As gay folk age ( shudder! ) and go off to gay retirement homes things cultural and geographic change in the lesbigay world: The NY Times ( 11/18 ) asks 'Is Key West Going Straight?' The longtime gay resort's guesthouses and hotels are being bought up by condo builders. The highly popular Atlantic Shores Hotel ( nude sun-bathing allowed ) is closing next year, as is The Lighthouse Court. There are still gay and lesbian trolley tours, and drag queen reviews ( tho some of the drags are straight men ) , but the Florida island's real estate is very nearly the highest in the country. Middle-class gays and straights are being priced out.
A cultural change is going on in Hollywood where The NY Times ( 11/20 ) points out the latest casting fad: straights playing gay. The number of flix where actors or actresses ( having been carefully documented as straight ) who have gay parts has increased dramatically—Heath Ledger & Jake Gyllenhaal ( Brokeback Mountain ) , Peter Sarsgaard ( Dying Gaul ) , Felicity Huffman ( Transamerica ) , Ralph Fiennes ( Bernard and Doris ) , Phillip Seymour Hoffman ( Capote ) , Cillian Murphy ( Breakfast on Pluto ) . It would seem straights playing gays is just acting while gays playing gays is just impossible.
The NY Times Book Review ( 11/6 ) checks out Hung: A Meditation on the Measure of Black Men in America by Scott Poulson-Bryant. Think fig leaves. Think several fig leaves. This supposedly serious volume centers on the tragic, yes tragic, expectations of the general population toward Black men's crotches, and the tragic, yes tragic, consequences when they don't measure up ( or even down ) . The author does manage to squeeze in the statistic that when the Kinsey Institute finally added Black men's inches to the already existing average measurements that average went up significantly.
One is tempted to say that the above is probably ridiculously unreadable while the new bio Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life by Julia Briggs ( NY Times Book Review,11/20 ) catalogs the ridiculously unread. Briggs goes thru 14 of Woolf's notoriously difficult books, dissects them, and pins 'em to a board. The book also delves into the married author's flings with other women, notably Vita Sackville-West. The thought of that snooping might've sent the unstable Woolf into a swooning swivet.