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Is gay the new black?

Recently, I was giving someone a pitch about my new, gay-themed novel, “Water Music,” which bowed last week – a pitch that I sometimes end defensively with, “Well, it’s not for everyone.” (I really must learn to stop demurring like that.)

Or maybe not, because when I say that, my listeners often respond as this man did: “I’m not so sure about that. I think it’s an idea whose time has come.”

This week seems to have confirmed that. HBO has a new series, “Looking,” about gay men searching for love in San Francisco. Unlike Showtime’s “Queer as Folk” (2000-05) – which was, let’s face it, all about hot guys (and women) having hot sex – “this show is at such a time when suddenly gay people can conform to heterosexual blueprints of how to live,” out actor and “Looking” star Russell Tovey told the Sunday New York Times (Jan. 19). “You can get married, you can have kids, you can have joint mortgages, you’re recognized as next of kin, which is all fresh.”

Tovey, who’s actually made a career of playing straight guys (the athlete Rudge in “The History Boys”), stars as a closeted footballer – soccer player to us in the U.S.– in John Donnelly’s play “The Pass” in London.

So is gay the new black – in more ways than one? Is Ellen DeGeneres, who’ll host the Oscars again (March 2), the new Oprah? Read more

 

 

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Mother and child reunion

How heartbreaking that new film “Philomena” sounds. It’s the story of a woman in search of the love child she was forced to give up by the Irish nuns to whom she was sent after her “indiscretion.” The Sunday New York Times had an excellent, spoilers -riddled article Jan. 12 about the fate of the real child, Michael Hess, a gay man who perhaps not so improbably became a Reagan-era lawyer in Washington D.C. and died of AIDS. The emotional kicker was that he was buried in his mother’s native country in the hopes that she would find him.

Which she did. But all those years when they could’ve had a relationship. All that waste. I could weep. Come to think of it, I did.

There are few more complex relationships than mother and child, which plays a part in my just-released first published novel, “Water Music.” I’m not here to judge why women get pregnant outside of marriage, why they keep or give up their children or why they have abortions. I’ve never been pregnant. The whole thing is beyond me.

But I would like to comment  on something that struck me in The Times’ article, and that is the idea that Hess’ friends and associates found him ultimately unknowable. Read more

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Lit by lightning

I’m reading “Divine Fury: A History of Genius” (Basic Books, $29.99, 312 pages), which is just the kind of  book I like – one in which the author takes the intellectual ball and runs with it. Darrin M. McMahon must be good at it. He also wrote “Happiness: A History.”

Genius, as he notes in his introduction, has meant many things to many different times. The word comes from the Latin, but the Romans, who cannibalized Greek culture, were really borrowing from the Greek “daimon.” Your daimon was – is – your guiding spirit, the link to the divine. Indeed, “Daimon” is the title of my unpublished novel about Alexander the Great, who like the Emperor Augustus and a host of ancient luminaries saw his daimon – his genius – as proof of his divinity. It wasn’t until the 18th century that we got the modern definition of genius as extraordinary creativity and accomplishment and not until the 20th century that we got the IQ tests that sought to quantify it. 

McMahon rounds up the usual suspects... Read more

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A bridge too far

Thank goodness I have Rafael Nadal as my BPB (Backup Pretend Boyfriend) since I may have to demote Gov.  Chris Christie from CPB (Chief Pretend Boyfriend).

Gov. Krispy Kreme – as I affectionately like to call him – is in deep political doodoo after his henchmen (oh, sorry, aides) apparently sought revenge on Fort Lee, N.J. Mayor Mark Sokolich by snarling traffic on his city’s stretch of the George Washington Bridge after he declined to support their boss’ bid for gubernatorial reelection. It is a measure of how far our civilization has come, or fallen, that men now avenge themselves not by decapitation or declaring war but by traffic jams – although if you’ve ever sat in one on the GWB, you might be yearning for the guillotine.

More is at stake here, of course, than Gov. Krispy Kreme’s potential presidential candidacy. There’s the whole issue of a relationship that exists only in my mind. Ever since he burst onto the scene, I have felt that we were kindred spirits. Read more

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The running man

The football season is still going strong, but already I’d like to give Colin Kaepernick – whose San Francisco 49ers take on the Carolina Panthers Sunday, Jan. 12 – the Tim Tebow Award for Most Unjustly Criticized Quarterback. 

Really, people, what’s with all the hate? I understand that haters gonna hate and that the Interweb is the medium of hatred, where anyone can hide behind the venom he or she spews. But really, the criticism of Colin – ranging from “overrated” to the d----- word, which I despise – absolutely baffles. It is, of course, the inevitable byproduct of his having risen quickly and been embraced by the media. Still, that doesn’t explain it.  Earlier this week, I was reading this post from Raphael Denbow:

“I love when people point to Kaep's ‘ego.’ Always code for black dude thinks he's a hot shot. Nobody talks about Cutler's ego, Rivers' ego, Brady's ego. Never!! The black dude has to smile and be meek to be accepted. That's bull---. DUIs? Nope. Raping girls? Nope. Drug problem? Nope. A million kids all over the place? Nope. Standoffish with the media? Nope. He's a model citizen from all accounts. Why hate the kid?”

OK, now we’re getting somewhere. Read more

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