Articles

When you’re Adolf Hitler’s most celebrated propagandist, redemption can prove elusive—even at age 100. By Daniel Gawthrop Posted on Dooneyscafe.com under “Probes” on February 6, 2002 To be an artist means never to avert one’s eyes.
–filmmaker Akiro Kurosawa, receiving the lifetime achievement award at the 1990 Oscars. I’m more attracted by an aesthetic subject than by an ugly one. I can’t be creative with a negative subject.
–filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, defending her legacy as ...

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Last week, Thai and Burmese Officials agreed at bilateral meetings to repatriate illegal Burmese migrants. The plan has some 100,000 ethnic Shan people here wondering how they might be affected. Published in The Nation (Bangkok) on Monday, January 14, 2002 Story and photos by Daniel Gawthrop One afternoon last May, at a temporary shelter for displaced persons in the Fang district of Chiang Mai province, I stood by and watched helplessly as 48 ethnic Shan ...

Posted on Dooneyscafe.com on November 24, 2001 Daniel Gawthrop scratches his head over “cultural creatives”. The language of new age, “progressive”, or “spiritual” literature can pose serious problems for people who believe in clear writing. Too much of it is steeped in sociological jargon that panders to the reader with feel-good sensibilities (“self actualization,” “essential one-ness”) that no one could possibly disagree with but which provide little, if any, useful information. Sociologists commit some of ...

Posted on Dooneyscafe.com on October 1, 2001 Daniel Gawthrop explores why Thai people haven’t responded to America’s tragedy with candlelight vigils. BANGKOK—Some time late in August, as the clouds moved in and the monsoon rains began their annual sweep of the Kingdom, a new form of political protest was born. Impoverished Thai villagers, led by a man from the western border province of Kanchanaburi named Chuay Kochasit, began smearing themselves in excrement–usually swine feces but ...

Posted on Dooneyscafe on August 21, 2001 Daniel Gawthrop reviews Christopher Hitchens’ indictment of Henry Kissinger.
(The Trial of Henry Kissinger, by Christopher Hitchens, Verso, 2001, 160 pages Cloth, price £15/US$22/CAN$32) One afternoon in 1971, I was asked to stay behind after school when all my classmates had left. My third-grade substitute teacher had some “concerns” she said, about the short story I’d handed in the day before. No, she didn’t mind that all the ...

Published in The Nation (Bangkok) on Wednesday, November 29, 2000 By Daniel Gawthrop HANOI - Last week, as US President Bill Clinton was wrapping up his historic trip to Vietnam, his Communist hosts issued an abrupt ideological broadside. Calling on the country’s citizens to embrace their socialist future and the state’s “primary role” in business matters, Party General Secretary Le Kha Phieu said: “The future of the Vietnamese nation is independence and socialism... Socialism [will] ...

Posted on Xtra.ca on July 13, 2000 [On the occasion of an Italian gay pride parade being held in Rome, near the Vatican, in the midst of the Catholic Church “Jubilee” celebrations….] By Daniel Gawthrop Somewhere this very minute, in the bedrooms and bathrooms of teenaged Catholics all over the world, a young lesbian or gay boy is reaching for the razor blades. They’re thinking suicide, or perhaps they’ve already gone through with it, because ...

Published in Canadian Forum (Vol. LXXXVII, No. 874), December 1998, pp. 20 - 26 John Lewis was destroyed by an over-zealous police investigation and hair-trigger journalism. By Daniel Gawthrop No one who showed up at the Dr. Peter Centre on June 8, 1998, took much notice of the frail, grey-haired man in the blue polo shirt standing in the hallway at the edge of the crowd. Instead, all eyes were focused on CBC personality Bill ...

[This essay was published in Xtra! West on August 21, 1997 under the headline "Fab Four's Founding Fag" and posted here years later as published. It has been revised for the 57th anniversary of Brian Epstein's death--August 27, 2024]  He was a brilliant over-achiever whose creative vision and marketing savvy turned a Liverpool guitar band into the biggest rock ‘n’ roll phenomenon of all time. He was a conflicted homosexual who never found a long-term ...

Published in Xtra! West on November 28, 1996 By Daniel Gawthrop About an hour into the Promise Keepers rally, I’m sitting across the aisle from a cherubic, 16-year-old blond from Abbotsford when prayer leader Brian Warren invites all the teenaged boys to rise from their seats. Warren—whose righteous, Afro-American baritone recalls the Bible-and-gun-toting Samuel Jackson character from Pulp Fiction—wants every boy to remember this moment for the rest of his life. So he urges the ...