You cut off the art, you cut off the soul

Kos of Daily Kos discussed how much the nasty guy idolized and seemed to be controlled by Putin of Russia. Things are changing.

Yet a funny thing has happened. Trump slobbered over Putin, believing that he and Russia are strong and mighty, serving as an example for his own imperialist and undemocratic designs. But Russia is not strong and mighty. In fact, Russia has run out of tools to prop up its failing economy. And out-of-control inflation, sky-high interest rates, and lower global energy prices have put Putin in a precarious position. Somehow, Trump noticed this, and his disdain couldn’t be clearer. We just might have somehow lucked into a pro-Ukraine Trump presidency.

The disdain shows up in the nasty guy’s tweets and calls for Russia to end the war in Ukraine. Kos quoted a passage. I won’t. Kos goes into why Russia’s economy is so bad. Putin has used up resources needed to pay for the war and inflation is now high. His groveling before Kim of North Korea for war aid doesn’t help his image. China seems hesitant to invest in Russia, but wants the war to continue because that keeps Western eyes off Taiwan. So the nasty guy might become pro-Ukraine. Some Republicans might too. Kos says if he really wants to make a difference in that war he should give Ukraine the long range weapons Biden wouldn’t. Morgan Stephens of Kos wrote that a memo from the Department of Justice shows how the nasty guy intends to force sanctuary cities and states to comply with his deportation agenda. Having the DoJ carry it out (rather than Homeland Security?) seems to be the plan. And this may be why:

The memo asserts that state and local officials must comply with the department under the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause, otherwise they could face criminal prosecution or civil violation charges. “Federal law prohibits state and local actors from resisting, obstructing and otherwise failing to comply with lawful immigration-related commands and requests,” the memo said. “The U.S. Attorney’s Offices and litigating components of the Department of Justice shall investigate incidents involving any such misconduct for potential prosecution.”

Stephens offers a bit of hope:

On Tuesday, former Rep. Adam Kinzinger, who has been a vocal Republican critic of Trump, shared some profound advice on how to handle the president. “If you stand up to Trump you intimidate him and he will back down,” he wrote on Bluesky. “If you crawl to him (like his sycophantic politicians) he will not respect you and will eventually throw you under the bus.”

I hope Democrats are able to acquire spine strengtheners. There are weaknesses to be exploited. Congress has passed the Laken Riley Act with several Democrats voting for it (which is several too many). The nasty guy will no doubt sign it. The act says that if an undocumented person is accused of a crime they should be detained for deportation. Walter Einenkel of Kos has a few things to say about that bill and deportations. Pardoning the 1500 criminals who attacked the Capitol has blown up the reason for deportations to “keep criminals off the street.” Back to the bill. Note the word accused. That means noncitizens may lose the right to due process. Another source said a landlord could use the threat of an accusation to keep noncitizen renters in line (as in over charging them or under maintaining the property).

"So when a private prison camp opens in your town and they say ‘we didn't know this was going to happen,’ know that they did, and they voted for it,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “When a dreamer is disappeared from your classroom, when the president of the United States destroys what is left of the Constitution—as he's announced in his attack on birthright citizenship—they will all say, ‘we didn't know this was coming,’” she concluded. “And I want the American people to know that they did. This vote represents it."

In a pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted the Harvard Business Review’s article on how deportations could be disastrous to the US food supply.

Most people probably assume the undocumented group is unskilled labor, but our interviews with four growers with operations in Florida and California and people at industry associations suggest the opposite. “We would lose a lot of our skilled workers,” said one California strawberry grower. “Some of our more skilled people have been here for 20 or 30 years, and they speak English.” One profile that he shared was that of a highly skilled supervisor who makes important daily decisions on planting and harvesting. Another was a skilled mechanic. A third was a crew boss with decades of experience. “These are people who came over in the mid-1980s and 1990s. They have been paying taxes and social security, but they never went through the citizenship process,” the grower said. Labor was 40% of his costs, and Trump’s statements have filled these workers and their employers with anxiety over their uncertain futures.

Dworkin also included a tweet by Aaron Reichlin-Melnick:

Leaked documents from the Trump admin show that ICE wants four new detention centers with 10,000 beds each, and fourteen smaller facilities with 700-1,000 beds each. That would likely mean tens of billions in taxpayer funds sent to private prison companies. They are salivating.

Reichlin-Melnick also included a tweet by Aaron Rupar:

AOC: “I want folks at home to look at what members of Congress are invested in private prison companies, and look at the votes on this bill. It is atrocious that people are lining their pockets with private prison profits in the name of a horrific tragedy.”

In the comments are memes and cartoons to share. A cartoon by Matt Reuter showing a man talking to his wife while pointing to the weather app on his phone, “It says it’s nineteen degrees out, but the general lack of empathy in our current political climate is making it feel colder.” A cartoon by Mike Luckovich showing a woman and man encountering several men labeled “GOP” lying on the ground. She asks “Where’re your spines?” A man on the ground responds, “Trump’s insurrectionists needed ’em to beat cops with.” A cartoon by RJ Matson shows a truck with an elephant driving. In the bed looks like manure labeled “Jan. 6 blanket pardons.” On the tailgate are “The Party of Law and Order” and “Back the Blue.” A cop has stopped the truck and is saying, “I’m going to have to ask you to remove those bumper stickers.” From a meme posted by Middle Age Riot:

Donald Trump: I will pardon the January 6 rioters. Police Unions: We endorse Donald Trump. Donald Trump: I have pardoned the January 6 rioters. Police Unions: What?

A cartoon posted by paulpro (author not displayed) shows a person with a rainbow shirt on the ground as three men beat the person with their bibles, creating a pool of blood. The caption says, “If your religion makes you hate someone, you need a new religion.” When I wrote about Bishop Mariann Budde yesterday I misspelled her name – I was working from a source that misspelled it. This is the correct spelling. A meme posted by exlrrp shows that I had written about her before for doing something quite loving.

Did you know that for 25 years, Matthew Shepard, who was brutally tortured and murdered for being gay, had no permanent resting place due to concerns his grave would be vandalized, and when Reverend Budde learned of this, she invited the Shepards to inter him inside the Washington National Cathedral. She co-officiated the service that welcomed Matthew to a forever home in the church and told the gathering, “20 years of mourning was not enough for someone who is loved. Nor can 20 years heal the grief of such a loss.”

My admiration grows. I’ve been involved with the Reconciling Ministries Network for close to two decades. They’re the group working to make the United Methodist Church more inclusive of LGBTQ people. Many conservative congregations have left. The current denomination rules are much better, though they say a congregation can fully include LGBTQ people, but that they don’t have to. So more work needs to be done. I still get their email newsletter and I’m planning to attend their next convocation this summer. Of course RMN is aware of the political climate and in today’s email has things to keep in mind: + The chaos and terror are the point. They’re designed to make us feel afraid and alone. We’re afraid because the harm is real. But we are not alone. Pastors are preaching courageously to soften hearts of stone. You are worth fighting for. + In times of crisis humans come together. Love recklessly and fiercely. We get creative about resistance and don’t let despair have the last word. + Take lessons from those who’ve experienced apocalypse before, the ones who’ve been through colonialism, political uprisings, natural disasters, genocide, food scarcity, and silencing. + We get free when we all get free. Look to the intersections of your communities. + Do not cancel one another so swiftly that no one is left standing in your circle. Practice gratitude and extend grace. We need one another. Brittany Luse of NPR talked to Colman Domingo, the star of the moving Sing Sing, which just received a few Oscar nominations. Much of the rest of the cast is real-life formerly incarcerated actors. The story is about incarcerated people working together to stage an original musical. Last week it was rereleased and this second time it will be screened in more than a thousand prisons. Luse noted the movie shows examples of healthy masculinity, the men are vulnerable with each other. Domingo explains that to create anything together, including something artistic, people have to leave behind something personal to gain something communal. One thing to leave behind is ego.

LUSE: The other thing that I noticed too is the film - it reminded me how masculinity is not necessarily always inherently defined but enforced. And the way that the men in the film communicated with each other enforced vulnerability as a value and did not enforce that those things made you weak or less than or deserved social punishment. DOMINGO: That - what you just said there was the light bulb for all of us as we were exploring making this film. These men are saying that this is part of our survival, to have all of these feelings, to have all this softness and tenderness. And it has nothing to do with sexuality whatsoever. It's more about mental health. It's about being good and kind to yourself and acknowledging your feelings and acknowledging your heartache, acknowledging your trauma, acknowledging what you feel.

Domingo added they hold each other accountable to actually be vulnerable, to say it’s OK, go there. The men also understood the necessity of art. Domingo said:

I remember when I first started out, I was touring around to junior high schools and high schools performing. And I would note that arts programs were severely cut. The first things to go - art. I thought, why is that? Well, I grew up with arts programs. Why is that? I mean, you cut off the art, you cut off the soul. You cut off people understanding how to be human with each other. You cut that out of schools, there's - I feel like there's a path to the prison industrial complex. Art is not frivolous. Art connects us, and we need it in our society. We need it in our schools. You know, a lot of these men who went through this program, they say, you know, if I had something like this growing up, I probably would never have been here. I would have another way to get out what was inside of me.

We are all going to hell with you

I had a minor annoyance today. Two birds, one at a time, attacked my windows, fluttering against and pecking at the glass. I’m sure they saw their reflections and were fighting the bird they thought was invading their territory. I could wave something inside near the glass and they would fly away. But soon they would be at it again. Both birds were about the size of my fist. One was yellow and white, the other yellow and black. Midday they were at the south-facing windows. In the afternoon they shifted to the west windows. I suppose I could have just let them do their thing since they weren’t damaging the glass, but they were rather noisy about it. My Sunday viewing was two films, each less than an hour. The first was Hans Zimmer, Hollywood Rebel. He has written the music for 150 films and won Oscars for The Lion King (yeah, Elton John wrote the songs, Zimmer wrote all the rest) and just recently for Dune. He was born in Frankfurt, Germany in 1957 and moved to England as a teen. He rebelled against strict discipline in school and the discipline to learn to play the piano lasted about two weeks. So his music is self taught. He started a recording studio with Stanley Myers in the 1980s. In that time he explored how to use synthesizers and computers, both fairly young, to create music. He branched out on his own in 1987 and was on his way to Hollywood with Rain Man in 1988. With that his rebel sensibility was back. Rain Man is a road movie and he didn’t follow the usual instruments used in road movies. In writing the music for the opening scene for Lion King he forgot he was told to limit it to 20 seconds. He was surprised when the director said they didn’t want him to change the music, they would reanimate the opening to fit what he wrote. After several big films, such as Interstellar, he could have lived off big films for the rest of his career. But he wanted variety and practically volunteered to score 12 Years a Slave to do something different. He doesn’t read the script for the movie. Instead, he has a long conversation with the director, which some say is almost like psychoanalysis. He also brings his assistants to meetings so they get exposure and learn how to navigate such meetings. Younger composers talk about how he influenced them. Lately, he has been filling arenas with live performances of his film music and is greeted like a rock star. Retire? Not anytime soon. The second movie was Elephant Whisperers, which won an Oscar for best short documentary. It’s a simple story. Bellie and Bomman, a couple who are grandparents, work at an elephant rehab camp in southern India. During the film baby elephants Raghu and Annu are rescued. Raghu was badly injured and they nursed him back to health, then cared for him for a few years. They said he was like their child. They loved him and saw he loved them back. Care included feeding, bathing, and sometimes decorating him for religious festivals. They are pleased that younger generations are willing and learning to become elephant caretakers. I was delighted when the service this past Sunday at my United Methodist Church started with the good news out of the just concluded General Conference. Our congregation’s song leader talked about the elimination of language harmful to LGBTQ people and explained what a big deal that is. She also talked about the globally centered revised Social Principles, which passed, and the regionalization proposal that lessens the colonization aspects of denomination structure. That bit passed GC and now has to be ratified by subregions (like Michigan). Then the praise choir sang “Draw the Circle Wide.” The big part of the harmful language was the phrase that homosexuality is “incompatible with Christian teaching.” After 52 years of it being part of the denomination rulebook and 40 years of effort to repeal it that is now gone! A lot of other rules were built on that phrase, rules such as an LGBTQ person could not be ordained, pastors could not officiate at same-sex weddings, those weddings could not be held in denomination churches, and money can’t be given to organizations “promoting the acceptance of homosexuality” (like funding programs to reduce LGBTQ suicide rates). All of those are now gone! I talked briefly with a delegate yesterday. She said she was amazed how quickly these proposals passed and that they passed with such high margins. She expected a struggle and there just wasn’t. The congregation song leader later said the denomination still has work to do. One is the healing of those who were hurt in the 40 year struggle. I am one of those. I went to the 2012 GC to urge the vote for removing the incompatibility clause and felt burned by the experience. Another place needing work is the difference between passing legislation and actually getting local congregations to fully accept LGBTQ people. Another proposal that caught my attention was an “Apology for the Illegal Overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom” in the 1890s. It passed. Yes, the Hawaiian Islands had their own monarchy and it was doing quite well for the people. But the United States conquered the islands and eventually allowed it to become a state. If one is curious the Love Your Neighbor Coalition is putting together a legislative summary. On the page already are the three main areas of regionalization, revised social principles, and removal of harmful language. LYNC is the LGBTQ caucus joined with various ethnic caucuses and other groups working towards an inclusive church. Over the last couple weeks the United Methodist Church made a big step towards being an inclusive church. I feel a lot better about being a member. The latest edition of Between the Lines and its online presence at Pridesource included an interview of David Archuleta by Chris Azzopardi. Yes, Archuleta won American Idol back in 2008. Last month he was back on the American Idol stage as a guest and he sang a song he would not have dared to sing when he was a contestant. In the intervening years Archuleta felt stifled by the Mormon Church and left it. He also came out as gay. And the Mormon Church has a very different stance on being gay than the United Methodist Church just passed. Some time after coming out to his mother she texted, “If you’re going to hell, we are all going to hell with you.” She also left the Mormon church. That prompted him to write the song, “Hell Together.” It’s what he sang on the family friendly American Idol stage. He hopes it inspires other parents to to be wholehearted allies to their queer children. The official video of the song is at the bottom of the Pridesource article and is dedicated to his mother. Here’s a bit of what Archuleta said in the interview that matches something I strongly believe:

I feel like, as human beings, we need community. And that's what was so beautiful about religion: it's community and you're there for each other. And so when you leave religion, people think, "Oh, you've lost the meaning of life." It's like, "No, I just have to find community elsewhere," and I have meaning for life again. So I think that's something else, to be encouraging to people who haven't left religion and haven't come out, because they're afraid of losing their community, and feeling like they'll lose their purpose to live. It's like, you know what? There is a community elsewhere and it's beautiful, and it'll give you a whole new sense of meaning to live, and it's wonderful.

Another important article from Pridesource is about the people awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Biden just handed out 19 of them. And one new recipient is Judy Shepard. She’s the mother of Matthew Shepard, who was killed in 1998 in a hate crime that was in the news quite a bit when it happened. Judy and her husband Dennis created the Matthew Shepard Foundation to raise awareness about violent hate crimes committed against LGBTQ people. Judy “was instrumental in working with then-President Barack Obama for passage of the landmark Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act in 2009.” TrueWordsRSpoken posted a cartoon that explains Free Speech in a way that my friend and debate partner would approve. The first couple panels:

The right to free speech means the government can’t arrest you for what you say. It doesn’t mean that anyone else has to listen to your bull----, or host you while you share it.

I’ll end today with a cartoon for music nerds posted by Ron Carter. It shows a car in a repair shop and scratched on the doors is a bit of a musical staff, complete with a clef and a couple sharps. The technician tells the owner:

Your car has been keyed. The good news is that the damage appears to B minor.

Cruelty as a part of American politics

Greg Dworkin, in his pundit roundup for Daily Kos, quoted Adam Serwer in the New York Times. Serwer wrote that the Republican politics of cruelty and exclusion started long before the nasty guy and will continue long after. There has always been a drive for some leaders to restrict blessings to a select few. What the nasty guy accomplished was to show Republicans how much they could get away with. Serwer names quite a few cases where he and they got away with a lot and still do. And the voter suppression laws they push are to make sure they can keep getting away with it. The word “cruelty” above was intentional. Sarah McCammon of NPR spoke to Adam Serwer about his new book The Cruelty is the Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump’s America. I’ve heard that phrase many times over the last few years and didn’t know it came from an essay Serwer wrote in 2018. This is some of what Serwer said in that interview:

Most people think of cruelty as an individual problem. And it is that, but what I'm focused on in the book is cruelty as a part of American politics, specifically the way that it is used to demonize certain groups so you can justify denying people their basic rights under the Constitution and exclude them from the political process.

Alexander Stephens, the vice president of the Confederacy, gave a speech in office declaring the black man is not equal to the white man and deserves to be a slave. But after the Civil War he wrote in his journal that slavery had nothing to do with the war. The most racist people tell themselves that their views aren’t racist. People still do that.

What I mean by cruelty is specifically the demonization of particular groups in order to deny them rights or exclude them from the polity. It's one thing to say that we're not going to allow in people on the basis of religion. It's another thing entirely to say that we are going to shatter families deliberately because we want to dissuade people from trying to come to the United States for a better life. We're always going to have disagreements in a democracy. That's what democracy is for. It's for reconciling disagreements. But what is not necessary is a politics where one side is trying to disenfranchise or exclude the other party's voters in order to maintain a grip on power. And that's what I mean when I talk about cruelty on a political level. ... The politics of cruelty that Trump's employed are a product of a system that encourages a minority of the country to engineer the government so that they are no longer accountable to the public. And Trump's real innovation was showing how much of that the Republican Party can get away with.

Jeff Singer of Kos Elections reviewed the results of the November election through the legislative districts in Michigan. My state is currently highly gerrymandered. Singer showed the GOP advantage by rating all the state House districts by the ratio of the vote for Biden and the nasty guy in the district and comparing that to their ratio in the state overall. Then he looked at the district in the middle. Biden won the state 51% to 48%, yet this middle district went to Biden 47-51. In the much smaller Senate Biden took the median district 44-54. That’s 13 points to the right from the statewide vote. Thankfully, a citizen’s redistricting commission is hard at work to keep this from happening again. I mentioned this next Michigan news briefly in a previous post. Kerry Eleveld of Kos reported the Senate Oversight Committee, led by Republicans, issued a report on the 2020 election. Every Republican on the committee supported the report. The key sentence:

There is no evidence presented at this time to prove either significant acts of fraud or that an organized, wide-scale effort to commit fraudulent activity was perpetrated in order to subvert the will of Michigan voters.

Eleveld wrote:

No mass contingent of dead voters, no suspicious 100% precinct turnouts, no supposed ballot dump in Detroit that propelled Joe Biden to victory in the state, which he won by some 150,000 votes or three percentage points. In a separate statement, Oversight Committee Chair state Sen. Ed McBroom said, "We must all remember: 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof' and 'claiming to find something extraordinary requires first eliminating the ordinary.'" McBroom also called Trump's claims "ludicrous" in an interview with Bridge Michigan and said there's "good reason" to believe the conspiracy pushers were "purposely defrauding people."

Some party member are still pushing for a fraudit in Michigan. Others are concerned that obsessing over the 2020 election will alienate suburban voters in 2022 and 2024. Even with this report – supported by Republicans – the party is still pushing for new voter suppression laws. There are photos defining the character of Mrs. Nasty Guy. I don’t need to share them. SemDem of the Kos community believes a photo from a tweet by Kate Bennett defines the character of the current First Lady Dr. Jill Biden. A middle school student is nervous about getting a vaccination and Dr. Biden is there to hold his hands and shield his eyes from the jab. I’ve missed having a compassionate First Lady. A few weeks ago I heard on Canadian radio about a piece of music titled Considering Matthew Shepard. Yeah, this is about the young man, back in 1998, who was badly beaten and tied to a fence in Laramie, Wyoming. His murder caught national and world wide attention. The latest issue of Between the Lines, Michigan’s LGBTQ newspaper, had a list of five queer things one can do. The University Musical Society in Ann Arbor would stream their Pride offerings into July. This piece of music was one of them. Today I got onto the UMS site and saw this work would only be streamed through tomorrow. Glad I checked. I guess I’m watching this evening. Considering Matthew Shepard was written by Craig Hella Johnson for his thirty member vocal ensemble Conspirare. He played the piano and there were another eight or so instruments. The piece was first performed in 2018. It is about 90 minutes. Through the piece we hear from Matt (excerpts from his journal) and his parents, from the fence that held him up, from the killers, from Fred Phelps (remember him?) and his Westboro Baptist Church, and from the community. The performance included images projected behind the singers. What I saw this evening was, alas, not the whole piece. This video is an hour. In addition to the performance there were scenes of early rehearsals and performances, discussions by the composer, Judy Shepard, and others, and news clips of the events of the time and of related events since then, such as Obama signing the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Act, and the Pulse massacre in Orlando. I now wonder if I can see a video of the whole piece without the commentary. I would like to see and hear more than what was a part of this documentary. I hope I don’t have to wait for a local choir to take it on.

Finally at rest

Those of us who were around in the fall of 1998 remember the national outrage when Matthew Shepard was killed – beaten and tied to a fence in bitter cold weather and left to die. He did a few days later. This was the first time the country had been outraged by the death of a gay man.

Matthew was an active member of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Caspar, WY before his murder. Matthew’s funeral at St. Mark’s was well attended that year. But his ashes were not interred. Parents Dennis and Judy were understandably afraid that whatever location was chosen would be desecrated or be the focus of weird pilgrimages.

Judy Shepard became an LGBT rights activist. Her efforts were helped by Gene Robinson, the first openly gay bishop in the Episcopal Church. He has since retired. Judy asked Gene if Matthew’s ashes could be interred at the National Cathedral in Washington DC, an Episcopal church. Gene helped make it happen.

So on October 26, twenty years after Matthew’s death, his ashes will be laid to rest. There will be a public celebration of life followed by a private interment. I’m delighted to hear the National Cathedral is a place where the ashes of a gay man would be welcome.



This story has made me feel teary for a second reason. My parents’ ashes are just a few feet from where I’m typing these words. It has been more than three years since Dad died. He told me to do nothing with his ashes until after his wife died so they would be handled together. It has been more than a year since Mom died. Last fall was too busy and last spring was too muddy. I’ve started plans for the final trip and I need to finish the details. I’ll have time about a month from now.

Wilde time

I saw a performance at the Hilberry Theatre yesterday. The weather was quite messy, so if I hadn't ordered and paid for a ticket I would not have bothered. Snow fell while I taught yesterday afternoon and highways were slow going for the evening commute. But instead of going home I went to Detroit's Midtown area.

First stop, after a slow drive from the college, was Whole Foods, as in while I'm in the area… By the time I parked near the theater I had only a half hour for supper (though I could have -- and did -- delve into what I had just bought at Whole Foods). I dashed into a Mid-East fast food place on the Wayne State University campus (of which the Hilberry is a part).

The preshow discussion for a very sparse crowd started a bit late. The speaker was John Corvino, a WSU philosophy professor and known as the Gay Moralist. It is his reputation that prompted me to attend last night's performance rather than one with better weather. He gave a bit of background and context for the evening's play, though he didn't enhance the evening's experience all that much.

The play was Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde. The script was written/assembled by Moises Kaufman. He's the same guy who created The Laramie Project about the death of Matthew Shepard and both plays have actors playing multiple roles. Material was taken from the various descriptions of the trial (including the official transcript) and writings of the participants.

Yes, we're talking about the famous Oscar Wilde, the one who wrote the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray and the play The Importance of Being Ernest among lots of other things that skewered Victorian England. I had known the outlines of the 1895 trials: Wilde took Lord Alfred Douglas as an "intimate friend." Alfred's father, Marquess Queensberry who was estranged from his son, objected to the relationship and threatened Wilde. Queensberry left a calling card at Wilde's club, which contained the words, "For Oscar Wilde, posing as a somdomite." He wasn't a good speller. Wilde sued for libel. Queensberry responded that it wasn't libel because it was true. During the trial when Queensberry's lawyer threatened to call several of Wilde's boy-toys as witnesses, Wilde withdrew the suit. That implied Queensberry was telling the truth. And that implied the Crown has a case of gross indecency against Wilde.

I didn't know the second trial ended in a hung jury or that there had been a third trial. I did know the final trial (which I thought was the second) ended in a guilty verdict. Because the crime was so detestable the judge sentenced Wilde to two years of hard labor. The judge thought Wilde deserved more, but the law limited the sentence to two years. Serving that time broke his health. The nature of the crime and the cost of the trials caused his finances to collapse. Wilde died three years after release at the age of 46.

There were two telling moments in the trials. At one time Wilde was asked by the opposing lawyer if he had kissed a particular boy. Wilde said he had not. Why not? "Because he was ugly." Wrong answer. The second was when he was asked, "What is the love that dare not speak its name?" Wilde's response was eloquent and too long to reproduce here. The text is in Wilde's Wikipedia entry.

At the start of the second act the playwright, portrayed by an actor, interviews a college professor about Wilde. It covered some of the same material John Corvino did. One point presented: Is it appropriate for Wilde to be described as gay when he didn't see himself as gay? Part of that is the concept of homosexuality was just making its way into English. That could be argued for a long time.

More importantly is Wilde's contribution to modern thought. Wilde defended Dorian Grey, in spite of its unsavory characters, because the story is told artistically. By the end of the trials Wilde began to see himself as a homosexual. Alas, the "professor" in the play was rambling and the Wikipedia entry doesn't have a section on cultural contributions.

I knew the Hilberry was color-blind when casting. There was a show a few years ago in which a senator in 1950s America had a black actress playing his wife. But I didn't think their casting was gender-blind. This play has nine actors on stage, all but two playing multiple roles. I was surprised that the actor playing lawyer Sir Edward Clarke was female. She and the female playing the judge (and one of the insolent boy-toys) did a marvelous job. In reading the program afterward I found out why women had those roles. There are only a dozen actors in the company this year (usually 18-20) and seven of them are male. They didn't have enough men for all the roles.

I also noticed something in the program that raises another question. The Hilberry Theatre company awards a Master degree in acting and takes three years. Actors are listed as "2nd year" etc. But this time there are no "1st year" students. Is the program ending or downsizing? Perhaps changing focus? There are 1st year students listed in the other departments -- acting, scene and light design, stage and theater management.

A review of the play is here, though this blog doesn't allow extracting an isolated entry. Scroll down to find it.

Today in History: Matthew Shepard

Matthew Shepard died 10 years ago today. Box Turtle Bulletin has an excellent series on what happened outside Laramie and in the hospital in Ft. Collins. You can read the whole series by going to the bottom of this link to find the first day.

Then you could Google Judy Shepard to find an article in any number of papers about what she has said over the last few days about the 10 years since her son was killed. We've made some headway -- 31 states now have hate crime laws that include sexual orientation -- but not nearly enough. We don't have one in Wyoming and we don't have one at the national level. And hate crime laws are the bare minimum of what gays need.

That bit of history contrasts with the hate stirred up by the GOP, a contrast that is disgusting. Here's another article about that tactic. I'm only linking it because one of the commenters says the GOP will say if anything ugly actually happens (and it doesn't need to directly involve Obama), "It's an isolated incident."