|
|
Philip Wong Managing Editor |
|
|
 | Room For Squares Last week, six Democratic presidential candidates met to participate in a televised forum on gay issues. While all six of them were proponents of equal rights and government benefits for gay Americans (to be frank, being opposed to equal rights is, at this point, pretty unfathomable), three leading candidates were still opposed to the idea of same-sex marriage, with one claiming to be for civil unions instead.More |  | Room For Squares Last Friday I treated myself to a ticket to see Rufus Wainwright, of whom I’ve been an avid devotee since seeing his first show at the Fillmore back in 1998. Anyways, there I was last Friday, at the Masonic Auditorium, ready to enjoy the velvet crooning and heartfelt warbling of our generation’s greatest songwriter when into the auditorium walked two gentlemen of a certain age, dressed in sleeveless leather vests and each wearing a flashing blue and red earring. Aside from checking whether or not I had unknowingly entered a rave, two other things came to my mind.More |  | Re-imagining the Timeless for a New Generation It’s a fair assumption to say that everything that has ever been written down is open to interpretation. In literature, it’s never more true than on the stage and in the theatre. Whether undergoing various translations or suffering the degradations of time, works like Shakespeare’s ubiquitous “Romeo & Juliet” and Sophocles’ “Antigone” have themselves gone through enough variations in recent years to remain relevant for a long time coming. In all this time though, I doubt they’ve received the particular kind of attention that Women’s Will is about to give them.More |  | Room For Squares My gaydar is in need of some serious fine tuning. My trusted “beep beep” meter was always there to help when I needed to pull the puff from a pile of punks. And perhaps in less densely populated areas it still would. But when more and more men are starting to pick up what have always been thought of as fairy tendencies, it’s time for us to start questioning whether that “Queer Eye For The Straight Guy” show really did us any favors.More |  | God’s Gift To Men Has it ever occurred to you how much easier your life would have been if you were the same as all the straight boys in school? When I was in high school, one of the biggest roadblocks to my coming out was my fear of their reactions. Don’t mistake me. I wasn’t under any illusion that it would make them stop talking to me because, frankly, they never spoke to me in the first place.More |  | The Track To Maturity If the truckload of Canadian acts like Leslie Feist, the New Pornographers and all of Broken Social Scene that has recently been making waves hasn’t yet whetted your appetite for all things north of the border, then you’ll probably want to start paying more attention to Tegan & Sara. Having already toured extensively with big name acts like fellow Canadians Neil Young, Rufus Wainwright, and Americans Ben Folds, the Pretenders and Ryan Adams, the sisters will be hitting San Francisco’s own Brava Theatre on July 22 & 23 in support of their new album, [b]The Con[/b], released the following Tuesday.More |  | Label Queen Labels. What would we be without them? We wear them, we use them, and whether we know it or not, we actually need some of them. Without terms like gay, lesbian and bisexual, many of us would cease to matter. Labels like those are pretty self explanatory; they give us some idea about who we are, and without them we’d be largely discounted by society. But don’t get me wrong. By no stretch of the imagination should any of us seek to identify ourselves solely by our sexual orientations.More |  | Being Anyone We Wanna Be Now that Transformers nostalgia is riding high on the back of a blockbuster summer film, I find myself looking back to the childhood role models of the 80s. To be honest, I always looked up to Jem more than I did Optimus Prime. But come to think of it, as a gay kid growing up during the onslaught of the AIDS epidemic, you weren’t given that many role models to choose from.More |  | That Is So Gay Did anyone else listen to "Hibernia Beach" on Live 105 back in the day? It was this gay-themed radio show that they used to broadcast on Sunday nights. Well, I used to listen to it a lot while I tried to cram in those final few Calculus problems before bedtime. Of all the topics discussed on the show (ranging from political to sexual), one topic has always remained most distinct in my mind. It was the night that the on-air DJs bantered over the colloquial use of the term “gay” to indicate distaste.More |  | Mass Devotion If the purpose of film is to offer escape, insight and entertainment, then it shouldn’t matter whether what’s onscreen is an Oscar contender or an offbeat, alternative film. Cult cinema is avidly loved by its audiences precisely because it promises escape from the bounds of mainstream propriety. The extreme devotion that cult films inspire in their audiences has nothing to do with following trends; instead it has everything to do with inspiration.More |
|
