From the Chicago Sun-Times (Aug. 19), we get word that Brazil’s government health services will provide free sex-change operations. Hmmm…is this just for citizens or can tourists get it, too? This could start a whole new mini-industry in Rio. ‘Go down a boy and come back a …’

In a little memory piece from The New York Times (Aug. 19) Armistead Maupin, author of the Tales of the City saga, muses that while San Francisco, the physical city, has not changed much since the ’70s when Anna Madrigal, the transgender heroine of Tales… ruled Barbary Lane, much has changed in the city’s (and the country’s) culture: ‘Attitudes and mores that 35 years ago seemed loopy, flaky or else ‘wacky, godless, treasonous ‘… have moved steadily, inexorably toward the center.’ Maupin, newly married to a much younger man and with a new book out—Michael Toliver Lives—noted that the city by the bay has not lost all of its ‘otherness’: It has become the home of a colony of ‘transmen’ (female-to-male transsexuals).

So you’re Albanian, it’s a century ago, there are no men left in your family and it’s a patriarchal society. Who runs things? The Chicago Tribune (Aug. 22) tells of Albanian journalist Elvira Dones, who writes about and has done a movie of the region’s ‘sworn virgins,’ or women who publically renounce their womanhood to live as men. They dress like, and have the rights of men, including voting. The idea, which developed during the 15th century, was for emergencies. Dones says there are only a few of these people left because the government has liberalized but she asked one ‘virgin,’ Ivanaj, if she would have felt restricted in a marriage. The answer? ‘Absolutely! More like squashed than restricted…I want total equity or nothing.’

If you’re into: 1) the history of the Raj (British ruled India) and 2) soap opera, you might check out Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire, written by Alex Von Tunzelmann and reviewed in the Chicago Sun-Times (Aug. 12). Let’s see—Nehru slept with Edwina Montbatten, the wife of the British governor-general of India, while Lord Louis ‘Dickie’ Mountbatten, the aforementioned g.g., slept with everybody, apparently: ‘In contrast to her intense jealousy toward women, Edwina never showed any sign of the least resentment toward the men in her husband’s life. There were quite a number of them. … His reaction on being told that one of his servants was gay was characteristically unflustered. ‘Of course,’ he replied. ‘All the best valets are.” By the way, Gandhi didn’t sleep with anyone—not even his wife, according to some reports.

PlanetOut (Aug. 11) says that reformed Jews have included prayers for Jews undergoing gender reassignment in a new edition of Kulanu (Hebrew for ‘all of us’). You can probably bet the editors are not in the same group that throws hissy fits about gay parades in Jerusalem.