From the ‘Taking-The-Les-Out-Of-Lesbos’ file: The NY Times Book Review (5-18) covers Erica Jong’s new novel Sappho’s Leap. Jong has written a rather fun parody of the Odyssey with Sappho as Odysseus but while the book has plenty of lesbian overtones, Amazons galore, Sappho herself has been transformed into a strong, competant romantic, umm … heterosexual.
From the ‘Gloat-A-Rama’ file, Frank Rich, in The NY Times in a long essay about the ramifications of William Bennett, America’s self-appointed cultural [and more] commissar, and his gambling habit, points out a Bennettian hypocrisy in a 1997 quote that ‘the best available research suggests that the average life span of male homosexuals is around 43 years of age.’ Says Rich, ‘the best available research has never suggested anything of the kind. … [Bennett’s] … sub rosa agenda was to stoke hysteria about gay men with AIDS much as he had about ‘super predatory urban blacks.”
John Singer Sargeant, the 19th century portrait painter, may have had a few mysteries in his life. Never married and presumed heterosexual, The NY Times (5-18) opines that his most famous (and scandalous) picture, ‘Madame X,’ supposedly of Amelie Gautreau, at closer study more resembles a young man of Sargeant’s acquaintance, Albert de Belleroche. Sargeant, older than Albert, had a ‘romantic friendship’ in which Sargeant referred to the younger man as ‘baby.’ They were lifelong friends, but, hmmm, would you want to portray your best male friend in an elegant black evening gown?
Harvey Fierstein in the NY Time (5-11) wrote a Mother’s Day essay, touting himself as a mother inasmuch as he is currently playing one (in Hairspray). Being old, and wise, and yes, motherly to all the young actors around him he is even, occasionally called ‘mom.’
The NY Times (5-22, 5-26) reports two deaths: C.A. Tripp, the psychologist and author of The Homosexual Matrix, the book which ‘tried to dispel many popular misconceptions about homosexuality, as well as to suggest new ideas about sexual attraction,’ died May 11. He had recently finished a book about Lincoln’s homosexual encounters.
Pepper LaBeija, AKA William Jackson, the ‘glamorous queen of the Harlem drag balls’ who was documented in the movie Paris is burning, died May 14.
From the New Yorker Gay Cartoon file (6-2): A person reading the personals sees ‘Transgendered person, male to female, seeks transgendered person, female to male, for possible foursome.’ The same issue has a long article about ‘Gertrude Stein’s War,’ an account of years when the two Jewish lesbians lived behind Nazi lines in Vichy, France.