The Guardian (10/12), in a reaction to prominent British politician John Peel’s claim that he was raped as a schoolboy at a public (Americans would say private) school, surveyed some other well-known British public school men. Typical quotes: ‘It wasn’t a culture of gang rape; it was boys getting crushes on other boys. It was like a ghastly parody of courtship, more to do with adolescent yearning than lust. Imagine it: 650 adolescents with nothing on their mind but sex who had to try to sublimate it all into playing [football] ‘; ‘At Eton, if you were a fag [ahem, this means ‘servant’] master you chose the prettiest fag from among the lower boys. You just liked to have a pretty fag’; ‘I was sexually molested by a gym master… who eventually attained the giddy heights of a treasurer of the Paedophile Information Exchange’; ‘Relationships were going on, but it was less the love that dare not speak its name than the fact that if you put 1,200 testosterone-fueled boys in an enclosed space there is bound to be some cross-fertilization.’
The Chicago Sun-Times (10/9) in a story on Arab gays says more are coming out despite harsh treatment by society and government. Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the West Bank, for instance, all mistreat, arrest and torture gay men. There is some tolerance in Lebanon but a bisexual male belly dancer there says that life in his country is in some ways harder because the sexes already mix freely so parents notice who does not. He says ‘It’s easier in Saudi Arabia, where the sexes are segregated.’
The Chicago Sun-Times (10/9) has an article on gay resorts that starts out as a how-and-why survey/history and then swoops down to note Saugatuck-Douglas, Michigan, as a mecca for gay tourism. Gays and lesbians travel, fly and apparently spend more than other Americans. Gay resorts have often started as down-at-the-heels artist colonies which lesbigays have gentrified. Saugatuck-Douglas has been going strong since the 1880s, and fortunately has not developed so much that it’s become unaffordable as a destination.
Attention, movie buffs: The NY Times (10/11) recommends the newly DVDed ’68 Italian flic Teorema by gay director Pier Paolo Pasolini in which a stranger (Terrence Stamp) seduces a whole family (mother, father, daughter, son) individually and then disappears, leaving them all transformed into saints.
From the ‘Is-It-Pal-or-Al-Imony?’ file—Parade Magazine (10/9) says novelist Terry McMillan is divorcing the hubby, Jonathan Plummer, who inspired her older woman/ younger man novel How Stella Got Her Groove Back; he says after six years of marital bliss that he’s gay and she owes him spousal support or royalties. Sounds like a serious case of G.D.S. (Gold Digger Syndrome).