THE VOICE OF CHICAGO'S GAY, LESBIAN, BI, TRANS AND QUEER COMMUNITY SINCE 1985

Frank Rich, the culture-at-large critic for The NY Times ( 12/12 ) fears that the right-wing hoo-ha over the movie Kinsey presages a return to the real sexual repression of Kinsey's era. He lists many parallels: e.g. ignorance of sexual matters—'can sex cause cancer?' ( in the movie ) and 'can masturbation cause pregnancy?' ( CNN now ) ; abstinence is the only cure needed for VD ( then and now ) . Let us hope that it does not come to what happened to Kinsey: hounded in his later years partly for his sympathetic view of homosexuality by those homosexual homophobes FBI head J. Edgar Hoover and his boy-toy agent Clyde Tolson.

Camp is always a defense against pompous pseudo-morality. A new movie, Straight-Jacket, skewers the hypocrisy of the '50s. The flic is a comic re-telling of Rock Hudson's life story, slightly disguised. The Hudsonish character marries his producer's secretary after he's seen coming out of a gay bar. Not only is she bossy with terrible taste in furniture, 'she's a total bottom.' The NY Times ( 12/10 ) does say the spoof is too much of 'an exaggerated cartoon.'

One of our old friends, Marie Kuda, was doing a little research and found this quote in the book It Happened on Broadway by Myrna & Harvey Frommers from Ethyl Waters, the late African-American actress ( who incidentally got her start in a Victor-Victoria manner by stepping in for a sick drag queen ) : Billy Allen, a producer, went to interview Waters for a part in a possible play revival. Allen was a little nervous as she'd heard Waters was aggressively lesbian so she sat in a chair by the door. Waters told her, 'I know you've heard a lot of things about me and most of them are true, but I know when to, how to, and not you. So relax.'