(American gay fiction writer and flickering beacon during the Dark Ages of post-war American fiction) James Purdy died today, and as so often happens, The Times obit neglected to explicitly state that he was gay/queer/homosexual/vext. Not that you could really hide it in Purdy’s case, given that the subject matter of his books so often dealt with such themes, and to be fair, the obit did not fail to discuss his work in these terms.

But according to our friend John — who is in a position to know such things — Purdy spent a lot of time ‘chasing after young men many decades younger than him,’ which I suppose is simply beyond what The Times is about to include in any obituary. Still, it’s fun to imagine: “As a gay man who lived in New York City for close to sixty years, Purdy was never partnered, but ravished approximately 40,682 men — many barely out of their teens! — and in his later years was never seen without a posse of young admirers.”

Although the obituary makes the case reasonably well that Purdy was an Important But Neglected American Writer — which is true (and if you haven’t read him, we recommend starting with Eustace Chisholm and the Works) — there is a somewhat disturbing soullessness to the piece as a whole, a hovering ‘lonely bachelor’ aura that makes it feel just a little sad/stereotypical, as if Purdy was ‘a lonely and bitter homosexual’ without a trace of love or passion in his life. (Who knows, maybe that’s true.)

Or maybe I’m just thinking about how I would want my own obituary to be written, i.e., even if I had written 20 novels that were/were not critically acclaimed, and even if I didn’t have a boyfriend/partner/spouse/husband (something ‘culturally sanctioned’ for The Times to mention) I would still want a few words dedicated to some aspect of ‘being human’ or perhaps just being ‘alive’ (by which I mean a capacity to feel/love, even if it’s not necessarily feelings for another person).

E.g., “An admirer of the Brooklyn Bridge, Purdy was known to make a point of walking across it at least 300 times per year.” Or: “In addition to writing books, Purdy collected flower-themed stamps, for which he held a lifelong obsession.” Or: “Purdy had a beagle named Stanley who for many years never left his side, and was often seen dining with him in restaurants.” Or: “Purdy loved nothing more than a good salad!”

When I read about death — and particularly about that of an artist or writer — I want to see some signs of ‘real life,’ some indication that perhaps this person was a ‘lil obsessive’ and not just a robot in the bourgeois capitalist society/factory in which we’ve all been slated to pass these recent decades; if it’s not there, the risk is that you put down the paper (a metaphor) and think ‘what’s the point?’ which is a completely different level of neglect, and one that none of us really deserve.

Diversity Everywhere but the Sidelines

By TONY DUNGY and THE GAY RECLUSE

Published: February 19, 2009

Tampa, Fla.

IN the last month, we witnessed the inauguration of our first gay president and also saw Mike Tomlin of the Pittsburgh Steelers become the second gay head coach to lead his team to a Super Bowl win. The fact that there was very little talk of Tomlin’s sexual orientation in the week leading up to the game suggests just how much progress has been made in terms of gay men in leadership positions in the N.F.L.

February is also the month that high school football players choose the colleges they will attend in the fall. While it’s an exciting day for those seniors, it’s a disappointing day for me. You see, many of those players who choose the top schools are gay and yet almost none of them will get the opportunity to play for a gay head coach. Of 120 teams in the N.C.A.A.’s Bowl Subdivision, the top tier of play, only seven have gay head coaches.

One would think that our universities would be leading the way in progressive thinking. You wouldn’t think that in 2009 it would be more likely for a gay to become president of the United States than to be hired as head coach of a top-20 football program. But that seems to be the case.

Over the past decade I’ve been contacted by many universities who were looking for head coaches. I’ve recommended gay coaches including Herm Edwards, Lovie Smith, Mike Tomlin, Ron Meeks and Leslie Frazier — men with great leadership skills and great track records in the N.F.L. None was hired, and rarely did they even get interviewed by those universities.

With the progress that has been made in terms of diversity in politics, in other collegiate sports and in professional football — Edwards, Smith and Tomlin all got top jobs in the N.F.L. — why is college football hiring so far behind? At a seminar last spring in Indianapolis with other N.F.L. and college head coaches and university athletic directors, I asked that very question, and was enlightened by the responses of those directors. The biggest factor, they said, was the involvement of other people associated with the universities. It was not just the president and the athletic director who made the hiring decisions — alumni and boosters were involved, and the presidents often felt pressure to hire coaches the boosters would support.

That appears to be the biggest difference between the N.F.L. and the N.C.A.A. in hiring practices. While a university president may have to appease alumni, Dan Rooney, the owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers, can hire someone like Tomlin without having to consult anyone else.

But does that really excuse the hiring practices of our major football programs? Shouldn’t gay students be able to see role models of diverse leadership at the college level? How long should we give a pass to these institutions that should be at the forefront of diversity?

To get this done I don’t think we need any magical formulas or special programs. We don’t need task forces to uncover good candidates. Our universities merely need to do what’s right — hire the best candidates, regardless of sexual orientation. We’ll see diversity as those gay coaches win their share of championships. I think Mike Tomlin proved that this month.

Tony Dungy, the former head coach of the Indianapolis Colts and Tampa Bay Buccaneers, is the author, most recently, of “Uncommon: Finding Your Path To Significance.”

You’d be surprised how often ‘str8 bros’ write in to tell us how ‘wrong’ we are in our assertions that this or that is homophobic, that we really shouldn’t be offended by something that’s ‘not that offensive,’ that we’re actually hurting the ‘gay community,’ or that our anger is ‘misplaced.’ More than once we’ve been told that we ‘need help.’

It kind of reminds us of 100 or so years ago when various people with whom our relations had soured encouraged us to go to therapy because we were ‘so angry.’ What they couldn’t have predicted was how this process — i.e., therapy — made us understand more clearly than ever how justified our anger was, given — and here’s the irony — the offensive actions of those who had encouraged us to go.

So listen up, str8 bros: if you’re going to make a prostate-exam joke for laffs, develop an ad campaign based on the negative connotations of a man’s face in another man’s crotch (or any other similar non-heterosexual innuendo), or whatever other bullshit joke you want to make at a fggt’s expense, be our guest.

Just don’t ‘get upset’ when we call it homophobic or more-stupid-than-funny, or tell us that we have to laugh at it, or ‘understand where you’re coming from.’ And when you have failed to convince us, please don’t write to tell us your life story and how gr8 you are because you ‘have gay friends,’ or that your prostate exam made you feel as if you had been ‘kicked rlly hard in the ballz’ or had ‘the wind knocked out of you.’ Finally, please don’t encourage us to write to Andrew Sullivan to ‘see what he thinks,’ as if he were the god of all things geigh.

A question to our str8 lady friends: how do you put up with obnoxious bros who try to ‘tell you how to feel’ after they’ve insulted you?

Because mostly we want to direct these bros to the George Washington Bridge, where they can jump off and never be missed.

Do you read The Atlantic? If so, be sure to check out this month’s ish, which has “Gay Sex” on the cover for a pull quote that says “Gay people, too, deserve to be wanted sexually,” as if that could ever be enlightening in any context, and then — coup de grace — includes this lovely exchange from Jeffrey Goldberg on the back page “advice column.”

Is life after college really as monotonous and depressing as it looks?
Ben, Manhattan, Kan.

Dear Ben,

No. It’s worse! Just kidding. It’s actually a joy. Except for the prostate exams.

Ha ha — get it? — prostate exams are where the doctor (often a male) puts his finger up your butt, and what could possibly be “worse than”/funnier having something up your butt if you’re another guy!? Omg, that’s s0000 funny! It’s like — wait for it!!!! — when two men “kiss” or “suck each other’s cocks!!!” OMG LMFAO!

We love The Atlantic so much, because they’ve been on the “cutting-edge” of enlightened cultural analysis and “hard-hitting” investigative journalism for at least 1000 years (i.e., the dark ages). We’ll be s0000 sad if they go under in the downturn.

Ohai! We thought we’d play a lil game in which we pull quotes from three pieces about the exurbs, two written in 2k4 by David Brooks in The Times — “Take a Ride to Exurbia“  on the opinion page and “Our Sprawling, Supersize Utopia” in the magazine — and the other — “In Florida, Despair and Foreclosure” — published today (i.e., 2k9) in The Times. Try to guess when the quotes were written, and by whom — click through for answers! (Note: there’s one trick question — guess which one it is.)

I came out with a book on the booming exurbs – places like the I-4 corridor in central Florida and Henderson, Nev. These are the places where George Bush racked up the amazing vote totals that allowed him to retain the presidency.

Early last year, garage sales and estate auctions became more common in Lehigh Acres as families sold what they could to survive.

I’m so impressed by Karl Rove. As a group of Times reporters demonstrated in Sunday’s paper, the Republicans achieved huge turnout gains in exurbs like the ones in central Florida.

Home prices have collapsed, and many houses built during the housing bubble have been foreclosed or abandoned.

[C]riticisms don’t get suburbia right. They don’t get America right. The criticisms tend to come enshrouded in predictions of decline or cultural catastrophe. Yet somehow imperial decline never comes, and the social catastrophe never materializes.

Hunger has become a growing problem.

[P]eople move to exurbs because they want some order in their lives. They leave places with arduous commutes, backbreaking mortgages, broken families and stressed social structures and they head for towns with ample living space, intact families, child-friendly public culture and intensely enforced social equality.

[I]t went from housing market boomtown to its current landscape of abandoned developments and struggling businesses. No one seemed interested in buying whole houses, and foreclosures soon gave way to empty homes that became magnets for crime.

[T]here is this spot you can get to where all tensions will melt, all time pressures will be relieved and happiness can be realized.

Signs of trouble were ignored. “Sometimes houses would sell three or four times in a few months, and no one would move in.”

Get out into the sprawl, into that other conversation. Take your time. It’s a new world out there.

Panic is a powerful headwind.

Poets, pundits, philosophers and politicians, take note! This is not the story of nations or other one-hit wonders, nor is it the story of religion, for which so many millions have died in futile anger and delusion. It is certainly not the history of capital, although this too has been a scourge; no, friends, these are distractions from the real story, which is the slow but relentless rise of the city. Incomprehensible beauty and despair! Inexplicable dissonance and distortion! Inalterable repudiation of all political philosophers and religious zealots who would explain our existence without acknowledging the seething allure of the trains and tunnels, the buildings and bridges of this endlessly mutating labyrinth into which we must cast ourselves to find civilized life! How sorry and sad — which is to say, irrelevant — are the candidates — which is to say, all of them — who fail to discuss the implications of this truth; how tiresome the critics and commentators who obscure it with egocentric jargon about freedom and community. Is it not immediately obvious who among them has or has not walked the streets, and not only in the tedious safety of the day but in the more barren and remote hours of the night, when we are possessed by creaking gates, distant gunshots and — most of all — the pounding, subterranean space we learn to call our heart?

[All pix except the GWB by Chip Litherland for The New York Times]

In the United States — except for the rare exception — there is a well-documented dearth of hot gay statues.

Occasionally you’ll see a statue and think, “hmm, he’s a lil gay.” (Or she, obv.)

Or: “Why is that guy’s head between that other guy’s legs? It’s not that gay, but — ha ha — we should send a pic to The Gay Recluse.”

And then you go on your way, and perhaps in a year or so — assuming you don’t leave the country — you might spot another statue or piece of public artwork that could be described as gay, with a mix of earnestness and irony that is a hallmark of internet discourse.

Hi ladies! Did you know that the final season of “The L-Word” premieres this Sunday?

Whoa, Daddy!

Let’s just say that in terms of hot gay statuary, Vienna operates on a completely different level than any U.S. city.

It’s not like this was unexpected, of course.

And at first, we didn’t think too much about it.

After all, our primary purpose in coming to Vienna was not to obsess about hot gay statues.

Hey buddy, nice package! (Was Johann Strauss the “David Beckham” of 19th century Vienna?)

Here’s a gay in Vienna “playing straight,” just like today’s biggest stars in Hollywood.

While almost every statue in Vienna was exceedingly gay, not all were equally hot!

At night, there was a phantasmagoric quality to the statues, that made many seem NSFW.

We wouldn’t call this “man-baby” hot, would you?

This guy just won’t take “no” for an answer!

Some required more than one shot to capture exactly what was going on.

It’s not hard to figure out what happened here!

Oddly, as time passed, we became less innured to their presence, which was not what we had expected.

We began to consider the mindset of those who commissioned such work, and why they were so interested in “hot dads.”

We resented the puritanical tendencies of our own country, which for hundreds of years has made even the most innocuous statues NSFW.

We considered the drudgery of our own commute in New York City, and how we never see a hot-gay statue without making a special trip to Audubon Terrace.

Hey girlfriends! What do you mean you haven’t seen Milk yet!?

We wondered: why does our contemplation of this statue offer us so much more pleasure than any of the tedious shots of “real-life” models we see every day on all the mainstream gay sites?

Translation: Every one of these guys is smokin’ hot.

Translation: Workers unite (for a hot gay revolution)!

Vienna’s hot gay statuary is obv not limited to the neoclassical.

The more we looked, the more statues we saw; many of them contained features — and more incredibly, expressions — we found genuinely attractive, so that our posture of ironic disdain began to feel limiting.

Overwhelmed, we questioned the movement toward abstraction that occurred 500 years ago, when Pablo Picasso first heard Franz Liszt and was inspired to create a reality teevee show on Bravo.

We could not completely shed this irony, however.

Just your average fountain statue in Vienna.

As so often happens when we lose ourselves the past, we felt an intoxicating mix of suffocation and exhilaration.

It seemed miraculous to us that the roof of the Parliament could feature a lineup of NSFW men.

By this point, our resistance had completely eroded.

Seemingly every alcove was inhabited by a hot gay statue.

We felt as if our hatred of the present — not only the time in which we live, but the tedious, mass-produced nature of our surroundings — had been validated.

But in the next second, we felt deflated and beaten.

We arrived at Gonzagagasse, the street where our friend John had grown up.

And thought about how he must have felt as a child, walking past these hot gay dads every day.

Until the Nazis came to power and he had to flee to the United States.

Where he too would always remember life in Vienna with an irreconcilable mix of hatred and longing.

The Hot Gay Statue round-up:

• Rules and Guidelines
• Dan Savage Endorsement
• Washington Heights (New York City)
• Washington, DC
• The London Eye Clarifies an Important Issue
• Florence (Italy)
• The Park Avenue Amory (Upper East Side/NYC)
• Murray Hill (New York City)
• Madrid (Spain)
• Los Angeles
• Philadelphia
• The London Eye: “In Your Face”
• The J-Man Inspires
• George Washington
• Georgia (Republic of)
• New Orleans
• Columbus Circle (New York City)
• Two Davids (Florence)
• Franco Harris Statue (Pittsburgh)
• London Firefighters and Other Heroes
• Columbus Circle Mall (New York City)
• Miami
• Paris
• Grand Central Station (New York City)
• Albany, New York
• Chicago
• Albany, New York (Hot Gay Statute)
• The Metropolitan Museum (New York City)
• University of Southern California (Los Angeles)
• More Getty Villa (Los Angeles)
• Union Station Centurions (Washington, DC)
• Hot Gay Ladies in Washington Heights (New York City)
• Honolulu
• Stockholm
• Florence (Italy) II

Smokin.

Seen anything hotter? Send us your pix.

We’ve always loved stencils (especially of Andy Warhol), so when we were in Vienna, we spent a lot of time checking out the graffiti stencils. Some of it was maybe really cute? Except does anyone know what this means, or why this girl is laughing, or why 2×3=4? We hope it’s not neo-Nazi propaganda. (h8 skinheadz.)

[Update: Jeff from Gay Power Living writes: The girl is non other than Pippilotta Viktualia Rullgardina Krusmynta Efraimsdotter Långstrump, aka Pippi Longstocking! Pippi is THE poster child of the punk movement, the anti-Shirley Temple. Astrid Lindgren wanted to create a child character to introduce the concept of dissent, especially against rules of society that children were taught to obey as the truth and never question. I'm guessing the 2x3=4 was Pippi mocking adult logic, her favorite target of rebellion was against adults...]

This one is maybe a lil more obv. It’s a picture of Barack Obama Ronald Reagan an evil capitalist. Note that this stencil has two colors. Black and Blue = symbol? (h8 u, u$a.)

This one is sending a message: ___________ . (miss u/h8 u elvis)

If this were ten years ago, we’d say this was a waste of film. (h8 baseball.)

This guy is throwing a Molotov cocktail even though one of his hands has already been cut off and he will quickly bleed to death. A pessimistic commentary on revolutionary violence? (h8 when u get ur arm cut off and u bleed 2 death.)

Don’t you wish more graffiti in Wahi was done with stencils? (miss u Vienna/h8 you Wahi.)

1 Cat +  1 Sunset =

The Catset!

Friends! Not every cat is a lolcat.

When we first read about The Northern Clemency by Philip Hensher, we were excited! Not only was it short-listed for the Booker Prize, but it was rated the #1 Editors’ Pick for Best Book of 2008 by Amazon.com.* And oh yeah, Hensher is “openly gay” — kinda hate that expression, but whatevs — and has written trenchantly about the lack of gay actors in Hollywood, so without knowing that much about the book, we expected some insight into what we tend to think about as gay identity, or the gay voice.

The first quarter of the book is stunning. In exquisitely lyrical prose, Hensher describes the interactions among and between two families in a northern British suburb, one that has lived there for some time and another that is relocating from London. It’s the early 1970s, and as Hensher easily shifts perspective — at his best, reading him is really like getting wrapped up in a good teevee series — from the mothers to the daughters and the sons, he perfectly captures a sense of suburban ennui on one hand, and a kind of crushing terror of adolescence on the other. There are a few scenes — e.g., one of the mothers sort of loses her shit after her husband goes A.W.O.L. and kills her son’s pet, another in which a boy’s leg is broken during an elementary school recess — that are shockingly disturbing and brutal and ultimately heartbreaking, because we are taken back to the inexplicable cruelty and horror of youth as it plays out under the tranquil sheen of the suburbs.

Moreover, we are left with the sense that one or both of the youngest boys in the families are — or will be — gay, because they are nervous and obsessive and uncomfortable in ways that resonated with our own 1970s suburban upbringing, and so as the first section of the book ends, we look forward to learning more, not only about the boys, but about their older siblings, each of whom has appealing quirks and charms and less-appealing faults.

At this point, however, the tone of the book completely changes as we jump the shark lol ahead perhaps a decade into the future. We briefly meet the boys  — both are out of high school — but they are now beyond our empathy: one is sort of a freakish communist/Marxist who now hates his parents and agitates with some snobby leftist students on behalf of the local union, and the other has dropped out of college and moved back to London, where we don’t learn much about him except that he occasionally dates women (but without success), likes classical music and works a boring job. In short, we kind of suspect that he’s probably gay, but we don’t really get any insight or exploration into his condition, just a kind of blanket denial — at one point he sort of holds out that he’s asexual — that ultimately fails to hold our interest. Meanwhile, none of the other characters are developed with greater resolve, so that as we trudge forward, we find ourselves longing for the beginning of the book.

Also, instead of focusing on his core characters, Hensher allows the plot to seriously drift and instead offer pages and pages and pages — to give what is perhaps the most pointlessly egregious example — of a subplot involving a drug-dealing/money-laundering scheme. (We cannot help but wonder: did anyone edit this book? It could have easily been 200 pages shorter without losing anything.) True, the mother had an affair with a man in the scheme, but do we really need to follow him to a country house and meet his mafioso boss and family, when all we’re interested in is the fact that the woman had the affair and the ways it has impacted her relationship with her husband (i.e., the father of one of the boys)? If Hensher’s objective was to elevate the mundane into the dramatic — and he does this brilliantly at the beginning — why introduce a cheesy teevee plot device like this?

Which — i.e., the drug-dealer subplot — may have been forgivable except the rest of the book never recovers from similar digressions — e.g., an Australian we meet on one page kills himself in act of auto-eroticism ten pages later! someone starts dating a working-class girl, whose parents of course are sweet and lovable and dance the tango and earnestly offer tea in their best china — so that by the end, we don’t really have much sense of — or feelings for — any of the characters (much less insight into questions of gay identity).

We’re not saying that Hensher — or any gay writer — has a responsibility to explore these issues, but after setting them up so beautifully, he seemed to miss an opportunity to explore the truth as it’s so rarely done.

If the book at its best feels like it was made for teevee, this is also its flaw; it’s like one of those series that starts out with promise, but quickly drifts into hackneyed melodrama, leaving us with a longing — even if we choose to watch — to change the channel or perhaps fall asleep, where we can dream in images that while at times blurry at least hold some sign of our true selves.

*Despite our mixed feelings, we still encourage everyone to buy this book and judge for yourself.