Homosexuality

Wednesday

David J. Garrow

Hoover damned

When J. Edgar Hoover died in May 1972 at seventy-seven, he had been director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation for forty-eight years, ever since progressive attorney general Harlan Fiske Stone had promoted the then-obscure twenty-nine-year-old Justice Department bureaucrat in 1924. With fewer than 400 agents, limited responsibilities, and a reputation badly tarnished under a corrupt previous attorney general, what was then called the Bureau of Investigation offered modest prospects. Still, the new boss set out to clean house, institute stringent hiring standards and impose a culture of science-based crime-fighting on his federal agents. One new hire in 1928 was Clyde A.

hoover
shards
York Underwood

Bret Easton Ellis’s comeback is a bloody masterpiece

Bret Easton Ellis has a secret. It’s what happened to him and his friends in the fall of 1981 in his senior year at Buckley, a private high school in Sherman Oaks, California. It’s about a hippie cult and serial killer known as “The Trawler” and the disappearance of his friends. It’s about how all this is somehow tied to the arrival of a new student that year, Robert Mallory. It’s a true story. The Shards is Ellis’s seventh novel, published nearly thirteen years after his previous book, Imperial Bedrooms. He has tried to write this novel twice before, once when he was nineteen and again when he was forty-two. That second attempt led to an anxiety attack that had Ellis rushed to the emergency room at Cedars-Sinai. At least, that’s the story.

Wednesday

Chadwick Moore

Mayor Pete’s planes, trains and automobiles

Almost a year ago, the Federal Aviation Authority, under the helm of transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg, announced that the aviation briefing known as NOTAM, or Notice to Airmen, would undergo a name change. NOTAMs are unclassified notices distributed from an aviation authority to all pilots that contain essential information regarding conditions, hazards, system concerns, or other flight operations. NOTAM, Mayor Pete’s Department of Transportation declared, wasn’t gender inclusive and, as of December 2, 2021, it should henceforth be referred to Notice to Air Missions, not Airmen.

pete buttigieg faa

Friday

Elle Nash

The return of Bret Easton Ellis

The Shards is about 600 pages long. “Should anyone even publish a 600-page novel?” asks its author Bret Easton Ellis. “I happen to believe, yes, if it’s justified.” Such books are rarely justifiable, and often, novelists become buzzed-about simply for executing them, but not many can boast that every word, scene and sentence is necessary. This is how it feels to read The Shards: not a detail is to be missed. It contains the thematic elements that run through Ellis’ oeuvre: the social lives of the wealthy, or nearly wealthy, drugs, sexuality and desperation painted over with bursts of violence. The through line that connects his work isn’t that sex and violence are taboo.

ellis

Tuesday

Mitchell Jackson

The Whitney Houston biopic is a big, gay masterpiece

Half an hour or so into the new Whitney Houston biopic, I Wanna Dance with Somebody, two bros sitting next to me asked, “Why is gay Whitney in Black Panther?” They were in the wrong movie, but based on the other audience members screaming at the screen, the lone straight men weren’t alone in finding director Kasi Lemmons’s new film shocking. Sony promoted I Wanna Dance with Somebody as the feel-good biopic of the year. The trailer starts with the hook of the titular song and goes on to show Houston (Naomi Ackie) dancing to “How Will I Know” and singing her iconic rendition of the “Star-Spangled Banner” at the Super Bowl. Houston rarely speaks, but when she does, she talks about music: “My dream,” she purrs, “sing how I want to sing.

whitney houston

Tuesday

Bruce Bawer

Gay marriage has nothing to do with Drag Queen Story Hour

The main reason why I lined up in the pouring rain to vote for Bill Clinton in 1992 was that he’d campaigned as a gay-friendly candidate. It wasn’t just his promise to allow gays to serve openly in the military. It was that he talked about gays as if we were human beings and not demons — fully equal to our heterosexual brothers and sisters. Back then, for gay Americans, every new election cycle meant one thing for sure: we’d have to gird ourselves for a fresh round of gay-bashing by presidential hopefuls. Clinton seemed to promise a new era in politics, when our very existence would no longer be an issue. Well, Clinton won the election. And four years later he signed the Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA. “Defense” as in defense from us.

gay

Tuesday

Chadwick Moore

BREAKING: soccer is gay

As with a couple of prominent unmarried senators, Americans have long suspected that soccer might be gay. Now, it’s official. On Monday, the US men’s national team unveiled a redesign to the team’s logo that replaces red stripes in the crest with the rainbow colors of the gay pride flag. https://twitter.com/USMNT/status/1592266453952172041 Soccer’s decision to come out of the closet ahead of the World Cup, and to live as its authentic self, was met with shrugs of “well, obviously” and “I always thought soccer might be gay since that time I caught soccer trying on my make-up and lipsyncing to Donna Summer.

soccer

Wednesday

Ross Anderson

Ryan Murphy goes cruising

American Horror Story’s eleventh season is a tableau of New York’s gay subcultures, thriving in its 1981, pre-AIDS glory. Its characters are male eye candy in jockstraps and stripy socks, daddies in leather straps and twinks out for a laugh. As Kal Penn’s cynical police commissioner summarizes, "That community? They come here for a reason. They come here to get lost, and that's exactly what they do.” The style? A mood board of Mugler costume-fashion, Chrome Hearts leather jackets, Lagerfeld’s filled shoulder pads and Calvin Klein underwear billboards. But its premise is that of an earlier and much more controversial gay masterpiece: Cruising.

american horror story

Wednesday

Cockburn

The craziness of the Kevin Spacey misconduct trial

An antihero, an allegation, a court case, a neo-Nazi. The Kevin Spacey trial has been a hell of a ride and it's barely begun. This week, Spacey has taken the stand as the first witness in his own defense in his sexual misconduct trial, brought forward by actor Anthony Rapp. Best known for his role in Star Trek: Discovery, Rapp claims that in 1986, Spacey, who was twenty-six at the time, invited Rapp, then fourteen, to his New York home. He alleges that Spacey picked him up, laid him down on his bed, grabbed his buttocks and pressed his groin into his body without his consent. Rapp first made his allegation in October 2017. In the eyes of the public, Spacey went from antihero to villain.

kevin spacey

Tuesday

Cockburn

Madonna comes out… as an attention seeker

Another day, another celebrity coming out on the internet. Madonna is the latest: this weekend, the pop icon posted a video on TikTok with the caption, “If I miss, I’m Gay.” The singer then tosses her underwear towards a waste basket, misses and then gestures “Oh well.” https://www.tiktok.com/@madonna/video/7152605555830426923?_t=8WQ5cXPY0Zi&_r=1 Some fans are sending their support for the sixty-four-year-old, who has long been a gay icon. But others are speculating that Madonna is just jumping on the latest bandwagon. Cockburn laughed out loud at a tweet that read, "Doesn’t Madonna do this once every couple of hundred years?" Cockburn has noticed that it now seems passé to be straight, as many ladies scramble to get out of the "straight white woman" box.

madonna

Wednesday

Chadwick Moore

The real reason straight people aren’t going to see Bros

Something happened in American society between the release of Bros last weekend and 2018, when Bohemian Rhapsody, the biopic of gay, HIV-positive Queen front man Freddie Mercury, grossed $900 million at the box office. Comedian Billy Eichner’s gay romcom barely eked out a pathetic $4.8 million on opening night, around the same amount that Ellen "Elliot" Page spent on flannel shirts and Groucho Marx glasses last year. Why the disparity in box office takings? Well, American moviegoers became deeply homophobic. That’s according to Eichner himself, who wrote on Twitter following the paltry opening weekend numbers, “That’s just the world we live in, unfortunately.

bros billy eichner

Thursday

David J. Garrow

The rise of gay Washington

Anyone under fifty may be unaware of how largely invisible gay Americans were until at least the 1980s. James Kirchick’s incredibly rich and impressively thorough Secret City does not mention Bowers v. Hardwick, the notorious 1986 Supreme Court ruling that upheld the criminalization of gay sexuality, but only post-Bowers did the push for gay equality, and eventually same-sex marriage, rapidly become what he rightly calls “the most successful social movement in American history.” In 1992, a Gallup poll indicated that 43 percent of Americans said they knew a gay person — double the figure from just seven years earlier — and across all of America it was that growing knowledge of the presence of gay people that allowed such a dramatic political transformation to take place.

gay

Friday

Cockburn

Parenting writer: take your kid to a Pride parade!

Cockburn is not a parent, at least so far as his public records are concerned. However, even he knows that taking children to a Pride parade is not the best idea for a family field trip. Heather Tirado Gilligan, the author of this Fatherly article, disagrees. She writes, “Pride Parades and the Pride festivals that follow are noisy and crowded. They’re filled with sights that may be new to kids, like public nudity and kink.” If Gilligan wanted any chance at all for her point to succeed, why would she mention “public nudity” and “kink” in the first two sentences? Taking a kid to a sex parade is like bringing a baby to a gun range: it sounds just a bit like bad parenting.

pride

Thursday

Robert S. Erickson

Throwing curveballs

"This mob is not the people,” declared Henry J. Raymond in his paper, the New York Times, about the Draft Riots in July 1863. Blue-collar workers in New York, mostly Irish, had begun by protesting a new conscription law, but anti-war sentiment quickly became a pretext for widespread destruction, looting and racial violence. Blacks were hunted, their homes and businesses trashed, and scores of them lynched. Raymond wanted no quarter for the rioters: “Give them grape[shot] and plenty of it.” The new musical Paradise Square imagines a “little bit of Eden” in the Five Points slum of downtown Manhattan, July 1863, where, we are told, blacks and Irish did not just coexist peacefully for a time but flourished.

paradise

Friday

Taylor Millard

Will DeSantis’s revenge on Disney work?

The Walt Disney Company is going to need some special magic following two losses in the Florida state legislature. Florida's House and Senate passed laws this week ending Disney’s self-governing special district and closing an exemption in the current social media law for companies that own theme parks. Governor Ron DeSantis is expected to sign the legislation. It’s a quick governmental haymaker to Disney’s big-eared visage and a surprising one. The Friends of Ron DeSantis political action committee has accepted almost $107,000 from Disney Worldwide Services, according to records. Disney regularly hands out money to both Republicans and Democrats.

ron desantis disney

Thursday

Stephen L. Miller

Hollywood won’t say gay in China

Exactly when and where are our stunning and brave Hollywood stars prepared to take a stand for gay rights? Liberal actors and celebrities have a made a show of standing against Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Bill, signed earlier this month by Governor Ron DeSantis, a man progressives seems intent on making the next president. When activists and journalists realized they couldn’t stop the bill from becoming law, they deployed their new favorite tactic: demanding that corporations speak out against the bill (see also: how in response to Georgia’s new voting legislation, they insisted that Major League Baseball relocate the All-Star game).

Thursday

Amber Duke

Americans support ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill, poll shows

A new poll found that Americans overwhelmingly support the language of the Parental Rights in Education bill signed into law by Florida governor Ron DeSantis this week. Celebrities at the Oscars on Sunday night shrieked about the alleged attack on LGBT rights and Disney executives were caught on tape promising to create more queer content for children in response to the so-called "Don't Say Gay" bill. A poll conducted by Public Opinion Strategies indicates that these woke institutions are wholly out of step with the concerns of normal Americans. When registered voters were shown the actual language of the bill, which prohibits age or developmentally inappropriate sexual education in pre-K through third grade, they supported it by more than a two-to-one margin.

boycott parental

Friday

Chadwick Moore

Sam Brinton and the dorkification of kink

Remember when gay people were cool? Libertines and romantics, reviled, spat-upon, defiant and irreverent? Gay life could be sexy and thrilling, tragic and shameful. If the homosexual offered nothing else, he carried an arsenal of bawdy tales that left any housewife glued and dithering at a cocktail party. Judge his life as you may, but never call it ordinary. The mystique is gone. That dusky boundary between the dark and dirty and the workaday has evaporated. Assimilation has meant the faces of gay are either vapid, Instagram-famous semen receptacles, complete goobers or repulsive shrills. And they’ve dragged the rest of us, by association, into their orbit of cringe. The Forces of Biden particularly love the latter two.

sam brinton

Thursday

Chadwick Moore

No love for the gays at the Beijing Winter Olympics

The nights are about to get a lot colder for men’s figure skaters at the Winter Games. Gay hookup app Grindr was removed from app stores in China this month just ahead of the 2022 Olympics in Beijing. Olympians are famously hot to trot. As far back as 1988, the International Olympic Committee banned outdoor sex after condoms were found littering the rooftops of the Olympic Village in Seoul. Complimentary condoms remained a staple at the Games, reaching a record at Rio in 2016 where 450,000 "little shirts," as they’re called in local slang, were supplied to the Olympic Village — that’s forty-two per athlete.

grindr

Thursday

Ben Sixsmith

Dave Chappelle’s last special is no masterpiece

Dave Chappelle is a member of a dying breed — a remnant of an age that has been drifting into history. That’s right. Dave Chappelle is a comedian who does not have a podcast. I do not begrudge comedians their podcasts. (After all, I am a writer with a Substack.) As a comedian who has not blessed us with his every thought and memory, though, Chappelle has maintained his mystique. His specials are events, and his last special, The Closer, is doubly so. Critics and reporters have been focusing on its allegedly offensive jokes at the expense of trans people. I would like to shove these subjects to one side for a moment and ask the most vital questions. Is it funny? Yes. Is it very funny? No. Chappelle is a tremendous performer.

dave chappelle