By Peter Sterne 5/21 4:06pm

Dubious Claims

Michael Kinsley (Photo credit: Simon and Schuster).

Did Michael Kinsley Invent Gay Marriage?

Does The New Republic editor at large Michael Kinsley think he invented the idea of gay marriage? It sure sounds like it. Mr. Kinsley published an article in last week’s issue of TNR in which he explains that it’s okay for people to be uncomfortable with gay marriage, since it’s only been around for a couple decades. And he should know, he wrote, since he introduced the world to the idea of gay marriage back in 1989.

“The first known mention of gay marriage is an article (“Here Comes the Groom” by Andrew Sullivan) commissioned by me and published in this magazine in 1989. And I would bet that there is no one born before 1989, gay or straight, who didn’t, when he or she first heard the idea, go, whaaa?”

Read More

By Drew Grant 8/28/12 1:39pm

Celebrity weddings

Michelle Rounds and Rosie O'Donnell (Getty Images)

Rosie O’Donnell Had a Wedding and None of Us Were Invited

Summer is a horrible time for the unmarried. How many days do we have to take off of work to travel to a friend’s destination wedding? How many holidays are spent not relaxing on a beach, but en route to a last-minute hotel, where you’ll spend the long weekend making small talk with people you don’t really know?

Ugh. Weddings. That’s why Rosie O’Donnell did it right: The 50-year-old actress, who was supposed to marry fiancée Michelle Rounds this month, was secretly hitched earlier this summer. Read More

By David Freedlander 3/28/12 8:30am

Politics

ObamaGayMarriage_Dale_Stephanos

Obama’s Gay Marriage Conundrum: Advocates Ask Obama to Speak Now; Political Pragmatists Say Hold Your Peace

Jon Cooper first met Barack Obama in 2007, a few weeks before Obama announced a run for president and back when he was mostly known as a promising first-term U.S. senator with a gift for oration. At a low-dollar fund-raiser in Midtown Manhattan, Mr. Cooper, the president of a large electronics manufacturing company and then the majority leader of the Suffolk County Legislature, stood next to Mr. Obama after he had taken questions from guests. Mr. Cooper pulled out a Christmas card that he had mailed to friends and family and showed it to the Illinois senator.

The card showed Mr. Cooper and Robert Cooper, his domestic partner of 27 years, and the couple’s five adopted children. (Robert Cooper changed his last name when the couple adopted their first child 25 years ago.)

“He told me how beautiful my family looked, and I said to him that I hoped that if you decide to run for president that you will remain a strong and consistent advocate for gay rights and for gay marriage,” Mr. Cooper recalled. Read More

By The Editors 1/24/12 7:33pm

opinion

The Tool Mr. Cuomo Needs

Say this about Governor Cuomo: He is not one to dampen expectations. Having delivered tax reform, gay marriage and new union contracts during his first year in office, the governor is looking for even bigger achievements in his second year—which happens to coincide with state legislative elections. Albany’s traditional embrace of the status quo is never tighter than when legislators are up for re-election, which makes the governor’s ambitions even more notable. Read More

By Rex Reed 11/16/11 10:06am

theater

Standing on Ceremony: The Gay Marriage Plays.

Star-Studded Bill of Playwrights of Standing On Ceremony Tackle Topical Wellspring That Is Gay Marriage

It had to happen. With the feeding frenzy over the passage of the same-sex marriage laws, in the press and in the chapel, someone had to come up with a play about it. Nine plays, in fact, staged in various venues across America (in New York, down at the Minetta Lane Theatre in Greenwich Village), featuring six skilled and adaptable actors reading the words of such diverse playwrights as Paul Rudnick, Moises Kaufman, Neil LaBute and Mo Gaffney, to name a few, on the subject of one of the biggest hot-button topics of the century. The umbrella title, Standing on Ceremony: The Gay Marriage Plays, says it all. All you have to do is listen, shed an occasional tear and laugh a lot. There is something for everybody. Read More

By Drew Grant 11/10/11 12:54pm

cartoons

getting-marriage-license

Drag Queens and Gay Marriage Featured in R. Crumb's Axed 'New Yorker' Cover

Robert Crumb, the alt-comic writer with a piggyback fetish, has always been ahead of his time. That’s what made his comics–usually featuring giant Amazonian women with humungous thighs as a chronic masturbatory fantasy– so transgressive to begin with.

But for all his former subversiveness, Mr. Crumb is pretty mainstream nowadays. Maybe not New Yorker mainstream though: Vice magazine unearthed a 2009 drawing from the cartoonist that was rejected by David Remnick‘s magazine. Though an answer was never given on why the cover wasn’t run, Mr. Crumb suspects it was because the New Yorker was too afraid of offending people with the image of a (possible?) drag queen and a twee person of unidentifiable sex trying talking to a sweating official from the marriage license bureau, with a sign pointing to a “Genders Inspection” office next to his window.

Below, a high res image of the cartoon, which was discovered at the Venice Biennale in June. Read More

By Drew Grant 11/04/11 9:12am

Conan O'Brien

Scott Cronick and his partner David Gorshein, married by Conan

Conan Presides Over Late Night's First Live Gay Wedding; People Who Hate Gay Weddings Freak Out [Video]

Last night, Conan O’Brien officiated a wedding between his costume designer Scott Cronick and his partner David Gorsheins on live TV. Even though this is New York (Right? Right, just checking…) there was still a huge public outcry from media stations all over the country, who all simultaneously felt like doing a gay wedding during a broadcast on TBS was just, perhaps, pushing the envelope? Read More