Queer Me 2011 Exhibition Inventory Booklet

Hey! Guys! Artists! Art-viewers! Check out the link above to see a PRINTABLE PDF of the artists in the show! I’ll link it on the menu bar as well! Artists: The thumbnails in the booklet MAY NOT BE AN IMAGE OF THE WORK YOU SUBMITTED! It’s just to represent your work!

Look for snapshots of the opening reception and the completed exhibition early next week!

Hooray!

Published: January 25, 2011

LONDON — For all the talk about one big, globalized art world, the trans-Atlantic gulf reasserted itself the other evening via a small but telling event. An overflow crowd of several hundred people, young and old, men and women, gay and straight, packed Starr Auditorium at the Tate Modern here to pay tribute to David Wojnarowicz, the artist and AIDS activist who died, at 37, from AIDS, in 1992.

Last week, on a visit to Los Angeles, the secretary of the Smithsonian, G. Wayne Clough, was still struggling to account for why he caved two months ago to Republican lawmakers and the leader of the Catholic League, a group that calls itself a defender of free speech. Mr. Clough told The Los Angeles Times that, among other things, fear of retaliatory budget cuts caused him to remove a video by Wojnarowicz from “Hide/Seek,” at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, a show about same-sex themes in American portraiture.

Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, had declared an excerpt from the video, featuring ants crawling on a crucifix, “hate speech.”

Mr. Clough said he now wished he had taken more time and consulted more experts before swallowing the bait and sinking the Smithsonian’s reputation in the process. Other American museums rushed to screen the video by Wojnarowicz (pronounced voy-nah-ROH-vitch), scoring points, notwithstanding that more than a few of them hadn’t demonstrated much interest in his work or in gay issues or in art about AIDS beforehand.

Better late than never, I suppose, as with Mr. Clough’s conscience. To be fair, it is his particular burden, one not shared by the heads of those other museums, to answer directly to the likes of John A. Boehner and Eric Cantor, the newly empowered Republican Congressional leaders. They capitalized on Mr. Donohue’s protest in what seems, in retrospect, like an awfully well-choreographed pas de deux to rekindle the culture wars. Mr. Clough’s capitulation was a diplomatic Hail Mary pass. But the truth is that appeasement never works.

The Tate is like the Smithsonian. It is a national museum. Before the Wojnarowicz event, I telephoned Nicholas Serota, the Tate’s longtime director, to ask if he could recall the last time British politicians had interfered in the programming of a public arts institution. He fell silent.

“There was a moment during the 1970s,” he finally came up with, “when a conservative government began to look like it might have a view about plays at the public theaters. There was a debate, and the government backed off, and since then ministers of both parties have consistently argued that public institutions should make decisions about programming themselves.”

“There was also ‘Sensation,’ ” Mr. Serota added, an exhibition that caused a ruckus here in 1997, although for reasons different from those creating a stir at the Brooklyn Museum two years later. In the United States Mr. Donohue and Rudolph W. Giuliani, New York’s mayor at the time, in the role that Representative Cantor plays now, went through much the same paroxysm of orchestrated grief over a work combining an image of the Virgin Mary with elephant dung.

But in Britain the flashpoint in “Sensation” was instead a portrait by Marcus Harvey of Myra Hindley, convicted in the gruesome “moor murders” of youths in northwestern England during the 1960s. Protesters, seeing a child killer glorified for art-world titillation, splattered ink and raw egg on the canvas.

Mr. Serota pondered how it might be harder as a museum director to defend showing the Hindley portrait than screening Wojnarowicz’s video, which taps into a long and established history of Christian symbolism and is, if anything, a spiritual cri de coeur. In any case, “Sensation” was at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, a private institution, not at the Tate or some other public museum, Mr. Serota said, so it never faced the specter of Parliamentary censure.

Instead, the debate over Mr. Harvey’s Molotov cocktail raged mostly in the tabloids. Here, British tabloids, partly following in the tradition of a national and centuries-old legacy of unruly caricature and political satire, play a mixed role. They regularly air populist scorn for the usual art provocations, mocking aging Young British darlings like Damien Hirst or Tracey Emin (she of the soiled underpants) or Sarah Lucas (fried eggs), and each year turning the Tate’s Turner Prize into a parody of loopy elitism on the public’s tab.

It’s a symbiotic, opportunistic relationship, providing mass-market newspapers with bankable headlines and making genuine celebrities of these same artists, while, as Stuart Comer, the American-born Tate film curator who organized the Wojnarowicz tribute, put it, also “defusing the politics,” which is to say, turning hot-button art into the stuff of cheap comedy without making a federal case out of it.

In the United States, where no hubbub over art interests the tabloids or cable news unless it does become a federal case (or involve newly obscene auction prices), there is nonetheless the presumption that ordinary taxpayers have a right to intervene via their political representatives in curatorial affairs because museums get tax breaks. It has something to do with the ideal of the American Everyman. As with the military or medicine, so with museums, we are by national inclination meddlers.

Europeans are not, which is why they have reacted to the Smithsonian flap with the same mildly appalled bafflement that they express toward American opposition to the health care bill. It all seems inexplicable to them. Cultural free expression and the independence of public arts institutions, like the right to medical treatment, are taken for granted across modern Europe. Since at least the war these have been considered basic rights.

At the Tate the other evening, several Wojnarowicz videos were screened, including “A Fire in My Belly,” the disputed one. Artists and curators spoke about the work and read from Wojnarowicz’s writings. As one speaker, the artist Oreet Ashery, recalled, Wojnarowicz felt “rage was a terrible thing to waste.” He made a rough-and-ready art out of his fury at do-nothing public officials, callous religious authorities and an American public slow to find compassion for those suffering and dying from AIDS. His prose-poetry, films and collages, full of romantic melancholy and righteous indignation, were rabble-rousing in not even conforming to the standard genres.

For Wojnarowicz, wielding a cudgel to fight bigots, bullies and death was his job. He wasn’t playing at politics, like so many other artists. Ian White, an artist and film curator, pointed out at the Tate how Wojnarowicz would return again and again in different contexts — with “an insistence, a persistence,” as he put it — to the same motifs and ideas, among them the crawling ants, which suggest nothing so much as a spreading plague. His goal was never conventional art-world fame but to be heard, “wherever, however, whenever,” as Mr. White put it.

Jonathan Katz, a “Hide/Seek” curator, also participated via Skype, telling the British audience that the uproar over the Wojnarowicz video was really an excuse to further the post-election campaign by conservatives for control of Congress and the White House. Then he meditated on how much had changed since the end of the 1980s and early ’90s, when Wojnarowicz was embroiled in earlier dust-ups with Republicans and conservative interest groups.

Back then, the National Endowment for the Arts decided to rescind money for a catalog to an exhibition about AIDS because of an essay by Wojnarowicz in which he attacked various public figures. The endowment reversed itself. After which Wojnarowicz made news again when the American Family Association, an anti-pornography lobbying group, issued a pamphlet cherry-picking images from his collages to attack the endowment’s support. Wojnarowicz sued the association for misrepresenting his art and damaging his reputation. He won in federal court.

As Mr. Katz pointed out, unlike 20 years ago, contested videos and texts today, if withdrawn from exhibitions or catalogs, spread virally around the world via the Web, while this same technology provides the Catholic League and liberals alike with the means to rally troops. It was just such a post on a conservative Web site that prompted Mr. Donohue to see the show, then man the barricades.

Here in Britain, government plans to raise university tuitions and to cut public programs recently incited violent student protests. People are constantly staging strikes and taking to the streets in France, Italy, Greece and Spain. Perhaps not coincidentally, several speakers at the Tate mentioned how much Wojnarowicz, even before this tempest erupted, had become an inspiration to young artists looking for role models other than the market-obsessed art stars of the past decade.

So the Smithsonian’s surrender at least had the virtue of reminding everyone on both sides of the Atlantic of his work. The voices of those who died from AIDS mostly died with them, but Wojnarowicz’s, deep and distinct, returned in recordings played at the Tate.

The message was loud and clear.

“Do not give me a memorial if I die,” he once said. “Give me a demonstration.”

At the club, the music thumps, go-go dancers twirl, shorties gyrate on the dance floor while studs play it cool, and adorably naive 17-year-old Alike takes in the scene with her jaw dropped in amazement. Meanwhile, her buddy Laura, in between macking the ladies and flexing her butch bravado, is trying to help Alike get her cherry popped. This is Alike’s first world. Her second world is calling on her cell to remind her of her curfew.

On the bus ride home to Brooklyn, Alike sheds her baseball cap and polo shirt, puts her earrings back in, and tries to look like the feminine, obedient girl her conservative family expects.

With a spectacular sense of atmosphere and authenticity, Pariah takes us deep and strong into the world of an intelligent butch teenager trying to find her way into her own. Debut director Dee Rees leads a splendid cast and crafts a pitch-perfect portrait that stands unparalleled in American cinema.

Sundance page about the film.
Official Film Website

Photo by Sarah Beth Glicksteen for The New York Times.

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Being gay in this Southern city was once a lonely existence. Most people kept their sexuality to themselves, and they were reminded of the dangers of being openly gay when a gay church was bombed in the 1980s. These days, there are eight churches that openly welcome gay worshipers. One even caters to couples with children.

More after the jump…

The changes may seem surprising for a city where churches that have long condemned homosexuality remain a powerful force. But as demographers sift through recent data releases from the Census Bureau, they have found that Jacksonville is home to one of the biggest populations of gay parents in the country.

In addition, the data show, child rearing among same-sex couples is more common in the South than in any other region of the country, according to Gary Gates, a demographer at the University of California, Los Angeles. Gay couples in Southern states like Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas are more likely to be raising children than their counterparts on the West Coast, in New York and in New England.

The pattern, identified by Mr. Gates, is also notable because the families in this region defy the stereotype of a mainstream gay America that is white, affluent, urban and living in the Northeast or on the West Coast.

“We’re starting to see that the gay community is very diverse,” said Bob Witeck, chief executive of Witeck-Combs Communications, which helped market the census to gay people. “We’re not all rich white guys.”

Black or Latino gay couples are twice as likely as whites to be raising children, according to Mr. Gates, who used data from a Census Bureau sampling known as the American Community Survey. They are also more likely than their white counterparts to be struggling economically.

Experts offer theories for the pattern. A large number of gay couples, possibly a majority, entered into their current relationship after first having children with partners in heterosexual relationships, Mr. Gates said. That seemed to be the case for many blacks and Latinos in Jacksonville, for whom church disapproval weighed heavily.

“People grew up in church, so a lot of us lived in shame,” said Darlene Maffett, 43, a Jacksonville resident, who had two children in eight years of marriage before coming out in 2002. “What did we do? We wandered around lost. We married men, and then couldn’t understand why every night we had a headache.”

Moreover, gay men who have children do so an average of three years earlier than heterosexual men, census data shows, Mr. Gates said. At the same time, there are fewer white women of childbearing age nationally, according to demographers, while the number of minority women of childbearing age is expanding.

Jacksonville was a magnet for Ms. Maffett even before she moved here. While its gay residents remained largely hidden, it had a gay-friendly church. In 2003, she spent her Sundays driving 90 minutes each way to attend from the town where she worked as a school bus driver.

Ms. Maffett appreciated the safety of the church in Jacksonville. Her father was a Baptist preacher, and her former husband was a member of the Church of Christ, so she knew how unwelcoming some churches could be for gays. Even so, she felt little connection to the gay congregation in Jacksonville — mostly white, male and childless.

“The pastors were all white guys,” said Ms. Maffett, who is black. “They were nice to us, but we weren’t really feeling that they knew how to cater to kids.”

Then she met Valerie Williams, a customer service worker with a sunny personality and a booming voice. Ms. Williams, 33, had been part of the city’s gay community for years, and when the first African-American, gay-friendly church opened in 2007, she thought it needed to go one step further.

“People were looking to do stuff with their kids, and they had no place to go,” she said.

So last summer, Ms. Williams became pastor of St. Luke’s Community Church, one of the oldest gay-friendly churches in the city, and immediately set up a youth program. Attendance by the mixed-race congregation swelled to more than 90 from 25 in just a few months.

“All of a sudden you started seeing all of these women coming out,” Ms. Maffett said. “All of them had children.”

In 2009, the Census Bureau estimated that there were 581,000 same-sex couples in the United States, Mr. Gates said; the bureau does not count gay singles.

The complete article can be found at: The New York Times.

(Image courtesy of Liz Rosenfeld.com)

1/27/11: “Frida & Anita” – a film by Liz Rosenfeld on Frida Kahlo and Anita Berber.

2/1/11: “A Fire In My Belly” – most recently brought to light by controversy with the National Portrait Gallery, this David Wojnarowicz piece is being screened and followed with a panel discussion.

More event details after the break…

January 27, 2011:

FRIDA & ANITA:

Film screening and discussion with the artist moderated by Professor Tavia Nyong’o.

Shot like a silent film from the 1920s, ‘Frida & Anita’ is a political fantasy, intersecting the lives of two queer radicals — Frida Kahlo and Anita Berber — who both left a huge dent in history, and clearly inspired artists who came after them. They both ruptured the immediate sociopolitical landscapes around them, defining, breaking, and re-defining the social classes with awkward grace and impenetrable energy, leaving what became both an art historical and sociopolitical legacy of work.

Liz Rosenfeld is a Berlin-based artist utilizing modes of performance through film and video in order to convey a sense of past and future histories through moving images. Liz graduated from Hampshire College in 2002 with a BA in New Media with a concentration in video art. In 2005 she received an MFA from the School of The Art Institute of Chicago in the Performance Department, and in 2007 gained an MA in Performance Studies from Tisch School of the Arts at New York University.

721 Broadway, 6th Floor, Room 612, 7-9 PM

http://www.lizrosenfeld.com/FilmandVideoWork.html

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February 1, 2011:

A FIRE IN OUR BELLY

Film screening and panel discussion discussion with Marvin Taylor, Thomas Crow, Karen Finley, and Leon Hilton

Artist David Wojnarowicz’s archives are housed at Fales Library and Special Collections on the third floor of Bobst Library at NYU, and the full-length video ‘A Fire in My Belly,’ which the National Portrait Gallery removed from its exhibition ‘Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture,’ was on loan from Fales.

This event brings together members of the NYU community to address the myriad and ongoing issues raised by the censoring of this important work.

721 Broadway, 6th Floor, Room 612, 7-9 PM

http://bullybloggers.wordpress.com/2010/12/13/%E2%80%9Cx-ray-of-civilization%E2%80%9D-david-wojnarowicz-and-the-politics-of-representation/

–

These events are presented by NYU Tisch’s Department of Performance Studies and are open to the public. RSVP on Facebook:http://www.facebook.com/Performance.studies.nyu?v=app_2344061033=ts <http://www.facebook.com/Performance.studies.nyu?v=app_2344061033&ref=ts>

Treacherous Roads Part of Almighty’s Strategy, Says Televangelist

VIRGINIA BEACH (The Borowitz Report) – Rev. Pat Robertson sparked controversy in today’s broadcast of his 700 Club program when he claimed that God created the blizzard currently battering the Northeast “to punish Americans who were planning to drive to do something gay.”

Explaining his theory, Rev. Robertson said, “Because of the bad road conditions the Almighty has made, any gay activities that people were planning on doing will have to be postponed by a day or two.”

Additionally, he argued, God shut down major airports in the New York area “so that people who were hoping to fly to do something of a gay nature would have to take a train or a bus, so it might be days before the gay thing they were going to do could occur.”

As for the millions of straight people in New York City who were also grounded by the bad weather, the televangelist said, “I think God probably wonders, if these people are really straight, then what are they doing in New York?”

In other blizzard-related news, the National Weather Service offered this update: “It’s as white as a Glenn Beck rally out there.”

PLEASE contact us at queerme2011@gmail.com if you have any questions!

Anti-Gay Atmosphere Permeates Uganda
by Barbara Bradley Hagerty

: Audio: Homophobic Atmosphere in Uganda

In October, a tabloid called Rolling Stone — no relation to the American magazine — published an article headlined “100 Pictures of Uganda’s Top Homos Leak.” The article listed names, addresses and hangouts of gay men and lesbians.

Frank Mugisha saw his photo. Then he noticed the subhead: “Hang them.”

“I was shaken up. I was freaked out. I was scared,” says Mugisha, who heads up the group Sexual Minorities Uganda. “I’m like, hang them? What is the general Ugandan community going to do to us if the media is calling for us to be hanged?”

On Tuesday, a judge in Uganda is expected to decide whether Rolling Stone may continue to publish the names of gay men and lesbians. Gay activists say that outing them puts them in danger. For example, a couple of days after his name and photo were printed, Mugisha received a text message from a university student.

“It said, ‘We don’t like homosexuals in Uganda and you guys should be executed. We know where you live, we know who you hang out with, we know who your friends are and we shall come and deal with you as the youth of Uganda.’”

Mugisha was not physically attacked. But others were, says Christopher Senyojo, a retired Anglican bishop who works with gays in Uganda.

“I know a girl whose house was stoned [and] had to run away for some time from that neighborhood,” he says. “I’ve known people who have been attacked, because after this publication, bad elements started to hunt them down.”

Across Africa, gay men and lesbians have been targeted for punishment or violent attacks in Malawi, Zimbabwe, Senegal and Cameroon. But Mugisha says, in Uganda, there’s an American connection.

“Homophobia has always existed in Uganda,” he says. “But I would say it’s greatly increased over the past two years, ever since American evangelicals came to Uganda.”

Specifically, he’s referring to a conference in March 2009, when three Americans spoke to hundreds of people in Kampala about homosexuality. One of them was Scott Lively, who told the group: “The gay movement is an evil institution. The goal of the gay movement is to defeat the marriage-based society and replace it with a culture of sexual promiscuity.”

Lively, who declined an interview, heads Abiding Truth Ministries, a conservative evangelical group in Massachusetts that claims people can be healed from homosexuality. On that same trip, Lively met with members of Uganda’s Parliament, and a few months later, Parliament member David Bahati introduced a bill that would impose the death penalty on gays.

“I am trying to make sure there is a way to protect our children and make sure our traditional family, the culture that we believe in, is not polluted,” Bahati said in an interview. He spoke to NPR while he was in Washington to attend an economic conference, but was prohibited from entering the building where the conference was held after the organizers learned of his bill.

Bahati says the vast majority of Ugandans oppose homosexuality, and he’s just representing their views.

“There has been an impression that maybe Bahati is another Hitler, is another Saddam Hussein, is another Idi Amin of Uganda,” he said. “I’m not that. I love people. I love gays, but we disagree on how we should approach this issue.”

Bahati’s bill — which will be considered as early as February — would exact the death penalty for consenting gay adults who are “serial offenders.” It would give life imprisonment for touching someone of the same gender in a sexual way, and jail time for anyone — including friends and family — who doesn’t turn gay people in.

“If it was passed, it would be terrible,” says Senyojo. He believes what the law doesn’t do, vigilantes would.

“The mob could definitely attack anybody who they said was a homosexual,” he says.

The Obama administration has warned Uganda that this is a bad idea. Bahati says America should mind its own business.

“As God-fearing people, we know that man and woman were created to have a union, and we are very, very, very strong about this,” he says. “This is our own view. We respect America for what they believe in. They should also respect Uganda for what they believe in.”

Bahati says because of international pressure, he would consider removing the death penalty provisions. He adds that his bill has overwhelming support in the Parliament. But even if it fails, the current law barring “carnal knowledge against the order of nature” carries a penalty of life in prison.

WASHINGTON — The Senate on Saturday struck down the ban on gay men and lesbians serving openly in the military, bringing to a close a 17-year struggle over a policy that forced thousands of Americans from the ranks and caused others to keep secret their sexual orientation.

By a vote of 65 to 31, with eight Republicans joining Democrats, the Senate approved and sent to President Obama a repeal of the Clinton-era law, known as “don’t ask, don’t tell,” a policy critics said amounted to government-sanctioned discrimination that treated gay and lesbian troops as second-class citizens.

Mr. Obama hailed the action, which fulfills his pledge to reverse the ban. “As commander in chief, I am also absolutely convinced that making this change will only underscore the professionalism of our troops as the best led and best trained fighting force the world has ever known,” Mr. Obama said in a statement after the Senate, on a 63-33 vote, beat back Republican efforts to block a final vote on the repeal bill.

The vote marked a historic moment that some equated with the end of racial segregation in the military.

It followed a comprehensive review by the Pentagon that found a low risk to military effectiveness despite greater concerns among some combat units and the Marine Corps. The review also found that Pentagon officials supported Congressional repeal as a better alternative than an court-ordered end.

Supporters of the repeal said it was long past time to end what they saw as an ill-advised practice that cost valuable personnel and forced troops to lie to serve their country.

“We righted a wrong,” said Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, the independent from Connecticut who led the effort to end the ban. “Today we’ve done justice.”

Before voting on the repeal, the Senate blocked a bill that would have created a path to citizenship for certain illegal immigrants who came to the United States at a young age, completed two years of college or military service and met other requirements including passing a criminal background check.

The 55-41 vote in favor of the citizenship bill was five votes short of the number needed to clear the way for final passage of what is known as the Dream Act. The outcome effectively kills it for this year, and its fate beyond that is uncertain since Republicans who will assume control of the House in January oppose the measure and are unlikely to bring it to a vote.

The Senate then moved on to the military legislation, engaging in an emotional back and forth over the merits of the measure as advocates for repeal watched from galleries crowded with people interested in the fate of both the military and immigration measures. “I don’t care who you love,” Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, said as the debate opened. “If you love this country enough to risk your life for it, you shouldn’t have to hide who you are.”

Mr. Wyden showed up for the Senate vote despite saying earlier that he would be unable to do so because he would be undergoing final tests before his scheduled surgery for prostate cancer on Monday.

The vote came in the final days of the 111th Congress as Democrats sought to force through a final few priorities before they turn over control of the House of Representatives to the Republicans in January and see their clout in the Senate diminished.

It represented a significant victory for the White House, Congressional advocates of lifting the ban and activists who have pushed for years to end the Pentagon policy created in 1993 under the Clinton administration as a compromise effort to end the practice of banning gay men and lesbians entirely from military service. Saying it represented an emotional moment for members of the gay community nationwide, activists who supported repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” exchanged hugs outside the Senate chamber after the vote.

“Today’s vote means gay and lesbian service members posted all around the world can stand taller knowing that ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ will soon be coming to an end,” said Aubrey Sarvis, an Army veteran and executive director for Servicemembers Legal Defense Network.

The executive director of the Log Cabin Republicans, a gay group that challenged the policy in federal court, thanked Republicans senators for participating in a historic vote. The director, R. Clarke Cooper, who is a member of the Army Reserve, said repeal will “finally end a policy which has burdened our armed services for far too long, depriving our nation of the talent, training and hard won battle experience of thousands of patriotic Americans. “

A federal judge had ruled the policy unconstitutionial in response to the Log Cabin suit, but that decision had been stayed pending appeal.

Aaron Belkin, director of the Palm Center in California, a research institute at the University of California in Santa Barbara that studies issues surrounding gays and lesbians in the military, said that the vote “ushers in a new era in which the largest employer in the United States treats gays and lesbians like human beings.”

In a statement on the group’s website, Mr. Belkin said: “It has long been clear that there is no evidence that lifting the ban will undermine the military, and no reason to fear the transition to inclusive policy. Research shows that moving quickly is one of the keys to a successful transition. If the President and military leadership quickly certify the end of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’ they will ensure an orderly transition with minimal disruption.”

Organizations that opposed repeal of the ban assailed the Republican senators who defied their party majority.

The Center for Military Readiness, a group that specializes in social issues in the military and has opposed repeal, said the new legislation “will impose heavy, unnecessary burdens on the backs of military men and women.” It said the Senate majority voted with “needless haste” by not waiting for hearings into a recent Department of Defense study of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. Elaine Donnelly, president of the group, said that the Pentagon’s survey indicated that 32 percent of Marines and 21.4 percent of Army combat troops would leave the military sooner than planned if “don’t ask, don’t tell” were repealed.

Kris Mineau, president of the Massachusetts Family Institute, said senators like Scott Brown, a Republican from Massachusetts, “broke trust with the people” by voting on repeal before the federal budget was resolved and “have put the troops at risk during wartime.”

During the debate, Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona and his party’s presidential candidate in 2008, led the opposition to the repeal and said the vote was a sad day in history. “I hope that when we pass this legislation that we will understand that we are doing great damage,” Mr. McCain said. “And we could possibly and probably, as the commandant of the Marine Corps said, and as I have been told by literally thousands of members of the military, harm the battle effectiveness vital to the survival of our young men and women in the military.”

He and other opponents of lifting the ban said the change could harm the unit cohesion that is essential to effective military operations, particularly in combat, and deter some Americans from enlisting or pursuing a career in the military. They noted that despite support for repealing the ban from Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, other military commanders have warned that changing the practice would prove disruptive.

“This isn’t broke,” Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, said about the policy. “It is working very well.”

Other Republicans said that while the policy might need to be changed at some point, Congress should not do so when American troops are fighting overseas.

“In the middle of a military conflict, is not the time to do it,” said Senator Saxby Chambliss, Republican of Georgia.

Only a week ago, the effort to repeal the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy seemed to be dead and in danger of fading for at least two years with Republicans about to take control of the House. The provision eliminating the ban was initially included in a broader Pentagon policy bill, and Republican backers of repeal had refused to join in cutting off a filibuster against the underlying bill because of objections over the ability to debate the measure.

In a last-ditch effort, Mr. Lieberman and Senator Susan Collins of Maine, a key Republican opponent of the ban, encouraged Democratic Congressional leaders to instead pursue a vote on simply repealing it. The House passed the measure earlier in the week.

The repeal will not take effect for at least 60 days while some other procedural steps are taken. In addition, the bill requires the defense secretary to determine that policies are in place to carry out the repeal “consistent with military standards for readiness, effectiveness, unit cohesion, and recruiting and retention.”

Because of the uncertainty, Mr. Sarvis appealed to Mr. Gates to suspend any investigations into military personnel or discharge proceedings under the policy to be overturned in the coming months.

Mr. Lieberman said the ban undermined the integrity of the military by forcing troops to lie. He said 14,000 members of the armed forces had been forced to leave the ranks under the policy.

“What a waste,” he said.

The fight erupted in the early days of President Bill Clinton’s administration and has been a roiling political issue ever since. Mr. Obama endorsed repeal in his own campaign and advocates saw the current Congress as their best opportunity for ending the ban. Dozens of advocates of ending the ban — including one wounded in combat before being forced from the military — watched from the Senate gallery as the debate took place.

Senator Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who is chairman of the Armed Services Committee, dismissed Republican complaints that Democrats were trying to race through the repeal to satisfy their political supporters.

“I’m not here for partisan reasons,” Mr. Levin said. “I’m here because men and women wearing the uniform of the United States who are gay and lesbian have died for this country, because gay and lesbian men and women wearing the uniform of this country have their lives on the line right now.”

Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader and a crucial proponent of the repeal, noted that some Republicans had indicated they might try to block Senate approval of a nuclear arms treaty with Russia because of their pique over the Senate action on the ban.

“How’s that’s for statesmanship?” Mr. Reid said.

A usually staid weekly Papal audience was spiced up this week with an acrobatic performance by a troupe of topless men. The four performers dressed in white suits walked across the stage towards the Papal throne and surprised the Pope by whipping off their shirts before beginning an acrobatic performance on Tuesday. The Pope looked on as the men hoisted each other into the air, one on top of the other, three high.