What do you do when you’re looking for gay tidbits in the media and there’s a whole cover story on your gay friend in The Reader (8-29), only he’s a major league porn star? You congratulate him for the publicity coup, that’s what. Brian-Mark, who of late has been seen at a table on Halsted St. with friend and activist Rick Garcia, has been two-stepped around dance floors by this columnist. And you’d never know it from watching his studly movies, but he’s not the lead. The Reader story goes into great, umm, depth as to his proclivities.
At what point will gay folk say ‘Enough is Enough’ in this gay summer when straight entertainers, e.g. Britney Spears and Madonna, go for a long wet kiss at the MTV Video Music Awards, as shown and reported in the Chicago Sun-Times (8-29)? File it in the Wannabe or the Desperate for Publicity files?
Another conservative finds himself elsewhere on the argument. Tribune columnist Dennis Byrne (8-18) comes out in favor of a bill against prison rape: ‘no one—man, woman or minor in confinement ‘deserves’ to be raped … . Prison rape, and the high chance of contracting HIV/AIDS from it … is not part of any sentence. Including capital punishment.’
Other columnists have commented on Cardinal Francis Georges’s sermon, reprinted in the Chicago Sun-TImes (8-8) attacking that paper’s headline, ‘Pope Launches Global Campaign against Gays’ (8-1). The Cardinal’s arguments are more than a little strange, but the headline was in fact wrong. It should have said, ‘Pope Reinvigorates Long-Term Global Campaign Against Gays.’ And the Cardinal should have fact checkers for published materials: saying popes have said marriage is a lifelong union of a man and woman for 2000 years is saying that some popes of whom we have no records of saying anything said these things before the Holy See was established.
And a cartoon from the Reader (8-29): God saying to one of his angels: ‘When Ashcroft gets here, let’s act gay.’