“SEX HAS ALWAYS BEEN the favorite topic of every intellectually cultured person I’ve known. The favorite topic for every unintellectually cultured person I’ve known is Books, or, what is worse, Music.” I’m thinking of these words, from a 1952 entry in his Paris Diary, as I ring the bell to Ned Rorem’s Upper West Side apartment on a late, gray winter’s afternoon.
MoreIN HIS LETTER to the editor in the January-February 2010 issue of this magazine, Richard Lottridge asked if anything had been written about the role of Merton L. Bird in the founding of the mid-century gay Los Angeles group known as Knights of the Clock. My interest was piqued, and what follows is a brief overview in which I’ve tried to assemble some (often contradictory) fragments of history.
MoreTHE FOLLOWING PIECE of writing appears in Family Parables, a collection of short fiction by the Slovene writer Boris Pintar, published by Talisman House in December in my translation. The collection consists of four short stories, each between eight and fifteen pages in length; a novella of some sixty pages, which lends the collection its title; and this piece, “Eros/Thanatos,” placed interestingly between the short stories and the novella, almost as a summing-up of the former (the last of the stories is about a man who brings home a hustler) and an introduction to the latter.
MoreFOR TWO DAYS in early March 2009, Ugandans flocked to the Kampala Triangle Hotel for the Family Life Network’s “Seminar on Exposing the Homosexuals’ Agenda.” The seminar’s very title revealed its claim: GLBT people and activists are engaged in a well thought-out plan to take over the world. The U.S. culture wars had come to Africa with a vengeance.
MoreHISTORIAN JONATHAN NED KATZ first published his essay “The Invention of Heterosexuality” in 1990, which he later expanded into an award-winning 1995 book of the same title. The beauty of Katz’s approach was its inversion, so to speak, of popular constructionist arguments about homosexuality. Recall Michel Foucault’s famous declaration that the homosexual as a “species” was “born” in 1870.
MoreTO COMBAT HOMOPHOBIA, it is crucial that we first understand it. We often talk about homophobia as if it were a monolith, requiring just one set of solutions. In truth, this phenomenon comes in several varieties that are linked by a web of overlapping motivations, theories, religious doctrines, political calculations, and psychological issues. Its roots are as complex and diverse as homophobia is itself multifarious. The reality of this social disease necessitates that we carefully diagnose it so we can calibrate our responses and tailor our educational campaigns.
MoreONE OF THE LOW POINTS in American history was in the early 1950’s when Senator Joseph McCarthy successfully fueled and exploited Americans’ fear and paranoia about secret governmental conspiracies, launching witch hunts to expose allegedly subversive infiltrators and Communists within the U.S. government. A lesser known part of the story is the critical role that a same-sex male relationship, almost certainly a sexual one, played in bringing the crisis of McCarthyism to a head and, in the end, silencing the senator. As it happens, the gay couple involved cannot exactly be considered the “good guys” in the drama.
MoreWriting a memoir is fundamentally a ritualizing experience, a literary rite-of passage that tends to occur when a writer is facing—and challenging thereby—the implacability of mortality. Gore Vidal wrote that Tennessee Williams “could not possess his own life until he had written about it.” Of his own life, Vidal snarled when asked if he would be remembered, “I don’t give a god-damn.” In a more contemplative mood, he once mused, “As for life? Well, that is a hard matter. But it was always a hard matter for those of us born with a sense of the transiency of these borrowed atoms that make up our corporeal being.”
MoreDisillusionment set in for the GLBT movement even before Barack Obama took office. The incoming President’s decision to accord a central role in his inauguration to the fundamentalist Rev. Rick Warren suggested that reaching out to the religious right was a higher priority for the new administration than GLBT inclusion. The Obama Inaugural Committee’s last-minute choice of openly gay Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson to deliver the invocation at an inaugural concert failed to allay concerns when his appearance was mysteriously left out of the television coverage. Civil rights advocates were also disappointed that highly qualified, openly gay candidates were passed over in the selection of the President’s cabinet. Openly gay Rep. Barney Frank’s optimistic assertion that GLBT people would now be part of America’s governing class was already ringing hollow by Inauguration Day.
MoreFor older GLBT adults and others concerned with aging issues as they affect our community, the progress we need in federal policy is in some ways a matter of simply “getting to neutral.” Of course, there is nothing simple about it.
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