From the ‘Did-‘Em-Up-and-Out’ file, the Chicago Tribune (July 28) says Italian scientists are exhuming the bodies of two intellectuals from the Medici court of Renaissance Florence. Both Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Angelo Ambrogini died in 1494 and were reputed to be lovers. The scientists hope to find all sorts of, umm, historic (salacious), factual (gossipy) details of their lives and deaths. By the way, don’t Native American tribes protest this sort of thing now? What is the Catholic Italian stance on opening folks’ graves?
The New York Times (July 24) reviews Rick & Steve: The Happiest Gay Couple in All the World, a new comedy on Logo that uses stop-motion animation. ‘The series isn’t so much a gay South Park as it is a Honeymooners for our post-Will & Grace age,’ the publication stated. Rick and Steve are not only married but horrified at any hint of illicit sex. The series is paradoxically dirty-mouthed but it has strictly family values—sort of yearning to be on both sides of a debate and ending up nowhere.
Albert Ellis, the psychotherapist who died July 26, had a different take on Freud, according to The New York Times (July 29): Freud was wrong from top to bottom. But Freud’s talking about sex did help Ellis to loosen up: ‘I came to consider practically all forms of noncoercive sex permissible. In fact, at the age of 15, I had my first and only homosexual episode— with my 13-year-old brother no less!’
From the ‘My-Goodness-Maudie-What-If-They-Want-to-Do-That-Here?’ file, the Chicago Sun-Times (July 30) says that the Mexico City government is going to allow gay conjugal visits in its prison system. The whole country of Mexico passed a law in 2003 banning discrimination based on sexual preference.