From the ‘Why-Wasn’t-This-Around-When-I-Went-to-School’ File: the News of the Weird column in the Chicago Reader (11-7) says University of Michigan in Ann Arbor offered as a sociology Fall semester course, ‘How to Be Gay: Male Homosexuality and Initiation.’The same issue of the Reader has as its cover story the attempts to preserve and exhibit the enormous collection of gay artist Roger Brown. Brown, who died in 1997, left the various folk collages, groupings, and artfully arranged piles of stuff to the School of the Art Institute, which later bought his home/studio on North Halsted also. Brown is identified with the Chicago Imagists, a group including among others Ed Paschke.
From the ‘Oh-Yeah-It’s-Not-Gay-But-How-Can-You-Skip-This?’ File: the Chicago Tribune (11-1) tells of a group of Catholic high school girls who chased a flasher (who’d flashed seven times previously outside their school) down the street, tackled him (with a bit of help from two neighborhood men), beat him up, then held him until the police came. Perhaps choir boys could take a lesson to priests who assault them.
The look on the face of one Episcopal priest, the Rev. Scott Erickson, as he listened during the consecration of gay bishop, the Rev. V. Gene Robinson, to the explicit recitation of so-called gay sexual practices by an objector, the Rev. F. Earle Fox, is priceless. Fox is an example of the give-them-enough-rope-and-they’ll-hang-themselves rule—he could have only made enemies for conservatives by his actions.
Front page of The NY Times (11-1): a story of how the reality of his dearly beloved lesbian daughter, Chrissy, has turned around presidential candidate Dick Gephardt’s views on a number of issues, especially gay and lesbian issues. Chrissy and her partner, Amy Loder, were in the family portrait X-Mas card sent by Rep. Gephardt from Congress last year.
On the cultural horizon: An HBO production of Angels in America starring Patrick Wilson as the self-hating gay Mormon (NY Times 11-2), and Dorian, a new story ballet based on Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray in New York’s City Center (NY Times 11-1). Wilde’s work, in which a portrait ages but its subject does not, has always been taken as a gay metaphor.