Archive for the ‘Drag Queens’ Category

In which The Gay Recluse decorates the office. Today in my office I hung up a color print I recently made to test out a new printer we recently bought after the old one died. The photograph was taken a long time ago, if you measure time in hours. It was Friday afternoon and difficult […]


In which Dante files a book report. Recently we heard from a publicist at Viking, who asked us to review the latest book in a series of “transvestive detective stories from Turkey.” Our editor agreed, although — because he does not deign to immerse himself into “genre” fiction — the task fell to yours truly. […]


In which The Gay Recluse remembers subtle forms of fourth-grade terror. It’s not hard to remember a phase we went through in elementary school, specifically fourth and fifth grade (and possibly sixth, although even now it pains us to think about this) when each Valentine’s Day, we took it upon ourselves to make increasingly elaborate […]


In which The Gay Recluse clarifies his thoughts on gay marriage after years of skirting the issue. Since we are gay and in a long-term relationship — almost ten years! — we are constantly besieged by frenz and relatives with questions that more or less could be summed up as this: “Oh it’s so sweet that you’re […]


In which The Gay Recluse is entranced. Tonight we watched A Story of Floating Weeds, the 1934 film by Yasujiro Ozu.  It’s a silent movie, which takes some getting used to (and we say this with regret, not about the movie, but the state of our frenzied existence). Like the other Ozu films we’ve seen […]


In which The Gay Recluse provides a postscript to our gay alternative to this week’s Modern Love piece in the Times by Kayla Rachlin Small. (For those looking for our informal-but-telling quantitative analysis of Modern Love, click here.) Dear TGR, I loved your riff on “The Steep Price of Your Forbidden Kiss” (a title which, […]


In which The Gay Recluse thinks about shit on the daily commute. As we walk through midtown each morning and each afternoon, we often pause to observe a fading silhouette on a wall; while somewhat decrepit, it provides comforting evidence — of a sort we are always on the lookout for — that Andy Warhol […]


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: Me, My Daughter and Them Subject: A lawyer who sounds seriously bitchy […]


In which The Gay Recluse — in case you missed it — reports on today’s media frenzy. So get this: today Gawker “executed” four of its “more-stupid-than-funny” commenters, three of whom we specifically targeted in the post we wrote yesterday about (get out your pencils and paper) Gawker’s original post about Chris Crocker. Say what […]


In which The Gay Recluse celebrates The New Dark Ages. Last night Gawker posted a piece about Chris Crocker, who has released a new video in which he responds to YouTube comments such as the following: –Next time you are walking in the street I hope you get run over by cancer –I WANNA KILL […]


Perhaps you saw the news story making the rounds today about the science of “gaydar”? Apparently a couple of geniuses affiliated with Tufts University came up with an “experiment” in which they showed participants “90 faces belonging to homosexual men and heterosexual men for intervals ranging from 33 milliseconds to 10 seconds.” When the participants […]


Dear ESPN, we wanted to take a few seconds to let you know how much we hate your pottery-themed ad campaign. It might not even be running anymore; we first saw it in the back of a cab two months ago, or maybe it was even longer than that, but we saw it again last […]


In which The Gay Recluse looks back at a classic of post-war American fiction written in a gay voice. Admittedly, to read Gore Vidal’s 1946 novel The City and the Pillar is to be thrown with startling efficiency into what has to be one of the bleakest periods in history, the post-war era of the […]


Did you see the story in today’s Times about the man — the window washer — who fell 47 stories (500 feet) and survived? He’s in the hospital and while basically a bag of broken bones, doctors say he should be walking within a year. Incredible. It reminds us of when we were at Cornell […]


Perhaps it was the broken signal of the closing subway door — so that the usual New York City tones were reversed, with the low one first — that dislodged us from our usual evening commute and sent us reeling toward the city of light; or maybe it was the pair of women speaking French; […]


In today’s Times, in a continuing effort to never acknowledge the gay voice as a force in 20th-century art and literature, film critic AO Scott heaps high praise on the Italian film director Pier Paolo Pasolini but never bothers to mention that he was gay: “Poet, playwright, screenwriter, filmmaker, Communist, Christian, moralist, pornographer, populist, artist,” […]


On Beatrice

16Nov07

When the russet hues of the setting sun stream through our western window, as happened today, it is quite possible to imagine Beatrice in the distorted, filtered light, contemplative and hovering as if she were still there, peering into the distance, longing for something to take her away. The first time we saw her, however, […]


The deserted, haunted quality of the oldest mansion in Manhattan is — like so much of Washington Heights — almost exhilarating when you consider the extremes of neglect it has endured to join us here today. The sign tells us that George Washington made his headquarters here during the fall of 1776, following a British […]


Last night we were pleased to be joined by New York Times critic Janet Maslin, who earlier this week treated us to her review of Boom, the new memoir by Tom Brokaw about life in the 1960s. Generally Maslin appears to have enjoyed the book, which she describes as “a response to the yearning for […]


Stark and imperial, during the day the white travertine facade of the Metropolitan Opera seems as inviting as a walk across a desert, but at night glows like a beacon to the modern, urban spirit in which it was conceived. The cloud-like apparitions of Chagall’s paintings hypnotize us and soften the disdain of the high roman arches through which we pass […]