Thank you for being a friend, again

Bea Arthur is my hero - the gays loved her, still love her, and as long as The Golden Girls, Maude and All in the Family are on DVD, will always love her.

Bea loved the gays back - she generously left homeless gay teenagers $300,000!



From The Ali Forney Center web site:

The Ali Forney Center (AFC) is planning to name one of it's transitional residences in honor of Bea Arthur, as an expression of gratitude for Bea's extraordinary kindness and generosity to the homeless lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) youth served by AFC.

The Ali Forney Center currently operates both emergency and transitional housing programs. The emergency housing program provides short-term shelter aimed at providing stability and guidance to youth suffering homelessness. The transitional housing program is aimed at providing longer-term housing for up to two years while residents pursue the educational and vocational goals that will allow them to live independent lives and overcome homelessness.

The Bea Arthur Residence will house 12 youths. $430K per year has been obtained from the Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development to support it's operational funding. AFC is currently working with the Hudson Planning Group to secure government and private funds to support the acquisition of a building to provide this home. AFC is currently renting all of its transitional housing sites, and has secured a generous three year grant from the Oak Foundation to support its work with the Hudson Planning Group to purchase housing sites. AFC is currently working with Rapid Realty to identify sites in Brooklyn to purchase.

The Ali Forney Center aims to provide LGBT youth with the support and guidance that they should receive from their families. All youth residing in AFC's transitional housing program are required to find employment and finish high school. Youth are supported in pursuing higher education, and are required to save a portion of their incomes. Mental health counseling is offered to our residents to help them overcome the pain and confusion of having been rejected by their families because of their LGBT identities. An intensive Life Coaching program has been developed with dedicated volunteers who help mentor our youth in pursuing their career goals and aid them in developing the skills they need to live independently.

If you would like to support the Bea Arthur Residence CLICK HERE

From The Daily News:

'Golden Girls' star Bea Arthur leaves $300,000 in will to NY group that helps gay homeless youths

Bea Arthur left $300,000 in her will to a New York organization that aids homeless gay youth.
The Ali Fornay Center provides services to more than 1,000 each year, and is planning to buy a building to house 12 young people - and name it in honor of the "Golden Girls" actress.

The head of the center said he is thrilled with the stage and television legend's generosity.
"We work with hundreds of young people who are rejected by their families because of who they are," said Executive Director Carl Siciliano.

"We are overwhelmed with gratitude that Bea saw that LGBT youth deserve as much love and support as any other young person, and that she placed so much value in the work we do to protect them, and to help them rebuild their lives," he said.

The Ali Forney Center offers emergency shelter and transitional housing in seven residential sites in New York. It also operates two drop-in centers offering food, clothing, medical and mental health treatment, HIV testing, treatment and prevention services, and vocational and educational assistance.

Bea Arthur (1991), by John Currin

Bea Arthur inspired many people, including artist John Currin. In 1991 John Currin painted "Bea Arthur Nude". I saw this painting at his solo show at the Whitney Museum in 2003.

Bea Arthur Nude (1991) - cropped by myself


Did Bea Arthur ever see this painting? If so, what did Bea think of this portrait? Was she flattered?

What does it feel like to have someone you've never met paint you nude, from their imagination? And, what would it feel like to see your imaginary breasts exhibited for the world to see at the Whitney Museum?

There are many things I'd have liked to ask Bea Arthur.

John Currin (born 1962) is an American painter. He is best known for satirical figurative paintings which deal with provocative sexual and social themes in a technically skillful manner. His work shows a wide range of influences, including sources as diverse as the Renaissance, popular culture magazines, and contemporary fashion models. He often distorts or exaggerates the erotic forms of the female body.

Currin was born in Boulder, Colorado, and grew up in Connecticut, where he studied painting privately with a renowned traditionally trained artist from Odessa, Ukraine, Lev Meshberg. He went to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where he obtained a BFA in 1984, and received a MFA from Yale University in 1986.

In New York City in 1989 he exhibited a series of portraits of young girls derived from the photographs in a high school yearbook, and initiated his efforts to distill art from traditionally clichéd subjects. In the 1990s, when political themed art works were favored, Currin brazenly used bold depictions of busty young women, mustachioed men and asexual divorcee's, setting him apart from the rest. He used magazines like Cosmopolitan along with old issues of Playboy for inspiration for his paintings. When criticized for being sexist, Currin did not deny it, but did remark that he felt that "at that time [he] didn't feel like a man and [he] didn't feel like a woman." In 1992 a subsequent exhibition focused, less sympathetically, on well-to-do middle-aged women. Nonetheless, by the late 1990s Currin's ability to paint subjects of kitsch with technical facility met with critical and financial success, and by 2003 his paintings were selling "for prices in the high six figures".More recently, he has undertaken a series of figure paintings dealing with unabashedly pornographic themes.

He has had retrospective exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and is represented in the permanent collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Gardenand the Tate Gallery.

Currin is based in New York City, where he lives with his wife and fellow artist, Rachel Feinstein. John Currin and his wife, Rachel Feinstein, in the front row at Marc Jacobs Spring 2006 show:


from: New York Magazine

Influences: John Currin

By Karen Rosenberg
Published Nov 19, 2006

Karen Rosenberg:You famously painted a topless portrait of Bea Arthur. Were you a big fan?

John Currin:Bea Arthur painting is from Maude, which I used to watch as a kid. In the eighties, I didn’t have TV for, like, a whole decade. When I started watching again in the nineties, The Golden Girls was in syndication. When I had a loft with Sean and Kevin Landers, we’d always take a break in the afternoon and watch The Golden Girls. When I made the painting, I was living in Hoboken and still making abstract paintings, and I was very frustrated. I was walking back from the PATH train and this vision of Bea Arthur just came to me.

From ArtForum:

John Currin - Critical Essay

ArtForum , Sept, 2003 by David Rimanelli
Bea Arthur Naked, 1991, remains the most sensational of these pictures, and the best. The artist depicts the star of Maude, that '70s sitcom about an uppermiddle-class do-gooder, women's libber, and suburban wit--not Arthur's later incarnation in The Golden Girls. Naked, Arthur nevertheless remains composed and dignified, her smile and slightly peaked eyebrows conveying a sense of irony, even amusement. The portrait is too psychological for the everyday antifeminist caricature. And Currin's technique, stiff but more than adequate, dry but not fussy, betokens too much effort for the sake of mere snide laughter. Painted in the rapidly expanding '90s context of well-meaning art (the kind that Maude herself might collect were she part of the scene?), Bea Arthur Naked draws together multiple threads: the "incorrect" representation of women; the campy Pop aura of television sitcoms, perhaps a hang over from the '80s (think "Infotainment" and all those other group shows about a generation raised by the unwholesome light of the tube); and a commitment to figurative painting in the face of politicized art practices, the ever escalating fortunes of photography, and scatter and/or abject art. Perhaps Currin indulged in the last tendency somewhat, given his debased or pathetic subject matter and an impoverished or superannuated technique that savors more of the thrift-shop aesthetic than of the Old Masters.