From the ‘Sacred-To-the-Profane’ file (with the sacred first) : The New Yorker (Mar. 3) has poet Honor Moore remembering, praising and outing her father, the much-esteemed Episcopal bishop Paul Moore. Moore was a social activist who marched with Martin Luther King, Jr., and ordained female priests, including the first out lesbian in that post. Honor Moore had suspected her father’s gayness for years, but after he died she received a call from a man who had been her father’s lover. She recalled a spectacular sermon Moore had preached at an AIDS memorial about the lives the dead men had lived in which he was ‘… practically weeping’ and ‘… so fierce, so passionate, so loving.’ From his lover, she found that her father had mistakenly been informed that the lover had died. He ‘… preached that night believing a man he had loved had died.’
From the profane: The New York Times Book Review (Mar. 2) tells us of John Rechy’s About My Life And the Kept Woman: A Memoir. Reviewer David Leavitt (himself a gay author) says Rechy is famous (or infamous) because of three books: City of Night, Numbers and The Sexual Outlaw—all portrayals of the gay subculture of Los Angeles in the ’60s and ’70s. Leavitt has his number: For all the good it did (does?) him, Rechy seems to have spent his life as an author/hustler lusting for recognition and rejecting it when it spotted him. ‘At its best, his prose is serviceable,’ according to the review. ‘At its worst it is trashy.’ Same as it ever was, to my recollection. The kept woman was Marisa Guzman, the glamorous mistress of Mexico’s ‘invisible president’ (which is, to say, a fascistic oligarch) Augusto De Leon; Rechy had a very tenuous personal relationship with her and worshipped her, or her position, from afar. One wonders if he is truly aware of how perfectly appropriate her superficiality is to his own.
From the ‘In-Case-You-Hadn’t-Heard’ file: Just to let you know, Andrew Morton’s Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography, as dissected in The New York Times Book Review (Feb. 17), tells us Tom is not, not, not gay and has many ex-girlfriends—all gladly, anxiously, eagerly interviewed to prove the actor’s virility (and how they brought it out and benefitted from it, and make sure you spell my name right and …). Of course, as the reviewer points out, even anecdotes from the book such as Cruise’s absolute and utter distaste for La Cage aux Folles does not necessarily prove his heterosexuality. (Besides, he already knows how to walk like John Wayne.)
From the ‘Ya-Better-Watch-Out’ file: The Chicago Sun-Times (Feb. 25) says students are parodying and criticizing their teachers on the Internet while teachers are busily suing the little darlings. Why in the world would a male teacher feel annoyed enough to take it to court just because he’d received a ‘flood of propositions’ after a student had posted the teacher’s name on a gay male site? It wouldn’t have to do with the fact that many districts would fire out gay teachers, would it?
One of the gay community’s friends, columnist Neil Steinberg of the Chicago Sun-Times (Feb. 25), asks why there hasn’t been much written about the homophobic murder of 15-year-old Lawrence King in California. Steinberg posits the gay press is less fiery in general because of the lessened lethality of AIDS. He criticizes religious groups more ‘ … given how religion is responsible for much of the vacant faux moral blather that underlies hatred of gays.’ He points out to them that Lawrence King died for their sins.