Could This Be It? Book Group

As well-read as San Francisco claims to be (it’s the, let’s have a roll of drum, third most bookish city in the United States after Washington DC and New York City in terms of book sales; Seattle has the most bookstores per capita), book groups are hard to come by, at least for me. I’ve [...]

歌依舊，6年逝 | Tribute to Leslie Cheung

Until the winter of 2003, I almost never paid attention to the Mandarin Oriental in Central, one of Hong Kong’s most luxurious. Leslie Cheung 張國榮 (1956-2003), aliased gege (elder brother), one of Hong Kong’s greatest singers and movie stars of the last quarter of the century, fell to his death in a presumed suicide jump [...]

Milk: A San Francisco’s Story

“My name is Harvey Milk, I want to recruit you…”
Ensconced on the window seat of a cafe on Castro Street, I’m looking at the now empty space across the street where filming crew decorated it to be Harvey Milk’s camera shop. In the space of just a few weeks last March, the crew descended upon [...]

Call in Gay

It’s December 10. I’m supposed to call in sick today but I have to hold office hour for any last-minute questions my students might have before their final exam on Friday. Today is International Human Rights Day, and the gay community is taking a historic stance against hatred by donating love to a variety of [...]

Frameline32 | SF GLBT Film Festival: Were The World Mine

The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 4, Scene 1
If you had a love-potion, who would you make fall madly in love with [...]

Frameline32 | SF GLBT Film Festival: Two Spirits

Two-Spirit people are American Indians who fulfill one of many mixed gender roles found traditionally among many American Indian and Canadian First Nations indigenous groups. Traditionally the roles included wearing the clothing and performing the work of both male and female genders. The term usually implies a masculine spirit and a feminine spirit living in [...]

Frameline32 | SF GLBT Film Festival: Gay Asian Short Films

From Singapore to Seoul and L.A.: Gay Asian Shorts is a collective of five short pieces. When I saw the title and the the picture with a pout-lipped Asian man posing in front of the dryers in a laundromat, I thought it’s some off-the-beaten-path documentary about gay Asian men and their shorts fetish! Well, that’s [...]

Frameline32 | SF GLBT Film Festival: Solos

I’m not surprised this film was pulled from the film festival over gay sex in Singapore, where the city-state is under a “benign Fascist” government. The sensitive, taboo subject–the sexual relationship between a male teacher and a male student to explore the fallout from an all-consuming love affair would be edgy anywhere else. What makes [...]

Mishmash

The Weddings
On the way to the doctor yesterday I walked by the City Hall and caught myself in the eddy of gay weddings that actually began on Monday evening when a few counties extended their office hours past 5 p.m., the moment the May 15 California Supreme Court ruling legalizing same-sex marriage took effect. While [...]

Breach?

Radio Television Hong Kong (RTHK), a government-owned broadcasting agency, aired an episode of Hong Kong Connection last summer that stirred up some nasty controversy last summer. The Broadcasting Authority, pressed by Christian groups, ruled that RTHK had breached the Generic Code governing their operations for not providing an opposite viewpoint when it aired Gay Lovers, [...]