It's been all over the local news, but just in case you missed it, LifeGem Memorials in Elk Grove Village can turn the cremated ashes of a loved one into a diamond; carbon from the ashes converts to graphite, which is pressurized into a diamond. And it's $4,000 for a quarter-carat.
If I'd had a diamond made from every loved one I've lost in the last 21 years of AIDS, I'd be dripping in jewels.
+++
By the time you read this, it would have happened … or not, depending on how reliable the story was. But as I sit here now, the New York Post reports that on Smackdown, the popular wrestling series, there will be the first-ever televised gay wedding between two male wrestlers.
"'World champion tag-team partners, Billy and Chuck, will tie the knot,' say World Wrestling Entertainment officials."
Except, the happy couple, Chuck Palumbo and Monty Sopp, are not gay … they're straight.
Don't ask me!! I'm just telling you what it says here.
[ And, of course, it did go down on TV last week...two straight men getting married before a huge TV audience of teenage boys. The opiate of the masses, anyone? We can only hope. ]
++
What is this, the '50s?
In St. Clairsville, Ohio's 7th District Court of Appeals says that putting cameras in a public restroom to videotape people as they use it is an illegal search. Apparently, local police concealed four cameras in a roadside rest stop in an attempt to curb sexual activity there.
The police were filming every man using the urinal and stall. Isn't that outrageous, not to mention a smidge kinky? Well boys, how would you feel about a bunch of uniformed cops watching you pee? Invasion of privacy, right …
… OK, forget it, wrong response … I knew I shouldn't have asked that question.
+++
Book of the Week: The Phallus Palace: Female to Male Transsexuals by Dean Kotula ( Alyson Books Paperback $19.95 ) .
Unless you're in the position of being a trans-person yourself, it's impossible for the rest of us to fully understand the complexities of it all.
I learned a long time ago to stop "trying" to understand it, and just "except" it. I've met so many drag queens, trannies, drag kings, bulldykes etc. after more than 20 years of working for the gay press that I don't even think about things anymore. I know a couple of people now and I have no idea what sex they are. True!
… If I ain't jumping into their panties I don't need to know what's going on in there …
All the profiles in The Phallus Palace are men who were born women, and it's fascinating, if only for the...admittedly superficial..."I can't believe that was a woman" angle.
WARNING: There is a section in the book with photographs on all the operations involved in the process, and a couple of photos of the results of phalloplasty. Yep, that's dicks to you. Although, I have to say that if I was going to have an artificial dick, I'd choose the Afro-Mambo Special. Oops! Sorry, am I stereotyping Black men as having larger equipment? You betcha sore ass I am!
Although I've treated this book as voyeurism, and for the non-trans person it is, it also reaches out for the humanity in all of us; whatever the lengths the subjects in the book go to align their bodies with who they really are, the one thing that's constant is their struggle to be accepted.
… And that's something we all have in common.
+++
Another book of trans-interest is None So Pretty: The Sexing of Rebecca Pine by Reg McKay ( Routledge Paperback $18.95 ) , which tells the true story of a man who married, had children and reached the age of 64 before he decided on a sex-change.
