Browsing: July-August 2006

July-August 2006

Blog Posts

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ODESSA, IN WEST TEXAS, feels like the remote edge of something in the way you might imagine Vladivostok: far from anywhere, exotic, but not the kind of exotic that attracts tourists. It’s an oil town, mainly. Buildings are tacky, functional. The land is flat, dry, barren, with a local culture to match: the big deal in Odessa is, famously, high school football. West Odessa, bleaker still, is the scrubby outskirts where they put the “adult” stuff that Odessa doesn’t want.

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IN THE GAY ARCHIPELAGO, anthropologist Tom Boellstorff of the University of California, Irvine, sets out to define, interpret, and reflect upon what it means to be gay in Indonesia. …

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Today we tend to take lesbian images for granted. While k d lang, Ellen DeGeneres, and Melissa Etheridge are visible lesbian icons, there is no uniformity to the lesbian image because, unfortunately, lesbians are still held up next to straight women rather than next to other lesbians to construct categories of normal. Tiraz True Latimer’s Women Together / Women Apart doesn’t make this mistake. …

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THE POLITICAL DUST STORM kicked up by the Oscar-winning film Brokeback Mountain, however predictable, found right-wingers railing that yet another symbol of American “family values,” the cowboy, was being desecrated. A typical Christian blogger screamed: “Now they’re out to destroy the American legend of the cowboy. God help us, and John Wayne forgive us!”

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WIDESPREAD INDIGNATION at the suggestion that Abraham Lincoln might have enjoyed sharing his bed with other men, that he delayed marriage to make it last as long as he could, and that he occasionally returned to the practice even in the White House when Mrs. Lincoln was away, suggests the fragility of tolerance for homosexuality.

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Can three decades have passed since I sat in a darkened Manhattan cinema transfixed by the cherubic-faced Robby Benson giving the performance of a lifetime as the innocent and emotionally troubled Billy Joe in the movie Ode to Billy Joe? Any gay person watching that landmark flick could immediately identify with the conflicted protagonist and both sympathize and empathize with his plight.

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