She's too modest to post it herself, so I will: Opensewer's own part-time blogger Jana Prikryl has a wicked good piece over at The Revealer.org about gays and the Christian church. Check it out!

There's a new film on everyone's favorite icon, Ernesto Guevara, and his younger days. Terror and Liberalism author Paul Berman weighs on the flick and the man: Che was a totalitarian. He achieved nothing but disaster. Many of the early leaders of the Cuban Revolution favored a democratic or democratic-socialist direction for the new Cuba. But Che was a mainstay of the hardline pro-Soviet faction, and his faction won. Che presided over the Cuban Revolution's first firing squads. He founded Cuba's "labor camp" system—the system that was eventually employed to incarcerate gays, dissidents, and AIDS victims.

The only man who might have saved Roger Ebert from spending eternity in cinema hell is dead. RIP Russ Meyer.

Scholarly books often resemble the pyramids erected for minor officials in ancient Egypt. Impressive in their way -- and built to last -- they are, nonetheless, difficult to tell apart. By contrast, The Sources of Social Power, by Michael Mann, a professor of sociology at the University of California at Los Angeles and a visiting research professor at Queens University Belfast, is "audacious in scope, ambitious in objective, and provocative in challenge," as the American Sociological Association put it in presenting Mr. Mann its 1988 award for distinguished scholarly publication.

Gary Taxali: There are some things better left unsaid, not because I have nothing to say because that would be contrary to my character. Rather, the pictures I make are themselves narratives that provide the viewer with many statements, many of which I myself am not aware. And if I were acutely tuned into this I'd have created a picture that shouldn't have been made in the first place.

Gary's gallery has been updated with all new work.