I HAVE NOT FORGOTTEN YOU PETER HUJAR or your PICTURES

I HAVE NOT FORGOTTEN YOU PETER HUJAR or your PICTURES

Many years ago Peter Hujar was my lover ... he is just now coming into public honor with a traveling MAJOR MUSEUM show organized by the Morgan Museum more than twenty years after his death from AIDS I remember asking him in the earliest days of after the STONEWALL REBELLION .if he would take a photo for a campaign the COME OUT cell of Gay Liberation Front . The COME OUT cell wanted to do a recruitment poster in a day when all most all lesbian and gay men were closeted and hidden in bars and secret cruising areas across the world. He agreed, For or a month we announced at the GLF weekly general meeting that anyone who wanted to be in this photo to come to a street in what is now known as SOHO. (sad that one person in the photo who disappeared for almost 20 years emerged and because of his lifestyle at the time could not remember where it took place published a confabulation and personal fantasy of where it took place. He was wrong,. As the person who organized the shoot with Peter, you would have thought he would have asked ... he did not!) Now that that has been said >|: NOTE why is it all white people despite the four people of color who showed up and at the last moment were afraid of going public about being gay and lesbian (The James Baldwin dual oppression dilemma). History must be told truthfully and not as a fantasy to be politically correct.
Peter died of AIDs in 1989

let me share a few photos I love of Peters... and as life would have it ..whe we broke up and feelings were raw I took almost every photo he had taken . of me. Now I wish I had
not ,,,,

Peter as he was when I lived with him. Handsome . One of Warhol's 10 most beautiful men fi

A very young John Kelly dancer 

Charles Ludlam making up for Camille

Lola Pat Camille *Theater of Rediculous 1973

I remember Paul Morrisey whispering in Candy's ear . "taks more hormones Candy and you will be more beautiful. Dead fro cancer she was still beautiful. There is a lesson for today herre.

From his first book 1964

Ethyl Eichelberger in costume 

Ethyl Eichelberger out of costume

 Ethyl in a pose

John and Gary

Iggy Pop 1969 

Iggy Pop 1977

John Ashbury

Diana Vreeland 1975

Tomata du Plenty who once saved my life in Seattle 

Add caption

Add caption

A young Fran 

Jackie Curtis 1970

Greer had sexual reassignment surgery at 15. Greer was not intersex,  His mother's request. Greer never fully recovered from it ..his art in many ways tells that story.

a young John Kelly

my favorite couple  Jo;hn and Gary 

George Harris /Hibiscus and Angel Jack

History Lesson: MEMORIES OF THE REVOLUTION the truth about Yippies and Zippies and Dana Beal

MEMORIES OF THE REVOLUTION: found a transcript of an long interview I did with author Michael Gross for a book he was doing that when published was called "MY GENERATION" ,he profiled about 8 people ,,, you would be amazed who we were .. and are today.. anyway .. this is an uncorrected transcript .. but it begins to clears up I think a controversy regarding Dana Beal the differences between yippies and zippies and . sets the stage for a revision of Tom Forcade in popular culture,

Jim Fouratt (Michael Gross) - (Tape 5):

FOURATT:  ...really the Zippies.  You know, the Zippies had formed, the Yippies sort of was over... The Zippies had formed, and Dana Beal... Abbie sort of supported the Zippies... Although he had been so critical of them, he still supported them in their mobilization for the Democratic Convention.  I'm pretty sure it was the Democratic Convention; it was in Miami Beach.

MG: Correct.

FOURATT:  I'll never forget going to an evening Zippie event outdoors in that park in Miami.  That's when Miami had all those old Jewish people, South Beach, who were wonderful.  They all had fixed incomes, and they really...you know, they were the '30s people grown old.  So they were really sympathetic.  And I watched what I would consider a mind(?)-washing experiment going on, led by Dana Beal, giving acid to all these young people, and then taking them through classic brainwashing steps.  To me, it was fascism.  I'd seen the Hippie counterculture now devolve into a Fascist political movement.  It was very chilling to me.

MG: I never found it... To me, Dana Beal and the Zippies were desperate, irrelevant, hold on to the past, and that was the Convention where Abbie was sort of stumbling around lost, too, because he was a leader, but there was no movement any more.

FOURATT:  Right.  That's why he left to join forces with Dana for that period of time.  It was a rite of passage for me, because that was not my vision.  That was not what I saw in that park.  Being there actually for the Convention was correct, but taking young people and using drugs was no different from what the government did.

MG: When you're saying "brainwashing," you mean...

FOURATT:  You can brainwash people with drugs.  You take them through certain steps.  Those steps were being used...

MG: What point were they trying to get across?  Trying to make them into anti-government zombies?

FOURATT:  Yes.  Well, I don't want to use those words, but...

MG: Use your own.

FOURATT:  They wanted to politicize these kids, who already were political because they were there, but for their own agenda, which was disruptive and nihilistic, as far as I'm concerned.

                           [PAUSE]

MG: Something happens to you in Miami.  you realize...

And here is a letter to the NYC newspaper called the  VILLAGER re Dana Beal:

"To The Editor:

Re “Yippie thinks he’s solved .... (news article, Oct. 14):

In a front-page story in last week’s Villager, the writer describes Dana Beal as a Yippie. Mr. Beal was never active in the Yippies when they were in existence in the late ’60’s and early ’70’s. He, in fact, was the founder of the Zippies, which rose in opposition to the Yippies.

The Zippies were best known as the group that held a mass deprogramming public ritual during the Democratic Convention in 1972 in Miami. 

I did observe the distribution of LSD to a large group of mostly young people in Flamingo Park and than the almost ritualistic “deprogramming” lesson taught from the stage by a Zippie leader. To my eye it was not dissimilar to the U.S. Army’s experimental use of LSD in the late ’50’s and early ’60’s.

Dana Beal has publicly identified himself as a Yippie for a number of years. I have spoken to him about his misappropriation of Yippie history for his own use. Mr. Beal, who was a close ally of Tom Forcade, the founder of High Times and a well-known pot dealer in the ’70’s until his suicide, is best know as a marijuana activist and has in recent years championed the medical use of marijuana. He also has championed the use of an African root to cure heroin addiction.

Pease identify Mr. Beal properly. The Yippie legacy is rich, as is the Zippie legacy. Don’t confuse them.
Jim Fouratt
Fouratt is a co-founder of the Yippies

GAYS AGAINST GUNS protest TOM PRICE , Secretary of Health and Human Services at Federal Plaza

On Friday, September 22, 2017,  GAYS AGAINST GUNS demonstrated against TOM PRICE, Trump's Secretary of Health and Human Services and his ogun violence policies. Know as an NRA Puppet, PRICE is also a homophobe, against same-sex civil marriage and has been cutting funds for mental health services.

On the steps of the FEDERAL PLAZA NYC at GAYS AGAINST GUNS demo  The PRICE IS the WRONG  against TOM PRICE, Trump's Secretary of Health and Human Services, NRA Puppet and homophobe  9-22-17

I was one of the four HUMAN BEINGS, white-shrouded figures who stand silent holding signs identifying GUN VIOLENCE victims.

GAG was founded right after the Pulse gay nightclub massacre. It is open to anyone of any sexual orientation and self-named identity  regardless of age or color or class are welcome to GAYS AGINST GUNS and its fight against GUN VIOLENCE and responsible gun control 

Human Beings stand as the spirits of those killed by GUN VIOLENCE as a die-in takes place of the steps of the FEDERAL PLAZA NYC at GAYS AGAINST GUNS  The PRICE IS the WRONG  demo against TOM PRICE, Trump's Secretary of Health and Human Services, NRA Puppet and homophobe 

Legendary Activists Rollerrena and Brent Earl Nickles join GAYS AGIST GUNS demo  against TOM PRICE and tell younger activist what they have learned in years of activism

Edith Windsor Memorial Service at Temple Emanuel NYC 9/15/17 plus Edie in her own voice tell what Supreme Court means Court v

Please join in the memorial service for Edith Windsor.  Edie changed US history. Her win at the Supreme Court gave same-sex couples the right to choose same-sex civil marriage as well as being treated for all benefits that previously were only available to opposite-sex couples .

If you watch you will learn about her remarka=ble life prior to the Supreme Court win. I treasure my conversations with her .. and they always ended in a hig,

click here for a live stream of the memorial service 

https://venue.streamspot.com/video/d204bfd75b

Watch here Edie explain what her victory Supreme Court victor actually meant 

Village Voice reunion ...So Many Memories .. Don McNeill, Jill Johnson, Arthur Bell, Howard Smith, Voice Censorship demo

Nice to catch up with Lynn Holtz and she filled me in on why Karen Durban (Voice editor) was not there, I told her of recently having a face book conversation with John Wilcox who lives Ouija California. He was one of the founders of the Voice. Sorry I did not see Musto or Richard Goldstein or John Parles or Joe Levy or RJ Smith there ..were they present? I was telling John Leland about Don McNeill

who I think would have been the voice of his generation if he had not drowned on LSD while in a swimming hole upstate.Don was 22 and immersed himself in the late 60's world of hippies, Yippies, Be Ins, the Motherfuckers, draft card burnings and the Jade Companions and reported them vividly and accurately in the pages of the Voice.
I had a flashback to when Howard Smith called me and said "Jim, the Voice is throwing away its Gerstner printing press and if you want it I will tell you when it will be put on the Street," I answered "YES." Got a group of kids to wheel it over from the Voice's Christopher Street office to my loft at 26 Bond street. With it we printed the Communication Company /NYC' missives and distributed them freely locally. A combination of culture (first published Diane DePrima's extraordinary Revolutionary Letters and political stories about police harassment and news about the Vietnam war in an attempt to wake up the hippies who Tim Leary had convinced to drop out and get high. In the late 60's, pre cell phones and social media, it was Howard Smith writing in Scenes (then the most read regular feature in the Voice after Jules ' cartoons about my organizing projects like the Be In etc and Bob Fass on WBAI that were the key to the Communication Company's organizing success. It also was what got Abbie Hoffman to come knocking on my door. We woke up a lot of hippies, and they joined the Anti-War movement with flowers in their hair. All of these memories because fresh again in my mind being in the room with all of the people who made the Village Voice matter each week. From the editorial side to the production side to the sales and promotion side. I told Jeff Weinstein about how the first demonstration of the Gay Liberation Front right after it formed the 3rd night of the Stonewall Rebellion was out side the Voice offices on Christopher Street.

We had tried to place an ad for a dance we were organizing at Alternate U on 14th street for gay men and lesbians as an alternative to meeting in bars.


The woman head of advertising refused to take our ad because we used the word "gay" . Imagine!


And then trying to explain who Jill Johnson was to a younger person who had never heard of her or her writing ... Or knew that Arthur Bell, a Voice critic was a founding member of the Gay Activist Alliance








Here are Jill Johnson and Arthur Bell at the 1971 Gay Freedom March in NYC









Ah, the Voice Reunion was a night to remember!

Never stop living. AWESOME & GRUESOME by THE OLDERS - A Ranthem

Never stop living. Never stop being creative. Listen to your heart and your imagination ... not to the noise outside. Know your tribe and support your peers Leave a legacy of a life lived fully... role model to those behind you a  life of creativity and compassion and commitment to making a better world  .. be here now. Know that you are appreciated and loved.   thank you, Verna and Roswell and all the elders.

ESSENTIAL REALITY CHECK: tools to understand how white supremacy seized the media with an unafraid showing its face

ESSENTIAL REALITY CHECK: tools to understand how white supremacy seized the media with an unafraid showing its face

1: A history lesson you did not learn in school. nor will your children or friends: How racism found it public way to Charlottesville

My friend Mark Kemp sent me this piece .. I have yo admit it was mostly new news to me .kwowledge is power ..so thank you, Jim, for writing this a nd thank you, Mark for sending it to me.  picture: Mark Kemp and Tarrah Segal and James C Leach  the author od this history lesson

ESSENTIAL HISTORY LESSON ON RACISM IN AMERICA 
James C. Leach 

Trump didn’t willingly offer an unequivocal condemnation of violent white supremacists during his campaign.

Trump didn’t willingly offer an unequivocal condemnation of violent white supremacists in Charlottesville.

Trump didn’t show moral leadership or political courage.

These are all serious omissions.

Now, an increasing number in his own party are, at long last, acknowledging the immense mistake they made in enthusiastically empowering his utterly immoral and unmoored worldview to take over the White House.

However, before turning up the volume on the simplistic narrative that Trump is the sole or even primary source of our nation’s fracturing, we might consider some other things Trump didn’t do:

•Trump didn’t enslave Africans and African Americans. That was twelve of our other presidents, over half of whom held enslaved people while in the White House.

•Trump didn’t write “The Abolition of Slavery must be gradual and accomplished with much caution and Circumspection. Violent means and measures would produce greater violations of Justice and Humanity, than the continuance of the practice.” That was President John Adams.

•Trump didn’t opine “I advance it, therefore, as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstance, are inferior to the whites in the endowment both of body and mind.” That was President Thomas Jefferson.

•Trump didn’t declare “To be consistent with existing and probably unalterable prejudices in the U.S. freed blacks ought to be permanently removed beyond the region occupied by or allotted to a White population.” That was President James Madison.

•Trump didn’t assert “there is a physical difference between the white and black races that will for ever forbid the two races from living together on terms of social and political equality.” That was President Abraham Lincoln.

•Trump didn’t contend “The problem is so to adjust the relations between two races of different ethnic type that the rights of neither be abridged nor jeoparded; that the backward race [blacks] be trained so that it may enter into the possession of true freedom while the forward race [whites] is enabled to preserve unharmed the high civilization wrought out by its forefathers.” That was President Theodore Roosevelt.

•Trump didn’t openly express the opinion to prominent black leaders “segregation is not a humiliation but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen.” That was President Woodrow Wilson.

•Trump didn’t go to a black college to announce to its graduating class “Your race is meant to be a race of farmers, first, last and for all times.” That was President William Howard Taft.

•Trump didn’t prevaricate explaining “If I come out for the anti-lynching bill now, they will block every bill I ask Congress to pass to keep America from collapsing. I just can’t take the risk.” That was President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

•Trump didn’t offer the excuse that white southerners “are not bad people. All they are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in school alongside some big overgrown Negroes.” That was President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

•Trump didn’t have an attorney general who approved an FBI wiretap on the home of Martin Luther King, Jr. That was President John F. Kennedy whose Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy made that call.

•Trump didn’t complain “These Negroes, they're getting pretty uppity these days and that's a problem for us since they've got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we've got to do something about this, we've got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference.” That was President, Lyndon Baines Johnson.

•Trump didn’t say, on tape “I have the greatest affection for them [Negroes] but I know they're not going to make it for 500 years. They aren't. You know it, too. The Mexicans are a different cup of tea. They have a heritage. At the present time they steal, they're dishonest, but they do have some concept of family life. They don't live like a bunch of dogs, which the Negroes do live like.” That was President Richard M. Nixon.

•Trump didn’t launch and then expand a Jim Crow “War on Drugs” and then double down on it in a way that increased state and federal incarceration at its most rapid rate in our history. That was Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton.

These brief excerpts are, of course, far from comprehensive. They in no way excuse the way Trump has encouraged the virulent rise of a more public and aggressive form of white supremacy. They do offer context.

Making this simply or even primarily about Trump ignores centuries of presidential racism and an even longer history of structural white supremacy here. Making this simply or even primarily about Trump excuses all of the ways we continue to participate in, benefit from, and implicitly (and even explicitly) defend a system that was put in place with the core assertion that a black person isn’t even a full person, much less someone whose life might actually matter. This isn’t, as some are now trying to claim “what we’ve become.” This is who we are because, in fact, this is who we have always been.

We must translate our outrage, our heartbreak, our fear and our dismay into something more than making Trump the identified patient in our national sickness. As we are now learning, those violent white supremacists marching through a Virginia town with a long, long history of white supremacy weren’t nearly all the easily stereotyped poor, uneducated, rural, southern Trump voters we’ve been counseled to try to understand. Implying that any of us live at great distance from this kind of lethal racism no longer seems defensible.

I wish I knew a resolutely hopeful course forward. I do not. In no way do I excuse Trump and other extremists. But, I am more focused these days on my own introspection, my own need to reflect on my own thoughts and actions and inaction, my own need to examine my privilege and the ways it shapes what I see and what I overlook, my own need to listen and learn, my own challenge to call out the more subtle and regular forms of racism that mark everyday life among white people, my own role in speaking truth to power. I am more aware than ever that only by unequivocally disavowing and working to dismantle four centuries of white supremacy can we even begin to find a way forward.

Because of all of this, I was among those deeply disappointed when a Charlotte Vigil last night began not with an acknowledgment of shared sorrow, nor with an expression of collective contrition, but with a partisan implication that we had all come together so that we could listen to white men call out Trump for refusing to denounce white supremacy. I was distressed to hear an utterly appalling concluding claim that, because some stood on a hillside shining a flashlight, there was no racism or division among those who gathered in Marshall Park last night. I was dismayed in between to hear certain benignly generalized statements about Charlotte backed by no expressions of courage or creative thinking from some who’ve continued to ignore the serious issues fracturing this city.

There’s no doubt: Trump didn’t offer the faintest hint of moral or just leadership at a time of national crisis. Sadly, that’s not our only, and just may not be our most serious problem at this distressing time.

2: Listen and be challenged:  National Book Award winner and Editor at large at Atlantic Magazene TA NEHISI Coates puts context into collective shock on Democracy Now ....   ESSENTIAL

https://www.democracynow.org/2017/8/15/full_interview_ta_nehisi_coates_onacj t









Now : Join me and about a 1500 people on the streets to UNWELCOME trump to NYC ... trust me it will make you feel good .. I engaged in live stream with some folks in the street .. Hey .. let me say right up front:  being LIVE at an event is much much much better than watching a LIVE STREAM...that said enjoy

click and join us on the street in front of TRUMP TOWER and waiting for Trump.
click

LIVE waiting to tell 45 NEW YORK HATES YOU me and a 1000 people.

Please let me know your response .. change is possible is we start with a reality check