From the ‘Retro’ file (N.Y. Times – 8/17): New on DVD the first 11 hours of the late ’80s cop show Wiseguy. Today’s The Sopranos has some subtlety in it but it doesn’t have the homoerotic overtones that ‘Wiseguy’ had. Star Ken Wahl (a hunk and a half, and a Sex and the City regular) played F.B.I. agent Vinnie Terranova who appears to like Sonny Steelgrave, a mob boss, more and … uh … more. ‘At the time, it wasn’t quite clear how much could be read into Vinnie and Sonny’s charged relationship. But today there’s no denying: the first half-season of Wiseguy is a testosterone-drenched love story of aggressive men attracted to the manliness they recognize in each other.’ In the original last episode the two men, after a nock-down brawl, lock eyes to the soundtrack’s ‘Nights in White Satin’ which ends with the words ‘And I love you, oh, how I love you.’ Mr. Wahl in a commentary regrets the song’s removal (for contractual reasons) from the DVD ‘because it really said it all.’
Yes, you’ve all read the news of Janis Ian’s marriage to Patricia Snyder, but The N.Y.Times (9-7) tells all the cool parts in an essay on its wedding celebrations page. The two met when Ian advertised for a chess partner. On their first date Snyder presented Ian with a book about roadkill: Flattened Fauna. And, the whole wedding party at City Hall in Toronto wore bright Hawaiian shirts. Ian said she’d write no songs about the wedding because she usually writes ‘about things that make me uncomfortable.’ She added, ‘we’re getting married because we deserve the right to be married.’
Tab Hunter will tell all in a new autobiography according to The N.Y. Times (9-9). Scandal followed him around in the ’50s when movie mags hinted he was gay. He was, having Anthony Perkins as a mate for a few years. Hunter decided to write his story to make sure everything comes ‘… from the horse’s mouth.’ Some of the touching moments surely will be the subterfuge involved in being gay in the ’50s—Hunter talks about going to the movies with Perkins in disguise, or going at different times.
The Chicago Tribune (9-10) writes of the relatively new gay scene in India. Very much a matter of embarrassment and disgrace to families, homosexuality is safely discussed there on the Internet. A new book The Boyfriend by R. Raj Rao is an account of a male journalist and his untouchable (caste) lover. But even gay activist Yadavendra Singh has agreed to marry to please his family, though he is marrying a lesbian. (Wasn’t this a movie?)