The New Yorker (10/10) has an incredible story about, of all things, Harvard’s admissions policies. A review of the book, The Chosen, by Jerome Karabel says a number of people at Harvard noticed in 1905 that too many students were, ahem, Jewish, so they invented a new criteria for new students to avoid this ‘problem’: among other things the system depended on appearance—committees of older men checking out possible entrants. Athletes became twice as likely to be admitted as other sub-groups. No one till now has commented on either the anti-Jewish or the sexual overtones. How absolutely baroque that Harvard’s Good-Old-Boy network had a genesis as a nasty bit of anti-Semitism and has evolved into a homoerotic beauty contest.
Last week we told you about manga, the gay male love tales—Japanese comics for American women. This week the Chicago Reader (10/7) dips into the related but even stranger ‘slash’ fanzines wherein writers (mostly women) create their own male/male love sketches for already existing stories, such as Star Trek (imagine, Good Lord, Spock and Kirk) to the easily mined (because it’s virtually all male) Lord of the Rings. ‘Slash now exists for hundreds of TV shows and movies, from The A-Team to Harry Potter. If it has two male characters in it, someone is making them f**k. More important to slash fans, someone is also making them kiss, hug, cry, cuddle and talk about their relationships.’
Cathleen Falsani, the Chicago Sun-Times’ (9/30) religion writer, quotes a gay Catholic priest on the topic of the Vatican’s ban on gay seminarians: ‘ … if the clergy has become this gay, is this not the hand of God? Shouldn’t the archbishops and the cardinals and the Holy Father be paying a little bit of attention to what God is doing, as opposed to what they think they ought to be doing?’ On the same topic Father Andrew Greeley (also a sociologist) writes in the Sun-Times (10/7) that about a sixth of American priests are gay, that two Vatican documents already ban ordination of gays (with no attempt to enforce them), and that the new document causing such a fuss has not yet been released by the church (so the people commenting on it haven’t seen it).
Apparently even dead, gay folks cause problems or so it would seem in Seattle where the much-deceased Stuart Smailes left a million dollar bequest for a fountain sculpture to the city. So far, so good except it had to depict a nude man. The city chose a statue called ‘Father and Son’ by New York sculptor Louise Bourgeois. The Chicago Tribune (10/4) says some love the depiction of a man and a boy separated by walls of water but a conservative talk show host calls it ‘a thinly veiled homage to pedophilia.’ Let’s not tell him about the Acropolis.