Dr. Helen Caldicott Speaks in San Diego

Says Global Warming Is an Emergency Requiring Drastic Measures

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

It’s been over a quarter of a century since pediatrician Dr. Helen Caldicott emerged from her native Australia to become one of the most eloquent spokespeople against nuclear power and nuclear weapons. She said back then she was engaging in “preventive pediatrics” by warning against the potentially cataclysmic effects of nuclear energy even in its so-called “peaceful” form. Today she’s past her peak as a media phenomenon — her October 23 speech at the First Unitarian-Universalist Church in Hillcrest drew less than 150 people in a room that can hold over 600, and the only media covering it were Pacifica Radio, Free Speech TV and Zenger’s — but her message was, if anything, even more fiery and emphatic than ever. She said that global warming will make it impossible for earth to sustain human life — unless we start a nuclear war and destroy ourselves that way first — and only a worldwide mobilization to develop and use only renewable energy sources can save us.

“As I look at the climate bill in Congress, there are all those corporations with lobbyists swarming over it, and the Congressmembers aren’t representing us,” Dr. Caldicott said. She pointed out that the corporations opposing any action to deal with global warming are using the same public relations firms that for decades represented the tobacco industry in its attempts to cast doubt on the scientific link between smoking and cancer — and the P.R. companies are using the same strategies now that they did then, calling the science behind global warming “uncertain” and “unproven” and trying to persuade politicians that any serious action against global warming will be devastating to the world’s economy.

According to Dr. Caldicott, there are indeed doubts about global warming — but in the other direction from the corporate P.R. propaganda. If anything, she said, the situation is worse than the scientists have been telling us. “When the U.N. Panel on Climate Change wrote its recently released report, it was based on data from five years ago,” she explained. “Now a group in London says if we continue business as usual, the temperature will have risen four degrees by the end of this century. The Arctic ice cap is already almost gone, and the Greenland cap is melting. If it melts, the worst problem is the oceans will rise 15 meters (about 50 feet). One-third of the world’s population lives at sea level. If that happens, New York and Sydney will be gone. The glaciers in the Himalayas are receding — and they supply most of the fresh water for China and India.”

In a slashing and sometimes rambling talk — she asked for indulgence about the rambling by saying it was the last speech on her tour and she was feeling punchy — she attacked defense contractors, war in general, religion and the corporate media. She criticized the government of Australia for having kept out refugees fleeing the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and said “the Pentagon is elated” at the prospect of global warming because it will mean more conflicts between countries — and therefore a greater market for U.S. defense contractors like Lockheed, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman.

“It fascinates me that in this society, if someone commits murder, it’s a crime — but this whole country is a killing machine and the soldiers are put on pedestals,” Dr. Caldicott said. “The kids who come back from war are traumatized, they drink and they beat their wives. As a woman and a physician, I don’t understand why men kill.” She called historical military leaders like Alexander the Great and Napoleon “psychopaths” and said part of the problem lay with her own gender: “Why did I fall in love with alpha males? So my babies would get really powerful sperm? The more I think of us, the more I think we are evolutionary aberrants, because we’re killing the planet.”

Dr. Caldicott said she’d recently returned from Alberta, Canada, “and I’ve never heard so many deniers of global warming. They are still chopping down trees — the lungs of the earth — like crazy. We’re chopping them down in Australia. Why do people like to kill? Why do they like to kill animals? We’re fishing the seas out.” At least part of the problem, she added, is the “exponential growth” of the human population from one billion 200 years ago to seven billion today. She compared the human race to bacteria grown in a laboratory, which reproduce relentlessly until they run out of nutrient in the culture medium — whereupon they die off en masse. “Are we going to destroy the world for money?” she said. “I think we are.”

As part of her presentation, Dr. Caldicott seized on two especially powerful motivators that make men fight wars: religion and sex. “Religion is a real bugbear,” she said. “I have to go back through history and look at the wars fought in the name of religion. There are mad people in the church, including 40 million people in this country praying for nuclear war. Why don’t the churches rise up and say we should stop killing people?” As for the war-sex connection, she said, “Why do men rape women when they conquer territory? I asked my dad, and he didn’t know. Why do they show men porno films before they go into war? The two things that get the limbic system to produce dopamine are sex and violence, and that fascinates me. As a physician, I want to find out why.”

While praising President Obama for wanting to rid the world of nuclear weapons, Dr. Caldicott acknowledged he’s “having a hell of a time” and said it’s largely due to the opposition of a Right-wing corporate media that, if she had her way, would be driven out of business. “I don’t believe Rush Limbaugh and these people should be allowed to talk on the radio,” she said. “When it comes to the future of the earth, I don’t believe in free speech. We’re important, but not as important as the 30 million other species with which we share the planet. The media companies and the FCC [Federal Communications Commission] need to address their responsibility for having people on the air who are threatening the survival of the earth.”

Dr. Caldicott said that, aside from Pacifica Radio and Amy Goodman’s syndicated broadcast Democracy Now, there are literally no U.S. media untainted by the corporations. “National Public Radio takes money from the nuclear power industry,” she said. “I want you to take on the corporations who are promoting global warming. Learn about it, go see your politicians and teach them. Senator Barbara Boxer is a good woman, but the energy bill is being corrupted by the nuclear power industry. They need to put me on TV to educate people about why nuclear power is not the answer to global warming.”

That last argument — the heavy-duty propaganda campaign by the nuclear power industry to promote its technology as “clean” and free of a carbon footprint — incenses Dr. Caldicott so much that she wrote an entire book about it and called it Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer. “Nuclear power is the bastard son of the nuclear-weapons industry,” she said. “A huge amount of fossil fuel is used to mine uranium. Milling uranium ore and treating it to produce yellowcake produces more CO2. Then to enrich it, you have to turn it into uranium hexafluoride gas and separate it into U-235 and U-238. They use coal-fired power plants to run the centrifuges that do this, and use CFC gas, which is otherwise banned worldwide, to keep it cool. CFC is not only an ozone depleter, it’s 20,000 times as effective a greenhouse gas as CO2.”

After the uranium is enriched to the 3 percent U-235 concentration needed to power a reactor, she explained, “it’s packed into fuel pellets, put into rods and taken to reactors like San Onofre, which is 30 years old. They pack 1 1/2 tons of uranium into a reactor, and they produce new elements which are all radioactive. The heat produced by the reactor boils water, which turns the steam turbines that generate the electricity. They started this because the scientists who invented the atomic bomb felt guilty and looked for a way to promote this technology for ‘peaceful’ use. Then it was propagandized as being ‘American’” — so effectively, she said, that to this day she gets criticized by people quoting the 1950’s playbook of the nuclear industry and the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and telling her she’s being “un-American” for opposing nuclear power.

Dr. Caldicott also mentioned what happens to the U-238 — which can’t be fissioned like U-235 but still emits dangerous, highly radioactive alpha particles — after it’s separated out in the centrifuges. It’s turned into depleted uranium ammunition and used in warheads fired by American tanks. “America used 360 tons of depleted uranium in 1991 near Basra, Iraq,” she explained. “U-238 is very carcinogenic, and children are 100 times more sensitive to radiation than adults. Fetuses are 1,000 times more sensitive. The shells are pyrophoric (they start fires when they explode) and spread radioactivity in the air. My colleagues noted an increase in childhood cancers in Basra by 1995, and that’s now gone up 700 percent. Because of the sanctions and the war, doctors can’t treat patients. U.S. soldiers would into hospitals and shoot up both the doctors and the patients. The half-life of U-238 is 4 1/2 billion years. They’ve contaminated the cradle of civilization for the rest of time, and those children will be having those diseases until the end of time.”

While her main agenda was to address global warming, renewable energy and the evils of war and nuclear power, Dr. Caldicott couldn’t resist commenting on the U.S. health-care debate. “How did insurance companies get into medicine in the first place?” she said. “You should have free taxpayer-supported medical care like we have in Australia — ‘single-payer,’ the ‘public option,’ whatever you want to call it. Instead your tax money goes to the Pentagon to kill people.” Responding to the argument that under a taxpayer-funded, government-run health insurance system people couldn’t make enough money to make it worth their while to be doctors, Dr. Caldicott said, “Doctors shouldn’t be rich. I think teachers should make more than doctors because they’re doing more for the human race.”

As depressing as her presentation sometimes got, Dr. Caldicott stressed at the end that she’s an optimist and she believes the earth’s problems, though grave, can be fixed — and they can be fixed by the same human ingenuity that caused them. She said the solution to the energy problem is “a heterogeneous collection of solar power and wind,” and urged the U.S. to install solar panels on top of every building and parking lot. She also argued that the power grid needs to be improved, especially in the Midwest, to move this energy from where it’s produced to where it’s needed. As evidence that the U.S. could pull this off if it had the political will to do so, she cited its history immediately after it entered World War II in December 1941.

“Within six months of Pearl Harbor, America converted every factory to war production because of the emergency,” Dr. Caldicott said. “There’s a much worse emergency now. The Earth is in the intensive care unit, acutely ill. We’re all physicians to a dying planet, and we can fix it.”

Queer Democrats Endorse Alvarez, Wayne for City Council

Discussion Lively but Not Bitter in 2 1/2-Hour Meeting

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

PHOTOS, top to bottom: David Alvarez, Howard Wayne

The predominantly Queer San Diego Democratic Club took two different directions in considering endorsements for the San Diego City Council at its October 22 meeting. In District 6, currently represented by Donna Frye, the club picked former Assemblymember Howard Wayne, an established candidate who boasted of a long list of endorsers — including the San Diego County Democratic Party, former State Senator DeDe Alpert, State Assemblymember Mary Salas, current State Senator and former City Councilmember Christine Kehoe and her two successors on the City Council, Toni Atkins and Todd Gloria — over Steve Hadley, Frye’s chief of staff, whose endorsers, aside from Frye, former City Council candidate Stephen Whitburn and former mayoral candidate Steve Francis, are mostly community activists within the district little known in the rest of the city.

In District 8, by contrast, the club picked grass-roots candidate David Alvarez, a member of the staff of State Senator Denise Moreno Ducheny, over two more prominent Latino candidates: Felipe Hueso, older brother of incumbent District 8 Councilmember Ben Hueso; and South Bay Union School District board member Nick Inzunza, Sr. Inzunza’s nephew Ralph resigned the District 8 Council seat in disgrace in 2005 after being convicted of accepting illegal campaign contributions from a strip-club owner, and his son Nick Jr. quit the position of mayor of National City in 2006 after the local media exposed him as a slumlord — though the San Diego Hispanic Chamber of Commerce disregarded that part of his background when it hired him as their executive director in March 2009. A fourth candidate, B. D. Howard, also appeared at the club’s October 22 candidates’ forum.

In the District 6 race, Wayne cited not only his long list of endorsers but his history in the Assembly. ”I’ve been a member of this club since 1991, and a few years later you helped send me to the state legislature,” he recalled. “[Former state legislator] Sheila Kuehl asked us to vote on her bill to end discrimination in public education based on sexual orientation. She held open the vote to give any member the opportunity to change a vote in favor if it might hurt them politically. We got 36 votes — five short of the number needed to pass — and all the ‘yes’ votes stayed on all night. A few years later, we debated the bill again, and there was talk from the floor about how it was part of a ‘Satanic Gay agenda.’ I said, ‘I’ve finally figured out what the “Gay agenda” is: that people in the Gay community demand the same rights as everyone else.’ This time we got 41 votes, the bare minimum.”

Hadley, a former minister who went to law school in San Diego but whose law license is from Washington, D.C., has been on Frye’s staff all but one year since 2001 and has been her chief of staff since 2004. “I’ve always been an activist,” he said. “I helped ordain the first women in my denomination and hired the first women on the staff. My family left the Republican Party in 1980 when the Moral Majority joined it.” After saying he’d supported a female-to-male Transgender person on his church staff and helped him through his transition, Hadley said he had helped Frye on church-state issues including opposing the Boy Scouts’ lease on city parkland, opposing the cross on Mount Soledad and supporting the California Supreme Court case for marriage equality. “The pastors in my town don’t like me very much,” he said. (Hadley avoided mentioning the name of his church, but he went to college at Loma Linda University, associated with the Seventh-Day Adventists.)

Club members questioned both candidates on why they hadn’t been more aggressive supporters of marriage equality. Asked why he hadn’t supported Assemblymember Mark Leno’s same-sex marriage bills, Wayne pointed out that he left the Assembly before Leno arrived. Hadley was questioned about his refusal to oppose school vouchers, and both candidates were asked about whether creationism should be taught in schools. Hadley said it should be kept out of science classes but should be mentioned in classes teaching “myths and fables.” Wayne flatly stated that the Genesis myth “belongs in church, not in education.”

Asked about the city’s ongoing budget crisis, Wayne said, “We’re going to have to live with sacrifices from the public and the employees, but we should not be contracting out city jobs.” Hadley, whose boss Frye has launched a controversial initiative with Republican City Councilmember Carl DeMaio to revamp the city’s budget process, said, “There is still huge waste at City Hall. We just found a consultant who was being paid $7 million, not for anything specific but just to have him around in case the city wanted to consult with him. I would also go back and look at the COLA (cost of living adjustment) for our retirees. When federal retirees do not get COLA’s, neither should our retirees.”

The debate over the District 6 endorsement pitted two former San Diego Democratic Club presidents against each other. Jess Durfee, who has served as chair of the San Diego County Democratic Central Committee since leaving the club presidency, said the committee recommending an endorsement to the full central committee came out 85 percent in support of Wayne. “Howard did an exceptional job,” Durfee said. “He’s been elected three times. He has the name recognition. He has the ability to access money. If we don’t have a strong candidate in this race, we will lose this seat — and our carefully won City Council majority — to the Republicans.”

“Either Howard or Steve would serve us tremendously, but I’d like to put in a good word for Steve,” said Stephen Whitburn. “He worked on our City Council campaign, and I came to admire him. You will rarely meet a more decent person than Steve. Steve is someone who makes up his own mind. Steve works with a church that usually doesn’t support marriage equality, and he’s stood up for us. He knows the city and the district inside out.” Wayne eventually won the endorsement, but by a surprisingly close margin — 36 votes, one more than the minimum required, to 18 for Hadley and four for no endorsement.

With four candidates present, the District 8 forum was more sprawling. Felipe Hueso used his opening statement to try to establish a more progressive reputation than his brother’s. “I’ve represented injured workers — the people who pick your fruit and lettuce — for 20 years,” he said. “I’ve been advising on their behalf through a lawyers’ organization. I’m a consensus builder. I started Inter-American College in National City 13 years ago, and now we have 150 students, we’re fully accredited and our graduates are bilingual teachers and nurse-practitioners. You need someone with business experience and accomplishments.”

“I’m running because I don’t like what’s been going on in District 8,” said Nick Inzunza. “Whatever is going on in the district is being imposed on it from outside. There’s discussion about modernizing Brown Field — which will mean 747’s landing in our backyard — but the people at the meetings are not from District 8. Also we have people from outside the district holding meetings on extending Donovan prison. We stopped 300 parolees from coming into our community. There was a proposal to put them in the Super Easy-8 motel on Palm Avenue. That would not have been a good environment for our kids.”

“I am running because I love the community,” said David Alvarez. “I was born, raised and grew up in Barrio Logan. My dad was a farm worker, a maid, a dishwasher and a janitor. My mom flipped burgers at McDonald’s. I was the first Alvarez [in his family] to graduate from high school and then go to college.” Like his opponents, he said infrastructure would be one of his priorities: “We have unpaved and eroded sidewalks, and eroded streets. We have a need for lighting. Another need is public safety. At a time when crime is increasing, we need money for more police officers and firefighters.”

Howard began with Benjamin Franklin’s famous quote after the 1787 Constitutional Convention, when he told a woman who asked what form of government the convention had given the country, replied, “A republic — if you can keep it.” He said his priorities were “making sure the government is responsive, setting up a satellite office near the border, adequate police and fire protection and the city budget. We’re going to have to figure out how to keep the deficit under control.” Asked whether they supported outsourcing city workers’ jobs to private companies, Hueso ducked the question, Alvarez and Inzunza both said no, and Howard said the voters had already decided to outsource when they passed the ballot measure allowing it, so the city had no choice but to go forward with privatization.

Alex Sachs, the club’s vice-president in charge of political action, chaired the candidates’ forum and moved it along so relentlessly that at one point he told the candidates they had 30 seconds each to answer a convoluted question about discrimination against people with HIV or AIDS in immigration and access to social services. One club member pointed out it had taken Sachs more than 30 seconds just to read the question, and therefore he should allow the candidates more time to answer it. Carlos Marquez, club member and labor activist who had written the question, later said he had sent it up to target Howard, who he said had told previous audiences he didn’t oppose discrimination against people with HIV and AIDS.

Alvarez actually won his endorsement more easily than Wayne had. Though club member and city union activist Michelle Krug said “Felipe Hueso is not his brother,” she came out for Alvarez — as did every other club member who spoke during the debate. Alvarez won the endorsement with 40 votes to one each for Howard and Hueso, none for Inzunza and three for no endorsement.

In addition to the City Council races, the club also heard from Assemblymember Hector de la Torre about his campaign for state insurance commissioner — mostly about how his attempts to reform the health care system, especially his bill to block health insurance companies from canceling people’s policies just when they start making claims on them (a practice called “rescission”), had been frustrated by Governor Schwarzenegger — and gave a tepid endorsement to Palm Springs Mayor Steve Pougnet in his campaign for Congress against incumbent Mary Bono Mack. The club expressed concerns about Pougnet’s willingness to bar undocumented immigrants from health coverage and his apparent support of parental notification requirements for some minor girls seeking abortions. Eventually the members took the unusual step of directing the club’s board to write Pougnet a letter about these issues.

BÉLA DORNON:

Photographer Chronicles “142 Days” of Marriage Equality in California

interview by MARK GABRISH CONLAN and CHARLES NELSON

Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Photo copyright © 2008 by Béla Dornon • Used by permission

The leaflet on the wall of Flicks’ bar in Hillcrest offered an irresistible lure for a Queer journalist who was himself half of a legally married couple. A photographer named Béla Dornon had announced that he was going to try to take pictures of every one of the estimated 18,000 same-sex couples who had married during what he called the “142 Days” — the “window” between June 15, 2008, when the California Supreme Court’s decision allowing same-sex couples in California to marry took effect; and November 4, 2008, when the state’s voters passed Proposition 8 and took that right away from us.

Though Dornon proved realistic about his chances to meet his goal of taking — or displaying — everyone’s photo, he nonetheless exuded optimism and a kind of quiet defiance when we went out to his studio on Mission Gorge Road October 20 both to interview him and to allow him to photograph us for use in his project. Our meeting turned out to be part interview, part photo shoot, and a lot of casual banter as Dornon revealed his unusual background. He grew up in a religious family but, as you will see, didn’t internalize his parents’ or his church’s anti-Queer beliefs and certainly didn’t struggle, as a lot of people from that background have, to reconcile his spiritual and sexual orientations.

Dornon is continuing his project, in some cases using photos he took of couples in his regular portrait business before they got married; in some cases borrowing them from other photographers or the couples themselves; and in some cases photographing new ones. His immediate goal is to get enough photos he’s taken himself or can legally show to exhibit them and create positive images of Queer couples to counter the hate propaganda used by the radical Right to pass measures like Proposition 8. Dornon can be reached by phone at (619) 757-3367 or e-mail at sdfaceplace@me.com. His regular business Web site is www.sdfaceplace.com and the special site for the marriage project, where you can view the photos he already has and download model releases and information to participate yourselves, is www.142days.com

Zenger’s: Why don’t we start just by telling me a little about yourself, your background?

Béla Dornon: That’s a long story. I was born and raised in California — born in Long Beach, raised in Oceanside. People sometimes ask me when I got out of Oceanside, and I always say as soon as I realized where I was. But I went to college, met a boy, settled down, and then we got married last year.

Zenger’s: That wasn’t your first relationship?

Dornon: No, he’s my second. The first one was a disaster primarily because we had no good role models. Neither of our parents had very successful relationships. We didn’t know any Gay couples that had long-term relationships. We just didn’t have anybody to pattern ourselves after. But it ended without too much acrimony, which is good.

Zenger’s: When did you first find out you were Gay? How did you come to grips with that?

Dornon: When I was about three, I remember my mother coming into the room while I was watching Sinbad the Sailor, and I turned it off because I didn’t want her to catch me watching that. But it took another seven years before I finally had a boyfriend. I never liked girls “that way.” I always knew I was Gay.

Zenger’s: You mentioned you’d been in an “ex-Gay” ministry, and that’s where you met your first partner. Why did you enter an “ex-Gay” ministry, and how did that work for you?

Dornon: For my mother. I really, really tried to be a Christian for her. My mother is a Fundamentalist born-again Christian, and I went that far for her. Unfortunately, I always knew it was bullshit. But I did it anyway, because that’s what she wanted. And luckily, I met a man the first time, and never went back!

Zenger’s: So you just went once?

Dornon: One time. That’s all it took! Now, are you going to ask me how I got interested in photography?

Zenger’s: Yes, I am.

Dornon: That [gesturing at a photo of an attractive man on the wall of his studio] is how I got interested in photography. When Phil and I moved to Germany in 2000, I started working out at a little gym next to the institute where we were both working. The boys there were absolutely gorgeous. This is a typical example. His name is Danny, and I quickly discovered that not only were they absolutely gorgeous, but they were very willing to pose, very happy to be naked, and just loved the attention. We already had a digital camera, and after a year I bought a much better one.

I just got completely absorbed in it. By the time we had left, I had taken 23,000 photos and had had two shows. And that’s basically it. I was just completely stuck on it. Unfortunately, San Diego doesn’t have very beautiful men, and they’re not very willing to pose nude, which is kind of sad. But there are other things to do here.

Zenger’s: What had you been doing with your life, career-wise, before that?

Dornon: You mean, besides housewife? Yeah, that was me in high heels and pearls every day. I was a teacher, I was a delivery boy, I was a masseur for 13 years. I designed Web pages. I wrote a book. One way or another, Phil has put an end to every one of my careers. He didn’t intend to put an end to my careers. It’s just coincidental.

For example, I got my teaching credential a year before he got his Ph.D. He’s a molecular biologist. So after his Ph.D., he needed to do a series of post-docs [post-doctoral fellowships] in other people’s labs, which means that every 18 months we would move to a new city, and I would have to get my credential recognized and start substitute-teaching again. We did that for six years, and then I was so completely burned out from subbing that I couldn’t do it anymore.

Zenger’s: Do you make your living as a photographer now?

Dornon: I do, just doing portraits and online photos. I used to advertise in print media, but I don’t anymore. Now I just have a very large presence on the Web, and with the social networks — what we used to call the “slut sites.” Isn’t that nice, though — “social networks”? That sounds so respectable.

I started the “142 Days” project right around January of this year, 10 months ago. I didn’t know what to do with all my anger and frustration over Proposition 8. It took me about a month and a half thinking about it, and then all of a sudden the light went on: “Hey, I’m a photographer. So the thing I can do is take pictures.” I thought it would be productive to document some of the couples who got married, and show some happy, smiling Gay faces for a change, unlike the entire anti-Prop. 8 campaign, which was all about straight people. Very frustrating.

So I started out. The problem was it’s like the fox, the chicken and the bag of corn. You can’t put up an exhibit without some pictures, and you can’t get some pictures without an exhibit. I started hitting up all of our friends and saying, “I need to use your pictures.” Or if they hadn’t posed for me, I’d say, “Get in here. I need some pictures.” That’s how I got the first five, and then after that I started putting up little flyers and stuff. And now I have the slide show at the Center, and apparently a billboard at Flicks.

But it has gone much slower than I thought it would. I thought it would be easier than this. A lot of couples just really kind of want to preserve their privacy with this thing — which I find strange, because if you’re willing to get married, what’s the big deal? But I have to respect their privacy.

Zenger’s: I noticed from your flyer that you had set yourself the goal of photographing every one of the couples.

Dornon: Yes, 18,000 couples. Well, photographing or displaying, because people are welcome to submit their own photos. Actually, a lot of people have. That’s a bit of a problem, too, because they have to get permission from the photographer if it’s a professional shot. But I think it’s interesting to see the diverse people’s celebrations, as well as their faces done in a studio.

Zenger’s: What sort of activism were you involved in before Prop. 8?

Dornon: I was in ACT UP in college, and I was in Queer Nation after that. I remember once, probably in 1987, I went to an ACT UP Day of Remembrance, on the quad at UCSD. It was actually the Jewish memorial thing, and I went. They asked for a representative from the Gay and Lesbian Student Union, so I went there with a big pink triangle and recited a poem. Actually, I sang with no accompaniment. And I’ve always been in the Gay Pride parades, starting in 1979 or 1980. I came down to that, and my mother was just furious, because she knew I was going to meet a guy. She was not happy about that.

Zenger’s: You mentioned that you actually went to that one “ex-Gay” meeting to make her happy. Did you really think you were going to “find the secret” and “change”?

Dornon: Well, I was raised in the church, and I had beliefs that were as deep as my — at that time — ignorant mind would allow. I believed in the power of the church to change people, but I didn’t believe that my sexuality was something that needed to be changed, or could be changed. I did it to make her happy. If I’d been an addict and I’d gone to church, I’d have fully expected it to work. But there was nothing wrong with me. There was nothing to be fixed. So I knew it wouldn’t work.

Zenger’s: Because I’ve met so many people, including ones who spent years in the “ex-Gay” ministries, who grew up in Fundamentalist homes and had this horrible disconnect between the values they had been taught and had absorbed, and their sexual orientation. Even growing up with this Fundamentalist mother, that doesn’t seem to have been a conflict for you.

Dornon: No, I resolved that when I was 16, after I was “outed” to her. I told her, “You know, if having sex with men means I’m going to hell, then I’ll go to hell.” She was just shocked. She just couldn’t believe that the fear of hell wasn’t enough to stop me from having sex. And I said, “No way.” I guess I always knew deep down inside that it was rubbish. But it’s hard to resist that kind of deep, deep conditioning.

We were not Sunday Christians. We were seven-day-a-week Christians: Bible studies at home. We went to the church at least three times a week. We had all kinds of Christianity in the house. It was not a casual thing. It was deep conditioning. But sex trumps everything.

Zenger’s: Reality trumps most things.

Dornon: Just the other day I came up with a capsule summary of my feelings about the subject, and that is, “Faith is a vector of insanity,” in the same way that fleas are a vector of plague.

Zenger’s: What sort of tradition? Was it Fundamentalist? Pentecostal?

Dornon: Fundamentalist Episcopalian. So not only did the service take an hour and a half of chanting and writhing on the floor, it was fundamentalist too. It was weird. I was in St. Anne’s Church in Oceanside, and the rector was chased out for having sex with half of his counseling patients and his daughter … after I left. I got out of the church at 19, and two years later he was chased out of the church for having wild sex with everybody. And he was the leader of the church, in every way.

But the funny thing is this seems to happen a lot in Episcopal churches. The priests are being arrested or driven out a lot because they’re having sex with everybody. It just seems to be normal. I mean, they can’t help it. They’re just crazy. Faith is a vector of insanity. Faith gives you the permission to believe things that aren’t true, and that’s what leads to mental illness. When you start to believe things that you know are not true, you’re on the slope. It’s all downhill.

Zenger’s: So would you describe yourself as an atheist, an agnostic, a nonbeliever?

Dornon: Oh, no, not at all. I would describe myself as a person with philosophical beliefs, but no religious beliefs. I was raised in the Episcopal church, and in the Episcopal church you’re supposed to have creeds. So I have my own creed. I’ve just added, “Faith is a vector of insanity.” [The others are: “One world * One race * One origin * One destiny.” * “All lands are Holy Lands.” * “There is no God of which I am not a part.” * “Sex is good; violence is bad.”]

Zenger’s: It’s kind of interesting that you have this studio right in the middle of suburban nowhere.

Dornon: That’s because we live out in the middle of nowhere. We live one mile up the road. And really, it’s not been bad, because all my business is Internet. The only thing this cuts down on are the people who don’t have cars, which in many cases is not a bad thing. Some people don’t have cars because they’re drug addicts who live in Hillcrest, and those kinds of people I don’t need to deal with anyway. It works fine.

The interesting thing is, you know how men won’t ask for directions? If they have a GPS they won’t let you give them directions. My address is on Mission Gorge Road, but you notice it’s a mall. So everyone here has his own address, and the GPS doesn’t work. It sends them two malls further down, or it sends them all the way into Santee, and then they call me and say, “According to my GPS I’m there, but I can’t find you.” And I say, “Well, I told you not to use the GPS.”

So now I won’t even give them my address anymore. They always say, “Just give me your address.” I say, “No. I’m next to the Jack in the Box, and I’ll tell you how to get there.” But men are like that about directions. It’s a competency thing.

Zenger’s: I enjoy the contrast between this nice little portrait studio right in the middle of suburbia, and your out Gay project with its own Web site and your mission to document as many same-sex marriages as possible to express your outrage that the people of California took our rights away.

Dornon: Somebody came and put “Yes on 8” signs all over that little plot of lawn, right on the corner, and I ripped them down because this is private property. This is not city property. And I told several people, including organizers of the campaign, that I’d done that, and they said, “Don’t take down signs. You’ll get arrested.” I said, “Well, I don’t think they can put signs on private property without permission of the owner,” and the owner had told me that he was going to stay out of it. I knew that they didn’t put them there with his permission. So I tore them down, which felt really good.

Zenger’s: Do you think of the “142 Days” as history? As photojournalism? As photography? As art?

Dornon: As protest. Protest and education.

Zenger’s: Who are you hoping to educate? Who are you hoping will be moved by it?

Dornon: When I have a slightly larger mass — you guys are couple number 41 — and I have 35 to 40 photos of my own. I’d like to offer them to news media and magazines as stock art and things like that. I’d like to say, “Here’s a little library of smiling, married Gay couples that you can use when you reference this story” — especially next year when it comes up on the ballot again.

Gay Film “Boy” Highlight of San Diego Asian Film Festival

But Most Festival Films Copy Hollywood’s Formulas Too Closely

story and photos by LEO E. LAURENCE

Copyright © 2009 by Leo E. Laurence • All rights reserved

While the San Diego Asian Film Festival (AFF) October 16 through 29 was larger and splashier, it ha serious earmarks of the popular Latino Film Festival (LFF) in the spring annually.

Indeed, the man running the Asian event — the energetic Phillip Luque, AFF's operations director — was formerly a right-hand man to the Latino festival’s executive director, Ethan van Thillo.

While literally hundreds of independent, international films of predominantly Asian culture were running on six screens at the Ultra-Star Cinemas in the Hazard Center; Luque was the man running around with a two-way headset, and keeping the larger AFF running smoothly.

While the Asian festival — now in its 10th year — was bigger than the Latino festival, the AFF movies copied too many of the styles of Hollywood films: filled with raw sex, guns, drugs and vio-lence.

In sharp contrast, the Latino festival's films selections — though fewer — were international movies that focused largely on good drama, without the need for raw sex and violence.

One of the featured attractions of the recent AFF was the classic movie Red Cliff, promoted as “the most expensive film in Asian history.”

But, it was a typical war movie, albeit that it focused on the major battles of the Han Dynasty in 208 A.D., when over 2000 sailing ships were burned during brilliant military strategy by an underdog army and navy.

After watching about a half hour of the bloody battles, I got bored with the violence. And, the movie ran for an unusually long 2 hours, 28 minutes. Indeed, the original version of Red Cliff, ran for a full four hours, and was cut in half for American audiences.

Easily one of the best AFF movies was Boy” an extremely sensitive drama of an 18-year old Philip-pino who discovers he's Gay in a go-go bar in Manila's seedy world of cheap Gay strip clubs.

With unusually good, natural-light cinematography and a screen script that could bring tears to your eyes, as well as deep laughter.

Boy showed the two boys in a long, prolonged seduction with sex scenes where you knew what was happening without showing it hard-core.

An army of over 400 volunteers, mostly Asian, was involved. “The big change is that in the past, volunteers were in their 20’s, but now they are high-school students,” said AAF Volunteer Coordi-nator Mark Gadia in an interview.

The Asian festival seem to have produced much larger crowds than did the Latino Film festival in the spring. Attendance was “over 10 percent better than last year,” according to operations manager Luque.

The AFF also produced a larger, 131-page, slick magazine loaded with expensive advertising, as compared with a lower-cost, 67-page program for the Latino festival in March. But, the Latinos were facing a sharp downturn in corporate advertising, as a result of the recession.

While the UltraStar Cinemas multiplex is an older building in the Hazard Center; it remains the venue for both the Asian and Latino festivals. But the building has a major problem with air condi-tioning.

It has only one air-conditioning system for seven theatres. That means they have to turn the temperature control down seriously low in order to keep the largest theatre cool. But that also made the smaller theaters freezing cold.

In this time of a premature and alarming rise in flu this fall, many movie patrons could be heard coughing regularly during screenings. Some patrons even covered their noses with handkerchiefs, to serve like face masks to stay safe against infection. One patron just left one-third into a movie saying, “it's too cold in here.”

The Asian Film Festival ran a full 15 days. More information can be found by e-mailing info@sdaff.org or calling (858) 565-1264.

PHOTO CAPTIONS (top to bottom):

Crawford High student Ding Wong, 15, served as a volunteer at the Asian Film Festival. Photo by Leo E. Laurence

Asian Kazuki Nakagawa, 21, who lives downtown, served as an Asian Film Festival volunteer. Photo by Leo E. Laurence

Asian SDSU student Edgardo Bungay, Jr., 20, of Chula Vista watched the Gay movie “Boy” at the Asian Film Festival. Photo by Leo E. Laurence

Joseph Rocha: Courageous Activist or Media Star?

commentary by LEO E. LAURENCE

Copyright © 2009 by Leo E. Laurence • All rights reserved

The growing movement to repeal Clinton-era “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy requiring discharge of “out” Gays in the military, now has a local, young, cute face: ex-sailor Joseph Rocha, 23, of Hillcrest. He even speaks well. But …

After meeting him at the Asian Film Festival at the UltraStar Cinemas where he made one of his many, many speeches; a photo-shoot for Zenger's Newsmagazine was scheduled twice, and abruptly canceled in a brief cell voice-mail with no reason.

He’s become an almost overnight media darling — and he seems to be letting it go to his head.

While talking by cell and setting up a very brief 10-minute photo shoot, he repeatedly bragged about all of the media interviews he's done and speeches he is making. I was impressed.

But, after one re-scheduling, he finally canceled at the last minute, after specifically requiring that we could only meet "in a public place.”

Credibility Issue

In front-page coverage of Rocha in the San Diego Union-Tribune, he claims that, because of his efforts, both the Navy's Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) and Secretary of the Navy (SECNAV) are concerned about a Gay sailor.

That's not quite true, according to a Navy Department source who requested anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the information.

The Navy's Chief of Naval Operations and Secretary of the Navy have ordered investigations into abuse of sailors, but whether the victim is Gay, Asian or whatever; the issue as the Navy sees it is the alleged abuse of sailors, any sailor. It just happens that the case exposing the abuse involves a cute, Gay (now ex-)sailor. Unlike many “don’t ask, don’t tell” dismissals, especially in the early days of the policy, Rocha was given an honorable discharge.

Rocha wants to return to active duty as an officer.

New Face

There's a reasonable probability that the ugly Clinton-era “don’t ask, don’t tell” will be repealed.

And the national movement towards that long overdue goal now has a face: a 23-year-old Latino ex-sailor who was violently abused based on his sexual orientation when he was on-duty.

That he is apparently converting the ugly, painful memories of the brutal terror he experienced as a bloody victim of homophobic violence in the Navy into his cause célèbre, into major news coverage of the issues surrounding "don’t ask, don’t tell," is evidence of Rocha's guts. But he seems to be letting his media stardom go to his head big-time. Otherwise, we'd have photos of him for this story.

William Powers Discusses “Writing for Change”

Author Pushes Students to Write at City College Book Fair

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

“I spent six years in Bolivia, but I’m not here to inspire you to go to a rain forest,” said author and former aid worker William Powers at the start of his presentation October 3 at the San Diego City College book fair. His hour-long presentation was uneasily divided between presentations of his experiences in Liberia and Bolivia and the year he spent living in a 12 foot-by-12 foot house in North Carolina, and pep talks aimed at getting the City College students in his audience interested in writing and developing the self-confidence needed to finish books and get them published. “If you leave here with one message,” he said, “it should be that if I can publish books, so can you.”

Powers recalled that he’d always been interested in writing when he was growing up — in high school, he wrote for the student literary magazine — until he went to college. “I majored in international relations because I thought English wouldn’t pay,” he confessed. “I worked with Native American youth in New Mexico for two years, and for 10 years I was in Africa and South America. But I couldn’t see myself on the other side of a book.”

That changed after what he described as “the two most intense years of my life” — when he worked in foreign aid in Liberia at the height of Charles Taylor’s dictatorship. Powers was all too aware of the unrest in the country and the civil war against Taylor’s regime — “all I could picture was kids with guns” — when Catholic Relief Services sent him there. But as a 28-year-old fresh out of graduate school, he was nonetheless “thrilled to be there.” It was only later that he found out “I only went because no one else would go.”

His job was to be part of “a major food pipeline” — getting donations of U.S. products into the hands of needy Liberians — “in the middle of a civil war. I had 150 professional staff and hundreds of day laborers bringing the food off ships to the six relief centers. I was there to help the country’s transformation from relief to development.” Unfortunately, that transition was being blocked by the cruelties of Charles Taylor, who not only held the title President of Liberia but also called himself the “chief witch doctor” of the country and regularly drank blood as part of a ritual aimed at keeping himself in power.

Like many Americans who go to trouble spots, Powers found a quiet dignity and strength in the people that contradicted the impression he’d got before he left that everyone was cowering in fear of Charles Taylor 24/7. “There was powerful energy and optimism,” Powers said, explaining that civil wars tend to wax and wane and therefore “there were long periods of peace” in which Liberian life continued more or less normally. Powers called Liberia “really the U.S. in America” — a reference to Liberia’s unusual history as a colony for former African-American slaves, founded in 1831 as part of a movement aimed at ending U.S. slavery by shipping all the slaves back to their ancestral continent. (This led to years of conflict in which indigenous Liberians often complained that the ex-slaves formed an aristocracy and oppressed them.)

Powers began writing his memoir of his Liberian experience, Blue Clay People, while in the city of Abijan on the Ivory Coast as he prepared to leave Africa. He continued while in Bolivia on his next assignment, working on so-called “carbon ranching” programs to save the rainforest and combat global warming. “One year later, I had a manuscript,” he said. “I sent it to my old high school teacher, who was now a book doctor, and she rejected it. A few weeks later, I sent it out to two small publishers. I got an e-mail from Uva Taylor at Chicago World Press, and she offered to buy world rights. I had several offers on the book, and with three offers I was able to get an agent. With every e-mail, there were another five figures added to the offer.”

Meanwhile, Powers was in Bolivia working on an issue — rainforest preservation — that had also been part of his mission in Liberia. He said the Bolivian rainforests were under assault from both the poor and the rich — impoverished Bolivians were clearing them to plant yucca so they could eat, and the huge American corporation Archer-Daniels-Midland was logging them to set up soy farms for export. What’s more, the mountains of Bolivia gave him a bird’s-eye view of global warming in action. “The glaciers above La Paz, which provide the city’s water, were literally melting,” he recalled.

The solution Powers and his group were trying to implement is called “carbon ranching.” It’s based on the idea that plants “breathe” carbon dioxide, the most common and most serious greenhouse gas. Therefore, it’s a bad idea to destroy great swaths of natural vegetation and use the land either for development, which generates additional greenhouse gases; or corporate agriculture, which takes far less carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere than the native plants do and involves heavy use of fertilizers, pesticides and other chemical inputs that are made from fossil fuels and the energy from them.

According to Powers, 20 percent of all global warming is due to deforestation — but, contrary to popular opinion, a rainforest that has been clear-cut can be restored. Indeed, he said that in Guatemala there’s a rainforest that has recovered after the Mayans clear-cut it 500 years ago — and he showed a slide of his group’s operation in Bolivia, aimed at restoring a former rainforest they had bought from a logging company. Powers said this not only helped Bolivia’s environment but stimulated its economy as well. “A lot of the indigenous people were trained as park guards,” he said. “Some did measurements of the trees.”

Powers’ experiences in Bolivia became the subject of his second book, Whispering in the Giant’s Ear: A Frontlines Chronicle from Bolivia’s War on Globalization. He noted that, next to Venezuela, Bolivia has the largest petroleum reserves in South America, and he credited the current government of Bolivian president Evo Morales for having nationalized the country’s oil reserves — not to throw out the multinational companies that were drilling there, but to reverse the 82 to 18 percent split of the country’s oil wealth so the larger share now goes to Bolivia and its people, not the companies.

But the book he wrote about Bolivia got hit hard by the companies he was denouncing in it. Attorneys for five of the multinationals mentioned in it “wrote a five-page memo that threatened to sue the publisher, Macmillan,” if the book remained in print. Macmillan caved and allowed the book to go out of print after the first edition sold out. Powers caved, too. “Some of my friends said to fight back and expose that,” he said, “but I knew I couldn’t win, so I let it blow over and quietly let the book come back into circulation.” Today it’s available, but only on a print-on-demand basis from amazon.com and Powers’ own Web site, williampowersbooks.com

In the meantime, Powers has been lobbying to have “carbon ranching” included in the Copenhagen treaty on global warming that is supposed to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which the U.S. helped negotiate but never signed. He’s been to the United Nations, where he’s met with former Irish president Mary Robinson and Wangari Matthai, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for reforestation work in her native Kenya. He calls the idea “sure-fire” but says it’s only one step towards a re-orientation of human life away from heavy-duty consumption and towards living in more harmony with the earth.

That’s the subject of his next book, 12’ x 12’, which is due out next year. It derives from a unique opportunity he had to house-sit for a woman doctor in North Carolina who lives in a house just 12 feet long and 12 feet wide, and who deliberately keeps her income so low she doesn’t have to pay taxes. Powers bristles at the idea that countries like Liberia and Bolivia are “underdeveloped.” Before he moved into this house — which is surrounded by food gardens that make it virtually self-sufficient — “I thought maybe Bolivia was developed and the U.S. is overdeveloped.” He said the little house in North Carolina is surrounded by farmers who raise free-range chickens — and they are surrounded by giant factory ranches that, according to Powers, “use their workers the way they use their animals.”

The point, Powers explained, is to practice what has been called “permaculture” — living in a landscape designed in harmony with nature — and, beyond that, to move beyond a consumer society altogether. It’s a concept he calls “enough” — “between where we live now and dire poverty,” he explained. “I think ‘enough’ is $10,000 per capita gross domestic product per year, the average in Europe in 1990. That’s how much material you need to maintain peak happiness. Subsistence agriculture is not poverty. We shouldn’t punish people for living sustainably with nature.” Just how “enough” can be reconciled with a capitalist economy and culture that demands the economy grow continually — and defines it as a dire problem (“recession”) when it doesn’t — Powers left unanswered.

One fascinating aspect of Powers’ talk was its surprising degree of optimism. Powers said he respects Left-wing spokespeople like Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore, who’ve made their reputations railing about how bad everything is — but that’s not his style. Asked how he can be optimistic about humans’ ability to handle global warming when it’s already advanced so far that the polar ice caps are melting, Powers said, “Mitigation and adaptation. There are all kinds of programs to help people adapt.” He said one hopeful sign was a recent meeting he went to between labor leaders and environmentalists calling for “green-collar jobs” — ways people can make their livings while being part of the global warming solution instead of part of the problem.

Powers also talked about the upcoming global warming conference in Copenhagen and what he’d like to see from President Obama. “I like the 350 organization,” he said. It’s an international group whose program, Powers explained, is to “keep global warming 2° Fahrenheit above what it is today. The U.S. has to take it seriously, and China and India must come to the plate. I’m going on December 11 and will be pushing for carbon ranching.” He said that at Copenhagen “Obama should agree to specific targets, not just rough goals and timetables’ — and, he added, the President needs to be less fearful about possible rejection by Congress.

“Congress is full of farm-state people who don’t want to make any change,” Powers said. “If there’s any way to reach them, it’s to broaden the appeal and show them how people in their states can be helped through carbon ranching. I believe Obama and his people are convinced that they won’t sign anything that won’t go through Congress.” Powers also said we need to use the leverage of “publicity and reputation” to push the Chinese government to adopt more sustainable environmental and development policies instead of following the same path we did. He recalled that when he was in Liberia, “I was representing an agency that had got the European Union to agree to accept only sustainably harvested timber. The Chinese consul said, ‘We want Liberia’s cheap timber,” but to an extent they can be convinced.”

Asked whether Africa can break out of the cycle of tyrants and dictators that has plagued it since the 1950’s and 1960’s, when most African countries became independent of colonial rule, Powers said that recent events in Ghana and Liberia made him hopeful. But he also cited a book by African author Dambisa Moyo called Dead Aid — a controversial work which argues that foreign aid has made Africa dependent (an argument Powers makes in his own Blue Clay People as well) and what is needed instead is more foreign investment and trade to create jobs for Africans — and agreed with Moyo’s point that aid from the West has propped up the dictators. “Africans, too, have to take responsibility,” Powers said. “In Guinea there’s been a bloodbath in the last week. It’s sad to see these repetitions happening.”

Powers confessed that he’s in “kind of a fallow period” as a writer — even though he continues to contribute to the Washington Post op-ed page and boasted that he’d got some of his thoughts about the environment and long-term sustainability into a column about grizzly bears. “A lot of my writing comes from seeing myself as an outsider,” he said. “There’s a risk of getting superficial. The trick is being there and listening to the people. I try to get across my method and use my own bliss and passion, and maybe those smaller pieces of writing for the Post can build themselves into a full book.”

“Nommogeneity” Explores African-American Poetry and Culture

Terrence Stubbs Presents 32-Minute Film at World Beat Center

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

It’s short — only 32 minutes — but Terrence Stubbs’ film Nommogeneity is a powerful film about African-American poetry and the social and cultural milieu which gives rise to it and inspires its practitioners. Stubbs, who in the 1990’s was a stand-up comedian sharing stages with current superstars like Chris Rock and Jamie Foxx, has spent the last decade studying film in San Diego and Long Beach. He presented Nommogeneity on October 1 at the World Beat Center in Balboa Park, an event held in conjunction with the book festival at San Diego City College.

The word “nommogeneity” was coined by Douglas Kearney, one of the poets featured in the film. It comes from an African legend that twin gods named Nommo brought the gifts of language and writing to the human race. Kearney combined “nommo” with the Greek word for birth (also the root of the word “genesis”) to create a term meaning “generation of the word.” The film features a number of strong-voiced young African-American poets, including Bennie Herron, Jaha Zeinabu and South African expatriate Marion Cloete. There’s also someone who isn’t quite so young: Amiri Baraka, the veteran author who as LeRoi Jones exploded on the New York literary scene in the late 1950’s with a series of plays and poems dealing starkly with racism and the African-American experience.

Baraka has been a provocateur ever since. In the early 1970’s he was actually put on trial for allegedly inciting a race riot in Newark, New Jersey with one of his poems. His close-cropped hair and neatly trimmed beard are now grey instead of black, but he’s still as energetic and visceral in his appeal as ever. In Nommogeneity, he’s shown reading “Somebody Blew Up America,” a poem inspired by 9/11 which uses imagery drawn from centuries of racism to point out that African-Americans have dealt with far more “terrorism” from their white compatriots than from foreign groups like al-Qaeda. The matter-of-fact way in which Baraka reads the poem just adds to its effect.

It wasn’t easy for Stubbs to land such a legendary figure and get him to be in his film. He initially e-mailed Baraka’s official contact for lecture gigs, and got a reply that Baraka would be pleased to cooperate with the project as soon as Stubbs could arrange to come out to New York to film him. That was totally out of Stubbs’ budget, but six months later he got an e-mail that Baraka had a date to read and lecture in New Mexico, and with less of a travel burden Stubbs got his equipment together and filmed both a reading and an interview that turned into the focus of his film, not only because it’s powerful on its own but because it illustrates the inspiration Baraka has provided to many younger Black writers, including virtually all the others in Stubbs’ film.

Stubbs said part of his inspiration for Nommogeneity is he’s tired of all the “love jones” poetry out there. Too much of modern Black writing is either romantic poetry or the kind of “playa” braggadocio — the celebration of conspicuous consumption — of much hip-hop, Stubbs said. What he wanted to showcase, he explained, was “consciousness” — meaning political and social consciousness. “I wanted to pick poets talking about prevalent stuff and give them a voice,” Stubbs said.

“I’d like to have people in schools and kids look at this,” Stubbs said. “People don’t like poetry much. They read Shakespeare, Dante, Milton and Homer, but this is different. It’s neo-realistic poetry.” It’s indicative of his bent that the two non-Black poets he named as his favorites, German writer Bertolt Brecht and Puerto Rican poet-actor-playwright Miguel Piñero (“I like his rooftop poem,” Stubbs said, adding that Benjamin Bratt played him in a biopic), were also known for engaging political and social issues in their work. Stubbs sees Piñero as having done in the 1970’s, with direct references to Viet Nam and Watergate, what the poets in his film are doing with the issues of today.

In general, the women poets in the film are less openly didactic than the men. One particularly beautiful sequence shows a woman poet reading on the waterfront at the Embarcadero Marina in San Diego. She’s also playing a flute, and while she couldn’t do both at the same time, she manages to accompany her reading with her flute quite eloquently in the film through the magic of multiple sound recording. Another reads a stunning poem called “Pigtails” inspired by the long braids she wears — and she’s actually shown having her hair braided while her voice is heard reading the poem.

Stubbs freely acknowledged that he used music videos as a model for his technique, making his movie far more than the usual stand-up-and-read poetry documentary. (Before filming Nommongeneity, Stubbs said, all he’d done on film were music videos and “a few cheesy little things.”) In response to a question as to whether poetry by people of color is “more musical” than that by whites, Stubbs replied, “I wouldn’t say ‘more musical,’ It’s just a different type of rhythm. They’re doing riverdance, salsa, the cakewalk or electric slide.” Certainly many of the poems in the film — especially the ones written by men — have such a throbbing, insistent beat and are so strictly cadenced in regular meters that all it would take would be a D.J. sampling tracks in the background to turn them into hip-hop songs.

The most striking performance in the film — and the one Stubbs said is his personal favorite — is a dramatic poem by Douglas Kearney called “The Chitlin’ Circuit.” Its language evokes both the history of African-American entertainment and the long string of demeaning words used by American whites to describe American Blacks. Kearney reads the piece in a highly theatrical manner, blending the words so they bleed into each other and become almost pure sound — and while reading the poem he flips the book containing its text, punctuating every change in rhythm and meaning with a simple physical action.

Stubbs describes Nommogeneity as “a work in progress,” and says he doesn’t consider it finished. “It takes a lot of work, hours and dedication” to make a film, he said. Getting Nommogeneity to its current form took two years, at least in part because he didn’t actually have it scripted in advance. “I’ve learned to plan better next time and go with the plan,” he said. “Some of Nommogeneity was just impromptu. When I did Marianne’s poem (the one read to the poet’s flute accompaniment) I had no idea what we were going to do. I just said, ‘Let’s go to the harbor.’”

Though he didn’t show his film on the City College campus, Stubbs hailed the City College film and video program and said it was a better place to learn than those at more prestigious schools. “City College has the best radio, TV and video program in southern California,” he said. “People come from Northridge to go there because they can touch equipment. Many people I know went straight from the City College program to working in the business,” Stubbs explained, because they got direct experience on actual equipment.

Asked what he’d like to work on in the future, Stubbs mentioned a documentary on Etheridge Knight, a Black poet who started writing in prison in the 1960’s and, after his release, was heavily involved in an organization called the Black Arts Movement — one which also influenced many of the poets in Nommogeneity. “He’s from my home town of Indianapolis,” Stubbs said; though Knight was actually born in Mississippi, he was living in Indiana when he was arrested, then settled in Tennessee after his release from prison. Stubbs said he’d also like to make a feature film, “but not something like Soul Plane. I’d like to do a film with a story and a meaning.”

Terrence Stubbs produced Nommogeneity through his own company, Drapetomania Film Works, which can be reached at (310) 493-6509 or by e-mail at drapetomaniafilmworks@gmail.com. He doesn’t list a Web site, but his Facebook page is at www.facebook.com/terrencestubbs

“Voices of Honor” Tour Closes in San Diego

Five Queer Veterans Plead for Repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

PHOTOS, top to bottom: Alex Nicholson, Julianne Sohn, Jarrod Chlapowski, Tess Benko, Stewart Bornhoft

“Different audiences have different understandings of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’” said Alex Nicholson, founder and director of Servicemembers United, at the final stop of the “Voices of Honor” tour his group and the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) staged this year to highlight the abuses under the U.S. military’s exclusion of open Queers and plead for repeal of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. The setting was an unusual one for a Queer event — the former chapel of the old Navy hospital in Balboa Park, now a war museum mostly honoring veterans from World War II — and the San Diego stop, on September 30, featured Nicholson and two other voices from the national tour, Jarrod Chlapowski and Julianne Sohn. Two local Queer veterans with histories of activism against “don’t ask, don’t tell,” retired Col. Stewart Bornhoft and Tess Benko, also spoke.

“Voices of Honor” was the second nationwide tour of “out” Queer veterans speaking — often to military colleges and other unlikely audiences — against “don’t ask, don’t tell.” The first, “Call to Duty,” was organized by Nicholson and featured in the PBS-TV documentary Ask Not. He and Chlapowski were prominently portrayed in Ask Not, and Bornhoft spoke at a San Diego Public Library preview screening of the film. “Voices of Honor” made many of the same points against “don’t ask, don’t tell” that “Call to Duty” did — that it’s not only discriminatory, it’s unequally enforced and it forces people, on pain of losing not only their jobs but their opportunities to serve their country, to lie about a basic part of who they are.

Nicholson began the presentation by reviewing the shifting rationales the U.S. military has evoked in its drive to ban Queers from serving. Before the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy was enacted in 1993, there was an outright ban on military service by Gays, Lesbians and Bisexuals, instituted shortly after the end of World War II and based on the idea “that Gays and Lesbians were security risks” because their lifestyles made them easy prey for blackmailers. “When that proved false,” Nicholson said, “the rationale became that Gays and Lesbians were mentally ill. When the leading psychological associations voted in the 1970’s that homosexuality was not a mental illness, the military abandoned that idea and in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s they started the idea that Gays and Lesbians in the military are a threat to unit cohesion, morale and combat readiness.”

That was the rationale for exclusion that got frozen into U.S. law when Congress enacted the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy in 1993. Before that, the ban had been a policy of the Defense Department which the president could have overturned by executive order, much the way President Harry Truman ordered the military to end racial segregation in 1948. The film Ask Not dramatically contrasts Truman’s boldness and courage in ordering an end to institutionalized racism in the U.S. military with Bill Clinton’s weakness and cowardice in refusing to do the same by ending the ban on Queers in 1993, when he still had the power to do so, and instead accepting Congressional enactment of “don’t ask, don’t tell” as a so-called “compromise.”

According to Nicholson, the toll “don’t ask, don’t tell” has taken on the U.S. military is far greater than the estimated 13,000 servicemembers actually discharged under the policy “either because they admitted being Gay or Lesbian, were ‘outed’ or were caught having ‘homosexual acts.’ We also estimate that about 3,000 people leave the service every year” because they no longer wish to hold down a job that forces them to lie about who they are as a condition of continued employment. Nicholson also said that probably even more language and intelligence specialists are being forced out than official figures would indicate, because “’linguist’ is a specialized field and a liot of people who know languages aren’t qualified as ‘linguists’ — including me.”

Nicholson said he was a “human intelligence coordinator” in the Army until 2002, when he was discharged after being “outed” by someone in his unit. “I tried to contain the information,” he said, “but once it got to command, they decided to rout me out quickly.” Not everybody is pushed out as fast as he was, he added; enforcement of “don’t ask, don’t tell” is left largely up to commanders in the field, and as a result implementation varies widely. “There are many people serving openly today,” he said — thanks to superior officers being willing to leave them alone — “and you don’t find the underlying rationale, the alleged threat to unit cohesion, morale and combat readiness, has come to pass.”

“I served active duty in the U.S. Marine Corps from 1999 to 2003,” said Julianne Sohn. She said she was inspired to join the Marines by her older brother, who graduated from the Marines’ officer candidates’ school the day Julianne signed up. “The difference was that I knew going in that I was not like the other girls,” Sohn said. “My mother said, ‘Watch out for those women.” Sohn said she “educated myself on ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ back in 1999” and thought she could live with it and serve out her hitch while staying closeted. But she noticed when she filled out her application that, despite the “don’t ask” promise of the policy, the form still had the “do you have homosexual tendencies?” question left over from the old days of the outright ban on Queers in the military.

“I joined the U.S. Marine Corps, went to Quantico for basic training and for the first year I didn’t have any trouble,” said Sohn — “except I broke up with my girlfriend because I couldn’t admit she existed. “In the second year it was scary because Marines talk to each other about everything, I came out to a few friends one at a time, and to lieutenants, and they were like, ‘It’s O.K.’ In my third year I was assigned to Parris Island, South Carolina, for deployment to Okinawa. Parris Island is where the big witchhunts were in the 1980’s, when Naval Intelligence Service (NIS) agents would hang out in Gay bars and follow people home.”

Sohn recalled that she was sent to Parris Island in 2001, just a few months before 9/11, and “I was called into the office of Mel, the legal assistant. He said, ‘I want to ask you something I don’t have a right to ask you.’ I said, ‘Stop right there.’ He actually protected me, but because of the strain of living under ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ I decided to leave the Marines and go to graduate school.” Under normal circumstances, that might have been the end of her military career — but in 2004, while living in New York City, she was called up under the Individual Ready Reserve and ordered to deploy to Iraq. “My liberal friends said, ‘Why don’t you pull the Gay card? You don’t agree with the war anyway.’ I said that wouldn’t be consistent with the oath I took.”

When she went to Iraq, Sohn encountered the dangers of combat first-hand. “The worst commute in Iraq is from Camp Ramadi to the military command center,” she recalled, “because you have to drive really fast to avoid IED’s.” “IED’s” is military-speak for “improvised explosive devices,” crude, easy-to-manufacture bombs, generally planted along roadsides and detonated by remote control, one of the most effective weapons of the Iraqi resistance against the U.S. occupation force. Sohn said she encountered “a piece of trash in the road” one day that turned out to be an IED. “The thing exploded behind us, and at that moment, when you’re in a combat zone, you don’t think about whether someone is Gay or straight,” she said.

Both Nicholson and Sohn cited statistics from Servicemembers United that said that “don’t ask, don’t tell” is disproportionately enforced against women and people of color. According to these figures, 50 percent of the servicemembers discharged under “don’t ask, don’t tell” in 2008 were people of color, even though they make up only 29 percent of the total force. Women made up 46 percent of discharges under “don’t ask, don’t tell” in 2007 and 33 percent in 2008 — even though only 15 percent of all U.S. servicemembers are female. Sohn said at least part of the reason women are so strongly targeted is because sexist ideas about women are deeply ingrained in the military. “The joke from my brother was that all women Marines are either bitches, dykes or ’ho’s,” she said.

California State Assemblymember Lori Saldaña, who attended the September 30 event, raised another reason why the “don’t ask, don’t tell” axe falls disproportionately on women: sexual harassment. Many servicewomen are routinely “hit on” by men in the ranks, often by men with higher ranks or command responsibility over them — and one way for these men to threaten women and get them to have sex is to blackmail them with threats of reporting them as Lesbians and getting them discharged under “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

“Lesbian-baiting definitely occurs,” Sohn said in response to Saldaña’s comment. “Women and minorities are disproportionately impacted, especially in the Army and the Air Force. A lot of the 1980’s witchhunts were aimed not only at people who were Gay but people perceived to be Gay. You have commanders who treat everyone equally, and others who single people out.”

“I’ve not always been supportive of repeal” of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” Chlapowski admitted at the start of his presentation. “I served from 2000 to 2005 in the U.S. Army. My grandfather was one of the first Army linguists. He died before I was born, but I heard the stories and that made me want to enlist. At the same time, I was struggling with my sexuality, and I thought that being in the military would make me ‘masculine,’ and therefore not Gay. I finished basic training and I was still Gay, and I had to deal with it under the restrictions of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell.’”

Chlapowski recalled approaching his best friend in the service, Rob Hicks, and when Rob realized where the conversation was going, “he had me go to a secluded area on the post and said, ‘That’s O.K. I’m Gay, too.’ From that point, he and I were confidants, and eventually I met other Gay people in my unit and we developed a pocket, a support system. But it wasn’t enough. I saw this level of camaraderie and brotherhood in the unit — and I had to lie and say I was dating girls. It was frustrating, so I started telling people as it came up.”

At this point, Chlapowski admitted, he still didn’t think “don’t ask, don’t tell” was such a big deal. He felt that if he could stay on a professional level and keep in the closet, he’d be protected. “Then I started seeing cracks in the façade,” he said. “I met a woman named Jan who warned me not to talk to a certain Army psychologist because he reported.” Contrary to what many servicemembers believe, psychotherapists and chaplains in the military are not bound by confidentiality the way their civilian equivalents are. The military’s attitude is we’re paying them, therefore we have a right to know if anyone they’re seeing professionally has confessed to breaking the rules — including “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

In addition to his warnings about the therapist, Chlapowski recalled one friend who was “outed” by his mother, who thought he’d be better off out of the military and revealed his homosexuality to his command to get him out whether he wanted it or not. Another friend of Chlapowski’s, Derek Thomas, “embraced the stereotypes” of Gay behavior but stayed in for a while “until one thing led to another, and he had to go through a nine-month discharge process which was more detrimental to unit cohesion than letting him stay in would have been. My friend Rob Hicks was discharged six months later. I realized that one person could be vindictive and get me kicked out.”

In addition to this irony — that “don’t ask, don’t tell,” which is supposedly in place to promote “unit cohesion,” can actually destroy it by undermining the mutual trust servicemembers, or anyone else, need to be able to work together — Chlapowski pointed out other flaws in the policy. “It’s vaguely written,” he said. “It’s not clear what qualifies as ‘physical evidence’ of ‘homosexual acts.’ Also, the people responsible for enforcing the policy are captains — ‘03’s,” in the Army — who are barely in the military. They are not given proper training and are forced to go by their own gut.” Chlapowski said his commander kept him on despite the rumors, but another member of his unit was forced out because of a letter someone had written him in Portuguese. “We hear these things,” he said, “but we need to conceptualize it as entire units being affected.”

Tess Benko, a straight woman and Marine veteran whose husband is still in the Marines, said she “saw first-hand the effects of the policy” when she was stationed in Okinawa. “One man told me he was Gay,” she said, “and later the inspectors saw his screen saver was a picture of a man, and in his quarters there were style magazines and other ‘questionable’ items. He felt like he was being hunted, and I believed he was. I believed he was being treated as a second-class citizen.”

According to Benko, “the idea that homosexuality affects unit cohesion is wrong.” She said her experience is that both straight and Queer servicemembers are equally able to put aside their sexuality and do their jobs properly — and when they aren’t, the policies now in place to protect servicemembers against heterosexual harassment and exploitation could be applied to Queers as well. “The United States Supreme Court, Congress and the executive branch have refused to do anything about ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’ so it’s up to us to do something from the bottom up,” she said.

“It’s not just about Gays themselves, it’s about the people around them,” said Bornhoft. “The ideals of West Point are embedded in me. ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ isn’t about sex; it’s about honesty. It’s a policy that forces us to lie. The West Point Cadets’ Honor Code demands that we tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. The Cadet Prayer says, ‘Never be content with a half-truth when the whole can be won.’ ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ mandates that we lie. This policy mandates that we discriminate.”

Bornhoft talked about his long struggle with his own sexuality. Like many Queers of earlier generations, he said, “I didn’t understand the feelings I had, and I thought I was the only person who had them. I joined the military, got married and had two children, and all that time those feelings were still there.” He cited the case of lieutenant Dan Choi, who came back from Iraq “and talked about how uncomfortable he felt telling half-truths.” Choi went on Rachel Maddow’s TV talk show and came out to the world on cable news — and got processed out, despite the pleas of activist groups to President Obama to invoke “stop-loss” (a policy that allows the military to suspend discharges in the middle of a war) and keep him in.

The degree of helplessness felt by mere politicians going up against the military establishment was highlighted by Bornhoft when he mentioned that U.S. Senate majority leader Harry Reid (D-NV) had written letters to Obama and Defense Secretary Robert Gates urging that the “don’t ask, don’t tell” law be changed. What Reid hadn’t done was introduce a Senate version of the Military Readiness Enhancement Act, H.R. 1283, which has 126 co-sponsors in the House of Representatives but, even if it gets through the House, can’t be approved unless a Senate version is also passed.

Bornhoft portrayed the case against “don’t ask, don’t tell” as a no-brainer. He said that 24 nations allow Queers to serve openly in their militaries — including the two biggest U.S. allies in the “war on terror,” Britain and Israel — and they haven’t had problems with unit cohesion, combat readiness and morale. “The British were forced by their courts to open, and now they recruit at Pride events,” he said. “Every demographic in U.S. polls is against ‘don’t ask, don’t tell.’ How come it hasn’t been repealed yet? It takes Congress to change the law. Write your Senators and Congressmembers, and get in touch with your friends in other states to get them to write.”

Web resources for repealing “Don’t ask, don’t tell”

Servicemembers United: http://www.servicemembersunited.org
Servicemembers’ Legal Defense Network (legal aid for servicemembers facing issues with “don’t ask, don’t tell”): http://www.sldn.org
Human Rights Campaign: http://www.hrc.org/issues/military.asp
AVER (American Veterans for Equal Rights): http://aver.us
Knights Out (West Point veterans urging repeal): http://www.knightsout.org, http://www.knightsout.com (they reserved both domains)

Lyric Opera’s “Anything Goes” Preserves Spirit of Musical Classic

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Lyric Opera San Diego just opened their 31st season with a production of Cole Porter’s 1934 musical Anything Goes, which despite some flaws manages to preserve the insouciant, “anything goes” spirit Porter and his writers — P. G. Wodehouse, Guy Bolton, Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse — put into it way back when. It’s running through October 11 at the Birch North Park Theatre, 2891 University Avenue in North Park, and is well worth seeing if what you want from a theatrical evening is a light soufflé that doesn’t make much sense plot-wise but offers good voices singing some of the greatest pop songs ever written.

Anything Goes was born out of Depression-driven desperation — a history Lyric Opera director Leon Natker cited in their decision to do it in the wake of America’s biggest economic meltdown since then. Producer Vinton Freedley had just broken up his professional partnership with Alex Aarons following the box-office failure of George Gershwin’s last stage musical, Pardon My English, in 1933. For his first solo production he tapped the services of Porter, Wodehouse and Bolton, all of whom were in Europe at the time — and because Wodehouse didn’t want to be in England at the time and Bolton didn’t want to visit him in Paris, they had to pick a northern French beach resort town to meet and work out the show.

At that stage the piece was called Hard to Get and featured a spectacular climax — a fake bomb thrown overboard to avert an explosion aboard the ocean liner on which the bulk of it took place. Then, just two days before rehearsals were supposed to begin, a real ocean liner, the S.S. Morro Castle, burst into flame off the New Jersey coast, killing between 125 and 180 people. All of a sudden, the bomb-on-board plot device seemed totally out of place for a light, frothy musical designed to make people feel good. But producer Freedley had already built the set of the ship, and he’d signed his stars — William Gaxton, Ethel Merman and Victor Moore — so Lindsay and Crouse were brought in to whip up a script that would fit Porter’s songs, incorporate those performers and take place at sea.

What they came up with was a wild tale about Reno Sweeney, a disgraced former evangelist who holds forth at a Broadway nightclub and sings with a group of four backup singers called her “Angels.” Reno is in love with Billy Crocker, personal assistant to industrialist Elisha J. Whitney. But Billy only has eyes for Hope Harcourt, daughter of Mrs. Wadsworth T. Harcourt. Hope loves Billy, too, but her mother has decided to replenish the family fortunes by marrying her off to British aristocrat Sir Evelyn Oakleigh. Desperate to get on board the ocean liner S.S. America before it sails to England so he can be with the other principals and try to pull Hope away from her fiancé, Billy gets a ticket and passport from Moonface Martin, a hapless gangster referred to as “Public Enemy No. 13.” They were supposed to be used by “Snake Eyes” Johnson, Public Enemy No. 1, but he was arrested before the boat sailed and Moonface gets himself and Billy on board by disguising himself as a priest — and getting a real priest arrested in the process.

Once the liner sails, Billy adopts a series of disguises — including passing himself off as a sailor — to try to get close to Hope. Eventually he’s “outed” as Public Enemy No. 1, but instead of being arrested he’s hailed and fêted at an on-board party by a ship’s staff desperate for any kind of celebrity on board. Hope, however, is repelled by his antics, so he reveals his true identity — and once the ship’s staff realize he isn’t a famous gangster, then he gets arrested. It all ends happily, of course, with Billy and Hope paired off, as are Reno and Sir Evelyn (Billy asked Reno to seduce him to get him away from Hope, and she succeeded better than he expected), while Billy’s employer, Whitney, ends up with Hope’s mother.

As usual with a musical of this vintage, the story is merely an excuse to cue the songs — and the songs are some of Porter’s best. Indeed, there are a few more of Porter’s most famous songs in this version than there are in the original, because the version Lyric Opera produced is a revision from 1962 that replaced some of the less-known Anything Goes songs with more famous ones from other Porter scores both earlier (“Let’s Misbehave” from his 1928 breakthrough show Paris) and later (“It’s De-Lovely” from Porter’s next musical, Red, Hot and Blue!; and “Friendship” from Du Barry Was a Lady). One would think the score of Anything Goes itself would have enough well-loved Porter songs to satisfy; three of the songs Porter wrote for it (“Anything Goes,” “I Get a Kick Out of You” and “You’re the Top” — four if you count “Easy to Love,” which was cut from the score in rehearsals because William Gaxton couldn’t sing it but was added to a 1987 Broadway revival) became standards and two others (“Blow, Gabriel, Blow” and “All Through the Night”), though less known today, were hits at the time.

But since Porter was still alive in 1962 and signed off on the revision, the folks in charge at Lyric Opera justified performing the revised version on the ground that “this was his final statement on the show … Cole Porter’s last collaboration on one of his most successful scores.” It’s still a quite charming show, though given the company’s stated rationale for producing Anything Goes in the first place — “If we don’t save these great American musical theatre masterworks for future performers and audiences, we will be losing an important part of our American artistic heritage” — it would have been nice to hear something closer to what played on Broadway in 1934 than what got revived in 1962. (Admittedly, that may not have been possible; to get the right to produce the show Lyric Opera had to deal with the Tams-Witmark music publishing company, and such organizations are notoriously tetchy about attempts to alter familiar performing versions. It wouldn’t be at all surprising if the 1962 revision was the only one they would let Lyric Opera perform legally.)

Fortunately, the show we do get at Lyric Opera is a lot of fun. Next to the Porter score itself, the best aspect of Lyric Opera’s Anything Goes is the finely honed ensemble tap dancing director/choreographer David Brannen got out of his cast, especially his chorus. Conductor Chris Thompson, though leading a reduced version of the score that omits strings, achieves a credible 1934 sound (remember that this show premiered just a year before Benny Goodman’s hit recording of Jelly Roll Morton’s “King Porter Stomp” launched the swing era), though even eight pieces turns out to be a bit too loud for some of the singers to overcome and be heard. As much money, energy and tender loving care as Lyric Opera San Diego and their benefactors have put into restoring the Birch North Park Theatre, it was still designed as a movie house in the early days of sound film (it opened in 1929) and their sound designers haven’t quite tamed the big expanse of acoustical space their performers are expected to fill.

As Reno Sweeney, Debra Wanger has the formidable task of filling the leather lungs of the role’s creator, Ethel Merman. Her voice is fine and musical, it’s got the right brassy timbre, and in the dialogue scenes she’s got the full measure of the show’s only multidimensional character. But she’s just not loud enough. Yes, Merman sometimes seemed to sacrifice all other aspects of singing — tone, pitch, phrasing — on the altar of sheer volume (though when she recorded “I Get a Kick out of You” in 1934 her voice was considerably less musclebound than it got later), and I can appreciate Wanger not wanting to shred her vocal cords to get that Merman sound, but if they couldn’t make her thrillingly loud under her own power they should have miked her.

As Billy Crocker, Jordan Miller is properly rambunctious and insouciant in his big numbers with Reno, “You’re the Top” and the interpolated “Friendship,” and he rises to the occasion for the big stentorian ballad, “All Through the Night.” He’s also a subtle comedian who pulls off the disguise scenes amusingly. Laura Bueno, who played the title role in Lyric Opera’s 2007 production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe, suffers the most from the alterations in the score — Hope loses her big featured number from the 1934 original, “The Gypsy in Me,” a song Bueno could have done full justice to — though she does get half of the duet on “It’s De-Lovely” as a consolation prize. Anthony Ballard’s Sir Evelyn Oakleigh is a charming doofus performance, pretty clearly patterned on Frank Morgan’s title role in the film The Wizard of Oz, and Shirley Giltner as Moonface’s hard-boiled girlfriend Bonnie sometimes threatens to take the limelight away from Wanger in the tough-broad department.

Originally, Jimmy Ferraro — Sancho Panza in the company’s production of Man of La Mancha — was supposed to play the key comic role of Moonface Martin, but he had to drop out of the production and was replaced by Lyric Opera’s veteran artistic director, J. Sherwood Montgomery. He’s a hard worker who’s been one of the driving forces behind this company, and in this production he’s the set designer as well as one of the stars, but he’s also a dreadful ham. To his credit, he does restrain himself a bit in this role (and the person who played Moonface originally, whiny-voiced comedian Victor Moore, wasn’t all that great either), and his song “Be Like the Bluebird” has a certain charm. The rest of the cast is quite fine — particularly Morgan Thomas Hollingsworth in the small but strong role of Bishop Henry T. Dobson, the real clergyman Moonface gets arrested in his place — and the chorus is first-rate.

J. Sherwood Montgomery deserves compliments as set designer; he’s constructed a credible-looking ocean liner that takes full advantage of the theatre’s stage and easily converts to all the locations required. (One practical consideration in favor of the 1962 version of the show was that, by moving “I Get a Kick out of You” from Reno’s nightclub in New York to the ship itself, it eliminated the need for an extra set.) Pam Stompoly-Erickson’s costumes and makeup adequately evoke the period — though, like Porter himself, she seems more turned on by the raffish demi-monde characters like Reno and Moonface than by the romantic leads. Matthew Novotny lights it all so you can see what’s going on, and as director Brannen keeps the pace lively and expertly cues the songs.

Though one could have wished for a more textually authentic performing version and a sound balance that would have made Porter’s brilliant lyrics easier to hear, for the most part Lyric Opera San Diego has done right by Anything Goes. It’s a show that holds up well and leaves you walking out of the theatre humming the songs and smiling.

The remaining performances of Lyric Opera San Diego’s production of Cole Porter’s Anything Goes are Thursday, October 8; Friday, October 9; and Saturday, October 10, at 7:30 p.m.; and Sunday, October 11, at 2:30 p.m.; at the Birch North Park Theatre, 2891 University Avenue in North Park. For tickets or more information, please call (619) 231-5714 or visit www.lyricoperasandiego.com on the Web.