The Eminem controversy hasn’t melted away yet. It threatens to become a gay version of the Clinton pardon scandal as more and more people jump on the post-Grammy analysis bandwagon. My colleague Rex Wockner says he’s off to listen to all of Eminem’s lyrics for deeper scrutiny. Richard Kim in The Nation (3-5-01) points out the strange partnering of GLADD (the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) and the right wing Focus on the Family in fussing at Marshall Mathers (AKA Eminem AKA Slim Shady). Referring to himself as one of the put-upon “faggots” in Marshall’s lyrics, Kim says all the critics tend to collapse “the distance between speech and action.” Kim also points how crucial faggotry is to Mathers—he mentions it in 13 out of 18 tracks of his Grammy winning CD. “… it’s hard to imagine what he would rap about if he didn’t have us faggots.”
Other Grammy winners had various comments according to The Chicago Sun-Times (2-23-01) : Dan Haseltine of Jars of Clay, a gospel group: “Kids need heroes … . Anything that gets them interested is worthwhile.” Taj Mahal joked “Maybe I should put my cap on sideways and start throwing [gang] signs.” Moby, a techno artist, “He’s very good at what he does, but he’s an anti-Semite, a homophobe and a misogynist, and I can’t support that.” Dave Alvin, folk singer, “I hate the brown ones.” Incidentally Time (2-26-01) points out (in Richard Kim’s word) “Diva” Elton John sang a duet in 1992 with the infamously homophobic Axl Rose in a tribute to Freddie Mercury. Where’s Rose now? Maybe that hug between Sir Elton and Slim Shady was really a kiss of death.
An Irish novelist with the wonderful name of Nuala O’Faolain is raising eyebrows in Europe and here with her memoirs, Are You Somebody? and her first novel My Dream of You. The 60-year-old O’Faolain has been a totally disconcerting op-ed journalist for the well-known and very traditional Irish Times. She’s taken on Catholicism, Irish homophobia, and domestic violence. She stands out from her conservative countryfolk for quotes like this “If I could find someone to love and be loved by do you think I would care about a minor detail like what gender the person is?”
Thank Maureen Dowd in the N.Y. Times (2-18-01) for trotting off to the Conservative Political Action Conference in Virginia where among other things she ferreted out news about “The Homosexual Agenda”—”Recruit Children,” “Destroy the Boy Scouts,” and “Take Over Public Schools.” (Personally my father was an army recruiter. Recruiting anything’s no fun and why the majority of gay men would want anything to do with a child is beyond me. The Boy Scouts were boring and proto-homophobic when I was a member. And lesbigays are way too intelligent as a group to go anywhere near the tainted and failing public schools.)
Ann, the more liberal of the two advice sisters, Abby and Ann, castigates herself in the Chicago Tribune (2-18-01) for giving the wrong advice to parents who suspect their grown children are gay or lesbian.
She originally told them to mind their own business but her readers told her, nope, tell the kids that they know and it’s okay. Here’s Ann: “Same-sex relationships are not a ‘lifestyle,’ it’s that way some people are born. They are sexually attracted to members of their own gender. Such individuals should not need to hide or pretend. They should be accepted as they are, with no apologies.”
Sneer if you will at words of an advice columnist, but she has millions of readers in severely homophobic parts of this country.
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The N.Y. Times (2-22-01) reports the Boston Globe has retracted a story that the murder of the two Dartmouth professors by two teenage boys was a crime of passion, the result of an affair one of the boys with the male professor. It was unclear why the retraction was printed since according to the Globe their best reporters had talked to extremely authoritative sources.
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San Francisco, according to the Chicago Sun-Times (2-18-01), is extending its health insurance to cover sex-change operations for its municipal employees. A director for the Gay, Lesiban, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society of Northern California, Susan Stryker, said the transgender community in that city is about 15,000.
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The documentary Southern Comfort tells the story of a female-to-male transsexual, Robert Eads, who is dying of cervical and ovarian cancer.
“The last part of me that is female is killing me,” notes Mr. Eads. Eads, referring to himself as “trailer trash,” reports he’d been invited to become a member of the Ku Klux Klan. (He declined.) His support group, men who have also undergone female-to-male procedures, and his lover, Lola Cola—a male-to-female transsexual, could even in this brief description degenerate into a satire of strange political correctness, but the review (N.Y. Times, 2-17-01) points out that the over-whelming impression is of their kindness to each other.