Thursday, October 31, 2019, 6:00 – 8:00 PM

In light of TransOhio’s recent decision to sever all ties with Stonewall Columbus (SWC), I would like to add a few comments.

And while I was not part of SWC’s executive leadership or a member of their Board... I was obviously close enough to that organization to see very intimately all of the events that happened before and after Pride 2017 and the brutal mistreatment of the Black Pride 4 AND the lack of a meaningful, apologetic response that still, after 2 years, was the impetus for TransOhio’s departure from a relationship with SWC. And kudos to them. It’s about time. And other Columbus LGBTQ organizations should gather up their courage and follow suit and cut off ties with SWC.

There is a very simple reason that SWC has become irrelevant and part of the problem instead of a solution to the intolerable treatment of our trans community and particularly our transPOC community...

Pride. Not the celebration. But the state of being enamored by one’s own opinion of the self/itself. “pride” lowercase.

Never been prouder of Columbus thanks to a spontaneous moment of dance at Bruce Nutt's Crazy Mama's 40th Anniversary shindig starring the indefatigable Fleshtones at Skully's, Friday, October 4.

Deep in their super-rock garage soul show, lead singer Peter Zaremba, guitarist Keith Streng and bassist Ken Fox began doing a 'boogaloo' line dance onstage to the catchiest stripper/tiki/funk beat I've ever heard compliments of drummer Bill Milhizer.

The lanky Zaremba and his fellow super-rock skinnies urged the audience to join them and 'boogaloo down High Street/c'mawn, c'mawn.'

With no further prompting almost the entire dance floor crowd did exactly that. Eight lines or so, each roughly a dozen people, instantly and joyfully in sync with the band began marching back and forth, like the best New Orleans' New Year's party you've never been to.

An already-hot Fleshtones show/special anniversary show kicked into ultra-high gear, spirits levitating, middle-aging bodies gyrating, the night now a happening and not just a remembrance of youth crazily spent.

About 12,000 years ago, late stone age humans precipitated the neolithic (agricultural) revolution that marked the start of the steady rise to civilization. Coincidentally, this occurred at the same time as the beginning of what is now known as the Holocene Epoch, the geological epoch in which humans still live.

However, since the industrial revolution commencing in about 1750, just 270 years ago, humans have been destroying Earth’s biosphere with such tremendous ferocity that the Earth we inherited at the beginning of the Holocene Epoch is vanishing before our eyes. And life is vanishing with it.

While this catastrophe first gained significant public attention with the publication of Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring in 1962, efforts in response to her effort to raise the alarm, credited with inspiring the modern environmental movement, have paled in comparison to the ongoing human effort to silence Spring.