Early 90s flashback time at east coast/west coast.

Covering Bush’s commencement address at Ohio State Univeristy, The Washington Post tells us:

The commencement addresses of George W. Bush serve as guideposts to a presidency first troubled, then revived.

A year ago, he received an honorary degree from his alma mater, Yale University, where he was booed, heckled and greeted with a sea of protest signs. Scores of professors boycotted the ceremony because they thought Bush undeserving, an image Bush himself indulged. "To the C students, I say, ‘You, too, can be president of the United States,’ " he said then.

Today, at Ohio State University, Bush basked in the adulation of 55,000 people who treated him to waves of standing ovations in Ohio Stadium as he received an honorary doctorate. University officials bestowing the ceremonial hood on the president hailed him as “the most sought-after commencement speaker in the nation” and praised his “common-sense approach,” his “unwavering faith in the nation” and his overall leadership since Sept. 11, which “comforted and inspired us all.”

According to FAIR, protesters were threatened with arrest for so much as turning their backs on the President during his speech:

According to the Columbus Dispatch (6/15/02), students were warned ahead of time they faced arrest if they showed any signs of dissent: “Graduates had been warned during rehearsal on Thursday that they faced arrest if— as was rumored— some stood up and turned their backs on Bush during his speech.” The warning continued on the day of the event as well, according to the Associated Press (6/14/02): “Immediately before class members filed into the giant football stadium, an announcer instructed the crowd that all the university’s speakers deserve to be treated with respect and that anyone demonstrating or heckling would be subject to expulsion and arrest. The announcer urged that Bush be greeted with a ‘thunderous’ ovation.”

What a beautiful lesson in patriotism. The students from OSU have a web site covering the event, and the followup, including statements by protesters at www.turnyourbackonbush.com.

Courtesy of Zoomata – video of a fashion shoot with Azzurri, the Italian soccer team.

Or maybe this will get me to pay attention, at least to the end of a game.

Get them while they’re hot: Jesus Inspirational Sport Statues. I think I’ll take the ballet one on page two. I hadn’t realized it was a sport.

Nude farmers creating stir in Sweden

A calendar featuring nude farmers armed with pitchforks, shovels and wheelbarrows is creating a stir in Swedish agriculture circles.</p>

A national farming organization, which presented a similar, hugely successful, calendar last year, is worried that the new version made by a local group of farmers could defeat the purpose of the original calendar.

“They’re surfing on our wave of success,” said Ann Linden, one of the creators of the national 2002 calendar.

Linden said the first version, featuring waist-up, black-and-white photographs of nude, young farmers in farm settings, was designed to change the image of Swedish farmers as “grumpy old men with hats.”

Linden said her poster boys were “attractive guys about 25-30 years old, who breed chickens, cattle or work in forestry.” </blockquote>

New Tom Tomorrow

From the IHT:

When Antonio Garullo and Mario Ottocento got married last Saturday in The Hague, they crowned a long-standing dream, and began what promises to be an even longer judicial nightmare.</p>

The gay couple chose to marry in the Netherlands because it is currently the only European Union country that grants heterosexual and homosexual unions equal legal standing. Garullo and Ottocento were the first foreigners to be married in the country and they are the first gay Italians to legally wed.</blockquote>

The Art Newspaper has an interesting article on two books dealing with homosexual themes in art.

A Hidden Love: Art and Homosexuality is a newer one that I haven’t seen in person yet – it should appear in the USA this month.

Mr Fernandez begins with something of a Gay Eden, or Olympus—a Greece where man-boy love was a crucial part of an instructional passage from youth to manhood, hence its regular depiction in sculpture and on vases. As cultures proscribed homosexuality, works of art reflected its enduring presence. The author savours biblical examples from Rembrandt, Orazio Gentileschi, and others. The broad range of Mr Fernandez’s enterprise calls to mind the discipline of systematic theology, from St Sebastian to St Genet.

I had the honor of meeting Paul Cadmus in person in June 1999, at the opening of a show at the Aldrich Museum. He was a beautiful, gentle, man (he was 95 at the time). I felt like I was meeting a saint, and in a way I was.

I love that the Navy’s web site has a page on The Fleet’s In.

Nice obit of Bill Blass from PlanetOut. I never met him, but I have a friend who was close to him, and another who worked for him for years.

In New York, Blass is also remembered as a generous and influential supporter of AIDS treatment services since the late 1980s.</p>

“He was a major donor to Gay Men’s Health Crisis at a time when prominent people were silent about AIDS,” said Ronald Johnson, associate executive director at GMHC, a New York-based agency that serves people with AIDS. “His visibility was important in raising consciousness about HIV/AIDS.”

…

Jonathan Jacobs, executive director of the AIDS Care Center at New York Presbyterian Hospital, remembered that Blass first visited when the center was a “threadbare clinic” in 1988, and he became a major fund-raiser thereafter.

“He understood the spirit of what we were trying to do,” Jacobs told the Gay.com/PlanetOut.com Network. He also praised Blass’ attention to detail, noting that Blass quietly made sure there were beautiful flower arrangements in the center’s waiting area each week for the past 14 years.

“We never had to ask him,” Jacobs said. “He was always there for us.”</blockquote>

Tom the Dancing Bug – Bush insists “Up is down”

Doug Marlette