Corey Johnson is an experienced, smart, courageous gay man who has already accomplished much in his career and life. He has served the people of New York City with intelligence, distinction and honor and they are fortunate to have the chance to vote for him for comptroller. Corey is an experienced fiscal manager and understands the details of the city’s budget better than anyone running for any office.

Corey’s experience is what the city needs in the office of comptroller. New York City has a budget of $90 billion, many times larger than most states. The comptroller’s office monitors the budget on a daily basis to ensure the fiscal health of the city. Corey’s experience will allow him to do that better than anyone else.

As speaker of the City Council, Corey delivered on-time and balanced budgets three years in a row managing a staff of nearly 900, including a team of financial analysts and economists.

During the COVID-19 crisis, Corey led the City Council through one of the worst budget crises in the city’s history and preserved millions in funding for critical city services ensuring support for the most vulnerable New Yorkers. It is this hands-on experience that will enable Corey to hit the ground running ensuring every dollar in the city’s budget is being used effectively.

The city, like the rest of the nation, continues to deal with the devastating impact of COVID-19 on its residents and its budget. Having an expert in the office of comptroller will ensure the services people need will continue to be protected. Corey understands the role of comptroller in today’s difficult times and has laid out his vision for the office. He will act as a watchdog for COVID-19 relief, overseeing every dollar in COVID aid spent in New York City. He will ensure aggressive, impactful oversight and audits of key agencies, including affordable housing programs and policing misconduct. He will provide responsible stewardship of the city’s pension system, protecting benefits city workers spent a lifetime earning. He will support monetary policy ensuring affordable housing, good jobs, small business and green infrastructure through community investments, with a particular focus on minority and women-owned businesses. He will deliver greater accountability for New Yorkers when he creates new publicly searchable databases for citizens and journalists to use. He will work to promote fiscal policy that prioritizes racial and gender equity, both within municipal government and in the private sector supporting working people by increasing workplace protections and creating good-paying jobs.

Corey has committed to creating a COVID-19 Recovery and Rebuilding Unit headed by an Assistant Comptroller for Recovery and Rebuilding that will have a laser-like focus on the city’s response and recovery efforts making sure every dollar is spent efficiently and equitably. Using the data and recommendations from this new unit, Corey will make recommendations to the mayor and Council members on potential improvements to the city’s plans. He is committed to launching a COVID-19 Relief Dashboard to monitor the new funding the city will receive including $5.9 billion in direct aid and up to $4.5 billion for schools from the new federal stimulus package.

The city is also scheduled to receive $1 billion in FEMA reimbursement. Corey will work to see not a single dollar is wasted. The Dashboard will track how the city is spending this federal aid. Corey believes armed with this knowledge, New Yorkers will be able to hold their government accountable and track opportunities for financial assistance and support. In addition Corey commits to auditing Emergency Procurement and Small Business Loans because he believes city government has a social responsibility and financial opportunity to invest in its hardest hit communities helping them rebound from the pandemic. Currently not all funds are being distributed equitably. Corey intends to use the Comptrollers auditing authority to hold a magnifying lens to the City’s emergency procurement and loans disbursed by the Department of Small Business Services to ensure no one is improperly profiting from the city during this time and that all New Yorkers have the opportunity to share and access recovery funds.

New York City is on the verge of rebounding from the pandemic. It is more important than ever to have elected leaders who both talk the talk and have walked the walk ensuring no one is left behind in this recovery. Corey is such a leader and will make a great city comptroller.

Peter Rosenstein is a longtime LGBTQ rights and Democratic Party activist. He writes regularly for the Blade.

Alix Dobkin, the openly lesbian folk singer and queer activist, died at age 80 on May 19 from a brain aneurysm and stroke at her home in Woodstock, N.Y.

Her music and activism were life-changing for lesbians.

I thought of Dobkin recently. One Sunday morning, I heard NPR’s Lulu Garcia-Navarro interview 22-year-old queer musician Marie Ulven, known as the girl in red. Her debut album “If I Could Make It Go Quiet” is just out.

Ulven was open with Garcia-Navarro (and NPR’s millions of listeners) about her sexuality and mental health. In “Period,” “Serotonin” and other songs, she sings honestly about her romantic break-ups and mental health struggles.

Awesome, I thought, women ask each other “do you listen to the girl in red?” to find out if they’re queer!

Sexism, homophobia and transphobia still exist in music. Some musicians are closeted because they resist labels or don’t feel it’s safe to come out.

Yet, Ulven is one of a number of out queer woman musicians from Hayley Kiyoko to Kehlani to Melissa Etheridge to Brandy Clark to Tegan and Sara.

I marveled as I listened to Ulven. When I was beginning to come out in the 1970s, you’d as likely have heard an openly queer musician on a radio show with a big audience as you’d have seen Richard Nixon smoking weed at Woodstock.

Back then, if you were a lesbian you didn’t feel heard or seen in songs. Not even in the fabulous, but hetero, music of the era from the Beatles to Smokey Robinson to Joni Mitchell.

You had to create the soundtrack-of-your-life by queering up, as best you could, the lyrics of songs you loved to include the women you loved.

Dobkin, known as the “Head lesbian” by her aficionados, was born in New York City. As she recalled in “My Red Blood,” her 2009 memoir, she grew up in a left wing and Jewish family.

Her parents were communists and took Dobkin with them as they organized on behalf of unions. As the Washington Post reported, Dobkin was named after an uncle who was killed by a right-wing firing squad in the Spanish Civil War.

She was proud of her parents, but “my wish was to be like everyone else in a Dick and Jane sort of way,” Dobkin wrote in “My Red Blood.”

Dobkin received a bachelor’s degree from Temple University in 1962. There, she studied painting. At college she began performing folk songs. Soon she was performing in clubs in Greenwich Village. Dobkin married Sam Hood, a co-owner of the Gaslight, a club in the Village. The couple had a daughter, Adrian. The marriage ended in divorce.

Dobkin is survived by her former partner and friend Liza Cowan, Adrian Hood, a brother, a sister and three grandchildren.

It’s hard to overstate how historic Dobkin’s work was.

In 1973, with Kay Gardner, and other women musicians, Dobkin recorded the album “Lavender Jane Loves Women.” This is believed to be the first album recorded by and produced by and for lesbians. Its songs were about lesbians.

Back in the day, it was wonderful to hear Dobkin, an out lesbian, cover “I Only Want to Be with You” on Lavender Jane.

“Alix was one of the first to celebrate us in music,” lesbian historian Lilian Faderman told the Washington Post.

Even now, when corporations sponsor Pride parades, it can be hard to say the word lesbian. Like when your family on Christmas Eve doesn’t want you to say the L-word.

Yet, decades ago, Dobkin told interviewers her job was “to say ‘lesbian’ as often as possible.”
“Living with Lesbians” was among the albums that Dobkin recorded.

Dobkin’s views on transgender people were controversial. She didn’t want transgender people to be in women-only spaces.

Dobkin was a co-director of the group Old Lesbians Organizing for Change.

Though recorded decades ago, many of Dobkin’s songs still ring true now.

In the pandemic, the lyrics “The woman in your life/Will do what she must do/…The woman in your life/…is you,” resonate with queer and hetero women.

Thank you for your music and your life, Alix, R.I.P.

Kathi Wolfe, a writer and a poet, is a regular contributor to the Blade.

Israel has a right to exist and defend itself, the Israeli people should be able to live in peace. The world must recognize that right. At the same time, the Palestinian people deserve a state where they can live in peace and thrive and it is up to the rest of the world to do everything to make both those things happen.

As long as Netanyahu and Hamas are there peace will not be possible. Netanyahu is Israel’s Donald Trump — an arrogant hate monger with no respect for anyone who doesn’t agree with him. He, like Trump, will do anything to maintain power even if it causes suffering for others. As the American people did with Trump, Israelis should throw Netanyahu out before he destroys their country. Maybe the two of them can rot in jail together.

We must also recognize that as long as Hamas, a terrorist organization, is accepted by the Palestinian people and continues to say they want Israel wiped off the face of the earth, the Palestinian people will never have the chance to build a country of their own, which is tragic.

Trump’s encouragement of the bilateral agreements between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain ended up hurting the Palestinian people as they were disregarded in those agreements. There are benefits to those nations and to Israel from these agreements as reported by “Kadri Jogi. “Israel recently shook the world by signing treaties with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain. It had previously concluded treaties in the Arab world with Egypt (in 1979) and Jordan (1994), bringing benefits for both parties. Egypt, the first country to conclude a peace treaty with Israel, received regular aid … as well as military assistance. Israel’s treaty with Jordan was similar in content. Western businesses in the Middle East found some two billion new customers (and counting). Now, the parties to the new treaties hope to gain political benefits and reach new markets. For Israel this would mean some 12 million people in the UAE and Bahrain. In return, Israel can offer expertise in the fields of water purification, extension of water supply, and agricultural technology, the most promising sectors for cooperation.” Egypt helped the United States with backroom diplomacy and brokered the most recent cease fire.

Despite this cease fire unless things change we will see violence break out every few years. Israeli policy on settlements must change and Hamas must stop lobbing rockets into Israel. There are more than two million people living in Gaza and the West Bank, most of them in poverty without hope of much of a future. They aren’t welcome in Israel or any of the Arab countries surrounding them. Their borders with Israel and Egypt are closed. Young people can’t find jobs and with each fight between Israel and Hamas civilians in Gaza feel the brunt of it.

Although some in the U.S. Congress like Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) want to cut off aid to Israel it’s a threat that won’t happen. What is happening is mounting anti-Semitism in the United States and more attacks on Jews. On Face the Nation, Sanders was asked about “the number of liberals who use the word apartheid to describe Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, a number of them liberals in the House who use that language. Joel Rubin, executive director of the American Jewish Congress, who handled Jewish outreach for your campaign, has said that using that word has increased the level of vitriol that has contributed to this anti-Semitism. Do you think those who share your view should not use that kind of language?” Sanders vacillated in his answer.

People must stop conflating support for Israel with support for Netanyahu. It would be the same as people in the past four years saying they support the United States being interpreted as support for Trump. Israelis getting rid of Netanyahu and Palestinians saying no to Hamas is the only chance of moving toward a lasting peace and reversing the declining chance to create a new Palestinian state.
If a new state could be formed it would be up to the rest of the world, led by the United States, to invest the hundreds of billions of dollars such a new state would need to build an economy and allow the Palestinian people to become truly independent and self-sufficient. Helping them build a nation that can become an equal partner in the region with the State of Israel.

Peter Rosenstein is a longtime LGBTQ rights and Democratic Party activist. He writes regularly for the Blade.