It’s time for music, and as usual, I had no idea what song/s I was going to start with until just now. I’m in the middle of preparing setlists for, um, ten days from now when I start playing live in anticipation of releasing my own first record in the spring, and I’m not unveiling my own work until that time gets closer, so I’ve been focusing on well-chosen covers — songs that I love, but more than that, songs that I feel like I can get inside and actually do something with, outside that whole piano-bar mentality of “if I know the chords, I can sing it!” So, to get my head into the mental space of interpretation — I’ve been in composing mode for a long time — I’ve been listening to a lot of cover songs and their originals. One that I love lately is Neil Young’s “Only Love Can Break Your Heart,” and Saint Etienne’s very, very different cover of that same song, which I just adore. So let’s start with those, hit shuffle on the iTunes machine, see where we are ten songs later, listen to some music, yadda yadda, etc. More videos after the jump!
1. Kristin Hersh – “Juno” [orig. by Throwing Muses]
2. Tori Amos – “Sister Janet”
3. Trick Pony – “A Boy Like You”
4. John Doe – “Don’t Forget How Much I Love You”
5. Casiotone for the Painfully Alone – “Optimist vs. The Silent Alarm (When The Saints Go Marching In)”
6. Lightspeed Champion – “Dry Lips”
7. Ricky Martin ft. Meja – “Private Emotion”
8. Princeton – “Stunner Shades In Heaven”
9. Jonny Lang – “Angel of Mercy”
10. Martha Wainwright – “Dis, Quand Reviendras-tu?” [Barbara cover]
Shut up about the Ricky Martin song, I like it. This is really a good mix, actually. Click on the ones I don’t post, too, especially the Princeton song.
It’s almost the weekend, so here’s your music post. We’re starting off this week with one of my favorites, “Whiskey Lullaby” from Brad Paisley and Alison Krauss. No particular reason, except that I was listening to it a lot last week and it’s so lovely. So listen to that, then we hit shuffle on the iTunes, see where we are ten songs later, watch some videos, blah blah blah. More videos after the jump!
1. Jason Mraz – “Not So Usual”
2. Trisha Yearwood – “I Want To Live Again”
3. The Band – “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”
4. Nirvana – “About A Girl”
5. Garth Brooks – “Two Of A Kind, Workin’ On A Full House”
6. Ricky Martin – “Love You For A Day”
7. Jimi Hendrix – “Fire”
8. Red Hot Chili Peppers – “The Power Of Equality”
9. Dietrich Schoenemann – “Dark Sight”
10. Jessica Lea Mayfield – “Lounge Act” (Nirvana cover)
My iTunes insists on showing you all the cheesiest pop and country in my entire collection. I love it.
Ricky Martin, who announced he was gay in March 2010, is being blasted for his sexuality in a series of homophobic slurs coming from clergy in his native Puerto Rico.
Martin, in the midst of his Music+Soul+Sex tour, was called out in separate interviews by two major Puerto Rican church figures, On Top Magazine reports. Cardinal Luis Aponte Martinez of San Juan urged Martin in an interview with Primera Hora last week to stop promoting his homosexuality.
“Personally, I admire Ricky for the great artistic gifts the Lord has endowed him, but please, for the love of his children, for whom I imagine he wants the best, try to set an example to our youth of the great values we all share, besides sex,” the Cardinal said.
Uh, it has very little to do with sex, but with sexuality, which is actually a different subject. I would not expect a Cardinal, forced into [assumed] celibacy by his career choices, to be an expert on sexuality, so this may be new information for him.
This comes on the heels of an even harsher rant from Pastor Wanda Rolon, the head of a large northern Puerto Rican church.
“[Ricky Martin] wants to take people to hell!” she wrote on her Facebook page. “RM is its ambassador.”
Wanda is dramatic! I would imagine, though, that Ricky Martin is a pretty confounding figure for closed-minded religious leaders to deal with. He’s got a beautiful family, loves his kids, is quite talented, seems by all accounts to be an overall nice guy, and so on; he’s everything that wingnuts lie to themselves and say that gay people are not. He’s an example of why wingnut messages about gay people just don’t play with our increasingly globalized, technologically savvy younger generations. They know better than to buy into the religious hatred, because they’ve seen with their own eyes that it isn’t valid or true.
Your blogger also likes to have an excuse to post pictures of Ricky Martin. Just sayin’.
A South Florida church apparently thinks featuring a gay man on television is obscene. Oscar Aguero Ministry announced plans this weekend to picket the offices of Univision for airing an interview back on November 2 featuring a now openly gay popstar Ricky Martin discussing his sexuality.
In the interview, Martin discussed his first sexual experience with interviewer Maria Elena Salinas in a segment that aired between 7 and 8 p.m.
The church claims that this promoted “sexual promiscuity and homosexuality as a gift of life, and an apparent blessing during a time when families are together, openly addressing adolescents and teen viewers.”
Also, don’t laugh about this, because these people don’t think it’s funny:
The group also claims that Martin promotes hedonism by telling his fans to live “la vida loca.”
Also, Ke$ha promotes mediocrity and boredom by telling her fans “blah, blah, blah.”
How do you say “You kids, get off my lawn!” in Spanish?
Everywhere you look, you see the menace of the homoseckshul agenda! Well, if you’re Porno Pete, you do. This is hilarious:
CHICAGO – Americans For Truth About Homosexuality (AFTAH) today questioned the propriety of “same-gender” TSA (Transportation Security Administration) “pat-downs” – if the TSA agents doing the “patting down” are homosexual, lesbian or bisexual.
Homeland Security Sec. Janet Napolitano went out of her way yesterday to stress that the TSA pat-downs are “same-gender” – mostly to reassure women that men will not be groping them at airports in the name of safety.
“But what about homosexual TSA agents?” AFTAH President Peter LaBarbera responded. “Isn’t it just as inappropriate for a ‘gay’ male TSA agent to pat down male travelers as it is for a normal, heterosexual male TSA agent to pat down female travelers?
“The reality is, most traveling men would not want Barney Frank to pat them down at the airport security checkpoint,” LaBarbera said. “Neither would it be fair to assign Ellen DeGeneres to pat down female travelers. (In the same vein, the Army should no more force normal male soldiers to shower and bunk with homosexual male soldiers than it would force females soldiers to bunk and shower with their male counterparts.)”
Seriously. And honestly, I agree with him: I would not want Barney Frank patting me down at an airport security checkpoint, mostly because he’s a Congressman, and that would be entirely inappropriate. Now, because Pete is a wingnut, and wingnuts are scared of Barney Frank, I understand why he immediately suggested Barney. But Peter, how would you feel if it was Ricky Martin?
For some reason, I think he’d stand at attention and take the patdown under those circumstances.
Or what if it was Neil Patrick Harris? I mean, who in their right mind would reject a patdown from NPH? Not me, and not you either.
I’m not sure whether to celebrate or cry. It is the best of times, and the worst of times, for the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community.
On the plus side, the Florida Department of Children and Families said that it won’t appeal a September appeals court ruling that declared the state’s law banning adoption by gay people was unconstitutional.
A DCF spokesperson said that it chose not to fight the decision by the 3rd District Court of Appeals in Miami involving Martin Gill and his long-time partner’s adoption of two brothers. The law hearkened back to the Anita Bryant era, when the disgraced orange juice queen overturned a Miami law banning discrimination against gay people with a hate-mongering campaign that pledged to “Save the Children”.
It probably did not help our opponents that their “expert” witness, George Rekers, was caught with a male escort he met on Rent Boy.com. As I said on Anderson Cooper 360, “George Rekers thinks its okay to rent boys, but not to raise them.”
As a native Floridian, it feels incredibly liberating to finally have this yoke of inferiority and second-class citizenship lifted. I’d also like to recognize Equality Florida’s Nadine Smith, who tirelessly spoke out against the harm caused by this law and refused to let our foes’ public association with Rekers die.
Meanwhile, on Tuesday, a federal judge ordered an immediate end to enforcement of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, which prohibits gay and lesbian soldiers from serving openly. We are waiting to see if the Obama administration will appeal this ruling.
However, the early signs are not good. In a move that has enraged much of the LGBT community, the president’s Justice Department filed a notice of appeal with the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts in support of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA, that bans marriage equality, even though Obama claims he actually opposes the law. It seems curious that Obama would make this move so close to the elections, when he is trying to excite his base. The president seems tone deaf and still believes that if he is nice enough to the extreme right, they will come to like him.
If Barack Obama does not vacate this bipartisanship delusion in the next 12 months he will be a one-term president. (Unless the GOP nominates a nut to run against him, which is not out of the question)
This has been a year of tremendous strides. A Gallup Poll found that, for the first time, the percentage of Americans who perceive “gay and lesbian relations” as morally acceptable has crossed the 50 percent mark. The numbers on people who support marriage equality is also at an all-time high – and more notable people than ever (Ricky Martin, Ken Mehlman, Chely Wright) are coming out.
However, the dramatic success of 2010 does not mean that the barbarians have agreed to go back into their caves without a fight. This week, New York Republican gubernatorial candidate, Carl Paladino, trashed the LGBT community, saying, “I don’t want [children] to be brainwashed into thinking that homosexuality is an equally valid and successful option. It isn’t.”
The candidate’s openly gay nephew, 23-year old Jeff Hannon, whom the candidate used as cover to prove he was not hateful, said that he was “very offended” by his uncle’s remarks and stopped showing up to work for the campaign. (Let’s give Jeff credit, because the lesbian sister of rabidly anti-gay Republican Senate nominee Christine O’Donnell still disgracefully supports her sister. Jenny O’Donnell recently proclaimed herself, “A lesbian, liberal Democrat for Christine, right here.”)
The Paladino situation went from uncomfortable to downright embarrassing when it was revealed that the candidate’s son, William, had once run a gay Buffalo nightclub, Cobalt, that held drag queen nights and featured “boy-tenders”. Backed into a corner, the perpetually angry candidate offered a lame apology.
However, words matter and the consequences of homophobia are devastating. In the Bronx, the ninth and 10th suspects of a grotesque anti-gay kidnapping and torture hate crime were arrested. And, a week after attending a Norman Oklahoma City Council meeting, where a hateful and disparaging “debate” on gay rights took place, 19-year-old Zach Harrington committed suicide at his family’s home.
In a appalling breech of journalistic standards, The Washington Post, gave space to the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins to justify such bigotry and try to absolve his role in the slew of recent gay youth suicides.
There is no doubt we are winning, but it is clear that we have quite a fight ahead of us.
It’s Friday afternoon, so let’s take a break from Important News (I’m sure I’ll find some in a minute) and look at this piece in The Advocate on “The Most Popular Gays On Twitter.” Important stuff! Let’s find out if I know who any of these people are?
15. Chris Colfer [I do not know who this is.]
13. Michael Buckley, “YouTube personality.” [I do not know who this is.]
11. Adam Lambert [I know about this one! He is the one with the singing and the gayness, yes?]
10. Neil Patrick Harris! Neil Patrick Harris! Neil Patrick Harris!
9. Suze Orman [Heart her.]
6. Ricky Martin
4. Rachel Maddow! [It is nice to see a political lesbian that high on the list.]
Okay, that’s like half of them. Click over to see the ones I skipped, as well as the top three. If you want to skip to number one, click here. (Hint: she dances.)
This post, of course, is really just a shameless ploy to point out that I’m not on that list yet, so, if you feel so led, you may follow me right here. Also, Wayne is here, Mike is here, and Truth Wins Out, which is run as a joint venture between Wayne’s dog Doinkers and my dog Lula, is right here.
First wingnut to go into hysterics about this gets a cookie. This is a good reminder, though, of just how much things are changing, and how, in so many ways, our battle is already won.
It’s time for music, and as usual, I had no idea what song/s I was going to start with until just now. I’m in the middle of preparing setlists for, um, ten days from now when I start playing live in anticipation of releasing my own first record in the spring, and I’m not unveiling my own work until that time gets closer, so I’ve been focusing on well-chosen covers — songs that I love, but more than that, songs that I feel like I can get inside and actually do something with, outside that whole piano-bar mentality of “if I know the chords, I can sing it!” So, to get my head into the mental space of interpretation — I’ve been in composing mode for a long time — I’ve been listening to a lot of cover songs and their originals. One that I love lately is Neil Young’s “Only Love Can Break Your Heart,” and Saint Etienne’s very, very different cover of that same song, which I just adore. So let’s start with those, hit shuffle on the iTunes machine, see where we are ten songs later, listen to some music, yadda yadda, etc. More videos after the jump!
