(Photo: Tjook)

Up until now, the threats of the federal sequester have seemed ominous but vague. We knew there would be cuts to, like, public goods and stuff, in a way that would, uh, somehow affect us, but it’s not until now that we are seeing the true ramifications of our government’s ineptitude.

And let's just say there are going to be a lot less half-naked men in sailor hats come the end of May.

The sequester has forced the cancellation of Fleet Week, the annual celebration of sailors that brings dozens of ships to New York City ports. The event usually means big bucks for the city’s bars, and, since the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, it has meant even bigger bucks for the city’s gay bars, which saw an influx of LGBT sailors come out for last year’s festivities.

According to the New York City Economic Development Corporation, the cancellation of the event will cost the city around $20 million, and gay bars in Chelsea and Hell’s Kitchen, near where the ships dock, will take a particularly large hit.

"It was worth a good 10 percent bump in business," said Rob Hynds, the owner of two gay sports bars on the West Side, to DNAinfo. "We always ran specials and will not be doing so since it's canceled."

One thing's for sure: the cancellation will mean the loss of a lot of parties like this one, the tragedy of which is pretty self-evident.

DNAinfo quoted one Eric Weinman who attended the event last year, hosted by XL nightclub, and seems to have had a pretty good time. "There were guys, it was their first time ever being at a party like that," he told DNAinfo. "It was good for them—and they were good for us, if you know what I mean."

So yeah. The government sucks, basically.

Kim Stolz and Amanda Leigh Dunn, co-owners of The Dalloway

"We've met before," purred Kim Stolz, an impish grin on her face. The Transom was standing in a dark corner with the most famous lesbian to come out, as it were, of America's Next Top Model. We were at the launch party for  The Dalloway, a bar/restaurant Ms. Stolz co-owns with fellow reality heroine Amanda Leigh Dunn, of The Real L-Word fame..

The Transom couldn’t recall previously meeting Ms. Stolz , though we remembered her infamous kiss with a curious competitor during Cycle 5 of ANTM, as well as her time as a VJ and correspondent on MTV News. Even in her new role as Citigroup vice president and part owner of the hottest lesbian spot to hit New York in decades, she was unmistakable.

"I feel like the New York lesbian scene was kind of different, more diverse when I was growing up," said the Manhattan native. "But recently it's been confined to dive bars and clubby atmospheres."

The Dalloway, on the other hand, is a gorgeous, two-story affair on Broome and Thompson. The downstairs is a mix between a lounge and a club, where every Thursday night one can find the "Girls Party"  downstairs, where gyrating models and bookish butches dance with abandon.  The night the Transom attended, Samantha Ronson was DJing, and the area around her raised booth served as the dance floor.

But it’s the upstairs that makes The Dalloway unique. It’s a restaurant with freestanding antlers on all the tables and the kind of hipster-meets-high-end vibe that makes it difficult to place on the Kinsey Scale. (OpenTable.com resorts to the tortured locution "lesbian implied.")

"We never planned to have food, originally," said Ms. Stolz. "But we were approached by Vanessa Miller, and she told us that she loved our idea, and that we should at least agree to a tasting. And who turns down a free tasting?"

Ms. Miller, a 24-year-old with elfin features moved from Boston to work at The Dalloway, was clever to offer an introductory freebie, since, as we learned over the course of the night, she just might be New York's next gastronomical wunderkind. As silver trays bustled by, we snatched small spoonfuls of delicately crafted fare: a take on fried chicken and mashed potatoes that featured a small cube of lightly-battered poultry on top of a cloud of fluffy polenta; an arugula salad with a dollop of avocado in a mysterious dressing that made our mouth almost decide to switch sides and become a vegetarian; and a parade of finger foods that put other holiday party catering to shame. Another guest, we noticed, had posted herself  near the kitchen so she could get first grab at the savory treat before they quickly disappeared into the mouths of The Dalloway's guests.

"Obviously, we couldn't say no once we tried the food," Ms. Stolz said. So they decided to broaden the idea of The Dalloway, to make it a place where one could "go bring parents from out of town to eat." While the 29-year-old Ms. Stolz said the door policy downstairs certainly didn’t demand queer credentials, the scene would be appeal to the "very LGBT community."

"And foodies," she added. Though obviously the two aren’t mutually exclusive.

All of this recently culminated in that telltale culture-news saturation point indicator, a withering segment about them on The Daily Show. And on Friday, The Jim Henson Company—which makes Muppet toys for Chick-Fil-As kids' meals—cut ties with the company as well. So, how's Chick-Fil-A fighting back?

The Daily Show's co-creator, Lizz Winstead, Tweeted out this photograph today:

It appears to be from the Willow Grove Mall in lovely Willow Grove, PA. Blogger Joe My God found that they're not the only one taking this message tactic:

Chick-fil-A is initiating a voluntary withdrawal for our Jim Henson Creature Shop Puppet Kid's Meal Premiums due to a product issue (even though all puppets passed safety testing requirements). In lieu of the kid's meal premium we will offer a Kid's Icedream. We plan to have replacement kid's meal premiums within 2 weeks. Thank you and we apologize for any inconvenience.

Now, technically, they're not The Muppets, which Disney now owns, but Jim Henson creatures are all kind of informally common-noun "muppets," no?  Either way, Chick-Fil-A is saying that the "voluntary recall" happened before The Jim Henson Company made their announcement: Essentially, that they recalled the product voluntarily, and The Jim Henson Company exploited the moment to take a stand.

Which seems unlikely, given both the "voluntary" nature of the product recall, as well as the varying messages each Chick-Fil-A franchise seems to be putting out.

When contacted for quote by the Huffington Post, The Jim Henson Company referred a reporter to their previous statement and basically told them to check in with Chick-Fil-A, but as The Consumerist pointed out, the recall is in fact "voluntary," which refutes what the sign at the heart of this reads: That it's a recall. Furthermore, they contacted the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which issues recalls like the one that'd be required for the toys in question; they had no issues with the toys listed for recall action.

But essentially, what you have here is an anti-gay fast-food chain and The Jim Henson Workshop engaged in a P.R. war, with a confused media caught in the middle, attempting to interpret subtleties in messaging that have more or less been distributed through social media. It is mostly weird, and relatively funny.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Morales and Reyes.

Movies about transgendered Latinos are not exactly on the menu every week, so the attention paid to Gun Hill Road is understandable. It’s a flawed but interesting debut by writer-director Rashaad Ernesto Green, who says he based it on his own family, without further explanation. I shudder to think.

After three years in prison for grand larceny, arms possession and selling drugs, Enrique Rodriguez, played by the riveting actor Esai Morales (La Bamba), returns to his old neighborhood in the multiracial Gun Hill Road section of the Bronx to start a new life and correct his past mistakes, only to find his whole world distorted and in ashes. His long-suffering wife, Angie (Judy Reyes), has, in his absence, been having an affair with another man, and his teenage son, Michael (newcomer Harmony Santana), has been planning a sex change while living a double life as a drag queen called Vanessa. Enrique loves his family, but finds it impossible to adjust to these violent changes and simultaneously focus on his parole officer’s warning: “Secure gainful employment or go back behind bars.”

While working as a short order cook and trying to reconnect with his estranged family, he is at first baffled (his son hates baseball and paints his toenails), then enraged. Imagine the frustration and mayhem when a macho Latino sees his only son turning into the kind of freak he witnessed in prison. (There is a hint that Enrique himself has been the victim of a sexual predator in prison when, in the opening scene, he slashes the feet of a massive inmate and gets an additional 90 days in solitary.) While Angie indulges Michael and showers the confused boy with compassion, Enrique cannot rise above and beyond his conditioning in the traditional role of masculine Puerto Rican supremacy. As Enrique brutally jams his son’s head into a sink and cuts off his hair, Michael wears his bras and hot pants and makes clandestine visits to the mother of an understanding friend who sells hormone injections and testosterone blockers. In one poignant scene, Enrique forces the boy to visit a prostitute with tragic results that lead to a near-suicide.

Gun Hill Road explores the contemporary anguish of parents who want to raise their children as reflections of their own images and troubled teens who want to forge their own identities or die. Torn between the two polar opposites, Angie becomes an enabler and Enrique falls back into his old criminal ways, while Michael searches for love and acceptance in the beds of people who want only to exploit him sexually. It’s a sad story, and Mr. Green offers no easy Hollywood solutions. The writing is predictable and off the scale in terms of trajectory. The basic plot structure never follows one idea through to resolution. Still, the performances are honest and deeply felt, framed in ways that make you feel you know exactly where every character is in relation to the world around them, including the Bronx, which becomes a geographical entity with its own perimeters. The bodegas, the clubs, the dark alleys, the crowded apartments never feel like sets. Played out against these settings, the pain of the transgendered son, torn between his passion to be a woman and the demands of a macho father he both loves and fears, and the father’s struggle to make amends for his past in a real world where integrity is no longer an option add up to a heartbreaking dilemma. Cut from the same fabric as Benjamin Bratt’s role in The Mission, it certainly is not a world many viewers will find familiar, and the disappointing midair ending that heaps even more problems on these disenfranchised people might be admirably realistic, but doubly depressing.

Still, Gun Hill Road is worth seeing for the acting. The great character actress Miriam Colon makes a brief but memorable appearance as the strong matriarch of the household, and Ms. Santana, a true transgendered teen who has never acted before, is especially wrenching. As the tortured father straddling two cultures, the talented Mr. Morales’s exploration of nuance and understatement in a difficult role might have been cheapened by a more bombastic actor, but the more he underplays his inner conflicts, the more powerful his performance grows. I’ve admired him for years, and it’s a thrill to see him in a sensitive, complex role that utilizes so many aspects of his talent. Gun Hill Road may not be a great film, but there’s no questioning the fact that he is very great in it.

rreed@observer.com

GUN HILL ROAD

Running time 88 minutes

Written and directed by Rashaad Ernesto Green

Starring Esai Morales, Judy Reyes, Harmony Santana

2/4

Quinn, who is Irish and openly gay, made the announcement Sunday surrounded by NYC Comptroller John Liu, Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, Manhattan Borough President Stringer and others, before the start of the all-inclusive St. Patrick's Parade in Sunnyside, Queens.

Referring to the other parade on Staten Island, Quinn said an LGBT group sought permission to march from the events' organizers. At first, they were allowed to march, but without any LGBT signage.

"Eventually, even the offer to march in a way was taken off the table all together and there was no invitation," Quinn said of the would-be marchers.

After announcing she and her colleagues would boycott that parade until it allowed LGBT participants, I asked Quinn if it was wrong for Mayor Bloomberg to have marched in it.

"Everybody makes their own decision," she said. "Don't Ask Don't Tell has been repealed. The military is no longer discriminating against LGBT people but yet parades in New York City are. It baffles the mind."

Then, Stringer stepped forward.

"I think the mayor had a wonderful opportunity to be here with us and not march, and that would have sent the clearest message," he said. "As influential as we are, the mayor does set the tone for this city. He would have moved this debate forward to recognize that."

Quinn said the people barred from the parade - Staten Island Pride - did not call for a boycott of the event. When asked, Quinn said the mayor was not explicitly invited to their press conference, but was aware of it and, as a matter of routine, "always welcome to anything we do."

Liu attended a pre-parade breakfast on Staten Island, but did not march. He warned that such parade policies lead to worse, and possibly harmful events. "The lack of inclusiveness that ultimately, inevitably that leads to far worse things" like "intolerance" and even "hate crimes," he said.

De Blasio said "there is a certain sadness" in having this debate, which has been fought for nearly two decades. "But I do feel some hope," he said.

The announcement brought together nearly all the leading 2013 mayoral candidates and presented a united front among the city's leading Democratic figures. Not in attendance was the all-but-announced 2013 mayoral candidate Rep. Anthony Weiner.

An aide to Weiner said he did, as in years past, march in the Staten Island parade alongside openly gay legislator, Assemblyman Matt Titone, but doesn't march in the larger St. Patrick's parade in Manhattan.