From the 'Revenue-That-Dare-Not-Speak-Its-Name' file the Atlantic Monthly (10/04) reports the Congressional Budget Office has figured out how much same-sex marriages would reduce the deficit and issued a report on it. If the approximately 600,000 gay couples in the USA got hitched it would cut the deficit by $350 to $450 million annually. Want to bet the Bushies are tip-toeing around this tidbit?
Pedro Almodovar, Spain's premier movie maker, is the focus of a major essay in The NY Times magazine (9/5). Almodovar has always featured very fluid sexuality (much like his own) in his films, straight men falling for gay men, gay men falling in love with women. His latest movie Bad Education deals with Catholic priests taking advantage of teenage boys and would make Mel Gibson a trifle annoyed, no doubt.
Richard Roeper, columnist in the Chicago Sun-Times (9/13), went to renew his driver's license online and discovered you can't do it if you take drugs, are alcoholic or crazy, have changed your name or gender, or lost your license. Nice to see what actions, conditions, and tendencies the state equates.
Playwright Bryony Lavery, who wrote Frozen and Last Easter, a dark (uh-huh) comedy about cancer, tells us in The NY Times (9/12) that 'I've been straight and I've been gay and now I'm retired. I've had enough.'
Alfred Kinsey, the American sex researcher, has a book and a movie about him debuting. The NY Times (9/13) reviews T.C. Boyle's book The Inner Circle and doesn't much like it. Seems dealing with a real, flamboyant person flattens Boyle's usual over-the-top, uhh, flamboyance. Kinsey not only interviewed people about wife-swapping, masochism, and gay sex—he practiced all these things. How much Liam Neeson, as Kinsey, in Bill Condon's new flic Kinsey will illustrate (demonstrate? cultivate?) these types of relationships remains to be seen as the film won't be released until November.
The NY Times Book Review (9/12) prints a recent story by gay author Truman Capote in its entirity. 'The Bargain' was found in the archives of the New York Public Library and deals with the sale of a ratty fur coat. You may remember Capote as the author of Breakfast at Tiffany's. (Or even more obscurely in a cameo appearance as the little boy with glasses in To Kill a Mockingbird. Capote was the cousin of Harper Lee, that book's author.)
Tim Miller, the gay political artist, gets to be trivial and even take his clothes off on stage in Us, according to a new review about Broadway musicals. The show purports to identify the genesis of Miller's radical queer politics with his youthful obsession with those tune-filled plays: 'Forget Marx and Engels, I had Rodgers and Hammerstein.'
