From the "Romeo-and-Romeo" Department... News of the Weird in the Chicago Reader ( 8/3 ) : The Canadian government has mounted an all-out campaign to dismantle the ultra-violent Quebec chapter of the Hell's Angels. The chapter went from bad to worse after hiring Ace Simard and Danny Boy Kane as contract killers. The two bikers fell in, then out of love, and then co-operated with authorities. Kane killed himself last year.
The New York Times ( 8/5 ) reports that Tyler Curtain, a teacher of critical and queer theory in the English department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has said, "Something about the Clinton-Lewinsky relationship is definitely queer . ... If, as Toni Morrison has argued, there is some truth to the claim that Clinton is our first African-American president, then I want to pipe up: He's our first queer one as well. Monica's famous navy blue dress from the Gap was stained on a day that included bestowal of Walt Whitman's 'Leaves of Grass' by Wm. Jefferson Clinton on Monica Lewinsky ... Whitman has been used as a shibboleth for non-normative sexuality ... ."
The New York Times ( 8/4 ) in a long, funny op-ed page article entitled "1 Mayor, 2 Guys, 1 Shih Tzu" reveals Rudolph Giuliani has been rooming with his good friends, gay couple Howard Koeppel and his partner, Mark Hsiao. "In happier times ... [ they ] double-dated with the Mayor and Donna Hanover." Now during his divorce the mayor is staying with them. The mayor's been picking up gay expressions from the couple such as "a friend of Dorothy" and even told Howard to calm down about Mark's collection of pillows saying "You're lucky you have someone like Mark." Noting that this situation has already been co-opted for a TV series on Spin City several years ago, the article quotes Mr. Koeppel on his house guest: "... Actually I love him. It's not sexual, it's just mental. I have my preferences and I don't find him attractive at all."
The Chicago Tribune ( 8/7 ) quotes ( actor ) writer-director Kevin Smith re gay jokes in his new film Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. GLAAD has asked Smith's studio, Dimension Films, to donate money to the Matthew Shepard Foundation and make mention of GLAAD in the closing credits. Smith ( who plays the cute, chunky, bearish Silent Bob ) says GLAAD ought to do what it's doing, but that he didn't make jokes at the gay community: "I made jokes at the expense of two characters who neither I nor the audience have ever held up to be paragons of intellect. They're idiots."
From The Chicago Tribune ( 8/8 ) a report of two elderly nuns who are also siblings being held in prison in Pekin, Ill., for trespassing on army property to protest American politics in Latin America. Eighty-eight-year-old Sr. Dorothy Marie Hennessey and her sister Gwen, both Franciscan nuns, have been activists for years and among other things fought for gay rights and lived with AIDS patients. They say they've adjusted to prison life south of Peoria except for the other prisoners treating them like saints.
The Chicago Tribune ( 9/10 ) reports on the cult-like status of artist Frida Kahlo...the bisexual wife of Mexican muralist Diego Rivera has, 47 years after her death, overtaken her husband in fame. "Life-size painted Frida cut-outs adorn stores and homes" in Mexico. A movie based on her life is to be released next year. She broke many conventions...in a patriarchal society it was no great scandal that Rivera had other liasons, but Kahlo also had them, with men and women.
