Watteau

Antoine Watteau, Voulez-vous triompher des belles?

I am one of the few people I know who loves the work of Antoine Watteau.  I would imagine that he  bores most people these days.  Even though almost all of his work is about love, there's not much sex in his pictures, and certainly nothing lewd.  There's nothing sensational about any of it.  Most people would find it to be too refined and decorous, a little too polite to be true.  Like so much Rococo art, we imagine Watteau's work to be the stuff of refined amusement for an over-indulged and parasitic nobility.  We might imagine the artist himself as a Parisian dandy of too-delicate sensibility.

It certainly came as a surprise to me many years ago to find out that Watteau was not any Parisian dandy.  He wasn't even French.  He was Flemish, from the city of Valenciennes that had only recently come under French dominion, and was still claimed by the Spanish Netherlands.  Far from being refined and urbane, Antoine Watteau was a prole, the son of a roof tile maker with only the most minimal education.  He spent his early years in Paris in dire poverty, mostly gravitating to his fellow Flemings in the city who helped him out with housing and employment.  Never in robust health, he died young from tuberculosis (probably aggravated by his early hardships) at the age of 36.
He never moved in the aristocratic circles that we would assume.  Frederick the Great collected Watteau's work enthusiastically as did English nobility, but not until long after the artist's death.  In his lifetime, most of Watteau's collectors, admirers, and friends were quite bourgeois; bankers, merchants, theater folk, and other artists.  The nobles housed at Versailles never heard of him, and probably wouldn't have liked him if they did.

Something else that is surprising is how early in the 18th century was Watteau's career.  King Louis XIV was still alive for most of Watteau's life and career.  The Roi-Soleil  died in 1715, and Watteau died in 1721.  Watteau predates most of what we would consider to be Rococo.  While the mid 18th century loved Watteau's work, by the end of the century, critical taste turned upon him dismissing his work as just so much refined decadence.  And so he would stay in the critical doghouse until the critics rediscovered his work in the late 19th century.

The painting above with the probably apocryphal title of Voulez-vous triompher des belles? looks at first glance to be a typical example of Rococo love in the shrubbery.  We see silk satin rustling in the dark leaves at twilight as in so many later Rococo paintings (though never was the effect of shimmering silk against dark foliage so beautifully painted as by Watteau).  If we look closely at it, there is a mysterious little drama taking place.  A couple find themselves apart from the rest of the company beneath an old stone herm covered in vegetation.  The man wears a mask and appears to be spooking the woman.  She is indeed startled, but not amused as perhaps the man intended.  She recoils as he lunges. He wears the costume of a very familiar figure from the Comedia dell'Arte, Harlequin, the trickster and scheming servant.  She could be in the costume of Columbina.  The people behind them are actors, we assume from the same troupe. They appear to be unaware of what is taking place on the other side of the herm, and busy with their own happy love making.  A couple find themselves alone together and go through a very uncertain drama of trying to fathom each other's feelings.  The situation is amusing, but with an air of desperation and melancholy about it.  The stone herm looming in the dark shrubbery subtly reminds us that the time for youth, love, and life itself is fleeting, as fleeting as the time of twilight in which this little drama takes place.

Antoine Watteau, Assembly in a Park:

This painting is a subtle drama of success and failure in love.  The couple on the left find success in a happy meeting of mutual feeling.  Their forms are echoed in the trees suggesting that Nature blesses their success.  On the right, a small gathering of people listens to a flute player.  A man makes a desperate grope for the object of his affection.  She rejects him.  His gambit fails.  The twilight time of day and the hazy transitions of color create a kind of dreamlike and transitory quality to this scene.

Watteau's scenes of people dressed in shiny silks trying to find love in a twilight park are not entirely imaginary.  In fact, we could have seen such assemblies at the beginning of the 18th century in the forests at Fontainebleau and Saint Cloud and other places just outside of Paris.
In his last years, King Louis XIV came under the influence of his very pious and bigoted mistress Madame de Maintenon.  A pall of earnest and gloomy piety fell over the court of Versailles and spread throughout the country.  Theater and musical concerts, already heavily regulated and censored, became even more so.  Comedia dell'Arte troupes were forbidden to speak.  Their performances were limited to mime.  Eventually, all comedy performances were banned whether they were the sparkling sharp wit of Moliere or the lewd slapstick improvisations of Comedia dell'Arte.  All public concerts of any music other than religious were also banned.  Public displays of affection became illegal.
The young people of Paris took boats up the Seine to the forests on the city's outskirts to have their amusements far from the surveillance of Louis' morals police.  Roving bands of musicians and actors took up residence in the forests entertaining crowds of Parisian young people with illegal concerts and stage plays.  Illegality only enhanced their glamor and appeal.

Antoine Watteau, Fete Venitienne

The people who wear those shiny silks in Watteau's paintings are not aristocrats or rich people, but theater people; actors and musicians.  Those silks in all their rich and fine colors bloom for us in this painting by Watteau of actors gathering under a reclining statue of Venus.  They are not performing, but enjoying themselves, dancing, making music, gossiping, and flirting.  Their's is a community founded upon feeling, especially the pursuit of love.  Some of these figures are portraits, or are based on the likenesses of friends.  The man with the large (and probably comic makeup) nose on the left dancing the quadrille with the brilliant young woman in the center is probably Watteau's friend and fellow Flemish painter in Paris, Nicolas Vleughels.  After Watteau's death, Vleughels would direct the French Academy in Rome for the rest of his life.  The man on the far right playing the bagpipe is probably a modified self-portrait.

Watteau, Fete Venetiennes, detail showing what may be the artist Nicolas Vleughels

Watteau, Fete Venitienne, detail showing the bagpipe player who may be a self portrait;  this detail is a dazzling display of Watteau's sure hand with a brush and his amazing transitions of color from blue to a pale violet to golds, greens, and reds.

Watteau, Fete Venitienne, detail; I've always been fond of Watteau's girls.  Yes, I'm a gay man, but they are all so pretty without looking shallow, and so self-assured without looking cold.

Watteau was the first artist to devote a career to painting outsiders, people on the social and economic margins; and in King Louis' final years, outside the law.  He is the first to show them not only sympathetically, but with understanding and even admiration.  They lead lives of emotional candor and authenticity very different from the anxious and constrained lives of both noble courtiers and bourgeoisie.  This is an idea that would flourish in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the work of artists like Gauguin, Picasso, and Kirchner.

Watteau was himself an outsider, kept impoverished for many years by the restrictions on foreign artists by the Parisian painters' guild.  He was the first artist to defy convention and one of the few to get away with it.  He never received a single public commission from Church or Crown, and never sought one.  He must have been something of a character since biographies were written about him even before his death.  One of the first was written soon after Watteau's death by his friend and collector, the scholar Philippe Comte de Caylus.  Watteau comes off in Caylus' biography as a very shy and withdrawn young man with a streak of arrogant and prickly independence.  Watteau spent his first years in Paris lonely and desperately poor working in a small shop on the Pont Notre Dame making copies of popular Dutch paintings.  Watteau copied one popular painting of an old woman praying by Gerrit Dou so often that he claimed he could paint it with his eyes shut.  That loneliness and poverty, together with the lessons of Dutch painting, seem to have haunted Watteau all his life.  The memory of the chilly reception and rigid restrictions he received from the Parisian Painters' Guild probably played a large role in his abiding desire to avoid obligations and commissions.
Watteau worked for the decorative painter Claude Audran III and some of his work for Audran survives.

Watteau, a painted panel for a folding screen

We can glimpse something of Watteau's Dutch influence, and of the political turmoil of his home city of Valenciennes in his many paintings and drawings of soldiers.  The Spanish Netherlands still claimed the city, and Watteau had to pass through a war zone to visit his family.

Watteau, Portal of Valenciennes

Watteau, drawing of soldiers; Watteau never shows soldiers in combat.  They are always on guard duty, eating, or resting, as he probably saw them on his trips back to Valenciennes.

Where Watteau found contempt from the Parisian Painters' Guild, he found a surprising embrace from the Academie, all the more surprising because Watteau's small paintings of actors, musicians, and young people looking for love couldn't be more different from what this institution of the French state produced and promoted.

The Royal Chapel at the Palace of Versailles was the last major construction project of the reign of Louis XIV, completed in 1710, five years before the king's death.  It was designed by Jules Hardouin Mansart to be an enormous baroque interpretation of the Sainte Chapelle of King Louis IX (Saint Louis).

The Royal Chapel of the Palace of Versailles

The Academician Antoine Coypel painted the spectacular ceiling of the heavenly host.

Antoine Coypel's painting on the ceiling of the Royal Chapel showing 

God the Father and the Heavenly Host

Another star of the Academie, Charles de la Fosse painted the Resurrection in the apse.

Charles de la Fosse's painting in the apse of the Royal Chapel of the Resurrection of Christ

It is hard to imagine 2 more polar opposite painters from Watteau, and yet, both of these very establishment figures admired Watteau's work enthusiastically and invited him to join the very prestigious Academie Royale in 1712.  The Academie required candidates for admission to submit a morceau de reception, a reception piece, a painting whose subject was chosen by the Director.  The Academie bent its own rules to accommodate Watteau.  He was given unprecedented liberty to choose his own subject `a sa volonte' as it says in the Academie's records.  Coypel himself presented the finished 6 feet wide canvas to the Academie jury.  Their generosity and flexibility with Watteau is testimony to the very open and liberal character of the Academie in the years around King Louis' death.

Antoine Watteau, Pilgrimage to Cythera

This is the painting Watteau made for his reception into the Academie.  He labored over it for a long time, not presenting the finished painting until 1717.  Watteau's most famous painting is a strange hybrid of classical love poetry and memories of the young people of Paris enjoying themselves in the surrounding forests.  The Academie records give us the title Pilgrimage to Cythera; like so many titles attached to Watteau's pictures, this may be apocryphal and not quite what the artist intended.  It does indeed show visitors to the Island of Cythera, the mythic home of the goddess Venus.  On the left, we see the ferry boat that brought the visitors to the island piloted by some kind of mythic figure come to life, a small cloud of putti float like bubbles above him.  He may recall the boatmen who ferried young Parisians to the forests of Saint Cloud, but he is definitely not one of them.

Watteau, Cythera, detail

  The goddess herself does not appear in the picture.  An old herm on the right entwined with climbing roses stands for her presence.  A misty twilit landscape that seems as ephemeral as the figures appear solid dominates most of the painting.  The whole painting takes on a kind of transitory dreamlike state.  Every aspect of the painting tells us that the event we are witnessing will dispel at any moment.

Watteau, Cythera, detail

Are people coming or going in this picture?  I'm inclined to agree with Michael Levey in the great chapter on Watteau in his book Rococo to Revolution,  we are watching people depart.  Our clue is in the small group of people in front of the herm of Venus in the lower right corner of the picture.  The couple on the right in front of the statue are still deep under the spell of love.  A small putto, perhaps Cupid himself, wrapping himself in a shawl tugs at the woman's skirts as if to wake the lovers and tell them that it is time to leave.  The couple immediately to the left gets up to leave, while the next couple on the left are on their way to the boat.  The woman turns back to take a last look at a place and a moment of supreme happiness before leaving.
Watteau paints the bittersweet moment when the dream is over and it is time to wake up.  The painting is a masterful series of color transitions from the warm umber earth to a variety of blues and whites in the atmosphere.  The flicker of rose, white, blue, and green flashes across in the silks of the lovers against the earth colors dominating the picture.  To our eyes, they are not bright colors, but they are very fine and rich colors making almost musical transitions from one to the other, and no single color is allowed to dominate.  The whole painting is as ephemeral as a soap bubble, but much more serious.

Love and happiness are serious subjects for Watteau.  He was keenly aware of how elusive they both are, and how brief the joy when they are achieved.  The first great painter at the very beginning of the Enlightenment occupied himself, not with the triumphs of Reason Over Superstition that were on everyone's minds in the first half of the 18th century, but with the passions and their power, including their power to trump reason.  Love is the serious business of forming a community of feeling, a difficult and perilous journey out of loneliness, according to Watteau.  In the end, Watteau's paintings frequently contain reminders, according to Michael Levey, "... of what remains long after life and love are ended ('Le Buste/ Survit `a la cite')."  For all of our struggles and labors, love and happiness are even more fleeting than life itself.  Their mortality makes our joys all the more valuable; a very different message from that of scores of ascetics down through the centuries.  Watteau sympathizes with all those caught up in the effort to find love and happiness, the things that make the whole bother of living worthwhile even if they are fleeting.

Watteau reveals his sympathies in the greatest of all sad clown paintings.

Antoine Watteau, Gilles

This painting shows an actor dressed as Pierrot (sometimes called Gilles in France).  In Comedia dell'Arte, Pierrot is usually a slow dull witted character, the butt of Harlequin's tricks and jokes, and usually disappointed or cuckolded in love.  Watteau shows him standing in dead center, dominating the picture, and yet profoundly isolated.  The low slapstick comedy in the background only enhances his isolation.  Watteau makes Pierrot and the donkey the only 2 figures looking out directly at us, a sly little joke reminding us of the character's customary role as a dolt.

Watteau, Gilles, detail

When we look at the figure of Pierrot, he is much more than his role.  The expression on his face is both flat and unfathomably opaque.  He faces us frontally with his straw hat framing his face like a halo in traditional images of Christ, but this figure is no Christ or Christ metaphor.  If he is a metaphor for anything it is for Watteau himself.  This is not a self-portrait, but Watteau clearly identifies with this figure; isolated, alone, and yet hungry for the applause of an audience.  It is hard to tell which, but this painting suggests the brief awkward moment just before the play starts, or just after it ends in anticipation of the hoped for applause.  Seldom was there ever painted a more complex and elusive face in art.  The color harmonies, and especially the painting of the white silk baggy costume with its luminous varieties of shades of white, are amazing.

Pierrot appears in many paintings by Watteau playing a variety of roles.

Antoine Watteau, La Partie Quaree

Antoine Watteau, The Italian Comedians; this painting is an old favorite of mine painted for Dr. Robert Mead as payment for treatment.

Watteau made a trip to London to see Dr. Mead in hopes for a cure. We see the whole Comedia dell'Arte cast of characters in this painting.  Harlequin appears twice.  On the left, he wears a mask and unsuccessfully tries to get the attention of Mezzetino and a young woman who are too involved with each other to notice.  Another Harlequin appears on the right introducing us to Pierrot who dominates the center of the painting.  Pierrot plays the role of stand-in for the artist.  He looks a little ill, though he is not quite so alone or lonely as in the more famous picture.  The people in the picture may be friends of the artist rather than actors.  Some critics see in the progression from small children on the left to the old Dottore on the right, a kind of allegory of the stages of life.  Perhaps.  Watteau knew he was dying when he made this painting.  This was one of his last pictures, left unfinished at the time of his death.  Another artist completed the architectural setting in the background.

Some critics even now complain that Watteau's approach to love is perhaps too cerebral, that his paintings don't have enough real or implied sexuality.  Watteau could paint female flesh with even more relish than he gives to light falling on silk fabric.  He takes his cues from Rubens' acres of enticing golden female flesh.  Rubens' nude peasant princesses seem a little over-bearing and vulgar compared to Watteau's girls.

Antoine Watteau, Jupiter and Antiope

Watteau, Jupiter and Antiope, detail

We can see his gifts not only in his rapid flickering brushwork that is always so sure, but in his equally sure drawing hand.  He uses a three color chalk method pioneered by Rubens, a great drawing technique for any artist like Rubens or Watteau who thinks primarily in terms of color.

Watteau, study from life for a now destroyed painting of Cupid and Psyche

One of Watteau's amazing sheets of drawings of heads; 

several portraits of the same girl, and 2 portraits of a boy

A remarkable drawing by Watteau of a seated woman showing 

his graphic equivalent for the shimmer of striped silk

Watteau's last, and arguably his greatest, work began on his own initiative.  He was already very ill and offered to paint a shop sign for his friend the art dealer Edme Francois Gersaint.  He said that he needed to exercise his "cold fingers."

Antoine Watteau, Gersaint's Shop Sign

This painting is famously known as Gersaint's Shop Sign, but it was not a sign board in the usual sense.      It is painted on canvas, and was originally arch shaped.  You can see a ghost of that original arch shape in the stonework next to the head of the figure on the far left.  A later artist added the top portion of the painting.  It originally filled the arch above Gersaint's shop and was meant to advertise the place.  Gersaint's shop was definitely not the expansive store that we see in Watteau's picture.  It was tiny, barely a booth on the Pont Notre Dame.  Gersaint's shop was similar to the jewelry shops in Florence on the Ponte Vecchio, only smaller.  The painting lasted only 15 days in its intended location, and advertised Watteau even more than Gersaint's shop.  The painting attracted crowds of admirers including many artists, and eventually a buyer.  The painting was modified repeatedly after Watteau's death.  It was transformed from an arch into a quadrilateral shape, and then cut in two pieces down the middle.  All of these changes happened before the King of Prussia, Frederick the Great, bought the picture in 1748.

In this painting, Watteau leaves behind the wandering actors in the woods, and their young followers from Paris, and returns to the solid respectable world of the urban bourgeoisie, and very slyly shows them in the throes of barely repressed passion.  The passing of time forms an undercurrent in this painting as it does in all of Watteau's work, but here with more wit and sympathy than in his previous works.

The painting today is literally cut in two, but Watteau intended us to see it as a sequence between halves divided by the perspective of the shop.

  On the left half, we see a gentleman offer his hand to assist a beautiful and beautifully dressed woman entering the shop from the street.  We see her from the back dressed in luminous rose silk never painted more brilliantly than here, a cascade of luminous folds.  As she steps into the shop, the hem of her dress reveals a slight surprising glimpse of her blue-green stocking.  She looks to her left to see a shop employee packing up a painting of King Louis XIV, a reference to his death 5 years before and to the passing of an era; from the gloomy piety of Louis' final days to the relieved hedonism of the Regency.  Another shop employee prepares to pack a mirror on top of the painting.  Behind the lady and the gentleman are paintings of nudes, perhaps the loves of Jupiter, a sly revelation of what truly transpires between these 2 respectable young people.

In so much of Watteau's work, music is the food of love, but here art takes on that role in the right hand part of Gersaint's shop sign.

On the left, an elderly couple with their backs to us enthusiastically study an oval shaped painting of nudes in the woods, perhaps Diana with her virgins bathing, or more likely the nymphs of the forest having fun.  Watteau cleverly suggests that this elderly couple is animated by the happy memories of past pleasures suggested by the painting.  To the right is a gathering of young people and the suggestions of hoped for pleasures and anticipated futures.  In another glorious display of painterly fireworks, Watteau paints another shining cascade of silk on a lovely young woman as she leans back to share the view in a small table mirror displayed by a shop girl.  Two young gentlemen appear to be looking at the mirror, but are more likely looking at the young lady, who is probably using the mirror to study them.  The shop girl is herself an object of attention.  The top tier of paintings on the wall behind the group show more nudes in passionate love scenes.  Watteau again slyly reveals what the young lady and 2 young gentlemen hope for.  The painting between the shop girl showing the mirror and the young gentlemen shows the Holy Family, perhaps suggesting what the the attractive shop girl really hopes for.

I've always loved Watteau's work for its magical subtlety of technique and especially for its rich complexity of feeling.   People have long told me that I have a fine painting technique, but mine looks so ham-handed compared to Watteau (I'm not being modest, only candid).  I could never match that sure hand and that light touch if I lived to be a thousand.  I've painted some expressive faces in my day, but nothing anywhere close to the complexity of Gilles or the Shop Sign.
I am happy to say that I am not the only artist enchanted by Watteau's work.  He had a big influence on English painters.  He decisively influenced Gainsborough.  Joshua Reynolds, of all people, loved Watteau's work.  Another surprising fan of Watteau was the great Romantic painter Turner.  In the 20th century, sour old Lucian Freud was a big fan, and painted an homage to Watteau.

A couple of other favorite paintings of mine:

Antoine Watteau, The Music Party (Les Charmes de Vie), This beautiful painting shows a group of people making music and creating a small domain of affection among themselves.  A young musician playing a large lute dominates the center, his shape silhouetted against the distance and the sky.  The columns on the left echo his casual pose, stepping up on a stool to create a support for his instrument.  The people in this painting may not be lovers so much as friends.  Small children play with dogs.  Another dog very inelegantly licks himself on the right, a little quotidian touch recalling Watteau's experiences with Dutch painting (this same dog appears in the lower right corner of Gersaint's Shop Sign).  One young woman tries with mixed success to engage the children in song.  In the shadows, a young man tries to distract another young woman who is trying to listen.  Watteau's friend and fellow Flemish painter Nicolas Vleughels appears standing to the far left.

Antoine Watteau, La Perspective, another very fine painting of lovers finding happiness in the forest.  Once again, the trees echo the forms of the strolling lovers.

Rosalba Carriera, Portrait of Antoine Watteau

Richard Wagner Turns 200 Today

A lot of music lovers' guiltiest pleasure has his bicentennial today.

He was an evil old bastard, but he really was a brilliant composer.  Here is the opening to Das Rheingold.  Phillip Glass, eat your heart out!







Personally, I'm partial to Parsifal.






The late great Bruno Walter conducts a brilliant rendition of the Good Friday Spell from Parsifal.




There's a great story that Mark Twain, who hated Wagner and all that he stood for, took his wife to Bayreuth for her birthday.  She was a devoted fan of Wagner's music.  He sat with her through the whole Ring cycle without a murmur of complaint.

Now that's love.


Happy Birthday Richard Wagner you old son of a bitch!  Thanks for the music and never mind about the rest.

By the way, a lot of the best conductors of your music are Jewish.   Ha!

Is Homophobia Dying?

Yesterday in Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, far right historian Dominique Venner shot himself dead by the high altar in front of thousands of horrified tourists.  Police did not disclose the content of his suicide note.  But, he wrote on his blog just hours before his death, condemning France's new marriage equality law and concluded with these ominous words:

New spectacular and symbolic actions are needed to wake up the sleepwalkers and shake the anaesthetised consciousness...
 We are entering a time when acts must follow words.

This is the sad final act of a man driven to self-destruction by his fears and hatreds, and perhaps a very bad omen of extremist acts to come.  Indeed, Marine Le Pen of the far right National Front is already calling Venner's suicide a "political act."

Dominique Venner was a brilliant award winning historian mostly specializing in military history, with a long record of far right views and actions.  He opposed Algerian independence and supported the attempted military coup against the French government by right wing generals in 1961.  Venner was involved in a plot to assassinate Charles de Gaulle in 1962.  He saw the biggest threat in immigration from Muslim countries.  He embraced the European right wing vision of a "clash of civilizations" between Islam and the West.  In his final years, he was a ferocious opponent of marriage equality and gay lesbian emancipation.

Opposition to marriage equality and gay rights is losing the political and social war in the West after many years of struggle.  Despite massive and violent demonstrations by the far right in the streets of Paris, public support for the marriage bill remains strong in France.  In the USA last year, election results in 4 states proved a major seismic shift in public opinion on gay issues that caught most of the professional political class off guard (though those of us paying attention over the past 4 decades could see this coming, just not quite so suddenly).  Fifteen countries around the world now have marriage equality laws.  Britain may soon make that number 16.  In the USA, 12 states now have marriage equality with the District of Columbia and 3 Native American tribes.  Illinois and California may soon make the number 14 bringing most of the population of the USA under marriage equality laws.  There are similar state laws in Mexico and Brazil.  In the USA, in parts of Latin America, the Pacific, and in much of the West, this is the result of years of political struggle, changing public attitudes as gays and lesbians become more visible and familiar, and generational change.

Our opposition is feeling deeply threatened now.  As the tide has so suddenly and dramatically turned in our favor over the last few years, expect to see acts of desperation and violence in a gathering backlash.  There have been 25 homophobic assaults and one murder already within the last 3 weeks in New York City, historically a refuge for gays and lesbians going back more than a century.  Expect more in other parts of the country and around the world.

Homophobia plays the same role at the beginning of the 21st century that antisemitism did a century ago.  It is a focus for anger and opposition to modernity and to Western liberalism.  Homophobia frequently finds itself linked to antifeminism since both stand for a drastic change in traditional sexual hierarchies.  The obsessive terror of feminine sexuality and autonomy shared by all religious fundamentalist movements fits perfectly with their demonization of gays and lesbians.
Hatred of modern cosmopolitanism, secularism, liberal egalitarianism, and the alienation created by global market capitalism drives the ferocity of the enemies of gay lesbian emancipation.  They see same-sexuality as the last straw, the final insult to what they always assumed to be a timeless ordering of society and nature.

Those passions are as strong as they are unreasonable.  Expect them to manifest themselves violently as we continue to make progress politically and socially.

Homophobia is losing the war, but it is far from dead.  We are winning, but we have not yet won.  Despite progress in marriage legislation in the USA, there is still no protection in federal law against housing and employment discrimination for gays and lesbians.  There is no clear legal declaration anywhere that gays and lesbians are indeed covered by the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.  In 29 states, gays and lesbians are effectively second class citizens who enjoy few to no legal protections.  Gays and lesbians remain the most frequent victims of violence and hate crimes.  Gay and lesbian teens continue to have a disproportionately high rate of suicide.

While much progress has been made, there is still a long way to go.

***

 IT has further thoughts on our progress and the continuing struggle that are well worth reading.

Speaking of Violence as a Fact of Life for Gay Men ...

Here is some empirical evidence hot off the press:

A gay man was shot in the face and killed last night in Greenwich Village here in New York about midnight.

A 32-year-old man was shot once in the face and rushed to Beth Israel Hospital, where he was pronounced dead. The victim's identity has not been revealed yet.  

 [Police Commissioner Raymond] Kelly said about 15 minutes before the shooting, the suspected gunman was urinating on the outside wall of a West Village bar, and then walked into the bar and threatened the bartender with a silver pistol. The suspect then left the bar, joined two other men and then the three confronted the victim and a male companion, who were walking south on Sixth Avenue. 

 The alleged shooter called the victim and companion anti-gay slurs several times and asked if they were "gay wrestlers," according to Kelly. After the victim was shot once in the cheek, the suspect fled to MacDougal Street and West 3rd Street. There, Kelly said the alleged gunman dropped his weapon and was caught by police.

The Police Commissioner went on to say that this clearly was a hate crime.  This is the fourth anti-gay crime in mid Manhattan in 3 weeks and clearly the most serious.

Photo from the New York Post of the suspect in police custody

The guy is clearly messed up in the head, but how many want to bet that "Jesus" "told" him to do this?



UPDATE:

The murder victim has been identified.  His name is Mark Carson.

The suspect, who was carrying a fake ID at the time of his arrest, has been identified as Elliot Morales.  His 2 companions that night are still at large.



Local activists organized a vigil at the murder site last night.

Hat tip to JoeMyGod.

Shocking Indeed: International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia

The BBC this morning is reporting shock over a European Union poll on anti-gay violence across Europe. "A quarter of gay people surveyed in a major EU poll say they have been subjected to attacks or violent threats in the past five years," reads the headline.  I'm not shocked at all.  If anything, I'm surprised that the number is only 25%.

Violence is a constant fact of life for all LGBTs regardless of gender, race, class, age, or nationality.  The very real threat of violence is always there, and so much a part of daily life for us that sometimes we fail to even notice it.  I remember participating in a kind of sharing group for gay men in New York in the mid 1990s; not a therapy group, more just a get together and share experiences group (the AIDS crisis was still at its peak at the time).  The group was mostly affluent professionals in their 30s and 40s, mostly white.  I remember a session when the subject of violence came up, and the moderator of the discussion asked if anyone had ever been physically or verbally assaulted for being gay.  The first reaction was general denial, each participant said that they had never suffered any abuse for being gay.  But then after awhile, the memories and the stories began coming out.  By the end of the evening, it became clear that just about everyone in that group had been singled out and abused in some way for being gay.  A couple of participants in the group told harrowing tales of being badly beaten.  One of them told a story about being very badly beaten in Central Park and barely escaping with his life.

Michael was a regular victim of violence and intimidation in his younger days.  The humiliation and assaults he suffered in high school were so bad that he seriously considered dropping out.  He still thinks dropping out and getting a GED would have been preferable to sticking it out for another year.  In his senior year, he finally had enough.  One of his tormentors pushed him too far one day.  It took a vice principal and a football coach to keep Michael from drowning the dude in a toilet in the boys' room.  Another one that year got a broken nose after he pushed Michael too far.  I don't agree with or advocate violence in any way, but Michael did enjoy a few weeks of peace at the end of his senior year.  People left him alone.
Since Michael doesn't exactly blend in very well with more conventional crowds, he still can be a lightning rod attracting verbal abuse.  Curiously, a lot of other more conventional people love him for it (he's a celebrity at the diner across the street from us with the waitresses, the retirees, the crossing guards, and the city sanitation workers who work or regularly have breakfast there; they always greet him by name).

I consider myself to be very fortunate.  I certainly have been menaced and threatened many times, especially when I was younger, but I've never been physically assaulted.  I certainly knew a lot of people who did suffer more than verbal assaults, and had the scars to show for it.  I remember back when I lived in Kansas City, MO back in the late 1970s, gay men there were very closeted and sitting ducks for violent crime.  I knew many who got robbed and beat up on their way home from the bars and discos on the weekends.  I knew one young man with a mouthful of silver teeth; he was pistol whipped in the mouth during one such robbery.

I knew lots of trans people who were assaulted so often that they expected it.  In New York in the 1990s most of them were prepared for it.  The tranny girls I knew all carried pepper spray and many of them carried knives and knew how to use them.  They all had many stories to tell about being jumped or punched or stabbed out on the street.

Mindful of all of this, that Good Christian People who've long dominated everything cry that they are "oppressed" just because they now find themselves and their views newly marginalized is the height of unmitigated gall.  Tell it to Harvy Milk, Marsha P. Johnson, Fanny Ann Eddy, Daniel Zamudio, Matthew Shepard, or David Kato among thousands of others who really did walk that Via Dolorosa all the way to their deaths.

***

So, what are your experiences?  Did you ever have to escape with your life?  How about you straight folk out there?  Did you ever have to take it on the chin (verbally or physically) for being our friend?

Assault on a Russian gay rights activist last year

EXTRA:

I wonder how many people remember this massacre of gay men here in the good ol' USA, the 1973 Upstairs Lounge fire in New Orleans that killed 32 people?  This remains the deadliest fire in New Orleans' history.  The crime was never solved.  Radio DJs in New Orleans made light of the victims.  Churches in the city closed their doors to funerals for the victims.  Fr. William P. Richardson held a memorial service for the victims at St. George's Episcopal Church and for his trouble was reprimanded by the local bishop and received complaints from 100 parishoners and a mailbox stuffed with hate mail.

EXTRA:

I sometimes think that gay men in particular have a conditioned reflex not to take ourselves or our experiences seriously.  Never is that more clear than when it comes to the violence that many of us have experienced and which menaces us all.  We can't even remember what happened to us individually or collectively.
I wonder if anything similar is true for lesbians?  I suspect this might also be true for trans people.  What do you think?

"You're Gonna Make It After All!" Minnesota Makes It 12

Marriage Equality comes to the Land O Lakes.




The vote in the Senate today was close, 37 to 30.  The Governor will sign the bill.

Michelle Bachman is ever so pissed and threatening to leave the state.  Please God, don't send her to New York!



Even the state bird is happy.








Matt Baume of AFER reminds us that progress will slow to a crawl once marriage equality starts to hit those 30 states that amended their constitutions to keep the fags from marrying.



EXTRA:

Michelangelo Signorile reminds us how far Minnesota has come in so short a time.

Minnesota is the first marriage equality state in which just a few short months ago analysts were still predicting gay marriage would be banned in the state's constitution in a ballot measure. And that dramatic turnaround underscores how rapidly public opinion is changing everywhere. Just two years ago Minnesota's then-Republican-led legislature voted to put a gay marriage ban on the ballot in 2012. Of the four states voting on gay marriage in the fall of 2012, Minnesota was viewed by political analysts and many gay activists as the long shot for a win by gays. But, in addition to beating back that measure, just six months later the Land of 10,000 Lakes has shown us what equality is all about. 

 Minnesota's marriage equality win also represents a stinging blow to the anti-gay evangelical right. This is the state that brought us Michele Bachmann, a GOP member of Congress who was running for president just a year ago, and an evangelical Christian who made her political career by pushing boilerplate religious bigotry about gays, including comparing them to Satan. With a husband, Marcus, who runs "pray away the gay" clinics in Minnesota, she's been a leader in the religious right across the country, even often taking credit for organizing anti-gay activists in Minnesota to get the marriage amendment on the ballot last fall. It was the hope of anti-gay forces nationwide that Michele Bachmann would keep the tide of gay marriage back. But the floodgates have opened.

Ufta!


MORE EXTRA:

A Tweet from Dan Savage:

The New World Trade Center Tops Out (Really)

My picture of the top of the new WTC from Calyer Street in Greenpoint, Brooklyn

"A skyscraper is a machine that makes the land pay."  -- architect Cass Gilbert


The new World Trade Center really has topped out this time.  The final 2 sections were hauled up to the top of the spire and bolted on early this morning.  The building is not finished.  The top of it isn't even finished.  The broadcast ring is still under construction, and it won't be until next year before enough of the interior is completed to open.  Still, this is a major milestone in the building's construction.


My pictures taken today, May 10, 2013, about noon of the topped out World Trade Center; taken at my usual spot by the East River Ferry port in Williamsburg, Brooklyn

Pictures taken this morning by a park ranger on Ellis Island of the topping out of the new World Trade Center:

My pictures over the years of the death and resurrection of the World Trade Center:

This is the only picture I have that I took of the old WTC, a picture from the roof of my building at 256 East 10th Street in July of 1994.

This is a detail from that 1994 picture.

One of my pictures of the destruction of the WTC on September 11th, 2001; the second plane crash.

From Liberty/Zuccotti Park in 2011; I was on my way home from a visit to the Occupy encampment there.

From the East River Ferry port in Williamsburg, September, 2010

From the same place, February, 2011

From the same place today, May 10, 2013

I must confess that I've very much enjoyed watching this prodigious project go up; so much so that its completion will be an anticlimax for me.  I've never seen so large a construction project in all my life, and I'm sure I will never see anything like it again.

I don't know if there's ever been a major building that has been through such a life, death, and resurrection cycle as this.  The only ones I can think of are all from far back in history.  The Parthenon was one such building and Chartres Cathedral was another, buildings that replaced earlier monuments destroyed by catastrophe.  Of course this building does not measure up to either of those monuments which set standards for architecture for centuries to come.  No one will ever say that about this building.  I seriously doubt that this building will last as long as both of those have.  I don't think terrorists will destroy it again.  I think it will simply become obsolete, and probably sooner rather than later.  The World Trade Center was not built for the ages, neither this one nor the first one.  It was and is again a commercial venture built in an era that doesn't really believe in anything like "the ages."  Now, and only now, is all that matters.  We are afraid of the past, and we don't really believe in the future, certainly not like our grandparents did even 50 years ago.

That doesn't necessarily mean that this huge pile of steel and glass is meaningless.  I can think of no other commercial construction project anywhere at any time involving so much tangled and powerful emotion.  There is no other commercial project anywhere incorporating death and resurrection imagery, and even a cemetery, at its center.  This office complex and transportation hub is also the final resting place of more than a thousand people, and a memorial to thousands more.  So many emotions of grief, anger, and injured national and civic pride are incorporated into a commercial project that may not be able to fully carry them all.

But is that really the fault of the buildings if they cannot successfully carry all that emotional weight?

Our largest and most ambitious buildings reflect our deepest and most sincere convictions.  Nothing else could possibly sustain the energy required to build such things.  As I've said many times, the towers looming over Manhattan and city centers around the world are our real cathedrals reflecting what we really believe despite what we say we believe.  The World Trade Center, all of Manhattan's towers, and every skyline proclaim our faith in the transformative power of money, the god who really does work the miracles, and upon whom we all pin our hopes for salvation.  Money may not be a transcendent god, but it is a god nonetheless.  The power, and the success, of that belief drives these buildings upward.  Just as much as in the days of temples and cathedrals, our own pride drives these things up as well.  They are huge monuments of ego, individual and collective.  Our belief in money and success is not prepared to deal with death and catastrophe.  The ambivalence of this project reflects our ambivalence about those issues.  We don't believe in misfortune any more than the ancients did.  We no longer believe in curses from angry gods repaying us for transgressions, but we cling to no less a superstition that says that we are all the sole authors of our destinies.

Art and architecture are vainglorious things, and huge prodigious constructions like this one are especially vain and hubristic.  And yet, we should all be poorer without them.  There is not a single monument on the earth that doesn't have some smell about it.  Monuments ranging from the Great Wall of China to the US Capitol were built with slave labor.  The Parthenon was paid for with embezzled funds.  The people of Reims rioted over the taxes levied to pay for their cathedral, and the people of Laon killed their bishop over the taxes he levied to pay for his cathedral.  In our admiration for the dark spirituality of Hagia Sophia, we forget that it was originally the Emperor's palace chapel and reflects the imperial ambitions of Emperor Justinian who had it built.  Even the houses of Frank Lloyd Wright carry their taints of corruption.  And yet no one is sorry that any of these were built.  We are more sorry when they are destroyed.

I thought of this scene from Fritz Lang's Metropolis today:






What I've always thought curious is that this version of the story is closer to Jewish rabbinical understandings than to Christian interpretations.  In the Midrashic literature, the Tower of Babel is indeed a rebellion against God, but the rabbis saw it as the creation not only of human pride but of cruelty as well.  One story says that the Tower rose so high that it took a year to hoist bricks to the top.  As a result, each fallen and broken brick was given a funeral while fallen workers were thrown out with the rubbish.

I don't see the World Trade Center as any kind of rebellion against God (our age doesn't believe in God anyway).  I don't see it as any great pyramid built by toiling slaves.  Compared to the thousands upon thousands who toiled on ziggurats and pyramids in ancient times, the World Trade Center is being built by a small army of skilled and highly paid specialists, almost all of whom are unionized and display the union insignia prominently at the construction site.

I do see the Tower as the creation of pride and hubris.

Perhaps Wagner comes closer to our tower in the final scene of Das Rheingold (Wagner goes great with New York's architectural and engineering prodigies).  The storm clouds and mists part to reveal the newly completed Valhalla.  It is the work of the giants Fafner and Fasolt.  It was paid for by gold stolen from the Rhine Maidens.  The giants quarrel over the gold and Fasolt lies dead reminding all of the crime that underwrote Valhalla's construction.  Loge recoils in revulsion at all of this as the Rhine Maidens sing mournfully of their stolen gold.  Wotan salutes the magnificent new fortress and leads the gods over a rainbow bridge into Valhalla at the conclusion.





Indeed, there was a lot of scandal and pride behind the construction of the first World Trade Center, the complete destruction of an entire neighborhood on the lower West Side.  There were the Rockefeller brothers Nelson and David using their money and influence on state and city governments to use eminent domain laws to clear residents out the proposed site.  Only a small Greek Orthodox church was spared.  I doubt you will find anything better in the history of any other prodigious construction in history.  These histories are witness to basic human animal selfishness and to the crapulence of the universe.

Great monuments, great art, and other great accomplishments are more often than not testimony to what we can do despite ourselves.



EXTRA:

Here are the Port Authority's usual faint-inducing close ups of the installation of the final piece of the spire yesterday.  These also give you an idea of just how big all of this is.

Was the crew that put the cap stone on the top of the Great Pyramid of Khufu this proud and this happy?  Probably not.  The crews that put the last stone in place on the spire of Strasbourg Cathedral or the cross on the top of Saint Peter's dome probably were.

Bravo guys!


And here's the silent video: