Gay senior lives less openly in care facility

The love of Victor Engandela’s life was a Czech immigrant, an older, square-jawed man, olive-skinned and Hollywood handsome with a shock of white hair and an unfailingly gentlemanly manner.

Joseph was his name. There are pictures of him pressed in a yellowed photo album buried on a shelf in Engandela’s room at an Evanston home for seniors.

“I was with him,” Engandela said, “until he took his final breath.”

He shares these photos, and stories of a rich life, with no one but the occasional visitor, spending most of his days isolated from his past, surrounded by contemporaries born in an age when homosexuality was taboo.

“I’m one of the few people here that’s out, and I feel the weight of that,” said Engandela, 85. “I don’t advertise it, but I feel people know I’m homosexually oriented. They like me, but they don’t like me as a homosexual. I feel shunned.”

Engandela realized he was gay when he was about 13. His parents were Sicilian immigrants, and he was raised Catholic, one of four siblings.

Rather than play with other kids, Engandela preferred sitting on the porch in his Chicago neighborhood watching the older Italian men talk and smoke cigars.

As he got older he began going to Bughouse Square, listening to poets and Marxists atop soapboxes on hot summer nights. That spot in Washington Square Park was also a covert meeting place for gays, and it was nearby, under the elevated train tracks, that he had his first homosexual experience.

“It was, really, quite beautiful,” he said. “But at that time it was a real no-no. I couldn’t talk to anybody about it.”
See Gay senior lives less openly in care facility

Chicago Tribune

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Annie Leibovitz and the gay tax

Poets swoon about it and singers croon about it, but LGBT people can calculate the cost of love down to the last penny. In my household it comes to around $329.25 monthly: that’s the gay tax my wife and I shell out for me to be on her health insurance plan, because her company must treat that benefit as additional taxable income. It doesn’t matter that our Massachusetts marriage is recognized in New York. Companies pay for their employees’ health insurance with pre-tax money through a federal program, and same-sex marriage isn’t federally recognized.

But that’s chump change compared to what love is currently costing celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz. Back in late February the NYT noted that Leibovitz had borrowed a total of $15.5 million from a company called Art Capital Group using “as collateral, among other items … town houses she owns in Greenwich Village, a country house, and something else: the rights to all of her photographs.”

But what the NYT missed, along with every other straight newspaper that picked up the story, is why Leibovitz suddenly found herself in such dire financial straits. It took AfterEllen’s Julie Miranda to put two and two together and figure out that “most of Leibovitz’ financial woes stemmed from her inheritance of her longtime partner, Susan Sontag’s estate.” Writes Miranda (who, in turn, is channeling Suze Orman’s Valentine’s Wish for Gay Marriage):

“Same-sex couples do not have the same privileges as straight married couples when it comes to inheritance. If your partner passes away and leaves her estate to you, you have to pay up to 50 percent of the value of your inheritance in taxes. However, if you and your partner were recognized as a married couple, you wouldn’t have to pay a dime…When Sontag died in 2004, she bequeathed several properties to Leibovitz, who was forced to pony up half of their value to keep them.”

See Annie Leibovitz and the gay tax @ Salon.com

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Why Do Homosexuals Want to Serve in the Military? For the Sexing, Of Course

If you like Southern fiction — and who doesn’t — you’re always on the lookout for the next Faulkner, someone who can take you, again, to that world of idiot manchildren and spinsters having sex with skeletons. A world of drunkards and poets, where degenerates and fanatically proper and squeamish old ladies of both sexes are condemned to live beneath the same roof with relatives they could only regard as monsters. A world where bible salesmen steal your wooden leg.

A world where, most importantly, and without any warning at all, anyone you know can turn on you and suddenly try to gay you up.

Well, I have seen the future of Southern fiction, and his name is retired DEA Supervisory Special Agent Gregory D. Lee.

Gregory D. Lee is also a conservative pundit — and who isn’t — and syndicated columnist. Today his column is entitled:

Why Do Homosexuals Want to Serve in the Military? For Sex, Of Course

And it contains this:

Homosexuals predominantly want to serve in the military in order to have access to people their own age with whom to engage in sex. It’s just that simple. It’s all about sex, and not about serving the nation…

See Why Do Homosexuals Want to Serve in the Military? For the Sexing, Of Course