A White Crane Conversation with David Mixner

By Christopher Murray

This is only an excerpt...

Called “the most powerful Gay man in America” by Newsweek magazine following his successful efforts to marshal Gay money and resources for Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, political advisor David Mixner helped start the nation’s first Gay political action committee, the Municipal Elections Committee of Los Angeles (MECLA), and was a co-founder of the Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund, the Washington-based national organization that identifies and supports highly qualified LGBT candidates for public office. He has been a leading advisor on several other presidential bids, including those of Richard Gephardt, Gary Hart, and George McGovern. In February, Mixner endorsed Barack Obama, saying, “The major factor in my decision to endorse Obama is the war in Iraq. To put it simply, he was right from the beginning. There is absolutely no question in my mind that Senator Obama is Senator Clinton’s peer on substance and policy. Clearly, he is not only ready on day one to be president, but he also will be right on day one! Obama has surrounded himself with some of the best minds in the country. He has the ability to inspire us to make sacrifices and to serve our nation. The senator has one of the best minds in the country. Like President Kennedy, he and his family will make us proud to have them in the White House. So, with great enthusiasm, I embrace Senator Obama and am allowing myself to dream and believe again.”

Christopher Murray: You said to me once that you have a vision for a Gay president. Why? How?

David Mixner: In America, the ultimate sign of success of a group making it, whether it was John Kennedy being Catholic, or a Jewish president someday, is living in the White House. Right now, we have two candidacies in part powerfully motivated by one being African American, Barack Obama, and one being a woman, Hillary Clinton. The attainability of someone from our Lesbian and Gay community being president one day is the ultimate symbol that one has arrived and been accepted by society.

That’s power, real power, where we are judged on our talents as whole human beings and not on our sexuality, where it’s possible for young Gay people to have any dream that they want and know that it’s attainable. If you one of us could be president, then any of us could be anything we want.

Murray: What is Gay political power and how is it changing over time?

Mixner: I don’t know if there is such a thing as Gay political power. I think there is such a thing as political power and that Gays are finally in a position to participate. If we are talking about Gay political power, we are talking about who is head of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund. Real power is people: Gay people heading committees in state legislatures and city councils. For the first time in the last decade, we are now in the position of attaining major political power and having not only a place at the table, but helping to design the table. It was less than four decades ago that Elaine Noble, when she ran for the legislature in Massachusetts, had to have armed guards. It was literally only two decades ago that Michael Dukakis refused to take organized, Gay-bundled funds. It was three decades ago that people refused to take my check as a political donation because I was openly homosexual.

That meant that the political power we had was internally focused. Who was on what board. Our status and self-esteem was based on our own community-based organizations. Now we are finding out as members of the community and getting married, having families, that we are no longer tokens. That although we have a broad range of frontiers to still break through, the fact of the matter is that it is not an anomaly for a Gay person to head the budget committee or ways and means committee in the legislature, which is real power. It is not an anomaly to be an openly Gay campaign manager for a candidate for president. So, what we have made is a transition from that internal focus of power to now where we are participating in power in society generally. This applies outside of politics as well.

Murray: What price have you paid personally for the unprecedented access you have had to the top echelon of political power in our country?

Mixner: It’s something I don’t think about too much. Thinking about it makes it more difficult to accept. It’s easier to avoid the question and just move on. I come from a time where I sat around my family’s dining room table and when a young Gay man killed himself in our neighborhood, my father and mother thought his family was better off. And a time when my partner was served by friends on paper plates because of fear of AIDS. When I was growing up, I thought I wanted to be an ambassador or senator or president but was told that would not be possible.

So there is no question, being Gay has changed the course of my life. Having children was out of the questions, running for political office was out of the question. Being fired from your job or being destroyed politically was a very real possibility if anyone knew. We saw friends arrested for sexual activity in parks and their names printed in the newspapers. What toll did it take? An enormous one. Eventually you cross a line with that oppression where you just aren’t willing to take it any longer. And that resolution to fight that oppression becomes your energy. Not only mine, I remember Harvey Milk and Elaine Noble and many others saying we cannot let another generation go through this. It was an understanding of the modern LGBT movement that few of us would experience the spoils of victory from our work. At this point, we’ve experienced success far greater than any of us would have expected. I’m too old now at sixty to be a dad and throw a football around with my son, but I could still run for office if I chose. But by the time that possibility came into my grasp, I had no desire for it.

Murray: Examples of the cost are that you have been blackmailed and sent into the political wilderness several times in your career.

Mixner: When I was working against the Viet Nam war and achieved notoriety working for Eugene McCarthy as one of the four coordinators of the Viet Nam War Moratorium Committee, there is zero doubt in anyone’s mind that, if I had been openly Gay, I wouldn’t have been able to do any of that work. None. I would have been viewed as a horrible weight on the anti-war movement and doing damage to the greater good. So, I was closeted. And during that period, I fell head over heels in love with someone who had been planted by someone. Some intelligence agency or some Gordon Liddy-type operation. It’s still unclear to me who. Photographs were taken and I was blackmailed and told that if I didn’t get out of the anti-war movement, those explicit photographs would be sent to my parents and the press.

I made a pact with myself that if the photos were sent that I would kill myself. I finally figured out that they wouldn’t send them other than anonymously, which would discredit them in the press, so I held firm, but it dramatically reminded me of my vulnerability. I pulled back and became less visible. I developed a persona of the harmonica-playing cowboy who was a grand strategist who said, “Aw, shucks, I don’t really want to do any of those interviews.” A lot of us kept behind the scenes those days, in Hollywood, in politics, just close enough to get a taste of what it was we really wanted, but not in visible danger.

Murray: How do you understand the growth of the Gay rights movement over time, both politically and socially?

Mixner: Chris, that is a question that could take hours to answer. But I remember, growing up in the 1950’s, it wasn’t unusual, for a family who discovered their child was Gay,

This is just an excerpt from this issue of White Crane. We are a reader-supported journal and need you to subscribe to keep this conversation going. So to read more from this wonderful issue SUBSCRIBE to White Crane. Thanks!

David Mixner blogs regularly at www.davidmixner.com

This is Christopher Murray’s first contribution to White Crane as part of a collection of interviews for a book he is writing entitled Brave New Faggot. Murray writes regularly for Gay City News in New York and is a licensed social worker and psychotherapist in private practice in New York City. He can be contacted at christopher@christophermurray.org or at www.christophermurray.org. He is a member of the White Crane Gay Men’s Health Leadership Academy.

Portrait of David Mixner, Oil On Canvas, 2002, by George Towne. Courtesy of the artist.

Inteview with Chas Brack

Telling Sakia Gunn's Story
By: CHRISTOPHER MURRAY
04/10/2008



GAY CITY NEWS
Director and producer Charles Brack is in the final, frenzied stages of completing a feature-length documentary about the 2003 bias crime murder of 15-year-old Newark resident Sakia Gunn. Media coverage of Gunn's murder was paltry compared with that of Matthew Shepherd -- though Gay City News was a notable exception -- raising questions about the way race and gender play out in discussions about bias crimes against queer people.

Brack, 48, who is called Chas by his friends, grew up in Chicago and has youthful memories of the disorder during the 1968 Democratic National Convention there. The June day he left Ohio's Antioch College in 1983 with a degree in communications, he drove through the night to arrive in New York for the Gay Pride celebration.

Brack worked for the New York City Commission on Human Rights in its Lesbian and Gay Discrimination Unit and later the AIDS Discrimination Unit as a human rights investigator, eventually becoming an associate producer in the Education Department.

In 1992, he joined Gay Men's Health Crisis where he was the co-coordinator of the Media Unit and associate producer of the "Living with AIDS" cable news magazine program. In 1996, he returned to the Commission on Human Rights, in its Community Relations Bureau, where he worked closely with the police on bias cases.

CHRISTOPHER MURRAY: Who was Sakia Gunn?
CHARLES BRACK: Sakia was a 15-year-old so-called "aggressive" [defined on the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation's website as a homosexual woman of color who dresses in masculine attire], living in Newark, New Jersey, who was killed by a gay basher. Sakia and her friends were returning to their homes after hanging out in Greenwich Village when they were approached by men making sexual advances. Words were exchanged and a fight ensued. Sakia was stabbed and bled out on the streets of downtown Newark. The assailant turned himself in to authorities and is currently serving an approximately 20-year sentence.

CM: What was the impact on you when you first heard about the murder?

CB: When I saw the report on television, the picture of Sakia said more to me than the newscaster. It was clear to me that there was a gender and/ or sexual orientation slant to the story that was not being reported. The person that the media described was a 15-year-old black girl, but I saw a 15-year-old black boy. I knew that there was more to be revealed.

CM: When did you decide to make the documentary?

CB: I was approached by a colleague about doing the film, so I jumped at the chance to do what I do, which is to try to lift up black LGBT people. I was the co-founder of Lavender Light Gospel choir, a charter member and ordained clergy in Unity Fellowship Church --NYC, as well as involved in other community-based organizations in New York City. I don't know, I just love my people.

CM: How is a documentary going to impact the course of events?

CB: I hope that LGBT youth will know that my generation is watching. Although we've been through a different struggle, we care about them. I hope that the film will signal to the larger LGBT and black communities, respectively, that they are not disposable. I hope that Sakia's name will become widely recognizable and that her death was not in vain.

I believe even in this time of morally and ethically declining media coverage of important issues, that media is still a powerful tool for social change, if wielded well. I have learned a lot about the issues that LGBT youth face on a daily basis. I thought that we'd come farther. Sadly, obviously this is not the case.

CM: At what point in the process is the film?

CB: We are in the post-production phase of the film, meaning that we have a rough cut. We hope to be finished in time for upcoming film festivals and New York City's Pride month. It's been a long road but well worth the travel.

CM: How can people support the film?

CB: Donations always help! Just a few more dollars will allow us to actually pay the very generous editor, who has been working for pennies to take out any audio glitches, which can occur when filming off set. Unfortunately, there is not a lot of money out there for this kind of work, but we have managed to get this far. I want the film to serve Sakia's memory well. It needs to look good and sound good in order to get noticed in the vortex of pejorative drivel that is passed off as good representation of black LGBT people.

CM: How did your interest in human rights come about?

CB: I have always been interested in diversity and social change from the time that my little Baptist church on the South Side of Chicago started visiting synagogues and nunneries. I can remember my first Seder at age 10. I guess that explains my past proclivity for Jewish men.

I knew that there was a world outside of the ghetto where I grew up. But I had no idea that that world would be so hostile to a little sissy boy with thick glasses who was accused of being uppity because I spoke proper English. So, all of my educational and employment choices have reflected that initial introduction to multiculturalism.

CM: What do you think LGBT people need to know about human rights and bias crime in our own community?

CB: We need not believe the press on our community. The fight is far from over. Even if we win the fight for gay marriage, it will not be a social panacea to cure all the remaining social plagues inside as well as outside of the LGBT community, like homophobia, sexism, transphobia, and racism. We need to know that most incidents of bias go unreported. We need to know that simply being gay is not a point of departure for our quest for diversity, we still have to do the work to make our community unified.

CM: What else do you have going on?

CB: I am currently working at Third World Newsreel as the operations director. Third World Newsreel is an alternative media arts organization that fosters the creation, appreciation, and dissemination of independent film and video by and about people-of-color and social justice issues.

CM: Do you think you could have been friends with Sakia Gunn?

CB: For many years when I was a kid, I was mistaken for a girl. Let's just say that I was not the butchest boy on the block. So, yes, I think we would have been running in the same circles.

I too grew up in a big city that did not have a clearly established place for black LGBT youth. But like Sakia and many others, we created locations and activities where we could just be ourselves. Our relationships were valued and solid. We cleaved to each other. Although it was a very different time when I was 15, we still encountered the same prejudices that queer youth of color face today.

CM: Are there personal reasons why this murder moved you?

CB: When I was young I even faced the disdain of my father, brother, and community because of my obvious feminine ways and appearance. It was a rough and simultaneously joyous time. Thank God for the Black Church! Despite their effort to cloak us, we are in force there.

But that little thing inside me, that I guess some would say was my spirit, would not be squelched. It's the same spirit that made Sakia and her friends strike back at their assailants.

CM: Can you explain the tangled interplay of homophobia, sexism, transphobia, and racism in Sakia's story?

CB: It's as simple as the cards being stacked against you. For as with many minority groups, the struggle is more complicated. But, being a man of faith I now know that these so called burdens have only proven to make me stronger.

So, for instance, while the straight black community and the white gay community stand on the precipice of the ongoing discourse about who is the most tortured protected class, black LGBT folk exist in a crevasse where we know that none of us is free until all of us are free.

I tire of the question, "Which is worse: being called a nigger or a faggot?"



For more information about Charles Brack's documentary film about the murder of Sakia Gunn, visit sakiagunnfilmproject.com


©GayCityNews 2008

Interview with the Artist Jamie Rauchman

Painting Cuba
By: CHRISTOPHER MURRAY
03/27/2008


The artist and documentarian James Rauchman, 55, has been doing a colossal series of work about gay life in Havana, Cuba. What began as the expression of a sexual obsession has grown into a major series of works in different forms - oil, watercolor, film - that embraces the kaleidoscopic contradictions of gay people's experiences in Cuba.

Born off Exit 10 on the turnpike in Metuchen, New Jersey, Rauchman received an MFA from Columbia in 1987. It was there where he met his partner of more than 20 years, the Barnard biologist Paul Hertz, with whom he lives in an art-filled apartment on the Upper West Side.

"We were introduced by a British gay rabbi," Rauchman said, obviously delighting in the transgressiveness.

Rauchman's work has been seen at Marian Locks Gallery in Philadelphia, at CRG Gallery in Chelsea, in the 2005 Havana Biennial, as well as in a special showing organized by the pop duo Ashford and Simpson at their Upper West Side restaurant Sugarbar.

His sensibility is defiantly gay, and sometimes graphic, but the work always maintains an intense sense of location and context that complicates a viewer's expectations about the figures depicted. His newest project, a documentary about the traditional Cuban religious holiday honoring Saint Lazarus, weaves a complex and moving portrait of a gay flower seller whose wares follow a torturous path to an altar.

Shortly before Fidel Castro's official retirement from the Cuban presidency, Rauchman paused from editing the new documentary to discuss his work.


CHRISTOPHER MURRAY: What drew you to making art in Cuba?
JAMES RAUCHMAN: I went to Cuba for the first time in 1997, following Paul, who was working there with some Cuban scientists. I had recently had an exhibition of Riverside Park landscape paintings with the New York City Parks Department, which represented about three years' work. Suddenly I was feeling stuck and was thrashing around looking for some new subject matter, when Cuba came up and grabbed me by the neck. Cuba to me is like a mirror image of the United States - everything is reversed there in terms of official and even societal priorities and I find this utterly fascinating.

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CM: How much of your Cuba work is about gay themes?
JR: I did a series of about 40 oil paintings detailing my ill-fated infatuation with a male hustler there. It helped me work out the feelings, so to speak. Since then I've done a series of watercolor portraits of all sorts of people, not gay-themed, and have made a couple of short documentary films that are about spiritual and economic issues in the society.

CM: What have you learned about gay life in Cuba?
JR: I've learned that, like everything else in Cuba, gay life is one big mass of contradictions. On the one hand, societal mores are about 40 years behind enlightened Western understanding of gay people - especially in the countryside. On the other hand, one night in Havana I was invited to a party at a public school where they were celebrating National Teacher's Day by presenting a lip-synching drag show for the pleasure of the local teachers and their children. Strange, but true.

CM: Is the role of art and artists different in a place where there is a dictator?
JR: Here are my biased oversimplifications: In Cuba there are official artists, and there are independent artists, and their roles are different from one another. The official artists do work that is Cuba-centric and nationalistic, and are promoted by the government in the official media, the only media there is. Meanwhile, the independent artists who have been university-trained along the lines of Western conceptualism, and are talented and clever, are scrambling for international exposure, just like artists everywhere.
The totalitarian Cuban cultural bureaucracy is very sophisticated in that they have figured out a way to allow, and even encourage, a kind of free artistic expression, including cultural, political critiques, among a certain segment of their artistic elite, which is available for export, but is not readily accessible at home. Thus they can keep a tight lid on their own population, while appearing to be more liberal than they are from abroad.

CM: Do Cuban gays think life will be better when Fidel Castro is dead?
JR: As I hear about it, there is already a lot of official support for gay people, through the agency of the daughter of Fidel's Castro's brother and [then] Acting President Raul Castro. She is known as an academic sexologist and has spoken out on TV for all sorts of LGBT rights. Too bad the average person has no civil rights to begin with. I think all Cubans in some way wish that that situation might change soon, at least when Fidel dies.

CM: A lot of your work is autobiographical in one way or another. Is it challenging to be in your work as well as creating it?
JR: On the one hand, I think that all artists use their lives as raw material in some way. I mean, what else do you have? But the specific challenge of representing myself, as an image, as a person, in a painting, comes out of a need, which I think some other gay people may share, to compensate for a sense of unreality I felt about myself when growing up. I think I have painted myself as a way of retrieving myself after having blocked myself out, or not accepting myself, for many years.

CM: You've been making documentaries about life in Cuba lately. What drew you to that form?
JR: I love what's going on with the art of documentary film these days. I realized when I was doing the series of paintings about my experiences with the hustler that it was sequenced like a story board for a film, and finally I realized I just had to pick up a camera and try to tell a real life story in that way, in that medium, in order to keep growing as an artist. It was especially exciting to have my first short documentary shown at last year's Woodstock Film Festival.

CM: Your partner Paul Hertz and you have a wonderful collection of contemporary art. When you look at what you and other artists are creating, how do you understand how art is changing now?
JR: Um, can I dodge that question? Paul and I collect what we like and we have reasons for liking what we like, but to try and explain those reasons is like trying to explain your whole life in one sentence. I don't understand how art is changing now, besides becoming more technological. I always thought that the best art was about something that doesn't change.

CM: If you could change something about your life as an artist, what would it be?
JR: Ah, good, now we're getting to the funny questions. Listen, it's been such a struggle getting to a state of basic, artistic self-acceptance, I wouldn't want to be seen being churlish, wishing for something as mediocre as material success. Next question!

CM: If you could have sex with a famous artist, living or dead, who would you pick and why?
JR: My kinky, inquisitive side wants to say Toulouse-Lautrec, but based on the pears and apples, I have to conclude that sex with Cezanne must have been very satisfying. But since you'd probably have to get both of those guys drunk to have sex with them, I'll just sprint ahead to Matthew Barney based on his looks, since he seems to be game for anything.

www.jamesrauchman.net/


©GayCityNews 2008

Recent Backstage Reviews

Jackie Mason: The Ultimate Jew
March 24, 2008
By Christopher Murray

"Even if the show is not too hot, I don't care, I'm not coming back," says Jackie Mason in his new standup show at New World Stages, referring to this purportedly being his "final one-man comedy." Well, it's pretty lukewarm.

Mason is the last of the Mohicans of borsht-belt comics. At 71, he has honed his delivery and timing over decades. He can handle a heckler, spin a one-liner out of recent headlines (as he does with Eliot Spitzer's fall from grace), and he knows his audience. His right-of-center political comedy and retro ethnic-stereotyping gags went over well with the mostly over-50 crowd on the night I saw the show, but the whole thing had a tepid quality.

The son and grandson of rabbis and one himself in his young adulthood, Mason's comedy is in the Jewish tradition of puncturing an inflated ego and exposing hypocrisy. That's a wonderful basis for comedy, but Mason's delivery feels pretty rote in this new show. The two main topics of the two-hour evening are skewering the Democratic presidential candidates and riffing on the American obsession with status. In the second act, Mason pulls out some chestnuts with impersonations of his old boss Ed Sullivan as well as mid-century figures like Liberace, Alfred Hitchcock, and even newsmen Walter Cronkite and David Brinkley.

While it's a pleasure to see someone do something he knows how to do superlatively well and also to gain appreciation for an old-school style of performance, Jackie Mason: The Ultimate Jew feels too much like overheated leftovers.

Presented by Jyll Rosenfeld, IAG, and Allen Spivack/Adam Spivak/Larry Magid
at New World Stages, 340 W. 50th St., NYC.
March 18–June 29. Tue.–Fri., 8 p.m.; Sat., 2 and 8 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m. (Additional performances Wed., March 26, April 9 and 23, and May 14, 2 p.m.)
(212) 239-6200 or (800) 432-7250 or www.telecharge.com.


Romeo and Juliet
March 17, 2008
By Christopher Murray

Theater Breaking Through Barriers (formerly Theater by the Blind) presents Shakespeare's tragedy of young lovers with just four actors and at a breakneck pace, the idea being to honor the uncut script as well as the purported original size of the troupes that performed the Bard's early works. It's an unfortunate and fatal miscalculation in the hands of director Ike Schambelan.

Played on a clean gray-blue set (designed by Bert Scott, who also did the lighting), the production presents the warring families of Verona as Boston Brahmins (the Montagues) and Southern aristocrats (the Capulets), their costuming (by Chloe Chapin) in shades of red and orange for the former and hues of blue for the latter.

Most of the rest of the play's characters are portrayed as members of various ethnic or cultural groups, including the disabled, but the accents used to indicate these identities are so broad and so bad as to be highly stereotypical. In fact, in the rush to clock the entire play in at two hours with no intermission, the four actors -- George Ashiotis, Gregg Mozgala, Nicholas Viselli, and Emily Young -- are reduced to dispensing with any sense of emotional reality and popping in and out of costume and character like wooden cuckoos out of clocks.

This is occasionally -- and absurdly -- played for laughs, as when Juliet in Friar Laurence's cell attempts to convince Paris, to whom she has been unwillingly betrothed, that she looks forward to their union. What should be a poignant scene of the young woman's foolish ploy becomes ridiculous because Emily Young has been cast as both Juliet and Paris. It's a particular shame, as Young provides flashes that she understands both the giddy excitement and feverish desperation of Juliet.

As Mercutio, also played by Young, asks, "What curious eye doth quote deformities?," this reviewer must ask, What director's eye doth deform this tragedy into low comedy?

Presented by Theater Breaking Through Barriers
at the Kirk Theatre, 410 W. 42nd St., NYC.
March 16-April 6. Wed. and Thu., 7 p.m.; Fri. and Sat., 8 p.m.; Sat. and Sun., 3 p.m.
(212) 279-4200 or www.ticketcentral.com.



Sex! Drugs! & Ukuleles!
March 14, 2008
By Christopher Murray

"Hey, do me a favor: Give me a vamp in F," says one character in Sex! Drugs! & Ukuleles! -- and with only that much pretext launches into another zippy song with fingers a-strumming. Such a casual yet enthusiastic spirit defines this slight but enjoyable new musical with book and lyrics by Uke Jackson (founder of New York Uke Fest, of which this show is this year's jewel in the crown) and music by Terry Waldo, best known for his scholarship about ragtime music.

The plot, such as it is, concerns a moment late in the 21st century when the pharmaceutical industry has taken over the world, outlawing sex, mandating pill popping (laughing out loud has become pathologized as LOL Syndrome), and limiting musical expression to something known as the Top Ten, gold-jacket-wearing performers who have won an American Idol-type contest.

Three antiestablishment ukulele players -- Max (John Forkner), Liz (Lindsay Foreman) and Julie (Meg Cavanaugh) -- self-proclaimed musical outlaws, have been meeting in secret to rehearse as a prelude for entering the contest, though they also meet just to enjoy the modest, kooky, nostalgic and charming obsession that is ukulele playing. When Pete, a mysterious stranger (Andrew Guilarte), offers to coach them for the contest, ambition and attraction threaten to foul things up until the harmonizing power of the ukulele sets things right again.

The show is replete with fun and upbeat choreography by Celia Rowlson-Hall -- featuring the elastic and enthusiastic dancer Dustin Flores -- and winsome and witty costumes by Susan Gittens. The songs, all in the New Orleans jazz mode, are short, optimistic, pleasantly forgettable, and come cascading one right after another. The performers play the broad, winking comedy appealingly, particularly John Forkner as a kind of uke sex symbol with his crown of curly hair and aren't-I-cute smile.

A fast 90 minutes, Sex! Drugs! & Ukuleles! charms with ease, rightly wearing its limited ambitions as a badge of honor: to provide a little musical entertainment in a troubled world.

Presented by and at Theater for the New City as part of New York Uke Fest 2008,
151 First Ave., NYC.
March 13-April 6. Thu.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m.
(212) 352-3101 or (866) 811-4111 or www.theatermania.com or www.theaterforthenewcity.net.



Brains and Puppets
March 03, 2008
By Christopher Murray

Brains and Puppets comprises two short plays by Edward Einhorn, The Boy Who Wanted to Be a Robot and A Taste of Blue, which evoke the experience of young people with the neurological conditions autism and synesthesia, respectively. Both plays are designed and directed by Tanya Khordoc and Barry Weil, who each perform in one.

In The Boy Who Wanted to Be a Robot, a parable of self-acceptance, Weil plays a boy who grows up in a land of robots. His full name, Organic Unit #1, is shortened to Orgo. He struggles to understand his limitations in comparison to his efficient robot friends -- "He got very tired and had many malfunctions" -- and his lack of connection with other organic units. His habit of counting and listing and his mirthless bark of a laugh confuse his friend Lisa and her stepmother, but they ultimately help him find a dragon queen who holds the key to his greatest desire. Although the story is slight, the winsome puppets and gentle humor convey the importance of tolerating difference and the right of all people to define their own identity.

Tanya Khordoc uses dyed liquids on an opaque projector and a series of light boxes to create colorful images that approximate how a person with synesthesia -- a condition that causes a person to experience a blurring of sensory stimuli: "hearing" colors, "seeing" music -- experiences his or her world. A Taste of Blue is a first-person narrative of a girl who is powerfully aware that she encounters her environment very differently from those around her. A honking car horn, for example, is "a burst of brownness." While the monologue acknowledges the essential loneliness of difference, it also finds great beauty and solace in accepting one's unique perspective.

There were just a few children in the audience of Brains and Puppets at the performance I attended. It's highbrow stuff for kids, perhaps, but these lovingly created stories work magic in transforming seeming limitations into privileges.

Presented by Untitled Theater Company #61 and Evolve Company
at Walkerspace, 46 Walker St., NYC.
March 1-15. Sat., 6 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m.
(212) 352-3101 or (866) 811-4111 or www.theatremania.com.



Our Country's Good
February 29, 2008
By Christopher Murray

Folding Chair Classical Theatre performs classic texts with a minimum of production values, choosing instead to focus on "story — plot and character — rather than on stagecraft," according to press materials. Its bracing revival of Timberlake Wertenbaker's Our Country's Good, which is based on The Playmaker by Thomas Keneally, therefore features a cast of 10 — most playing multiple roles — barefoot and in street clothes, with the only costume elements being military dress coats worn to designate those characters who are members of the Royal Navy or Marines. It's a "light up, lights down" design, with the set consisting merely of two benches, plus five wooden cubes holding the small number of carefully chosen props.

Our Country's Good concerns an officer in the penal colony at New South Wales who has been charged with directing a group of convicts transported to Australia in the late 18th century in a production of George's Farquhar's comedy The Recruiting Officer. Class, gender, and racial issues are exposed as rehearsals for the play within the play progress.

The pared-down scenic elements lend the flavor of a workshop or academic exercise to the production, which is belied by the commitment and acting chops of the company. It's difficult to single out any one actor, as the entire cast delivers with passion and intelligence in portraying the conflicts among the characters as they are transformed by — dare I say it — the magic of the theatre. Our Country's Good is all about the power of storytelling to show us to ourselves in new and novel ways, and Folding Chairs' production is a brisk and supple demonstration of this theme.

Although the team utilized a dialect coach, the multifarious accents are sometimes all over the place, and occasionally the performance style veers into acting with a capital A. Still, ample credit must go to director Marcus Geduld, also the company's artistic director, for eliciting such strong and moving performances.

Presented by Folding Chair Classical Theatre
at 78th Street Theatre Lab, 236 W. 78th St., NYC.
Feb. 28-March 22. Thu.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sat. and Sun., 2 p.m. (No matinee performances March 1, 2, 7, and 8.)
(212) 868-4444 or www.smarttix.com.

Recent Backstage Reviews

Cat's Cradle
February 25, 2008
By Christopher Murray

Untitled Theater Company #61's adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut's 1963 novel Cat's Cradle is subtitled "a calypso musical," but that's not quite accurate. This ingenious production, adapted and directed by Edward Einhorn, is more accurately described as a play with music (by Henry Akona) performed by an enthusiastic 22-member company. It also makes diverting use of a small camera focused on an intricate series of models (designed by Tanya Khordoc and Barry Weil), with the resulting images projected onto a beige curtain along the upstage wall to indicate various settings.

The complexity of the production is matched by the convoluted plot. Vonnegut's deadly serious satire concerns a writer (Timothy McCown Reynolds) playing detective to unravel the mystery of a famous scientist's strange and dangerous discovery, ice-nine, a compound that causes water to freeze at room temperature and may be able to wreak havoc globally.

The trail the writer follows leads him to the dead scientist's grown children and the tiny imaginary Caribbean island of San Lorenzo, where he becomes embroiled in machinations of state, religion, and the heart. The potentially dangerous amalgam of unfettered ambition, ingenuity, and creativity is shown to have disastrous consequences for both families and communities.

The creators' ambitions are characteristic of Untitled Theater Company #61's mission to produce "a Theatre of Ideas, political, scientific, and philosophical." While the different elements sometimes compete with each other in a confusing mélange, the overall effect is bracing and makes for intriguing theatre. The adaptation remains incompletely dramatized, but the actors' commitment to the storytelling keeps things focused and energized.

The company makes full use of its somewhat limited musical ability, and several actors stand out in featured parts, among them John Blaylock in dual roles as a laconic model-store owner and a cynical foreign-service attaché and Sandy York as a chirpy denizen of Indiana with big hair and replete with zeal for any Hoosier she encounters.


Presented by Untitled Theater Company #61
at Walkerspace, 46 Walker St., NYC.
Feb. 23–March 15. Tue., Thu., and Fri., 7:30 p.m.; Sat., 8 p.m.
(212) 353-3101 or (866) 811-4111 or www.theatermania.com.


Ghost on Fire
February 25, 2008
By Christopher Murray

It's not quite clear to me why Oberon Theatre Ensemble chose to revive Ghost on Fire, Michael Weller's 1986 play about a disillusioned film director named Daniel Rittman (Don Harvey) who is facing the serious illness of his onetime collaborator and the potential breakup of his marriage. The play is creaky, to say the least, and replete with characters stuck in a perpetually dyspeptic mode as they wrestle with the disappointments and torpor of middle age. "You ponderous bastard," Rittman's old cameraman Toomie (Brad Fryman) shouts at him. But the play itself is a ponderous mediation on coming to terms with the loss of youthful dreams and optimism.

Oberon's production, directed by Eric Parness, is a little creaky itself, unfortunately. A series of monologues by the main characters is upstaged by actors setting up for the next scene, the blocking frequently seems unmotivated, and often the actors seem a little vague about their position in a scene, sometimes staring aimlessly into the ether during another's speech.

That being said, Harvey, with his deep-set eyes, communicates the essential loneliness of a man who has walked away from his life's passion. The most energy, however, is stirred up with seeming ease by Brianne Berkson, who plays several roles and excels as the trophy wife of an Israeli businessman. She slaps suntan lotion on her legs with a disdainful mixture of boredom, intelligence, and erotic charm and slaps down the dithering men around her in much the same way.



Presented by Oberon Theatre Ensemble
at the Lion Theater, 410 W. 42nd St., NYC.
Feb. 21–March 9. Schedule varies.
(212) 279-4200 or www.ticketcentral.com.

Robert Espinoza Interview

Poet and Go-To Guy

By: CHRISTOPHER MURRAY

02/21/2008

	With his background in labor union work and LGBT philanthropy, Robert Espinoza just completed a study on the funding needs of queer people of color groups.

A few weeks ago, an organization dedicated to encouraging financial support for the queer community released a groundbreaking report on the work done by LGBT people of color institutions, how they see their efforts, and how they survive.

The report was penned by Robert Espinoza, who is the director of research and communications at Funders for Lesbian and Gay Issues. Espinoza, 31, has developed a strong national voice in the philanthropic world on issues related to queer people and people of color. In his work, he has also pressed grant-making organizations to think generally about how to share power and become more inclusive.

The former communications director for the Denver Service Employees International Union local, Espinoza was appointed by that city's mayor to the Public Safety Review Commission in 2002 and was on the founding staff of the communication department at the Gill Foundation, a philanthropic organization that supports LGBT and HIV/AIDS initiatives. He serves on the Queer Youth Fund of the Liberty Hill Foundation in Los Angeles and for four years was one of six panel members of the OUT Fund, at New York's Funding Exchange. A published poet,Espinoza recently moved to Brooklyn's Sunset Park and is working on a series of poems about superheroes.

CHRISTOPHER MURRAY: What does Funders for Lesbian and Gay Issues do?

ROBERT ESPINOZA: We work with foundations around the country to support their institutional giving to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer [LGBTQ] organizations. We produce research reports on foundation giving to lesbian and gay communities, and we bring together funders from around the country to collaborate and to strengthen each other's giving. The goal is to spur more foundation dollars to our various communities, notably groups working on racial, economic, and gender justice.

CM: Why was the new report on LGBTQ people of color organizations undertaken?

RE: We wanted to understand how to better support groups led by and for LGBTQ people of color, many of which work at the local level and are more obscure to mainline foundations. The report helped identify about 84 autonomous LGBTQ people of color groups across the country, spanning 20 states, plus DC and Puerto Rico. This report also helps launch our Racial Equity Campaign, a multi-year effort to increase foundation giving for racial equity among our communities.

CM: What were the major findings?

RE: We found that most of these groups represent a pretty diverse spectrum of racial/ethnic populations and are generally local, based in urban or mixed settings, rely largely on volunteers, and survive on small annual budgets, typically raised through community events and individual donors. Also, few of these groups rely on foundations for support. In fact, our research shows that of the roughly $65 million that US foundations gave to LGBTQ causes in 2006, only nine percent went to LGBTQ communities of color.

CM: Were there any surprises?

RE: One notable finding is that these groups have shaped their organizations to address economic inequities and poverty, which isn't surprising given how entwined race and class are in this country and around the world. For example, we found that 35 percent explicitly work with poor and low-income people and many of them work on a range of socioeconomic issues such as immigration, the criminal justice system, employment, housing, and so on. When we support an autonomous LGBTQ people of color infrastructure, we're also helping people of color deal with economic injustice and all its ugly by-products.

CM: Since LGBTQ people of color organizations have largely functioned without much governmental or philanthropic support, how will they grow and should they become more mainstreamed?

RE: Many of these groups could benefit simply from multi-year, general support grants, allowing them the breathing room they need to strengthen their infrastructure and become more resilient. Others have remarked how they also want technical assistance. Our grant-maker challenge is to not assume that because a group is small or doesn't reflect the traditional structure of larger organizations, that it can't handle a grant or that it's fragile and ineffective.

For me, mainstream speaks to the ways in which an organization understands power and its relationship to the mainline institutions that govern our country. Many groups often grow in size, budget, and programming and, in order to sustain this growth, or to meet the mainstream values of its larger donors, take on a character that becomes less about building a strong base of community members and then holding those same institutions accountable. Do these larger groups continue to operate in clear, principled ways that reflect our communities and not the narrow interests of the governing elite? I think our own organizations are a microcosm of a much broader democratic tension among money, politics, and civic engagement.

CM: As a Latino gay man, how do you understand the intersections of your various identities?

RE: I see them as a source of strength and understanding. Growing up queer and working class in a Mexican immigrant family taught me a lot about the insidiousness of racism, classism, and homophobia, as well as how interrelated they are in everyday life. I came of age in a mostly Latino, Southwestern town in southern Colorado yet was tracked through the public school system in advanced courses with mostly white students. Many of my family members struggled financially and held deeply embedded homophobic attitudes about queer people. And the more I've moved within policy circles, or now in philanthropy, I'm reminded how few progressive queer people of color are represented as decision-makers.

Popular discourse prefers simplicity when it comes to identity. You see this in the Hillary/Barack debate, where the public insists on debating which side has it worse, erasing all of us who live multiple identities, or forgetting how the right [wing] targets many of us in multiple ways. Our political movements have to recognize that we share the same opponents and that we live complex, multifaceted lives.

CM: What do you think are some of the biggest challenges for gay people of color in their individual lives and as different groups?

RE: I think we face ignorance, hostility, and discrimination, across our various identities, in all parts of our lives - our homes, our jobs, on the street, and in legislation. Yet so often the "solutions" that policy makers devise or the programs that practitioners create assume that a one-fits-all remedy will suffice, as if all LGBTQ people experience inequities in the exact same ways. Many LGBTQ people of color groups are making up for the void in our movements that has left unaddressed the cultural specificity of our needs.

CM: What would you like to change about the LGBTQ community?

RE: In activist circles, I'm disappointed by the ways in which mainline, often national, LGBTQ organizations have crafted policy agendas that minimize the racial, economic, and gender dimensions of our rights. You can advocate for relationship recognition and nondiscrimination laws without turning the other way on policy questions of race or economics. I want a queer movement that speaks out on labor rights, or against the war, or for transgender inclusion, without believing that such stances distract from its goals.

CM: Why do you write poems about superheroes?

RE: I like the creative tension of comic icons and everyday life. I'm fascinated by thinking about how our culture makes sense of extraordinary people, and what superhero means in a world ravaged by war, poverty, global warming, etc.

CM: What's going on in Sunset Park these days?

RE: Typically, they involve quiet evenings and weekends. It's a great neighborhood and comforting to be back in a largely Mexican environment.

Recent Backstage Reviews

Blue Coyote's Happy Endings
February 15, 2008
By Christopher Murray

Blue Coyote Theater Group asked nine playwrights "for their take on the sex-worker industry." The entertaining result, Blue Coyote's Happy Endings, presents nine short pieces of great variety, all of which in some measure wittily explore questions of how we see each other in the context of our desires.

A tatty red velvet curtain frames the performing space for a succession of vignettes featuring go-go boys, peep show habitués, lonely hearts, and lovers. Theatrical serial Burning Habits author Blair Fell's piece, Beauty, begins the evening with a voyeur in a black raincoat (David Johnson) waxing eloquent on the charms of an exotic dancer (Joe Curnutte).

The usual dynamic of the watcher and watched is flipped, however, in Christine Whitley's strangely tender and moving Peep Show, in which a woman (a beautifully vulnerable Laura Desmond) pays for the privilege to be ogled and objectified by a brusque but oddly tender man (Robert Buckwalter).

Various kinks that help people grow closer to or stay distant from their erotic fascination are explored in John Yearley's Whenever You're Ready, about an artist's nude model (Tracey Gilbert), and in Matthew Freeman's The White Swallow, about a radio announcer-voiced husband (Matthew Trumbull) with a strange predilection picked up from watching snakes swallow their prey on Wild Kingdom.

But the most successful pieces, appearing last in the evening, poke gentle fun at our yearning for connection. Boo Killebrew's winsome Pulling Teeth imagines a suburban coffee klatch at which a fey Easter Bunny (the talented comedian Phillip Taratula) tries to convince his pal the Tooth Fairy (R. Jane Casserly) to stop turning tricks to earn money and assuage her loneliness. In David Johnston's Yes Yes Yes, a nerdy reader of James Joyce (Jim Ireland) finds surprising shared interests with a literate go-go boy (again, tow-headed Joe Curnutte, providing pitch-perfect irony in his portrayal).

Presented by Blue Coyote Theater Group and Access Theater at Access Theater, 380 Broadway, 4th floor, NYC. Feb. 12-March 1. Tue., 9 p.m.; Wed.-Sat.., 8 p.m. (212) 868-4444 or www.smarttix.com.


The Wild Party
February 12, 2008
By Christopher Murray

"Queenie was a blonde/And if looks could kill/She'd kill twice a day/In vaudeville." So begins the opening song in Andrew Lippa's musical version of the literally banned in Boston 1928 poem by Joseph Moncure March.

The jazzy, sung-through score concerns a crisis in the troubled relationship of Queenie (a platinum blond-wigged Nicole Sterling) and her comedian boyfriend Burrs (the cherry-cheeked Jonathan Hack). Queenie has decided that "I'll raise my skirt and make him hurt" by publicly humiliating Burrs when they throw a bathtub-gin party for all their eccentric friends, including a love-weary lesbian (the delightful Tauren Hagans), a pugilist and his moll (Theis Weckesser and K.C. Leiber), and two flamboyant piano-playing brothers (Justin Birdsong and Zak Edwards). Things get violent when Queenie's attentions are caught for real after their friend Kate (Julia Cardia) brings a dapper newcomer, Mr. Black (Michael Jones), to the wild party.

The Gallery Players revival of this 2000 Off-Broadway musical (not to be confused with George C. Wolfe and Michael John LaChuisa's Broadway version from the same season) features what has become standard for this group, a distinct and committed ensemble cast that seems to be having a terrific time. The leads are the workhorses in this piece, driving the slight plot forward while the mayhem swirls around them.

The company's vocal talents aren't quite up to the demanding score, but their enthusiasm in evoking a cartoon of Roaring '20s debauchery is infectious, especially in Summer Lee Jack's sexy and stylish if somewhat overaccessorized period costumes. Director Neal J. Freeman and choreographer Brian Swasey provide clarity, a sense of mischief, and clockwork precision in moving the 18-member cast around a postage stamp-sized stage.

Presented by and at the Gallery Players, 199 14th St., Brooklyn, NYC. Feb. 2-24. Thu. and Fri., 8 p.m.; Sat., 2 and 8 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m. (212) 352-3101 or (866) 811-4111 or www.theatermania.com or wwwgalleryplayers.com.