From the ‘Pants-Roles’ file—NY Times (7-6). In a write-up covering the late Katharine Hepburn’s career, it is mentioned that one of her start-up films was Sylvia Scarlet (1935), ‘in which Hepburn trolls the lower depths with fellow hustler Cary Grant … . [S]he is dressed as a boy in one of the most incandescently sexy transvestite turns a major star has ever attempted.’ Take that Barbra (Yentl) and Dustin (Tootsie).
From the ‘Of-Course-We-Can-Kick-Ourselves-In-the-Butt-Again’ file, the Chicago Tribune (7-9) reports the Roman Catholic Church, paying millions in damages against pedophile priests, has now dismissed an extremely popular choir director in Rockford for being gay [see articles also in Windy City Times June 25]. Bill Stein was asked to renounce his partner of 10 years and refused. Stein did not make a big issue of his sexuality but did tell friends he wanted to adopt a child with his partner, Manny Ahorrio. Stein had doubled the size of the choir, replaced the organ and taken the choir to Italy, where they sang for the pope. Many church members are withholding pledges (better hope for no more pedophile lawsuits), and even leaving the church.
In a previously missed column, Steve Chapman of the Chicago Tribune (6-22) points out the ‘Perfect Match: Gay Marriages and Conservative Values.’ Chapman notes that the flimsier kind of marriage conservatives scream gays are fomenting already exists—living together—and gays and straights do it. ‘Gay marriage isn’t a repudiation of the values conservatives prize. It’s an affirmation.’Eric Zorn in the Chicago Tribune (7-10) tells us that the U.S. General Accounting Office has identified 1,049 federal laws and programs ‘in which a person’s marital status confers a special benefit, right, privilege or obligation.’ He goes on to ask which rights opponents of the same-sex marriage wish to deny gay couples.
It does this Kansas native’s heart good to read in The NY Times (6-29) that one of the first applications of the Supreme Court’s pro-gay decision was to set aside the sodomy conviction of a Kansas teenager who had sex with another teen boy. One would’ve liked to have been a fly on the wall in the Topeka home of the vile Rev. Phelps (whose anti-gay actions and rhetoric have managed to change many Kansan’s convictions to pro-gay) when the Supremes’ move was announced. We’d bet the Rev’s response wasn’t very … Christian.
And from the past, The New York Times (6-20) tells of the astonishing coincidence of a single Civil War nurse finding and caring for brothers on the opposite sides of the same battle. The nurse was ‘good, grey [and gay] Walt Whitman.’