Lesbigay watchers of the Oscars can congratulate Aussie Russell Crowe on his Best Actor award, but we can also hope that the hunk who looks great in a skirt, umm, toga we mean, will not now, with fame draped around his shoulders, start indulging in homophobic movies and pronouncements like his countryman Mel Gibson. Crowe, whose award was noted in every major paper in the world, of course got his first notice playing a gay character in The Sum of Us. Should Crowe make any 'phobic moves we could always sic another of his countrymen on him—Dame Edna!
The New Yorker (4/2/01) in an article "Cries and Whispers" on novelist Edith Wharton, notes that at the turn-of-the-previous-century, " ... it is undeniably striking that among the four major female writers in the English language of this period—Virginia Woolf, Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein and Wharton—there was so astoundingly little practicing heterosexuality, so much aversion to the male." Woolf, Cather, and Stein were lesbian in various degrees while Wharton lived in an unconsummated 28-year marriage. The article goes on to emphasize the hothouse fin de ciecle atmosphere of Wharton's social life where she and (closet gay) novelist Henry James cultivated and exchanged the same young man, one Morton Fullerton, as a lover. Also pointed out is Wharton's tendency to portray in her novels male characters as indecisive (as to marriage, anyhow) dilletantes who are read today as classic closet cases. Her private papers, scrupulously kept, reveal both an interesting little pornographic sketch of father/(little) daughter incest and documents showing she supported the unsuspecting Henry James through some difficult times in his life with money transferred through their publishers.
Remember the Indian hijras reported here recently who wanted a third box besides "male" and "female" on India's census forms? The "hijiras" are mostly eunuchs (boys "fixed" at birth) but they have been joined by effeminate homosexuals. News of the weird in the Chicago Reader (3/30) reports they have won a number of local elections and are making moves toward forming a political party.
News of the Weird (3/23) also reported on a convention of "Encouragers" in New York City — gay men who like to fatten up their partners. Beware of anyone offering a second helping!
Tom Stoppard's play as reviewed from its opening has The New York Times theater critic ecstatic. The review (3/30) deals with the immediate afterlife of the semi-closeted English poet A. E. Housman. Stoppard stints no history or ideas—some extremely obscure to modern American audiences—but still has produced a fast-moving and moving piece of work. Oscar Wilde makes a spectacular cameo, the older and younger Housman meet and romantic sparks fly, the classical riverboat, Charon wisecracks. The whole play is an essay on love (and the example chosen is gay), presented in the words of a critic as "Hell ... [turning] out to be an old-style academic's dream of a cocktail party."
A number of different papers and magazines are commenting on the issuance of Alfred Hitchcock's films on DVD. Check out Rope, Hitch's one continuous shot drama which is based on the gay Chicago murderers Leopold and Loeb.
All you gay movie fans need to go out and get the Vanity Fair April 2001 issue. It's a special Legends of Hollywood edition. Many great stills and articles—the one I honed in on was of Myra Breckinridge, the gender-bender movie based on the Gore Vidal novel about a man who becomes a woman who wants to be a man again. You probably haven't seen it unless you are better than middle-aged because its video release disappeared almost as soon as it came out. Too bad, because this movie was probably inspirational for the phrase "so bad it's good." Mae West's in it, wrote her own dialog. Raquel Welch plays the post-operative Myra, who had started life as Myron, played by Rex Reed. (Farrah Fawcet has a featured role in it.) The whole business was a spectacular celluloid disaster, according to article author Steven Daly, and its director, Michael Sarne, became a pariah.
Need a book for a Sapphic love of your life or merely a dykish acquaintance? Maybe she'd like Woman Sailors and Sailor's Women by David Cordingly. Reviewed in the Chicago Sun-Times (3/18) the book presents examples of "women disguised as cabin boys or marines," "homosexuality on board naval ships," wives who joined husbands aboard ships, women pirates, and births on board (where male babies became known as "sons-of-guns" because they were born next to the canons).
The gay satirist David Sedaris and his sister Amy have a play in New York, The Book of Liz. Reviewed in The New York Times (3/28), the plot deals with a runaway from an Amish-type sect called the Squeamish. The play takes on 12-step programs, spiritualism, alternative medicine, and gay waiters. All targets are neatly skewered a la shish-kabob. Ms. Sedaris stars as Sister Elizabeth who flees her sect only to find refuge in a Pilgrim-themed restaurant where her Squeamish costume is a natural.
Jim's e-mail address: daunsenbere@prodigy.net
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