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James Duggan

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Thom Cardwell

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Copyright 2008

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QUEERtimes is published weekly as a service for discerning queers and heterosexuals alike in Philadelphia and beyond.

 

Expressed opinions are that of the author(s) and do not represent the thoughts, feelings and /or opinions of any person, organization, company, staff member, or any of our advertisers.

Philadelphia - Stacey Sobel, Executive Director of Equality Advocates Pennsylvania, announced on Thursday that she is stepping down from her position.  Sobel has guided Equality Advocates Pennsylvania, formerly the Center for Lesbian and Gay Civil Rights, since April 2001.  As the organization's second Executive Director, she has led its efforts to increase its policy reform, legal and education services to Pennsylvania's lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community. 
 
"I am very proud of the work that Equality Advocates Pennsylvania has accomplished during the last seven years. During that time, I have been focused on advancing equal rights for Pennsylvania's LGBT community.  Now, I am looking forward to the next step in my career which will include consulting work and a schedule that will allow me to spend more time with my family," she said.
 
Equality Advocates Pennsylvania has experienced unprecedented growth over the last several years due to Sobel's guidance and leadership.  During her tenure the organization's income has more than tripled with increased funding from grants, events, individuals and corporate sponsors. The organization has also participated in ground breaking legal cases including successfully advocating before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court as co-counsel for the amici curiae for second parent adoption and custody rights for LGBT parents, and as co-counsel with the City of Philadelphia to uphold the City's domestic partnership benefits.
 
 Sobel has provided leadership on all LGBT related legislative issues over the past seven years and created broad-based coalitions to support LGBT legislation and fight anti-LGBT legislation, policies and amendments.  Virginia Gutierrez, Board President, stated, "Stacey has been a champion for equal rights for all Pennsylvanians.  She is one of the best lobbyists, if not the best, in the Commonwealth.  Equality Advocates Pennsylvania is in a much better place now than it was seven years ago thanks to Stacey's dedicated leadership."
 
Some of her legislative activities while executive director included: leading the efforts in 2006 and 2008 to halt legislation attempting to amend the Pennsylvania Constitution to prohibit same-sex marriages and relationship recognition of non-marital couples;  working to amend Pennsylvania's non-discrimination laws to prohibit employment, housing, and public accommodations discrimination of LGBT people; and drafting the amendment to the state's hate crimes law to include actual or perceived sexual orientation and gender identity, among other groups, which was one of the most comprehensive in the country and the first Pennsylvania law to recognize the LGBT community.
 
The Board of Directors has approved the appointment of an interim executive director to ensure a smooth transition in leadership and position the organization for the future.  Pamela Leland comes to the organization through The Nonprofit Center at LaSalle University to serve as a transitional leader for the organization.  The Board of Directors has appointed a search committee to start a national search to recruit an executive director that will lead the organization into the future.
 
Douglas Metcalfe, Board Spokesperson and past President of the Board, added, "The Board has a unique opportunity to expand on Stacey's seven years of stewardship of the organization with a highly qualified transitional leader, which will allow the organization to fully evaluate and assess our priorities and needs and allow us to find the best person in the nation to lead the organization into the future."

 

(Source: Equality Advocates Pennsylvania)

 

[Editor's Note:  QUEERtimes wish Stacy well in here new endeavors and thanks her for her many years of dedicated service in the fight for our civil rights.  Her presences on the front lines of the battle will be missed.  Thank You Stacy and Good Luck!]

 

 

Happy Birthday, Andy Warhol, on Your 80th Year!

The father of pop art and celebrity fame, for just being famous, would have been 80 on August 6 but his legend and legacy and his art lives on and on all over the world. There is perhaps no other source, quoted so often than Warhol.

Like another great queer tastemaker, Oscar Wilde, who was also the most quoted and quotable person of his day, Warhol shares this distinction with Wilde.

I'll confess that I've always had a strange fascination with contemporary artist Andy Warhol.  It might have begun back during my graduate school days in Manhattan where the leading figure of the Pop Art scene and a major celebrity, even icon, reigned supreme.

In those days, it was literally impossible not to see Andy Warhol, wearing his spiky silver wig and oversized glasses, often times, dark sunglasses, at one restaurant, bar, club, gallery or some other public venue.

He was out a lot--so much so that I wondered if he might have lookalikes running around town. He seemed to be--literally--everywhere.

When Warhol turned from the visual arts to filmmaking, I saw many of his experimental films like Sleep, Empire and Stars at the city's most popular art film houses. I remember that those film screenings had a sense of historic moments, like whatever I didn't understand then would somehow be revealed to me in the future.

I truly can't recall when the Warhol thing started. Nowadays all I know is that it continues to this day.

It's really only a fascination, not an obsession though I did recently discovered that I own much more Warhol memorabilia in my house, in my closet, in my library, in my video collection, even in my stamp collection, than I realized until this minute.

Honest! I had no idea that my unintended (purely unconscious) accumulation of china plates, mugs, glassware and a decorative wall plaque, silk ties, tee shirts, boxer shorts and a messenger bag,  selected old copies of Interview, and a considerable pile of art books, catalogs, journals, postcards and notebooks, and movies from Warhol's Dracula to the most recent Ric Burns documentary, American Masters: Andy Warhol for the Public Broadcasting System, and a forgotten sheet of the 37-cent self-portrait stamp, issued 2002, by the United States Postal Service, all evidenced what's clearly my very own "collection of Warhol stuff."

But all this leads me back to the recounting of my long overdue visit, no, pilgrimage, to The Andy Warhol Museum in downtown Pittsburgh.

 
For me, the museum isn't only a treasure for Pittsburgh, Warhol's birthplace and the site of his formal art school days at free classes at the Carnegie Institute of Technology and from where he graduated from college, but one for the nation and the world. After all, there are only a handful of museums, exclusively dedicated to the works, papers, archives and scholarship of one artist. It's a rare honor and even a rarer treat.

I was thrilled to find out that the most festive way to approach the museum was to walk across the bridge named in his honor (another distinction afforded few artists in the world) that is strewn with flags of the same self-portrait as the USA postal stamp. Later I would get to view the paintings in the museum's permanent collection among the 900 paintings, 1,500 drawings, 500 prints, 77 sculptures and 400 photographs by Warhol, making the institution "the most comprehensive single-artist museum in the world."

Housed in a former Mattress Factory, the museum boasts 35,000 square feet of exhibition space on seven floors. I was excited to see not only the countless familiar images that Warhol created--the renown Campbell Soup cans, the multiple silk-screens of Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Elizabeth Taylor, Liza Minelli, the Rolling Stones but the rooms full of life-size Brillo soap pad boxes and the floating mylar silver cloud pillow in the rooms.

The museum is a wonderful place for the whole family. While you'll find many of the films not suitable for kids, the permanent exhibitions of Warhol's work will intrigue, delight and entertain everyone.

I've always been wild about Warhol's wallpaper designs and the repeat pattern cows in outlandish colors are displayed on the museum walls (okay, I do have a tie sporting this exact pattern).

I didn't know that Warhol was quite fond of children and created fish wallpaper as well as a series of small paintings of vintage windup mechanical toys for kids. There's a room devoted to these works for kids to be inspired by and to enjoy. There are some interactive and creative challenges for kids and the archive rooms offer the promise of creative juices to flow.

Forever obsessed himself with fame, fortune and, above all, celebrity, I found it fascinating that Warhol was such a saver of absolutely everything. The guy acted, his whole life, as his own archivist.

If you don't mind some step aerobics (but you can also take the elevator to each floor), the museum curators have assembled Warhol's paper ephemera, old family pictures, his elementary school report cards, scraps of paper, all manner of debris and memories, early drawings and notebooks, on bulletin boards on every floor.

The more I write about this incredible museum, the more I realize that I'm still only scratching the surface which only means that The Andy Warhol Museum is clearly a destination all its own and a single reason to visit Pittsburgh (if, indeed, you really need one).