I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
I’ve been remiss not to post the video below earlier.
Entitled “Miss Gay Latino,” it was an entry from me and journalist/videographer Kate Nash in last month’s Santa Fe Three Minute Film Festival. And it won the festival’s prize for best documentary.
But the timing may have worked out just fine. More on the video later.
Gay rights is in the news today — the 40th anniversary of the infamous police raid on New York City’s Stonewall Inn. The raid was followed by riots, widely considered the sparks for the modern gay rights movement.
The fact that President Obama is hosting a large group of gay and lesbian leaders at the White House today also helps to put decades of struggle and cultural change into perspective.
Daily Kos diarist tjlabs weighed in on those decades of struggle and change yesterday with a very personal post reflecting on the Stonewall Inn (“the Mafia-run bar for gays and transvestites”) and how the subsequent raid and riots turned out to be “the catalyst for my personal revolution.” Tjlabs added, “I knew that I didn’t want to live a lie.”
So the ex-Roman Catholic seminarian and deacon is now 28 years into a committed gay relationship in a state — he doesn’t say which — that allows either same-sex marriage or civil unions for same-sex couples.
New Mexico, of course, isn’t one of them. (For a thorough and enlightening dissection of the state’s most recent battle over domestic partnership legislation earlier this year, check out this week’s Santa Fe Reporter’s cover story — “Sexual Disorientation,” by SFR staff writer Dave Maass.)
This past weekend, Santa Fe — a.k.a. the City Different — played host to its annual gay pride parade. Similar pride parades played out all over the world this past weekend. Santa Fe Pride regulars know that for several years now, their parade has been well attended by a slice of Santa Fe’s gay community that happens to be a minority within in a minority: gay Mexican immigrants.
It’s that slice that is the focus of the short video Nash and I entered into the Santa Fe film festival.
A testament to Santa Fe’s gay-friendly, immigrant-friendly vibe, the video traces a one-of-a-kind drag show that took place last November — complete with backstage footage and interviews with each of the five contestants. The video aims to give a sense of each of these guys and why they chose to participate. Their stories and reasons are compelling.
The contestants worked jobs ranging from construction to fast food. And each strutted his/her gender-bending stuff on the Lodge hotel’s stage to wild applause from what appeared to be a mostly straight, overwhelmingly immigrant audience.
I remember thinking that notions of a monolithic, socially conservative immigrant community need to be tossed out the window.
More broadly, we know that societal attitudes regarding homosexuality have been changing for quite some time. A political memo by Adam Nagourney in Saturday’s New York Times puts those social changes in a political perspective, citing polling data that demonstrates a dramatic generational shift in public opinion in spite of today’s often elusive politicians.
In the view of many gay leaders, the shifts in public attitude are a validation of the central political goal set by the dozens of gay liberation groups that sprouted up in cities and on college campuses in the months after the Stonewall uprising: to have gay men and lesbians who had been living in secret go public as a way of dealing with societal fear and prejudice.
While the drag show Nash and I documented was much more diversion than political statement, it was very public. Yet, I suspect Santa Fe’s reigning Miss Gay Latino doesn’t know much about Stonewall.
Even so, he and his compañeros vividly personify the strategy, history and evolution that define today’s gay rights movement … 40 years later.
