Supreme Court issued opinions in three closely-watched cases concerning the Bush administration's assumption of various privileges since 9/11. In two of the three cases, the Court ruled decisively against the Bush administration's efforts to trample on civil liberties; in the third, the Court decided for jurisdictional reasons not to decide on whether or not "the President has the authority to detain [Jose] Padilla militarily."

The Court's opinions in the first two cases, Hamdi v. Rumsfeld and Rasul v. Bush, are at times remarkably forceful. They are a profound testament both to the seriousness of the Bush administration's disregard for civil liberties and to the importance of judicial review. Therefore, I think it's worthwhile to quote here some extended excerpts, selected by me, from the full text of the majority opinions, as well as shorter bits of some of the concurring opinions. (Note that the majority opinions in Hamdi and Rasul were written, respectively, by a Reagan and a Bush appointee.)

"the Government has never provided any court with the full criteria that it uses in classifying individuals as [enemy combatants]....the circumstances surrounding Hamdi's seizure cannot in any way be characterized as 'undisputed...because Hamdi has not been permitted to speak for himself or even through counsel as to those circumstances' [quoting from lower court ruling]....[Petitioner] Hamdi's [interest] is the most elemental of liberty interests--the interest in being free from physical detention by one's own government....the risk of erroneous deprivation of a citizen's liberty in the absence of sufficient process here is very real....Moreover, as critical as the Government's interest may be in detaining those who actually pose an immediate threat to the national securtiy of the United States during ongoing international conflict, history and common sense teach us that an unchecked system of detention carries the potential to become a means for oppression and abuse of others who do not present that sort of threat....We reaffirm today the fundamental nature of a citizen's right to be free from involuntary confinement by his own government without due process of law....it is...vital that our calculus not give short shrift to the values that this country holds dear or to the privilege that is American citizenship. It is during our most challenging and uncertain moments that our nation's commitment to due process is most severely tested; and it is in those times that we must preserve our commitment at home to the principles for which we fight abroad....'the risk of erroneous deprivation' of a detainee's liberty interst is unacceptably high under the Government's proposed rule....We therefore hold that a citizen-detainee seeking to challenge his classification as an enemy combatant must receive notice of the factual basis for his classification, and a fair opportunity to rebut the Government's factual assertions before a neutral decisionmaker....We think it unlikely that this basic process will have the dire impact on the central functions of warmaking that the Government forecasts....We have long since made clear that a state of war is not a blank check for the President when it comes to the rights of the Nation's citizens....it would turn our system of checks and balances on its head to suggest that a citizen could not make his way to court with a challenge to the factual basis for his detention by his government, simply because the Executive opposes making available such a challenge."
---Justice O'Connor, opinion of the Court in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld (joined by Rehnquist, Kennedy, and Breyer; in a separate opinion, Souter and Ginsburg partially concurred)

"To appreciate what is most significant, one must only recall that the internments of the 1940's were accomplished by Executive action....Hamdi...would...seem to qualify for treatment as a prisoner of war under the Third Geneva Convention, to which the United States is a party....By holding him incommunicado, however, the Government obviously has not been treating him as a prisoner of war, and in fact the Government claims that no Taliban detainee is entitled to prisoner of war status....This treatment appears to be a violation of the Geneva Convention provision that even in cases of doubt, captives are entitled to be treated as prisoners of war 'until such time as their status has been determined by a competent tribunal.'...[Moreover,] the USA PATRIOT ACT...authorized the detention of alien terrorists for no more than seven days in the absence of criminal charges or deportation proceedings....It is very difficult to believe that the same Congress that carefully circumscribed Executive power over alien terrorists on home soil would not have meant to require the Government to justify clearly its detention of an American citizen held on home soil incommunicado....in a moment of genuine emergency, when the Government must act with no time for deliberation, the Executive may be able to detain a citizen if there is reason to fear he is an imminent threat to the safety of the Nation and its people (though I doubt there is any want of statutory authority...). This case, however, does not present that question, because an emergency power of necessity must at least be limited by the emergency; Hamdi has been locked up for over two years....we are heirs to a tradition given voice 800 years ago by Magna Carta, which, on the barons' insistence, confined executive power by 'the law of the land.'"
---Justice Souter, concurring partially with the opinion of the Court in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld

"By the express terms of its agreements with Cuba, the United States exercises 'complete jurisdiction and control' over the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base....Respondents themselves conced that the habeas statue would create federal-court jurisdiction over the claims of an American citizen held at the base....Considering that the statute draws no distinction between Americans and aliens held in federal custody, there is little reason to think that Congress intended the geographical coverage of the status to vary depending on the detainee's citizenship. Aliens held at the base, no less than American citizens, are entitled to invoke the federal courts' authority....Petitioners' allegations--that, although they have engaged neither in combat nor in acts of terrorism against the United States, they have been held in Executive detention for more than two years in territory subject to the long-term, exclusive jurisdiction and control of the United States, without access to counsel and without being charged with any wrongdoing--unquestionably describe 'custody in violation of the Constitution or laws or treaties of the United States.'"
---Justice Stevens, opinion of the Court in Rasul v. Bush (joined by O'Connor, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer; Kennedy concurred in a separate opinion)

"Perhaps, where detainees are taken from a zone of hostilities, detention without proceedings or trial would be justified by military necessity for a matter of weeks; but as the period of detention stretches from months to years, the case for continued detention to meet military exigencies becomes weaker."
--Justice Anthony Kennedy, concurring with the opinion of the Court in Rasul v. Bush

Do queers make up half of homeless teenagers?

An unprecedented, perceptive, and humanizing NYT story on the rising numbers of homeless gay teenagers in New York:

"As hundreds of thousands of people flock to New York today for the annual celebration of the 1969 Stonewall uprising and the birth of the modern gay rights movement, few are likely to give a moment's thought to their homeless brethren, a growing legion of the disowned and the dispossessed, most of them black and Latino, an increasing number of them H.I.V. positive and still in the throes of adolescence."

"the hottest property in this year's Senate races"

So says Time of Illinois's Barack Obama. And E.J. Dionne, Jr., in Friday's Washington Post, similarly swooned: "if there is a media darling in this year's election, it is the 42-year-old Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate from Illinois. Obama has been the subject of sympathetic profiles in the New Yorker and the New Republic, and more national attention is on its way. Already there's speculation that he may be the first African American president of the United States--and he's only a state senator....Obama is someone who can make staunchly progressive positions sound moderate by being quietly reasonable."

I almost feel sorry for the Illinois Republicans. Their guy, already down 20+ points in the polls, has now had to drop out after his divorce papers revealed that his private life is just as disgusting as his political views.

True, the Republicans get to hand-pick someone to run against Obama. But Barack seemingly doesn't even have to campaign to get oodles of free press. If only John Kerry could do the same.

Perceptions of Gay Pride Day

"Amateur Day" --david
"Except for the beads, it's like a 4-H fair." --mark

A conversation with an Auschwitz tour guide

In the Soviet-bloc years, exhibits at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp emphasized that many Poles died there, strongly downplaying the fact that the vast majority of the 1.5 million souls killed there were Jews. In this respect, the exhibitions contributed to a Polish national narrative about WWII that obscured that Poland's Jewish population of 3.5 million was literally wiped out.

Today, more appropriately, the exhibitions do focus on the Nazis' efforts to exterminate European Jews. The politics of representing the Holocaust, however, remain murky, confused, and tense. Nothing detracted from the sheer emotional power of walking around the largest of the Nazi death factories and learning about how its "efficiency" was gradually increased between 1940 and 1945. However, when the Nazis' non-Jewish innocent victims were repeatedly listed on the introductory panels, one group was left out, which I found troubling.

I took up the matter with my assigned tour guide. Here's how our conversation went:

TSW: Were any of the Nazis' homosexual prisoners brought to Auschwitz?
Guide: Yes they were.
TSW: How many?
Guide: I don't know.
TSW: Why don't you know?
Guide: The Nazis destroyed a lot of records. There's no way to know.
TSW: If there were homosexual prisoners here, then why isn't that mentioned in any of the placards [along with the Polish non-Jews, Roma/gypsies, and political prisoners, who are all repeatedly mentioned in addition to the Jews]?
Guide: I don't know.
TSW: Why haven't you mentioned homosexuals so far in your tour?
Guide: I will tell about the triangles, later.

Later in the exhibition, she pointed to a Nazi diagram showing the badges that the various groups of prisoners were forced to wear, much like this one:



And the guide did, indeed, say it: "...green for professional criminals, purple for Jehovah's witnesses, pink for homosexuals and so on." Still, it seems strange that a tour guide would only mention homosexuals because the Nazi document she's showing us does so.

Bush's quiet new faith-based health policy will spread HIV

There are no words to describe this outrage.

Safe sex, the #1 way proven way to stop the HIV/AIDS crisis, was invented by gay men, no thanks to Ronald Reagan. Now the Bush administration wants to censor all programming by federally-funded public health organizations, even programming not funded by federal dollars,

An amazing bit of the story: a study by Columbia University Department of Sociology chairman Peter Bearman of the sex lives of 12,000 adolescents from 12 to 18 years old over a five-year period found unsafe sex much greater among youth who’d signed pledges to abstain from sex until (heterosexual) marriage (a key component of most abstinence only–based education programs, which leave gay kids, who can’t get married in 49 states, to face a lifetime of chastity).

The story says you can help try to stop these regulations by emailing HIVComments@cdc.gov by August 16. We won't see real change, though, till this war-profiteering religious fanatic is out of office.

Why are Eastern Europeans the most popular gay porn stars?

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Going out in the Castro: "Wrong color or wrong gender"?

A fabulous group of San Francisco activists is demanding an investigation of systematic racial discrimination at one of the Castro's most popular gay bars---and they're trying to stop the owner from buying the Pendulum, across the street, which is San Francisco's only predominantly African American gay bar (and the oldest continuously operating bar in the Castro). Learn more, and learn what you can do, at the protestors' website, Is Badlands Bad?

The twilight world

I'm in my second Internet cafe in Cracow. The going rate for using the net is 2 zlotys per hour: on the order of US$0.55.

I just went to the craziest gay bar I've ever seen. Like the bar I went to in Warsaw, it has a very inconspicuous street profile consisting of a door with a sign and a buzzer. Again, it's one of the approximately three gay bars recommended to visitors of Cracow. I had a hell of a time finding the place, because the street it's on is only one block long and is a few blocks outside of the central "Stare Miasto" district. And this place was the first gay bar I've ever been to where you actually have to ring the buzzer. As I learned once I was inside, the bartender buzzes you in, theoretically after checking you out on the little closed-circuit monitor to make sure you're not a hooligan who's come to beat up queers or something. At least, that's my reading of what it was about.

The place, which is called Klub Queer (it has quite an elaborate website, doubtless maintained by its seemingly all-under-21 staff), was what I can only describe as a very gently converted basement flat. It's a long narrow space, the middle room being the biggest and containing the bar. It has a real restroom in back, a real bar, and several other renovations have been made that make it workable as a tiny little bar, but it still feels like you're in somebody's garden apartment. That said, it's genuinely nicely lit, cozy, and has a friendly vibe. There were, over the course of the hour I spent there, probably 15 guys in the place, all except one or two under 30 years old. It has an espresso maker and a tiny dishwasher behind the bar, but it basically looks like it was, not that long ago, a home kitchen. There's a computer behind the bar where I could see that the sound was being run by an MP3 playlist that the bartender was in control of (and which played American pop songs). And there was a TV on which a channel called Fox Kids was playing cartoons.

I have never been anyplace like this. I think the modal age was probably 19 or so. It's definitely for the out-of-the-closet set; they even have a little framed thingy on the wall showing the rainbow jewelry that you can purchase from the bartender. There was a group of four skinny boys, two of whom were also the bartenders but flitted back and forth between the two sides of the bar, who were clearly in charge of the place and spent a lot of time here and with each other. None of them really spoke English at all. With one of them, not the bartender, a cute blond kid, I managed after quite an extended exchange to extract the fact that, yes, he was from Cracow. One of them seemed to be the designated English speaker and they tended to defer to him when I tried to say something, but let's just say he probably wouldn't do so well on his TOEFL.

Not that I can speak any Polish at all....

The problem with European men...

...is that they all look gay. (Remember that early Internet game, Gay or Eurotrash?) The reason Polish men look gay is basically that they wear clothes that fit and they look like they spent at least a few seconds paying attention to their hair before going out in public. They may even have used styling products. "Metrosexuals" aside (and I love 'em), I think I often forget how easy most American straight men make things for us fags.

The actual gay scene in Poland, however, is not so impressive. In certain respects, it's like going back in time to pre-Stonewall American cities:

(1) You really have to look for it. That's why little guidebooks to the gay locales of various cities, Bob Damron's the most famous and successful one, were so important to gay Americans in the 1960s. Today, the Internet serves the same function, in that various people have assembled English-language lists of gay bars and cafes that I have consulted. Gay stuff just isn't listed in the tourist information, with the exception of one tourist booklet I picked up in Warsaw in which a couple of gay venues had placed advertisements.

(2) The club I went to, at least, had an unobtrusive entrance and no windows. It was one of the places that advertised in the Warsaw tourist rag (see #1), and was described on the net as among the biggest and most interesting places to go and even has a (Polish-language) website. However, when I got there---admittedly on a weeknight---there was nobody there. Or, rather, there was a group of five young hipsters, five guys and their female friend. And the bartender. Two of the group of five were clearly a couple and intermittently, cutely, held hands. By the time I left (after ordering a Polish beer and later a glass of white wine, which was definitely a mistake), a couple more people had shown up: another young male hipster with a female friend, and a guy who was friends with the bartender and got involved in an intense conversation with him. The place was pretty swank, actually, and the music (dance) and sound system were good, but there was nothing going on. This is perhaps the most exciting gay bar (apart from one that is apparently now filled iwth more straight hipsters than gay people) in a city of 3.5 million people. Ann Arbor does better on a weeknight.

Oh: (3) In Krakow---fittingly, the city that Pope John Paul II comes from---the first-ever pride march, last month, was met by religious protestors in just about equal numbers to the marchers. According to one young woman I talked to today, the religious-right folks regard themselves as "arch-Poles" or "super-Poles," keeping out harmful foreign influences. (It's an old story, of course: just about every society has regarded homosexuality as a foreign influence, or blames it on some neighboring group. And indeed the name of this blog references the Cold-War notion that homosexuals were, like so many others, un-American.) Even the first gay rights marches in the US, in 1970 and 1971, weren't met with this level of hostility. But Poland is far more homogeneous than the US, and it's not surprising (and it's disturbing) that homosexuality is being represented as anti-Catholic and anti-Polish.

The thing is, though, that religious-right antigay activism is at least as much a foreign influence as queerness is. Some obnoxious American Catholic antigay group has not only created a website praising a few Cracovians for heckling and throwing eggs at gay marchers last month, but also literally takes credit for "inspiring" Polish antigay activists to mail out hundreds of thousands of leaflets protesting recent efforts to create gay pride events in Poland.

I suspect, although I don't really know, that there's a generational divide in Polish attitudes toward homosexuality. Quite a few young people in Poland, at least in public places in prosperous cities like Warsaw and Cracow, are pretty devoted to being hip, and they pull it off pretty damn well. The whole country is structured by a pretty extraordinary generational divide, actually; people under 25 really don't remember much from the Communist age, and they often studied English in school, rather than the Russian that their parents had to learn.

Krakow's two Nobel laureates, Czeslaw Milosz and Wislawa Szymborska, apparently spoke up for the gay march, and I have confidence that Western styles of "coming out of the closet" will become increasingly popular among young people. Yes, we don't have same-sex marriage in the US, but all in all I'd guess it's easier to be gay in dozens of American cities than in Poland's largest cities.

In the next couple days I'll be interested to check out Krakow's bars. One of them is even said to have a lesbian party on Wednesdays!

"The Judenrat let it be known that all ... had to come out at 4:00 a.m. the next day"

[A departure from my usual themes, prompted by my traveling in Poland]

In September 1939 there were 3.5 million Jews living in Poland; today there are five thousand.

Today my mom and I visited Czyzew, Poland (pronounced approximately "CHIH-zhehv," and sometimes called Czyzewo or "CHI-zhehv-uh"), the village of 2,500 where my great-grandfather Josef Schwarz spent his first twenty years before leaving for the United States in 1913. In New York he worked in the garment trade, where he met Eva Gorski, the Russian Jewish woman he married and my mother's grandmother. Today we met the mayor of Czyzew and learned a bit about its history, thanks to the assistance of an English-speaking guide from Warsaw who is used to helping American Jews who want to find their roots in the ruins of the communities, now destroyed for some sixty years, where their relatives lived. We made some essentially unsuccessful, but still rather fascinating, efforts to track down a record of Josef's birth. This meant visiting the village hall and the regional archive in Lomza, and watching the archivists pore over turn-of-the-century Cyrillic script in yellowed record-books, which the local synagogue (apparently only quite intermittently) maintained. My mom was a little disappointed that we didn't find the real paper trail of her grandfather, yet there was nonetheless something fascinating about simply learning how difficult such things are to track down. It's quite amazing that the records we saw today even survived the upheavals of World War II, when so little of Poland, and especially of Jewish Poland, did so.

We have had a lot of trouble determining the number and names of my great-grandfather's siblings. At least two seem to have stayed in Poland and later emigrated to Palestine; perhaps two may have stayed in Czyzew, in which case they were almost certainly killed in the Nazi death camps. Czyzew is located in the same gubernia as Jedwabne, the site of the episode described in Jan Gross's 2000 book Neighbors. Gross's book concerns an episode long well-known locally but until recently totally ignored by historians, in which (as the book jacket bluntly puts it) half of a small Polish town murdered the other half, killing some 1,600 Jews in an afternoon, less than a month after the Nazis invaded this then-Russian-occupied part of Poland. Gross argues that, Polish national narratives to the contrary, the Germans in fact played hardly any part, at least in this town and he thinks in many others, in the killing of Jews.

In a Yizkor or memory book collected by survivors and descendants of Czyzew residents, one man tells a small-town variation on the familiar themes of Gestapo and Judenrat: "The work lasted for three weeks. And when it had ended, the Judenrat let it be known that all people, craftsmen and women had to come out at 4:00 a.m. the next day and to assemble in the town square. This was the 28th day of the month Av, 1941.[...]" After we saw Czyzew, where no Jews live today, we drove out to the edge of town and along a dirt road to check out a large tombstone. The inscription, in Hebrew and Polish, said---roughly---"Here is the tomb of the 5,000 Jews from several towns [including Czyzew] who were murdered here by the Nazis in August 1941 for the sole crime of being Jewish." According to Neighbors, a similar plaque in Jedwabne claimed, until just a year or two ago following the book's publication, that it was the Nazis who had murdered the Jews of Jedwabne.

Yes, Virginia, there is a boycott...

.org

Please copy, paste, and/or adapt the following letter and SEND IT TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW.

------

Dear friend,

I'm writing to ask you to join something I just recently learned about: a national boycott of the state of Virginia, where the harshest anti-gay law ever passed by a state legislature will soon go into effect. All businesses located in the state are covered unless and until they publicly urge the Commonwealth of Virginia to repeal the law (companies excluded from the boycott will be posted at VirginiaIsForHaters.org). J. Crew is being especially targeted, for reasons listed below. Gay-owned businesses are excluded.

WHY THE BOYCOTT? The law that goes into effect July 1, HB 751, not only prohibits civil marriage between same-sex partners, but actively seeks to invalidate any and all legal contracts between these individuals. Durable powers of attorney, health care directives, even wills and property contracts are at jeopardy now that this law has been passed.

WHY SHOULD I FOCUS ON J. CREW FOR THE TIME BEING? The boycott's organizers are beginning by focusing attention on J. Crew, for two reasons, (1) lots of gay people shop there, so input from gay consumers matters more to them than to other firms, and (2) it's an old Virginia company that has long been symbolically associated with Lynchburg, Virginia (yet maintains few operations there today). For these reasons, J. Crew is a company that's relatively likely to be willing to issue a public statement quickly. You can take action today by cancelling your subscription to the J. Crew catalog if you currently receive it (instructions below).

WHAT'S THE TEXT OF THE NEW LAW (HB 751)? "A civil union, partnership contract or other arrangement between persons of the same sex purporting to bestow the privileges or obligations of marriage is prohibited. Any such civil union, partnership contract or other arrangement entered into by persons of the same sex in another state or jurisdiction shall be void in all respects in Virginia and any contractual rights created thereby shall be void and unenforceable." This endangers all private contracts entered into by gay couples looking to attain any measure of stability and protection under the rule of law.

WHAT CAN I DO RIGHT NOW TO HELP OUT? Email service@jcrew.com with something like the following. "Dear J. Crew: Love your clothes, hate the way your state votes for hate. If you want to know why, check out VirginiaIsForHaters.org and in the mean time, discontinue my subscription to your catalogs. Until Virginia restores the rights of same-sex couples to protect their relationships, I won't be supporting Virginia businesses unless they've joined the effort to repeal the boycott. You might want to let the General Assembly know that a lot of your customers are angry. Sincerely, [name and address]"

WILL IT WORK? Gay boycotts succeeded in getting Florida Citrus to drop its advertising contract with spokeswoman Anita Bryant in 1980. Although studies suggesting that gay people are disproportionately affluent have been debunked (read the book MONEY, MYTHS, AND CHANGE: THE ECONOMIC LIVES OF LESBIANS AND GAY MEN by M. V. Lee Badgett), the gay market has the power of a growing reputation. And with lots more anti-gay ballot measures being considered in others states (perhaps yours?) RIGHT NOW, it's important that we send a strong message to Virginia politicians and companies right away.


Sincerely,
[name]

[I adapted some of the above material from VirginiaIsForHaters.org, where you can read much, much more about the boycott]

Security Risk is taking next week off

Security Risk will be taking a brief leave of absence while I'm out of the country from tomorrow, June 18, until June 26. I may be able to post from Poland, but I probably won't be posting as frequently.

Reaganpalooza is a white thing

Check out a fantastic article on Reagan and race, submitted by my friend Claire.

Bill Clinton on W's Manichean vision of good and evil

Were you, too, weirded out by Monday's ceremony in which Dubya not only unveiled Bill Clinton's official portrait and fawned over his book, but called Bill and Hillary "a great mom and dad"? Bill did manage, however, both to maintain the upbeat atmosphere and also get out this meticulously worded indictment: "I hope that I'll live long enough to see American politics return to vigorous debates where we argue who's right and wrong, not who's good and bad."

Stunningly, Fox News has given Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 a rave review and declared of Disney chief Michael Eisner that "Not releasing this film will turn out to be the curse of his career." (Check out the film's amazing trailer.)

Leave me home alone with Johnny Depp

Macauley Culkin said in a recent interview, "I am totally straight, but I would still sleep with Johnny Depp."

Why do I find this comment so hilarious? I think Home Alone was a powerful comic paean to suburban domesticity, and I can't think of him outside of that role.

Plus, he seems pretty on the ball. Who wouldn't sleep with Johnny Depp?

Ronald Reagan's secret admirer

One of the world's most influential and controversial leaders has weighed in with his perspective on the loss of Ronald Reagan.

"John Ashcroft, last night I dreamed of you naked..."

So begins this surprising and provocative column in which a Chicago dyke invites the Attorney General to her lesbian wedding.

What's Judy go to do with it? [re-posted]

A relatively widespread belief is that the death of Judy Garland, in the week preceding the July 1969 riots at the Stonewall Inn, inspired that famous rebellion, which has almost from its inception been heralded as the starting point for the "modern" gay and lesbian movement. In fact, celebrations of the riots' anniversary have gradually morphed into a whole "pride season" each summer that even presidential candidates celebrate (some of them, anyway).

Since Judy Garland was beloved among gay men, who claimed many of her songs as parables of their condition, this narrative about her relationship to Stonewall has seemed like proof that gay camp and diva worship can generate political resistance, even revolution. Thus, the journalist Daniel Harris writes, "Garland was simply the hostess, a performer who good-naturedly rented out her immense reputation as an occasion for a huge gay party, a dry run for Stonewall, a dress rehearsal for the birthday bash of the burgeoning gay rights movement, which her last and most important concert, her funeral, was to inspire only a few years later."

Trouble is, the story's not true. So says another journalist, David Carter, in a new book called Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution, just published in time for the 35th anniversary next month. Having interviewed everyone he could find who was anywhere near the place (including the police captain who led the bar raid that night), and dredged up every scrap of paper he could find that was written in the riots' aftermath, Carter concludes, "No eyewitness account of the riots written at the time by an identifiably gay person mentions Judy Garland. The only account written in 1969 that suggests that Judy Garland's death contributed to the riots is by a heterosexual who sarcastically proposes the idea to ridicule gay people and the riots....in the only piece of indisputably gay writing at the time of the riots where Garland's death and the riots are both mentioned, the two events are not related....[moreover], consider that the main fighters in the riots were street youths. These young men were not of the generation that listened to Garland, their music being rock, soul, and funk."

Carter's book has a kind of Kennedy-assassination, obsessional quality. He tries to reconstruct exactly what happened at every stage (e.g., "who was the man in the red shirt?"). The result, though, is actually quite a page-turner, because the stakes associated with so many of his questions are so high. (What role did drag queens and lesbians play? What was the Stonewall's clientele like? Who threw the first bottle?) Scholars of queer history have long questioned whether Stonewall suddenly transformed gay and lesbian life, as so many popular accounts would have it---and rightly so. And yet the riots do carry tremendous emotional and political significance, and their aftermath do seem to have led to significant shifts in how gay people in New York related to the police. I recommend it.

DC pride parade retraces the route of Reagan's funeral

This past weekend's annual LGBT pride parade in Washington, DC, led the Washington Post to report on what Reagan meant to us. The paper reported, "Today, on Pennsylvania Avenue -- America's Main Street -- organizers say some 100,000 gays and their friends are expected to gather along the same route that Ronald Reagan's funeral procession took last week. The irony is not lost on many who recall the 40th president's legacy differently from its portrayal in many of last week's events."