Definitely one of the fathers of LGBT rights

I looked at Michigan’s COVID data, updated Wednesday. I get the data here (the website and its address have been updated). The number of new cases per day has gone up again. For the last three weeks the peak has been 1300, 1949, and 2529. The number of deaths per day remain low. In the last 10 days the number has been 8 and less. The Freep Film Fest is happening now. That strange word in the title is the common nickname for the Detroit Free Press. This is the 9th year in which the newspaper had sponsored a festival of documentary films that have something to do with Michigan. This year I bought tickets to three of them, one of which I’ll watch from home. Last night I went to an actual theater to see the premier of America, You Kill Me. It is the story of Jeff Montgomery who started the Triangle Foundation, a Detroit organization working for LGBT rights. The title comes from his speech at the first Matthew Shepard Memorial Lecture at Brown University. The movie was to have been premiered at the 2020 festival, which was canceled. The two years since allowed the director to more finely edit the film. The movie wasn’t good on attaching years to various events, so I found Montgomery in Wikipedia. In 1984 he and his boyfriend Michael were to the point of considering they would together buy a house (the Frank Lloyd Wright house in the Palmer Park neighborhood). But Michael was murdered outside a gay bar – and the Detroit Police said they would not investigate because they didn’t have the resources for “just another gay killing.” That stepped up Montgomery’s activism, and in 1991 he and a couple others formed the Triangle Foundation. They went to LGBT bars with business cards that said if you are in trouble call. That meant they were receiving calls up to 3am. Then working a day job. Montgomery worked to end police entrapment, “bag a fag,” programs. This is when an officer pretends to ask for gay sex and when the other guy agrees arrests him for indecency. Those efforts ruined a lot of lives. Some of of these sting operations were at highway rest stops. Montgomery used a good way to combat them – he invited a lot of gay friends to a picnic at a rest stop. Of course, plainclothes police were there. Many who attended knew which ones were the police and made sure they were included in the legal party. He was active in the Scott Amedure case. On the TV show Jenny Jones Amedure, a gay man, surprised another man by saying he had a crush on him. Three days later that other man murdered Amedure. At the trial the defense tried to say it was the show’s fault for ambushing their client that way. Montgomery worked with the prosecutor to shut down the gay panic defense – a man should not fly into a panic/rage simply because another guy expresses sexual interest. Though those three days meant the murder was premeditated the killer was convicted with second degree murder instead of first – the jury was still swayed a bit by the gay panic defense. Montgomery compiled statistics, trained public prosecutors, and spoke to government officials at the city, county, state, and national level. Former Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm was in the film saying how much he helped her set up pro LGBT policies even when the Legislature and state Supreme Court were controlled by Republicans. When a legislator said he couldn’t support a bill because there were no gay people in his district, Montgomery was soon back with a gay person from his district. Montgomery also started a network of LGBT advocacy groups similar to the Triangle Foundation. Through that he and colleagues across the country went to Washington to meet with the Clinton administration. Alas, Montgomery was in great pain due to an autoimmune disease. He tried to control the pain through alcohol, though he had been sober for 19 years. He started showing up drunk. He was far more progressive, working for the rights of transgender people and sex workers, than his white donors were comfortable with. A second organization, Michigan Equality, was formed. In 2007 Montgomery’s progressive views and health issues prompted his ouster – early retirement – from Triangle. Soon Triangle and Michigan Equality combined to form Equality Michigan – and the movie and crowd last night had comments about how ineffectual they have become. The victim advocacy that Montgomery built has fallen away and their legislative lobbying seems ineffective. Even worse, after Montgomery was ousted the Detroit LGBT community ignored him. He died in 2016, after being interviewed for this movie. I certainly knew about Montgomery from the many articles about him in Between the Lines, Michigan’s LGBTQ newspaper. I’m sure I saw him at an event or two, though never actually met him. I was a donor to Triangle for many years, and even did a day of volunteer work at their office in Detroit (which was hard to find because they didn’t put the name on the building for security reasons). I still donate to Equality Michigan, though I now wonder if my money would be better spent elsewhere. I recommend this film. Jeff Montgomery is definitely one of the fathers of LGBT rights. Jillian Orr just graduated from Brigham Young University. BYU is run by the Mormon church and which bans same-sex relations. Orr is bisexual and had to hide her relationship with a woman. She received her diploma in January though participated in the recent graduation ceremony. She used that as a chance to make a statement. She and her sisters sewed a pride flag into the inside of her graduation gown and once on stage and past the dignitaries she flashed the colors. In a Ukraine update Mark Sumner of Daily Kos wrote about the fuel depots in Russia that have exploded. Ukraine was careful to hit the depots – and not civilian areas. These explosions mean Russia will have a harder time storing fuel near the fighting. Sumner quoted a conversation between father and soldier son that was tweeted by Dmitri. In what could be dark comedy they discuss what weapons the son might steal – Can you get rifles? Sorry Dad, want an anti-tank thingie, a rocket? I don’t need that – can you get pistols? No one here has pistols – do you want a land mine? No, don’t need that. Sumner discussed the most important vehicle in the military. Not the tank, but the jeep, or its modern equivalent, the Humvee. The troops need to get around somehow. Over the last couple months I’ve learned a great deal about the military – a lot more than I wanted to know. Kos of Kos discussed that yeah, Russia has taken over this town and that, but there isn’t an overall strategy. One would think Russia would be trying to encircle Donbas. So why is Russia attacking west of Izyum? Kos included a tweet from Julia Davis:

Russian state TV is raging about WWIII and an inevitable escalation over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Citizens are being primed to believe that even the worst outcome is a good thing, because those dying for the Motherland will skyrocket to paradise. Just when you thought Russian airwaves could not get any more bizarre, Putin’s puppets have now surrendered to the idea of nuclear apocalypse, because at least they’ll “go to heaven.”

If I remember right Charlemagne tried that trick and was rather successful at it. I learned about that from a book on early Christian history, titled Saving Paradise by Brock & Parker. In the centuries after Jesus Christianity was focused on his life. Starting at the time of Charlemagne the emphasis shifted from the life of Jesus to his death. We’ve been dealing with that ever since. In another Ukraine update Sumner quoted the same video posted by Julia Davis mentioned above and added this comment:

Think of Putinism as next-stage Trumpism: Oh, sure, we’re all going to die, but that’s a good thing because we get to go out while expressing our hate for everyone else. It’s all the worst things about radical jihad, in a western suit. Oh, and with nukes.

Sumner reported that while people, both civilians and military, are safe in the tunnels below the Azovstal factory in Mariupol, they aren’t safe if they need to go to the surface. Russia shelled a field hospital in the complex and reportedly dozens died. In an update from Thursday afternoon Sumner discussed the two towns Popasna and Pervomaisk that are two miles apart. Before this war Popasna was controlled by Ukraine, Pervomaisk by the Donbas separatist forces. I had mentioned the pair in a previous post. Sumner thinks these must be the longest two miles in the world. “How else to account for Russia reporting ‘steady progress’ in Popasna for 12 days in a row, without actually taking Popasna?” Maria Pevchikh of the Anti-Corruption Foundation did a long thread on classical music conductor Valery Gergiev. The reason he is the topic is because he is an ardent Putin supporter. He also asks for donations for various musical efforts and much of the money goes into his pockets. Gergiev has been quite in demand as a conductor, working in front of orchestras across Europe and the US. He did such a fine job during his tenure in Rotterdam he was given honorary Dutch citizenship, though he didn’t give up his Russian citizenship. Prevchikh wrote Gergiev’s usefulness to Putin can be described this way:

They came up with a simple formula targeted at the Western audience: You love Gergiev and his talent → Gergiev loves Putin → Therefore, you should like Putin too. Maybe Putin isn’t that bad if your favourite musician endorses him. Just think about it. Reconsider.

That Gergiev conducts memorial concerts for Putin’s victims – such as the plane shot down over Ukraine in July 2014 – is a nice cover. How does Prevchikh know the grieving for victims isn’t genuine? Gergiev was awarded by Putin the job of Directorate of the Imperial Theaters, of both they Mariinsky in St. Petersburg and Bolshoi in Moscow. Gergiev also owns several properties worth millions of dollars in NYC and across Italy. One doesn’t own this much expensive land on a conductor’s salary.