Thoughts, Opinions, and Irrational Ranting

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Tony Kushner was recently denied an honorary doctorate from the City University of New York because one trustee launched into a tirade against him at a board meeting, claiming Kushner was viciously anti-Israel and using the information from one website as proof. No other board members came to his defense or even asked for more detailed evidence proving these claims to be true. So, if we are going to judge a man based on random quotes found on the internet, here is what Tony Kushner said regarding Israel after the controversy surrounding his honorary degree from Brandeis University:

“I love Israel, but as a great fan of pluralist secular democracy, I don’t have faith in nationalist or tribalist solutions for the problems of oppressed and persecuted minorities; I have great faith…in a steadfast, absolute refusal to conflate government with religious principle or ethnic identity. I love Israel, but I am neither a Zionist nor an anti-Zionist; I’m a Diasporan Jew who isn’t willing to say that the history and culture of the Diaspora was merely a long prelude of weakness and misery leading to the founding of a Jewish state and the invention of Jewish military power – I think there are other kinds of power, there’s an alternative history of power to which Jews have made important contributions. Though I think nationalist solutions to the problems of oppressed minorities are usually mistakes, I love Israel, I am moved and excited by its culture, its meaning in Jewish history, but I’m critical of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian people, I’m opposed to the occupation, the settlements, the barrier wall, and attacks on civilians, whether the civilians are Palestinian or Israeli. I love and admire the Palestinians but I believe that in the midst of their suffering some Palestinians have made their own terrible mistakes. I tend to believe that people make mistakes because of their suffering rather than some inherent evil. Threading through all of this error and anger, on the Israeli and Palestinian sides, I see histories of persecution, injustice and suffering in collision.”

Constance Crompton and I recently ventured South to the States for the Women in the Archives Conference at Brown University. Adventures were had, microbrews were enjoyed, architecture was admired, archives were discussed. We had some free time after the conference, and one of the conference organizers suggested we use it to visit Swan Point Cemetery. There were lots of old gravestones, she noted, as well as many bird-watching opportunities. Finally, she pointed out that H.P. Lovecraft was buried there and that his fans were always leaving “weird stuff” by his grave. Well, I am never one to turn down the promise of “weird stuff.” I have never even read H.P. Lovecraft, but I had created quite a vision of what might be there. I was imagining his grave might look like something along the lines of this:

Or this:

Or even this (we were in a university town, after all):

Sadly, after marching around in a freezing cold drizzle of rain for an hour while scrutinizing a cemetery map that would probably more accurately be described as Kafkaesque, rather than Lovecraftian, what we found was this:

Oh. How understated. No wonder we couldn’t spot it from the car – I was looking for some sort of monstrous obsidian pyramid, possibly topped with some tentacled beast, possibly with a vortex opening in the sky above it. This rather pedestrian gravestone wasn’t WEIRD at all. The best effort towards “weird” was made by whoever left the toy dinosaur:

We made our own “weird” offering of a Canadian penny. Sadly, Cthulhu did not make an appearance in order to thank (or eat) us.

Last night I was lucky enough to attend a screening of Track Two, a 1982 documentary on the Toronto bathhouse raids. After nearly being lost to time and decay, the film has finally been digitized and made available in its entirety for free online, thanks to the generosity of Xtra! and the Pink Triangle Press.

The screening took place at Buddies in Bad Time Theatre and was sponsored by Queer Ontario and Xtra!, with proceeds benefiting the 519 Community Centre’s Seniors program. In attendance were two of the filmmakers, Gordon Keith and Jack Lemmon, as well as The Body Politic‘s Ken Popert and Gerald Hannon. It was a truly amazing experience to share a room with so many of Toronto’s gay liberation activists, without whom queers such as myself wouldn’t have all the rights we have today.

After the screening, I spoke with the filmmakers, who wanted to know how I, as a woman, felt about the movie. They said they had tried very hard to show lesbian contributions to the fight, and they were curious to know if they were successful. I told them that it was incredibly powerful to see the footage of lesbians taking to the street in defense of the men and the gay community as a whole. It was also thrilling to see interviews with some of my queer heroes, Pat Murphy and Chris Bearchell, and rousing speeches from Margaret Atwood and June Callwood.

Watch the entire film on YouTube, or read more about it and download a copy from Xtra!