You think Oprah’s taking James Frey (A Million Little Pieces) to the woodshed was justified? What do you think of the Nasdijj kerfluffle? The L.A. Weekly (1/28) says that this so-called Amerind memoirist (The Boy and His Dog Are Sleeping) is not only not a half-Navajo father of a poor pathetic (dead) little boy, not the son of an alcoholic Indian prostitute, and is not capable of anything resembling truth, but is, in fact, a gay pornographer who wrote for Drummer Magazine (a defunct S&M periodical) and who wrote critical letters about his own gay work to pump up business. Nasdijj (a.k.a. Timothy Barrus) managed to insert himself into the business of serious gay writers such as T.R. Witomski and Lars Eighner, only to royally tick them off. So far, these folks have thrown him out: the American Indian community, the straight community, the Hollywood community (who were all set to make movies of two of his books), the publishing community and the gay community.
The New Yorker (2/6) reviews a new bio of Alan Turing, the English code-breaker who figured out the Nazi Enigma encryption system. The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer, by David Leavitt, suggests it is not wrong to say that Turing won the war for the Allies. The book also hints that Turing’s suicide over a gay scandal may have been murder. (In the interest of ‘truthiness,’ the gay Leavitt has had, umm, ‘issues’ with the truth himself. He was spanked hard for stealing passages from the poet Stephen Spender for a book, While England Sleeps.)
The Brokeback Mountain Watch: The cartoon strip ‘Boondocks’ in the Chicago Tribune (1/22) announced a new street slang word: ‘brokeback.’ The term describes something that is not quite as masculine as it’s first perceived, as in ‘That man-bag of yours looks pretty brokeback.’ The Chicago Sun-Times (1/31) has a political cartoon of a cowboy man-in-black at a saloon telling the barkeep about his neckwear: ‘Of course they’re pearls, silly—what else would I wear with basic black?’ And watch out for the plays on words popping up: ‘Kick-back Mt.’ (Jack Abramoff and any congressman), ‘Humpback Mt.’ (Ishmael & Queeqeg), ‘Outback Mt.’ (two hunky Aussies), and ‘Runningback Mountains’ (two romantic tight ends).
News of the Weird (1/27) reports that the fertility clinic of Erasmus Hospital in Brussels, Belgium, is putting a quota on French lesbian couples wishing to conceive there because it needs to save sperm for Belgian clients. (France, par depit, will not pay for such treatments.)
Christine Jorgensen Reveals is a one-man play entirely lip-synched because its author, Bradford Louryk, believes this about the famous transsexual: ‘Her dainty-voiced self is so specific; the audience … is seeing a man in a dress playing a woman born as a man who went to great lengths to be a woman.’ (The NY Times, 1/12). Most of the dialogue is from recorded interviews with Jorgensen, the ex-G.I.