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James Duggan

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Thom Cardwell

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I first visited Texas when I was just 11 years old.  It was the summer between my 6th and 7th years of school. I went to visit my mother's sister's family.  It was the summer of firsts--the first time I flew on a plane without my parents, the first time I learned to jump a horse, the first time I was attracted to a real cowboy, and the first time I got mononucleosis (well the only time.)

My return to Texas was when I was 17 and just graduated from high school.  I went to San Antonio for basic training at Lackland Air Force Base--six weeks of summer fun. Memories to last a lifetime, so my recruiter told me.

I've since returned to the Lone Star State many times for both business and pleasure over the years and despite the fact it is the home to the Dallas Cowboys (spit) I've become fond of Texas.  But never in my wildest dreams did I think that all eyes would be looking toward Texas as a new milestone in queer history is achieved and a glass ceiling would be broken.

Last Saturday, Houston, the fourth most populous city in the nation (trailing only after New York, Los Angeles and Chicago in that order), and the largest city in the southern United States and Texas, elected a lesbian mayor. In a run off election against another democrat, Annise Parker won with 53% to 47% of the vote.

I'll spare you a detailed analysis of the race--that I'll leave for the queer history books. But the key to this win was the voter's familiarity with Parker.  This was her seventh successful citywide election; three terms on city council and three terms as city controller. Always running as an out lesbian, but never making her personal life an issue, the voters came to know Parker and continue to elect her on her merits.  Sexuality was never an issue (except to the ever growing smaller, vocal minority of, anti-queer peoples.)

With such an historic election in America's forth largest city, one breathes in the hope and possibilities that are ours with the advent of more out elected officials. This is vital to the political advancement of the queer civil rights movement. The more we are known to others on a personal, familiar, level the greater the chance we have of advancing our political agenda--equality--in legislative action.

It is incumbent upon all of us to encourage, promote and support out candidates at all levels of elected office.  Especially in the state of Pennsylvania, the Keystone State, where there are no out elected officials on the state level.  The familiarity that comes with working with an out colleague is paramount to changing the hearts and minds of our legislators. It far out weighs any seniority that we may displace when we are forced to challenge incumbents.

The win in Houston is simply the beginning of not only what can be but what needs to be.  History is made by those who act.  The next time a qualified queer comes to you and asks for your support to run for office, jump on it and don't let go.  Their elected presence in the halls of our government buildings where laws are made is necessary to bring about the change that is equality.

Queer writer Edmund White is genuinely one of our literary treasures. He authored some of the greatest queer books and "first" of its kind in their genre, such as the coming out novel, "A Boy's Own Story"  (always what a wonderful title, too!), the seminal novel about AIDS, "The Farewell Symphony," a gay sexual how-to guide, a classic in its own right and definitely way ahead of its time, "The Joy of Gay Sex," and how gay men create their own "communities," in the nonfiction book, "States of Desire" (another catchy and memorable title!). He also produced essays on a wide variety of topics from politics to sex, works of historical fiction, and biographies about queer literary luminaries like Jean Genet and Rimbaud. As an activist living and writing in New York City during the 1960s and 1970s, he was influenced or involved with the gay liberation movement, fueled by the Stonewall rebellion, a member of the Violet Quill, a group of queer authors, including Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano and Robert Ferro, who helped to define queer literature in the 1970s and beyond, and the formation of the Gay Men's Health Crisis in the early years of HIV/AIDS.  Now having reached 70 years of age, White looks back on his youthful, wild, sexual past in a memoir, "City Boy," where he writes candidly about the life of an urban gay man growing up in a very freewheeling and adventurous time. Queer writer Wayne Hoffman (The Guide, December 2009) asks White why he's written so explicitly about sex throughout his career in his body of work? "I always felt that heterosexual men avoided the subject because they were afraid of what their wives and daughters would say. For gays of the past, freedom meant having nothing left to lose--we were already pariahs, so why not let it all hang out? Now that gays have become respectable and are getting married and are supposed to be monogamous and are adopting children, perhaps the same rules of discretion (that is, hypocrisy) apply to us as well."

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Lesbian chef and winner of Hell's Kitchen, Heather West, is definitely someone to be reckoned with. First off, she's an out lesbian, the first ever to become the winner of a reality TV show. Then she's a dead ringer look-a-like for Reese Witherspoon. So she's blonde, sweet, cute and feisty!  She's to-the-manner-born and bred in the arts and skills of cooking, learned to bake at 4, began working in restaurants at 13, and used cooking as therapy to help her family cope with her mother's cancer diagnosis at 19. Though she admits and apologies for sometimes turning into the "screaming chef" in the kitchen (she says that she's turns a little too much into the control freak), West wouldn't have it any other way following her dream to become a chef. It has been truly a decisive moment for West winning the top prize on Hell's Kitchen. Her prize was a good gig--a one-year contract as senior chef of Terra Rossa at the Red Rock Casino in Las Vegas. Of the experience, West described as both "exciting and surreal" she told journalist Kristin A. Smith (Curve, November 2009). "They just dropped me in Vegas and gave me a lot of money. What did they think I'd do with it? I love blinking lights," she laughed. Nowadays she's back with Hell's Kitchen, this time as a staff member for season six, the result of host Gordon Ramsay who wanted her back with the show!

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Queer icon director John Waters takes on the holiday season like no one else can or ever would imagine doing!  This season he's showing off with his "A John Waters Christmas Live" on December 22, one night only, at BB Kings Blues Club, 237 West 42nd Street, in New York City, (BBKingsBlues.com). The Pope of Trash talked to journalist John Russell (Next, December 11, 2009) about his longtime obsession with Christmas that has been revealed in a variety of ways over the decades in Waters' career. He admits to fretting over the fact that there are only 146 shopping days until the BIG day when he thinks about it in July!  He has been known to send out the campiest and craziest of his own cards that have, frankly, become quite legendary. He's released, back in 2004, a CD, "A John Waters Christmas," with a collection of bizarre and campy holidays songs personally chosen by the man himself. The tree ornaments that he sent to his friends one year, a glass ornament with a healthy but plastic cockroach inside, he recently discovered now fetches $75 on eBay!  "It's very collectible," he laughs. "If I ever find out who sells my Christmas cards, they'll never get one again," he threatens. What's his show all about? "I talk about everything from Christmas music to the TV specials that I wish I'd had; things I hate about Christmas: If Christmas is gay or not--and that's a pretty complicated question! If we're having a nervous breakdown at Christmas, how to have it in the proper way. I think that I have a lot of good advice [about that issue]," he assures us. In the end, Waters claims that he's always been in the "Holiday Business." "I always say, if I'm not working at Christmas. I'm in trouble!"