It’s hard for me to believe that July is almost here. Summer just started and it seems like it’s quickly passing by!
Thank you for taking the time to check out my “Random Friday Thoughts”.
I’ve done well not talking about “that man” too much lately, but I am today. If you disagree and want to tell me, that’s fine as long as you do it diplomatically. I feel that I’m voicing my thoughts that way!
45’S DULUTH RALLY
Last week, 45 visited Duluth, Minnesota, and I was teased by friends about the visit.
Hey, there’s no wall here in Minnesota to keep him out! There was nothing I could do about it! 🙂
45 was heckled by a couple of protesters that made it inside and he quickly had them thrown out. They still intimidate him!
45’S SPIN ON WINNING MINNESOTA
Since I was forced to listen to some of his speech, I’ll comment on something he said and I’ll clarify it for DJT.
During the pep rally, 45 mentioned that he almost won Minnesota in the 2016 election. Other than Illinois, it was the only blue state in the Midwest.
What he selectively forget to say was that he lost Minnesota by 44,765 votes. He said, he was “this close” to winning.
However, our bordering state, Wisconsin, separated from Duluth by just a bridge, was much closer to going to Hillary Clinton! She only lost Wisconsin by 22,748 votes.
So, he was much closer on “this close” to losing Wisconsin than actually winning Minnesota!
Sounds like he’s guilty of “fake news”, too! You’re shocked, right?
But, it is what it is! The results are the same. 😦
“ROLLING STONE” DULUTH DISS
Let me reel it in — I got sidetracked!
The point of talking about “that man” is an online “Rolling Stone” article about 45’s visit by Ana Marie Cox.
Cox really had nothing nice to say about Duluth or even neighboring Wisconsin with its “greasy…imports”!
She stressed, “Duluth is a struggling post-manufacturing cipher with the highest drug overdose rate in the state” and talked about the city’s “poverty rate (21 percent) that would rank it among the most desperate counties in West Virginia and per capita income just below that of Wheeling”.
And, if that wasn’t brutal enough, she described the area around Lake Superior as “stolid, brutalist mid-century relics and precarious-seeming industrial shipping contraptions, rusty and mostly silent” and the downtown area where “every surface is covered with a thin layer of grime.”
She summed it all up, “in other words, potential Trump Country.”
I’ve only lived in Duluth for four weeks now. I feel very welcome and comfortable here –much more than I did in Panama City in the Panhandle of Florida. Ana Marie Cox, let me tell you, that is true “Trump Country”.
And, the statistics she used, which were likely Googled, may be true. I can’t and won’t say that Duluth is perfect city or utopia, but look around at many other cities in the country! Take a visit to Youngstown, Ohio!
The issue with the article that fired me up the most was referring to Duluth and the Northland as “potential Trump Country”.
45 talked to a near capacity crowd of less than 9,000 people in the Amsoil Arena with more turned away outside.
I know there are fervent 45 supporters in Minnesota and Wisconsin and many of them drove for hours to see him.
Cox referred to Duluth as “the small city of 80,000”. I can work with that number for the point I’m going to make.
It’s needs to be stressed that the Duluth MSA (metropolitan statistical area — grossly simplified as adjacent counties to an urban core with commuters) has a population of roughly 279,771. That’s the second-largest in Minnesota!
So, when you’re taking about 10-thousand people at the arena for his visit out of “80,000” in Duluth or more than one-quarter million in the Duluth MSA — this is not “Trump Country” or “potential Trump Country”.
Hundreds of thousands living here could have cared less about him visiting!
NEXT!
MARRIAGE EQUALITY
This week, in 2015, the Supreme Court of the United States made “marriage equality” the law of the land.
“Gay marriage” and “same sex marriage” simply became marriage.
On the night of the ruling, Barack Obama’s and the people’s White House was aglow in rainbow colors.
Boy, that iconic institution stands for much different things today than it did three years ago! 😦
AN END OF PRIDE MONTH DOWNER!
Earlier this week, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy announced he was retiring.
Ironically, it was one year ago this week that I wrote this about Kennedy: “Rumors are swirling that Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) Anthony Kennedy, almost 81-years-old, might be ready to announce his retirement.”
This is a major blow to the LGBTQ community and for women!
Three years ago, Kennedy authored the SCOTUS decision to make “marriage equality” a reality.
He eloquently stated: “No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were. As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.”
What all this means now is “that man” will get another conservative justice to solidify the divisiveness not only in the country, but at the highest court in America, too!
A “GOLDEN” PICK ME UP!
Damn, this blog is a downer and there’s still more below! 😦 Here’s a pick me up, even if just for me. 🙂
International and gay icon Kylie Minogue closed out this year’s New York City Pride.
If I only see one concert this year, I want it to be Kylie. However, that probably won’t happen until 2019 when she’ll likely tour the U.S.
Here’s her latest hit and title track from her new country-tinged dance album is “Golden”.
“We’re golden/Burn like the stars/ Stay golden/
Straight from the heart/We’re the voice that’ll never give in/
Getting knocked down, back up again/We’re golden/That’s who we are/”
“LARRY KRAMER: IN LOVE & ANGER”
Sadly, most people don’t know Larry Kramer.
What’s even sadder is that most of the youth in the LGBTQ community today don’t know the pain and sacrifice this man went through to give them chances that he and his friends never had back in the 1980s and 1990s.
Kramer was a Hollywood screenwriter and gained fame in 1969 penning the Oscar-nominated film “Women in Love”.
But, his fortune came four years later on the flop, “Lost Horizon”. That film gave Kramer the financial security to do something he wanted to do: write about the gay community.
He did and his 1978 novel, “Faggots”, about the out and open gay community of New York City in the 1970s before AIDS was controversial.
Middle America was shocked about the easy come and easy go world of sex and drugs and the gay community shunned him because he exposed their lifestyle.
But, Kramer became a beacon of hope for gay men dying of AIDS in the 1980s by starting the Gay Men’s Health Crisis Center (GMHC) and ACT UP, an activist group that put the heat on politicians (most notably President Ronald Reagan, President George H.W. Bush and New York Mayor Ed Koch) to get off their asses and start fighting AIDS!
Kramer was so outspoken and blunt that he was forced out of GMHC, the group he founded!
His biggest literary success was the autobiographical Off-Broadway play, “The Normal Heart”, in the 1980s. It played on Broadway in 2011 and was made into a hit movie in 2014.
Kramer turned 83 earlier this week. He’s still writing and is still a major force in the LGBTQ and HIV/AIDS communities.
“THE NORMAL HEART”
If you didn’t catch this Emmy, Golden Globe, Screen Actors Guild, and Critics Choice Television Award winner, please do so now!
It stars Mark Ruffalo, Matt Bomer, Jim Parsons, Taylor Kitsch, and Julia Roberts. It was directed by Ryan Murphy.
RETROSPECTIVE REGRETS
As many of you know from my blog and social media, I’m outspoken on matters of LGBTQ equality and for HIV/AIDS.
We all have a voice and with the platform I’ve been given, I feel it’s only right that I use it to educate people and spread the word that LGBTQ people are just like everyone else — we work, we pay taxes, we hurt, we love, and we want happiness.
It’s probably the fact that we love and want physical intimacy that alarms many people on the “right” (in other words, in the “wrong”).
So, if I educate one person at a time and maybe that person sees things more openly, then I’ve succeeded.
However, watching the Larry Kramer documentary brought a feeling of regret for me of wasted years.
Back in the early-1980s when gay men in San Francisco and New York City started dying at an alarming rate, I was in small town Kentucky. It felt like a world away from this unnamed “gay cancer” killing “homosexuals”.
It wasn’t until the late-1980s that I knew a person that died of AIDS.
In the early-1990s, I started reading “The Advocate” and I learned about the big gay world and all of the hideous things LGBT people were fighting for and against (AIDS, funding for AIDS medication, homophobia, gay bashing, etc.).
Even then, in my 20s, I lived my life without the worries of the real world — other than the occasional hurled slurs, “faggots” or “queers”, toward me and my friends if we were leaving or going into the gay bar or hanging out at the Paducah Riverfront.
We can’t go back and change things.
But, if I could, Larry Kramer, I’d be with you in New York City and Washington D.C. fighting the system. I’d be at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue chaining myself to the fence in a “die-in” or I’d be yelling at Reagan to fight for the lives of all Americans and pleading with Nancy to make him listen!
Larry, thank you for your sacrifices and I want to thank you for me just being here today!
“PATRICK MELROSE”
Some of you may only know Benedict Cumberbatch as “Sherlock” from television or as “Doctor Strange” in the Marvel Universe!
I’ve never seen either of those roles, but I was blown away by his Oscar-nominated performance as Alan Turing in 2014’s “The Imitation Game”.
I think that Cumberbatch now needs to clear some space on his mantle for his second Emmy Award!
He rightfully earned it in the first episode of Showtime’s five-part drama series, “Patrick Melrose” from this spring!
It’s 1982 and Patrick (Cumberbatch) heads off to New York City to retrieve the ashes of his father, David.
The episode shows Melrose strung out on almost every drug imaginable and in an alcohol-fueled insanity!
Also, the incredible Jennifer Jason Leigh will likely be getting some Emmy love herself, playing Melrose’s drunk and lousy mother, Eleanor.
Hugo Weaving plays Melrose’s father and earns every bit of hate directed toward him.
An excellent “Tour de force” for every actor in the series!
However, I’m now very torn because this will likely pit Cumberbatch and Jason Leigh against Darren Criss and Judith Light (“The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story”) in the Emmy race for Limited Series or Movie categories!
GRADE: A
90s NOSTALGIA
Since moving to Duluth, Minnesota, this month, I’ve been a little nostalgic about my previous times living in the Midwest and Great Lakes back in the 1990s.
After moving to Milwaukee for the summer of 1990 and then back home to Kentucky, this song became popular in 1992. Remember it?
While the song only reached #36 on the Billboard Hot 100, it was one of the first techno hits to make the chart.
However, “Love U More” topped the Billboard Dance Club Songs chart for two weeks in early 1993.
It was the first of four #1 Billboard Dance songs in America for the British band. They also had two others to reach #2 on that chart!
THAT’S IT
With all the craziness in the world, make it the best in your little part of it!
Anthony
What's Peeps Thinking About Now? It's Probably Random! 