From the ‘What Gay Cowboys?’ file, we noticed that the Sunday newspaper magazine USA Weekend (1/13-15) had a two-page spread on every jot-and-tittle of the upcoming Golden Globe Awards, but nary a mention of any aspect of Brokeback Mountain, which subsequently won best picture and best director. The New Yorker (1/23 & 30) has a cartoon of two old Western geezers rockin’ on the front porch, one asking ‘Were we gay?’
In the Irish American News (1/2006), columnist Tom Boyle quotes David Clohessy, national director of the Survivers Network for Abused [by] Priests regarding the Vatican’s new anti-gay policy: ‘At best it’s a distraction, at worst it’s damaging…. It will feed the mistaken notion that [the abuse scandal] is about the behavior of priests and not the behavior of bishops. Gay semanarians didn’t hire and transfer and cover for child molesting priests. It was bishops who did that.’ Boyle himself goes on: ‘In a nutshell to say ‘It’s OK to be homosexual as long as you don’t think like a homosexual, act like a homosexual, hang out with homosexuals, or go to places known to be hangouts of homosexuals’ well, that’s ludicrous on its surface.’
From the ‘We’re Everywhere’ file, tidbits from here & there: The New York Times (12/20), in its science section, covers (uncovers?) two 4300-year-old gay Egyptian men, Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep, who are portrayed embracing, holding hands and nose-kissing and who are buried in a very expensive tomb. They are identified as, ahem, the king’s chief manicurists. Another New York Times (12/23) article discusses the newest trend among trendmeisters (or mistresses): owning three homes. Edrie Ferdun and Jan Felshin, former professors and partners of 45 years, trek, with cat in tow, off to South Beach, Fire Island and the Poconos yearly. The Times (1/15) touts visiting Australia for the 2006 month-long Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras, where one could join in the nude bike ride painted one of the rainbow colors.
The Book Review of the New York Times (12/14) looks at Paul Levy’s The Letters of Lytton Strachey. Strachey was an eminent Edwardian biographer, gay man and campy letter writer who once criticized Virginia Woolf’s novels thusly: ‘It is the lack of copulation—either actual or implied—that worries me.’ The New York Times (12/16) tells us of Guy Padgett, the young gay mayor of Casper, Wyoming. Padgett knew the murdered Matthew Shepard, by the way. The Times (1/8) describes the come-down of gay Michael J. Kopper, the first Enron executive to plead guilty to criminal charges: working on a different lifestyle without the $1.5-million house or the BMW 530. Lastly, the Chicago Sun-Times (1/8) gives a mini-history of Chicago’s gay and lesbian Gerber/Hart Library as it celebrates its 25th anniversary.