The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name has a translator now: right there in the Chicago Tribune (Oct. 7) gay columnist Rex Wockner explainns the secret washroom-cruising language of closeted homosexuals—the foot bumps, the hand swipes, the peering through door-cracks. Who would’ve believed that Senator Larry Craig could start all this? Wockner says ‘So the bottom line: Larry Craig was evidentally cruising. The only way he wasn’t cruising is if the perfectly detailed police report is a total fabrication, or if by magical coincidence all his many moves flawlessly mimicked the intricate choreography of the men’s-room mating dance.’
Film critic Roger Ebert (Chicago Sun-Times, Oct. 7) screened the over-looked bio-flic Freddie Mercury: The Untold Story (made in 2000) in April of this year. Chicago’s 43rd International Film Festival also picked it up and showed it. The movie portrayed the private side of Mercury—Zanzibarian Farrokh Bulsara of the Parsi religion (ancient Zoroastrianism: check out their funeral rites) vs. the public gay rock singer who died of AIDS. Ebert, by the way, according to his own column in the Sun-Times (Oct. 5), is feuding with gay British horror writer Clive Barker, who believes Ebert has a negative attitude toward video games as serious art (more or less true). Clive called Ebert a ‘pompous, arrogant old man’ and Ebert said the caliber of Barker’s badinage would not get him into ‘the Leatherhead and Dorking Debating Society.’ Clive looks hot but Ebert speaks better.
The Chicago Sun-Times (Oct. 7) reviews Gay Artists In Modern American Culture: An Imagined Conspiracy, by Michael S. Sherry. The book is about the ‘Lavender Scare’ of the 1930s-1970s. The author found that ‘commentators in all levels of the media … were often beside themselves with worry about the pernicious influence of gays in the arts.’ Phillip Roth, for example, mentioned Albee’s play Tiny Alice with its ‘ghastly pansy rhetoric.’ It’s true that many major artists in mid-century America were gay—the article casually names 25—but it was widely believed, even in liberal circles, that gays had formed a conscious cabal to make America lose the Cold War. Perhaps things are a little better now—recently Hollywood agent Michael Ovitz tried to summon the ‘gay mafia’ genie to blame for his decline and became a laughingstock.
The New York Times (Oct. 9) had a major front-page article on ‘Aging and Gay, and Facing Prejudice in Twilight.’ Many lesbians and gay men moving into nursing homes after being out for years are being forced back into the closet for protection. Gay activists are founding and demanding units for gay people in homes, and also want all-new gay-themed retirement centers to help gay clients avoid isolation, bullying or even suicide.