Yesterday I chatted with Michelangelo Signorile on his show on SiriusXM 108 about homeless LGBT youth and my recent article on Sylvia’s Place in the New York Times. Here’s our conversation, which starts after about 30 seconds of music.
You can also download the audio and play in itunes by clicking here: 11.08.11 Sylvia’s Place1
Today, the New York Times published my story “A Church. A Shelter. Is It Safe?” on the front page of the Metro section, below the fold.
I’ve been kind of lazy with my money in recent years. Perhaps that’s because I don’t have much of it. But that was never an excuse for my parents, who also never had a lot of it, but who always tried to be conscious of how they used it, where it went, and who used it in between.
One of my earliest political memories is of my dad’s grass roots organizing around migrant farm workers (a cause close to home in Oxnard) and around ending apartheid in South Africa. My dad would never go to Africa, or even leave the United States. But through out my childhood, my dad thought it was important to apply whatever pressure he could, from our home in Ventura County, to help the causes of our neighbor, the migrant far workers, as well as and our distant brothers and sisters suffering under apartheid, half a world away.
And so, the earliest boycotts I can recall were against grapes and lettuce (which put pressure on farm growers) and Bank of America (which was doing business in South Africa).
Having learned what I’ve learned about banks over the past few years (and especially the past couple of months), I’ve know for awhile the best thing I could do with the little money I have is to invest it with a local credit union. Bank Transfer Day vanquished my laziness and got me to open up an account with the credit union that just happened to be down the street from me.
I posted this picture at the Voice, of what first appeared to me to be the World Trade Center reincarnated.
It’s been quite a week: I began physical therapy; I covered a General Assembly meeting of Occupy Brooklyn; I wrapped up a six-month long writing project; I said goodbye to a houseguest of six weeks (who moved to Zuccotti Park), capping off seven months of the past twelve hosting people; I chatted with recently laid off friends; I baked a shitload of pumpkin bread.
But far and away, the highlight of the week was not burning to death on the 4 train under the East River. I’m not sure what it says about me that I wrote through this harrowing experience and immediately posted it at the Voice,
but I’m proud of it. It helped me to keep my focus.
Last week, I appeared on Brian Vines’s BCAT show Intersect to talk about Mayor Bloomberg’s Young Men’s Initiative.
I divulged something quite personal about myself: unlike the Mayor, and unlike just about anyone who has (like me) worked at Saturday Night Live, written for the Village Voice, and attended Burning Man, I’ve never actually smoked pot.
So there’s this thing called SEO, right? Search Engine Optimization.
I am not very good at the internets in general, or SEO in particular.
But today, because I knew no one else would go there with that word, I used Rick Perry’s real estate name exactly as it appears in my article at the Voice.
Click the image to enlarge and see how the powers that be at Google decide that my article should, for once, be the first hit.
This is not the combination of words I’d have wanted for such an occasion. But there’s no need to be afraid to call things as they are.
This week in the Village Voice, I wrote the feature story “The White Mayor’s Burden.” It’s a story of how hypocritical Mayor Bloomberg’s Young Men’s Initiative is, given all he’s done to suspend, stop and frisk, and lock up young black and Latino men. I was especially fascinated by the role of race in marijuana arrests, school discipline, and the FDNY.
I was raised during the Cold War. Though my parents were considered “pinkos” for the 1980s and raised me with a fair amount of Soviet sympathy and American skepticism, I was still brought up with a decent dose of prejudice against Russia. So it is with great bemusement that I appear on a channel called Russia Today, speaking to a Russian audience about “cruel times in America.”
This week in the Village Voice, I write my swan song to New York same-sex marriage. It’s a love story, about two couples (one legally blind) who choose whether or not to get married. I’ll more about it later, and the day when I experienced 11 weddings (and a funeral).