From the ‘Butch-Nelly-Nelly’ file, we learn from the New York Times (Mar. 18) of the on-rink rivalry of two male competetive ice skaters—the lean, tall, dressed-all-in-black athletic Evan Lysacek and the 125-pound sequined, swan-outfitted artistic Johnny Weir. They don’t like each other, but those judges just keep matching them up. At the national championships in January they finished tied at 244.77 points each, although Lysacek won on a ‘controversial tie breaker.’ Weir ‘coyly brushes off patter about his sexuality,’ although gayness is not quite so big an issue as in other sports. [I should think not: In some figure skating competitions,gayness is not a minority report, it’s a committee of the whole.] Weir, who describes his performance costumes as ‘Care Bears on acid,’ is contemptuous of Lysacek’s attempts to have the competitions rachet down the music and performance (as opposed to athletic) aspect of figure skating. But neither man has gotten especially personal about the other; Lysacek hasn’t stooped to homophobia (unlike openly gay announcer Mark Lund, who has said ‘I don’t think he’s [Weir] representative of the community I want to be a part of’), while Weir just says about his rival ‘I just don’t like him.’
From the ‘Do-You-Think-She’ll-Come-Out-In-2020?’ file, Parade Magazine (March 16) interviewer Dotson Rader at least manages to ask actress Jodie Foster about her sexual orientation (‘… she fidgets and turns away’) but she has publically acknowledged her longtime friend Cydney Bernard. Both of Foster’s sons, whose fathers have not been publicly named, have the middle name Bernard.
From the ‘Panic-Attack-in-Oklahoma-City’ file, the New York Times says hundreds of gay and lesbian activists protested at Oklahoma’s Capitol because Rep. Sally Kern, R-Oklahoma City, had said homosexuality was ‘the biggest threat our nation has, even more so than terrorism or Islam.’ One would like to tap into her imagination for entertainment’s sake—it reminds me of a parody I once wrote on homophobia that started, ‘They’re out to recruit you like lambs to the slaughter/ They want rouge on your son and boots on your daughter.’
The New York Times Magazine (March 16) has a major article about the whys, the wherefores and the who’s whats in ‘When Girls Will Be Boys,’ which explores the situation ‘ [a] t the nation’s elite women’s colleges, [where] there is a new kind of a gender trouble: students who enter as one sex and become another.’ The transgendered go to college, too, and their issues are coming to the fore: Smith College has made many bathrooms ‘gender-neutral’ and some professors there ask what pronouns students prefer in reference to themselves. (They make up pronouns sometimes.) Issues such as whether transmen (women becoming men) are the same as men who are born male (even if they don’t have all the operations) or some other sex come up, and traditional women students may object to, on a more minor issue, sharing bathrooms with any kind of man.
R.I.P. author Arthur C. Clarke, the prolific science-fiction writer who wrote, among his other works, 2001: A Space Odyssey. He was 90 and lived in Sri Lanka (nee Ceylon). All the major newspapers and agencies bid him farewell but only the BBC News (March 19), which abides by Great Britain’s extremely strict libel rules, hinted that the shortness of his very short marriage—which ended long ago—was because he really preferred young men instead of women, hence his sojourn in liberal tropical Sri Lanka. HAL’s dad is probably not ‘ … a-fraid.’