Gayest Cities in America, 2012

Source:
http://news.advocate.com/post/15571734525/gayest-cities-in-america-2012

15. Denver
Denver is simultaneously outdoorsy and a rapidly growing metropolis, and its attitude is exceptionally laid-back and gay-friendly. (Screw the antigay zealots in nearby Colorado Springs.) A day spent skiing, fishing, hunting, or camping with the fit locals can lead to an evening dining, clubbing, or camping of another sort. Much of the sporting and social scene is devoted to the ladies of Denver; witness the Capitol Hill neighborhood, girl-watching at There Urban Whiskey Bar (ThereDenver.com), a nosh at Racine’s (RacinesRestaurant.com), and dancing at Charlie’s (CharliesDenver.com).

14. Long Beach, Calif.
How gay is Long Beach? Its pride celebration is one of the country’s biggest, and the Long Beach Pride float seems to make its way to every other Pride event within 500 miles! There are a ton of gay and lesbian bars, restaurants, a big boat suitably named the Queen Mary (QueenMary.com; it’s also haunted, and a hotel). The sunny, welcoming city provides a more relaxed alternative to nearby Los Angeles.

13. Austin
No amount of backwoodsiness from previous and current statehouse residents George W. Bush or Rick Perry can taint the cosmopolitan, countercultural, and friendly nature of this capital city. Bands, barhopping, and barbecue feature prominently here, for queers and others. The lesbian-owned Hotel San José (SanJoseHotel.com) is a minimalist oasis; no fewer than 16 bars offer libations for LGBTs; and Splash Days (au naturel sunbathing and parties over Labor Day), the Austin City Limits Music Festival (late September), and March’s South by Southwest (SXSW) film and music festival keep Austin suitably weird — and gay.

12. Portland, Ore.
Bisexual Sleater-Kinney alum Carrie Brownstein has fun on Portlandia (“Put a bird on it!”) playing with the rep of the city’s hipster, hyper-locavore, hyper-literate, boycott-ready, feminist, fleece-clad denizens. But there’s other fun to be had here too. Visit the arty Pearl and Alberta districts; stay at the Ace Hotel; read at the country’s largest indie bookstore, Powell’s; drink at the Silverado (SilveradoPDX.com) and Red Cap Garage/Boxxes (Boxxes.com); tune in to Out Loud (KBOO.fm/OutLoud), and party at Crush (CrushBar.com), popular with men and women. Oh, then there’s all that nature stuff!

11. Little Rock, Ark.
The River Market District is the main gay area, and many businesses that don’t advertise as specifically LGBT are friendly and open. The compact city has Backstreet (1021 Jessie Rd.) and U.B.U. (TheAquarium.bizland.com) for the over-18 crowd, and those of legal drinking age can check out SixTen Center Street Bar, TraX, Miss Kitty’s/Saloon (all three at TraxNLR.com). But not all LGBT life happens in a bar: According to GayChurch.org, nine of the city’s churches advertise as LGBT-friendly. Amen!

10. Grand Rapids, Mich.
The heart of western Michigan LGBT life is in Grand Rapids, with dancing, drinking, and bingo at the Apartment (ApartmentLounge.net), which has been in operation for over three decades; karaoke at Diversions video bar (DiversionsNightclub.com), and drag shows and go-go boys at Rumors (RumorsNightclub.net). The city boasts one of the Midwest’s best LGBT country line-dancing scenes, with the Grand River Renegades (GrandRiverRenegades.com) offering anyone a dance card on Sundays at Rumors.

9. Atlanta
We won’t fault you for trying to forget Real Housewife Kim Zolciak’s dip into the lesbian pool — but don’t blame Atlanta if everyone there wants to sample the fun LGBTs have all over town. Lesbian businesses thrive in East Atlanta, and gay clubs go off in Mechanicsville. People coming to Atlanta like to party, and the GayTL delivers with Black Gay Pride in September and Atlanta Pride in October, and the black gay clubs’ second-busiest weekend of the year surrounds the observance of Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday in January. Holla!

8. Knoxville, Tenn.
The state’s legislature has been an unmitigated disaster for our rights, making a law to prevent cities from adopting LGBT-inclusive antidiscrimination ordinances (although, happily, the ridiculous “don’t say ‘gay’” bill is dead for now). Nevertheless, Knoxville has defiantly produced a robust gay scene, including the University of Tennessee’s Commission for LGBT People; a welcoming spot for queer, trans, and other marginalized teens at Spectrum Café (SpectrumCafe.org); gay-affirming churches; and thriving nightlife.

7. St. Paul and Minneapolis
It’s technically two cities, but oh, what fun there is to be had here. The region is a draw for upper Midwestern LGBTs, and Minneapolis topped this list in 2011 for so many reasons. These two cities can’t get enough of each other: There’s the Twin Cities Gay Men’s Chorus (TCGMC.org), Twin Cities Pride (the 40th annual is June 23-24), and even Quorum: The Twin Cities GLBT and Allied Business Community. Sheesh, just get domestic-partnered already!

6. Ann Arbor, Mich.
You don’t have to be big to have it going on, as this sixth largest city in Michigan does. The area has one of the few clubs in Michigan catering to dykes: Stiletto’s (technically in nearby Inkster) draws in every lesbian in Detroit. But talk about a taste for drama! Just ask U. of M.’s first out student body prez, Chris Armstrong, the target of a smear campaign by nutso assistant attorney general Andrew Shirvell. We raised a glass at Aut Bar (AutBar.com) when the kook got the boot.

5. Seattle
When Forbes named Seattle the most miserable sports city in the nation, many of us felt a twinge of empathy. No matter; there’s heaps of other stuff to keep us busy, including tons of locavore and cosmopolitan cuisine, funky bars in a robust LGBT scene, Dan Savage, and hookups — or at least the search for them. TheStir.com noted that Seattle ranks among the top cities for residents who list “casual sex” as the type of relationship they’re seeking.

4. Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
Booting spring breakers from its shores may have not boosted Jagermeister sales, but it sure has classed up the joint. Add to that a mass exodus from Miami, where a real estate boom priced out many gay clubs (then the boom busted), and you have the recipe for a rising homo mecca in South Florida. The area is teeming with gay bars and restaurants, and a ton of guesthouses and spas that run the gamut from mild to spicy. Lesbians are finally starting to move to Fort Lauderdale too, though most girl bars, like New Moon (NewMoonBar.com), are in nearby Wilton Manors.

3. Cambridge, Mass.
The home of Harvard University likes a smarty-pants, including the nation’s first African-American lesbian mayor, E. Denise Simmons. Though her reign ended in 2009, she is currently in her sixth term on the City Council, which enacted antidiscrimination protections for transgender people in 1997. The town’s Paradise bar (ParadiseCambridge.com) is billed as New England’s only gay club with hot male dancers six nights a week — hey, everyone needs a night off — and the town is right next to a little hamlet named Boston, where allegedly LGBT stuff sometimes happens too.

2. Orlando, Fla.
Besides hosting Gay Days at Disney World, where 50,000 LGBT folks and their kids dressed in red T-shirts invade the theme park the first Saturday in June (and spend $100 million in town), Orlando has more gay softball teams than you can shake a Louisville Slugger at. And residents just got domestic-partnership protections. For non-Mickeyphiles, there’s oodles of homo content each year at the annual Orlando International Fringe Theater Festival (OrlandoFringe.org).

1. Salt Lake City
While those unfamiliar with the Beehive State are likely to conjure images of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, far-less-oppressive-than-it-used-to-be Salt Lake City has earned its queer cred. There are more than a half-dozen hot spots for men and women, including the eco-friendly nightclub Jam (JamSLC.com), though the sustainable bamboo flooring is perhaps less of a draw than the packed dance floor. The Coffee Garden (878 South 900 East) is a gathering spot for those looking for a caffeine fix, the Sundance Film Festival brings LGBT film buffs to screenings downtown, and lesbian-owned Meditrina (MeditrinaSLC.com) is a true wine bar — yes, you can get a drink in this town.

Reich, Little Rock and UFOs

Reich, Little Rock and UFOs
by Kenn Thomas
steamshovelpress.com

The Little Rock Nine, a group that integrated Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas in September 1957, observed its anniversary Tuesday even as the protests in Jena, Louisiana underscored continued racial strife in the US. But the plight of the Nine was not the only social oppression that America suffered in 1957--the UFO cover up was in full flower and UFO believers were handily marginalized and even prosecuted. The scientist Wilhelm Reich was thrown in jail in part for exploring human energy potential and therapeutic techniques not approved by the Food and Drug Administration, but also in part because he was using the consequent cloudbuster technology to battle UFOs in the Tucson desert.

Reich had been condemned as a medical quack, his books had been burned and his "life energy" boxes, precursors to a type cannon called a cloudbuster that harnessed atmospheric energy, were destroyed. Reich had harmed no one and, indeed, had helped many with his understanding and manipulation of what he called the orgone. He witnessed several UFOs on his estate in Maine and used the orgone cloudbuster guns to cause them to go away. He did the same on a famous trip to the desert southwest that he documented in his last book, Contact With Space. By his own estimation, he fought the first battle against space intruders, and won. The FDA, of course, never truly followed Reich's scientific protocols on either orgone boxes or cloudbuster guns, and convicted Reich only on technical violation of its injunction to stop distributing orgone boxes.

Authorities threw Reich in a prison cell in Lewisberg, PA from which he did not emerge alive. In memos to the prison chaplain before his death, however, Reich continued to write passionately about the social situation in the US. His note from September 1957 even includes reference to the disturbance at Little Rock Central High School. He emphasized the very psychological and emotional undercurrents he felt were being ignored in the broader social arena of conspiratorial 1950s America, what prevented many from seeing the space ships he saw in abundance:

"I am merely fulfilling my public duties as a U. S. citizen and worker in planetary affairs if I continue to point out where the true danger to our social and personal existence is placed: its is Emotional Poisoning: disruption through sowing distrust throughout our society, doping and drugging of our population, espec. our YOUTH; draining us financially through areas [...]race, a camouflage of the true menace, the Emotional Poisoning a la Little Rock racial upheavals; keeping our high placed officials at bay through fear of sexual scandals [Clinton!--kt], railroading efficient men and women into prisons or lunatic asylums through [?] up there environments; subverting justice by whispered little lies & frightening or using judges. Doing all this destruction unnoticed as it were by all those responsible. It was clear from the very beginning that [?] and now lyrics were subverted by such use of stupidities & evasions on our part [rock'n'roll!--kt], especially by the staid reluctance to talk bluntly and take the bull by the horns. The bull is really no more tan a few slimy tape worms eating away at our emotional guts. It is high time to start giving social power to the established functions of Love, Work & Learning as bastions against the tapeworms."

The prison memo form includes this banal and perhaps prescient statement: "Your failure to specifically state your problem may result in no action being taken." Reich's imprisonment was in part the end result of mis-reporting on him that appeared in the New Republic under the editorial leadership of a now-confessed communist spy named Michael Straight in a book entitled, After Long Silence. New Republic made its own pronouncement about Little Rock in its July 7, 1958 edition, complaining about the Supreme Court's failure to stop legal challenges that were slowing down the integration process. The Supreme Court, opined New Republic, "must stand the ground they themselves have assumed, or the grand experiment they inaugurated will end in bitter farce, with consequences for the state of the union that stagger the mind."

Clearly the magazine had a better view of the possible consequences of Supreme Court actions than it did on its own. The consequences of Reich's work with UFOs and otherwise, on the other hand, and the implications of the study of character structure on the understanding of race issues has continued over the years. Writing in a chapter called "Racism and Slavery" in The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Publishing Company, 1972), my old friend historian George Rawick notes the impact of "that great underground classic of modern thought, Wilhelm Reich, Character Analysis, 3d ed. rev., first published in German in 1933, and its less well-known but significant companion, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, first published in German in 1933. While I cannot subscribe to all of Reich's system, this chapter could not have been written without his monumental attempt to relate Marx and Freud which loosened the ideological armoring of Western rationalism for me and many others." Although Reich never stated it explicitly, clearly he saw that same armoring as the block that keeps so many from accepting the realities of the UFO issue.

Kenn Thomas' new book, The Conspiracy Files, as well as the new issue of Steamshovel Press, is available through his website, steamshovelpress.com.

Now available as PDF exclusively from Steamshovel!

The New Issue of Steamshovel Press!!!
All conspiracy. No theory.

CONTENTS INCLUDE:
Charles Fort: Dogma be Damned by Skylaire Alfvegren; Southern California, Cult Mecca, by Adam Gorightly; Parapolitics in Popular Culture: The Prisoner by Kenn Thomas; Notes on Conspiracy Theories, by Jim Keith; Correspondence with Jim Keith; Freeplay Excerpted by Len Bracken; Short Shrift: Beatnix and Comix by Kenn Thomas; Caries, Cabals & Correspondence with X. Sharks DeSpot; Robert Anton Wilson RIP; The O’Reilly Factor In The JFK Assassination by Bill Kelly; Dark Matters by James Romberger.

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THE CONSPIRACY FILES by Kenn thomas

The Conspiracy Files: Evidence Behind the World’s Most Notorious Theories reviews current and historical mysteries, clearly setting out the main players involved in each story and providing detailed background information. This unique gathering of the hard facts works to spell out the sometimes preposterous, yet always fascinating, connections between the different theories. PDF only, $20 (via disk, or supply e-mail address)


PARAPOLITICS BY KENN THOMAS

Join Steamshovel Press editor Kenn Thomas as he tracks parapolitics—aka conspiracy theory—in the 21st Century. Thomas has traveled and lectured about conspiracies throughout America for the past decade, appearing in the major media as the sharpest critic of the consensus view of current affairs. From the Kennedy assassination to 9/11, Thomas examines the underlying parapolitics that animate the secret elites and the war ravaged planet they manipulate. Parapolitics collects Thomas' lecture remarks, interviews, correspondence and articles printed in the underground press from around the world. PDF only, $20 (via disk or supply e-mail address)

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Kenn Thomas at Conspiracy Con, San Jose, CA, May 2007

Moving beyond the confines of 9/11, Thomas reviews the current parapolitics around the globe, starting with the assassination-by-polonium-poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko, through the Valerie Plame spy scandal, to the remaining mysteries of the Trade Towers' destruction. "Parapolitics is activity that happens alongside the normal politics people read in the papers and see on TV, not instead of it," explains Thomas. "It's not just a matter of saying that the media just lies and that the Bush baddies are responsible--although gawd (sic) knows that's true. But, we ignore the conspiracies that exist in the wider world, such as global jihad and the assassination that culminated with Litvinenko, at our peril." This lecture will put these other global conspiracies in the context of what's happening in America. Part of the lecture will also include a tribute to his friend, the late author of Illuminatus!, Robert Anton Wilson, including rare video. 1 hour DVD, $10

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