BLOG IN FULL ORDER Hey! You! Get Out of My Way! Part1 I love New York. Don’t get me wrong, I honestly love New York. I think that I liked it better when it was scary and full of crime though. It kept you on your toes. Not to mention all the day to day drama. The looking over your shoulder to see who or what might be lurking in the shadows. This was the 80’s, the fabulous 80’s. Back when I had a Flock of Seagulls hairdo and people knew what Kajagoogoo meant. Back then when someone was [...]
Today We Reflect on the Downtown nYc Scene as Seen Through the Lens of Nelson Sullivan With an Interview Tribute…
A Life that was cut short. A visionary through the lens of a video camera. Nelson Sullivan leaves a legacy of videos that no one else was able to capture. If you were in the Downtown scene, you knew Nelson. Always documenting the scene stars of the era like: Ru Paul, Lady Bunny, Holly Woodlawn, Leigh Bowery, Michael Musto, James Saint James, Ernie Glam, and one of our favorite personalities Christina (RIP). Nelson was definitely one of a kind. Today we pay a tribute to his work with an interview with Queer Historian and Archivist Robert Coddington and Dick Richards, [...]
Pictures Can Speak Volumes
Pictures are amazing, especially when they bring back memories. For instance the picture above brings back a flood of memories for me. At the moment it was happening it was extremely sad. I took this picture outside the sliding glass door of a Los Angeles hotel room on Dec 24, 2000. The weather and my mood were in sync. I was returning home after a failed relationship abroad. I was emotionally drained, in a fog (psychologically and literally) and it was Christmas. The hot tub you see in the picture was definitely a lot of help. As I stepped into [...]
John Lyron Burnside Inventor, Activist, Pioneer.
John Lyon Burnside the third born in Seattle on November 2, 1916. Gay, Activist, Pioneer, one of the founding father’s of the Radical Faeries, Inventor of the Darkfield Kaleidoscope and the Symmetricon lived a very active life. Being poor and raised as an only child his mother would have no choice but to place him in orphanages through-out Seattle. By his teenage years he enrolls himself into the Navy and served until he decides to call Los Angeles home. For many, many years John L. Burnside was paid royalties from any company that sold a optically correct Darkfield Kaleidoscope in [...]
The Stonewall Inn, the Riot, the Uprising, the Celebration
On Monday Night April 25, 2011 PBS stations nationwide unveiled a new documentary about the Stonewall Riots which took place June 28, 1969. The oppression that the LGBT community was subjected to should have never happened in the first place. People were getting tired of being arrested and treated like a second class citizens. On that warm night in June the boiling point was at its peak and people were ready to fight back and that’s just what happened. In this documentary we follow the veterans who take us step by step on that fateful night through to the first liberation [...]
Memoirs of a Gay(sha)!
Cousins and Cocks. The First Time That was so much easier than I had thought, damn my parents were easy. I had become quite the expert at manipulating people into doing anything I wanted, and at sixteen there was one thing I wanted most of all – sex, any sex would do, rough, smooth, quick or slow, what did I care, I was a virgin with hormones to spare, my one criteria was it had to be with a man. Having been openly gay for a year already, I thought myself an old hand at the matter and maybe I [...]
First Day on the Job
After arriving from Toronto I spent my first month in Brooklyn on my friend’s couch. I had no money and no discernible skills so I had to come up with a way to support myself. I was young and I was alone and scared, that’s true, but for all the things I didn’t know about New York City and about surviving on my own, there was one thing I had no doubt about, I wasn’t going back to Toronto. They’d have to find me, handcuff me, put me in leg irons and drag me back kicking, screaming, biting and scratching [...]