This is the official statistic from the San Diego County Health Department. But we who have been involved with this HIV/AIDS epidemic since its early dark days of the 1980s (when indeed AIDS = death was true) know that countless people died of AIDS and they were not reported as such but as cancer, heart…
dvd of the week The second animated film by Tim Burton to be nominated for an Oscar, Frankenweenie has more flashes of brilliance in it than anything he has done in more than a decade. It is the story of a strange, nerdy boy – both a budding filmmaker and a genius scientist – who…
dvr this Starz, Friday, Jan. 25, 10 p.m. The Starz show about mostly naked muscle men killing each other and having sex with each other and many of the women they come into contact with is loosely based on the actual Roman slave rebellion during the first century B.C. It’s astonishingly violent and the sex…
“We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths – that all of us are created equal – is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall … Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like…
Members of the House of Representatives have offices in three buildings, each of which is named after a former speaker: Sam Rayburn, Nicholas Longworth and Joseph Gurney Cannon. When a fourth building is needed, I have little doubt it will be the “Nancy Pelosi House Office Building.” Not just because she was the first woman…
Flight lesson No. 1 Kim: “Push the stick forward and the houses get bigger. Pull the stick back and the houses get smaller. That’s all there is to flying”, or so I’ve heard. I was about to find out during my first flight. I was a little nervous and had to remind myself that I’ve…
You might have noticed that artists and writers are beginning to look back and reflect upon the 1980s and that era that has come to be known as the “AIDS crisis”? I am thinking about Just Kids by Patti Smith, a memoir that chronicles her early years in New York and her pivotal friendship with…
thursday, jan. 24 Leading Ladies Ken Ludwig’s new comedy centers on two young English Shakespearean actors who are so broke that they are performing their Shakespearean shows at Moose Lodges in Amish country. When they hear about an elderly lady about to die, leaving her fortune to her long-lost English nephews, the actors decide to…
The media often facilitates the barriers in the way of tolerance of trans people in broader society, and sometimes are the barriers themselves. One recent example is from Great Britain. Columnist Suzanne Moore wrote an article entitled Seeing Red: The Power Of Female Anger for the British newsmagazine The New Statesman speaking to how women…
It’s the end of January already! How many of you have still kept your New Year’s resolutions? I spent New Year’s Day taking down all of my holiday decorations, boxing them up, putting the boxes in the rafters of my garage and then cleaning up. I mean a deep cleaning. Polishing the furniture, vacuuming, cleaning…
