“The Many Passions of Michael Hardwick: Sex and the Supreme Court in the Age of AIDS” author Martin Padgett’s fascinating, deeply researched new book sheds fresh light on a pivotal figure in American LGBTQ+ history. An Atlantan, Hardwick was the Midtown bartender and visual artist at the center of the landmark 1986 Bowers v. Hardwick […]
While she now knocks them dead nightly on the Las Vegas strip performing as Tina Turner and Patti LaBelle, drag legend Hot Chocolate was born in Atlanta over 50 years ago. Like her fellow Atlanta female impersonation icons Rachel Wells and Charlie Brown, Hot Chocolate created her high energy stage persona onstage at the Sweet […]
Editor’s Note: This excerpt from a 1976 Democratic Convention dispatch by Celestine Sibley, who among her other tasks, covered the Georgia state legislature for years, was originally published in the 2001 collection of her journalism, “Celestine Sibley, Reporter,” edited by Richard L. Eldredge. The following is the 2001 introduction to the piece: Having never covered […]
As a 17-year-old Chamblee High School student in 2003, Angela Vara still vividly remembers being invited by her Aunt Vicki Vara to ride atop the Backstreet Atlanta float in the city’s Pride parade. “I remember coming down Peachtree Street and seeing a sea of people wearing pride clothing and holding rainbow flags,” Vara recalls. “I […]
For over three decades, Atlanta radio morning man Steve McCoy woke us up and made us laugh, even on the mornings we sat idling behind jack knifed tractor-trailers on Spaghetti Junction on the way to work. McCoy’s voice welcomed visitors from around the globe during the 1996 Centennial Summer Olympics, introduced an impromptu in-studio morning […]
Under the watchful eye of a Bob Dylan painting hanging over his right shoulder at Bantam Pub in Atlanta’s Old Fourth Ward neighborhood, singer-songwriter Chip McGuire is in a good place, both personally and professionally, these days. Being proactive about a bipolar depression diagnosis, McGuire is in therapy and taking meds to treat the disorder. […]
By Mr. Charlie Brown Eldredge ATL guest columnist Way back in 1971 at start of my drag career at the Watch Your Hat and Coat Saloon in Nashville, we had to enter and leave the club on Second Avenue with our drag concealed in a garbage bag. We were equally careful to enter the club […]
“Which Hogwarts House are you?” I’ll admit the question — posed by a member of the 360 Media PR team sitting at the entrance of Harry Potter The Exhibition on press day — caught me completely off guard. “He feels like a member of Ravenclaw,” said Paolo, our Eldredge ATL website wizard (and in-house “Harry […]
As Joni Mitchell once wryly observed, “sometimes, change comes at you like a broadside accident.” When the iconic singer-songwriter wrote those lyrics 30 years ago, Mitchell could not have predicted having to rebuild her life following a 2015 brain aneurysm. In his new powerful page-turner of a memoir, “Chase The Light: The Gruesome Art of […]
On Wednesday night at 7, Cynthia Tucker, the former Atlanta Journal-Constitution editorial page editor returns to town with co-author and current University of South Alabama colleague Frye Gaillard to discuss their new book “The Southernization of America: A Story of Democracy in the Balance” (NewSouth Books, $25.95) at the Atlanta History Center in Buckhead. The […]