“My line to people is that the Pines is to gay people what Israel is to Jews,” Andrew Kirtzman, a longtime Pines resident and real estate developer, said recently. “It’s the spiritual homeland. There’s just a sense of history in the air, almost tangible but not quite. You just feel like you’re part of some kind of grand creation meant solely for gays.”
History is on people’s minds this season, as the Pines marks the 60th anniversary of its founding: two newly published books examine a period many here see as a golden one; homeowners are returning to restore and rebuild houses inundated by Hurricane Sandy; and the Pavilion, the harborside dance hall that long served as an anchor of social life in the community, is reopening as a boldly reimagined version of an unloved structure that in 2011 was destroyed by fire.
Regeneration is a word not often associated with summer towns — ephemeral by definition and seldom more so than on an island whose geography is entirely at the command of a mercurial ocean. Yet it’s in those forces, the ocean’s tidal surges and ebbs, the wind-carved dunes, that clues can be seen to the particular powers this landscape has exerted on those who inhabit it, said Christopher Rawlins, the author of “Fire Island Modernist: Horace Gifford and the Architecture of Seduction,” an overdue monograph about a little-known architect to be released this week.
“It’s an inherently erotic landscape,” said Mr. Rawlins, who found in Mr. Gifford’s work motives and inspirations of a kind that were once considered joyous, until a plague came along and cloaked them with a shroud.
“The Stonewall generation invented what I call this architecture of seduction,” Mr. Rawlins said, referring to a style marked by spare interiors engineered to foster outdoor living; by spare but theatrical geometries; and by stage effects like mirrored ceilings and expanses of window wall.
[F]or all our new familiarity with the idea of Greenland as a global climatological force, we don’t often think about it as a place where people live. With only 56,000 souls living on 836,000 square miles, it is the least densely populated country in the world. Most residents are concentrated in a few cities and towns on the island’s western edge. Some 16,000 live in the capital city of Nuuk.
And Nuuk, like cities around the world, is an urban heat island, according to research conducted by Tony Reames, a doctoral student at the University of Kansas School of Public Affairs and Administration.
Reames, whose studies have focused on environmental justice in urban America, began his research as a class project, not sure what he would find. But the almost laboratory-like conditions of Greenland, he discovered, were a perfect place to measure the effect of human urban development on temperature, especially in the dark winter months.
“You don’t have solar influences at all,” says Reames. “It’s a unique situation to observe the human activity impact.”
He looked at data from 2005 to 2011, and found a strong urban heat island effect in the winter months. In 2011, for instance, the urban area of Nuuk registered temperatures on average 0.5 degrees Centigrade warmer than the surrounding area. February temperatures were 1.1 degrees Centigrade higher than in the surrounding areas, an effect that Reames says is attributable to the intense demands of the heating season and to energy-inefficient buildings that radiate much of that heat into the atmosphere.
Cuba's outward tide looks unlikely to end any time soon, and may increase.
The government relaxed laws in January, making it easier for Cubans to leave the country, which U.S. officials in Havana say has led to a 10 percent increase in inquiries about visas.
Before the change, most visa applications came from the elderly but now most are coming from young people, they said.
Schools in Havana offering classes in foreign languages, particularly English and French, are overloaded with young applicants.
[. . .]
"One of the things that's ironic is Cuba has an educated population, but it doesn't have anything for them to do. They've almost prepared their professionals to emigrate," said Cuba expert Ted Henken at Baruch College in New York.
"I think in some ways the Cuban revolution is the best thing that ever happened to Miami, because half of their professional force was probably trained there," he said.
In a world where population growth is exploding and a region where countries have high birth rates and low median ages, Cuba's population is declining and getting older.
Preliminary figures from a national census last year showed that the number of Cubans had slightly declined from 2002 to about 11 million people.
The median age of Cubans has risen to about 39 from 36 in the 2002 census, according to a U.S. government estimate, far above that of any other country in Latin America.
By the late 1950s, when Fidel Castro and his guerrilleros came to power, homosexuality was viewed as a form of capitalist decadence at best and counter-revolutionary deviance at worst. Simply put, gays weren’t welcome to join in the revolution. Little wonder, for it was a revolution spawned by machismo and which soon came to be marked by a close alliance with the USSR, another regime fostering openly hostile attitudes and policies toward gay people.
In the 1960s, the climate only worsened. Reinaldo Arenas, a Cuban author whose most famous book is the memoir Before Night Falls, wrote about the perils of being a gay Cubano in Pentagonia, his “secret history of Cuba,” before escaping to New York, where he died of AIDS in 1990. In a 1965 interview, Castro remarked that a homosexual could never be “a true Communist militant.” In his understanding, it was a matter of nature clashing with politics.
[. . .]
Times changed. By the 1990s, Castro began to soften his stance on queer rights, to the point that he recently declared that the persecution of homosexuals in Cuba was “a great injustice” for which he accepted personal responsibility. His niece, Mariela Castro, has taken up the rights of transgender people with gusto. Sex reassignment surgery is now free to eligible citizens. But ordinary Cubans, it seems, are not ready to listen just yet.
Today, there is only one “official” gay bar in all of Cuba, and it’s not in Havana. It’s in Santa Clara, scene of a historic battle that handed Castro control of the country more than half a century ago. The city is now a tourist destination, and the bar in question is famous for its transvestite shows. Think Disney World presents Stonewall à la Copacabana. It’s for them, not us.
[. . .]
Despite Castro’s declaration of support for the queer community, there are no official gay-rights groups active inside Cuba. It’s hard to band together in a country where the internet is strictly regulated, with fines and imprisonment for unauthorized hookups. The Cuban Association of Gays was formed in 1994, during a thaw in relations between gays and the state, but disbanded in 1997 after its members were arrested. Pride marches and gay publications have also been banned, lending a very ambivalent tone to what it means to be “state sanctioned.”
[. . .]
There is also a well-known gay-themed party, 10 Pesos (named for the cost of entry), which takes place in or around Havana every Saturday, if you know where to find it. That’s not always easy, as it changes location to avoid becoming a target for the police. Spanish film director Pedro Almodóvar was arrested at one such party. So was designer Jean Paul Gaultier. Foreigners found on the premises were reportedly released with the admonition not to “flaunt” their homosexuality or risk further arrest. Some of the locals were beaten.
In a statement released on Thursday, Haida Salmon Restoration Corp. (HSRC) said it has “removed” Mr. George as a director of the company. “In addition, the HSRC has terminated Mr. George’s employment as an officer of the corporation,” it states.
Mr. George could not be reached for comment. The California businessman is a proponent of the theory that global warming can be blunted and ocean acidification stopped by fertilizing the ocean with iron.
The Haida organization made international headlines several months ago, when it dumped more than 100 tonnes of an iron substance into the ocean off Haida Gwaii in an attempt to stimulate plankton growth.
The HSRC hoped to recover its investment through increased salmon harvests and through selling carbon credits by demonstrating that the iron grew massive clouds of plankton that sucked CO2 out of the atmosphere.
But the experiment, which was not sanctioned by any official body and lacked the involvement of recognized ocean scientists, was widely condemned by researchers, the federal government and the United Nations.
Members of the Canadian Somali Congress have condemned the Toronto Star for repeated references to “Somali drug dealers” in its initial story about mayor Rob Ford’s alleged drug use. The Star‘s first article on the subject originally used the description “Somali” 10 separate times to refer to the men who apparently were involved with Ford in this case. There seems to have been second thoughts among Star editors about this: even before CSC president Ahmed Hussen contacted the publication they edited the article, which now contains five uses of the word.
[. . .]
Star reporter Robyn Doolittle, who co-authored the article with investigative journalist Kevin Donovan, stands by her descriptions. “I think it’s material to the story,” Doolittle told us during an interview at City Hall. “If you accuse the mayor of smoking crack, you have to provide as much detail as possible.” Doolittle declined to directly address the relevance or frequency of the “Somali” identifier, and referred us to the Star‘s public editor Kathy English. (We had received no reply from English at press time.)
Susan Eng, a former Toronto Police Services Board chair and longtime activist regarding media equity, says the references to ethnicity are irrelevant, because even the Star is protecting the identity of the men in question—in contrast to something like a police search, the goal isn’t to provide a physical description so the public can help locate the individuals. Star reporters “are not suggesting that anyone should go and find these people, and unless that’s your motivation as a reporter, you have no reason to use this language,” Eng told us by phone. She added that journalists often become defensive when they are told their descriptions might stereotype specific communities. “You don’t have to be a racist to make this kind of mistake,” she points out.
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