In what amounts to a mini-survey of modern Russian pop culture in The New Yorker (3-10), Gary Shteyngart points out a few interesting items: interviewing the manager of t.a.T.u., the Russian teens who sing of their lesbian love for one another, he finds their manager ‘invented’ them. The young ladies were picked in a 500-strong casting call, then told to be sexual for a Western audience. t.a.T.u. is about as lesbian as Margaret Thatcher and Queen Elizabeth II. Shteyngart also interviewed Vladimir Sorokin, the Russian writer of the novel, Goluboye Salo, which can be translated as ‘Gay Lard’ or ‘Blue Lard.’ (‘Blue’ is Russian slang for gay.) ‘Although there’s enough sodomy in Sorokin’s work to fill a world-class bathhouse,’ Sorokin is being sued for pornography specifically for a very detailed scene of a Stalin clone and a Khrushchev clone getting it on. A youth group publicly threw some of Sorokin’s work in a giant toilet, after which sales of ‘Blue Lard’ increased seven fold.
Time magazine (3-17) has a story on gay fraternities. Gamma Lambda Mu on the Florida International University campus is one of the two dozen gay frats around the country. Most of F.I.U.’s students are Latino, which complicates matters. Mario Campa, 21, a co-founder of this fraternity is not out to his family. (One wonders what appearing in Time will do to that issue.) Most of these frats see themselves as a cure to the Matthew Shepard syndrome. They also hope to set up networks like those of straight frats for economic and political influences. Gamma Lambs can’t date one another but their sense of humor shows in their t-shirt motto: ‘Let’s give ’em something to talk about.’
365Gay.com (3-29) tells of the mysterious gay Iraqi blogger who has tens of thousands of readers hanging on his reports out of Baghdad. Salam Pax (which means ‘peace’ in Arabic and Latin) is neither pro-Saddam nor pro-American. He has detailed the persecutions of gays by the Iraqi government but has this to say to the Americans: ‘How could ‘support democracy in Iraq’ become … ‘bomb the hell out of Iraq?’ … Nobody minded an undemocratic Iraq for a very long time. Now people have decided to bomb us to democracy? Well, thank you! How thoughtful!’ His site is (dear_raed.blogspot.com).