Where are the fact-checkers when you need them? Or at least someone who knows what a dictionary is. The Chicago Sun-Times (11/2) says a new outdoor game something like horseshoes is catching on—it consists of throwing cloth bags with corn into a hole and is called Tah Dah— ‘Cornhole’. The problem as some old farm folks would know is that this is mid-western slang for homosexual male anal intercourse. One would guess this won’t catch on among ‘moral’ types.
He’s a little bit zany; he’s a little bit intolerant; he’s a little bit dead. The Chicago Tribune (11/3) reports the death of Belgian Cardinal Gustaaf Joos who regarded some 5 to 10 percent of people claiming to be homosexual as gay or lesbian but ‘… All the rest are simply sexual perverts.’ Other Belgian Catholic leaders in that country where same-sex marriages are allowed distanced themselves from Joos.
The NY Times (11/2) writes of Parvez Sharma, a gay Muslim film director. Sharma has received many positive but also many threatening e-mails about his yet uncompleted documentary In the Name of Allah, which will examine how homosexual Muslims around the world reconcile their faith with their sexual orientation. Sharma is receiving advice from Sandi Simcha DuBowski, who made a similar film on gay and lesbian Orthodox and Hasidic Jews. The range of opinion on Muslim homosexuality stretches from believing the Koran doesn’t condemn it to believing the Koran advocates homosexual acts be punished with death. Sharma believes Islam can tolerate diversity but this ‘… religion of more than a billion people … has been hijacked by an extremely small and sometimes loud minority.’
The Downtown Plays, a rolled together bevy of playlets by nine prominent playwrights (including, among others, David Henry Hwang, Paul Rudnick, and Wendy Wasserstein) as reviewed in The NY Times (10/26) sounds like a hoot: in ‘Pride and Joy’ a matron addressing a PFLAG-like group claims the title of ‘most accepting, most loving mother of all time, bar none’ because she has three, count ’em, sexually different children including a balding out-of-shape son who announces he’s really a woman inside. Mama’s rejoinder? ‘What woman, Ed Asner?’ Let’s hope it travels well.