How Gay Was Gore Vidal? Daily Beast

 

 

Sure he had sex with men, but just try to call him gay to his face. A year after the famous writer’s death his biographer Tim Teeman reveals new details about his balance between studied public ambivalence and his enthusiastic private behavior.   

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When I visited Gore Vidal’s home in the Hollywood Hills, five months after his death, one book, left unshelved, jolted me: The Mayor of Castro Street, Randy Shilts’s acclaimed biography of Harvey Milk, the inspirational gay San Francisco city supervisor assassinated in 1978. While Milk and Shilts were openly gay in rougher times, Vidal’s sexuality occupied a more vexed, undeclared place. Like both men Vidal was arguably a gay radical and hero, although he would have hated the plaudit.

 

Vidal died a year ago today, aged 86, of complications from pneumonia, the culmination of a long, painful decline which had included alcoholism and dementia. His death precipitated a memorable correction in the New York Times, whose obituary initially stated Vidal and Howard Austen, his partner from 1950 to 2003, when Austen died, did not have sex. “According to Mr Vidal’s memoir, Palimpsest, they had sex the night they met, but did not sleep together after they began living together. It was not true that they never had sex.”

The New York Times shouldn’t feel embarrassed: this imperious lion of American letters delighted in sowing confusion about his sex life and sexuality. Vidal said he was bisexual, but his family and friends say he was gay. Vidal adamantly believed “gay” referred to a sexual act, not a sexual identity. When I interviewed him in 2009, in his last major newspaper interview for the Times of London, and suggested he could have been America’s first gay president, he replied, witheringly, “No, I would have married and had nine children. I don’t believe in these exclusive terms.”

There was the way of Right and Left and easy pieties, and then there was Vidal’s way. He said almost nothing about HIV and AIDS, even though his nephew Hugh, who died of AIDS, begged him to. “Gore didn’t think of himself as a gay guy,” says Vidal’s close friend and now-biographer Jay Parini. “It makes him self-hating. How could he despise gays as much as he did? In my company he always used the term ‘fags.’ He was uncomfortable with being gay. Then again, he was wildly courageous.” Fred Kaplan, who wrote a landmark biography of Vidal, says, “He was not interested in making a difference for gay people, or being an advocate for gay rights. There was no such thing as “straight” or “gay” for him, just the body and sex.”

For most of their lives together, Vidal referred to Austen as his friend. His true love, he claimed, was Jimmie Trimble, a boy he had known at prep school who died fighting at the Battle of Iwo Jima. Vidal slept with Anaïs Nin and enjoyed close friendships with women including Claire Bloom and Joanne Woodward. He and Austen had sex with hustlers, or “trade” as Vidal called the handsome, “straight-acting” young men he liked. Paying for sex appealed to Vidal because it meant with this, as with so much else in his life, he was in control. He was mostly the “top.” In bed as in life, no one was going to screw Gore Vidal.

Vidal loved sex, and gossiping about it: he estimated he had had sex with a thousand men before he was 25. He told his nephew Burr Steers he had successfully pursued and had sex with Fred Astaire when he first moved to Hollywood. Steers says, “He also told me Dennis Hopper had a lovely tuft of hair above his ass. He never told me how he knew that.” Another close friend of Vidal's revealed Vidal had asked, when hearing the friend was staying at the legendarily louche Chateau Marmont, "How is the Chateau?", before adding: "Brad Davis [star of Midnight Express and Querelle] was a beautiful boy and I fucked him on the bathroom floor of the Chateau Marmont." Davis, who was HIV-positive, died of a drug overdose in 1991.

In my book, In Bed With Gore Vidal: Hustlers, Hollywood and the Private World of an American Master, to be published in November, Vidal’s friends and family talk about not just the sex Vidal had and with whom, but the roots of his complex attitude towards sexuality and love which lay in a fractured upbringing, and why his refusal to be defined was as personal as it was intellectual. He may have been “post-gay” before his time, but Vidal was also of his time—when being “gay” meant being effeminate, an outsider, without power. Vidal did not identify with any of those positions and wasn’t in thrall to the equality movement. He had grown up around power—his much-loved grandfather was a senator—and he coveted his relationship with John and Jackie Kennedy (whom he was related to) before they fell out, he claimed because Bobby Kennedy believed Vidal’s sexuality could become a White House embarrassment.

In bed as in life, no one was going to screw Gore Vidal.

Vidal was defiant, but also cowed, in his sexuality. His resistance to being known as gay was in some ways old-school: he felt it could be used to diminish him, yet he didn’t play the overt heterosexual like the secretly gay or bisexual celebrities of the day, like Cary Grant and Walter Pidgeon. Indeed Vidal was the radical who wrote The City and the Pillar in 1948, one of the first modern novels about homosexuality, which made him famous even though he also felt it led to him being blacklisted and destroyed his chances of a political career. This may seem contradictory, but at different times Vidal was proud of his early success and bitter that it had marked him out somehow. If he wouldn’t define himself, others were not so subtle. In 1968 Vidal was famously called a “queer” on television by the conservative author and commentator William F. Buckley. An interminable legal case unfolded between them, Vidal convinced and genuinely afraid, I discovered, that Buckley had evidence he had had sex with underage boys.

Yet Vidal, while not declaring anything, didn’t hide: he bought a transsexual heroine to life in Myra Breckinridge (1968) and wrote essays against sexual repression and in favor of sexual equality. Weeks after the Stonewall Riots in 1969, the campaign group the Mattachine Society wrote to Vidal asking for financial support, with a bracing opening gambit: “I don’t think it is any secret to anyone that you are gay — most people seem to take it for granted—and it is on this basis that this appeal is being made to you, to help us lend a helping hand to your less fortunate brothers (or should I say ‘sisters’).”

Vidal caroused with Tennessee Williams and Christopher Isherwood and feuded with Truman Capote. He slept with Jack Kerouac at the Chelsea Hotel. His much-cherished years in Rome in the 1960s were a merry sexual circus. He had sex with hustlers in the afternoons, he said, so he could concentrate on conversation with friends in the evening.

One of Vidal’s oldest friends was Scotty Bowers, who had sex with, and procured sex for, celebrities including Cary Grant, Spencer Tracy, and Vidal himself. “Gore had a medium-sized cock, seven inches, he looked circumcised but wasn’t,” Bowers recalls. The few times Bowers had sex with Vidal was “pleasant, not mad love.” Vidal was always “on the ball, not bashful or shy, rather aggressive and pushy,” and was “more or less into a quick trick. He did everything sexually: you sucked his cock, he would suck yours, but he preferred to fuck. He was young and hot and sex was rather quick.”

After Austen’s death Vidal cried to one friend he had loved him. This was no “friendship,” but, as I sketch in the book, a deep, enduring relationship. Vidal’s sister Nina Straight remembers her half-brother becoming very upset was when, "sometime in the ‘50s or ‘60s" Vidal lost a tiny picture he carried in his wallet "of Howard as a little boy with bangs and Mary Jane shoes. He was really upset and saying, 'He's the only good person I've ever known’—‘good’ meaning simple, guileless — and he loved the image of that little boy, the basic, innocent dedication and purity.” Vidal’s family and friends view his lifelong devotion to Jimmie Trimble with incredulity, yet Vidal would gaze at Trimble’s portrait most nights before going to bed.  

As Vidal grew frailer, Bowers bought men round “to just sit with him.” In December 2011, seven months before he died, Vidal, mind wandering, asked Bowers, “You suppose we could find Bob and bring him over?” “Bob” was Bob Atkinson, a favorite hustler of Vidal’s that Bowers had first set him up with 63 years previously. “Gore liked Bob because he had been in the Navy and he had a cock as big as a baby’s arm,” Bowers recalls.

All that sex, but he never worried about HIV and AIDS? I said to his nephew, Steers. “I think he was quite confident it was something that wouldn’t happen to him,” Steers replied. Because he thought he was at less risk of infection as he liked fucking men rather than being fucked? I asked. Steers laughed. “No. Because he was Gore Vidal.”

Tim Teeman’s “In Bed With Gore Vidal: Hustlers, Hollywood and the Private World of an American Master” will be published by Magnus Books in November.

The New Audio Geeks

By STEVEN KURUTZ NYY TIMES

In his bachelor days in the late ’80s, Philip Elias lived in a

town house in Pittsburgh wired for jaw-dropping sound.

He owned a Bang & Olufsen Beocenter 9500 music system with three pairs of B&O Penta 3 tower speakers, each set up in a different room. Sometimes he would invite friends over and crack open a new album as if he were uncorking a great bottle of wine.

The speakers, which cost around $5,000 a pair and required months of saving to buy, were as breathtaking in design as they were in sonic quality, Mr. Elias said: “Architecturally, they were sensual. Almost something out of the Museum of Modern Art. That was important. They made a statement above the sound.”

These days, Mr. Elias, 58, is an advertising executive who lives with his wife and three children in a house in Pittsburgh with enough high-end audio gear to open a stereo showroom, including a Krell Showcase five-channel power amp ($4,500), Thiel CS6 loudspeakers ($9,000 a pair) and an Escient FireBall CD system ($4,000). Every year, he offers to buy his children a great stereo, he said, but they never take him up on it.

“They’d rather have a laptop,” he said. “It’s dispiriting.”

The Internet and digital technology have upended the music industry over the last decade or so, but high-end audio has arguably suffered an even greater blow. The industry’s very raison d’être — the nitpicky pursuit of superb sound reproduction, no matter the cost or complexity — is irrelevant to many music listeners today.

People download MP3s from iTunes or Web sites and play them on their smartphones or laptops. They share songs with friends by e-mailing YouTube links. Sure, the music sounds flat, tinny, supercompressed; it’s an audiophile’s hell. But convenience and mobility rule the day.

Ken Kessler, a veteran audio journalist, summed up the industry’s problems last year at an audiophile conference in Denver. Speaking to a roomful of mostly middle-aged men, he said: “In the ’60s and ’70s, if you opened up Esquire or Playboy and they showed a bachelor pad, there was a killer sound system in it. Now, there’s an iPod dock.”

Apple devices aren’t losing ground with bachelors or anyone else, and soon music may exist mainly in the nebulous “cloud.” Still, there is a sense that after years of near extinction, a new generation of home audiophiles is emerging to follow in the footsteps of guys like Mr. Elias.

From the renewed popularity of vinyl (a trend that isn’t lost on retailers like Urban Outfitters, which now sells not just records but turntables alongside its clothing) to the sales explosion of high-end headphones like the $400 Beats by Dre, many younger music fans are seeking a listening experience that goes beyond an MP3 and a cheap pair of earbuds.

Of course, for some, the primary motivation is fashion; it’s become cool to collect vinyl or wear slick headphones. But for others, there is a desire for what Charley Damski, a 24-year-old budding audiophile, called a “pure connection to the source.”

Mr. Damski, who lives in Los Angeles and works at a television animation studio, said he spent high school buying and burning CDs and making mixes from songs he downloaded from iTunes and file-sharing sites.

Then he heard one of his older brother’s albums, “A Night at the Opera” by Queen, in 5.1 surround sound. “I remember listening to it in my room and hearing all the voices,” Mr. Damski said. “I thought, ‘Oh, there’s another layer to this I wasn’t aware of.’ ”

Hearing music with such outstanding sound quality was a revelatory experience, he said: “You don’t know you need it until it exists.”  

If sonic quality has diminished for many in recent years, the quantity of music that people consume may be at a high. Freed of home storage constraints, digital libraries have swelled absurdly.

Dan Svizeny, a 24-year-old manager at an online advertising agency in Philadelphia, recalled how his high school classmates bragged about the number of tunes stored on their iPods. “They would say, ‘Oh, man, I have 60,000 songs,’ ” he said. “It was a currency.”

For a while, Mr. Svizeny, a guitarist and avid music consumer, engaged in the MP3 arms race, ripping songs from Napster and other file-sharing sites and importing them to his iTunes account. “The sound quality didn’t matter at all,” he said. “Just the music.”

But Mr. Svizeny’s attitude has since changed. He no longer owns an iPod and rarely, if ever, downloads music, he said. At work, he listens to Spotify, the music-streaming service. At home, he plays LPs, inspired, he said, by his father’s collection of Black Sabbath and Frank Zappa records. “I could buy a terabyte hard drive and store countless MP3s, but it’s lost value to me,” Mr. Svizeny said. “I’d rather hold a physical thing.”

With vinyl, he added, “You’re experiencing music in a different way.” 

Mr. Damski went through a similar evolution, from having more than 50,000 songs on his hard drive to “abandoning” iTunes, he said, in favor of Spotify and the scratchy joys of vinyl. He likes the physicality of LPs, and the way they make it hard for him to skip songs. He also enjoys what he called the “Easter egg hunt” of used-record shopping, otherwise known as sifting through bins of Olivia Newton-John and Al Martino releases, hoping to find a rare gem from the Beach Boys’ bearded phase.

In true audiophile fashion, it now pains Mr. Damski to listen to low-resolution music played through the microspeakers of a smartphone or a computer. “I wanted to hear a Kinks song the other day that wasn’t on Spotify, so a friend looked it up on YouTube,” he said. “It sounded so bad.”

He laughed at his own fussiness, but added, “I didn’t even want to listen anymore.”

As for home audio equipment, Mr. Svizeny owns what he considers an average Sony turntable, receiver and speakers, while Mr. Damski uses his roommate’s Audio-Technica model. But both men hope to acquire a high-end system someday.

“If I own a house and have disposable income, a good stereo will be a primary investment,” Mr. Damski said. “Definitely higher on the list than bath towels.” 

For years, the typical high-end audio customer has been a white-haired classical music aficionado or an aging rock fan for whom listening to “Aja” in 1977 on a pair of Altec Lansings was a spiritual experience.

But recently, veteran audio companies have started adapting their products to the changing tastes of younger listeners. McIntosh, for years the holy grail for preamps and other components, has been adding USB ports to its entire product line in a long overdue acknowledgment of the popularity of music streaming. Thiel Audio, the revered speaker maker, has hired an industrial designer for the first time to make sure its products pass what its chief operating officer, Bob Brown, called the “aesthetics test.”   

“My wife laughs at how our house was filled with speakers the size of refrigerators,” Mr. Brown said. “This generation is not going to buy ugly, boxy stuff. They listen through their eyes first, before their ears.”

Mr. Brown envisions that Thiel speakers will be curvier, with thinner profiles, in keeping with the industry trend and in line with modern interiors. It’s a look he hopes will appeal to his new, more-discerning target audio customer: the young career woman.

“The bachelor-pad stuff is old,” Mr. Brown said. “I wish it wasn’t, but I have to be honest: If you sell to my son and my wife and the young career woman, you get me. I don’t make the buying decisions anymore. It’s over.”

Grain Audio, a new company formed by four industry veterans, is covering its bookshelf speakers and earphones in wood, an aesthetic it hopes will appeal to both sexes. Mitch Wenger, its president, said music fans shouldn’t have to conceal speakers behind walls or cabinets at home, as they have for years.

“It should be furniture-quality,” Mr. Wenger said. “It’s, like, my Eames chair and my Grain bookshelfs. That’s the thinking.” 

Since the Apple store has for many people replaced the stereo showroom, audio companies are also striving to find creative ways of reaching younger music fans. Two years ago, Roy Hall, the founder of Music Hall Audio, approached Urban Outfitters about carrying his turntables. At first, the retail chain sold a $250 entry-level model, but sales have been so robust, Mr. Hall said, that some stores now carry his higher-end mmf-2.2 turntable, which sells for $450.

“The kids are not idiots,” Mr. Hall said. “A nice little hi-fi system with a good turntable sounds amazing — way beyond an iPod.” 

And while many audio companies have struggled or gone under in the wake of the iPod’s popularity, the iPod has also created millions of potential audiophiles. “You have a whole generation getting music over the Internet, from streaming, tablets, iPhones,” Mr. Brown said. “It’s introduced many more people to music.”

Sam Angiuli, a 25-year-old sales representative at Bloomberg LP, is typical. Like Mr. Svizeny and Mr. Damski, he has amassed a large iTunes library and uses an online music service, SoundCloud, yet he is as finicky about good sound as an old-school audio geek like Mr. Elias.

In his teens, Mr. Angiuli “worked two to three jobs at a time,” he said, to finance a sternum-rattling stereo for his car. Now he is on the verge of buying his first high-end home system for his Manhattan apartment. It will be equipped with McIntosh components and cost $10,000 to $20,000, he estimates.  “My ear can hear the difference,” Mr. Angiuli said, explaining why he dedicates so much of his income to audio gear.

Being a modern audiophile, he added, is “a constant battle between the best sound and convenience.” It’s a world in which turntables and McIntosh preamps vie for shelf space with digital media streamers and iPods.

Still, to someone like Mr. Brown, the speaker executive, it’s encouraging that sound quality is once again part of the equation.

“I never lost faith that the new generation would come along,” he said. Then he added, in what could be the audiophile credo for any age or era, “If you really love music, you’re ever searching for how to hear it better.”

Starting With Something Simple

As a salesman at Stereo Exchange, a bastion of audio geekery in Manhattan, Michael Toto has watched the upheavals in the music and audio industries from the ground level. With music fans switching between MP3s and vinyl, the current moment is a combination of “high-tech and low-tech,” he said. To that end, Mr. Toto recommended a few basic stereo components, to be used separately or in tandem, for entry-level audiophiles who want a system that blends modern technology and convenience with higher-quality sound.

CONNECT BY SONOS

PRICE Around $350

WHAT IT DOES Hook up this music streamer to a home stereo, and it will play audio from Spotify, Sirius XM radio, iTunes and other sources. It is platform- and format-agnostic, and has an Apple-like cube design. Mr. Toto called the Connect “the box of choice” and “a product for a modern music listener.”

DECCO65 BY PEACHTREE AUDIO

COST Around $1,000

WHAT IT DOES An all-in-one amp, preamp and digital-to-analog converter, the Decco65 can be used in conjunction with a Sonos Connect or any device with a digital output, like the Apple AirPort Express. “It gives a warm sound to digital files,” Mr. Toto said, calling it a kind of gateway into high-end home audio. It also looks sharp, with an outer shell in black lacquer, cherry wood or rosewood. (Price varies by finish.)

TRAVELER TURNTABLE BY VPI

COST Around $1,500 (without cartridge)

WHAT IT DOES This first step into high-end performance turntables is made by a small New Jersey company that has been in business since vinyl was the default format. The Traveler’s platter is extremely stable, producing amazing sound. It can be “tweaky” to start, Mr. Toto said, but “when you set this up the right way, it’s a damn beautiful piece of equipment.”

SMB-02 HEADPHONES BY PHONON

COST Around $350

WHAT THEY DO These over-ears headphones are made by a Japanese company with an audio dream team that includes a veteran sound engineer, a music producer and a D.J. The results are known in the audiophile world as “the holy grail of headphones” for their comfort and clear, lush sound. “We get batches in 10 at a time from Japan,” Mr. Toto said, “and sell them out immediately.”

Gay Rights: Progress and Retreat

The Guardian (London)

               

Gay rights around the world: the best and worst countries for equality

Equal marriage laws are being passed in several countries, but in Russia, life grows harsher each month for LGBT people. Which places are best and worst for gay rights   

Emine Saner

 

An act of defiance in front of a demonstration against gay marriage in Marseille, France, in 2012. Photograph: Gerard Julien/AFP/Getty Images

We have a US president who supports gay marriage, and now a pope who, if not exactly signing up to equality for all, is at least starting to talk in language less inflammatory than his predecessor. "If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has goodwill, who am I to judge?" he told an assembled group of journalists on the papal plane back from his tour of Brazil. Then he went on to criticise the gay "lobby" and said he wasn't going to break with the catechism that said "homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered". Still, for a brief moment it looked like a minor breakthrough.

Then you weigh it against a raft of anti-homosexuality legislation that is coming into force in countries across the world. In Russia, gay teenagers are being tortured and forcibly outed on the internet against a backdrop of laws that look completely out of step with the rest of Europe. In what is being described as rolling the "status of LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender] people back to the Stalin era", President Putin has passed a number of anti-gay laws, including legislation that punishes people and groups that distribute information considered "propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations". The country also now has powers to arrest and detain foreign citizens believe to be gay, or "pro-gay". It has led to the boycott of Russian vodka brands by gay bars and clubs in solidarity, started by writer and activist Dan Savage and taken up by bars in London.

In many African countries where homosexuality is already illegal, more draconian anti-gay laws are being passed and violence against LGBT people is increasing.

Is there a link between growing rights in some countries and worsening or removal of rights in others? "There are really complicated links between the two. If you look at the history of the advancement of LGBT rights in the UK, every advance is accompanied by a backlash," says Alistair Stewart, assistant director of the Kaleidoscope Trust, a UK-based organisation that supports international LGBT rights. "To a certain extent that's happening on a global scale now – the advances that are being made in some parts of the world encourage a backlash in other parts of the world. The struggle for even basic human rights for LGBT people – freedom of association, freedom from violence – becomes harder to achieve when the opponents can point to something like gay marriage, which isn't even on the books for most of the countries we're talking about and make the argument that 'if we give these people even the most basic of human rights, next they'll be asking to get married in our churches'." Jonathan Cooper, chief executive of the Human Dignity Trust, is less sure they are related: "The further persecution is already happening."

The Human Dignity Trust challenges laws to end the persecution of LGBT people around the world. "Most countries sign up to international human rights treaties. If you take Belize as an example, it has ratified all the key UN human rights treaties and in their constitution they have a right to a private life, to equality, to dignity. And so basically to criminalise homosexuality is a violation. To bring a legal challenge against that takes a very brave individual." It has been supporting Caleb Orozco, the gay rights campaigner who launched a legal challenge to overturn Belize's criminalisation laws. "We're still waiting for the judgment. They said it would be out by the end of July but obviously it's not coming now."

Orozco's case has prompted a backlash in Belize against him, and Unibam (the United Belize Advocacy Movement). A report last week from the Southern Poverty Law Center, the US civil rights organisation, highlighted the influence US hardline religious groups had in Belize and other countries. "Many of these American religious-right groups know they have lost the battle against LGBT rights in the US, and they're now aiding and abetting anti-LGBT forces in countries where anti-gay violence is prevalent," said Heidi Beirich, author of the report. "These groups are pouring fuel on an exceedingly volatile fire."

It's the classic missionary model, says Stewart, "where money and resources and organisation are set up in the countries that they are targeting". It's also worth remembering which country is responsible for the legacy of persecution faced by millions of LGBT people today. There are more than 75 countries where homosexuality is still criminalised: "Forty-two of them are former British colonies so we can see where the legacy comes from," says Cooper. To see which countries are getting worse in terms of gay rights makes grim reading, but Stewart is cheered by the support he sees. "One of the reassuring things that has come out of the response to the Russian laws in particular is there is a growing international apprehension. One of the last great undone pieces of the civil rights movement is to address the rights of LGBT people, and there does seem to be a growing international support for change."

 

Where are LGBT rights improving?

Parts of Latin America remain the standard for equality for LGBT rights. Argentina's Gender Identity Law 2012 allowed the change of gender on birth certificates for transgender people. It also legalised same-sex marriage in 2010, giving same-sex couples the same rights as opposite-sex couples, including the right to adopt children. Uruguay and Mexico City also allow equal marriage and adoption, and last week Colombia recognised its first legal same-sex civil union (not "marriage").

In Asia, LGBT groups are making progess, if slowly. Last year, Vietnam saw its first gay pride rally and this year's event will launch a campaign for equality in employment. On Tuesday, it was reported that the country's ministry of justice has backed plans to legalise gay marriage, after the ministry of health came out for marriage equality in April.

In Singapore the Pink Dot pride rally attracted 21,000 people at the end of June – its biggest number since it started four years ago. "It's a strong signal that Singapore is not as conservative as some think," Paerin Choa, a rally spokesman, told Reuters. Just hours before attending the rally, Vincent Wijeysingha became Singapore's first openly gay politician when he officially came out. The country bans gay sex, though this is rarely enforced, but in April a gay couple, Gary Lim and Kenneth Chee, attempted to get the law removed. Their case was dismissed, but they are appealing with the help of Lord Goldsmith, the former attorney general.

The Human Dignity Trust filed a suit at the European court of human rights against Turkish-occupied northern Cyprus, the only place in Europe where homosexuality is still illegal, and looks likely to win.

In a letter sent to the Kaleidoscope Trust, the prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago expressed her wish to repeal the laws that ban homosexuality. The prime minister of Jamaica, Portia Simpson Miller, has voiced similar wishes. In June, Javed Jaghai was the lastest activist to launch legal proceedings to challenge the anti-sodomy laws (however, violence against gay people is increasing, and 17-year-old Dwayne Jones was stabbed to death last week at a party according to local media reports).

In Malawi, the president Joyce Banda announced in 2012 that laws criminalising homosexuality would be repealed – she has since distanced herself from that, although there has been a moratorium and there have been no prosecutions. "So it's not just the global north where things are moving forward. In some parts of the world where you'd least expect them, things are getting better," says Stewart.

The number of countries legalising same-sex marriage continues to grow, with Denmark, Brazil, France and New Zealand just some that joined more progressive countries that had legalised it earlier. Last month in the US, where Barack Obama publicly supports equal marriage and it is legal in several states, the supreme court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act (which prevented the federal government from recognising marriages between gay couples) as unconstitutional. And of course England and Wales now has the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013.

 

Where are LGBT rights worsening?

In Iran, a place where homosexuality is punishable by death and you thought LGBT rights couldn't really get worse, this year the country's official who works on human rights described homosexuality as "an illness that should be cured". Of course, gay rights are no better in many other Middle Eastern countries. The ILGA (International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association) provides a comprehensive look at state-sponsored homophobia in a 2013 report .

Gay-rights activist Yury Gavrikov is detained by riot police at a rally in Moscow in May. Photograph: Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP/Getty Images

Two weeks ago, Eric Ohena Lembembe, was found at home in Yaoundé, the capital of Cameroon. He had been tortured – his neck and feet broken, his body burned with an iron – and murdered. As the executive director of Camfaids, Lembembe was one of Cameroon's most prominent and outspoken LGBT rights activists and openly gay – an astonishing act of bravery in a country where homosexuality is punishable with prison and violence against LGBT people is common and almost never investigated. Amnesty International's 2013 report on global human rights stated even people who supported LGBT rights were being harrassed, particularly equality lawyers Alice Nkom and Michel Togue who had both received calls and text messages threatening to kill them and their children if they did not stop defending gay people who had been arrested. In June this year, Togue's office was broken into and files and computers stolen. In March 2012, a workshop held to educate young people about LGBT issues was shut down.

Last week, two men were given prison sentences under the country's anti-gay laws; in 2011, another man, Jean-Claude Roger Mbédé, was sentenced to three years in prison for sending a text message to another man. Men who are perceived to be gay are arrested, somtimes only on the basis of someone's suspicions, and some are forced to undergo rectal examinations and tortured into confessing. "They have such an active prosecution system," says Cooper. "Although prosecutions do occur in other jurisdictions, you don't have that kind of active prosecution policy that you have in Cameroon."

After the death of Lembembe, gay-rights groups said they couldn't continue their work unless they are given protection by international donors who fund the fight against HIV/Aids. "We have all decided to stop our work in the field because our security is at risk," said Yves Yomb, executive director of Alternatives-Cameroun. "We have no protection from the police and we feel that our lives are at risk."

Sharing a border with Cameroon, Nigeria's anti-gay laws are becoming ever more draconian. It recently passed a bill outlawing same-sex marriage, punishable with a 14-year prison term. "Nobody in the country is seriously asking for gay marriage," says Stewart from the Kaleidoscope Trust. "There is no reason to legislate against it, when homosexual sex is already illegal. It also has more concerning provisions that ban the formation of groups that support LGBT rights and a series of provisions that if you know a homosexual but don't turn them in, you are aiding and abetting. That isn't on the statute books yet but it seems likely that it will pass in some form."

Politicians in Uganda are attempting to pass a similar bill, at one point seeking to punish homosexual relationships with the death penalty; people found guilty of being gay will now face life imprisonment, and anybody – parents, teachers, doctors – who suspects someone in their care is gay will be punished if they do not report them.

Last week, President Mugabe told a rally of Zanu PF supporters that Zimbabwe would never accept homosexuality, and that gay people were "worse than pigs, goats and birds". There are 38 African countries where homosexuality is illegal.

In Russia, gay rights are moving further away from other European countries. In an extreme version of Britain's section 28, a new law will punish anybody disseminating "propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations among minors expressed in distribution of information … aimed at the formation … of … misperceptions of the social equivalence of traditional and non-traditional sexual relations". It has also failed to comply with the 2010 judgment at the European court of human rights that requires it to allow gay pride events. Violence against LGBT people is rising. In May, there was a brutal murder of a man who had revealed to "friends" he was gay. Official numbers of homophobic attacks are low, but LGBT activists say this is because attacks are not often reported, and when they are police rarely label them as such, but one poll last year of nearly 900 people by the Russian LGBT Network found more than 15% had experienced physical violence between November 2011 and August 2012.

Last week, the Pink News reported neo-Nazi groups in Russia has been luring gay teenagers to meetings, where they are forced to come out in videos that are then posted on social media sites. It reported that one victim, 19-year-old Alex Bulygin, killed himself after his sexuality was revealed.

Russia's renewed attacks on homosexuality may be spreading beyond its borders – there are moves in Ukraine to adopt its own ban on "gay propaganda" and in May the parliament dropped a bill that would have outlawed discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation after a protest by anti-gay activists.

 

July 22, 2013

 

Faster Than the Speed of Light?

By DANNY HAKIM NY TIMES

 

 

HOUSTON — Beyond the security gate at the Johnson Space Center’s 1960s-era campus here, inside a two-story glass and concrete building with winding corridors, there is a floating laboratory.

Harold G. White, a physicist and advanced propulsion engineer at NASA, beckoned toward a table full of equipment there on a recent afternoon: a laser, a camera, some small mirrors, a ring made of ceramic capacitors and a few other objects.

He and other NASA engineers have been designing and redesigning these instruments, with the goal of using them to slightly warp the trajectory of a photon, changing the distance it travels in a certain area, and then observing the change with a device called an interferometer. So sensitive is their measuring equipment that it was picking up myriad earthly vibrations, including people walking nearby. So they recently moved into this lab, which floats atop a system of underground pneumatic piers, freeing it from seismic disturbances.

The team is trying to determine whether faster-than-light travel — warp drive — might someday be possible.

Warp drive. Like on “Star Trek.”

“Space has been expanding since the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago,” said Dr. White, 43, who runs the research project. “And we know that when you look at some of the cosmology models, there were early periods of the universe where there was explosive inflation, where two points would’ve went receding away from each other at very rapid speeds.”

“Nature can do it,” he said. “So the question is, can we do it?”

Einstein famously postulated that, as Dr. White put it, “thou shalt not exceed the speed of light,” essentially setting a galactic speed limit. But in 1994, a Mexican physicist, Miguel Alcubierre, theorized that faster-than-light speeds were possible in a way that did not contradict Einstein, though Dr. Alcubierre did not suggest anyone could actually construct the engine that could accomplish that.

His theory involved harnessing the expansion and contraction of space itself. Under Dr. Alcubierre’s hypothesis, a ship still couldn’t exceed light speed in a local region of space. But a theoretical propulsion system he sketched out manipulated space-time by generating a so-called “warp bubble” that would expand space on one side of a spacecraft and contract it on another.

“In this way, the spaceship will be pushed away from the Earth and pulled towards a distant star by space-time itself,” Dr. Alcubierre wrote. Dr. White has likened it to stepping onto a moving walkway at an airport.

But Dr. Alcubierre’s paper was purely theoretical, and suggested insurmountable hurdles. Among other things, it depended on large amounts of a little understood or observed type of “exotic matter” that violates typical physical laws.

Dr. White believes that advances he and others have made render warp speed less implausible. Among other things, he has redesigned the theoretical warp-traveling spacecraft — and in particular a ring around it that is key to its propulsion system — in a way that he believes will greatly reduce the energy requirements.

He is quick to offer up his own caveats, however, saying his warp research is akin to a university science project that is just trying to prove that a microscopic warp bubble can be detected in a lab. ”We’re not bolting this to a spacecraft,” he said of the warp technology.

Dr. White was an engineer with a background in the aerospace industry when he came to NASA in 2000, starting his career at the agency by operating the arms of space shuttles. He got his doctorate in physics from Rice University in 2008, and now works on a range of projects aimed at taking NASA beyond the fiery rockets that have long characterized space travel.

For NASA, Dr. White’s warp speed experiments represent a rounding error in its budget, with about $50,000 spent on equipment in an agency that spends nearly $18 billion annually. The agency is far more focused on more achievable projects — building the next generation Orion series spacecraft, working on the International Space Station and preparing for a planned future mission to capture an asteroid.

But it has made internal resources available for the project and freed up other engineers to assist Dr. White. It has also restored the pneumatic system in the laboratory Dr. White is using, to allow it to float. The lab was once used to test equipment for Apollo missions and has control panels underneath it that look like they belong in a fallout shelter that time forgot.

Steve Stich, the deputy director of engineering at the Johnson Space Center, said, “You always have to be looking towards the future.” He held up his iPhone.

“Forty years ago, this was ‘Star Trek,’ Captain Kirk talking on a communicator whenever he wanted to,” he said. “But today it exists because people made the battery technology that allows this device to exist, worked on the software technology, worked on the computational technology, the touch screen.”

Theoretically, a warp drive could cut the travel time between stars from tens of thousands of years to weeks or months. But we should probably not book reservations anytime soon.

“My personal opinion is that the idea is crazy for now,” said Edwin F. Taylor, a former editor of The American Journal of Physics and senior research scientist at M.I.T. “Check with me in a hundred years.”

But Richard Obousy, a physicist who is president of Icarus Interstellar, a nonprofit group composed of volunteers collaborating on starship design, said “it is not airy-fairy, pie in the sky.”

“We tend to overestimate what we can do on short time scales, but I think we massively underestimate what we can do on longer time scales,” he said of the work of Dr. White, who is a friend and Icarus collaborator.

Dr. White likened his experiments to the early stages of the Manhattan Project, which were aimed at creating a very small nuclear reaction merely as proof that it could be done.

“They tried to go through and demonstrate a nuclear reactor and generate half a watt,” he said. “That’s not something you’re going to market. Nobody’s going to buy that. It’s just making sure they understood the physics and science.”

Neil deGrasse Tyson, the well-known astrophysicist at the American Museum of Natural History, said some leap beyond our current technology would be needed to make interstellar travel feasible.

“Routine travel among the stars is impossible without new discoveries regarding the fabric of space and time, or capability to manipulate it for our needs,” he said, adding, “By my read, the idea of a functioning warp drive remains far-fetched, but the real take-away is that people are thinking about it — reminding us all that the urge to explore continues to run deep in our species.”

Still, one of the most dubious is Dr. Alcubierre himself. He listed a number of concerns, starting with the vast amounts of exotic matter that would be needed.

“The warp drive on this ground alone is impossible,” he said.

And he posed a more fundamental question: How would you turn it on?

“At speeds larger than the speed of light, the front of the warp bubble cannot be reached by any signal from within the ship,” he said. “This does not just mean we can’t turn it off; it is much worse. It means we can’t even turn it on in the first place.”

Dr. White, who has never spoken to Dr. Alcubierre, said “I appreciate his thoughts. I don’t know whether I agree with all of his observations, based on some work I’ve done.”

“He and I could certainly debate for a very long time,” he added.