WATCH: GLAAD President to Georgia Rep. Betty Price: “How about an early retirement like your husband?”

www.glaad.org/blog/watch-glaad-president-georgia-rep-betty-price-%E2%80%9Chow-about-early-retirement-your-husband%E2%80%9D

PHOTOS: Get flashed by the power angels in Zurich
Flash Party is a hugely popular gay dance party hosted by Angels Events in Zurich.

www.queerty.com/photos-get-flashed-power-angels-zurich-20171027?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+queerty2+%28Queerty%29

Julie Taymor Directs Clive Owen in Stylish but Earthbound ‘M. Butterfly’ on Broadway: REVIEW

When David Henry Hwang’s modern riff on Puccini’s Madama Butterfly arrived on Broadway in 1988, it became a sensation. Even once the deception at the heart of M. Butterfly ceased to shock, audiences were fascinated by the true story that inspired it, of a French diplomat who fell in love with a Peking opera singer, not knowing (spoiler alert) that she was truly a man. Julie Taymor’s revival, which opened last night at the Cort Theatre, delivers some of the director’s customary flourish, but the story underneath, significantly revised by Mr. Hwang, feels hollowed out and robbed of its bite — and not because the cat is no longer in the bag.

Some three decades after its premiere, the threads running through Hwang’s play — gender identity, sexuality, racial geopolitics, and most prominently in the original text, misogyny — exist in a very different context. We argue incessantly about them on Twitter, pausing only to march over them in the streets and occasionally to breathe into a paper bag. Perhaps now would not be the best time to meet the OG Rene Gallimard, who’s fear of women subsides only when he feels full domination over them. That Gallimard would have belly-flopped onto Broadway only to realize the pool is empty. With these headlines? Has he no shame?

Well, yes and no. The emperor has new clothes, or rather, a different sort of wool pulled over his eyes. Instead of being a closet cad, shy about his true desire to subjugate women but no less turned on by it, this Gallimard seems more explicitly a closet case, and quite a gentleman at that, especially as embodied by a charming Clive Owen. He’s gone from a man who occasionally indulged in a little locker room talk, to one you might find trying not to peer over at your towel. Vulgar attitudes toward women, such as they are here, are entirely relegated to Gallimard’s best friend and foil Marc (Looking’s Murray Bartlett, sans mustache).

All this makes for a more palatable, but far less provocative and cohesive M. Butterfly.

Addressing us from a cell on the outskirts of Paris where he’s been imprisoned for treason, Gallimard takes us back to his diplomatic post in 1964, to recall how he met the “Perfect Woman” in Peking who caused his downfall. Song, embodied with nimble grace by Jin Ha, at times interjects with her side of events that he’d rather push aside, like her meetings with a communist agent to pass on intelligence she learned from her Western beau. The new revision grants Song a bit more agency and one hell of a different backstory, one that makes Gallimard’s delusion to her true sex all the more wild to wrap our heads around.

But the real dissonance comes at the moment of reckoning. There’s a certain easy parallel between the racial and sexual politics in the original text — Gallimard believed Song was a woman because his desire fed so gluttonously on the submission of an Eastern woman to his Western male dominance. It’s what Song ultimately describes as the West’s “international rape mentality towards the East.” But with those themes largely stripped from the preceding story, such that their relationship largely consists of exchanges in romantic cliches worthy of Miss Saigon, one hardly knows what to make of it all in the end.     

Returning to Broadway for the first time since the debacle of Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark, from which she was fired in part for hemorrhaging money into an overly elaborate production, Taymor takes a downright modest approach to physical staging. It’s possible to argue that scenic designer Paul Steinberg’s folding mobile panels are meant to evoke the frailty of illusion; it’s also not inaccurate to describe them as flimsy. Still, Taymor’s direction is fluid and often quite beautiful, particularly during scenes in the Chinese opera (choreography is by Ma Cong).

In teasing queer desire to the fore, Hwang has necessarily tidied up the play’s frank and insightful look at dark underpinnings of straight male sexuality. But uncomfortable though they may be to interrogate, doing so could hardly be more urgent.   

Recent theatre features…
In Off-Broadway’s ‘Lonely Planet,’ Coping with AIDS Trauma on a Human Scale: REVIEW
Transcendent ‘Torch Song’ Starring Michael Urie and Mercedes Ruehl Is Required Gay Viewing: REVIEW
‘Downton Abbey’s Elizabeth McGovern Opens in Puzzling ‘Time and the Conways’: REVIEW
‘A Clockwork Orange’ Shows Plenty of Skin, Skimps on Danger Off-Broadway: REVIEW
No Tea, No Shade — Off-Broadway’s ‘Charm’ Wants You to Behave: REVIEW
5 Actions to Take Now Inspired by Michael Moore’s ‘The Terms of My Surrender’ on Broadway

Follow Naveen Kumar on Twitter: @Mr_NaveenKumar
(photos: matthew murphy)

The post Julie Taymor Directs Clive Owen in Stylish but Earthbound ‘M. Butterfly’ on Broadway: REVIEW appeared first on Towleroad.

Julie Taymor Directs Clive Owen in Stylish but Earthbound ‘M. Butterfly’ on Broadway: REVIEW

What Is It About Guys In Masks? (85 Photos)

www.advocate.com/photography/2017/10/27/what-it-about-guys-masks-85-photos

Trump’s First Openly Gay Ambassador Narrowly Approved by Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 11-10 Vote

The first openly gay ambassador pick during Donald Trump’s tenure was narrowly appointed to be the U.S. envoy to Germany on Thursday. On an 11-10 vote, the Foreign Relations Committee recommended that the full Senate consider Richard Grenell to be the U.S. ambassador in Berlin, according to the Associated Press. Grenell is not a stranger to…

The post Trump’s First Openly Gay Ambassador Narrowly Approved by Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 11-10 Vote appeared first on Towleroad.

Trump’s First Openly Gay Ambassador Narrowly Approved by Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 11-10 Vote

X Factor’s Holly Tandy Admits Acts Are Already In Competition Over Song Choices
‘X Factor’ singer Holly Tandy has revealed things are already getting cut-throat between this year’s contestants, and live shows haven’t even started yet.

This time around, in a change of pace for the show, there will be no themed weeks during the live shows, which Holly claims has led to a bit of competition between the acts in terms of which songs they’ll be performing.

Speaking to The Sun, the teenager confessed: “I’ll tell you what’s competitive: song choice.

In what we’re sure is a move that had always been planned rather than a last-ditch attempt to drum up interest in a show fewer than people than ever before are actually watching, Simon Cowell has once again tinkered with the format of this year’s live shows, resulting in something we’re still struggling to get our heads around.

This year, the weekend’s live shows will contain one elimination in each episode, with the performances spread out over two nights, depending on what category the acts are performing in.

The traditional sing-off has also been replaced by a simple elimination for the act who receives the least amount of public votes, while the top two will reportedly battle it out for a “money can’t buy” prize.

See how Holly and her fellow competitors get on when the ‘X Factor’ live shows kick off on Saturday (28 October) at 8.20pm on ITV.

www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/x-factor-holly-tandy_uk_59f311d7e4b07fdc5fbd8d22

Taming the Beast of Queer Shame

Filmmaker Jonathan Wysocki unpacks how the fears of sharks masked deeper fears of being gay.

www.advocate.com/commentary/2017/10/27/taming-beast-queer-shame

I Am Delivering 406,108 Abortion Permission Slips To Amber Rudd Today
The government’s mistrust of women in the UK is real and measurable. The repercussions of it weigh heavy across all of our lives. And the physical weight of it amounts to precisely one hundred and forty-three stone in paperwork every year.

I know this because that’s how much a year’s worth of abortion permission slips weighs, and I’m delivering that amount – all 406,108 of them – to the Home Secretary Amber Rudd today, with permission from people across the UK who have joined our campaign to scrap the existing abortion law.

It’s hard to tell which is more shocking: that women can be sent to prison for having an abortion if they don’t secure written consent from two doctors – or that many people in the UK are still unaware of this fact despite its very real repercussions: In 2015 Natalie Towers was sent to prison for two years and six months for buying pills online to procure a miscarriage.

Women in this country are still governed by a law written in 1861 – before women had the right to vote – that criminalises abortion. Campaigners in 1967 fought hard to create a loophole act, the 50th Anniversary of which we mark today, which enabled women in England, Scotland and Wales to have an abortion so long as they understood this was a special measure, requiring the permission of two doctors.

This measure was seen as a temporary fix, not a solution. The law did not legalise abortion: it merely forced women to prove twice over that their pregnancy would cause greater mental or physical harm to them than continuing it. And it did nothing for women in Northern Ireland whose rights are so restricted that abortions are near impossible to access: rape, incest and fatal foetal abnormalities are not considered sufficient grounds. (Though we hold out hope for the current Supreme Court case.)

Furthermore, since the 1967 Act was introduced, there have been 60 abortion bills put to the House in an attempt to restrict access to abortion. Only one has tried to expand it.

So long as our rights are subject to the whim of doctors, to technological development, to decisions made in parliaments where men’s voices drown out women’s – well, they are not rights at all.

Every time that a woman has to ask for permission, every time that a woman from Northern Ireland or Scotland – where women are being turned away from having abortions after 18 weeks because of resistance from their doctors – has to travel, every time that term limits are debated – our essential human rights are questioned.

Women can never have control of their lives until they have control of their bodies. The Women’s Equality Party has said from day one that WE see any attempt to restrict our reproductive rights as an act of violence against us, and WE will not rest until there is full decriminalisation of abortion in every part of the UK. No exceptions, no qualifications, no conditions.

WE are not interested in gaming the system, in Parliamentary power plays and piecemeal negotiations; in fiddling at the edges of legislation. WE believe that abortion should not exist at all in criminal law but be moved into healthcare, where it belongs.

And as the only political party for women’s equality, WE are taking these demands into the political space, to use the political will of the electorate, and the political voice of feminism, to demonstrate to other parties the need for change.

So that the choice of every woman can be realised. And in that choice, her liberty too.

Join our campaign to give Amber Rudd permission to change the law on abortion. Click here to sign a permission slip. It’s #TimeItsNotACrime

www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/sophiewalker/i-am-delivering-406108-ab_b_18395288.html

Kentucky Judge Who Discriminated Against LGB Families Forced to Resign

Judge W. Mitchell Nance refused to hear adoption cases involving LGB families based on his “convictions.” 

www.advocate.com/families/2017/10/26/kentucky-judge-who-discriminated-against-lgb-families-forced-resign