I owe the inspiration for this post to my friend and WAG magazine colleague Ronni Diamondstein, a writer with superb taste in literature, as befits a former librarian.
Ronni, who has lived in and written about The Netherlands, recommended Jessie Burton’s new novel “The Miniaturist” (Ecco/Harper Collins, $26.99, 400 pages) – a book that I devoured one evening and that has made me despair of being a novelist as it is such a marvelous evocation of Holland in the 17th century. (Think Tracy Chevalier’s “Girl With a Pearl Earring,” only darker.) You can almost smell the tang of the water rising from the canals and the sea.
“The Miniaturist” is about a country girl with an old family name but little money who arrives in Amsterdam...
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Read MoreAs we might’ve predicted, the presence of Michael Sam in the NFL is bringing out the worst in humanity.
First, the NFL, according to NBC’s Peter King, asked around if any team had interest in putting Sam, the league’s first openly gay player, on its practice squad after the St. Louis Rams cut him, basically to avoid a PR disaster – not because the guy’s good and deserves a chance or even because the league is standing up for what’s right.
Meantime, the Dallas Cowboys bit and now a group calling itself American Decency will protest the Cowboys’ home opener against the San Francisco 49ers Sunday, Sept. 7. Gee, wonder if American Decency is going to protest spousal abuse, gun possession, drunk driving, dogfights and any of the NFL’s other little extracurricular activities.
I’ll be rooting for my Niners but go, Sam.
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Read MoreSo in the end after all the hoopla, Michael Sam – the first openly gay player in the NFL (almost) – didn’t make the cut with the St. Louis Rams.
There are just so many ways to look at this. How convenient for the those who can sigh with relief and say, “Hey, we tried but he just wasn’t good enough.” How vindicating for the skeptics, who will say, “He was such a lightweight to begin with. The only reason he got a shot was because he’s gay.”
But how sad for those of us who’d like to see the Sams and the Tim Tebows of the world find their places in the NFL sun regardless of the imperfections of their (still considerable) skills and their sexual or religious persuasions.
Some day, we won’t have to judge people by anything but those skills and what the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called “the content of their character” – which in Sam’s case seems to be class all the way, and which is more than you can say for the Ray Rices of the game. ...
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Read MoreHard to believe but it’s already football season, and God, it’s off to a dreadful start, isn’t it, what with former coach and analyst Tony Dunghy saying he wouldn’t want Michael Sam, foreseeing trouble ahead for the NFL’s first openly gay player, and then Baltimore Raven Ray Rice getting a slap on the wrist for allegedly beating his wife in an Atlantic City elevator when she was still his fiancée.
This has been compounded by ESPN analyst Stephen A. Smith saying that women should be careful not to provoke men, for which he received a week suspension. Now ESPN ombudsman Robert A. Lipsyte has weighed in, saying, “Smith’s attempts at coherency are often as exciting as Tim Tebow’s scrambling.”
OK, people, let’s start with the easiest of the problems here. Why drag Tim Tebow – a man who has never shown women anything but respect – into this? Here’s a guy who’s training hard, hoping to get back into the NFL, unwilling to give up on his dream. There’s something at once poignant and commendable about this. But the NFL culture – which rejected him – can’t stop making fun of him even as it uses him to draw eyeballs. Pathetic.
But there’s something more serious going on here.
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Read MoreIn 2012, swimmer Ian Thorpe published his memoir, “This Is Me.” Except it wasn’t. Well, not entirely.
In his memoir, Thorpe denied rumors that he was gay, said he dated only women and added that he looked forward to marrying and having children.
He may still be looking forward to marrying and having kids but it will be with a man: Thorpe recently revealed in a TV interview in his native Australia what many of us have long suspected – that he’s gay.
Jason Collins, the first openly gay player in the NBA, was among the first to tweet support. To those who are inclined to withhold such encouragement, pointing to Thorpe’s hypocrisy and deception, I say, Walk a mile in the guy’s size 17 shoes.
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Read MoreI remember once reading an article about Novak Djokovic – an earthy guy (must be being born on that Taurus-Gemini cusp), who doesn’t mind expounding on sex and who said, “It’s what God put us on this earth for.”
That stopped me cold, because if there’s one thing you very rarely read, it’s a sentence in which God and sex team together. The Bible tells us to multiply, fill the earth and subdue it, but let’s face it, we’ve been defining the conditions of the multiplication ever since. It really has applied only to heterosexual couples who don’t use birth control. Everyone else can forget the multiplication, let alone the filling and subduing.
Religion hasn’t always been hostile to sex, particularly the goddess movement. But the sky-god faiths, especially the Abrahamic ones, seem determined to control women’s bodies.
I must confess that as a practicing Roman Catholic, I, too, bought into the notion that sex was somehow dirty unless it was in the strict confines of a birth-control-less marriage. But as I became more educated, I realized that this wasn’t about sex or religion but sheer economics...
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Read MoreIn the show “Vicious,” which bows on PBS Sunday, June 29, Sir Derek Jacobi and Sir Ian McKellen play two bitchy old queens, for want of a better description – indeed the Britcom was originally titled “Vicious Old Queens” – who’ve been lovers for 50 years.
Both are among the greatest actors of this or any century and long out of the closet. And the series was picked up in its native England for a second season. But some critics complained – and some here wonder – whether it plays into gay stereotypes, or whether we’re all too sensitive to political correctness.
“It’s actually a sign that we’ve all matured, and now it’s perfectly respectable to have an exaggerated, farcical representation of two people who are gay,” McKellen said in Dave Itzkoff’s piece for the June 29 New York Times’ Arts & Leisure section. “And for us to accept that they can be figures of fun, just in the same way as a farce about straight people would be.”
Maybe so, but I asked myself...
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