Ever wonder Sherlock Holmes & Dr. Watson? That is, their relationship? According to the Guardian (11/20) you’re not alone—in a review of a new book by Graham Robb, Homosexual Love In The 19th Century, Robb’s closing chapter lists various ways Sherlock is obviously homosexual. Sharing many of his traits are his colleagues: Raffles, Lupin, Dupin, Poirot, Miss Marple, Father Brown, and of course, Ellery Queen. Robb has many insights re 19th century gaydom; ’19th century homosexuals lived under a cloud but it seldom rained.’ Oscar Wilde only went to jail because he ‘… acted such a damn fool.’ Life for homosexuals was ‘a catalog of human idiocy, fear and suspicion’ but ‘also one of courage, tolerance and sly subversion.’
Frank Rich, the culture-at-large critic for The NY Times (12/12) fears that the right-wing hoo-ha over the movie Kinsey presages a return to the real sexual repression of Kinsey’s era. He lists many parallels: e.g. ignorance of sexual matters—’can sex cause cancer?’ (in the movie) and ‘can masturbation cause pregnancy?’ (CNN now); abstinence is the only cure needed for VD (then and now). Let us hope that it does not come to what happened to Kinsey: hounded in his later years partly for his sympathetic view of homosexuality by those homosexual homophobes FBI head J. Edgar Hoover and his boy-toy agent Clyde Tolson.
Camp is always a defense against pompous pseudo-morality. A new movie, Straight-Jacket, skewers the hypocrisy of the ’50s. The flic is a comic re-telling of Rock Hudson’s life story, slightly disguised. The Hudsonish character marries his producer’s secretary after he’s seen coming out of a gay bar. Not only is she bossy with terrible taste in furniture, ‘she’s a total bottom.’ The NY Times (12/10) does say the spoof is too much of ‘an exaggerated cartoon.’
One of our old friends, Marie Kuda, was doing a little research and found this quote in the book It Happened on Broadway by Myrna & Harvey Frommers from Ethyl Waters, the late African-American actress (who incidentally got her start in a Victor-Victoria manner by stepping in for a sick drag queen): Billy Allen, a producer, went to interview Waters for a part in a possible play revival. Allen was a little nervous as she’d heard Waters was aggressively lesbian so she sat in a chair by the door. Waters told her, ‘I know you’ve heard a lot of things about me and most of them are true, but I know when to, how to, and not you. So relax.’