Archive for the ‘The Gay Recluse’ Category

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” […]


In which The Gay Recluse reports to the Board of Directors. Summary Results for January 2008 surpassed budgeted forecasts and represented significant growth for The Gay Recluse. It is expected that as editorial and production capacity of the site continues to expand, traffic will continue to trend upward, justifying additional capital investment into the operation. […]


In which The Gay Recluse ponders a sampling of recent search terms used to find the very pages you are now reading. Note: All search terms listed are in the exact form provided by WordPress.com, which is the host (at least for a while) of this blog. Hyperlinks to relevant posts included. Search: gay aristocracy […]


In which The Gay Recluse ponders the transformation of the monumental into the mundane (and vice versa). Date of Incident: January 31, 2008 Time: 7:23 pm Causes of Disaster: Sprawling development in dwindling reserves of space. Remarks: Unplanned and haphazard growth has resulted in dangerous towers of material. Falling debris has already made the area […]


There is something oddly unsatisfying about The Master, Colm Toibin’s 2004 treatment of the life of Henry James. Odd because we almost always love Toibin’s prose, which is elegant but unpretentious, and — unlike so much contemporary fiction — never shifts tenses or otherwise calls attention to itself in a distracting or superfluous manner. Occasionally […]


In which The Gay Recluse documents the exceedingly beautiful ruins of Washington Heights. Location: Audubon Terrace Address: Broadway between 155th and 156th Streets Remarks: Of all the exceedingly beautiful ruins in Washington Heights, perhaps none is more heartbreaking than Audubon Terrace. Not quite dead, it is like a great whale stranded on a beach; as […]


In which The Gay Recluse ponders the transformation of the monumental into the mundane (and vice versa). Date of Incident: January 29, 2008 Time: 6:04 pm. Causes of Disaster: Heedless galloping of invasive species across fragile ecosystems. Remarks: A once pristine landscape has been ruined, and is seen here with buckled terrain and dangerous fault […]


In which The Gay Recluse ponders the transformation of the monumental into the mundane (and vice versa). Date of Incident: January 28, 2008 Time: 5:39 pm. Causes of Disaster: Careless and possibly blatant disregard of invaluable records; ongoing acts of civil disobedience. Remarks: After a long and exhaustive search, an historic document of invaluable worth […]


In which The Gay Recluse ponders a sampling of recent search terms used to find the very pages you are now reading. Note: All search terms listed are in the exact form provided by WordPress.com, which is the host (at least for a while) of this blog. Hyperlinks to relevant posts included. Search: disaster + […]


In which The Gay Recluse, with very little sarcasm or irony, reports on retail in Washington Heights. Development: Cigar Shop Address: 609 West 161st Street between Broadway and Fort Washington Remarks: Except for the famous quote — likely apocryphal — attributed to Sigmund Freud, we don’t know shit much about cigars except that they are […]


In which The Gay Recluse ponders the transformation of the monumental into the mundane (and vice versa). Date of Incident: January 26, 2008 Time: 4:38 pm. Causes of Disaster: Failure to follow implemented routines; boredom, malaise. Remarks: Clean-up of the disaster area had already begun when workers were attacked by a savage, rampaging beast. There […]


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: Closing Night for My Bit Part Subject: Woman looks longingly at famous […]


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 […]


In which The Gay Recluse ponders a sampling of recent search terms used to find the very pages you are now reading. Note: All search terms listed are in the exact form provided by WordPress.com, which is the host (at least for a while) of this blog. Hyperlinks to relevant posts included. Search: rambo gay […]


In which The Gay Recluse ponders the transformation of the monumental into the mundane (and vice versa). Date of Incident: January 21, 2008 Time: 1:35am. Causes of Disaster: Failure to implement long-term planning procedures; budget overruns; bureaucratic miscommunication. Remarks: It was long ago noted that the tube in question was reaching dangerously low and unsustainable […]


We have long suspected that “Modern Love” — the weekly column in the Sunday Styles of The Times — has been a startlingly barren landscape for gay writers, particularly when you consider its location in what is undoubtedly the “gayest” section of the newspaper (and — oh yeah — the gayest city in the world), […]


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 […]


In which The Gay Recluse ponders the role of technology in the transformation of the monumental into the mundane (and vice versa). Date of Incident: January 15, 2008 Time: 6:34pm. Causes of Disaster: Narrow countertop; careless placement of container; fatigue; needless “multi-tasking.” Remarks: After much debate about whether to even supplement the salad in question […]


In which The Gay Recluse writes in highly attenuated metaphors about the Democratic primaries in Michigan. Regular readers of The Gay Recluse may remember when — a long time ago, perhaps even as many as ten days — we wrote about our preference for Sweetie® Clementines from Mulholland Citrus after a high-stakes “taste-off” with Cuties® […]