On Gay Modern Love: Andrea Neighbours Not Very Happy About Parody
26Jun08
In which The Gay Recluse provides a postscript to last week’s Gay Modern Love, the weekly feature in which he parodies Modern Love, the column in The Times in which openly gay writers almost never appear and even less frequently write about romantic love. (For our quantitative analysis, click here.)
So it turns out that unlike Kayla Rachlin Small, who loved our riff on her Modern Love column (and no coincidence wrote one of the most moving columns ever), not every author is so enamored of our efforts to call attention to the plight of Gay Modern Love in the Times.
Today, for example, we received this note from Andrea Neighbours, the author of last week’s essay:
Hey there,
I see you’ve parodied my Modern Love essay from last week’s New York Times (On Gay Modern Love: How My Partner Won Back My Vote). Would you kindly remove it? Or at least remove my name and make clear this is a parody of an essay you lifted from the Times without permission.
Thank you.
Best,
Andrea Neighbours
Hey Andrea, no probs. We couldn’t have said it any better ourselves, so consider it done. Sincerely yours,
The Gay Recluse
Filed under: Drivel, Gay, Law, Letters, Sickness, Stereotypes, Technology, The Times, Traffic | 3 Comments
Tags: Andrea Neighbours, Fair Use, Gay Modern Love, Madults, Modern Love, Parodies, Passive Aggression, Permissions, The Internet
The Gay Recluse 
I love it when people get all like indignant on the web and emails and try to be all official sounding i.e. “…parody of an essay you lifted from the Times without permission.”
Like you have to get permission before you parody something that is in need of some serious parody-ing.
Thanks, John–I completely agree! And I’m pretty sure the law does, too. (Hey, one reason to love the USA.) What’s most bothersome to me about it is that she didn’t explain exactly why it bothered her so much, but she does come off as rather humorless (and obvs didn’t spend more than two seconds on the site, or she would have realized that much of it is built on satire and parody).
I admire your ability to comply with her request in a manner that can actually be described as “kindly.” You, sir, are a class act and an inspiration to us all.