Flannery O'Connor said, "Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them."

Poem: "The Rider"
by Naomi Shihab Nye
from Fuel: Poems by Naomi Shihab Nye.
© Boa Editions. Reprinted with permission.


The Rider

A boy told me
if he roller-skated fast enough
his loneliness couldn't catch up to him,

the best reason I ever heard
for trying to be a champion.

What I wonder tonight
pedaling hard down King William Street
is if it translates to bicycles.

A victory! To leave your loneliness
panting behind you on some street corner
while you float free into a cloud of sudden azaleas,
pink petals that have never felt loneliness,
no matter how slowly they fell.

Gay Fiddler Ashley MacIsaac For Canadian Prime Minister?
Angela Pacienza, Canadian Press
March 21, 2006 - 7:00 pm ET

(Toronto, Ontario)

Prime Minister Ashley MacIsaac?

The controversial fiddler insisted Tuesday his desire to run for the leadership of the federal Liberal party is not just another one of his outlandish stunts.

``I know that I've courted a lot of press in the past for situations in my entertainment life,'' said 31-year-old MacIsaac in an interview.

``I have for many years relied upon the sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll image to sell (concert) tickets. That's not what I plan on doing to sell my particular platform of what I think the Liberals need to do to move forward.''

MacIsaac shot to fame in 1995 with the release of Hi How Are You Today?, an album which included the dance hit Sleepy Maggie.

In no time, he was making headlines for his eccentric behaviour, which included flashing his genitals when his kilt flipped up during a 1997 appearance on a late-night U.S. talk show. He once told an interviewer that he enjoyed urinating on sexual partners; to another he said he wanted to be ``weirder than Michael Jackson.''

Calling himself a lifelong Liberal, MacIsaac said he's a changed man who's been toying with the move for a few years.

He said he's attended several Liberal conventions in the past and hopes to turn to friend Allan MacEachen, a former Liberal deputy prime minister, for advice. MacEachen spent more than 20 years in the Commons and 12 more in the Senate before retiring in 1996.

If MacIsaac follows through, he could be running against former Ontario NDP premier Bob Rae and MPs Scott Brison (who also is openly gay) and Michael Ignatieff, who have been named as potential candidates. MP John Godfrey and Toronto lawyer Martha Hall Findlay have declared their intention to seek the leadership.

Liberal party president Mike Eizenga declined to comment on MacIsaac's ambitions, citing the need to remain neutral in the contest. Liberal national director Steven MacKinnon similarly declined comment.

However, at least one potential leadership candidate indicated that he's not taking MacIsaac seriously.

``I can't talk to you,'' said the putative rival, who spoke on condition of anonymity. ``I'm in the middle of a square dance.''

MacIsaac, who is from Cape Breton but has been based in Toronto for the last five years, said he's ready to mount a campaign to convince people he's a worthy candidate. He said his platform will include aboriginal and youth issues and strengthening ties with Quebec.
``It's obvious I'm taking a really big leap to try and have people consider becoming delegates for myself,'' he conceded, saying that he'd like to at least make the second ballot in the December race.

Some may find MacIsaac's stated political ambitions tough to accept, given past stunts where he's called up media outlets to offer so-called news tips about his life.

He told a Calgary newspaper in 2004 that he planned to have a gay wedding in Alberta, which won him a couple of national headlines, but there were no reports of any actual wedding. A year earlier he announced he was going to run as an independent federal candidate in Dartmouth, but later changed his mind.

On Tuesday he showed up for at least one TV interview in Toronto clad in a fur coat, gold chains dangling from his neck and wearing black shades.

MacIsaac insisted he wasn't being flippant or disrespectful but simply being himself by injecting a ``little pizzazz in politics.''

``People are who they are. I'm not going to be ashamed of who I am,'' said MacIsaac, whose most recent album, Pride, was released last September and was due to hit stores in the U.S. this week.

``I don't think anybody ever had a problem watching George Bush wear his cowboy boots . . . Judging a book by its cover is never a good thing to do.''

The leadership race officially begins on April 7. The Liberals will choose their new leader on the weekend of Dec. 2 in Montreal.

© www.365Gay.com 2006

St. Patrick's Day parade chairman compares gays to neo-Nazis


To John Dunleavy, chairman of the “no gays allowed” St. Patrick's Day parade in New York City, Irish LGBT activists are comparable to neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan. That's what Dunleavy told The Irish Times in a story about the increasingly controversial parade winding along Fifth Avenue on Friday. For 15 years, the parade committee has refused to allow gay Irish groups to march as an identifiable group.

“If an Israeli group wants to march in New York, do you allow neo-Nazis into their parade?” Dunleavy told The Irish Times. “If African-Americans are marching in Harlem, do they have to let the Ku Klux Klan into their parade?”

Lesbian city council leader Christine Quinn announced Friday that she was boycotting the parade after failing to broker a compromise between LGBT advocates and parade officials that would have allowed gays to march.

(The Advocate)

It's the birthday of playwright Henrik Ibsen, born in Skien, Norway (1828). He is generally considered to be the father of modern drama. His father was a wealthy merchant in Norway's timber trade, but when Ibsen was eight years old his father went bankrupt, and the family had to move to a rundown farm outside of town. Their family friends stopped talking to them, Isben's father became abusive, and his mother fell into depression. When he was sixteen, Ibsen left home and never saw his family again.

He got a job as assistant stage manager for a new theater and then applied to the government for a stipend to travel abroad, and got it. He spent the next twenty-seven years living in Italy and Germany.

He found that by leaving his homeland he could finally see Norway clearly, and he began to work on creating a true Norwegian drama. At a time when most people were writing plays full of sword fights and murders, Ibsen started to write plays about relationships between ordinary people.

One of Isben's first realistic plays was A Doll's House (1879), about a woman named Nora who refuses to obey her husband and eventually leaves him, walking out of the house and slamming the door in the final scene. It changed the style of acting. At the time, most actors were praised for their ability to deliver long poetic speeches, but Ibsen emphasized small gestures, the inflection of certain words and pauses, and he inspired a new generation of actors to begin embodying the characters they played.

When he published his play Ghosts (1881), about a man with venereal disease, it was so scandalous that no one would produce it onstage for two years. A London newspaper called it, "An open drain; a loathsome sore unbandaged; a dirty act done publicly." But eventually, after writers like George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde began calling him the greatest living playwright, audiences began to accept his work as literature.

Henrik Ibsen said, "Writing has ... been to me like a bath from which I have risen feeling cleaner, healthier, and freer."

- from Garrison Keillor's "The Writer's Almanac" on National Public Radio (NPR)