Statement for World AIDS Day 12/01/21
by Larry Mass
When the first AIDS cases were reported in1981, we felt overwhelmed, to say the least. We weren’t sure what we were dealing with. Was it an STD? Multiple STD’s? Biological warfare? …
Gays, immigration and the endless challenges of consciousness and activism
by Lawrence D. Mass
In the mid 1970’s I began my journey of consciousness and activism as a watchdog for reactionary developments in psychiatry that threatened to reverse the 1973–74 declassification of homosexuality as a mental disorder by the American…
OPERA QUEENS, FANDOM, WAGNERISM and GERMANY
by Lawrence D. Mass
“Despite Germany’s praiseworthy culture of remembrance, many Germans have a jarringly tenuous grasp of the extent of Nazi crimes or the population’s involvement.” — James Angelos
Rosa von Praunheim’s Opera Divas, Opera Queens looks at the world of opera in Germany through the lenses of gay…
by Lawrence D. Mass
How many sopranos have had their singing of Dove Sono, the Countess’s great aria in The Marriage of Figaro, described by one of the world’s most discriminating music critics as “note perfect”?
Only a few of my closest gay friends knew of my clandestine career as…
ANDREA DWORKIN — THE CASSANDRA OF REVOLUTIONARY FEMINISM
Commentary and an Interview with Martin Duberman
by Lawrence D. Mass
ANDREA DWORKIN: The Feminist as Revolutionary.
by Martin Duberman, The New Press, 351 pages, 2020
“Every truth passes through three stages before it is recognized. In the first stage it is ridiculed, in the second stage it is opposed…
by Lawrence D. Mass
— 1/27/21, Holocaust Remembrance Day
“The Truth Nobody Wants to Hear”
From Left: Michael Shapiro, Gottfried Wagner, John Corigliano, William M. Hoffman, Lawrence D. Mass, 1995, at the home of Michael Shapiro, Chappaqua, New York
For Gottfried Wagner, my work on Wagner, art and addiction struck an immediate chord of recognition. I…
THE SUPREME COURT DECISION ON CIVIL LIBERTIES AND THE PANDEMIC: LESSONS FROM AIDS
WORLD AIDS DAY REFLECTION, 12/1/2020
by Lawrence D. Mass
Imagine the headline: The Supreme Court Affirms the Right of Gay Men to Have Sex in High-Risk Venues.
On the basis of its recent decision about civil liberties…
by Lawrence D. Mass
Banned from California: -Jim Foshee-Persecution, Redemption, Liberation…and the Gay Civil Rights Movement by Robert C. Steele, Wentworth-Schwartz Publishing, 2020, 361 pages
Over the last half century there have been many notable exhibits on LGBT history and culture. A capstone of this legacy was “Stonewall 50” at…
REMEMBERING DR. JOYCE WALLACE, EARLY AIDS HERO AND PIONEER OF HEALTH CARE FOR STREETWALKERS
by Lawrence D. Mass
Wallace was a tireless advocate of health care for streetwalkers and the first to tell the gay community, via me, about the epidemic that would later become known as AIDS
At 74…
ALEX ROSS’S TESTIMONIAL TO THE LIFE, TIMES AND ART OF RICHARD WAGNER
by LAWRENCE D. MASS
Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music
by Alex Ross, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 766 pages, 2020
For every window on Wagner we think we’ve already peered through, Ross has found more lenses and prisms through which to re-view them. At his best, Ross gives dimension to individuals, artworks and events, and captures…
