We’ve all heard that Tom Cruise won $10 million from someone who said among other things that Mr. Cruise was gay but did you hear Melvin, the resident nelly person on the Tom Joyner radio show (Z103 on 1/17)? ‘Don’t you remember?’ he said. ‘Liberace won the same suit.’
From the ‘Never-Heard-Of-Bears’ file, Julie Burchill (a fellow) writes in The Guardian (1-15) how ‘If it moves, shave it’ bacame his personal manifesto. Burchill, gay, goes on: ‘The simplistic view of beardies and other weirdos is that people who dislike body hair, their own or other peoples, are neurotic and anti-sex, scared of their animal side … I’m sure it can’t be true of the increasing number of men who are happily waxing their legs, chests, and backs, shaving their armpits, noses and ears and plucking their eyebrows.’ Further: ‘… the more truly interested in sex someone is, the more they are likely to admire fur-free flesh, on themselves or on others.’ All this, Mr. Burchill admits derives from a time, when as a 13-year-old he was horrified by seeing Peter Sellers in an old ’60s movie with a hairy chest. In his own desperately-in-need-of-therapy words: ‘… an upper body so covered in coarse black hair that he looked as though he’d been dipped first in tar, then in iron filings and then as the finishing touch, had the inner bags from a dozen heavy-duty vacuum cleaners dumped over him.’
Gay-themed books, plays and movies: from the New Yorker (1-20), Colum McCann’s third novel, Dancer is based on the interior life of Rudolf Nureyev including a 36-page sentence of a night with one Victor Pareci which starts in ‘Nureyev’s apartment in the Dakota, winds through night clubs and bathhouses and concludes in a row of trucks parked in Manhattan’s meat-packing district.’ Charles Busch, according to the NY Times (1-17) appears as Lady Sylvia Allington in his new play Shanghai Moon. Though he plays a tough broad, he is part of a mini-trend to cast men (usually gay) as women. Fortunately Busch is not cast as the ingenue because he looks rather like Milton Berle in drag. The 1975 gay novel P.S. Your Cat is Dead has been made into a movie starring (and written and directed by) Steve Guttenberg. The novel was one extended (cute and funny) coming out anecdote. Let’s just see if the main character is ready to fall into the gay burglar’s arms at the conclusion as was the case in the book.