Browsing: March-April 2006

March-April 2006

Blog Posts

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Although Brokeback is too painful a movie to watch many times, the curious thing is it makes you want to fall in love again. Instead, one listens to the soundtrack, which alternates between the pastoral beauty of Gustavo Santaolalla’s theme on the guitar-so spare, so haunting-and the raucous, messy world of the bars, where Matthew Shepard met his killers. I’m not sure why Brokeback is so moving. But in the end I think it has something to do with its being what McMurtry called it: “a tragedy of emotional deprivation.” This is surely a universal experience, but at a certain point in life most gay men seem to conclude that it’s the particular fate of being gay.

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IN LIPSHITZ SIX, or Two Angry Blondes, T Cooper writes the story of four generations of the Lipshitz family. In 1903, after an especially horrific pogrom, Hersh and Esther and their four children emigrate from Kishinev, Russia, to the United States.

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One aspect of the corruption and bribery mega-scandal shaking Washington that’s swirling around conservative lobbyist Jack Abramoff, and which hasn’t gotten much mass media attention, is how a lot of dough from Abramoff-controlled slush funds went to leading homophobes from the religious Right.

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IS IT POSSIBLE to talk about gay sex in the 1970’s without talking about hiv/aids in the 1980’s? Are we justified in presenting the 70’s as the decade in which gay men had anonymous sex in public parks, backrooms, and bathhouses, all under the guise of “gay liberation”? The release of a new documentary, Gay Sex in the 70s, raises these and other questions.

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While Lynch is a master storyteller and Sweet Creek’s good-versus-evil plot makes it a page turner, the characters are so vividly drawn as to overshadow the action of the book. So interesting are their inner lives that one suspects Lynch’s storylines are merely an excuse to delve into the human soul.

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Thoughts on news of the day

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While bringing to life the vibrant homoerotic tradition in Islamic culture, El-Rouayheb concludes that male same-sex desire was not the same as our current understanding of homosexuality, but rather something else, and that “sodomitical” acts were intensely problematical during this 300-year period, just as they are today.

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STANDING IN LINE for Brokeback Mountain the afternoon it opened in Washington at a little theater near Dupont Circle, I saw two kinds of people: silent gay men of a…More