Allen Roskoff talks about his time at 186 Spring Street

Earlier today, around 40 gay activists and onlookers including State Senator Tom Duanes and City Councilmember Danny Dromm gathered in SoHo today in front of 186 Spring Street, the site of a nearly 200-year-old house that they argued played a major role in gay rights and AIDS activists history in the 1970s. The activists accused Canadian developer Stephane Boivin of buying the house, originally erected in 1824, from Beastie Boy member Adam Horovitz while making public promises that Boivin would preserve the house. Instead, the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation (GVSHP) discovered that the developer reneged on his promise and filed plans with the city to demolish the historic site in order to build new condominiums. (Boivin has not responded to the coalition calling for 186 Spring's preservation, and one was unavailable for comment with the Village Voice.)

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Like GLAAD promoting a telecom merger, the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force has wound up in the dubious position of weighing in on gambling, a not terribly LGBT-specific issue.

Chris Geidner at BuzzFeed has been beating down the path of a fascinating story over this past week, exploring how and why the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force has gotten involved with the issue of gambling in Maryland. His latest post reports that an anonymous source funded a gaming mailer sent to Maryland Democrats on behalf of the task force's lobbying arm.

We feel like we've been to this rodeo before. In our Voice Pride Issue feature, we asked, "What does a telecom merger have to do with fighting gay defamation?" as we reflected upon how and why the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) supported a proposed AT&T merge with T-Mobile. And now, we must ask, what does being LGBT have to do with gambling in Maryland?

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"UNITY" has been a bit fractured ever since the National Association of Black Journalists pulled out

Earlier this week, the Voice went on SiriusXM's Michelangelo Signorile Show to talk about our experiences at the UNITY convention.

As we noted, this was the first UNITY without the official participation of the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ). It was also the first UNITY with the participation of the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association (NLGJA). Many members of NABJ still attended, including NABJ president Gregory Lee, who we interviewed.

NABJ's departure from UNITY and NLGJA's inclusion were not directly related to each other. Yet as we wrote, there was the appearance that the two were linked because of the timing, and there were feelings of unease between some members of both groups (particularly in that the name was changed from "UNITY: Journalists of Color" to simply "UNITY: Journalists").

We also reported that several people at UNITY told us that, though NABJ had not departed because of NLGJA, they had been the only group to vote, in the past, against NLGJA joining. (In the embedded audio of our post, current NABJ president Gregory Lee addressed this.)

But two other reputable sources contacted us to counter this claim. We updated our last post with a note from John Yarwood, former UNITY board member, to say it was not mathematically possible for NABJ to be the sole group to have blocked NLGJA.

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On Friday, August 3, the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association named me NLGJA Journalist of the Year 2012. The above video shows CNN's Miguel Marquez presenting the award to me in Las Vegas before I addressed NLGJA's annual gala with my acceptance speech, "Access: Use It to Give Voice to the Voiceless (and Hell to the Powerful)." Below are my prepared remarks, which do vary a bit from how I actually delivered them.

Good evening.

I want to first say what an honor it is to appear right after Chris Geidner, my homo journo brother from another mother. We're exactly the same age - ok, he's a month, to the day, younger than me - and I've been blessed to repeatedly cross paths with him on this amazing journey we've both been on during the past couple of years. Although I admire Chris greatly for the quality of his work, I admire him even more for wearing an open heart of gratitude on his sleeve in appreciation of the privilege we all have in doing this work. And it is a privilege; it's a gift. He understands how blessed each one of us in this room is who gets to earn their bread as a journalist.

Congratulations on your well deserved recognition.

Now, as for the rest of you, my fellow homosexual journalists: I'd like to talk to you tonight about the word access. I've been thinking about that word a lot lately, and I'll start with a kind of coming out story, regarding something I haven't admitted publicly before.

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Steven Thrasher

Gregory Lee (foreground) of NABJ in a heated exchange with LZ Granderson of ESPN and Mark Whitaker of CNN

Updated below, with a message from former UNITY board member John Yearwood.

Greetings from New York, New York (the city, not the casino) as the Voice has returned from the 2012 UNITY convention in Las Vegas.

The elephant in the room for UNITY, as CNN Worldwide Managing Editor Mark Whitaker acknowledged in UNITY's first panel, was the absence of the National Association of Black Journalists.

For many years, multiple groups of minority journalists (NABJ, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, the Asian American Journalists Association, and the Native American Journalists Association) would meet every four years in what became the largest "Journalists of Color" convention in the world (and the largest gathering of journalists, period, in the United States). But in a highly public battle, NABJ decided it would not participate in UNITY 2012 about a year ago.

Meanwhile, the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association joined UNITY a few months later. The formal name "UNITY Journalists of Color" was changed to simply "UNITY Journalists."

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Before meeting the director of The Skinny for lunch recently, I had seen Patrik-Ian Polk refer to himself on his Twitter profile as "The gay Tyler Perry. Shut up." But I'd also heard of him referred to as the gay Spike Lee.

So which is it, I inquired when we met, especially since many people consider the former of those two directors to already be gay?

"It's both," he says laughing.

Polk considers himself something of the kind of love child Lee and Perry would have had they gotten together and been able to procreate. (Pushed as to whether he thinks Madea's alter ego could possibly be interested in women, Polk says, "He says he's straight," with something of a smirk on his face, adding, "I have no reason not to take him at his word.")

The influence of both filmmakers can clearly be seen in The Skinny, Polk's third feature film which just concluded a run at the Quad and premiered on Logo this month. In a similar way that Lee put black (hetero) sexuality on the screen in a raw, in-your-face manner completely unlike how it had ever been seen before with She's Gotta Have It, Polk puts black homosexuality up there in a way rarely seen in narrative movies from the opening minutes of the film. Like Lee's early films (and, actually, from early dispatches we've heard about Red Hook Summer), Polk is wearing many hats behind the camera on The Skinny, a project he largely financed himself.

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Steven Thrasher

Edith Windsor, the day after a federal court first ruled in her favor

Edith Windsor, the octogenarian lesbian widow who successfully sued the federal government for over chariging her $363,000 in estate taxes, wants to take her case to the Supreme Court.

According to a press release from the New York Civil Liberties Union, which is representing Windsor along with the ACLU and Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison: "Edith 'Edie' Windsor, who sued the government for failing to recognize her marriage to her late spouse, Thea Spyer, asked the U.S. Supreme Court today to hear her challenge to the so-called "'Defense of Marriage Act' (DOMA)...In the meantime, Windsor will continue to defend her victory before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which has agreed to hear her case on an expedited basis."

Last month, the Voice reported about Windsor's victory in a federal district court here in New York. Although the Obama Administration has stopped defending DOMA, believing parts are unconstitutional, House Speaker John Boehner has directed the Bipartian Legal Advisory Group (BLAG) to keep defending it in federal court.

Asked by the Voice what she'd say to Speaker Boehner for seemingly wanting her to be the only person in America he wants to pay more taxes, she replied, " I think I'd rather not talk to him."

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The Voice's Michael Feingold already reviewed The Columnist, in which John Lithgow brilliantly portrays columnist Joseph Alsop in David Auburn's new play on Broadway. But, we wanted to share a few thoughts about our experience watching it this weekend, in light of other things we've been writing about lately.

By chance and choice, we've been taking a bit of a wander through gay American history recently. After writing about How To Survive A Plague this week, David France's documentary about the heyday of ACT UP mostly made of home video footage, it was fascinating to watch The Columnist, a completely different, Broadway exploration of a very dissimilar kind of gay life. Both represent gay American history, though from extremely different points of view.

We also couldn't help but think of Dan Savage's recent label of the gay Republican group GOProud as a bunch of "house faggots" when we were watching The Columnist. You don't get much more closeted than Joseph Alsop, and you certainly don't get any closer to the Big House (and, in his case, the White House) than that homosexual did.

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Via GLAAD

Cindi Creager, the Center's spokeswoman, is no fan of speaking to the press!

As we began to delve into the depressing implosion of the Bronx Pride Center, which closed after former head Lisa Winters was charged with embezzling $338,000, we remembered how easy it is for non-profits lacking proper oversight (gay and straight) to do grave harm to their communities.

So, we decided to step things up with our coverage of the city's main LGBT Center, which doesn't have public board meetings, hasn't answered a questions of ours in a year, and recently blocked people from commenting on their Facebook wall.

Actually, it seems, they only block the Voice from commenting on their Facebook wall, something we had to show up in the office of their communications person, Cindi Creager, to discover. (And let us tell you, the spokeswoman was none to pleased to have to speak to an actual member of press.)

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courtesy Sundance Selects

Peter Staley in David France's How To Survive A Plague

Two things starkly colored my experience as I went to a screening of David France's fascinating documentary How to Survive a Plague, about the heyday of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), earlier this week.The first was seeing the film through the prism of my feature article in last week's Voice Pride issue, "Does 'Gay Inc.' Believe in Free Speech?" The correlations between the questions the film explored and my article raised of queer activism (and, in a few cases, the actual same activists) were for me many.

I've also never had such a strong experience of feeling like I was watching my current day to day life replicated onscreen, although experienced in a different era and under different circumstances (like in a sci-fi, parallel universe) as when I was watching How to Survive A Plague. Part of this is because David France wrote the first articles in the Voice about ACT UP 25 years ago and my reporting, on similar topics, owes a great deal to his legacy at this publication. Most eerily, I'd spent the day before I saw the film at the Pride march talking for a good thirty minutes to State Senator Tom Duane. The loquacious politician was waxing especially freely as he contemplated his last Pride before leaving the Senate and reflected on his life in politics as the parade passed by. We stood talking about the fights for gay marriage in New York and the right to be able to openly serve in the military in the past tense. To see him the next day in the film at least 20 year earlier, young and lithe (and long before drug cocktails gave any hope to those with HIV), was startling.

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