Time Out Chicago (May 10-16) compares bears and bears—that is, the polar, panda and grizzly types on one hand and the large gay hirsute men on the other. Bear Pride is May 24-28 in Chicago and the magazine has a chart so you can tell the two kinds apart. Give the rag points for trying but Harvey Fierstein is NOT a bear, even if he says he is.
From the ‘You-Can-Call-It-Gay-Sex-I-Call-It-Greed’ file, compare these two news items—the first from The Advocate News & Politics (4/23) and the second from The New York Times (May 15). An Oklahoma City father wants $20,000 from the public library to cover psychic damage from his two teenage sons’ discovery of The Whole Lesbian Sex Book while they were researching military academies. The father says the book caused ‘many sleepless nights in our house.’ [I’ll bet. And I wonder how such sensitive lads will handle the terminal butchness of those overlooked academies.] In Chicago, a set of grandparents want $500,000 for the psychological distress caused to a 12-year-old girl whose substitute teacher showed Brokeback Mountain, the gay cowboy love story, to the girl’s class. The girl had counseling and treatment. [It was perhaps at a Hollywood spa run by American Girl? One wants to know whether it was the gay sex or the much more graphic straight sex that frizzled her into a tween trauma.]
From the ‘There-Ought-To-Be-At-Least-One-Gay-Person-On-the-Staff’ file: In the Winter 2007 Arts & Crafts Homes and the Revival (a quarterly), there’s an intriguing article on Red Roof, an arts-and-crafts mansion in Gloucester, Mass. Built in 1902 by A. Piatt Andrew, Jr., the amazing structure has a few features listed in the magazine but apparently not, umm, interpreted at all. Andrew was a member of an intellectual group called the American Bloomsbury (think Virginia Woolf’s coterie), a congressman, a founder of a voluntary ambulance corps in WWI and a lifelong bachelor. His best friend, art historian Henry Davis Sleeper, also a bachelor, lived several doors away. Red Roof has a whole secret warren of rooms behind a door hidden in the wainscotting of the living room wall. There are a study, library, music room, sink and an even more secret loft bedroom accessible by ladder. Should someone have guessed that this was a veritable love nest for the two turn-of-the-last-century gentlemen? (They didn’t.) There are hopes for preserving the house, which is for sale.