As part of its Americas Off Broadway series, 59E59 Theater is presenting Jeff Key in "The Eyes of Babylon." I saw yesterday afternoon's performance. The show is running through July 3. It is definitely worth seeing.
Jeff Key served in the U.S. Marines in Iraq during the early months of the war. He is a gay man who enlisted in 2000, determined to comply with the "Don't Ask Don't Tell" policy so he could serve … <Read More>
Here's a combination one might not have anticipated: a program whose two centers of gravity were the Walton Violin Concerto and Maurice Ravel's orchestral arrangement of Modest Mussorgsky's suite of piano pieces, "Pictures at an Exhibition." On top of that, an interesting bit of "framing" – the program began with Rimsky-Korsakov's arrangement of the prelude to Mussorgsky's unfinished opera, Khovanshchina, followed by the Walton, and after intermission, they began with Ravel's Pavane pour une Infante … <Read More>
Thursday night I went to a preview performance of "Unnatural Acts" at Classic Stage Company. I'm not sure when the official opening is, but this is a limited run, so I thought I would write about it briefly to encourage people to see it while some tickets remain available, because I think this is a "must-see" production for anybody interested in LGBT history in the U.S.
The play is described as "conceived by Tony Speciale" … <Read More>
Today The Advocate published on its website an interview with Albert Pisani, the Air Force member who was recently discharged under the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" Policy for being gay. There had been much speculation about this discharge, because generally such discharges had stopped last fall after Defense Secretary Robert Gates changed the rules to require that the subcabinet level Secretaries of the various services personally sign off on any DADT discharge. People wondered whether … <Read More>
In Jackson v. State of Texas, 2011 WL 2320819 (Tex.App.-Dallas, June 14, 2011), the court of appeals rejected the argument that the U.S. Supreme Court
In a pair of opinions released on June 15, Chief U.S. District Judge James Ware of the Northern District of California denied a motion by the Proponents of Proposition 8 to set aside last summer's ruling by now-retired Chief Judge Vaughan Walker (which held Prop 8 to be unconstitutional), and also denied a motion by the Proponents to require all parties to surrender copies of the video/audio recording of the trial that are in their … <Read More>
In a most unusual action, twenty U.S. Bankruptcy Judges in the Central District of California have joined together in an opinion denying a motion by the United States Trustee to dismiss a bankruptcy petition that was jointly filed by a same-sex married couple, holding that to grant the motion would deny the petitioners' equal protection rights under the 5th Amendment of the United States Constitution. The June 13 ruling in In re Gene Douglas Balas … <Read More>
A New York State trial judge, finding himself bound by intermediate appellate precedent in the absence of a ruling on the question by the state's highest court, has refused to dismiss a defamation lawsuit brought by a man who claims he was falsely alleged to be gay or bisexual and to be actively engaging in homosexual activity. Yonaty v. Mincolla, 2011 N.Y. Slip Op 51037(U) (Supreme Court, Broome County, June 8, 2011). According to Justice … <Read More>
In his opinion for the Supreme Court in Lawrence v. Texas, holding that Texas could not apply its criminal law to consensual homoseuxal sex between adults, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, Jr., made clear that the case before the Court did not involve minors, and thus the Court was not ruling on whether minors have a due process right to engage in consensual sex. Most of the cases involving minors concern sex between adults and minors, … <Read More>
This week's subscription series at the NY Philharmonic focused on central and eastern Europe in the early 20th century: Shostakovich's Symphony No. 1 (1924-25), Rachmaninoff's "Isle of the Dead" (1909), and Schoenberg's "Erwartung" (also 1909). There was also a thematic tie in the second half, with both pieces relating to death and loss as a theme.
This program was not on my subscription series. In recent seasons, the Philharmonic's seat-filling and audience-building efforts have included sending … <Read More>