Archive for the ‘Drivel’ Category
In which The Gay Recluse reads an acclaimed book of contemporary fiction and is more than disappointed. When we first received our copy of Call Me By Your Name (FSG, 2007) by Andre Aciman, we were a bit startled (but pleased, to be sure) that a book about a love affair between a 17-year-old boy […]
Filed under: Drivel, Gay, Literature, Pessimism, The Gay Recluse, Writers-American | Leave a Comment
Tags: Andre Aciman, Bad Books, Call Me By Your Name, Closet Case, Gay Voice, Homophobia, Stereotypes
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: I Married a Republican: There, I Said It Subject: A (bland, suburban) […]
Filed under: Drivel, Politicians, The Times | Leave a Comment
Tags: Daniel Jones, Fashion & Style, Gay Modern Love, Gay Stereotypes, Gay Voice, Gay Writers, Homophobia, Modern Love, Republicans, The New York Times
In which The Gay Recluse provides a fresh alternative to this week’s particularly bland and tedious Modern Love offering in The Times. “I Married a Lesbian Republican: There, I Said It” by Ann Hood and The Gay Recluse IT was happening again. I was at a cocktail party where the hosts were people I had […]
Filed under: Drivel, Government, Stereotypes, The Gay Recluse, The Times | Leave a Comment
Tags: Daniel Jones, Fashion & Style, Gay Modern Love, Gay Stereotypes, Gay Voice, Gay Writers, Homophobia, Lesbian, Modern Love, Republican, The New York Times
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 Valley of Misery Between Peaks of Joy Subject: In this column […]
Filed under: Drivel, Gay, Language, Obsession, Stereotypes, The Gay Recluse, The Times | 1 Comment
Tags: College Students, Daniel Jones, Fashion & Style, Gay Stereotypes, Gay Voice, Gay Writers, Homophobia, Modern Love, Modern Love College Essay Contest, The New York Times
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: An Open and Shut Marriage Subject: Married woman describes doubts about “open” […]
Filed under: Drivel, Gay, Landscape, Stereotypes, The Gay Recluse, The Times | Leave a Comment
Tags: Daniel Jones, Fashion & Style, Gay Stereotypes, Gay Voice, Gay Writers, Homophobia, Marriage, Modern Love, Relationships, Straight Women, The New York Times
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 […]
Filed under: Athletes, Drag Queens, Drivel, Gay, Memory, Science, Stereotypes, The Gay Recluse | Leave a Comment
Tags: Andrew Sullivan, Chris Crocker, Gay Stereotypes, Gaydar, Homosexual Stereotypes, Ivory Tower, Lady Bunny, Matt Kaplan, Nalini Ambady, Nicholas Rule, Rock Hudson, Safety School, ScienceNow, Three Quarks Daily, Tom Cruise, Tufts University
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 […]
Filed under: Capitalism, Drag Queens, Drivel, Gay, New York City, Stereotypes, Television, The Gay Recluse | Leave a Comment
Tags: Advertising, Ceramics, Chris Berman, ESPN, Glazes, Mike Ditka, National Football League, Pottery, Sunday NFL Countdown
Although the year — and our annual ceremony — is fast winding down, we felt that we could not let it slip by without acknowledging 2007’s most remarkably opaque book review, which today appeared — just under the wire! — in The Times Sunday Book Review. Because this was easily the most remarkably opaque book […]
Filed under: Drivel, Literature, The Times | 1 Comment
Tags: Diary of a Bad Year, J.M. Coetzee, Kathryn Harrison, The New York Times Sunday Book Review
We could not look back at 2007 without offering our appreciation to all of the scientists out there whose groundbreaking research has done so much to perpetuate our society’s most cherished and deeply held gay stereotypes. It is most remarkable how in every instance, such research continues to ignore a — if not “the” — […]
Filed under: Drivel, Gay, Government, Language, Law, Science, Stereotypes, The Times | Leave a Comment
Tags: Best of 2007, David France, gay fruit flies, gay mice, Gay Research, Gay Science, Gay Stereotypes, John Tierney, New York Magazine, The Gay and Lesbian Review
Today we were both amused and disheartened to find a panoply of gay code words used in a N.Y./Region (long our favorite section) piece in The Times on Mr. William J. Dane, a curator and art scholar who has maintained the Newark Library’s collection of prints and rare books for more than six decades. To […]
Filed under: Drivel, Gay, Language, The Gay Recluse, The Times | Leave a Comment
Tags: Gay Code Words, Gay Euphemisms, Stereotypes, Stilted Prose, The New York Times
On Pier Paolo Pasolini
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,” […]
Filed under: Drag Queens, Drivel, Film, Gay, The Times | Leave a Comment
Tags: A.O. Scott, Anna Magnani, Gay Bashing, Momma Roma, Negligence, New York Times, Pasolini, Salò
On Beatrice
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, […]
Filed under: Drag Queens, Dream, Drivel, Good Rock, Memory, Orchids, Resignation, Sickness, The Russian Blue, The Times, Writers-French | Leave a Comment
Tags: 9/11, Animal Medical Center, Baudelaire, Beatrice, Candy Darling, Cannanes, Cats, Dante, Daphne Merkin, Death, Lipidosis, Love, Robert Moses, Russian Blue
Andrew Sullivan expressed the idea (and admittedly, with thoughtfulness) in an essay he wrote a few years ago for the New Republic, while more recently British playwright Mark Ravenhill tackled the same theme (with much less success) for The Guardian. Their collective story goes something like this: in the dark ages of oppression (i.e., approximately […]
Filed under: Capitalism, Drivel, Gay, Government, History, Literature, Obsession, Pessimism, Writers-British | Leave a Comment
Tags: Andrew Sullivan, Arthur Schopenhauer, Gay Culture, Gay History, Mark Ravenhill, Michel Foucault, Stonewall
At the opera last week, we ran into a friend who we were surprised to note had gained at least 500 pounds since we had last seen him. “You’ve gained weight,” we said, not wanting to ignore the obvious. “Are you in good health?” “More than good,” he nodded enthusiastically, and then began to explain. […]
Filed under: Capitalism, Drivel, Gay, History, Opera, Pessimism, The Times | Leave a Comment
Tags: Baudelaire, Cities, Dick Cavett, Modernity, New York Times, Obese, Opera, Spleen
Andrew Sullivan and his conservative ilk should realize that we too — and despite easily falling on the “left-liberal” side of the coin — can never digest more than a word or two of Bob Herbert’s stultifying prose before falling asleep. It’s unfortunate, because we ride the C-train with the same class of forgotten gilded-age […]
Filed under: Capitalism, Drivel, History, The Times | Leave a Comment
Tags: Andrew Sullivan, Bob Herbert, Brad DeLong, Economics, New York Times, Paul Krugman, Walter Benjamin
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 […]
Filed under: Drag Queens, Drivel, Gay, History, The Gay Recluse, The Times | Leave a Comment
Tags: Candy Darling, Gay Culture, Gay Film, Gay History, Greta Garbo, Janet Maslin, Leonardo da Vinci, Ludwig II, Magnus Hirschfeld, Maria Callas, Marlene Dietrich, New York Times, Tom Brokaw
In reading great works of literature, we are sometimes struck by the presence of what could be termed a “gay voice.” It is a voice that resonates with perspective of the sexually-oriented “outsider,” so that we come away with an understanding (and it does not have arrive by way of a literal representation) that “heterosexuality” […]
Filed under: Capitalism, Drivel, Gay, Infrastructure, Sickness, The Gay Recluse, The Times, Writers-American, Writers-British, Writers-French, Writers-German | 2 Comments
Tags: A.O. Scott, Gay, Henry James, Herman Melville, Marcel Proust, Michael Kimmelman, Peter Nadas, Susan Sontag, Thomas Mann, Toni Morrison, Virginia Woolf
On Free Speech
Certain misguided if likable (at least in the case of Andrew Sullivan) conservatives and libertarians are questioning the verdict against “asshole of metaphysically transcendent proportion” Fred Phelps, who with his “church” picketed the funeral of a gay marine, as a potentially “bad precedent” for First Amendment free-speech rights. For those untrained in the nuances of constitutional law — and with some […]
Filed under: Drivel, Government, Law, Sickness | Leave a Comment
Tags: Andrew Sullivan, Chris Eisgruber, Conservatives, Constitutional Law, First Amendment, Fred Phelps, Free Speech, Libertarians
The Gay Recluse 