All in a Day’s Work We’ve covered our share of homophobic clergymen and politicians who got caught engaging in the very acts that they condemn, but there’s always a new wrinkle in the dirty laundry. Take the case of R.J. May, a South Carolina state rep. and firebrand who railed against child porn and what he called “trans-plus sex,” with a special passion for censoring books with LGBT characters. But that was until R.J. was busted for sending over 1,000 images of underage sexual abuse during a six-day period last year. The charges against him included distributing images of children as young as toddlers and infants. As of this writing, he was in an Edgefield (SC) County jail facing a federal indictment on ten counts of distributing porn. What’s striking about R.J. is the rapidity with which he toggled between the two pursuits. Just minutes before emailing some of those 1,000 images, he was sending a holy message to constituents that ended with “Amen. Happy Easter.” In such cases, we’ve always assumed that the anti-gay stuff was a cover, or perhaps atonement, for those wicked thoughts and deeds. But this guy was just plain nihilistic, not to mention reckless.
Besties Even if you’re avoiding the news, you probably saw this statue of Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein, which showed up on the National Mall last Sept. 23rd. Now known as “Best Friends Forever,” it was erected under a permit issued for “The Secret Handshake.” Twelve feet tall and fashioned out of foam, resin, wood, and wire and painted to look like bronze, the statue was removed by the Park Police the next day, but somehow it was rescued by the anonymous owners, after which it spent time in a number of locales, winding up in front of Busboys and Poets Café on 14th and V Streets in DC. Clearly the main point is to highlight the close ties between the two men, but it is of more than passing interest (at least for us) that they’re holding hands and dancing. And those backward kicks they’re both doing—can we tawk?
Bedroom Material Let us pause to remark on the fact that an openly gay man has been named People magazine’s “Sexiest Man Alive.” His name is Jonathan Bailey, and he’s the star of the Netflix series Bridgerton, but also starred in the gay series Fellow Travelers, among other mouthwatering roles. Perhaps the choice was intended as a provocation—of course it got a rise out of the right-wing blogosphere, which took it as further evidence of moral chaos, the End of Days, etc.—but perhaps there’s an underlying message for our times. Underpinning the current reactionary regime is a resurgence of heterosexual men that seems like a Reconquista, with women and LGBT people among those running for cover. People’s readers and creators are largely women, and it may just be that for this readership straight men in general just don’t seem quite as hot as they used to. What’s counterintuitive about the choice of a gay man is that “the sexiest man” is meant to turn on some kind of collective sexual fantasy that a gay man is unlikely to satisfy. Nevertheless, maybe that sense of longing and frustration is precisely the mood that’s being captured.
It Wasn’t a Bitch Slap In a story that began to simmer last summer, what caught our eye, and everyone’s, was the report that France’s First Lady, Brigitte Macron, had “bitch-slapped” a woman for claiming that she (Macron) was actually a man in deep disguise. It turns out the phrase was being used metaphorically to refer to a lawsuit that Mme Macron had filed against one Candace Owens, an American who’d been making this spurious claim on her podcast. Owens, a MAGA Republican and conspiracy fabulist with a following, had already been discredited for promulgating patently false anti-Semitic myths. For whatever reason, Owens’ allegations really got under Madame’s skin—maybe it was the claim that the First Lady was really her brother Jean-Michel disguised as a women—so she sued for libel. Long story short: she prevailed in court, and Ms. Owens was ordered to pay €13,500 (about $15,000) in damages. The defense’s argument was not helped by Jean-Michel’s presence in court, though the allegation was always an absurdity. Why it was ever invented is anyone’s guess—perhaps in some tortuous way an attempt to take the focus off Trump’s troubles with Epstein while attacking both transgender people and France’s liberal prime minister.
