From the 'Sex and the City' watch—as profiled in The New York Times ( May 20 ) —the four young ladies in the movie-made-from-the-TV-show are going to be their semi-wild selves for their fans, but did you catch the interview with 'Sex' girl Cynthia Nixon in The New York Times Magazine ( May 18 ) ? In it, she straightforwardly says she's left the father of her kids and moved in with a woman and that the woman, 'Christine,' '... doesn't wear women's clothes'—not even any kind of women's shoes? And, no, Cynthia does not think of Christine as the male figure in the relationship. Sex in the city, indeed.
From the 'Muslim and Gay' folder, the ISIM ( International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World ) Review ( Spring 2008 ) , a publication, I admit, I was not aware of, there is an article with the ungainly name of 'Queer-Friendly Islamic Hermeneutics.' Translated, that means— loosely—gay-friendly religious interpretations of the Koran. Some liberal Muslims have called for a reformation of Islam since, among other things, many modern Muslim clerics are hostile to homosexuality. The article points out that the prophet himself never criticized homosexuals, and one mixed-sex person ( probably a naturally intersexed person ) lived in his family's quarters. The article also revamps the Sodom-and-Gomorrah story of Lot ( called Lut in the Koran ) so that it becomes an anti-hospitality story instead of an anti-gay one.
Same folder: The New York Times ( May 21 ) reviews the flick 'A Jihad for Love.' There are lots of angst among gay Muslims dealing with their gayness, but the documentary by Parvez Sharma doesn't catch fire for the reviewer.
Same folder: The Chicago Tribune ( May 21 ) says a gay Iranian teen, Mehdi Kazemi, has been granted asylum in Britain because he rightly fears execution if he returns home: His boyfriend was hanged for sodomy with Kazemi.
From the 'I-Sorta-Liked-It' file, in a review of a book 'The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like Minded America is Tearing Us Apart' by Bill Bishop and Robert G. Cushing in The New York Times Book Review ( May 18 ) , a map of the United States is conjured up with areas such as Biblenia ( guess where ) , Upper Crustatia, Alamomania and the like. The area around San Francisco? Homogenia.
Check out two contrasting looks at the whole gay-marriage situation in California: Columnist Dennis Byrne, in The Chicago Tribune ( May 15 ) , trots out his standard conservative homophobia with 'Gay marriage decision came from a tyrannical court.' He calls the decision '... curious, obtuse, ... laughable.' Neil Steinberg, in The Chicago Sun-Times ( May 18 ) , calls gay marriage a 'non-problem,' and says that '... gay marriage will be a ho-hum part of mundane, unquestioned ordinary reality in 20 or 30 years.'
From the 'Lost-and-Found' file, The Chicago Tribune ( May 17 ) reviews 'The Red Leather Diary' by Lily Koppel. The book was inspired when Koppel found an 80-year-old diary in a dumpster in New York. Incredibly, she found the still living 91-year-old diarist, Florence Howitt, and they both recount Florence's gloriously bisexual adventures in 1930s New York.