Reading this excellent, somewhat-Shandean meditation on the glories of post-menopausal life by Roseanne Barr got me all jealous. Maybe it’s the fact that I’ve been spending a lot of my time around post-menopausal women lately, but I’m going through a phase in which I simply can’t wait to be in my mid-50′s. I think that’s [...]
Archive for the ‘Sex’ category
What is it you want?
After the ball was over, after the break of morn, after the dancers’ leaving, after the stars were gone…it was about forty eight hours before I read my first piece of Internet verbiage about how the goal of marriage is an assimilationist one and how saddened the writer was to have her queerness coöpted. And [...]
What is best in life?
The canonical answer. For the rest of us, it is a bit more complex. I worried about this question almost constantly when I was a child. Should I strive for intellectual grandeur? Should I try to get political or physical power over others? Should I find someone who loves me in return, or just try [...]
Censorship is a Funny Thing
In the past few weeks, my roommate and I have watched a couple of movies that got their directors banned from making films in their home countries. We didn’t set out to do it; it’s just what we like, I guess. It seems a bit extreme to me, not just to ban the film itself, [...]
Ask, tell, et cetera
Not long ago, Slate.com ran an Explainer column describing how the U.S. military ascertains whether a service member is gay, for purposes of booting them out under Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. Apparently, photos are the best, most reliable source. Facebook postings are another key source: Does the soldier post about having a same-sex partner? Do [...]
Sex education
Teen fiction is a massive fiction market, but when I was a teenager in the early 1980s we had to make the leap from children’s literature to literature with nothing in between. Well, that’s not entirely true. I vividly remember the cruelty and transgression of Paul Zindel’s The Pigman and the taboo-busting discussions of menstruation [...]
Things I remember about coming out in the ‘80s
Rachel’s and Dave’s posts this week stirred up a lot of thought about my own coming out circa 1987 in college. Random memories won out over narrative or analysis: I didn’t realize until later that when she kept sleeping naked with me in my bed, she wanted to be more than friends. Sinead O’Connor was [...]
Queerness and exile
I’ve been thinking this week along some of the same lines as Rachel’s post from yesterday. I’d like to add a few thoughts to hers, starting on the subject of religion but then generalizing. Last week I went to a panel discussion on queer youth and religion where one speaker, Professor Mark Jordan, talked about [...]
June 2010: Transcendence
The Gun Club – Sex Beat Jorge Ben Jor – Errare Humanun Est The John Shakespear Orchestra – Number One Theme Neu! – Isi Jean Louis – Misaotra Mama Roy Ayers – The Memory Roy Ayers – Feel Like Making Love Patrice Rushen – Forget Me Nots Spacemen 3 – Big City (Everybody I Know [...]
A queer addendum
I was at a party recently and got to talking to one woman about elite vs. non-elite (in my parlance, “fancy” vs. “not fancy”) educational institutions, and whether it mattered how elite the school was that one attended for various career paths. We digressed to talk about one institution, let’s call it College X, of [...]
