Now you figure out if this political cartoon from the Chicago Tribune 5/30 is subtly homophobic: Dubya is in bed with an Archie Bunker type labelled "Far Right" while his wife, labelled "Centrist America" says, having discovered them, "In the words of your own father, Dubya ... you're in deep doo-doo!"
Both The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune of 6/1 report that on the 20th anniversary of the first recognition of AIDS as an illness, HIV is rapidly rising among young gay African-American men at a rate of infection six times greater than among white gays; at the same time The NY Times reports the plague has infected virtually every inhabitant of a remote Chinese village because of a bizarre Chinese medical practice. The very poor people of Donghu, China sold their blood to raise money but the blood collection agents put all the blood in a centrifuge, took out the plasma, and re-injected the left-over red cells back into the sellers.
Various articles on population from the There-Ought-To-Be-A-Gay-Angle-Here Department: William Safire, on the op-ed page of The New York Times ( 5/21 ) , commenting on the polygamy trial in Utah, says the real solution is polyandry, which allows women to have more than one husband. A letter commenting on Safire's ( perhaps tongue-in-cheek ) essay says Safire defames gays who want to marry but can't. In the meantime, back in China, the Chicago Trib ( 5/30 ) reports that census figures show that because of sex-selective abortions ( i.e., no girls ) , "bachelor villages" inhabited mostly by men dot the poorer parts of China. Can socially sanctioned homosexuality to assuage social unrest be far behind?
In an article entitled "Fandom's Final Frontier?" the Tribune ( 5/28 ) surveys the odd farther reaches of fanzines ( fans' small magazines ) , the world of Slash where ( mostly women ) fans write and exchange homoerotic scripts for various TV shows and movies. They relate in glorious pornographic detail Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock going where no Star Trek script has gone. Ditto Starsky and Hutch, Hawkeye and Trapper, Lake and Han Solo. The article goes on "... if it has fans, it has been slashed." "Slash, by the way, comes from the mark used in the original Kirk-Spock coupling: K/S. Most of the writers are straight women who are "picking up where the show left off, or left out." "Many of the story lines are reminiscent of romance novels—with a striking difference. The main characters are truly equal. And the fact that women must turn to gay male relationships to find this equality says much about the way women are portrayed on TV and in the movies."
A major overview of gay book publishing "Transition Time for Gay Works" appeared in The New York Times ( 5/10 ) . What publishers call L.G.B.T. books ( lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender ) face a number of challenges: assimilation—books that earlier would've been perceived as gay are now considered "regular" fiction; KoolAIDS: the Art of War by Rebih Alaneddine, and The Lazarus Rhumba by Ernest Mestre are examples of this category. Another problem may be that gay people active in publishing and the gay movement may be getting out. Even Publishers' Weekly, which recently put out an issue mostly devoted to LGBT books, is not sure where those books are going. By the way, this article mentions an online gay book club, www.insightoutbooks.com, founded less than a year ago. It has 11,000 member, offers about 350 works, adds 15 books to its list each month, and will start to offer members a monthly catalogue in July.
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