The movie critic for the New Yorker (5/17) seems ready to award Brad Pitt ‘Best Butt of the Year’ as he reviews Pitt’s version of Achilles in the new flic Troy: ‘The trouble here is that the most expressive part of his body is his much exposed rear.’ The review rightly fusses that the movie has stripped the homoerotic element of Achilles’ love for the younger warrior Patroclus from the plot. (It also tossed out all the gods and goddesses and added a great wooden horse, not found in the original story of the Trojan War. In the original, the horse doesn’t appear until the sequel, the Odyssey.)
Burbling along in the garden section of the Chicago Tribune (5/9) we found the dysfunctionally functional story of the master gardener Vita Sackville-West, whose estate, Sissinghurst, is famous for its White Garden. ‘Virginia Woolf was but one of her lovers. She once eloped to France with a childhood [girl]-friend who grew up to be her most fervent lover; and both their husbands chased after them in a two-seater plane on Valentine’s Day.’ Her husband, Harold Nicholson, was bisexual, too, and he and she had numerous same-sex affairs during their long marriage. She would dress in long earrings, lace shirt, corduroy jacket, game-keeper’s pants and laced-up top boots, described as ‘Lady Chatterley and her lover [in] one.’
The New York Times (5/9) in a sort of review of a film bio of Cole Porter gives a bit of dialog in which a young male lover of Porter sets himself up in his own theatrical agency by blackmailing Porter’s wife with photos of Cole (Kevin Kline) enjoying himself with a piece of rough trade in a bathroom. And, hmmm, isn’t this star getting a lot of mileage out of denying he is one while playing one in the movies?
The Tony Award nominations, according to The NY Times (5/11), are heavily gay-tinged: Wicked (the Oz story from the witches’ point of view), Caroline, Or Change (written by gay playwright Tony Kushner), The Boy From Oz (a biography of singer Peter Allen, the first of Liza Minnelli’s several gay husbands), and I Am My Own Wife (a story of an East German transvestite) have been nominated.
The Economist (5/8) reports that gay poet Thom Gunn, 74, has died. Gunn, an Englishman, moved to the States in 1954 to be with his lover, and personally acknowledged his gayness years before he did so in his poetry. However, the Economist says, ‘he was to become perhaps the best gay poet writing in English.’ … Both The Independent and The Guardian published accounts (5/12) of the life and untimely death last week by suicide of David Reimer. He was raised as a girl after a circumcision went wrong, but refused to accept the gender reassignment and insisted on living his life as a man.