Archive for May, 2006

31
May
06

Burn the Witch!

By Eric Leave a Comment
Categories: Gay, New York and Sports
Tags: ,

This just in from the Morning Herald in Sydney, Australia, where it is already tomorrow:

BARE-FACED CHEEK
Who said Americans had a sense of humour? Our man in New York, Phillip McCarthy, went to see the Australian gay rugby team, the Sydney Convicts, take on teams from North America and Europe to win the Bingham Cup, named after a gay 9/11 victim, Mark Bingham.

When a couple of streakers from the Convicts section tried to cross the field, the hosts were not amused. Says McCarthy: “Americans don’t really get streaking at sports events — it’s considered an English peculiarity, like bad plumbing,” and the incident brought a swift public address announcement from arena officials threatening to stop the match if there was a repetition.

I missed this incident, but I heard from many people afterward about the streakers at half-time during the final San Francisco Fog vs. Sydney Convicts match on Sunday, May 29. These may have been the same guys who ran naked somersaults across the stage during the kangaroo court at the closing night party at Webster Hall later that night. If so, I’m sorry I missed half time.

I would like to state for the record that the source of the displeasure was not an entity affiliated with the hosts of the tournament, my rugby team. No, we know how to appreciate a well-placed naked man in rugby boots. The announcement came rather from a joyless official on the loudspeaker at Icahn Stadium, which adjoined the pitch where the match was being played, and which was hosting a high school or junior high track meet at the time. I guess the guy on the mic threatened to call the police, with all the humor of a 17th century Puritan preacher and all the authority of your meanest uncle.

Yes, with naked men and women dripping from billboards up and down Manhattan and bullets and explosions all day long on television, heaven forbid we should allow people to see a fun, non-sexual and completely harmless expression of nudity in real life. This shame of the human body in America is freakish.

29
May
06

Bingham Cup 2006

By Eric Leave a Comment
Categories: Gay, New York and Sports
Tags: ,

On Memorial Day weekend, my rugby team, the Gotham Knights, hosted the third biennial Bingham Cup, the largest international tournament of gay rugby teams in the world. (Previous hosts are the San Francisco Fog and the King’s Cross Steelers of London.)

Here’s our latest press release:

The Sydney Convicts Rugby Football Club took top honors on May 28 at the 2006 Bingham Cup hosted this year in New York City. Having traveled half-way around the world from Australia to compete, the Convicts’ victory against the San Francisco Fog in the finals closed out the international gay rugby tournament held in honor of United Flight 93 hero Mark Bingham.

Alice Hoagland, mother of United Flight 93 hero and gay rugby player Mark Bingham, presented the grand prize on Randall’s Island, the site of the tournament. More than 700 rugby players from teams around the world competed in 80 matches. Ms. Hoagland passed up screenings of United 93 at the Cannes Film Festival to attend the tournament. Instead, she presented the Cup named after her son to the winning team on Sunday. Players from teams all over the USA and from Canada, England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Holland, and Australia, flew in for the tournament.

In addition to the presentation of the Cup, Boston Ironsides won the second division competition with a 3-0 overtime victory against the Dallas Diablos to take home the Bingham Bowl. The Sydney Convicts also won the third division by defeating a Worldwide Barbarians team by 26-7 to take home the Bingham Plate. In the first ever Bingham Cup women’s rugby division, top honors went to the aptly named team from New York Rugby Club named “I Love Kuch,” who bested the Scottsdale Lady Blues and a composite team to take the newly designated prize.

The Bingham Cup is the biennial international rugby competition named after Mark Bingham a hero of United Flight 93 on September 11, 2001. Bingham played for gay & bisexual rugby team the San Francisco Fog RFC after leading UC Berkeley to national championships. The Bingham Cup was first held in San Francisco in 2002 and in London in 2004. The 2006 Bingham Cup was hosted by the Gotham Knights Rugby Football Club, a team Bingham was helping to found in 2001 before his untimely passing, and proceeds will benefit both college scholarships via the Mark Bingham Leadership Fund and the United 93 Memorial Fund.

For more information about the Bingham Cup, participating teams and match results go to www.binghamcup.com.

Associated Press coverage of the tournament was picked up across the country in mostly smaller daily papers. We’ve been covered in the gay press and internationally, notably in Australia, the UK and South Africa. We’ve also had some strange appearances, such as on Chinese and Indian television.

Notable appearances:
• Outsports.com
• New York 1 television news (Includes video clip. Please excuse the silly spelling error in the headline.)
• Reuters.com (Includes video clip.)
• Newsday

Other appearances:
Time Out New York
New York Channel 9
MSNBC
CNN SI
Sports Illustrated Live
WNBC
LOGO
YES Network
Boston Herald
at least one TV station in mainland China
at least one TV station in India
Fort Worth Star Telegram
Arizona Republic
Calgary Sun
Hamilton Spectator (Ontario)
The Independent (South Africa)
Mail & Guardian (Johannesburg, S.A.)
The Trentonian (New Jersey)
Charleston Gazette
San Diego Union Tribune
WKNG Channel 6, (Orlando, FL)
Times Leader (Wilkes Barre, PA)
Findlaw
Auburn Citizen (New York)
Guelph Mercury (Canada)
Standard Speaker (Pennsylvania)
Edge (Boston)
The State (South Carolina)
Pioneer Press (St. Paul, MN)
Monterey County Herald (CA)
NEPA News (PA)
Kentucky.com
Kansas.com
Sydney Star Observer (Australia)
UK Gay News (London)
PM Entertainment (Long Island)
New York Blade
Southern Voice (Atlanta)
Houston Voice
Southern Voice (Florida)
Washington Blade
Gay Outdoors
365Gay.com
OutUK (London)
Gaysports

23
May
06

Religion in the Copy Center

By Eric Leave a Comment
Categories: Religion and Strangers Observed
Tags: ,

I was in Staples at 34th and Broadway today, waiting for some copies to be made, and I overheard a conversation between a man in his early 20s and a woman in her late 40s about God and biblical literalism. It had been going on for some time by the time I got there.

He was standing at the paper cutter cutting 8.5 x 11 copies into eighths. Some kind of cards to hand out advertising an event of some sort. He wore a too-long moustache, an oily ponytail and rollerblades.

She stood next to him at the counter doing something with lamination. She had unbound salt and pepper hair down past her shoulders, she wore too much eye makeup, and loose, shabby clothing.

I couldn’t tell if they knew each other before this episode at Staples. At first I thought they were arguing. They were disagreeing slightly. That I could tell for sure. But it was cordial enough. Essentially, his point of view was ecumenical and secular and logical, but ultimately respectful and deferrential. He didn’t want ana rgument; he was just curious. Her point of view was very rigid and literal and of strong conviction. He was being heroically fair to her with statements like, “I really appreciate your point of view. I’m just saying …”and “I’m not a scholar, so I can’t be absolutely certain, but …”

At one point he explained that he always had a problem with the Book of Leviticus and its harsh prescriptions against immoral heterosexual behavior and homosexuality.

She leaned in. “Well, you know why homosexuality is bad,” she said, lowering her voice to a discreet whisper. “It’s because it’s unclean. It spreads disease. It’s unholy.” She went on, though I had lost interest in the particulars.

He gamely pointed out that plenty of heterosexual behavior also spreads disease. They discussed it a bit further. He also drew a distinction between the conviction that adultery being bad because it’s against God’s word and the opinion that adultery being bad because it breaks down bonds of human trust, his opinion being the latter. Eventually they agreed that it was ultimately best to live a life of peace and forgiveness.

Then she closed her part of the discussion with a neat and tidy “Listen, I don’t judge. That’s not my job. Only god can judge us.”

Bravo. I agreed with her — partially — on something: It was not her place to judge people. But what caught my attention was her hypocrisy. She was passing judgment.

I can accept that whoever wrote what is in the Bible is passing judgment. Or, rather, if the words in the Bible are to be taken as the word of God, then what is in the Bible is a representation of God passing judgment. We’re taught that only God can do so and that we must not. OK. I can take that as an axiom of Christianity.

But if she says something like “Homosexuality is unclean,” instead of “The Bible says homosexuality is unclean” or “We are taught that homosexuality is unclean” — if she is stating the biblical fact with her own conviction and not attributing the judgment to God, then she’s not expressing an original thought at all — she’s just taking credit for someone else’s work. She’s plagiarising God. And how do you think he would fancy that?

23
May
06

Phantom Limbs

By Eric Leave a Comment
Categories: Strangers Observed
Tags:

My vigilance has paid off: I saw another man with an arm missing today.

He was wearing a long-sleeve sweater (it was rather chilly and windy today), and the cuff of the empty left sleeve was stuffed into his left-hand hip pocket. (Can I even say “left-hand hip pocket” in his case?) First I thought he wanted people to think he just had his hand in his pocket. But on closer examination, I think it’s more likely because he didn’t want a swinging empty sleeve to get snagged on sharp or rough surfaces. Or to be tugged on by small children.

So, that’s two right arms and one left arm I’ve seen — or rather, not seen — missing in the last couple of days.

Why do I never see armless women?

Severed limbs are so bizarre. The moment a body part is separated from the body, it becomes something else. The body is still the body. It just weighs slightly less. But the body part becomes a dead object. Useless refuse. Something to bury. Somethign to preserve. It could even be art. We make pictures with crayons by what the crayon leaves behind on the paper. Can we make art with what we leave behind of our bodies?

Is it even ours when it is removed? We always talk about “my hand” or “my leg,” but if that hand or leg is lopped off, is it mine anymore? I can’t do anything with a severed arm it except maybe beat someone over the head with it or use it as a door stop. Whether I want to keep that arm or not, it’s sort of given back to the earth at that point, in a way, isn’t it? Relinquished to the cycle of decay and creation and everything that is outside of our bodies.

21
May
06

Arms

By Eric Leave a Comment
Categories: Strangers Observed
Tags:

I saw two people yesterday who had only one arm. I saw the first one on the way to a rugby training that morning. His baggy tee shirt sleeve hung empty from his side shoulder like a deflated balloon. The second guy, I saw on the way home. He had his shirt sleeve pinned up.

I thought nothing of the first one. Just an anonymous New Yorker with one arm. When I saw the second one, he stood out to me because of the first guy. How many armless people will I see today? I wondered. I thought armless might be a theme for the day, and I was preparing for the third one-armed man. But I saw no more.

It was a strange way to book-end rugby training, rugby being a game that requires two arms yet not infrequently puts someone in near danger of losing them. I don’t think most people participate in activities that put them in such danger.

Today, I saw a person who I thought might be missing an arm or two, but they were actually just tucked inside his shirt. I could offer no explanation for why he might be doing this, except that maybe his arms were cold.

It made me remember pretending to be an amputee as a kid. I’d pull my sleeves off and clasp my arms under my shirt behind my back and walk around bumping into things and people and falling down and trying to get back up with my arms. My favorite part was always pushing my arms back out through the sleeves and watching them “grow” back to their normal state.

I think I will be looking at everyone’s arms today.

20
May
06

How P!nk Helped Me See the L!ght

By Eric Leave a Comment
Categories: Music and Words
Tags:

As a kid, I imagined God literally controlled each one of us. I visualized it with Flintstone vitamins. I’d pour them out on the kitchen table and take Fred and Dino in each hand and bounce them toward and away from each other, making them talk to each other and interact.

“Hi, Dino.” “Ruff! Ruff!” “Down, boy!”

You find philosophy in the strangest of places.

Like lately — I’ve been downloading crap for the last few weeks from iTunes. Everything from Tim Burton movie sountracks to mindless pop music. Something tickles my fancy, and 99 cents later, it’s mine. Recently I was reminded of a little gem from P!nk called “God is a DJ.”

I’ve heard worse.

In fact, I’m a little embarrassed to admit, I like the song. It’s kind of clever, isn’t it? (Isn’t it?) Father forgive me, for I have sinned. It is … a long time since my last confession.

If God is a DJ
Life is a dancefloor
Love is a rhythm
You are the music

If God is a DJ
Life is a dancefloor
You get what you’re given
It’s all how you use it

At first, I thought that last line was “And somehow you use it,” which I actually like better.

I suppose there’s a sort of theological relevance: God is not a puppetmaster, manipulating us like marionettes. God doesn’t move us one by one. Rather, he spins the record, and we groove along the best way we can. He merely controls our environment, and we are left to make our own choices.

Of course, “God wants you to shake your ass,” as P!nk so gamely shouts toward the end of the song. It’s the sort of clever conceit that passes for deep thought in pop music. But truthfully, it’s not a bad metaphor. “Get your ass on the dancefloor,” she shouts again. Get out there and do something. Take what you have in life, and move. Don’t stand there against the wall and watch everyone else dancing.

I can see why someone might believe that. It might also be total crap. Who knows if P!ink herself even believes it. It’s irrelevant.

At any rate, it’s a much more comforting way of comprehending divine intervention than what my childhood imagination allowed. It outs a lot of pressure on a kid to think of himself as a chewable pawn between the index finger and thumb of God’s hand.

10
May
06

Our Hands, Ourselves

By Eric Leave a Comment
Categories: Strangers Observed
Tags: ,

I like to watch people’s hands while standing in the subway. During the morning and evening commutes, when the trains are crowded and people are standing and grasping at anything solid to keep their balance, hands are so exposed. Sometimes all I can see of a person is his or her hand.

Some bite their fingernails; others take exceptional care of their tips. They are brown and beige and pink and sallow and white. Some have spots. Some have finely formed ropes of veins down the arm, around the wrists and across the back of the hand. Some have hairy knuckles. Some with a firm grip show sinews and tendons straining against the skin. Some are fat and shapeless. Some are so thin, it’s a wonder they function at all.

There is a paradox about hands: While they are indeed exposed and open and very public, they are also extremely private and personal and intimate. Almost everything we do both privately and publicly involves hands. Why are we so skittish about genitalia and breasts when it is our hands that prepare our food, burp our babies, wipe our asses, wash our bodies, insert and remove our contact lenses, wear our wedding rings?

If the brain is the largest sex organ, surely the hand is the second largest. Indeed, sometimes sex involves the hands more than any other body part.

You put your hands where? And then you touched me? the doorknob? your french fries?

Of course, we wash them. And for the ultimate in OCD behavior, we can also waterlessly sanitize them. So, I’m not talking about dirt or germs here, but rather the idea of what we do with our hands.

We write with our hands, conducting our fears, memories and desires — and things much more banal — from the brain to the page. Some talk with their hands, expressing themselves with complete languages but without a single word. We construct with our hands: buildings, art, Web sites. We destroy with our hands.

We play with our hands — piano, rugby. A friend of mine, who does both, and who works on a laptop computer all day long, recently broke the smallest phalange of his ring finger. All the things he does that matter have become exercises in endurance, so central are his hands to his life.

We are defined by our hands. When that thumb showed up millions of years ago, everything changed. Forget fire, the wheel, moveable type, cheese in a can. The revolutionary hand started this whole crazy mess.

It’s kind of obscene, the way we so shamelessly expose people to our hands, given all the trouble they get up to. We should wear gloves.

02
May
06

The Saddest Thing in the World

By Eric Leave a Comment
Categories: New York

This could be a sequel to Left on the Tracks.

On Sunday afternoon, I was reminded of the emotional turmoil of childhood. It’s amazing to me how kids can swing so quickly and completely from mood to mood. It’s positively dizzying, and I think it’s remarkable that we survive childhood at all, physically or emotionally. At a small age and size, everything has such enormity, and some big feelings can come out of those little brains.

A boy, maybe three years old, was standing with his mother and younger sister at the Roosevelt Avenue subway station in Jackson Heights facing the Manhattan-bound express track. They stood safely back from the edge of the platform. As I walked along the platform near the yellow edge, the boy accidentally dropped something just as a man was walking in front of him. The man’s foot connected with the skidding plastic object with sickening perfection, and he inadvertently kicked it over the edge onto the tracks.

It all happened so quickly, I couldn’t even tell what the kid had dropped.

The boy’s face changed in a flash from disinterested placidity to complete non-comprehension, as if a passing magnet had wiped him clean.

The man stopped dead in his tracks and cringed, his face contorted in acute embarrassment. He wasn’t asking for this, but there it was. “Oh, no,” he said. “Oh, no. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” Almost pleading.

There seemed to be complete silence, as there always is in the immediate wake of a child’s injury. Everyone stands there, holding their breath, including the kid … Uh-oh. The kid’s gonna start bawling. Here it comes …

He looked up at his mother, begging with his eyes for her to undo everything that has just happened.

“I’d just hop down there and get it,” the mans started, “but…”

“Oh, no, no,” said the mother. “It’s OK. It’s OK.”

Even I wondered if something could be done, like I was desperate to please this child I’d never met, to protect him from disappointment. But clearly it was a crazy idea to jump down onto the tracks.

She looked down at her son, pointing a finger, and began to compassionately admonish him. She seemed to tell him is was his fault, or that it could have been avoided if only … something. You should be careful next time … I warned you about this … something. Maybe it was all for the benefit of the stranger, who looked like he wanted to melt away between the floor tiles. Maybe she was embarrassed, too.

The boy collapsed into tears.

She picked him up to hold him close and console him. I imagined the hapless stranger as Enemy No. 1 in the boy’s mind. Get out of there, I thought. Get away from that kid.

Walking by the scene of the crime, I tried to steal a glance at the object. It looked like an animal of some kind. A lion, maybe, or half-lion, half-man. Some kind of action figure, probably from some cartoon show I’ve never heard of and will never see in my life.

I noticed his little sister, sitting in a stroller facing the other way, had a similar toy — safe in her grip. A giraffe, maybe. She looked unfazed by the entire episode.

the untallied hours