Time Magazine (6/27) in a major article on the new China has a set of citizen profiles including one of lawyer Zhou Dan who first wrote about being gay on Chinese websites in 2001. As a result of being public about his own gayness Zhou has inadvertantly become one of China’s first advocates for gay people. Gays from all over China are seeking his help in blackmail and workplace discrimination issues. (While it is very difficult to be gay in China, Beijing has removed homosexuality from an official list of mental disorders.)

For those who believe their gaydar has gone whacky there’s a reason. The NY Times (6/19) names something beyond metrosexuality: ‘Gay Vague.’ ‘The lag time between gay innovation and straight appropriation is nonexistent now. They’re picking up the trends as fast as we are,’ says Bruce Pask, the gay style director of Cargo Magazine. Try checking out new boy bands or young male movie stars’ sexuality by looks alone: R.I.P. Gaydar.

Larry Kramer, gay activist, author (The Normal Heart, Faggot), ‘angriest gay man in the world’, owner of a new liver, and H.I.V. positive, celebrated his 70th according to The NY Times (7/5). Those in attendance learned that The Normal Heart is once again to be made into a movie after the rights reverted to Kramer from Barbra Streisand, that his (so far) 3,000 page novel, The American People, is proceeding apace, that Yale is positive about continuing the Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian and Gay Studies, and that what Kramer most remembers about his liver transplant surgeon, Dr. John Fung, is that Dr. Fung wore red cowboy boots with his hospital whites. Fung, by the way, says Kramer now has a normal life expectation.

A gay cartoon from the New Yorker (7/11&18): the old woman who lived in a shoe (it’s a boot) who had so many children, etc. She’s talking to a neighbor about her last child—’This is my youngest. When he goes, I’m turning this place into a leather bar.’

An exhib ‘Before Victoria: Extraordinary Women of the British Romantic Era’ at the NY Public Library has a man in it: the Chevalier d’Eton who cross-dressed as a woman in a bet to fool Mme de Pompadour, infiltrated (as a woman) the Russian Court as a spy, went to live in England as a man, but was allowed back in France only on the condition he live forever after as a woman (The NY Times, 4/8).

 

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