Britten at 100

 "In Britten I have found a new hero, a musically surprising and multi-dimensional citizen of the world." ~ Marin Alsop

Here is a piece from npr on composer Benjamin Britten (and specifically his War Requiem) on the centenary of his birth. I did not know his music or politics at all.

Update (11/26):  There also is a recent essay here from NYRB reviewing a troika of recent works on Britten. The essay is more straightforward about Britten's sexuality and his politics than the npr piece. And it comes down, I think, on the right side of the continuing debate about Britten's accomplishment and stature. That debate seems to be heated: " . . . [I]n Britten’s centennial year (he was born in 1913 and died in 1976), the “battle of Britten” . . . continues. Britten’s reputation—the need to decide once and for all whether he is great or overrated—is central to discussion of him, in a way that is not true for more acclaimed contemporaries (like Stravinsky) or lesser ones (like Finzi). A peevish, aggrieved tone persists on either side."

Self-Evident Truths

Image © iO Tillett Wright 2012

I am now not sure just where I came across this project - Self-Evident Truths by iO Tillett Wright. But it consists in a remarkable set of portraits, initiated in 2010 of "anyone that felt like they qualified to fall on some part of the LGBTQ spectrum, from bisexual, to transgender"and " intended to humanize the very varied face of gays in America today." The project started out as small but has burgeoned and is ongoing. Very nice, forceful work. And what I like most, perhaps, is that Wright invokes not the Constitution but the Declaration of Independence.

Curing Gays of Their Sexual Orientation: A Question

I really don't care how people have sex or how they define their sexuality - or how they alter or redefine it over time. So, if "gay" men want to repent and undergo therapy or whatever, so they can become non-gay, that is fine. People pay all sorts of money to make themselves 'normal' or otherwise in various ways. Not my business. Nor, I think, is it the business of the state (or the church!). But here is a story at The New York Times that made me wonder about how the "problem" is cast. In it, one of the men describes to the reporter why he was going to great lengths to change his sexual orientation and why he objects to the new California law that bans certain sorts of 'therapies' that promise to get the gay out of you. In the reporter's words: "He was tormented as a Christian teenager by his homosexual attractions." Why not say, "He was tormented as a homosexual teenager by his repressive Christian upbringing"?

Gay Rights, States Rights and the President's Persistent Lack of Leadership

So, President Obama has decided to catch up with civilized opinion on gay marriage - finally. What follows below are a set of images that came across the news feed on my FB account this afternoon. We need a third map showing the percentage of FOX News viewers by county in North Carolina. I know what my priors lead me to suspect on that. The take away is that Obama is not simply late on this issue, he barely has caught up - you'll note that he continues to privilege states rights over gay rights. And given that the nice folks in NC voted to constitutionalize discrimination yesterday, well . . . where does that leave the President?

Just Two Cheers for Maryland on Gay Marriage

This week, the Governor of Maryland signed legislation legalizing same-sex marriages. My news feed on FB has turned up a whole set of congratulatory pronouncements - like this one from Lambda Legal and this one from the Human Rights Campaign. This is a matter about which, as I've said here before, I am ambivalent. So I was pleased when my news feed also turned up this post - "A Radical Queer Primer for Straight Leftists" - which comes pretty close to my own views on the subject. I agree that "Despite the ranting of the right-wing Christian lunatic fringe, gay marriage is not a radical issue, it’s a way to assimilate, to fit into the dominant heterosexual culture." However, I don't agree that marriage ought to be abolished. Let people do as they please, including getting married or not. That said, marriage should be de-legalized in the sense that it should thereby be decoupled from a whole range of things like one's tax status and the availability of employment benefits of all sorts, and so on. The "Primer" I link to makes two additional very smart points about the relationship of gay constituencies to progressive politics that strike me as being right on target. Indeed, if we hope to de-legalize marriage we will need to implement a progressive agenda on things like health care. Highly recommended.

Human Rights, Democracy, Pragmatism

"Thus, we come down to what is tangible and conceivably practical, as the root of every real distinction of thought, no matter how subtle it may be; and there is no distinction of meaning so fine as to consist in anything but a possible difference of practice" ~ C.S. Peirce (1878) "How To Make Our Ideas Clear"

At The New York Times blog "The Stone" today, Anat Bilezki has posted this nice, deflationary piece on human rights. More specifically, she argues that in one sense it makes no practical difference whether one grounds one's commitment to human rights in secular or religious terms.

"What difference does it make? [. . .] Why do we care, or why should we care, if the practice of human rights is born of religious or secular motivation?

Take a look at how we work on the ground, so to speak; look at how we do human rights, for example, in Israel-Palestine. When Rabbi Arik Ascherman, the leader of Rabbis for Human Rights in Israel, squats in the mud trying to stop soldiers who have come to set a blockade around a village or fights settlers who have come to uproot olive trees (as he has done so often, in villages like Yanoun and Jamain and Biddu, in the last decade) along with me (from B’Tselem — the Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories), or a group of secular kids from Anarchists Against the Wall, or people from the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions — and he does this on a Friday afternoon, knowing full well that he might be courting religious transgression should the Sabbath arrive — does it matter that his reasons for doing so spring from his faith while the anarchists’ derive from their secular political worldview and B’Tselem’s and ICAHD’s from secular international human rights law? The end-product, the human rights activity, is similar, even identical; but the reason, the intention, the motivation for it are distinctly different. Does that matter?

In terms of active promotion of human rights, Bilezki clearly thinks the answer to her final question is simple - "no." But looking further into the political context she insists that the answer is "yes, it matters" and here she looks at the way authority works in political discourse, especially political disagreement. She insists, rightly, I think, that properly religious authority, deriving as it does from some belief in the divine - what she identifies as "God's command" - is a way of preempting political disagreement and debate with a call to simple obedience.

"The problem arises not when we act together, but rather when we don’t. Or put differently, when we act together, the problem stays in the realm of theory, providing fodder for the philosophical game of human rights. It is when we disagree — about abortion, about capital punishment, about settling occupied lands — that the religious authority must vacate the arena of human rights. This is not to say that all religious people hold the same views on these issues or that secular persons are always in agreement (although opinion polls, for whatever they are worth, point to far more unity of thought on the religious side). It is rather that an internal, secular debate on issues that pertain to human rights is structurally and essentially different from the debate between the two camps. In the latter, the authority that is conscripted to “command” us on the religious side is God, while on the secular side it is the human, with her claim to reason, her proclivity to emotion, and her capacity for compassion. In a sense, that is no commandment at all. It is a turn to the human, and a (perhaps axiomatic, perhaps even dogmatic) posit of human dignity, that turns the engine of human rights, leaving us open to discussion, disagreement, and questioning without ever deserting that first posit. The parallel turn to God puts our actions under his command; if he commands a violation of human rights, then so be it."

In the U.S., of course, the most obvious recent instance of this phenomenon has appeared in the "debate" over gay marriage in which many opponents insist that it is "God's command" that gay and lesbian people be excluded from equal rights. Invoking God in that context forecloses debate by excluding a segment of the population from the category "human" to which human rights apply. Bilezki, it seems to me, runs aground insofar as she intimates that a commitment to rights is or can be grounded in compassion. That is a topic for another time. But she is just right when she focuses not on agreement but on disagreement and on what we do, how we proceed, when we disagree. This, on my view, places the importance of democratic politics into relief - for democratic politics is best understood as a way of structuring disagreement.

I began with an observation from Peirce. It is a good general rule, I think. But it places pressure on us to consider consequences in the subtle way Bilezki does in this piece.

History and Gay Marriage

"The President has long believed that gay and lesbian couples deserve the same rights and legal protections as straight couples. That's why he has called for repeal of the so-called "Defense of Marriage Act" and determined that his Administration would no longer defend the constitutionality of DOMA in the courts. The states should determine for themselves how best to uphold the rights of their own citizens. The process in New York worked just as it should."

After hearing that the bill passed, Mary Rodriguez, in white, cheered at the Stonewall Inn in the West Village, where the gay-rights movement began more than 40 years ago. Photograph © Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times.

The opening passage I've lifted above is from a statement the White House released in response to the vote last night in Albany (the capitol of New York State) to legalize same-sex marriage. If this is Obama's position - and apparently it is - I wonder if he recalls the phrase "Jim Crow," which was the system by which States in the American South institutionalized the bigotry of the white population toward African-Americans for decades and decades. Among the problems with Obama's unwillingness to look to history for lessons that might guide us moving forward is that he ends up looking like a fool. In the current debate this means that state after state can enshrine religious bigotry in law by withholding equal protection of the laws from gay citizens. After all, New York is one of just six states (plus DC, of course) that have legalized same-sex marriage. And, according to this report in The New York Times: "Dozens more states have laws or constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage." Does Obama think "the process" worked just as it should in all those jurisdictions too? And, as The Times also reports, let's be perfectly clear too - the NY legislation was carefully drafted to insure that private and religious organizations can continue to discriminate against gay and lesbian citizens. This accommodation enshrines bigotry.

Having said all that, I am ambivalent about the entire preoccupation with marriage. Legislation allowing gay men and lesbians to marry is important insofar as it allows them certain legal rights and privileges that might otherwise be withheld from them. On the other hand it also clearly is an example of the normalization of gay liberation - homosexuals now are free to be just like heterosexuals. The aims of gay and lesbian politics turn out to be not so "queer" after all. (I myself would prefer that legal status and political-economic benefits be more clearly disentangled from one's marital status altogether.) And when I saw the photo above, taken at celebrations around the Stonewall Inn last night, I wonder at the irony of that political transformation.*
__________
P.S.: This conclusion may seem odd or unsubstantiated. And I hardly am an expert on the topic. So, what follows is a passage from this recent interview with my colleague Douglas Crimp who is extremely articulate about such matters and from whom I have learned a tremendous amount.

"I think . . . that something of an enormous shift happened in the wake (sic) of AIDS toward a conservative gay culture where issues like fighting for equal rights to marriage and to fight in the military took precedence over what I think of as a truly queer culture, which is a culture that wants to change how we think about forms of human relations in a much more general sense. I still feel very much what I learned from early second wave feminism, which was the critique of marriage as an institution and how marriage actually served governance as a way of managing the complexity of relations that are possible among people.

One of the greatest gains of the gay liberation movement and the general liberation movements around sexuality and gender was the possibility of rethinking all kinds of questions of affective relationships so that among gay men for example, if you stop thinking about finding Mr. Right, finding a lover or finding a marriage partner, and rather think about possibly sexualizing friendship, maintaining friendly relations with people whom you have had a romantic relationship or having fuck buddies, then a whole proliferation of ways of connecting with others opens up."

No Comment (almost)

A man holds a sign in favor or repealing the military "don't ask,
don't tell" policy during a Senate Armed Services Committee
hearing on DADT Thursday. Photograph AP/Alex Brandon.

I will withhold comment on John McCain making a jackass of himself at the Senate hearings this past week. Well, not quite. The only consolation as we watch Obama make a shambles of American politics is the recollection that the alternative was McCain. Truly scary! But what I really wanted to note is that it turns out, according to the recent survey conducted by the military themselves, that those military personnel who are most afraid of gays are the big, brave Marines. Go figure.

Tell the Bigots it is Time to Get Over It, Don't Coddle Them!

Let's see, Federal Judges, the President, the Secretary of Defense and Chairman of the joint Chiefs, Most Democrats in Congress, roughly two-thirds of the men and women serving in the military, and majorities in the general population too - all support ending discrimination in the basis of sexual orientation in the military. Republicans, of course, stand in the way. And now they will surely demand that we need to accommodate the bigots - those few in the military who oppose serving with gay men and women. We lose military personnel because of the current policy. If we lose some because they simply cannot bear the thought that some of their co-workers might be gay, that is simply too damned bad. Obama ought to be taking the lead on this not sitting back waiting. His present stance is not pragmatism, it is cowardice.

Harvey Milk (May 22, 1930 – November 27, 1978)

Harvey Milk at the 1978 Gay Freedom Day Parade.
Photograph © Terry Schmitt/ San Francisco Chronicle

Three decades ago tomorrow conservative politician Dan White snuck into San Francisco City Hall where he shot and killed Harvey Milk and George Moscone who, respectively, were a member of the Board of Supervisors and Mayor of the city. Milk commonly is characterized as the first openly gay person elected to public office in the United States. Here are some of the good bits from a 1999 piece in (of all places) TIME Magazine:

"There was a time when it was impossible for people — straight or gay — even to imagine a Harvey Milk. The funny thing about Milk is that he didn't seem to care that he lived in such a time. After he defied the governing class of San Francisco in 1977 to become a member of its board of supervisors, many people — straight and gay — had to adjust to a new reality he embodied: that a gay person could live an honest life and succeed. [. . .]

When he began public life, though, Milk was a preposterous figure — an "avowed homosexual," in the embarrassed language of the time, who was running for office. In the 1970s, many psychiatrists still called homosexuality a mental illness. In one entirely routine case, the Supreme Court refused in 1978 to overturn the prison sentence of a man convicted solely of having sex with another consenting man. A year before, it had let stand the firing of a stellar Tacoma, Wash., teacher who made the mistake of telling the truth when his principal asked if he was homosexual. No real national gay organization existed, and Vice President Walter Mondale haughtily left a 1977 speech after someone asked him when the Carter Administration would speak in favor of gay equality. To be young and realize you were gay in the 1970s was to await an adulthood encumbered with dim career prospects, fake wedding rings and darkened bar windows. [. . .]

Relentless in pursuit of attention, Milk was often dismissed as a publicity whore. "Never take an elevator in city hall," he told his last boyfriend in a typical observation. The marble staircase afforded a grander entrance.

But there was method to the megalomania. Milk knew that the root cause of the gay predicament was invisibility [. . .] That made the election of an openly gay person, not a straight ally, symbolically crucial. "You gotta give them hope," Milk always said. [. . .]

The few gays who had scratched their way into the city's establishment blanched when Milk announced his first run for supervisor in 1973, but Milk had a powerful idea: he would reach downward, not upward, for support. He convinced the growing gay masses of "Sodom by the Sea" that they could have a role in city leadership, and they turned out to form "human billboards" for him along major thoroughfares. In doing so, they outed themselves in a way once unthinkable. It was invigorating."

At a time when virtually all Americans would've cheered dissidents in Eastern Europe who were "living in truth," Milk showed the importance of pursuing that strategy here too. He trafficked in, imagination and visibility and hope. And he did so, as John Cloud, the author of this piece suggests, by reaching downward not upward, that is, by building democracy.

__________
We've had the award winning documentary The Times of Harvey Milk for a while. Now, of course, we have a major motion picture to remind us that imagination and visibility and hope remain very imperfect and precarious achievements. You can read The New York Times review here ... and I'll post more as they appear.

ACT UP Oral History Project

I have posted a couple of times [1] [2] on the importance of ACT UP as a political movement. In terms of concrete demands the organization sought (starting in 1987) to harangue, cajole, shame and ridicule mainstream America - especially our political, scientific and medical institutions - into recognizing and responding to the AIDS epidemic that was decimating not only gay men, but women and racial minorities and the poor. A major task for ACT UP consistently has been rendering the epidemic visible to a society that not only could not, but actively refused to see it. And, importantly, ACT UP chapters continue their work in, for instance, Austin, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco and elsewhere.

I recently discovered this web page which is home to the ACT UP Oral History Project. One of its founders, Sarah Shulman, explains why she was moved to initiate the project:

"In June 2001, I was in LA doing a play. One day, driving around in a white rental car, I accidentally tuned in to NPR's commemoration of the 20th anniversary of AIDS.

"At first America had trouble with People With AIDS," the announcer said. "But they then came around."

I had long been disheartened by the false AIDS stories told in the few mainstream representations of the crisis. Gay people are alone—hurting each other and causing our own oppression—until benevolent straight people bravely overcome their predjudices to help us.

Bravo!

But now, that lie was being extended beyond the arts to actual history. We were being told that AIDS Activism never existed. Instead, the dominant culture simply "came around."

That is not what happened. I know, I was there.

As I drove, listening to the radio, I realized that in the years since I had left ACT UP, I had seen no major history of the movement emerge. I had seen no mainstream documentation, and that the knowledge of what we achieved was rapidly fading from public memory.

Actually, what really took place was this: thousands of people, over many years, dedicated their lives to achieving a cultural and scientific transformation. In other words, a nation that had always hated and humiliated and violated gay people, was forced—against their will—to behave differently than they wished to, because activists intervened and took control of a terrible situation, thereby changing it.

I know that people with AIDS, are not just gay. But homophobia was the prototype of the oppression that people with AIDS experienced. Active neglect. Cruel exclusion. Dehumanizing abandonment. From friends, family, class, job, race, neighborhood, religion, and country. Now, add history."

To date, the project has done 100 interviews with individuals who were active early on in ACT UP New York. The aim is to make sure that the history of an organization that has been so crucial to making the AIDS crisis visible as a political crisis does not itself succumb to political invisibility.

Alvin Baltrop . Douglas Crimp

The cover story at ArtForum this month (February 08) is a very brief essay by my colleague Douglas Crimp on the photography of Alvin Baltrop. The essay itself is sandwiched between 10 of Baltrop's "Pier Photographs." This is an immense series of photos which he he took from the mid-1970s through the mid-1980s chronicling the lives and travails of gay men (and sometimes women) who sought sanctuary and sex amid the dangerous decrepitude of the "abandoned" piers along the lower West Side of Manhattan. Until reading the essay today I'd not heard of Baltrop, who died in 2004. The striking thing that both Baltrop's photos and Douglas's essay reveal is how the need to define and redefine oneself can lead members of marginalized populations to appropriate putatively abandoned spaces in which to do so. The piers might be viewed as landscapes of desperation or as sites of innovation and experimentation.

Act Up at Twenty

Here is the text of an editorial - including a mild bit of self-criticism -from The Nation (9 April 07 issue):

"Twenty years ago, a furious speech by the playwright and activist Larry Kramer at New York City's lesbian and gay community center birthed a new activist organization, ACT UP--the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power. Within a month, weekly planning meetings were attracting 200 people, a motley mix of gay men, lesbians, recovering addicts with AIDS and the newly diagnosed, a great many of them just in their 20s. Though barely noticed in the pages of this publication, ACT UP would revolutionize AIDS research and treatment, as well as inject new life into the gay movement and infuse the tactic of direct action with its own style of theatrical militancy.

At the time, six years and at least 30,000 American deaths into the epidemic, Ronald Reagan had yet to give a public address on AIDS. Not a single drug was available to treat HIV. Prevention efforts had been left to volunteers and struggling nonprofits. The right's solution was epitomized by William F. Buckley's modest proposal that gay men with HIV have their buttocks tattooed.

For its first action, in March 1987, ACT UP sent some 250 activists to descend on Wall Street. Armed with cardboard tombstones and anti-Reagan posters, they chanted, "Release those drugs," lighting a fire under the Food and Drug Administration and drugmakers to speed up research and approval. Two years later pharma giant Burroughs Wellcome was finally marketing an HIV treatment but had priced it (AZT) at an impossible $8,000 a year. So ACT UP returned to Wall Street, but this time activists didn't just picket. As former bond trader Peter Staley recalls, 'We [had] sealed ourselves into one of their corporate offices using high-powered drills. They didn't back down, so we upped the ante by shutting down the New York Stock Exchange, sneaking past security and using foghorns to drown out the opening bell. The company finally lowered the price three days later.'

During the years that followed, ACT UP stormed the National Institutes of Health, the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control to protest their shortcomings. On the local level, Catholic dioceses and boards of education were targeted for blocking HIV information in public schools; city governments for failing to provide care and housing; jails and prisons for setting up segregation units. Some ACT UPers set up guerrilla needle-exchange programs; others staked out the entrances to junior highs to distribute condoms directly to students. Just as essentially, ACT UP members became self-taught experts in such arcane fields as virology and patent law and in so doing rewrote the patient-doctor relationship and helped put the idea of universal healthcare--now favored by a majority of Americans--on the political map.

Along the way, ACT UP borrowed strategies from other radical movements: antinuke protesters for techniques on civil disobedience, antiapartheid campaigners for bringing political funerals to the streets. Many of its tactics--videotaping demonstrations as protection against police brutality, coordinated but autonomous affinity group actions--have become standard fare in the global justice movement, as has ACT UP's deeply democratic tradition.

ACT UP is now a shadow of its former self, but its alums have gone on to found Health Gap, a driving force for global treatment access; the Treatment Action Group, which continues to push the AIDS research agenda; and Housing Works, which has won housing for thousands of New York City's HIV-­positive homeless. And true to form, the organization will mark its twentieth anniversary with a march on Wall Street March 29 to demand single-payer healthcare for all.

Today, anyone who gains access to an experimental drug before it's approved, or takes a life-saving medicine that was fast-tracked through the FDA--indeed, anyone engaged in the struggle for healthcare--is indebted to ACT UP's audacity and vision."

Issues for Republicans - The Rule of Law and "Faggots"

"This kind of purge is legal but unprecedented." That is how Slate depicts the recent purge by the Bush Administration of (at least) eight perfectly competent US Attorneys recently. (There are only 93 US Attorneys in total, so we are talking close to ten percent of the staff here.) Well, this is part of the risk raised by the incompleteness of any set of rules. Since large expanses of our legal and political systems are covered by informal arrangements, it is perfectly legal for political operatives to exploit loopholes and breach "mere" convention. You will recall the Tom Delay-engineered redistricting scheme in Texas a few years back. It was conventional not to redistrict more than once a decade, but perfectly legal to do so. Once again we see that the Republicans seem more than willing to challenge and change the rules when it is to their advantage. When will the Democrats stop being "shocked! shocked!" and play hardball? They ought to be seeking Attorney General Alberto Gonzales's job. He is meant to be upholding the administration of justice, not subverting it in the name of partisan and/or political advantage, right?

Republicans at the Justice Department seem to be tone deaf on the issue. Here is a passage from a story in The New York Times today: "Justice Department officials, who would speak about the department’s decision making only anonymously because they were not authorized to discuss personnel matters publicly, now acknowledge that the dismissals were mishandled. They failed to anticipate how much attention the highly unusual group firing would draw, and the agency’s contradictory accounts about whether the dismissals were performance-related helped spur suspicions." So, the problem is not that Gonzales has fired people for no particular reason, but that he did so in a clumsy way and that someone noticed. Perhaps the Attorneys ought to have been fired serially over the course of several months? Same effect, less notoriety.

"Ann Coulter" © Tom Tomorrow

Speaking of Republicans, it turns out that they are in something of a pickle. Ann Coulter, who I think is a fool, has made a set of "jokes" in a speech to a right wing convention that, depending on one's views, are either anti-John Edwards or anti-gay. According to The Times several of the Republican Presidential candidates - McCain, Romney, Giuliani - are falling over themselves in an effort to distance themselves from Coulter's remarks. The various campaign spokesmen characterized Coulter's comments as "inappropriate" or "offensive" but it is unclear precisely what they might mean. I see at least two possibilities:

(1) The word "faggot" is disrespectful toward homosexuals whom we ought to accord equal dignity and respect (to paraphrase a spokesman for Romney). Well then, let's see whether the candidates are just engaging in cheap talk here. How about gay marriage fellas? How about gay clergy? Where do McCain, Giuliani and Romney on such matters? I am certain that voters in the Republican "base" are eager to find out.

(2) Name calling should not be allowed in politics. Calling John Edwards a "faggot" is disrespectful toward him. No way John is gay! The tacit premise here, of course, is that there is something wrong with being "a faggot." In that sense Romney, Giuliani and McCain really are agreeing with Coulter.

I welcome clarification.

Mapplethorpe: Thinking About Politics & Events

There is an exhibition of Mapplethorpe's work at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh at the moment. The Guardian ran a piece on it -"Such Dirty Pretty Things." Unsurprisingly the author discovered that Mapplethorpe seems not to have been a very swell guy. So what! His work is terrific and raises all sorts of interesting questions about politics. I am not referring to the obvious issues of free expression that trail in the wake of right-wing objections to his depictions of sadomasochistic, gay sexual practices. Those are important, but we might raise similar issues when discussing all sorts of artistic endeavors. In other words, Mapplethrope is hardly unique in that respect.

[Calla Lily, 1986. Gelatin-silver print, edition 10/10, 23 7/8 x 19 3/4 inches. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Gift, The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. 93.4302. © The Estate of Robert Mapplethorpe. ]

Instead, it is interesting to consider the extent to which those images themselves were political in the 1970s. They are not pictures that urge us to man the barricades for the cause of gay liberation or sexual liberaiton more generally. But they do, as philosopher Arthur Danto points out in his book on Mapplethorpe, make a striking effort to legitimiate a way of life that was marginal. [I refer here to Athur Danto. Playing with the Edge: The Photographic Achievement of Robert Mapplethorpe. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996 (now unfortunately out of print).] This is important because it pushes our conceptions of politics away from a pre-occupation with "events" - wars, elections, demonstrations, and so forth - and toward a broader understanding of political action as in a sense world disclosing. I am not altogether happy with that characterization but it will ahve to do for now. This is an abstract topic to which (perhaps to your dismay!) I plan to return. I offer it as a counterpoint to the personallized, gossipy approach that too often passes for criticism and commentary on photography.