Mark Leduc, Merce Cunningham, GLAAD Television Rankings, Walter Cronkite And Gay Rights, Whale Carcass Discovered On Docking Ship, Gates 911 Call

On Wednesday, Mark Leduc, Canadian Olympic silver medalist for boxing in the 1992 Barcelona Games, died. He was 47. According to a report he was found at his home the previous Sunday, unconscious, in a sauna, and is thought to have died of heat stroke. I had the pleasure, albeit brief, of meeting Leduc, a Canadian sports legend, who came out just after his success at the Olympics, in Toronto at a Pride event in the late nineteen-nineties, and was struck by how soft-spoken and how sweet a man he was.

One of the most influential figures in modern dance, Merce Cunningham, has died. He was 90. Mr. Cunningham, like fellow choreographers George Balanchine and Martha Graham, reinvented the aesthetics of movement, but Cunningham was more of modern that any, charting new territory with daring and wit. Mr. Cunningham collaborated on several occasions with his husband, the modernist composer John Cage.

GLAAD’s third annual Network Responsibility Index was released Monday, a means to measure the quantity and quality of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered individuals on television, and found that HBO ranked the highest of all fifteen networks surveyed, with LGBT characters on several shows, including True Blood. Showtime too, scored well, with The L Word, The United States of Tara, and Weeds. Of networks, ABC ranked highest, the LGBT community served well by Brothers and Sisters, Desperate Housewives, and Ugly Betty. A&E, CBS, and NBC were among those networks who received the lowest rankings.

A fascinating, great piece on how, in the early nineteen-seventies, one lone gay activist helped change the mind of CBS News stalwart Walter Cronkite on reporting the struggles and successes of the gay rights movement, and in turn changed forever the way major media covered gay issues.

A story about a dead whale impaled on the bow of a Princess Cruise Lines ship that docked Saturday in Vancouver, British Columbia, the truly is obscene.

The Cambridge Police have released the 911 call placed in the saga of angry academic Henry Louis Gates, and not surprisingly, the woman who placed the call, never mentions the word “black” once. She also suggests that she is not sure a crime is being committed, saying “I don’t know if they live there or they just had a hard time with their key.”