Josh Radnor Talks About 'happythankyoumoreplease'

Actor Josh Radnor is probably best known for his role as Ted Mosby on the hit CBS-TV series, How I Met Your Mother, but he is also a film director and screenwriter.

He may become as well known for those latter two jobs if his new film, happythankyoumoreplease, which goes into limited release in U.S. theatres today, becomes a hit.  Happythankyoumoreplease (read that as "happy thank you more please") marks Radnor's debut as a screenwriter and as a director; he also stars in the film as Sam Wexler, a harried New York novelist who takes an abandoned child into his home with resulting chaos and pathos.

The film's cast also includes Malin Akerman as Annie, Zoe Kazan as Mary-Catherine, Pablo Schreiber as Charlie, and Kata Mara as Mississippi, as well as Michael Algieri, in his big-screen debut, as Rasheen.  (There is also a cameo by Oscar nominee Richard Jenkins as Sam's potential publisher.)

Last November, Josh Radnor was the featured guest on the closing night of the Virginia Film Festival in Charlottesville.  He appeared on the stage of the historic Paramount Theatre after a screening of happythankyoumoreplease, fielding questions from the audience and from Glenn Williamson, a University of Virginia alumnus who served as executive producer of the film and moderator of the evening's discussion.

I was at the Paramount that night (November 7) and captured the entire exchange on video.  Here it is (also available on YouTube), in four parts.

Part I:

Part II:

Part III:

Part IV:

My own assessment of happythankyoumoreplease? It's a pleasant film, good enough to rent through Netflix on a quiet evening at home, but not compelling enough to drive me to a theatre on a Saturday night. For a freshman effort, it's well-directed in an elementary manner -- Radnor admits in the Q&A above that he was not sufficiently confident in his own skills to write dialogue scenes that involved more than two characters at a time -- and a good product for a quick (23-day) shoot that often involved some guerrilla filming on the streets of New York.

As  Radnor put it in an interview with the film's publicist,

New York is the best and worst place in the world to shoot a movie – the best because you can’t beat the production design, the worst because the city doesn’t respond all that well to “quiet on the set.” (I started to get the feeling whenever we were shooting outside and called “action” Mayor Bloomberg said, “Cue the sirens.”) ... I very wisely surrounded myself with people who knew how to shoot a movie quickly in New York (I certainly didn’t know how to do it.) A lot of people try to tell you it can’t be done, that you’ve got to shoot in Toronto or Pittsburgh or somewhere. But they’re wrong. You can do it. If you get the right people on board.

Josh Radnor did win an audience award for his performance at the Sundance Film Festival, so I suspect the movie might have greater appeal than I'm willing to give it credit for.

According to Fandango, happythankyoumoreplease is not scheduled to screen in Charlottesville or near Washington, D.C., anytime soon, but it does open on March 4 at the Angelika Film Center on Houston Street in New York and at The Landmark on West Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles.

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41 Years Ago Today, the Queers Fought Back

Forty-one years ago today, gay men and lesbians in New York City announced that they had had enough of police brutality, exploitation by the mob, and enforced invisibility by fighting back for the first time in what became known as the Stonewall Riots. That incident in Greenwich Village on the night of June 27-28, 1969, and subsequent nights marks a demarcation in the struggle for gay equality and is widely seen as the beginning of the modern gay rights movement.

In truth, men and women had been engaged in the struggle for decades previous to 1969, but Stonewall was of a piece with its era, as the 1960s saw race riots across the country, violent demonstrations against the Vietnam War, and marches for women’s rights and what were then termed “Negro” rights. As a result, Stonewall caught the attention of the media and opinion elites as a symbol – at that time, an unwanted symbol – of gay exuberance. Journalist Lucian Truscott IV said it “was the Rosa Parks moment” for gay Americans.

In a new documentary from PBS’s American Experience and Boston’s WGBH-TV, journalist Howard Smith, who witnessed the first night of the Stonewall riots as a reporter for The Village Voice, says, “It really should have been called ‘Stonewall Uprising.’ They really were objecting to how they were being treated. That’s more an uprising than a riot.”

Indeed, the documentary film, appropriately called Stonewall Uprising, uses its first 45 minutes or so explaining what life was like for gay people in the 1960s.

Attorney William Eskridge says in the film that “the 1960s were dark ages for gay men and lesbians,” and excerpts from contemporaneous movies and TV reports bear out his judgment.

Mike Wallace, for instance, hosted a 1967 documentary from CBS Reports called “The Homosexuals,” which featured a talk by Dr. Charles Socarides – who, it goes unmentioned in the film, was the father of a gay son who served as a White House liaison to the gay and lesbian community during the Clinton administration – in which he says “homosexuality is, in fact, a mental illness that has reached epidemiological proportions,” as though it is somehow contagious.

At the time, the film reports, gay men and lesbians were subjected to excruciating “treatments” under the hands of doctors, including aversion therapy, electroshock therapy, and gruesome pre-frontal lobotomies. A mental health facility in Atascadero, California, was known as “Dachau for queers” because of its dangerous and unethical experimental treatments.

A 1966 report by WTVJ in Miami called “The Homosexual” featured a lecture by Detective John Sorenson in front of an assembly of several hundred schoolchildren that seems shocking by today’s standards. (The children, for their part, seem shocked by what they hear.) He tells them, in what sounds like a warning about illicit drug use, that “you will be caught” if they engage in homosexual conduct, “your parents will find out,” and “you better stop quick.”

This atmosphere naturally made life uncomfortable for gay Americans. Mike Wallace said on CBS that public opinion surveys at the time showed that “two out of three Americans look upon homosexuals with disgust, discomfort or fear.” As a consequence, he said, “the homosexual, bitterly aware of his rejection, reacts by going underground.”

Historian Eric Marcus notes that “before Stonewall, there was no such thing as ‘coming out’ or ‘being out’ … There was no ‘out.’ There was just ‘in’” the closet.

Gay men and women from small towns migrated to the cities and especially to New York, where they hoped that the anonymity of urban life could protect them. Stonewall riot participant Tommy Lanigan-Schmidt relates that “priests rant[ed] in church about certain places not to go, so you kind of knew where you could go by what you were told not to do.”

Even the big cities were not complete refuges. New York laws were used to oppress homosexuals on sometimes the flimsiest basis. Eskridge points to “a whole basket of crimes people could be charged with,” including an “1845 statute that made it a crime to ‘masquerade’” and which was used to justify arresting drag queens and other men who dressed in women’s clothing.

The police routinely used entrapment techniques to arrest gay men (and sometimes women). Former New York City Mayor Ed Koch, who during the 1960s was a leader of both the Democratic party and of the campaign against “vice,” admits in the film that “entrapment did exist, particularly in the subway system.”

Eskridge provides the hard numbers. “At the peak” of the crackdown against gay citizens, he says, “as many as 500 people per year were arrested for the ‘crime against nature’ and between 3,000 and 5,000 people per year were arrested for solicitation or loitering crimes. This is every year in New York City.”

Despite this widespread abuse of police power, Eskridge notes, “gay people were not powerful enough politically to prevent the clampdown.”

An ironic note, uncommented upon in the film, comes in the form of an interview with Richard Inman, then the president of the Mattachine Society of Florida, with WTVJ in Miami in 1966. Asked what homosexuals want in terms of changes in the laws, he replies:

“Let me say, first of all, what types of laws we are not after, because there has been much to-do that the Society was in favor of the legalization of marriage between homosexuals and the adoption of children and such as that.

“That is not at all factual,” he said. “Homosexuals do not want that [although] you might find some fringe character somewhere who says that’s what he wants.”

The fact is, at that time, gay men and women felt virtually powerless to change even the most oppressive laws that were being used against them, much less to aim for full equality with straight Americans. “Who was going to complain about a campaign against gay people?” asks Stonewall veteran Jerry Hoose. “Nobody – not even us.”

After laying out the conditions for gay people in the 1960s, most of the rest of the film is a nearly minute-by-minute recreation of the initial riot, which took place on June 27 in reaction to a police raid on the seedy Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street. According to Seymour Pine, who was then a deputy inspector for the NYPD’s morals division, he led a team of only six officers to conduct the surprise raid. (Even the Mafia, which ran the bar, was not informed.)

Pine was as shocked as anyone that the normally meek patrons reacted violently. One participant, interviewed decades later, said:

“Cops got hurt. It must have been terrifying for them. I hope it was. It gives back a little of the terror they gave in my life.”

Another participant reports: “My father said, ‘About time you fags rioted.’”

Keep in mind that, in 1969, most of the participants in the Stonewall riots were teenagers or in their early 20s. Contrary to the press reports at the time, they were not just drag queens, but a cross-section of what might be considered the “gay community” of the time. Patrons of the Stonewall Inn included street kids, hustlers, college boys, and locals from the neighborhood. The larger crowd that gathered and eventually took part in the riot even included heterosexuals like members of the Black Panthers.

The tension that eventually led to the uprising can be explained in a haiku-like graffito that was featured in a photograph in the Village Voice (spelling as in original):

Gay Prohibition
Corupt$ Cop$
Feed$ Mafia

The rebellion on those nights in June 1969 sparked a revolution in gay thought and political activism. Only a year later, the first gay pride march was held in New York City. Organizers had no idea how many people would show up (it turned out to be thousands) and whether it would be peaceful (they received bomb threats and feared sniper attacks).  Fears were unfounded and a tradition was born.

Playwright Doric Wilson, who was also at Stonewall, remembers that “America thought we were these homosexual monsters, but we were so innocent and, oddly enough, we were so American.”

Lesbian activist Virginia Apuzzo echoes Wilson when she notes that “it’s very American to say, ‘This is not right.’ It’s very American to say, ‘You promised equality. You promised freedom.’ And in a sense, the Stonewall riots said, ‘Get off our backs. Deliver on the promise.”

Over a montage of gay-rights parades from around the world, Apuzzo continues, “In every gay pride parade, every year, Stonewall lives.”

Stonewall Uprising is a strikingly dramatic source of information about the history of the Stonewall riots, what came before, and, in a coda, what came after. Because there are few photographs and no motion picture film of the actual events, the producers rely, in part, on dramatizations of some scenes, but do not make clear what is a historical document and what is a recreation.

The excerpts from films of the time – CBS Reports, WTVJ-Miami, and an amusing public service announcement from 1961 called “Boys Beware” – are stunning in what we might now call their “political incorrectness.” They are funny and curious today but they portray what must have been a terrifying time for gay men and lesbians of the 1960s.

Stonewall Uprising could have taken better advantage of things like animation and CGI. A fascinating animated street view of the riot could have been better utilized and should have remained on screen for a longer period so the information it conveyed could be better absorbed.

Grouped with older documentaries like Before Stonewall (and its sequel, After Stonewall) and dramatic films of the time like The Boys in the Band, Stonewall Uprising offers a useful look at a history that should not be forgotten but that is gladly in the past.

Stonewall Uprising is being screened at cinemas around the country this summer. It is currently (through July 1) in Atlanta at the Landmark Midtown Art, and from July 9 to 15 it is playing in Palm Springs, San Francisco, Berkeley, Minneapolis, Tulsa, and Montpelier, Vermont. It comes to the Landmark E Street Cinema in Washington, D.C., on July 16 through July 22. Many other cities and cinemas are listed on the First Run Features web site.

Stonewall Uprising: Written by David Heilbroner. Based on Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution, by David Carter. Directed and produced by Kate Davis and David Heilbroner. A Q-Ball Productions film for AMERICAN EXPERIENCE.


All photographs provided courtesy of First Run Features; click on photos to embiggen and see captions and full photo credits.

Who Wants to Live in New York?

In the Outlook section of Sunday's Washington Post, Jonathan Yardley reviews a new book by journalist David Owen (not, I presume, the British politician of the same name) called Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less are the Keys to Sustainability. Yardley quotes the book:

A former resident of Manhattan who has lived for many years in a rather remote Connecticut town, Owen finds in New York City, Manhattan in particular, a model that the rest of the country could profitably emulate. A city of "extreme compactness," New York "is the greenest community in the United States." The "average Manhattanite consumes gasoline at a rate that the country as a whole hasn't matched since the mid-1920s," and "eighty-two percent of employed Manhattan residents travel to work by public transit, by bicycle, or on foot," which is "ten times the rate for Americans in general, and eight times the rate for workers in Los Angeles County." It all derives from being a very crowded place:

"Manhattan's density is approximately 67,000 people per square mile, or more than eight hundred times that of the nation as a whole and roughly thirty times that of Los Angeles. Placing one and a half million people on a twenty-three-square-mile island sharply reduces their opportunities to be wasteful, enables most of them to get by without owning cars, encourages them to keep their families small, and forces the majority to live in some of the most inherently energy-efficient residential structures in the world: apartment buildings. It also frees huge tracts of land for the rest of America to sprawl into."

A "model that the rest of the country could profitably emulate"? Really?

Well, it's possible, given a sufficient level of coercion. The fact is, if people wanted to live in cities like New York, they would have already chosen to do so.

New York attracts nearly 50 million tourists from around the world each year. In 2007 and 2008, more than 37 million came from the United States alone. An incredible 35 million people visited Times Square in 2007. (By comparison, only 6.7 visited the Eiffel Tower in Paris.)

Those tens of millions of tourists don't arrive back home and say, "I want to replicate the New York living experience right here." If they are like me and most of the people I know, they view New York as a nice place to visit for a few days, but think that it would be a most unpleasant place to live. As Marianna Allen (a Mask & Bauble colleague from Georgetown days gone by) sang on the original cast recording of Stephen Sondheim's Merrily We Roll Along:

"Who wants to live in New York?
Who wants the worry, the noise, the dirt, the heat?
Who wants the garbage cans clanging in the street — ?"

I know I'll be scolded by residents of the five boroughs, many of whom would never choose to live anywhere else. But that's their choice; it's not mine, and it's not the choice of the 290 million Americans who prefer not to live in New York or in urban conglomerations very much like it.

Authors like David Owen are condescending control freaks who think that most Americans are not smart enough, or sophisticated enough, or sensitive enough, to pursue the lifestyles that Owen and his ilk would impose on us. They disdain the choices people make as a consequence of being free and liking it.

And why, if Owen thinks New York is the ideal place to live, does he live in "a remote Connecticut town"?

Because he chooses to do so. I respect his choice (hypocritical though it might be) and he should respect mine and that of every other American.

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Four Decades After Stonewall

This weekend marks the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, considered a critical moment in the gay rights movement.

The riots did not, contrary to popular mythology, start the gay rights movement. They did not even mark the first time that gay bar patrons had fought back against a raid by corrupt police in a major city. (There was a similar event at the Black Cat Tavern in Los Angeles two years earlier.)

Moreover, groups of gay men and lesbians had been organizing around the country for some forty years. The Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis each had active chapters in various cities, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. (This history has been chronicled in many places, notably in the documentary film, Before Stonewall.) As Dale Carpenter put it in a post on the Independent Gay Forum this week,

The liberationists who gave us Stonewall hastened us down a path (already begun long before them) that has brought us to the edge of unprecedented respect and acceptance.

To demonstrate the differences between today and 1969, one need only take a look at how the mainstream media covered the incidents at the Stonewall Inn and compare it to how they might do it today.

As an example of how far mainstream acceptance has come, Conan O'Brien made an inoffensive joke in his monologue on The Tonight Show on Friday about a news item he had seen about a gay senior citizens group. Their slogan, he said, was "We're here; we're queer; we can't hear you." Well, maybe elderly people might take offense at that -- but not gay people.

In 1996, Edward Alwood wrote a comprehensive history of how the news media has covered gay issues and events in a fascinating book published by the Columbia University Press (with copious illustrations and photographs and accessibly readable despite its academic origin), Straight News: Gays, Lesbians, and the News Media. Here is some of what he wrote about the coverage in June and July 1969 of the Stonewall Riots (excerpted from pages 84-88 of Straight News, footnotes omitted). He begins with coverage after the first night of the riots:

The six-paragraph, single-column story ran on page thirty-three of the [New York] Times on Sunday, June 29. It carried no byline, indicating that the author was a junior writer. The small article was classic New York Times. In sterile language it described the clash in terms of the problems faced by the police. It mentioned nothing about the recent rash of arrests at gay bars or the history of police harassment. Readers were left to figure out for themselves the reasons for the uprising. The story began,

4 POLICEMEN HURT IN ‘VILLAGE’ RAID
MELEE NEAR SHERIDAN SQUARE FOLLOWS ACTION AT BAR

Hundreds of young men went on a rampage in Greenwich Village shortly after 3 A.M. yesterday after a force of plainclothes men raided a bar that police said was well known for its homosexual clientele.Thirteen persons were arrested and four policemen were injured. The young men threw bricks, bottles, garbage, pennies and a parking meter at the policemen, who had a search warrant authorizing them to investigate reports that liquor was sold illegally at the bar, the Stonewall Inn, 53 Christopher Street, just off Sheridan Square.

The tone of the article and its placement deep inside the newspaper came as no surprise to homosexuals. “I didn’t expect it to be on the front page because the Times didn’t cover gay stuff,” recalled Martha Shelley, then president of the New York chapter of Daughters of Bilitis. “I knew that if there had been that many black people rioting in Manhattan, the story would have been front page news.”

Reporter Dennis Eskow took a similar approach in his story in the New York Daily News, 3 COPS HURT AS BAR RAID RILES CROWD. It was accompanied by a three-column photograph showing police talking to a group of smiling young men outside the bar, hike the Times story, Eskow’s was buried on page thirty. It began, “A predawn police raid on a reputed Greenwich Village homosexual hangout, the second raid within a week, touched off a two-hour melee yesterday as customers and villagers swarmed over the plainclothes cops. Before order was restored, the cops were the targets of thrown coins, cobblestones and uprooted parking meters, windows were smashed, a police van was nearly overturned and the front of the raided bar, the Stonewall Inn, was fire-bombed.”

The spontaneous demonstrations did not end immediately. They were renewed the next day, after the Stonewall Inn reopened. The newspapers again reported on the events. Their placement and tone suggest (in retrospect) an utter lack of understanding of what was happening and what would follow (including the first gay pride parade in New York exactly one year later, on June 28, 1970). Some of the reports displayed outright bigotry with regard to the gay men who had reacted to decades of police oppression, blackmail, and extortion. Alwood continues:

The Times reported the Saturday night outbreak in a second article. Again, the single column, ten-paragraph article was buried on page twenty-two. It began,

POLICE AGAIN ROUT “VILLAGE” YOUTHS

Heavy police reinforcements cleared the Sheridan Square area of Greenwich Village again yesterday morning when large crowds of young men, angered by a police raid on an inn frequented by homosexuals, swept through the area. . . . A number of people who did not retreat fast enough were pushed and shoved along, and at least two men were clubbed to the ground.

Only reporter Jay Levin of the New York Post was able to put the uprising in a context that would enable the average reader to understand the events, despite the condescending tone of the article. His story ran on July 8, more than a week after the riots erupted. Headlined THE GAY ANGER BEHIND THE RIOTS, the story began,

“People are beginning to realize,” said the doorman at the Stonewall Inn, “that no matter how ‘Nelly’ or how ‘fem’ a homosexual is, you can only push them so far.” With a battle cry of “gay power,” the Nellies, fems, gay boys, queens—all those who flaunt their homosexuality -- have been demonstrating that they have indeed been pushed too far."

Although most of the city’s newspapers underplayed the riots, two others sensationalized them beyond extremes. The worst offender was the Daily News, the irreverent paper of the city’s working class. Headlined HOMO NEST RAIDED, QUEEN BEES ARE STINGING MAD, the article by Jerry Lisker appeared on July 6, nearly a week after the riots, on the first page of the local news section:

She sat there with her legs crossed, the lashes of her mascara-coated eyes beating like the wings of a humming bird. She was angry. She was so upset she hadn’t bothered to shave. A day old stubble was beginning to push through the pancake makeup. She was a he. A queen of Christopher Street. Last weekend the queens had turned commandos and stood bra_strap to-bra-strap against an invasion of the helmeted Tactical Patrol Force. The elite police squad had shut down one of their private gay clubs, the Stonewall Inn at 17 Christopher St., in the heart of a three-block homosexual community in Greenwich Village.

In mocking, denigrating descriptions that ran throughout the article, Lisker described gays as “Queen Bees,” “princesses and ladies-in-waiting,” “Florence Nightingales,” and “honeys turned Madwomen of Chaillot.” “Queen power reared its bleached blonde head in revolt ,“ the article said. He referred to the Stonewall Inn as “a gay mecca” and a “homosexual beachhead .“ In one section he wrote,

The whole proceedings took on the aura of a homosexual Academy Awards Night. The Queens pranced out to the street blowing kisses and waving to the crowd. A beauty of a specimen named Stella wailed uncontrollably while being led to the sidewalk in front of the Stonewall by a cop. She later confessed that she didn’t protest the manhandling by the officer, it was just that her hair was in curlers and she was afraid her new beau might be in the crowd and spot her. She didn’t want him to see her this way, she wept.

Written in an entertaining and dramatic fashion, the story evoked the days of yellow journalism, when newspapers put a premium on telling a story rather than finding the facts or providing the truth.

The July 3 edition of the Village Voice struck a similar tone in two front page articles that provided the most extensive coverage of all. By coincidence the Voice’s editorial offices were located on Christopher Street, only a few doors from the Stonewall Inn. When the riot began on the first night, reporter Lucian Truscott IV was in the Lion’s Head, a favorite drinking spot for journalists, and darted outside to see what had happened. As a result he wrote GAY POWER COMES TO SHERIDAN SQUARE, the lead article on the front page of the next edition:

Sheridan Square this weekend looked like something from a William Burroughs novel as the sudden specter of “gay power” erected its brazen head and spat out a fairy tale the likes of which the area has never seen. The forces of faggotry, spurred by a Friday night raid on one of the city’s largest, most popular, and longest lived gay bars, the Stonewall Inn, rallied Saturday night in an unprecedented protest against the raid and continued Sunday night to assert presence, possibility, and pride until the early hours of Monday morning.

Like the article in the Daily News, Truscott’s contained a liberal dose of prejudiced characterizations ranging from “fags” to “blatant queens.” “The stars were in their element,” he wrote, capturing the drama of the moment but ignoring and trivializing legitimate complaints about oppressive police tactics. He referred to the “limp wrists and primed hair” of the gays but described the police as “the city’s finest.”

Fast-forward forty years. So much has happened in that time it boggles the mind. (Who, in 1969, would have imagined that gay and lesbian citizens would be lobbying for equal marriage rights and that they would have achieved them in several foreign countries and six states? That an openly gay man would be heading the U.S. civil service, which once excluded homosexuals from government employment? Or that a majority of Americans approve the idea of gay men and lesbians serving openly in the military?) Gays are no longer disdained: they are courted by politicians (President Barack Obama panders to gay voters almost weekly) and targeted by merchants.

As an example of the latter, consider this article in the June 2009 issue of O'Dwyer's PR Report, a (subscription-only) newsletter for public relations professionals, by Matt Tumminello, president of Target 10 in New York.

Tumminello notes:

In 1969, gay visibility was practically non-existent and only a handful of individuals were willing to stand up and he counted. Today, gay visibility has exploded and the community has become a thriving market segment that holds a wealth of opportunity for major companies and consumer brands.

Gently chiding his PR colleagues and competitors for underserving the gay market, Tumminello lists a few salient facts:

About six to seven percent of the population is gay or lesbian. In urban areas, that percentage can exceed 10 or 12 percent.

The per capita buying power of gay consumers is estimated at $45,300, with a total market estimated at $712 billion.

Gay consumers are concentrated and easy to reach through targeted media, resulting in an efficient use of marketing dollars.

In research we’ve conducted. 73% of gay men and lesbians strongly agree that gay-targeted marketing positively impacts purchasing decisions. This market is extremely brand loyal.

Gay consumers influence trends, styles and tastes beyond their own community. Call it “The Queer Eye effect.”

Gay consumers are early adopters and there are many categories where gays over-index, such as travel, grooming, personal care products, technology and entertainment.

Gay research capabilities have become first-rate in the last five years. The results of a marketing program can be tracked and measured with great precision.

Tumminello concludes by reminding his readers that the gay market is not just a 21st century phenomenon, but it started slowly and is now maturing:

The gay market is not something new or just starting to emerge. It’s been growing up and all around us. A look at the last ten years of pop culture shows how far we’ve come. It’s been more than a decade since we first met Will & Grace. The Queer Eye guys finished giving America a makeover in 2007 after a successful four-year run. And last year, Ellen DeGeneres married her wife the same month she signed on to be the face of Cover Girl cosmetics. Today we even have LOGO, the gay TV network owned by MTV that reaches into more than 30 million homes.

Most recently, marriage equality has found a groundswell of support. Gay couples are now marrying in five states - probably six, by the time this magazine hits your desk. It may have seemed impossible a generation ago, but many of us now believe we won’t have to wait a lifetime to see it happen in all 50 states.

Ten years from now, as historians and activists mark half a century since the Stonewall Riots brought the struggle for gay and lesbian civil rights to public attention, what will they be marveling about? For my money, the most remarkable thing about this progress is the short span it took to get from there to here. While the boys and men who fought back at Stonewall might have stimulated, initially, a left-wing movement, the surprise is that it is the free market, encompassing both commerce and popular culture -- something valued more by the right than the left -- has been the strongest motivator, protector, and stimulant for gay liberation.

Free Speech and Irony

Only in America -- or perhaps only in New York City:

A man was arrested in New York only days before we celebrate the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. His alleged crime? Reciting the words of the First Amendment in a public place.

The arrested performance artist goes by the name of Reverend Billy (real name: Bill Talen) and is well-known to those who follow street theatre in the Big Apple.

According to the Associated Press,

Talen, 57, has spent years using his mock persona as a fire-and-brimstone evangelist to rail against consumer culture — what he portrays as the Disneyfication of Manhattan. He was arrested this year on misdemeanor trespassing charges for protesting at a Starbucks; that case is pending.

His latest run-in with the law began after he turned up to support people gathering in Union Square last Friday for the monthly Critical Mass bike ride asserting cyclists' rights.

The NYPD has aggressively policed the rides, arguing that they can interfere with traffic and threaten public safety. Advocates for Critical Mass have accused police of infringing on the riders' constitutional rights to free speech and free assembly.

The video shows Talen preaching the "44 beautiful words of the First Amendment" to a visibly annoyed congregation of police commanders huddled a few feet away. At one point, an officer approaches and warns him that his sermon is breaking the law.

"What's the law?" Talen asks.

"Harassment," the officer answers.

When Talen persists, another officer comes up behind him and slaps on handcuffs. When being put in a police van, the satirist shouts, "We have a right to peaceful assembly!"

Talen was held overnight before being released without bail. A criminal complaint alleges he harassed police officers by approaching them and "repeatedly shouting at such officers through a non-electric bullhorn."

It did not take long for somebody to post the video cited in the AP report to YouTube. Judge for yourself whether Reverend Billy deserved his treatment at the hands of the NYPD:

For the record, here are the words of the First Amendment the Constitution, which Reverend Billy and his co-activists were so vigorously reciting:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

If I'm not mistaken, Reverend Billy was one of the guest speakers at the Virginia Film Festival a few years ago, and I remember vocally disagreeing with his views about economics and society during one of the screenings. Whatever his misguided positions on free enterprise might be, he has my support in his colorful efforts to protect our civil liberties.

Should Libertarians Support Rudy Giuliani?

Two libertarian writers whom I respect (and, full disclosure, whom I know personally) have diametrically opposed views about former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and whether he deserves to be the Republican presidential candidate in 2008.

On the pro-Rudy side is Deroy Murdock, an adjunct fellow at the Atlas Economic Research Foundation and a frequent guest on TV chat shows like the syndicated Chris Matthews Show. A New York-based syndicated columnist whose work appears in the Washington Times and other newspapers, Murdock wrote a gushing piece about Rudy Giuliani in the National Review back in March. In it, he provides details of the successes during Giuliani's eight years as Gotham mayor, including these compelling figures:

...Giuliani governed as a Reaganesque supply-sider:

Giuliani scrapped three taxes and slashed 20 others, lowering Gotham’s tax burden by 17 percent and saving individual and business taxpayers $9.8 billion. A family of four earning $50,000 saw its local taxes plummet 23.7 percent.

While inflation averaged 3.9 percent, Giuliani’s average spending grew 2.9 percent annually. If the departed GOP Congress were that fiscally disciplined, the next federal budget would be $2.275 trillion — $625 billion cheaper, Cato Institute fiscal analyst Stephen Slivinski calculates.

While hiring 12 percent more cops and 12.8 percent more teachers, Giuliani sliced other positions 17.2 percent. Overall, municipal headcount fell 3.1 percent.

These policies helped cut local unemployment from 10.4 percent in 1993 to 5.7 percent in 2001. Tourist arrivals rose 32 percent in that period, while the Big Apple’s population grew 9.3 percent. People who came stuck around, and those already here stopped evacuating, as they were doing before Giuliani Time. Not insignificantly, the personal incomes of New Yorkers ballooned 53 percent during Giuliani’s tenure.

In conversations with me, Murdock has told of his amazement at the way Giuliani, at press conferences introducing the city budget, was able to field questions about nearly every detail of New York's fiscal situation. According to Murdock, Giuliani is a master of detail, with much more innate intelligence than the average politician. Moreover, given the political demographics of New York City -- Republicans and conservatives are a minuscule minority -- Giuliani's achievements are even more remarkable, because he was able to accomplish so much, through sheer force of personality and adherence to principle, against otherwise unrelenting opposition.

Coming from the other side -- the anti-Rudy side -- is David Boaz, executive vice president of the Cato Institute in Washington and author of Libertarianism: A Primer. He has an op-ed piece in today's New York Daily News entitled "Libertarians, beware the rigid reign of Rudy."

Boaz acknowledges the same accomplishments that Murdock touts, but he adds some warnings:

Throughout his career, Giuliani has displayed an authoritarian streak that would be all the more problematic in a man who would assume executive powers vastly expanded by President Bush.

* * *

And it should distress many conservatives that Giuliani took umbrage at affronts to his dignity, perhaps most notoriously when he tried to stop city buses from carrying a New York magazine ad saying the publication was "possibly the only good thing in New York Rudy hasn't taken credit for." The First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams notes in his book, "Speaking Freely," that "over 35 separate successful lawsuits were brought against the city under Giuliani's stewardship arising out of his insistence on doing the one thing that the First Amendment most clearly forbids: using the power of government to restrict or punish speech critical of government itself."

As a presidential hopeful, Giuliani's authoritarian streak is as strong as ever. He defends the Bush administration's domestic surveillance program. He endorses the President's power to arrest American citizens, declare them enemy combatants and hold them without access to a lawyer or a judge. He thinks the President has "the inherent authority to support the troops" even if Congress were to cut off war funding, a claim of presidential authority so sweeping that even Bush and his supporters have not tried to make it.

Giuliani's view of power would be dangerous at any time, but especially after two terms of relentless Bush efforts to weaken the constitutional checks and balances that safeguard our liberty.

In 1964, Barry Goldwater declared it "the cause of Republicanism to resist concentrations of power." George W. Bush has forgotten that; Rudy Giuliani rejects it.

Both Boaz and Murdock are correct in their assessments of Rudy Giuliani. The question libertarian Republicans must ask themselves is, which side of Giuliani is more important to us? Are we swayed by the Rudy who transformed New York and made it livable and economically viable? Or are we repulsed by the Rudy who shows little respect for the limits of power and the individual rights and liberties enshrined in the Constitution?

Tintinnitus

It was only a few weeks ago that a New York state senator proposed legislation that would have prohibited pedestrians in New York City and Buffalo from talking on their cell phones while crossing the street.

So it was not hard to believe a story on NPR's "Weekend Edition Sunday" that reported how a New York city council member is proposing that all cellphone ringtones, except for four approved by the government, would be banned in an attempt to prevent "ring rage" -- that is, people getting into fights because of obnoxious or loud cellphone rings.

I was listening to the report in the car on my way to church and was particularly struck by this soundbite from Councilor David Yassky, responding to New Yorkers who called the proposal "ridiculous," which encapsulates so perfectly the road from compassion to totalitarianism:

David Yassky: Well, look, Liane, you can always find people that complain about any change but you know, first of all, it's not just the noise pollution. This is very costly to our economy. We estimate that distracting ringtones in the workplace and then the arguments and joking that goes along with that cost our economy more than $1.2 billion a year.

And, you know, when we did the pooper-scooper law, we did the smoking ban, we banned trans fats, first, you know, people objected but then they realized just how valuable these laws can be.

Liane Hansen: So you don't think it's too extreme?

Yassky: Not at all. I think New York will prove to be a model. Once we do this, I think you'll see this in cities across the country.

That's exactly the sort of crypto-socialist, nanny-state claptrap that one has come to expect from New York politicians. So who could blame me for being suckered by a National Public Radio April Fools' prank?

It turns out that NPR has a history of playing effective April Fools' jokes on its listeners. In an Arts section article on Sunday, Washington Post radio beat reporter Marc Fisher notes:

NPR producers have a knack for finding phony stories that sneak right up to the edge of credibility. In 1994, "All Things Considered" reported on teenagers who agreed to tattoo their ears with corporate advertising in exchange for a lifelong 10 percent discount on the company's products. NPR has presented April 1 reports on dog-bark translation software, the abuse of performance-enhancing steroids by classical violinists and a U.S. Postal Service program that would allow Americans to take their Zip code with them when they moved....

NPR's gags tend to take listeners to remote corners to visit unusual characters. But in 1992, "Talk of the Nation" host John Hockenberry reported that Richard Nixon was coming out of retirement to run for president. The report included audio of Nixon defiantly averring that "I didn't do anything wrong, and I won't do it again." NPR included comments on the surprise announcement by Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe and Newsweek reporter Howard Fineman. Callers jammed the show's phone lines to deliver themselves of their outrage that the disgraced ex-president would consider such a comeback. Hockenberry waited until the show's second hour to reveal that what the Nixon listeners had heard was actually impressionist Rich Little.

I didn't know any of this history at the time I turned off the radio, before the music bumper of Kander and Ebb's "New York, New York" (done in a comical style) would have revealed to me that I had been had. It wasn't until I looked it up on NPR's web site -- with the intention of blogging about the latest legislative outrage from New York -- that I found out the truth of the prank.

Good job, NPR! If nothing else, it shows that the line between reality and satire is very thin, indeed.

Report from New York

As must be clear by now, I spent last weekend in New York, both to attend some business meetings and to appear on The Joey Reynolds Show -- as well as to imbibe the theatre district in my off hours on Saturday.

I was also there precisely a month earlier, to join a group of Georgetown theatre alumni eager to celebrate the off-Broadway directorial debut of one of our number, Rick Lombardo, who is the artistic director of the New Repertory Theatre in Watertown, Massachusetts. Rick is the director of Bill W. and Dr. Bob, the story of the founders of AA, which is now playing at New World Stages on West 50th Street.

The mini-reunion was great fun, with classmates coming from all over the country to see the show and raise a toast after the curtain fell. It took such an event for me to see Mask & Bauble alumna Carolyn Patterson and her husband, Bob Goss, the proprietors of the Inn at Monticello just outside of Charlottesville. (Really, I promise to visit someday soon!) Others came from as far away as Minnesota, Missouri, and New Jersey.

The cocktail reception afterwards also gave me a chance to chat with Elizabethan scholar Scott Pilarz about Clare Asquith's book, Shadowplay, which I was just finishing at the time. Asquith's book (subtitled "The Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare") posits that Shakespeare's plays are "coded" documents designed to support Catholic dissidents in an age of political and religious turmoil. Whatever the merits of Asquith's arguments -- and there is a sense that she overreaches -- I don't think I will ever take a Shakespeare play at face value ever again. Now that I have been introduced to the code, I will alway see multiple layers at work. (I have also realized that, for fun, the code can be applied to almost any piece of drama. Read Asquith's glossary and try it out yourself the next time you're at the theatre.)

Altogether, there were about 35 five of us. Thanks to the organizational skills of Trish Sullivan Vanni, we got a block of tickets to the show, and a vague suggestion of "let's all get together in New York when Rick's show opens" turned into reality.

My review of Bill W. and Dr. Bob is included in the essay below, which I submitted to The Metro Herald late last night.

And to all those M&Bers across the country -- let's do it again soon!

Report from New York 1:
The Big Voice – Company – Altar Boyz – Bill W. and Dr. Bob
Rick Sincere
Metro Herald Entertainment Editor

(NEW YORK) --- Flying blind sometimes leads to interesting and delightful, if previously unimagined, destinations.

Such can be the case when buying a show ticket at New York’s TKTS both based on odd criteria, like the theatre’s location or the play’s running time, rather than on what critics have written or how long the show has been selling out its seats.

In this situation, I discovered The Big Voice: God or Merman? at the (off-Broadway) Actors Temple Theatre on West 47th Street. A bijou of a musical, this two-man show is made up not with precious gems but instead with semi-precious stones that make for a divertingly entertaining and touching evening.

Written by Jim Brochu (book) and Steve Schalchlin (music and lyrics), who originally played themselves (“Jim” and “Steve”), the cast now consists of Dale Radunz as Jim and Carl Danielsen as Steve.

The capsule summary of the show says a lot about New York, if nothing else. A Baptist boy from Arkansas and a Catholic boy from Brooklyn grow up, meet, and find spiritual fulfillment through musical theatre – and this on a stage in a theatre owned and operated by a synagogue. (Now that’s New York!)

Brochu’s book is strongest in the play’s first half, when it tells the separate stories of the protagonists’ youth and early adulthood, before they met and fell in love. As one might expect from a plot that cleaves closely to real life, the last third tapers off somewhat, as it pursues the middle of the “boy meets boy, boy loses boy, boy gets boy back” formula.

Schalchlin’s music and lyrics are workmanlike but not especially memorable. The melodies bear echoes of the music of Steve’s Baptist upbringing. (Like a disproportionate number of gay men of his age cohort, Steve is the son of a preacher-father and a piano-teacher-mother.) Still, the songs do what they must to flesh out the characters and advance the plot.

Some of the play’s most amusing moments revolve around Jim’s lifelong devotion to Ethel Merman, whom he met at age 12 on the stage of the Broadway Theatre after a performance of Gypsy. His story of epiphany and transformation could be lifted from the adolescent diary pages of countless musical theatre queens.

What is perhaps most striking about Jim and Steve’s shared story is that it is not one about youthful romance, but rather about mature love and marriage, and about the perseverance of older gay men through rocky times that include sickness, separation, loneliness, and anger.

The low-budget, off-Broadway intimacy of The Big Voice offers a fitting counterpoint to the big-budget, Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s Company at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, just a block away on 47th Street.

Company, a breakthrough “concept musical” in 1970, has been tweaked and transfigured several times in the years since. This latest incarnation, directed by Tony-winner John Doyle, combines orchestra and cast so that each actor plays one or more instruments to accompany themselves on stage.

This conceit, also employed in Doyle’s 2005 production of Sweeney Todd, is somewhat distracting, at least at first, and one can come away with the impression that it is used throughout merely to achieve a particularly visceral and emotional payoff in the last five minutes of the show.

That said, this new production of Company is filled with excellent performances, especially from Raúl Esparza as Robert and Barbara Walsh as Joanne. (Esparza is being widely touted as the most likely winner of the Tony Award for leading actor in a musical – even by other contenders for the prize.)

Esparza, who made a splash in Merrily We Roll Along and in the title role of Sunday in the Park with George at the Kennedy Center’s Sondheim Celebration five years ago, shines here as well. His Robert is detached and cold, manifestly in pain. Through most of the play he delivers his lines with the flatness of David Sedaris reading one of his essays, as if compelled to hide from everyone – friends, lovers, himself – any human feelings he might have.

As the cynical Joanne, Walsh also is detached. (That the only instruments she plays are the triangle and orchestra bells – using a single hammer for each – speaks volumes.) While the other characters play whole phrases on melodic instruments – sax, clarinet, trumpet – Joanne just punctuates. She delivers her 11 o’clock number, “The Ladies Who Lunch,” with viciousness unequalled in previous Broadway productions, easily in the same class as the ur-Joanne, Elaine Stritch.

One quibble I have with this and other recent productions of Company (including the one the Four County Players recently mounted in Barboursville, Virginia) is the new scene in which Peter asks Robert about “homosexual experiences” in a clear attempt to make a pass at him. The scene seems hopelessly tacked on and adds little to either character’s back story. It almost seems like Furth’s answer to the persistent question of Sondheimophiles, “Is Bobby gay?” The answer is, as it ever was, no.

Company and The Big Voice complement each other in their reflections on relationships and marriage, although there is little question that Company is and will remain a classic piece of musical theatre while The Big Voice will merely be a pleasant addition to the community-theatre repertoire (except, perhaps, in small towns like Mammoth, Arkansas, where it could, alas, do the most good.)

* * * * * *

New World Stages on West 50th Street is an off-Broadway venue that has the architectural feel of a suburban cineplex. In fact, it once was the home of a multiple-screen movie theatre, which – now converted to showcase live performances – serves legitimate-theatre audiences well. Each auditorium, ranging in size from 199 to 499 seats – has stadium seating, meaning there is not a bad seat in the house – no obstructions, not even the beehive hairdos of the ladies who lunch sitting at the matinee in front of you.

Two shows currently at New World Stages – the musical comedy, Altar Boyz, and the drama Bill W. and Dr. Bob – make good use of the environment the theatre complex provides.

Altar Boyz, written by Kevin Del Aguila (book) and Gary Adler & Michael Patrick Walker (music and lyrics), pretends to be the final stop of a concert tour for a Christian boy band made up of Matthew, Mark, Luke, Juan, and Abraham. (Abraham is the one Jewish member among the four Catholic boys.)

Through a series of flashbacks and musical numbers, Altar Boyz reveals how the boys met, formed the band, and advanced through their careers.

Simultaneously a satirical look at the boy-band phenomenon – think N’Sync or Backstreet Boys – and Christian pop-rock, Altar Boyz scores on both counts. (It slips a bit in consistency when it makes some cracks about Catholic belief that are actually better targeted at Evangelical Protestants.)

The music and lyrics have wit and panache. The music offers pastiches of rock, pop, country and western, and Broadway show tunes. The lyrics have unexpected turns that unfailingly evoke laughter (sometimes giggles, sometimes guffaws).

The current cast members of Altar Boyz are all replacements for those who can be heard on the original cast CD. That does not reflect on their quality, for all five “boyz” turn in fine performances. Particularly noteworthy is Zach Hanna as Mark, the band’s closeted gay member. (Every boy band has at least one, right?) Hanna creates his character through subtle glances and gestures without a word to define what he makes apparent to the audience. (Apropos of The Big Voice, Mark’s object of affection, Kyle Dean Massey – who plays Matthew -- comes from a small town in Arkansas, where he once sang in the same church choir as Metro Herald contributor Tim Hulsey.)

Landon Beard (Luke) and Eric Schneider (Abraham) also offer well-tuned performances, as did Carlos L. Encinias, the understudy who played Juan on the night I saw Altar Boyz. Remarkably – and for this equal credit goes to the playwright as well as the actors – the characters are not homogenized. Instead, each of the five has a distinct personality and purpose, so that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

While Altar Boyz is playing in Stage 4 at New World Stages, Stage 2 hosts Bill W. and Dr. Bob (written by Stephen Bergman and Janet Surrey), a show as close to critic-proof as one might find. That is to say, even if the reviews are tepid or negative, audiences flock to see Bill W. and Dr. Bob, which tells the story of the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous. Given that New York critics, as a class, tend to disparage the uplifting and inspiring and to prefer the cynical and inhumane – not that there’s anything wrong with that! -- negative reviews of Bill W. and Dr. Bob have been expected. (Note, however, that this reviewer has read none of the notices for this show and is, therefore, open to correction.)

Director Rick Lombardo (full disclosure: he is a college classmate and onetime theatre colleague of mine) explains how word of mouth led to an extended run for Bill W. and Dr. Bob when it premiered at the New Repertory Theatre near Boston, prior to its being optioned for New York.

The cast and crew knew they had an unexpected success on their hands when, a few performances into the run, audience members spontaneously called out “Hi Bill” when Robert Krakovski (as Bill Wilson) stepped to the front of the stage and announced, “My name is Bill, and I’m an alcoholic.”

The formulaic AA call-and-response repeated itself night after night.

“After a while,” related Lombardo to The Metro Herald (over drinks at Victor’s Café, a Cuban restaurant near the theatre), “we could predict what the overall audience reaction to the show would be by how many voices we heard say ‘Hi, Bill!’ We learned that alcoholics react very differently from non-alcoholics to certain scenes in the play.” As an example, he said, alcoholics would laugh uproariously at painful scenes in which the characters are dead drunk – a laughter of recognition absent from audiences with fewer AA members in them. The higher the ratio of alcoholics to non-alcoholics, the livelier and more vocal the audience could be expected to be.

The extended run at New Rep was supported by AA members coming back to see the show multiple times, bringing their friends with them, who in turn would bring their friends along when they came back a second or third time. It is no wonder that Bill W. and Dr. Bob has had the highest advance ticket sale of any show in the history of New World Stages.

One knows one is entering a different universe immediately upon seeing the set designed by Anita Fuchs. She has created a disorienting atmosphere by placing a sharply raked stage in juxtaposition to oddly-angled, movable panels that do not meet our usual expectations regarding spatial perspective. The set tends to make one queasy.

Bill W. and Dr. Bob is a six-actor, multi-character play. Four actors – Krakovski as Bill, Patrick Husted as Dr. Bob Smith, Rachel Harker as Lois Wilson, and Kathleen Doyle as Anne Smith – play single roles throughout, while Marc Carver as Man and Deanna Dunmyer as Woman play multiple roles, as the story is told through flashbacks and encounters.

While it may appear easy to play drunk, it requires a high degree of discipline, as well as nuance, to make it feel authentic. Krakovski and Husted can’t get away with simply imitating Foster Brooks. We have to see them sweat – and we do.

Harder than playing drunk, perhaps, is playing the drunk’s wife. The reactions of Harker and Doyle, who play (respectively) Bill and Bob’s wives, are measured and subtle. Either woman could choose to pick up and move away. Instead, they meet their marital challenges with fortitude and, in the process, create the forerunner to Al-Anon.

Word has it that director Lombardo had to cut 25 minutes from the play, which seemed bloated during its Boston run. It still has some problems in that, as the play draws to a close, audience members tend to check their watches. It drags a bit and could use some additional tightening. This, however, is a mere quibble in comparison to the satisfaction so many audience members obtain from the show.

The actors now performing in Bill W. and Dr. Bob are signed to six-month contracts, but we can expect the show to go on long after that August deadline comes around.

Bill W. and Dr. Bob continues at New World Stages, 340 West 50th Street, New York, between 8th and 9th Avenues. For tickets, call Telecharge at (212) 239-6200 or purchase online at www.telecharge.com. For group sales, call (212) 933-0263. For further information, visit http://www.billwanddrbob.com.

Altar Boyz continues at New World Stages, 340 West 50th Street, New York, between 8th and 9th Avenues. For tickets, call Telecharge at (212) 239-6200 or order online at www.telecharge.com. For further information, visit http://www.altarboyz.com.

Company continues at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, 243 West 47th Street, New York, between Broadway and 8th Avenue. For tickets, call Telecharge.com at 212-239-6200 or 800-432-7250 or purchase online at www.telecharge.com. For group sales, call (212) 302-7000. For further information, visit http://www.companyonbroadway.com/index.htm.

The Big Voice: God or Merman? continues at the Actors Temple Theatre, 339 West 47th Street, New York, between 8th and 9th Avenues. For tickets, call 212-947-8844 or visit BroadwayOffers.com and mention code BVBBX72. For further information, visit http://www.thebigvoice.com.

(Photo and logo from The Big Voice courtesy of Keith Sherman & Associates.)
(Photo of Company and the Barrymore by Rick Sincere.)
(Photo of Robert Krakovski and Patrick Husted from Bill W. and Dr. Bob by Carol Rosegg; courtesy of Sam Rudy Media Relations.)