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WINDY CITY TIMES
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Media Watch
by JIM EDMINSTER 2005-10-12
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This article shared 2330 times since Wed Oct 12, 2005
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The New Yorker ( 10/10 ) has an incredible story about, of all things, Harvard's admissions policies. A review of the book, The Chosen, by Jerome Karabel says a number of people at Harvard noticed in 1905 that too many students were, ahem, Jewish, so they invented a new criteria for new students to avoid this 'problem': among other things the system depended on appearance—committees of older men checking out possible entrants. Athletes became twice as likely to be admitted as other sub-groups. No one till now has commented on either the anti-Jewish or the sexual overtones. How absolutely baroque that Harvard's Good-Old-Boy network had a genesis as a nasty bit of anti-Semitism and has evolved into a homoerotic beauty contest.
Last week we told you about manga, the gay male love tales—Japanese comics for American women. This week the Chicago Reader ( 10/7 ) dips into the related but even stranger 'slash' fanzines wherein writers ( mostly women ) create their own male/male love sketches for already existing stories, such as Star Trek ( imagine, Good Lord, Spock and Kirk ) to the easily mined ( because it's virtually all male ) Lord of the Rings. 'Slash now exists for hundreds of TV shows and movies, from The A-Team to Harry Potter. If it has two male characters in it, someone is making them f**k. More important to slash fans, someone is also making them kiss, hug, cry, cuddle and talk about their relationships.'
Cathleen Falsani, the Chicago Sun-Times' ( 9/30 ) religion writer, quotes a gay Catholic priest on the topic of the Vatican's ban on gay seminarians: ' ... if the clergy has become this gay, is this not the hand of God? Shouldn't the archbishops and the cardinals and the Holy Father be paying a little bit of attention to what God is doing, as opposed to what they think they ought to be doing?' On the same topic Father Andrew Greeley ( also a sociologist ) writes in the Sun-Times ( 10/7 ) that about a sixth of American priests are gay, that two Vatican documents already ban ordination of gays ( with no attempt to enforce them ) , and that the new document causing such a fuss has not yet been released by the church ( so the people commenting on it haven't seen it ) .
Apparently even dead, gay folks cause problems or so it would seem in Seattle where the much-deceased Stuart Smailes left a million dollar bequest for a fountain sculpture to the city. So far, so good except it had to depict a nude man. The city chose a statue called 'Father and Son' by New York sculptor Louise Bourgeois. The Chicago Tribune ( 10/4 ) says some love the depiction of a man and a boy separated by walls of water but a conservative talk show host calls it 'a thinly veiled homage to pedophilia.' Let's not tell him about the Acropolis. |
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This article shared 2330 times since Wed Oct 12, 2005
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