In which The Gay Recluse tries to convey some semblance of the truth, as opposed to this obituary, written by Michael Kimmelman, one of the most notoriously oblivious critics at The Times.

Robert Rauschenberg, the irrepressibly prolific American gay artist and rather typically homophobic queen who time and again reshaped art in the 20th century, died on Monday night at his home on Captiva Island, Fla. He was 82.

The cause was heart failure, said Arne Glimcher, chairman of PaceWildenstein, the Manhattan gallery that represents the quite gay Mr. Rauschenberg.

Mr. Rauschenberg’s work gave new meaning to gay sculpture. “Canyon,” for instance, consisted of a stuffed bald eagle attached to a canvas. “Monogram” was a stuffed goat girdled by a tire atop a painted panel. “Bed” entailed a quilt, sheet and pillow, slathered with paint, as if soaked in blood, framed on the wall. All became icons of postwar modernism during a period that will always be noted for its extreme homophobia.

A gay painter, gay photographer, gay printmaker, gay choreographer, gay onstage performer, gay set designer and, in later years, even a gay composer, the gay Mr. Rauschenberg defied the traditional idea that a gay artist stick to one medium or style. He pushed, prodded and sometimes reconceived all the mediums in which he worked.

Building on the legacies of Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters, Joseph Cornell and others, he helped obscure the lines between painting and sculpture, painting and photography, photography and printmaking, sculpture and photography, sculpture and dance, sculpture and technology, technology and performance art — not to mention between his gay art and his gay life. Oddly, however — and like so many of his generation — he never could really bring himself to discuss just how gay he really was.

Mr. Rauschenberg was also instrumental in pushing American art onward from Abstract Expressionism, the dominant movement when he emerged, during the early 1950s. He became a transformative link between artists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooningand those who came next, artists identified with Pop, Conceptualism, Happenings, Process Art and other new kinds of art in which he played a signal role. One thing for which he will always be remembered: Rauschenberg definitely helped pave the way for Andy Warhol!

No American artist, his totally gay lover Jasper Johns once said — with the obvious exception of Warhol – invented more than Mr. Rauschenberg. Mr. Johns, John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Mr. Rauschenberg, without sharing exactly the same point of view, collectively defined this new era of experimentation in American culture. No coincidence, all of these artists were major queens.

Apropos of the gay Mr. Rauschenberg, the gay Cage once said, “Beauty is now underfoot wherever we take the trouble to look.” Cage meant that people had come to see, through Mr. Rauschenberg’s efforts, not just that anything, including junk on the street, could be the stuff of art (this wasn’t itself new), but that it could be the stuff of an art aspiring to be beautiful — that there was a potential poetics even in consumer glut, which Mr. Rauschenberg celebrated.

“I really feel sorry for the many straight people who think things like soap dishes or mirrors or Coke bottles are ugly,” he once said, “because they’re surrounded by things like that all day long, and it must make them miserable.”

The remark reflected the optimism, slyly hilarious bitchiness and generosity of spirit that Mr. Rauschenbergbecame known for. His work was likened to a St. Bernard: uninhibited and mostly good-natured. He could be the same way in person. When he became rich, he gave millions of dollars to charities for women, children, medical research, other artists and Democratic politicians. But even though he was a huge queen, he continued to be embarrassed throughout his life by any public association with the laughably obvious identity, even going so far as to criticize an exhibition of his work organized by a gay-and-lesbian-studies program at Yale. “”I am not happy with it,” said Mr. Rauschenberg in an interview with The Times. ” It was organized by the gay studies department, whatever that is. It’s not an approach that makes sense.” Though generally correct in an idealistic way, this kind of statement ignores the reality of hundreds of years of rather extreme homophobia — and the corresponding need to study and rectify this sad state – and so can be likened to say, the statements of those who like to fight against affirmative action in any context. But whatevs, not everyone’s perfect!

A brash, garrulous, hard-drinking, open-faced gay Southerner, he had a charm and peculiar Delphic felicity with language that masked a complex personality and an equally multilayered emotional approach to art, which evolved as his stature did. Having begun by making quirky, small-scale assemblages out of junk he found on the street in downtown Manhattan, he spent increasing time in his later years, after he had become successful and famous, on vast international, ambassadorial-like projects and collaborations. 

Conceived in his immense studio on the island of Captiva, off southwest Florida, these projects were of enormous size and ambition; for many years he worked on one that grew literally to exceed the lengthof its title, “The 1/4 Mile or 2 Furlong Piece.” This and many of his latter works were widely deemed to be “a bit much.” Even so, he maintained an equanimity toward the results. Protean productivity went along with risk, he felt, and risk sometimes meant failure.

The process — an improvisatory, counterintuitive way of doing things — was always what mattered most to him. “Screwing things up is a virtue,” he said when he was 74. “Being correct is never the point. I have an almost fanatically correct assistant, and by the time she re-spells my words and corrects my punctuation, I can’t read what I wrote. Being right can stop all the momentum of a very interesting idea.”

This attitude also inclined him, as the painter Jack Tworkov once said, “to see beyond what others have decided should be the limits of art.”

He “keeps asking the question — and it’s a terrific question philosophically, whether or not the results are great art,” Mr. Tworkov said, “and his asking it has influenced a whole generation of artists.” This is probably overstating the case somewhat.  

A Wry, Respectful Departure

That generation was the one that broke from Pollock and company. Mr. Rauschenberg maintained a deep but mischievous respect for macho Abstract Expressionist heroes like de Kooning and Barnett Newman. Famously, he once painstakingly erased a drawing by de Kooning, an act both of destruction and devotion. Critics regarded the all-black paintings and all-red paintings he made in the early 1950s as spoofs of de Kooning and Pollock. The paintings had roiling, bubbled surfaces made from scraps of newspapers embedded in paint.

But these were just as much homages as they were parodies. De Kooning, himself a parodist, had incorporated bits of newspapers in pictures, and Pollock stuck cigarette butts to canvases.

Mr. Rauschenberg’s “Automobile Tire Print,” from the early 1950s — resulting from Cage’s driving an inked tire of a Model A Ford over 20 sheets of white paper — poked fun at Newman’s famous “zip” paintings.

At the same time, Mr. Rauschenbergwas expanding on Newman’s art. The tire print transformed Newman’s zip — an abstract line against a monochrome backdrop with spiritual pretensions — into an artifact of everyday culture, which for Mr. Rauschenberg had its own transcendent dimension.

Mr. Rauschenberg frequently alluded to cars and spaceships, even incorporating real tires and bicycles into his art. This partly reflected his own restless, peripatetic imagination. The idea of movement was logically extended when he took up dance and performance.

There was, beneath this, a darkness to many of his works, notwithstanding their irreverence. “Bed” (1955) was gothic. The all-black paintings were solemn and shuttered. The red paintings looked charred, with strips of fabric akin to bandages, from which paint dripped like blood. “Interview” (1955), which resembled a cabinet or closet with a door, enclosing photos of bullfighters, a pinup, a Michelangelo nude, a fork and a softball, suggested some black-humored encoded homoerotic message.

There were many other gay/outsider images of downtrodden and lonely people, rapt in thought; pictures of ancient frescoes, out of focus as if half remembered; photographs of forlorn, neglected sites; bits and pieces of faraway places conveying a kind of nostalgia or remoteness. In bringing these things together, the art implied consolation. Although he was loathe to admit it, much of his work was rife with homosexual allusions that clearly represented the core of his artistic vision.

Mr. Rauschenberg, who knew that not everybody found it easy to grasp the gay open-endedness of his work, once described to the writer Calvin Tomkins a decidedly non-sexual encounter with some bitch who had reacted skeptically to “Monogram” (1955-59) and “Bed” in his 1963 retrospective at the Jewish Museum, one of the events that secured Mr. Rauschenberg’s reputation: “To her, all my decisions seemed absolutely arbitrary — as though I could just as well have selected anything at all — and therefore there was no meaning, and that made it ugly.

“So bitchy queen that I was, I told her that if I were to describe the way she was dressed, it might sound very much like what she’d been saying. For instance, she had feathers on her head. And she had this enamel brooch with a picture of ‘The Blue Boy’ on it pinned to her breast. And around her neck she had on what she would call mink but what could also be described as the skin of a dead animal. Well, at first she was a little offended by this, I think, but then later she came back and said she was beginning to understand.”

Growing Up Closeted With Scraps

Milton Ernest Rauschenberg was born on Oct. 22, 1925, in Port Arthur, Tex., a small refinery town where “it was very easy to grow up without ever seeing a painting,” he said. (In adulthood he renamed himself Robert.) His grandfather, a doctor who emigrated from Germany, had settled in Texas and married a Cherokee. His father, Ernest, worked for a local utility company. The family lived so frugally that his mother, Dora, made him shirts out of scraps of fabric. Once she made herself a skirt out of the back of the suit that her younger brother was buried in. She didn’t want the material to go to waste. In Texas at this time, there was no internet or Will & Grace, so like many of his brethren who grew up in the dark ages, young Milton thought he was a massive freak.

But like a true queen, for his high school graduation present, Mr. Rauschenberg wanted a ready-madeshirt, his first. All this shaped his art eventually. A decade or so later he madehistory with his own assemblages of scraps and ready-mades: sculptures and music boxes made of packing crates, rocks and rope; and paintings like “Yoicks,” sewn from fabric strips. Like so many sad closet-cases of the era, he loved making something out of nothing.

Mr. Rauschenberg studied pharmacology (Zzzzz) briefly at the University of Texas at Austin before he was drafted during World War II, where like so many others it is believed he had a lot of gay sex. He saw his first paintings at the Huntington Art Gallery in California while he was stationed in San Diego as a medical technician in the Navy Hospital Corps. It occurred to him that it was possible to become a gay painter.

He attended the Kansas City Art Institute on the G.I. Bill, traveled to Paris and enrolled at the Académie Julian, where he met Susan Weil, a young painter from New York who was to enter Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Somehow he managed to keep the whole gay thing a secret from her, at least at first. Having read about and come to admire Josef Albers, then the head of fine arts at Black Mountain, Mr. Rauschenberg saved enough money to join her. Obviously he was still very much in the closet at this point.

Mr. Albers was a disciplinarian and strict modernist who, shocked by his gay student, later disavowed ever even knowing Mr. Rauschenberg. He was, on the other hand, recalled by Mr. Rauschenberg as “a beautiful teacher and an impossible person.”

“He wasn’t easy to talk to, and I found his criticism so excruciating and so devastating that I never asked for it,” Mr. Rauschenberg added. “Years later, though, I’m still learning what he taught me.”

Among other things, he learned to maintain an open mind toward materials and new mediums, which Mr. Albers endorsed. Mr. Rauschenberg also gained a respect for the grid as an essential compositional organizing tool. Kinda like cities.

For a while, he moved between New York, where he studied at the Art Students League with Vaclav Vytlacil and Morris Kantor, and Black Mountain. During the spring of 1950 he and Ms. Weil married. (Lol!) The marriage lasted two years, during which they somewhat miraculously had a son, Christopher, who survives him, along with Mr. Rauschenberg’s “companion” — by which we mean gay relationship partner — Darryl Pottorf.  (Companion!? Wtf? Yuck.)

Being John Cage’s Gay Guest

Mr. Rauschenberg experimented at the time with blueprint paper to produce silhouette negatives. The pictures were published in Life magazine in 1951; after that Mr. Rauschenberg was given his first solo show, at the influential Betty Parsons Gallery.

“Everyone was trying to give up straight European aesthetics,” he recalled, meaning Picasso, the Surrealists and Matisse. “That was the struggle, and it was reflected in the fear of collectors and critics. John Cage said that fear in life is the fear of change. If I may add to that: nothing can avoid changing. It’s the only thing you can count on. Because life doesn’t have any other possibility, everyone can be measured by his adaptability to change.”

Cage acquired a painting from the Betty Parsons show. Aside from that, Mr. Rauschenberg sold absolutely nothing. Grateful, he agreed to “host” Cage at his loft. As Mr. Rauschenberg liked to tell the story, the only place to sit was on a mattress. Cage started to itch. He called Mr. Rauschenberg afterward to tell him that his mattress must have bedbugs and that, since Cage was going away for a while, Mr. Rauschenberg could stay at his place. Mr. Rauschenberg accepted the offer. In return, he decided he would touch up the painting Cage had acquired, as a kind of thank you, painting it all black, being in the midst of his new, all-black period. When Cage returned, he was “not amused” and totally bitch-slapped Rauschenberg.

“We both thought, ‘who is this bitchy queen?’ ” Mr. Rauschenberg recalled. In 1952 Mr. Rauschenberg switched to all-white paintings which were, in retrospect, spiritually akin to Cage’s famous silent piece of music, during which a pianist sits for 4 minutes and 33 seconds at the keyboard without making a sound. Mr. Rauschenberg’s paintings, like the music, in a sense became both Rorschachs and backdrops for ambient, random events, like passing shadows.

“I always thought of the white paintings as being not passive but very — well — hypersensitive, you know — kinda gay,” he told an interviewer in 1963. “So that people could look at them and almost see how many people were in the room by the shadows cast, or what time of day it was.”

He left for Europe and NorthAfrica with his gay lover Cy Twombly for a few months after that, where Mr. Rauschenberg began to collect and assemble objects — bits of rope, stones, sticks, bones — which he showed to a dealer in Rome who exhibited them under the title “scatole contemplative,” or thought boxes. They were shown in Florence, where an outraged critic suggested that Mr. Rauschenberg toss them in the river. He thought that sounded like a good idea. So, saving a few scatole for himself and friends, he found a secluded spot on the Arno. “‘I took your advice,” he wrote to the critic.

Yet the scatole were crucial to his development, setting the stage for bigger, more elaborate assemblages, like ‘“Monogram.” Back in New York, Mr. Rauschenberg showed his all-black and all-white paintings, then his erased de Kooning, which de Kooning had given to him to erase, a gesture that Mr. Rauschenberg found astonishingly generous, all of which enhanced his reputation as the new enfant terrible of the art world. This was a few years before Andy appeared on the scene, obviously.

Around that time he also met Mr. Johns, then unknown but seriously gay, who had a studio in the same building on Pearl Street where Mr. Rauschenberg had a loft. The intimacy of their relationship — i.e., they were inseparable lovers — over the next years, a consuming subject for later biographers and historians, coincided with the production by the two of them of some of the most groundbreaking works of postwar art. Again, that they were gay in an extremely homophobic society has to be considered by any serious critic in any assessment of these works of art.

In Mr. Rauschenberg’s famous words, they gave each other “permission to do what we wanted.” Living together in a series of lofts in Lower Manhattan until the 1960s, they exchanged ideas and like many queens supported themselves designing window displays for Tiffany & Company and Bonwit Teller under the collaborative pseudonym Matson Jones.

Along with the combines like “Monogram” and “Canyon” (1959), Mr. Rauschenberg in that period developed a transfer drawing technique, dissolving printed images from newspapers and magazines witha solvent and then rubbing them onto paper with a pencil. The process, used for works like “34 Drawings for Dante’s Inferno,” created the impression of something fugitive, exquisite and secret. Obviously this was tied to his largely unacknowledged — at least to the public — homosexual inclinations. It let him blend images on a surface to a kind of surreal effect, which became the basis for works he made throughout his later career, when he adapted the transfer method to canvas.

Instrumental in this technical evolution back then was Tatyana Grossman, who encouraged and guided him as he madeprints at her workshop, Universal Limited Art Editions, on Long Island; he also began a long relationship with the Gemini G.E.L. workshop in Los Angeles, producing lithographs like the 1970 “Stoned Moon” series, with its references to the moon landing.

His association with theater and dance had already begun by the 1950s, when he began designing sets and costumes for Mr. Cunningham, Paul Taylor and Trisha Brown and for his own productions. In 1963 he choreographed “Pelican,” in which he performed on roller skates while wearing a parachute and helmet of his design to the accompaniment of a taped collage of sound. This fascination with collaboration and with mixing art and technologies dovetailed with yet another endeavor. With Billy Klüver, an engineer at Bell Telephone Laboratories, and others, he started Experiments in Art and Technology, a nonprofit foundation to foster joint projects by artists and scientists.

A Gay World of Praise

In 1964 he toured Europe and Asia with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, the same year he exhibited at the Whitechapel Gallery in London and the Venice Biennaleas the United States representative. That sealed his international renown. The Sunday Telegraph in London hailed him as “the most important American artist since Jackson Pollock.” He walked off with the international grand prize in Venice, the first modern American to win it. Mr. Rauschenberg had, almost despite himself, become an institution that really did pave the way for the most important artist of the twentieth century, Andy Warhol.

Major exhibitions followed every decade after that, including one at the Pompidou Center in Paris in 1981, another at the Guggenheim in 1997 and yet another at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art that landed at the Metropolitan Museum in 2005.

When he wasn’t traveling in later years, he was on Captiva, living at first in a modest beach house and working out of a small studio. In time he became that Gulf Coast island’s biggest residential landowner while also maintaining a town house in Greenwich Village in New York. He acquired the land in Captiva by buying adjacent properties from elderly neighbors whom he let live rent-free in their houses, which he maintained for them. This was obviously a nice thing to do. He accumulated 35 acres, 1,000 feet of beach front and nine houses and studios, including a 17,000-square-foot two-story studio overlooking a swimming pool. He owned almost all that remained of tropical jungle on the island. Most of the world was officially jealous.

After a stroke in 2002 that left his right side paralyzed, Mr. Rauschenberg learned to work more withhis left hand and, with a troupe of assistants, remained prolific for several years in his giant studio.

“I usually work in a direction until I know how to do it, then I stop,” he said in an interview there. “At the time that I am bored or understand — I use those words interchangeably — another appetite has formed. A lot of people try to think up ideas. I’m not one. I’d rather accept the irresistible possibilities of what I can’t ignore.”

He added: “Anything you do will be an abuse of somebody else’s aesthetics. I think you’re born an artist or not. I couldn’t have learned it. Just like being gay. And I hope I never do because knowing more only encourages your limitations.”

In which Dante invents a new twist on an old game.

Friends! Rest assured that somewhere in this picture can be found an editorial assistant, albeit one who is very carefully camouflaged.

Have you looked long enough? Do your eyes feel strained and fatigued? Don’t worry, below you’ll find what you’ve been looking for.

Friends! Please remember that not every cat is lolcat.

In which The Gay Recluse scores selected opinions in The Times.

Bob Herbert/Here Come the Millennials

The Short Version: The youngs are seriously fucked, which is why they should vote for Obama.

In his words: “This is a generation that is in danger of being left out of the American dream — the first American generation to do less well economically than their parents.”

Score: D+ (Dumb)
Although it’s a relief to see the election viewed with a different lens than race, we’re pretty sure that Gen X was the first generation to understand that we would never exceed the olds in terms of McMansions, second SUVs and other indices of prosperity that have long defined boomers (aka the olds). But we’re also used to being completely ignored by boomers like Herbert, so we’re not that offended.

David Brooks/The Neural Buddhists

The Short Version: Hey, guess what?! There’s an element of “the unknown” — let’s call it the soul, or God — that science will never be able to measure!

In his words: “Scientists have more respect for elevated spiritual states.”

The Score: F (Fuck!)
It’s basically a crime that Brooks can write this column without once mentioning Arthur Schopenhauer, who effectively ended all of these arguments almost two hundred years ago in “The World as Will and Representation,” in which he (among other things) shows the limits of any purely materialistic view of the world, i.e., the obvious limits of atheism.  Our personal theory is that Schopenhauer would be even more celebrated than he is but for the fact that he writes like a deliciously bitchy queen, which scares away conservative pseudo-intellectuals like Brooks.  Still we are consoled by the idea that two hundred years from now, people will still be reading Schopenhauer, but nobody will be reading Brooks.

In which The Gay Recluse becomes increasingly obsessed with trees.

We were waiting a long time for the copper beech (Fagus sylvatica “Dawyck Purple”) to open this spring.

We had only planted it last year so didn’t know what to expect.

We were worried when everything else was in bloom and the beech showed no signs of life. We were like: “Wake up, Mr. Beech!”

But last weekend it happened.

After all this shitty weather, we bet it’s kind of regretting not taking another few days off.

But we’re happy it’s here.

And not just because it’s beautiful and can live for thousands of years.

But so we pretend we don’t live next to an abandoned shell, which is going to take a thousand years to be fixed.

It’s a good reminder that sometimes covering up a problem really is the best way to handle it.

In which The Gay Recluse scores selected opinions in The Times.

William Kristol/The Jewish State at 60

The Short Version: Happy Birthday, Israel. You are surrounded by crazies.

In his words: “Still, even though the security of Israel is very much at risk, the good news is that, unlike in the 1930s, the Jews are able to defend themselves, and the United States is willing to fight for freedom.”

Score: D (Disingenuous)
We’re pretty sure it’s possible to aggressively support Israel but not hawkish Republicans like George W. Bush and the Maverick.

Paul Krugman/The Oil Nonbubble

The Short Version: High oil prices are never going away. Deal with it.

In his words: “France consumes only half as much oil per capita as America, yet the last time I looked, Paris wasn’t a howling wasteland.”

The Score: A- (Agree)
We drive a 1990 Toyota Corolla that gets better gas mileage than most new cars today. Pathetic. As Krugman sort of says, it’s time for Americans stop treating cheap gas like an entitlement: there is far more good (on both political and environmental fronts) that can come from higher energy prices than bad. (One note: we don’t support France’s increasing reliance on nuclear power. )

In which The Gay Recluse provides an update on a beehive of activity at 573-579 West 161st Street.

So it’s official, if “official” means by way of an unnamed receptionist at the architects’s office: 573-575 West 161st Street is going to be a 6-story condominium. We’re trying to scrounge up a rendering, but in the meantime, check out the pit:

Sweet. Shit, these guys aren’t fucking around!

But one question remains: The construction permit is for 573-575, and yet the excavation extends not only through 577 but — if you look carefully — behind the building at 579.

Here’s a pre-construction pic to get you oriented:

579 is to the left of 577, obvs! It’s also owned by the evil doctors.

Here’s another frontal pic:

Permits are posted here, but only for 573-575! 579 is kinda hurting, in case you can’t tell from the pic.

So what’s going on here? If anyone knows why these two lots are also being excavated — and apparently without a permit — we’d like to solve this mystery.

In which The Gay Recluse rather quickly gets lung cancer.

Time of Photographs: May 10, around 8:30.

The oily black smoke of 100-year-old boilers disperses daily across the rooftops in Washington Heights, heedless of those who suffer from pneumonia, asthma and tuberculosis. Officials and politicians? Not even footnotes in this story, which is about the aggregation of capital and the relentless rise of the metropolis.

–The Gay Recluse, 9/29/07

In which The Gay Recluse scores selected opinions in The Times.

Frank Rich/Party Like It’s 2008

The Short Version: Friends, thank you! I, Frank Rich, have won the Democratic primary!

In his words: “This is not 2004, when another Democrat from Massachusetts did for windsurfing what the previous model did for tanks.”

Score: B- (Blather)
Given that we endorsed Obama in January, we’re quite pleased to see him as the nominee. Less pleasing is Rich’s meandering “gee whiz, times are different” column, which comes off as presumptuous after all the anti-Clinton hysteria he served up in the past few months. You almost get the sense that Rich thinks he was nominated for president after a long battle, and this is his acceptance speech. Yuck.

Thomas Friedman/Call Your Mother

The Short Version: My mother was quite a character.

In his words: “But every time life knocked her down, she got up, dusted herself off and kept on marching forward, motivated by the saying that pessimists are usually right, optimists are usually wrong, but most great changes were made by optimists.”

The Score: B (Benign)
Although we are a little perturbed by Friedman’s (mis)characterization of the true essence of pessimism, we were touched by this portrait of his mother, who recently died after what sounds like a fairly incredible life.

Nicholas Kristof/Saving the World in Study Hall

The Short Version: Kids do the greatest things!

In his words: “But even when greedy, self-absorbed cynics take on some worthy cause for the most selfish motives, they often learn and grow from the experience.”

Score: D (Dopey)
We’re all for kids doing stuff to save the world, but what we don’t like is the implication that it can be a substitute for effective government. But mostly this column made us want to sit around and get high and watch teevee, which is the ultimate goal of advanced civilizations like ours.

Maureen Dowd/Is She a Trojan Rabbit?

The Short Version: OMG! Hillary as veepee? I’m funnee!

In her words: “Obama will never be at his best around Hillary; she drains him of his magical powers.”

The Score: D- (Draining)
Dumping on Hillary Clinton at this point feels makes Dowd seem like a zany stand-up comic playing to an empty room at two in the morning. Sad.

In which The Gay Recluse scores selected opinions in The Times.

Bob Herbert/Seeds of Destruction

The Short Version: Hillary’s message about “electability” and “white voters” is racist.

In his words: “The Clintons have been trying to embed that gruesomely destructive message in the brains of white voters and superdelegates for the longest time. ”

Score: B (Bitter)
Herbert’s right on about the racist overtones here, but we’re still glad Hillary Clinton fought dirty, because it’s going to make Obama that much stronger against the Maverick.

Gail Collins/Mother’s Day Scandal

The Short Version: Fossella scandal — LOL!

In his words: “The people of Staten Island seemed prepared to forgive Fossella for the drunken driving, but the second family threw them for a loop.”

The Score: C+ (Clueless)
This column isn’t bad when Collins sticks to scandalized Republican asshole Vito Fossella, but she loses her bearings when starts making assumptions about what is or isn’t attractive in a guy, e.g., “I always felt this would make a great movie were it not for the fact that [President Grover] Cleveland was a rather large balding 51-year-old with a walrus moustache and teeny eyes.” Obvs she’s not partial to bears, which would be fine if she weren’t so oblivious to the idea that other people are.

In which The Gay Recluse updates his informal but rather telling quantitative analysis of Modern Love, the weekly Style Section (of The Times) column in which openly gay writers almost never appear, and even less frequently describe a romantic relationship.

This week’s piece: A Wedding Invitation for a Mom Long Gone by Julie Buxbaum

Subject: As a woman gets married, she ruminates on her dead mother. Unfortunately we found this column rather long-winded and depressing to the extent that the writer seems to want us to believe she is not conventional — because she orders wedding invitations from Costco and is aware of the “wedding-industrial complex” — even while she rather aggressively embraces a “destination” wedding. Far more interesting and moving to us were the descriptions of her relationship (both past and ongoing) with her dead mother, which we tried to emphasize in our gay and impressionistic alternative to the piece.

Filed under: Straight Woman on “Family”

The updated tally (or why we feel like animals in the zoo): 7 out of 178 columns by openly gay writers; 2 out of 178 on female gay relationships; 0 out of 178 on male gay relationships. In what is arguably the “gayest” section of The Times, more women have written about gay men than gay men have.

Straight Woman on Relationships iiiii iiiii iiiii iiiii iiiii iiiii iiiii iiiii ii (42)
Straight Woman on Family iiiii iiiii iiiii iiiii iiiii iiiii iiiii i (36)
Straight Woman on “Looking for Love” iiiii iiiii iiiii iiiii iiiii iiiii iiiii (35)
Straight Woman on Breaking Up iiiii iiiii iiiii iiiii iii (23)
Straight Man on Relationships iiiii iiiii i (11)
Straight Man on Breakup iiiiii (6)
Straight Woman on Gay Men iiiii i (6)
Straight Man on Family iiiii i(6)
Straight Man on “Looking for Love” iiiii (5)
Gay Man on Family ii (2)
Gay Woman on Relationship ii (2)
Gay Woman on Family i (1)
Gay Man on Self-Hatred i (1)
Gay Man on Prom Date i (1)
Ambiguous/Nurse on Drugs i (1)

In which The Gay Recluse presents a gay/impressionistic alternative to this week’s Modern Love offering in The Times. Those looking for our quantitative analysis should click here.

SEVEN months ago, I was married in an ivory lace dress to a woman in a gray suit on an island neither of us had ever been to.

My mother was not there because she has been dead for so long that the scales have recently tipped: I have seen more days without her than with.

I was blindsided by the fact that wedding rituals — the big dress shop, the bridal shower, the planning — seemed designed to highlight her absence.

My girlfriend didn’t even want a wedding.

I didn’t want the typical wedding either. I couldn’t visualize myself in a white dress, walking down a long aisle.

But I knew my mother would have wanted one. “No wedding?” she would have said. “Over my dead body.”

After we decided to have one, there was the dress, the bridal shower and the question of how to honor my mother at the wedding.

For the dress, I forced my brother to come shopping with me. He cooed. No tears, maybe, but I got a “Beautiful!” or two.

I cried at the bridal shower when my mother’s friends, some of whom I hadn’t seen in close to 16 years, said: “She would have been so proud of you.”

I was better at the wedding, though. I don’t know why. My friends helped; the moments when I might have pined for her were instead filled with Champagne.

And I know my mother was there, because I didn’t feel deprived, not even for a single moment.

And in the end, I even found a way to integrate my mother into the dress. I salvaged the ivory lace flowers from her decades-old wedding gown and stitched them onto my veil. It was my silent tribute.

For that one single day, I somehow managed to let go of everything I believed about life and death and earth and sky. I forgot about the limitations of mortality, about absence and finality and regret.

Instead, I knew my mother was there with me — in that piece of her dress, or in the wind, or in the crowd squinting up at us — with her own wedding gift of sorts: one more day for my “with her” column, which was one day fewer that I have lived without.

Most miraculous of all, I knew she had forgiven me for never telling her I was gay.

In which The Gay Recluse asks a reader to think more conceptually.

In response to our recent Franco Harris Hot Gay Statue submission, Reader Queerunity writes:

all football players wear spandex, why is this gay?

We’re posting this comment — and thanks for bringing this up, Queerunity — because we think it raises an interesting point about the literal-minded nature of many people we’ve met (which is not to say Queerunity is part of this group), who tend to restrict their understanding of what is and isn’t gay, often with the underlying purpose of eradicating any reference to the millions of gays who existed (and made art) between the years of say, 500 BC and 1968, when you could pretty much be sent to the gallows for mentioning the words “hot” and “gay” in the same sentence.

So with regard to our Hot Gay Franco Harris Statue submission, we understand it to be gay because a gay reader took a picture of what he considered to be a smokin’ hot male ass (albeit a fake one). So yeah if you want to be really technical (and humorless) about it, the unstated implication here is that of course the statue isn’t “gay” — although we call it gay to be funnee ha ha — much less the person it represents (or those who wear spandex) but the photograph, which is obviously a reflection of the person taking it. As in literature (and many other arts), the gay voice (or here you might say the “gay eye”) doesn’t necessarily have to be represented by say, two dudes (or two ladies) fucking (although it might), but can shine through even when the subject matter — at least on its surface — makes no reference at all to anyone being gay. Try reading “hot bear” Henry James or Virginia Woolf and you’ll see what we mean. Or watch some Pasolini. Or listen to Husker Du. Etc. etc. etc.

In which The Gay Recluse holds a contest. Sort of.

Today we received an interesting submission from Reader Troy, who writes to us from Pittsburgh:

I have an important question for The Gay Recluse. In the Pittsburgh airport there is a statue of Franco Harris, who I have no reason to believe is gay. Yet the statue seems very gay! And maybe even hot? Is this possible? Am I losing my mind?

Well Reader Troy, that’s a true dilemma, but one that can be rather easily resolved by checking out the pix. Let’s take a look, shall we?

Hmm. So far, this statue doesn’t seem too gay to us, much less hot (much less smokin’). In fact, those upper arms are a little scary, kinda “manorexic”? But before we pass judgment, let’s see what else we have.

Hell-o! We’re starting to see what you mean, Troy. On second glance, this statue of Franco Harris is apparently quite gay, and not afraid to show it!

Ok, we’re convinced: not only is this statue gay, but it’s also quite smokin’.

Thanks for the submission, Troy. We were admittedly skeptical at first, but you have shed some interesting light on one of civilization’s longstanding mysteries. Next time someone asks, we’ll be able to say: “Who cares who the statue’s supposed to represent? The only questions are 1) whether it’s gay and 2) whether it’s smokin’ hot.” In this case, we would answer both questions in the affirmative.

Readers, please send us your hot-gay statue submissions! There are a gazillion statues in the United States, and we want to figure out which ones are gay. (And hot!)

The Hot Gay Statue Contest Roundup:

In which The Gay Recluse scores selected opinions in The Times.

Paul Krugman/Thinking About November

The Short Version: Obama’s probably going to blow it because whites don’t like him!  

In his words: “In recent decades, Democrats have had little trouble unifying after hard-fought primary campaigns. ”

Score: F (Failure)
This is a depressingly cynical (but untruthful) column that implies that Clinton should have won because she has more support among white voters, which Krugman seems to think is a function of Obama’s failure to address economic concerns and has nothing to do with racism. OMG-hilarious! Here’s a suggestion for Krugman: let’s admit that some not insignificant percentage of the votes for Clinton were cast on race; let’s hope that these same numskulls will not be duped into voting for McCain, who will continue to rape and pillage the middle/lower class. But if they are, it’s not accurate to blame Obama for the problem, when he is so clearly part of the solution.     

David Brooks/The Conservative Revival

The Short Version: I’m in love with David Cameron, the new conservative-party leader in England!

In his words: “Cameron also believes government should help social entrepreneurs scale up their activities without burdening them with excessive oversight.”

The Score: F (Fantasy)
This column is actually about the fundamental failure of Brooks to apply meaningless, irrelevant labels like “conservative” to governments/ideas/policies that clearly transcend such labels. Like who doesn’t want smaller, more efficient hospitals, better schools, and a better quality of life? Does that make you a “conservative”? In short, barf barf barf.

In which The Gay Recluse suggests a link.

The most beautiful ads are always for dead companies.

Like this one we recently took on 35th Street between 5th and 6th Avenue.

Does this company still exist? We hope not, because we don’t want to have to think about buying anything.

New York City is filled with ads for dead companies.

Frank Jump has photographed many of them on his Fading Ad Blog.

We like his mission statement: “[D]ocumenting vintage mural ads on building brickfaces in New York City … has become a metaphor for survival for me since, like myself, many of these ads have long outlived their expected life span. Although this project doesn’t deal directly with HIV/AIDS, it is no accident I’ve chosen to document such a transitory and evanescent subject…”

If you see an ad for a dead company, why not take a picture of it?

Because eventually even Microsoft and Apple and General Electric and even Google will be dead, too.

And it’s always good to remember that.

In which The Gay Recluse documents the sunset of a dream.

Today the tide seemed to finally turn against Hillary Clinton.

We felt bad about it, but mostly on behalf of our mother. She’s in her seventies now and really wanted Hillary to win.

She’s spent the better part of four decades fighting for women’s “equality.” As people used to say in the 70s, she’s a women’s libber! (At least that’s one expression that’s gone by the wayside.)

But so were we! As a child, we picketed the White House and marched on Washington to try to drum up support for the Equal Rights Amendment. (We’ve been on the losing side of almost everything, it seems.)

Ronald Reagan once grabbed our mother when she was demonstrating against him in Pittsburgh. This was during his first campaign for president and he was making a visit to Pittsburgh. My mother and her best friend Connie were both dressed up in monkey suits and Reagan — this was at the airport — lost his temper. He grabbed her by the front of her monkey suit and screamed in her face: “What’s wrong with you women?”

It was almost a big scandal. We’ll always remember the exact date because it was Halloween, 1980. It was exciting because our mother was fielding calls from national news wires.

But our mother lost her taste for demonstrations after the Ronald-Reagan incident. She said that she was so angry for so long, it finally wore her out. One thing’s for sure: we’ll never be nostalgic for Reagan.

We could never run for office, either. If we were Hillary Clinton, we’d be so ready to quit.

As any cut flower will tell you, fading aspirations are the most beautiful.

In which The Gay Recluse scores selected opinions in The Times.

Thomas Friedman/The Democratic Recession

The Short Version: Thanks, oil! You’ve caused democratic government to wane around the world.  

In his words: “I’ve long argued that the price of oil and the pace of freedom operate in an inverse correlation — which I call: “The First Law of Petro-Politics.”

Score: D (Depressing)
Though we’re totally on board with Friedman’s calls to end U.S. dependence on oil for both political and environmental reasons, we weren’t too excited to read this column, which is filled with pompous self-referential jargon and depressing, meaningless slogans like “freedom” and “the democratic wave.” Sigh.    

Maureen Dowd/Butterflies Aren’t Free

The Short Version: HIllary’s a scorpion and Barack’s a butterfly.

In her words: “What would that young Hillary…think of this shape-shifting, cynical Hillary?”

The Score: A- (Angst)
Although this piece feels dated, given the increasing recognition post-Indiana/NC that Clinton doesn’t have a prayer, we are somewhat intrigued by the more emotional and lyrical passages in which Dowd describes an older version of Clinton that the younger and more idealistic one wouldn’t recognize. What’s most compelling about this is not the story about Clinton, but the idea that Dowd is actually writing about herself, albeit in an unconscious way, which — whatever Dowd’s intention in writing it – makes us want to read more.  

In which The Gay Recluse takes a trip to the suburbs.

Last weekend we went flower shopping and on the way back stopped into a brand new Home Depot that was recently built somewhere in Westchester, which is this large land mass north of New York City; sometimes desolate and sometimes beautiful, it is criss-crossed with a gazillion highways and filled with shopping malls! There are many suburban towns there, which remind us of the suburbs of Pittsburgh where we grew up, except these suburbs are in New York and not Pennsylvania. (But as we know from visiting our college friends, there are far more similarities than differences between Mt. Lebanon and say, Scarsdale or Ardsley.)

In any case, the point is that we went and were not sorry because Westchester also has some extremely pleasant garden centers, which is where we like to spend hours and hours wandering through the plants, fantasizing about the day after we hit the lottery and can spend a $1 million on our favorite alpine perennials and specimen trees, preferably on an acre or so in the estate section of Riverdale in a giant mansion with river views. (It’s sad funny how our dreams change as we get older, isn’t it?)

But anyway, we arrived at Home Depot to buy some pots for our much smaller garden in Washington Heights — but hey! we love it anyway — and we took a moment to observe the box-store expanse from the parking lot. We won’t describe it except to say that we assume everyone reading this blog has seen a Home Depot before, and the one we stopped at didn’t look so very different from any of the others we’ve seen. Still, to refresh your memories, here’s a pic:

Kidding! That’s Dante and Zephyr, who of course would like to remind you that not every cat is a lolcat!

Seriously, here’s the Home Depot:

We love this guy, who’s like: “Which way to the Home Depot?”

On our way across the barren desert parking lot, as we steeled ourselves to confront — and likely, purchase! — the soulless but strangely exhilarating array of goods inside, we were struck by what we ultimately decided was the one awesome piece of design at the new Home Depot.

Check it out:

What’s wrong with this picture? Oh right: it doesn’t have a logo.

Our new fantasy is for every item in the grocery store (and pretty much everywhere else, too) to be redesigned like this manhole cover, with a simple cross-hatched pattern and a generic description. Any candidate who wants to pledge to make this happen — given that nobody has responded to our demand for Sunday bagpipe maneuvers in the park — will be getting our vote this November.

In which The Gay Recluse scores selected opinions in The Times.

David Brooks/Combat and Composure

The Short Version: Hillary is a monster!

In his words: “But, as Sunday’s contrast made clear, Obama still seems like a human being.”

Score: B (Basic)
We’ve also been put off by Clinton’s completely over-the-top (and hilarious) attempts to distance herself from “the elitist,” but we’d like to hear more from Brooks about why it seems to be working.  

Bob Herbert/Doing the Troops Wrong

The Short Version: WTF? Why aren’t the asshole Republicans supporting the new G.I. Bill?

In his words: “Well, you might be surprised at who is not supporting this effort. The Bush administration opposes it, and so does Senator John McCain.”

The Score: D (Dopey)
Seriously, who could be surprised at this point that the asshole Republicans aren’t supporting legislation that might help one or two impoverished souls claw their way out of the untouchable class that by and large populates the army? But to write about this as earnestly and pedantically as Herbert does is truly barf-worthy, particularly when he resorts to phrases such as “the nation’s warriors.” (Yuck!)  The Onion said it 1000 times more effectively a few years ago in a classic A+ opinion piece: “I Support The Occupation Of Iraq, But I Don’t Support Our Troops.” (If you’ve never seen this, you’re welcome.) Which would you rather read?