From the ‘Ennis & Jack’ file, The NY Times (12/18) went out and found real gay cowboys a la Brokeback Mountain. Some were hot, some not but all were brave enough: ‘That [they]… were willing to be named and photographed was not without social and even physical risk.’ They were all aware of the Matthew Shepard murder and they heavily identified with the loneliness shown in the movie. By the way, either Heath & Jake really didn’t know how to do things or else they were having a lot of fun. Take your pick—Ang Lee, the director, said on the Charlie Rose Show that he had to shoot the sex scene 13 times.
And then there’s the Pope in an Atlanta Journal-Constitution (12/25) political cartoon telling a group of clergy ‘Gays can’t be priests’ whereat they all leave as he sputters ‘I meant from now on!’
People Magazine (12/11) has its ‘smartest woman in the world’ columnist, Marilyn vos Savant answering a question about whether psychiatrists can truly change a homosexual into a heterosexual. Her answer: ‘I think change is possible, but only for individuals who were never truly gay in the first place…. Judging from the letters I receive, I suspect that some apparently homosexual people are really heterosexuals who are deeply phobic about the opposite sex…. But for those people who have been gay since birth, no way!’
Herbert Muscamp in a long article in The NY Times (1/8) on 2 Columbus Circle, the N.Y. City building by Edward Durell Stone, turns his homage of a place to a history of the structure’s vanished audiences: gay men. The building, a Venetian Gothic slap in the face of modern formalism, has been the Gallery of Modern Art, the New York Cultural Center, then the Department of Cultural Affairs. It had been called ‘a queer building’ for years. Its uses, Muscamp says, were witnessed by many of the 80,000 New Yorkers who have died of AIDS. ‘It stands for the collective memory of an audience—the seasoned gay audience, perhaps the most culturally receptive group any city has ever seen.’ Muscamp may have been inspired to write because the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission refused to hold hearings to save the building.