[What's New] [Check my political blog] [Expansionist Party master index page.] [Fanetiks (spelling reform) homepage.]  [Simpler Spelling Word of the Day.] [MrGayPride homepage.] [Resurgence City: Newark USA website and photo galleries] [Newark USA blog]

[Dated photo. My beard is now mostly gray, but everything else is much the same.]

This area comprises (1) an index to my subject-matter and family-photo Internet sites and (2) a bio. [End]

Copyright L. Craig Schoonmaker 2001, 2002. 2003, 2005

"SCHOONMAKR"
Home Page

L. Craig Schoonmaker
295 Smith Street
Newark, New Jersey 07106
UNITED STATES
Phone: (973) 416-6151
E-mail: Schoonmakr@aol.com

Of all the people there ever were
And all there ever will be,
I
Got to be
Me.

What's New
on this site and interlinked sites

May 2007: Fotos and description of the 90th Birthday party thrown for my Aunt Mae (Nugent Wynne), widow of my late mother's little brother Jimmy.

February 11, 2006: I have turned my "Newark USA" blog into pretty much a picture-a-day blog to show people that Newark is in much better shape than many people may think. I may not update it every day, but I've missed only a couple since I started posting a foto a day perhaps two weeks ago.

June 1, 2004: I have created a "Simpler Spelling Word of the Day" website on Yahoo GeoCities to offer more-sensible spellings for the more absurdly spelled words in English, one word a day — altho sometimes more than one word seems appropriate, if a change applies to more than one very similar word. I typically update this page between noon and 3pm each day. The URL to the main page of that site is http://www.geocities.com/sswordday/index.html.

May 11, 2004: I have added an occasional blog, "Newark USA", about LIVING (that is, living well) in Newark, New Jersey, at http://newarkusa.blogspot.com.

April 18, 2004: I have started a political "blog" thru blogger.com on its website, blogspot.com, under the name "The Expansionist/The Anti-Post". A "blog", for those who aren't clear on the term, is a "web log", an online journal in which a person writes personal observations several times a week, which are arranged in chronological order, most recent first. My blog speaks to topics of the day, and I add to it almost every day. It often replies to opinion pieces in the retrograde New York Post. See my take on things at http://antipost.blogspot.com.

December 30, 2003: "What I Did on My Vacation by Craig Schoonmaker, Age 40 1/2, August 12, 1985". This whimsical piece modeled on elementary-school assignments, was neatly handprinted and copied onto 3-hole notebook paper, then pulled loose and sent to the members of my family. Alas, the alignment isn't perfect, which is less obvious in the .PDF file than on the original, and the copier cut off individual characters that extend too close to the margin. But you'll get the idea. It gives a report on a family gathering to celebrate Brian and Rosan's wedding, and my later trip to Europe. Aside from being funny (at least we thought it was), it also freezes a moment in time when relationships and places of residence were different. Enjoy.

Introduction

I am perhaps best known for being the man who, in 1970, offered the term "Gay Pride" for events surrounding the first annual march commemorating the Stonewall Riots.

The term "gay pride" has since been applied to many other things, and the effect it has had in making people all over the world more accepting of homosexuality — in themselves and others — is hard to overstate. But I've been involved in many other things too, and had two other, relatively trivial effects upon language.

I was instrumental in getting the Merriam-Webster company, publishers of prestige dictionaries, to include, in first position, the term "New Jerseyan" for a person from New Jersey. Before I protested and showed them proof (as, for instance, a letter from then-Senator from New Jersey Bill Bradley) that "New Jerseyan" is the preferred term among educated people, "New Jerseyite" — which is WRONG — had been the only term Merriam-Webster showed.

I also got the Oscar Mayer company (now part of Kraft Foods) to stop trying to change the pronunciation of "bologna" from ba-LOE-nee to ba-LOE-na. It took an exchange of several letters, but the clincher was that Oscar Mayer itself had little kids in its commercials singing "My baloney has a first name, it's O-S-C-A-R ...", not "My balona has a first name ...".

I'm a writer, and language is important to me.

*

Politics

My work for the Expansionist Party of the United States ("XP"), occupies its own homepage under my XPUS screenname on America Online ( http://members.aol.com/XPUS). Four subpages, on Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, Russia, South Africa, and English as the language of liberation, appear at the XPUS2 screenname. One enormous XP page, "Letters from the Chairman", appears under this screenname, at http://members.aol.com/Schoonmakr/Chairman.html.

The XP site is, to quote a British colleague, "immense", with many webpages (some written by other people), some of them profusely illustrated (in some cases with my own photographs), on many subjects. I also drafted and serve as webmaster for the website of United States International. Everything on all my political sites is indexed from the main page of XP's AOL site.

Spelling Reform

My work on the best system for reforming the spelling of English ever proposed (he said modestly) occupies its own homepage on AOL: http://members.aol.com/Fanetiks, with many subpages. One of those is a pronouncing dictionary of commonly mispronounced words, with over 120 usage notes on particular words that give cues to broader principles of correct pronunciation. An overview of general principles of correct speech also appears at that site. Last I checked, my Fanetik proposal was shown as one of the top-10 spelling reform sites on the Internet.

On June 1, 2004, I created a "Simpler Spelling Word of the Day" website on Yahoo GeoCities. It comprises a page showing the word for that day, plus separate pages showing all words used thus far. The principles behind each proposed reform are explained, often with notes about the individual word's history.

Gay Rights and Self-Understanding

My work in this area occupies its own homepage, with many subpages, on AOL as well: http://members.aol.com/MrGayPride. Most of the pieces there were created for the organization Homosexuals Intransigent!, but there are also some items from Homosexuals of High IQ, an altogether different organization.

Boosting Newark

I have created a website (also on AOL) concerning the many good things about my home (since June 2004), much-maligned Newark, New Jersey. Called "Resurgence City: Newark USA", it works to persuade good people to make their homes — and investments (and thus money) — in rebounding Newark. Here is one of my many, many photos that appears on the site. My late father, who took me to the park portrayed, is shown standing left of center.

Family

 A number of family photos are displayed on this site, along with a "Virtual" Memorial Service for my late mother. An album of photos taken during the period when the family was gathered around Mother in her last week appears here, as well as an album of photos of the 13th generation of descendants of Hendrick Jochemsz Schoonmaker (my siblings' grandchildren) and an album of black-and-white photos from the 1920s to 1940s. As I scan and fix other photos (my sisters found hundreds of old photos when cleaning out my mother's house to make it ready for sale), they too will be added. There are also some fuzzy photos taken with my cheapo Polaroid digital camera (my first digital) of my house. In addition, I created a table of the criteria I used in deciding which of the houses I looked at in my initial househunt best suited me, showing whether the house I decided upon met those criteria.

Biography

L. Craig Schoonmaker, born December 20, 1944 in Holy Name Hospital, Teaneck, New Jersey, has a long history of political and social activism. (From this point forward, "L. Craig Schoonmaker" will be replaced by "I", "me", etc.)

Though raised in suburban New Jersey, at age 20 I moved to New York City to find freedom as a homosexual man. I resided in Manhattan for 35 years but relocated to semi-suburban western Newark, New Jersey ("Vailsburg") in mid-June 2000 to have more room for myself and my cats, and to create a garden.

Political and Gay Activism. Within a few months of arriving in Manhattan in 1965, I joined the Mattachine Society, a homosexual-rights group I had heard about in a public-television program on WNET when I still resided in Middletown, New Jersey. For some months, I volunteered once or twice a week to answer phone calls to provide information on gay places to callers and to take messages for Mattachine officers and counselors.

In August 1968, I was socializing with friends on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village when the police came along in an antigay sweep (typical behavior in those days). I refused what I regarded as an unlawful order to "break it up and move on", so was arrested, handcuffed, carted off in a commandeered taxicab, and thrown into jail for the night. In the trial that ensued, I asserted a First Amendment right (of gay men) "peaceably to assemble" and was acquitted by the judge. I notified Mattachine of that legal triumph over police harassment. Around the same time, Mayor John Lindsay issued orders to police to stop harassing homosexuals, and antigay sweeps of Christopher Street ended.

In autumn 1968, while attending the City College of the City University of New York, I was chosen President of Students for Humphrey (Hubert H. Humphrey, that is, then Vice President of the United States, in his unsuccessful run for President on the Democratic ticket). I was, I admit, largely a non-YPSL figurehead for a campaign spearheaded by YPSL (pronounced "yípsal"), the Young People's Socialist League. That was then and is now fine with me, because Hubert Humphrey was an extraordinary man and would have made an extraordinary President, and both democratic socialists and ordinary Democrats had good reason to join forces to try to make him President. Alas, we failed, and Richard Nixon became President. The Nation was to suffer for its error in judgment.

The following semester, I struck off in a new direction on my own, to form Homosexuals Intransigent! ("HI!") as a student organization that was recognized by the student government of City College on April 1, 1969 — almost three full months before the Stonewall Riots that were to give rise to the Gay Liberation movement.  Naturally, I had no idea at the time that gay men were at the edge of exploding in a major social upheaval. I was part of that upheaval, but started my part without a riot.

HI! refused heterosexual forms of organizing ("men-and-women-together-now!") and offered full membership only to men. Lesbian women were to be co-equal in a separate women's group, should such be formed. None ever was, though I put in touch with each other all lesbians as contacted HI! to express interest in participating in a women's branch.

Because of HI!'s insistence that gay men must have a place to themselves where they could be themselves, the other gay student groups then in existence (three Student Homophile League ("SHL") chapters at Columbia University, New York University, and Cornell University) threw up a boycott against HI!, refusing all cooperation and attempting to keep HI! out of the "homophile" movement of the time.

Actually, SHL might just have been peeved that I first investigated SHL, as well as the even older Mattachine Society of New York, but decided to form a separate organization rather than a chapter of either SHL or Mattachine.  It might even have been pettier than that, in that I went to speak to "Stephen Donaldson" (Bob Martin, by an alias), founder of SHL, at his Columbia University dorm room, only to find that he was sleeping at the time, even tho he knew he was supposed to meet with another gay college man interested in setting up a new student group. I had the distinct impression that Stephen/Bob was sleeping nude, but, as a gentleman, I looked the other way while he got up and got ready to meet with me. I felt I was being gentlemanly. Bob, however, may have thought I was being insulting, in not looking at him while he spoke to me as he got dressed. Bob, who was from the same county in New Jersey as I grew up in (Monmouth) and died of AIDS in late 1996 or early 1997, was a very strange man, but quite goodlooking. Had he been less weird, I would have been glad to sleep with him, and indeed we exchanged business cards the last time we met (with that in mind, I felt), even tho he was still plainly weird — but goodlooking! I felt at the time that if ever we were to be alone together we would get intimate, unless some ideological argument arose that would turn us both off. And I regret today that we never did get together, and I never did get a chance to try to straighten him out and get him off the drugs that were so obviously an appallingly large part of his life — and which killed him.

HI! prospered despite SHL's initial hostility, and the SHL chapter at Columbia, about a mile from City College, eventually came around, to co-sponsor a student dance at City, even tho its officers were uptight about a photographer from Gay Power newspaper's taking photos of the crowd dancing, whereas HI!'s members weren't fazed at all by such attention but were indeed glad to get it.

As part of my duties for HI!, I became a columnist for the newspaper Gay Power, and was interviewed for and heavily quoted in Donn Teal's book, The Gay Militants (which was re-released in paperback in 1995). I also wrote articles that appeared in various other publications, including the short-duration Gaysweek in New York City and Gay Horizons in Calgary, Alberta. Things I wrote in that period have as well been quoted briefly in the books The Long Road to Freedom and the late Randy Shilts's bestseller, Conduct Unbecoming.

It was only by accident that I was not present at the Stonewall Riots, the disturbances in Greenwich Village at the end of June 1969 that gave rise to the Gay Liberation Front and other activist gay organizations.

I resided at the time in New York City, where the Riots occurred, and had been, as a matter of fact, a regular customer of The Stonewall. I knew, thru friends, some of the go-go boys. My friends and I danced the night away at The Stonewall on innumerable occasions, and participated in the intricate line dances (in particular, "The Spider") popular among the regulars. The Spider was devised well after the first of the major gay line dances, The Madison, which friends showed me but we didn't do any longer. (The Madison was, it seemed to me, extremely intricate and hard to learn. Perhaps that was part of its appeal:  anyone who did master it became part of an in-group and could lord it over anyone who didn't.)

With "The Spider", an inventive individual dancer could invent moves within the framework of the larger dance, which move then took his name (e.g., "the David"; I wonder what ever happened to David). We also danced The Hesitation at The Stonewall, at private parties, etc., in which the dancers would periodically stop and "Vogue": i.e., assume striking positions as tho they had been caught in the flash of a camera during a 'shoot' for a fashion magazine (men's or women's, as ever the dancer might have envisioned).

The time was turbulent, but the music was wondrous, Motown to the max, when Motown was new and pure and real, and the bulk of its artists and executives really did live in Detroit!

The Stonewall had been a nearly magical place. It opened to great expectations, in a time when one didn't really expect a new gay bar to last more than six months. The young gay crowd at the time was more than a little flighty, and a dance bar, especially, like The Stonewall, might at best expect a few months as "the" place to be, followed by a few months of fading glory, followed by abandonment and closure.

In its first weeks, The Stonewall was glorious, filled with beautiful slender, preppy college boys from NYU, Columbia, and the many other colleges of the greatest of all American college towns, New York City. (If you never thought of New York as a college town, you have underappreciated how many major institutions of higher education make their home there. But that is hardly unusual. Very few people realize that New York has more students than any other American city. Most people associate "college town" with "small town", and if they think of any city as being a "college town", it is Boston. But New York has multiply more college students than has Boston or any other city in this Hemisphere — as it has more of almost everything than any other city in this Hemisphere, or the other.)

Over time, The Stonewall fared better than most popular bars of its era, but the "in crowd" moved on to the next hot spot, and others filled the gap.  Increasingly, The Stonewall filled with marginal types — "fluffy sweaters" (effeminate young men), drag queens, a few faghags, and a very few dykes. Many of the new habitués were of Third World complexion and attitude. Only when one understands the seething passions of these new regulars do The Stonewall Riots make real sense. Middle-class white gay college students really didn't have much anger at society, "The System", etc., to erupt into a gay riot. And it is questionable whether the police would have moved as they did against a bar whose clientele was primarily middle-class white gay men.

In any case, the NYPD did try to roust 'disreputable elements' from The Stonewall one night, in yet another of innumerable hassles they were accustomed to committing against the managers, employees, and customers of gay bars.  Ordinarily, everyone in the bar would take it in stride and move along — almost no one was ever arrested in the late 1960s. But late one Saturday night at the end of June 1969 the patrons of The Stonewall flipped out and decided they weren't going to take it any more.

I wasn't there.

Instead, I was that year attending summer sessions in California, first at Long Beach State, while visiting my two sisters, who had moved to L.A. County several years before, and then at San Francisco State. At each California college, I tried to start chapters of Homosexuals Intransigent! The Long Beach student newspaper, intrigued by flyers I posted on bulletin boards, ran an article about those efforts.

In San Francisco State, I resisted an antigay attempt to expel me from the dormitory for posting organizing notices. That expulsion effort failed, for lack of support by the administration. It was at San Francisco State that I first heard about the Stonewall Riots, which had occurred only a week or two before, from one of the men who replied to my bulletin-board notices.

Though I had too little time in brief summer sessions to establish chapters of HI! at those two colleges, I did prepare the way for others. At least at San Francisco State, a chapter of the Gay Liberation Front was organized soon after the fall semester started, in the turbulent months following Stonewall. (Charles Thorpe, who organized the successful GLF chapter at San Fran State, came up with one of the most brilliant observations I have ever seen in the gay world: 'You know what you get when you put red, white, and blue [national colors of the United States] together? — Lavender!' [the single color of gay power (then), equaled only by the rainbow flag (today)].)

At the Eastern Regional Conference of Homophile Organizations (ERCHO) meeting in Philadelphia in late 1969, I offered an amendment, which was promptly accepted, to the resolution that established the annual gay and lesbian march that to this day commemorates the Stonewall Riots. As head of a group of college students, many of whom may have owned neither suit nor sports jacket, I moved that the Christopher Street Liberation Day March (as the proposed demonstration was then to be known) would not mandate a dress code. Theretofore, organizers of major "homophile" demonstrations had required men to wear jacket and tie, women to wear skirts or dresses. There was no way the new, younger organizations were going to adhere to such a rule.

In retrospect, I lament that neither I nor anyone else foresaw that the absence of a dress code of even liberal nature would be interpreted by some as license to wear outrageous outfits (e.g., black leather G-strings and motorcycle caps, but nothing else), or even go completely naked, as would offend the general public whom the demonstration was intended to impress favorably, as well as embarrass and appall well-adjusted homosexuals who do not consider themselves freaks but see year after year that media focus on the outlandish few and thus willfully mischaracterize the normally-dressed many. The point of the march was to arouse pride in gay people — not shame nor embarrassment.

In early 1970, in the discussions within the committee that planned the first gay march, I was the man who first offered the term "Gay Pride" for the weekend of events to be planned by New York City host organizations around the march in hopes of drawing more people in from outside the city than would come for a demonstration alone.

The initial proposal had been to call the overall event "Gay Power Weekend". I wanted a term less confrontational and political, more celebratory, more inwardly rather than outwardly oriented — that is, a designation directed to the way gay people think about themselves rather than what straight people think about them — so suggested "Gay Pride Weekend" instead. To my (pleasant) surprise, there wasn't the slightest objection to my suggestion, nor even discussion. By instantaneous consensus, the Christopher Street Liberation Day Committee established "Gay Pride Weekend".

"Gay Pride" has now obliterated the earlier names, "Christopher Street Liberation Day" for the march and ancillary activities in New York and "Christopher Street West" in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Indeed, "Pride" has become more generally shorthand for "gay" or "lesbian", as in the yearly "Pride Guide" issued in advance of New York's march.

*

HI! bounced along for three years until disrupted by a sociopathic liar and thief who worked his way into a position of power, generated factionalism that infuriated  me into resigning as President, got himself elected the new President — then promptly stole the organization's small treasury and left town. Though I thereupon recaptured leadership of the embittered remnants of the organization, HI! had been so thoroughly disrupted that it lapsed into inactivity and remains to this day only a watchdog on media and commentator on gay life that issues letters and flyers on isolated occasions only.

Nonethless, to HI! and its head (me), the world is indebted for the term "Gay Pride" and the impact that associating the word and concept of "pride" with "gay" has had on millions of people around the world — gay, straight, and lesbian all.

Several alumni of HI! went on to found other organizations. One took a gay-related challenge to the highest level of the U.S. Civil Service, and won. I am gradually uploading to the Internet the important printed materials that affected so many of HI!'s members. Many are already available at the MrGayPride netsite.

After the demise of Homosexuals Intransigent! as an activist organization, I formed Homosexuals In Mensa ("HIM") as a Special Interest Group ("SIG") within Mensa, the international organization of people of high IQ (98th percentile and up), which I had joined shortly before.

The antihomosexual leadership of the New York chapter of Mensa attacked HIM with, among other things, a front-page editorial in its newsletter irrationally entitled "Men, Women, et Alii". That leadership insisted that HIM could not be recognized as a SIG because it permitted only gay men to join, whereas any SIG, said the leadership, must be open to all members of Mensa. I replied that the constitution of Mensa declared simply that 'any member of Mensa may form any group of members' into a Special Interest Group, and that "any group" would of necessity include an all-male group, just as it could include a group for blond Mensans, left-handed Mensans, black Mensans, or any other subgroup of Mensans. I also suggested that it was absurd for an organization that excludes 98% of the human race to object to any form of exclusivity in a SIG!

Within months, the viciously antihomosexual New York leadership was largely ousted by a group more friendly to HIM, in some small measure helped by reactions of the general membership to the former leadership's outrageous behavior vis-a-vis HIM (such as the grotesquely-titled editorial). The ousted leaders, however, retreated to a fallback position of trying to prevent enlargement of HIM to National-SIG status. Inasmuch as Mensa's national headquarters were in Brooklyn, there was considerable overlap in and contact between the former leadership of the New York Chapter and the ongoing leadership of the national HQ.

The antigay national leadership pitted a recently formed group, "Gay SIG" on the West Coast, which permitted both lesbian women and heterosexuals of both sexes as well as gay men to join, against HIM for national recognition, as though only one gay-related SIG could be recognized. The membership of HIM other than me did not want to fight on, so I left Mensa — which, in any event, I found to be the oddest group of people I ever met, quite a judgment considering that for years I had been active in the "homophile" movement, a grouping that included quite a few odd people of various sorts. Mensa was filled with what I regarded as bizarre SIGs devoted to things like astrology and the occult. In time, the newsletters HIM issued (of which I still have copy) will be added to the MrGayPride netsite.

Still feeling the need for a social group for gay men of intelligence, I then founded Homosexuals of High IQ ("H₂IQ") outside Mensa. This was a small group that met monthly in members' homes (most often, but not only, in mine) around a discussion topic, sometimes with a speaker, and issued a newsletter shortly before and to announce each meeting. H₂IQ enjoyed a few years of modest success, until enlarged social opportunities in New York's gay community, specifically the flowering of the bar scene, lured so many members away as to render the group unviable, around late 1978. In time, the newsletters H₂IQ issued (of which I still have copy) will be added to the MrGayPride netsite. Two are already there.

In 1977, the late Stanley H. Hauser (1928-1996), a gay friend then resident in New York City's Borough of Queens, and I formed the Expansionist Party of the United States over the telephone, at Hauser`s suggestion. XP subsumed my gay-rights activities and remains to the present my major activist outlet.

My other interests include spelling reform, "urban reforestation", pet-population control, and the promotion of English as auxiliary world language.

Spelling Reform. In about 1972, as an intellectual exercise, I devised a phonetic spelling system for the English language, which I dubbed "Fanetik". When my nextdoor neighbor, an intelligent but not well-educated black youth who had been raised in the South Bronx, picked up something written in Fanetik that had been lying on my coffee table and read it aloud, with some difficulty but semi-fluently, never having been told any of the rules, I began to realize that Fanetik might be useful as a general-purpose spelling reform, or at least as an aid in teaching reading and speech.

After using Fanetik for note-taking and personal writing for many years and adjusting the system to correct any shortcoming I found, I added written accents to show syllabic stress, then started to work on promoting this Augméntad Fanétik system as a tool for teaching English, especially to nonnative speakers who would not know what syllable to stress unless they saw a written accent. I am presently creating materials in both Fanetik and Augméntad Fanétik, including a series of "Éeze Réeder" books, for use mainly abroad, in ESL (English as a Second Language) classes in the U.S. and other English-speaking countries, and for teaching reading to children and functionally illiterate adults within English-speaking countries. For the complete system and sample texts, see the Fanetiks netsite.

Urban Reforestation. I am also interested in promoting the planting of trees and other greenery in cities as a way of providing a more natural environment to soothe the spirit of stressed-out citydwellers. I am, back-burner, working on a proposal for a group, tentatively to be called "Trees Please", that would plant trees and flowering plants on every street and avenue in New York City, and on strong rooftops, in vacant lots and the like in New York and Newark, and enlist neighborhood residents to take care of them, as a major urban-forestation project. If it works in the New York area, I will then promote it elsewhere.

Toward a Global Language. My other major interest is English as auxiliary world language, that is, as a second language that would supplement, not replace, existing national and regional languages for trade, education, tourism, and general-purpose communication. I am working on a proposal to form English Everywhere ("EE"), a group that would send young people from the United States to countries around the world to provide expért translations of street signs, maps, museum captions, and the like, especially at major tourist sites, and to teach local people solid conversational English as might enable them to take advantage of the host of technological and cultural materials of every kind available in English.

U.S. students who work on EE projects abroad (possibly for college credit) would likely enjoy excellent job prospects on their return. Having achieved fluency in another language and knowledge of even the nuances of another culture, they would seem excellent prospects for sales and advertising positions in companies that trade with the countries they worked in, as well as for various positions in the State Department and academia.

Part of the problem with teaching English is that there are various dialects and many different pronunciations for individual words, so a new learner does not always know what is "correct". This is in part the consequence of "descriptivism", the approach taken by most compilers of English dictionaries today. They hold that the job of a dictionary is to describe English, that is, record the language as it is in fact used, not dictate how it should be used. If that means listing six pronunciations for the five-letter word "atoll", they will list six pronunciations for a five-letter word. If you look up "atoll" and want to know how to pronounce it, you have to guess which one to use, because you surely cannot know just from looking at the list, in that the one given first is not necessarily the one most used by educated people. It might simply be the oldest or the most commonly used by people generally, not by the educated elite.

I believe that most people want authoritative guidance when they go to a dictionary, so I created a sample prescriptivist, pronouncing dictionary for English, one that suggests "correct" pronunciation(s) and condemns disapproved usage. To gather the words most at issue, I listened, with alphabetized wordlist near to hand, to a great deal of educational and entertainment television and films from several English-speaking countries, and to short-wave radio. When I heard a word that departs from standard U.S. usage, I checked whether I had already noted it; if not, I added it to my list. That list grew, over many months of keen listening, to over 1,700 words, to which I added over 120 usage notes specific to particular words but which give cues to principles of wider application.

I created that annotated wordlist into a table for ready reference by anyone who wants to know how these words are pronounced by educated people in New York, the media capital of the United States, which country is in turn the center of the English-speaking world, holding two thirds of all native speakers of English, the most widely dispersed international language. (The speech of educated New Yorkers is not the notorious "Noow Yawk" accent so popular as shorthand for stupidity in film and television.) Most new learners of English want to learn correct U.S. English, but spoken materials like TV and films incorporate many accents, so do not give clear nor consistent guidance as to proper pronunciation. Written materials give no guidance. ESL students and other people interested in more guidance than the typical dictionary affords can find it in my Correct Pronunciation wordlist, which, as a table of over 1,700 commonly mispronounced words, with approved and condemned pronunciations, plus usage notes in plain English, is now available online, along with a discussion of general principles of good speech in a separate discussion.

I hope that enlarging the number of people who speak and read English easily will speed development of the Third World (see http://members.aol.com/XPUS2/EngLib.html) and promote democratic values in societies that have no tradition of democracy.

I have not yet found funding for English Everywhere nor Trees Please, nor a publisher for a fuller, hardcopy version of Correct Pronunciation.

Never having been independently wealthy, I can work at my various causes only part-time, in that I must support myself. For most of my life, I have worked as a word processor and legal secretary, mostly part-time. I have also worked at low-level jobs in television, publishing, and in a trade association for the book-publishing industry.

* * *

In brief:

• Born December 20, 1944, Holy Name Hospital, Teaneck, New Jersey
• Graduated from Middletown Township High School (Monmouth County, New Jersey) 1962
• "Stopped out" between high school and college, to move to New York City, where I worked as a clerk-messenger in a television documentary unit of ABC News, then as a production assistant at ATLAS Magazine (now called World Press Review)
• Started college, at the Freshman Program at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York on 42nd Street between Fifth Avenue and Avenue of the Americas, 1967
• Arrested August 1968 on Christopher Street, Greenwich Village, for refusing antigay police order to "break it up and move on"; acquitted on First Amendment grounds
• Transferred to City College/CUNY, September 1968
• President, Students for Humphrey, City College, autumn 1968
• Founder (April 1, 1969) and President (thru present), of Homosexuals Intransigent!
• Offered amendment barring dress code in annual gay march, autumn 1969
• Offered, early 1970, term "Gay Pride" as member of the first Christopher Street Liberation Day Committee
• Bachelor of Arts in Political Science, City College/CUNY, 1971
• Founder, Homosexuals In Mensa, c. 1972
• Creator, c. 1972, of phonetic spelling system for English ("Fanetik"), and later an elaboration that shows syllabic stress ("Augméntad Fanétik")
• Founder, Homosexuals of High IQ, c. 1975
• Co-Founder (February 1977) and Chairman (to present), Expansionist Party of the United States
• Recognized by Bowker's Who's Who in American Politics in 1987
• Recognized in Marquis' Who's Who in America in 2002
• Never married (heterosexually or homosexually); no children.

See also Gale's Encyclopedia of Associations and its associated publications for more on the Expansionist Party.

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