The NY Times in its obit of gay architect Philip Johnson was very, very careful to make sure they mentioned his gayness—they're still catching flack about not mentioning Susan Sontag's sexuality. ( They said they asked her son and he wouldn't confirm it. Oh please—why didn't they pull up the old New Yorker article where SHE said she was gay. )
Rita Mae Brown, the lesbian novelist, has downright sneaky publicists—two full pages in the New Yorker ( 2/7 ) , one of which is a crossword puzzle to win a cruise, touting her mysteries ( co-written with her cat ) . A blue state trifecta—animal loving, intellectualism, and gay-friendly. ( So as to keep the PETA folks off my back her co-author is Sneaky Pie Brown. )
A new book on Michelangelo reviewed by the Guardian ( 1/29 ) says author James Hall's Michelangelo and the Reinvention of the Human Body gets the gay artist dead-to-rights: his massive but passive male bods have always made everyone ( especially other artists ) nervous—is the gay sculptor/painter espousing a ' ... strange cult of body-building and body torment?' or is he just drawing what he likes—'the first great tunnel visionary.' At any rate the reviewer points out the Renaissance artist's right-now 21st century influence: the depiction of superheroes in the modern cartoon strip.
For the film buffs out there: the Guardian ( 1/29 ) says that from 1970 to 1980 the British film industry survived by producing a series of hilariously bad semi-porn movies that satirized the dirty movie while being dirty movies. These, umm, devices had names like Confessions of a Window Cleaner and Adventures of a Taxi Driver and starred real actors from British cinema and the telly. They were about as sexy '... as an in-growing toenail.' They did incredibly well at the box office and often '... were made by gay writers and directors who couldn't stand making heterosexual blue movies [ so they began ] ... deliberately camping up the plot and dialogue.' These films kept thousands of people working but were finally done in by 'proper porn' and VCRs.
'Who's your daddy?', the phrase familiar in pop & hip-hop, has a gay origin, says an article in the Chicago Tribune ( 1/18 ) which looked it up in the dictionary: 'the partner who plays the dominant or masculine role in a homosexual relationship'; example 'jailhouse daddy'.
Reuben Cox, a photographer, has an exhibition in New York. The NY Times ( 1/27 ) reports all his subjects are middle-aged transvestites or transexuals who live in the South: 'It is clear that his subjects are women by choice, not birth, and that this choice has etched their faces with amazing mixtures of sadness, defiance and nobility.'