As I sit on the dais at Johns Hopkins Turner Auditorium waiting for the press conference announcing the first U.S. HIV positive to HIV positive organ transplants to begin I reflect back to what brought me here. I am not anyone of prominence. I was born and raised in South Baltimore and worked as a teller for many years at the racetracks where I punched out the wagers for customers betting on the races.
No, Margaret Cho–Vigilante Killing isn’t Cool
Margaret Cho’s call for women to kill their rapists was treated with the general adulation that Gregg Shapiro showed for the Korean-American performer in his interview (Baltimore OUTloud, March 4, 2016). But Cho’s widely publicized celebration of vigilante killing of men and boys accused of sexual misconduct should not pass without condemnation and consideration of history.
Remembering Scalia
I’ve never wished… …a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure. – Clarence Darrow Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached. – Antonin Scalia HE MAY NOT HAVE WISHED HIM DEAD, but Antonin Scalia would have surely tested Clarence Darrow’s limits. One can wonder what the attorney for the damned, as they called Darrow when he defended Leopold and Loeb from the gallows, would have thought of a judge who could say in all seriousness that mere innocence is an insufficient reason to call off the hangman.
State Power: A Friend We Should Do Without
A recent lawsuit filed by a Baltimore lesbian-feminist against a San Francisco lesbian-feminist, two high-profile heterosexual underage sex cases, and the raid on the male escort advertising website Rentboys.com by Federal Homeland Security agents and the NYPD has gotten us thinking about the use of state power to address community grievances and enforce moralistic sex codes. It’s our belief that sexual minority peoples and communities should be extremely suspicious of state power.
Editorial: Right Ways, Wrong Ways to Fight Injustice
We emphatically condemn the mayhem that began on Monday and hope that it will not be as disastrous for the city as the riots of 1968. For those too young to remember, in 1968 Baltimore joined other urban centers in rioting over the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Those riots destroyed neighborhoods that have yet to recover, as many middle-class African-Americans joined the white citizens of Baltimore in an exodus to the suburbs that had been going on for nearly two decades. Although there are many causes for the urban decay that Baltimore and other industrialized cities have […]