From the 'We-Already-Knew-You-Weren't-Gay' file the Chicago Sun-Times ( 9/23 ) says that newscaster Ted Koppel at his friend Peter Jenning's memorial said 'I am not gay—not that there's anything wrong with that—but from the time I first met Peter 41 years ago 'til our last meeting a few weeks ago, I felt a thrill whenever I saw him.'
Chicago's own Neil Steinberg, Chicago Sun-Times ( 9/23 ) columnist, skewers the Catholic Church's purge of gay priests: 'Those wayward priests were abusing boys, not boogieing it up with guys their own age in dim Halsted Street bars,' and '... the funny thing—if any of this was funny—is that while the gay lifestyle is derided as 'unnatural', celibacy, of course, is the most unnatural lifestyle of them all.' The NY Times' writers actually wavered on this topic. An op-ed piece ( 9/25 ) thought purging gays was just an internal church matter of following its own values while another ( 9/27 ) said that not even high Vatican officials expect that this anti-gay policy will lead to a 'gay-free' church.
The Washington Blade ( 9/23 ) has done a little research and found the Pentagon has a secret policy to send those reservists who say they are gay right into combat. This is for the stated purpose of preventing soldiers who want to avoid war from 'playing gay.' But what if the person who 'came out' was really gay? What's happened to 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell'?
They've turned the bouncy good-natured 1999 flic But I'm a Cheerleader into a cute musical in New York. The plot's the same: no one is foiled from becoming lesbian or gay in spite of being sent to a boot-camp to 'cure' them. Maybe this'll swoop into Chicago ( The NY Times, 9/20 ) .
Andrew Sullivan, the gay journalist, has the last, best word on the Penguin Wars. Liberals and conservatives have drafted the tuxedoed birds to their causes: the movie 'March of the Penguins' ' affirms traditional norms like monogamy, sacrifice and child rearing,' while Silo & Roy, New York's gay penguin pair make headlines. It turns out, says Sullivan, that penguins are positively non-monogamous and Silo left Roy for a hussy named Scrappy. Quoth Sullivan: 'How do I put this gently to both the social right and the PC left? ... We're not penguins ... . We're humans. [ Just go to that movie or the zoo ] ... And marvel at the beautiful, confounding mystery of it all. Not everything is political. And not everything is about us.'
The Chicago Reader ( 9/23 ) excerpted gay advice columnist Dan Savage's new book The Commitment: Love, Sex, Marriage and My Family as its lead story. In spite of his mention of personal non-monogamous sex, the thesis of the book would seem to be: '... straight people have redefined marriage to a point that it no longer makes any logical sense to exclude same-sex couples.'