From the ‘Another-One-Bites-the-Dust’ file, the Chicago Sun-Times (Aug. 22) tells us that one gay character won’t be there in the network TV series lineup for 2006-’07, although they’re not telling who. On the 679 series on the big six networks, there are nine gay, lesbian or bisexual characters—roughly 1.3 percent of all characters.
James Tiptree, Jr., Racoona Sheldon and Alice B. Sheldon are some of the names the San Francisco writer Alice B. Sheldon used. The New York Times Book Review (Aug. 20) states that according to Julie Phillip’s bio, James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon, Sheldon was a counterintelligence analyst for the C.I.A., a chicken farmer (with a Ph.D. in experimental psychology) and a scandalous debutante (who eloped with a man she met at her debut tea), who finally lit on writing science fiction. In the meantime, ‘she frequently found herself consumed by intense crushes on women she could never bring herself to act on.’ Virtually all her San Francisco work as Tiptree scored points as feminist or pro-woman arguments although she was believed to be a man by virtually everybody, including her big-time friends (by way of letters) Philip K. Dick, Ursula LeGuin and Harlan Ellison. She wrote two novels—Up the Walls of the World and Brightness Falls from the Air—as well as many short stories.
In an article entitled ‘The Trouble When Jane Becomes Jack,’ The New York Times (Aug. 20) highlights a ‘… sometimes bitter debate among lesbians’ about the matter of female-to-male transgenders. ‘It just saddens me to see so many of our strong butch women giving up their womanhood to be a man,’ is a typical comment. Some alternative and/or lesbian publications have headlined issues with the question ‘Is Lesbianism Dead?’ The numbers of F-to-M transgender individuals in the U.S. are guesstimated to be anywhere from 5,000 to 100,000, and issues get complicated if you’re having procedures done. For example, if you haven’t had all the procedures (top and bottom), are you officially transgendered? No, even if you have a beard and sideburns. And what pronoun do you use?
From the ‘Final-Warning-Shot-Across-the-Bow’ file, here are two gay movies to stay away from: Vacationland, says the Times (Aug. 2)) is a ‘gay indie clunker’ with a complicated and ludicrous plot while the Chicago Tribune (July 21) says Two Drifters has unsympathetic characters in a tedious plot. All the characters playing gay men look pretty hot, of course, but they don’t act (in all senses of the word) it.