1. Hedda Gabler, Femme Fatale and Conflicted Mistress Hedda Gabler is the portrait of a woman suffocating from boredom and dissatisfaction, not to mention struggling with feelings for other women. Her marriage, even in its post honeymoon stages, is a nattily dressed drag going quickly lackluster. Her husband, George Tesman, is clueless and insufferably gay (in the antiquated sense of the word) such that Hedda seeks out ways to avoid his company—since, well, she prefers the company of women. In fact, Hedda’s attraction to women—Eilert Lovborg in particular, a women who dresses in men’s clothes and lives life with abandon—seems […]
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GAYDAR EXTRA: Taking The ‘Gay’ Out Of Gaming
BY AARON STELLA GAYDAR EDITOR Hey pals and gals. Got a quick one here for ya. Editor-in-chief JV shot me an email the other day (thanks boss) alerting me to a new development in the Christian coteries: apparently, it’s not enough now to censor the sex (nudity), violence, substance abuse, and demonic images (oh lord) in video games, homosexual content is now on the chopping block. According to Tumeroks, a blog dedicated to covering the development and growth of online games (Warhammer online, World of Warcraft, Diablo 3, etc) a Christian conservative investment firm called The Timothy Plan has just […]
REWIND 2008: The Year In Gay
BY AARON STELLA GAYDAR EDITOR Frankly, I’d be lying if I said 2008 was a good years for gays. First, there’s the case of Senator Larry Craig: Mr. Whoopsie footsie nudging tootsies with the undercover cop in the airport restroom. Uh, whoopsie! Exactly. The Idaho senator just couldn’t keep his homosexual tendencies to himself, could he? According to the police report, Craig was caught propositioning a man in the stall next to him in the Minneapolis -St. Paul airport restroom by way of foot nudging. To Craig’s misfortune, the man he propositioned turned out to be an undercover cop. Whoopsie! […]
GAYDAR: A Family Of Strangers
BY AARON STELLA Welcome back happy campers to another edition of my so-called ‘you-wouldn’t-believe-it-if-I-told-you’ life story. Last time around, I mentioned that I was developing a relationship with a family with ulterior motives unbeknownst to me. I also mentioned that they would eventually become my family. Things get kind of wild from here on out folks, so hold on to your hats! The year is 2001. I’m a sophomore at the Catholic high school in Cullman, AL, practically friendless, and in thrall to a feeling of powerlessness among my peers and family members. Giovanni, the German exchange student that had […]
GAYDAR: Jingle Bells, Batman Smells
[Photos by THOMAS SHEEDER] BY AARON STELLA Some people just get more Christmas than others this year. While the Scrooges of Wall Street help themselves to the bailout buffet, us Cratchets must fight to make ends meat, much less a “Merry Christmas” (and it’s ‘Happy Holidays’ now, by the way). Even the shrewd, business-savvy Jews are barely scraping by; at least that’s the case in the Dumpsta Players’ destitute portrait of the Lipshitz family. This year for Christmas, trash-glitz drag troupe the Dumpsta Players showed their sympathy to the millions going without this Christmas in “A Very Lipshitz Christmas” on December 18th […]
GAYDAR EXTRA: A Very Dumpsta Christmas
JINGLE BELLS, BATMAN SMELLS: Sara Sherr and Jimmy Divine get their Dumpsta on. BY AARON STELLA Christmas is here. Yeah, the economy sucks, and you’ve pawned your whole re-gift stash. Well, at least you can treat yourself to a little Christmas cheer. For only $1.99, you can revel in some holiday havoc with one of Philly’s premier trash-glitz drag troupes: you guessed it, the one and only Dumpsta Players are showcasing their Christmas extravaganza “A Very Lipshitz Christmas.” The Lipshitz’s, an orthodox Jewish family, find themselves flat broke (thanks to the Wall Street meltdown) this Christmas, a tragedy which eventually brings […]
GAYDAR EXTRA: Where Did Our Love Go?
Shout it from the rooftops: its Day Without a Gay! What would happen if one day, all the homosexuals in America—nay, the world—suddenly abandoned the work place? Today is the day we just might find out. DWD started with a few concerned homosexuals distraught over the Prop 8 ruling (boo). Even after the numerous demonstrations that erupted from the ruling, the people at DWD saw the need to up the ante in fight for the rights of gays everywhere. With their combined efforts, DWD has become a nationally-heeded herald: instead of calling into work sick today, call in “gay” and […]
GAYDAR GALLERY REVIEW: The ‘View’ Flourishes
BY AARON STELLA GAYDAR EDITOR Budding and virtuoso artists exhibit the lush pastoral and the iridescent abstract in “Views” at Flourish Gallery, which opened First Friday this month. Ric Best, consummate photographer and co-proprietor of Flourish, produced austere stills of bucolic France, while Austin Algeo, bartender at Woody’s of five years, showed the finest of his experimental shots of Philadelphia’s 2008 Independence Day fireworks fanfare. Best’s associates and admirers had always been curious about his rumored talent for landscape stills. As the requests accumulated, Best endeavored on the laborious enterprise of sifting through the some 4,000 photographs he shot while […]
GAYDAR: My Own Private 9/11
BY AARON STELLA GAYDAR EDITOR Today we set the Wayback Machine to September 11th, 2001, which will forever live in infamy as the day I was expelled from the Alabama School of Fine Arts (ASFA). Freshman year at ASFA, I boarded in the high school dormitories, until the dorm directors permanently banned me for illicit acts of sodomy. By the time my sophomore year rolled around, I had accepted the mantle of ‘delinquent in the making.’ And so, one afternoon, September 10th, 2001 to be exact, I snuck back into the dorm to have one last romp in the sack […]
GAYDAR: How I Became The Alabama Slammer
BY AARON STELLA Welcome back ya’ll to another bold and beautiful edition GAYDAR! OK, down to business. Last time I told you how my family settled into our Alabama homestead. Now, I was never one for the bucolic pleasantries of rural living. Luckily, I would reside in Birmingham at the Alabama School of Fine Arts (ASFA, which suspiciously sounds like “ass fuck” — appropriately so, as you shall soon see). As I mentioned in the last edition, I had been accepted into ASFA. I applied as a vocalist and a pianist, but because I lack adequate sight-reading skills, they accepted […]
CINEMA: Concentration Camping
Hitler had concentration camps: we had American-Japanese internment camps. Roosevelt OK’d it. Nixon, albeit 35 years later, apologized for it. Come and gone? I think not. Family Gathering is Lise Yasui’s opus which depicts her family’s experience in an American-Japanese internment camp. Yasui’s family left their internment shrouded in mystery for years as she was growing up. And so, Yasui’s curiosity to penetrate the taboo precipitated the production of this film. “I intended to make a straight-forward historical film that explored the political and social pressures that led to the internment,” Yasui said. Historical accounts in general, however, can be […]
GAYDAR EXTRA: Taking It To The Streets
On November 4th, 2008, we made history with the election of the first black president in the history of the United States. But the motion to ban gay marriage in California cast a dark cloud over Californian gays for what was for most a joyous day. Proposition 8 is a California state ballot proposition that denies homosexual couples the right to marry. Gay activists and gay couples naturally saw this as a threat, and rigorously campaigned against the proposition prior to the presidential election, which included raucous demonstrations out front of churches of many denominations and the boycotting of business that supported the “Yes to 8” cause. But despite “No to […]
TONITE: Swallow Your Pride
Josh Camerote’s Swallow Your Pride, a documentary about Philadelphia’s Wing Bowl competition, chronicles a year of the life of a past Wing Bowl champion. Bill Simmons, aka El Wingador and the principle subject for the film, spent his days prior to Wing Bowl stardom in the limelight of professional sports. But upon retirement, he soon realized that the incessant stirring in his belly could be symptomatic pangs of his next vocation. But what glory is there in competitive eating, you ask? Well, Camerote thinks it about time all you dainty elitists swallowed your pride and recognize the intense […]