November 5, 2009 at 11:49 am by Patrick Saunders
Geoff "Googie" Uterhardt as gay rights icon Harvey Milk in the Onstage Atlanta production 'The Harvey Milk Show'
Gay rights icon Harvey Milk was murdered in 1978, but people refuse to let him go. A biography and Oscar-winning documentary in the ’80s were followed by the successful play The Harvey Milk Show composed by Atlantan Patrick Hutchison in the ’90s. Then, the dam broke with last year’s success of the Oscar-winning feature film Milk, starring Sean Penn.
Around that time, local director Barbara Cole Uterhardt and her husband, actor Googie Uterhardt, approached Hutchison about bringing the production back. “Sure enough, Patrick was willing to work with us,” Googie says. And now The Harvey Milk Show is back at Onstage Atlanta through November 21.
“They made some changes, added a song in that hadn’t been in for awhile,” says Googie. “Then I auditioned and got the part.”
“The part” would be the role of Harvey Milk, the gay community’s closest approximation of Martin Luther King, played by the only straight male actor in the entire production.
Continue reading “He’s baaack: Harvey Milk visits Onstage Atlanta” »
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Tags: Barbara Cole Uterhardt, gay rights, Geoff "Googie" Uterhardt, Harvey Milk, LGBT, onstage atlanta, theater.
April 13, 2009 at 12:19 pm by Curt Holman
Over Easter weekend the blogosphere erupted with the news that Amazon.com was categorizing gay-themed books as “adult” content, stripping them of their sales rankings and removing them from Amazon’s general search engine. According to the Associated Press:
“There was a glitch in our systems and it’s being fixed,” Amazon’s director of corporate communications, Patty Smith, said in an e-mail Sunday. As of Sunday night, books without rankings included James Baldwin’s “Giovanni’s Room,” Gore Vidal’s “The City and the Pillar” and Jeanette Winterson’s “Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.”
Jordan McAuley of Out Traveler: Atlanta sent me an email this morning pointing out that “our two Atlanta guidebooks, the Out Traveler: Atlanta and ATLANTAboy: An Insider’s Guide to Gay Atlanta have both been removed.”
Former Creative Loafing Atlanta music editor Craig Seymour has emerged as one of the bloggers on point for this issue. In his April 12 blog post “Is Amazon homophobic?,” he says:
In the last couple of days, people have been blogging about how Amazon has been labeling gay and lesbian books as “adult” and removing the books from their search engine. I’m glad the issue is FINALLY getting attention, because I have been complaining about it since February.
Craig’s blog includes an e-mail “paper trail” that indicates Amazon’s so-called “glitch” has been in its system much longer than the Sunday statement would indicate, and is targeting gay-themed books but not comparable straight ones.
Continue reading “Amazon.com ‘pinklisting’ includes Atlanta authors” »
Posted in Books, News | 6 Comments »
Tags: Amazon.com, gay rights.
