Venus and Mars The human genome keeps busting myths about our past, such as the recent discovery that two figures from Pompeii long known as “the Two Maidens” are in fact two men. The pair has been redubbed as “the Gay Lovers.” Given that the bodies unearthed at Pompeii preserve their exact position at the time of Vesuvius’ eruption, the fact that the two were caught in intimate embrace—both are eighteen to twenty years old—has intrigued scholars and tourists alike. Be it noted that the switch from “maidens” to “lovers” carries with it an interesting shift in connotation beyond their gender, as the former (rather quaint) term implies a “chaste” relationship, the latter an explicitly sexual one. No doubt this is because in our culture, and perhaps in ancient Rome, women are allowed or assumed to embrace one another in a nonsexual way, while men who are so arranged can only be doing one thing. Then too, if we actually look at the position in which the two men were frozen for all time, it doesn’t really look so much like an “embrace” as it does… well, you decide.
File under “Duh” (with apologies to the excellent news service lgbtqnation.com). The headline read: “Science: The More a Straight Man Drinks, the More Likely He’ll Find a Guy Sexy.” The kicker, of course, was that rubric “Science” at the top of what seems a truism. Still, it was a real study following sound methodology, and it involved recruiting men at various stages of inebriation at straight bars in the Midwest. After being tested for drunkenness, subjects were shown a video vignette of both men and women and asked to rate each one’s attractiveness in general and as a potential sex partner. Sure enough, the drunker they were, the more willing these straight guys were to entertain ideas of a walk on the wild side. Curiously, their willingness to shag the pictured women, already quite robust, did not rise with inebriation; and a separate sample of women showed no increase in sexual willingness as they became drunker. Conclusion, given in vino veritas: if it weren’t for sexual repression and macho taboos, heterosexual men would probably mess around with one another a whole lot more than they do.
Now Will You Shoot Me? Over the years we’ve been known to report on extreme cases of hypocrisy involving pastors or politicians who rave a good anti-gay game but then get caught in some highly compromising situation. Think of it as a service we provide. The latest involves one Pastor Kenneth Adkins, a prominent Florida preacher who gloated publicly after 49 people were massacred at Pulse nightclub in Orlando last year: “I don’t see none of them as victims. I see them as getting what they deserve!” Suddenly (in)famous in the Blogosphere, Adkins was soon back in the news after being arrested for sexually molesting a fifteen-year old boy and girl, and he has since been sentenced to life in prison. The sordid details, as always, are particular to the case at hand. Adkins’ MO was to pay the teens to have sex while he watched and joined in. The question, of course, is why these guys never get the message that anti-gay ranting isn’t going to save them. Indeed, we’ve seen this movie so many times, we can almost state it as a proposition: the more baroquely extreme the anti-gay rants, the more likely it is that the ranter has something deeply weird going on in his private life. Which raises the question: are they trying to get busted?
Next! We know Liza Minelli hasn’t always made the smartest choices in the husband department, but now we learn that one tried to kill Elton John, and almost succeeded! Liza has had four husbands to date, some famous in their own right, like singer-songwriter Peter Allen and TV producer Jack Haley, Jr.—both demonstrably gay. Number three, Mark Gero, was kind of a cipher, but then she married TV producer and personality David Gest in 2002. Soon after the wedding, Elton John gibed to the press: “I’d love to buy Liza a heterosexual husband.” According to Gest’s bodyguard, Imad Handi, Gest flew into a rage and announced: “I’m going to kill that motherfucker. He’s a dead man!” True to his word, he proceeded to hire a hit man who, for $50,000, agreed to do the deed at a 2003 concert in Anaheim—until Handi persuaded him to call it off. Gest died last year, and Handi has written a tell-all memoir. Turns out Gest was pretty gay, or perhaps bisexual, and was obsessed with Simon Cowell. Meanwhile, given her pattern, Liza is long overdue for husband number five; it’s not clear why he hasn’t materialized. Okay, it’s totally clear.
This Seat Is Taken In Mexico City there are separate subway cars and busses for men and women, a measure designed to protect women from men’s unwanted advances. A new campaign takes a more indirect tack, using graphic persuasion to get the message across: a seat molded to resemble a male torso and anatomically complete pelvic region. Above it reads the message: “It is uncomfortable to sit here, but that is nothing compared to the sexual violence that women suffer on their daily journeys.” The “penis seat” has had the intended shock value, provoking much controversy in the media. Whether it has cut down on sexual harassment is unclear. Some might argue that the seat is suggestive in a way that could actually give some people ideas. And who knows whether some men—and women—might find the ride in that seat not uncomfortable at all? Some might even think it improves their daily journeys. For them, alas, the seats are not a permanent fixture but only a temporary campaign to make women feel safer. Maybe.
