Gay Community

There's been much discussion in the gay community lately concerning the so-called "circuit parties," which have become annual high holy days for tens of thousands of gay men. For the uninitiated, circuit parties, in such gay meccas as Fire Island and Palm Springs, are marathon bacchanals where gay men ingest prodigious amounts of drugs, cruise incessantly, and bop and bounce their stunningly buff bods at 140 beats per minute.They've been going on for years, but they've been under the microscope since last August, when a Fire Island partygoer overdosed and ended up comatose and on life support.

Mayor Martin O'Malley met privately with gay community leaders yesterday in his latest attempt at damage control a week after he chose not to fire the city's new housing commissioner for making anti-gay remarks while drunk. The mayor and the commissioner, Paul T. Graziano, also wrote conciliatory letters to the gay community, published yesterday in Baltimore-based Gay Life magazine, in the wake of Graziano's use of the word "fags" and disparaging, sexually graphic remarks about gays at a Fells Point bar Dec. 29. And City Council President Sheila Dixon issued a statement yesterday criticizing O'Malley's handling of the matter, but not calling for Graziano's dismissal.

Consider this our encore applause for Macklemore's performance at Preakness. This weekend, the self-made Seattle rapper took the stage at the Triple Crown's second jewel and delivered a set that included his two most recognizable songs -- "Thrift Shop" and "Can't Hold Us" -- but also the song "Same Love," in which he stands up for same-sex marriage and gay rights in an unabashedly forward way. Here's a link to the song's video on YouTube....

Sgt. John Kowalczyk wasn't hiding his sexual orientation; he just wasn't broadcasting it. But word was spreading through the police academy, and he sensed tension. He asked to address his fellow officers and got right to the point. "I'm gay," he said. "What do you want to know?" He answered questions for the next hour - some inquisitive, others downright insulting - and spent the rest of the training academy working to show his peers that he could hold his own as a cop. Seven years later, Kowalczyk, 31, remains one of the few openly gay officers in the Baltimore Police Department.

It may well be that the support of Baltimore's gay community pushed Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke to his narrow primary victory four years ago. Against that background, it is ironic that the Baltimore Alternative, one of the city's two gay newspapers, has endorsed former mayor Clarence H. "Du" Burns, who has been perceived as less friendly toward the gay community than Mr. Schmoke.What often used to be a politically monolithic gay community in Baltimore now appears to be fracturing. Several activists have endorsed Mr. Schmoke.

DALLAS -- Prestige Ford of Garland, Texas, advertises to the gay community. And sells cars.Absolut advertises to the gay community. And sells vodka.The list goes on. National and local advertisers increasingly are targeting gay and lesbian customers -- not because of "political correctness," but because the ads sell products.This growing interest by mainstream advertisers has & 2/3 strengthened gay-oriented media and is bringing more demographic analysis of the gay audience and the growth of other marketing vehicles, such as catalogs.

County Executive Charles I. Ecker will nominate a Columbia gay rights advocate and two other women to the Human Rights Commission Wednesday and send their names to the County Council for confirmation.Jan Nyquist had not expected to be one of the nominees. When she saw Ecker at a sporting event in Columbia last week, she pulled him aside to urge him to appoint gay rights activist Robert Healy to the Human Rights Commission.Ecker instead asked Nyquist if she would be willing to apply for appointment.

ALBERT L. GORDON, 94 Gay rights advocate Albert L. Gordon, an attorney who helped advance gay rights in the 1970s and 1980s by challenging discriminatory practices and laws, including a successful effort to decriminalize consensual homosexual acts, died Aug. 10 in Los Angeles. He was 94. His death was due to old age, said his son Harold Gordon. Albert Gordon, a heterosexual whose twin sons are gay, became a lawyer in his late 40s and devoted most of his practice to defending the rights of homosexuals and battling the bigotry of law enforcement.

The winter's chill that marred relations between Mayor Martin O'Malley and his supporters in the gay community was all but forgotten in yesterday's bright sunshine at Druid Hill Park, where cheers and applause greeted the mayor at the Gay and Lesbian Community Center of Baltimore's annual Pride Festival. O'Malley took the festival stage to announce the creation of a Gay and Lesbian Task Force, made up of eight community activists and representatives of every city agency. The task force will meet four times a year to help frame city policy on issues raised by gay and lesbian activists, O'Malley said, and it will also serve "a trouble-shooting function" to prevent misunderstandings between the gay community and City Hall.

Harry Hay, 90, a pioneering activist in the gay rights movement, died yesterday in San Francisco. He had recently been diagnosed with lung cancer. Mr. Hay, among the first to argue that gays represented a cultural minority, devoted his life to progressive politics and in 1950 founded the secret network of support groups for gays known as the Mattachine Society. His contribution to the American political landscape can be traced to his involvement in the Communist Party and the labor movement in the 1930s.