Swish

A “swish” factor is critical to Warhol’s films, where beautiful butch boys in tight jeans and leather jackets share the screen with transvestites in elegant dime-store drag. Edie Sedgwick may have been his most famous superstar (at least the one now most likely to adorn a book jacket), and plenty of women crossed in front of his camera. But it’s all the male bodies — adorned, adored and at times stripped bare — that underscore the radical politics of Warhol’s gaze. In films like”Couch” (1964), which features some salacious banana eating, as well as images of men having sex in front of casual and diffident observers, Warhol presents gay desire as something perfectly ordinary, which in and of itself was extraordinary.

Outing (2)

Ian McKellen

… Unless You Are Ready

Outing (1)

Michael Gambon as Albus Dumbledore

J. K. Rowling outed Dumbledore yesterday. I don’t have a good feeling about outing whatsoever. There is a Magician’s Oath which reads: “As a magician I promise never to reveal the secret of any illusion to a non-magician, unless that one swears to uphold the Magician’s Oath in turn. I promise never to perform any illusion for any non-magician without first practicing the effect until I can perform it well enough to maintain the illusion of magic.” I am for ambiguity.

Artificial Nature

“I deny that anyone knows, or can know, the nature of the two sexes, as long as they have only been seen in their present relation to one another. If men had ever been found in society without women, or women without men, or if there had been a society of men and women in which the women were not under the control of the men, something might have been positively known about the mental and moral differences which may be inherent in the nature of each. What is now called the nature of women is an eminently artificial thing — the result of forced repression in some directions, unnatural stimulation in others.”

John Stuart Mill, 1869. The Subjection of Women.

So Far, So Near

“Common sense always speaks too late. Common sense is the guy who tells you you ought to have had your brakes relined last week before you smashed a front end this week. Common sense is the Monday morning quarterback who could have won the ball game if he had been on the team. But he never is. He’s high up in the stands with a flask on his hip. Common sense is the little man in a grey suit who never makes a mistake in addition. But it’s always somebody else’s money he’s adding up.”
Philip Marlowe in Playback (1958), by Raymond Chandler

Significance

As they entered the dim locker room, Bob looked about him with a delighted melancholy. “I guess this is the last time I’ll be coming in here.”

“Well, we can still use the courts this summer. . . .”

“That’s not what I meant.” Bob took off his coat and hung it up carefully. Then he took off his tie. These were his best clothes and he handled them with respect.

“What do you mean?” Jim was puzzled. But Bob merely looked mysterious.

The City and the Pillar (1948) by Gore Vidal

Come Out, If You Dare!

October 11
National Coming Out Day

Reality / Dream

“There are. intangible realities which float near us, formless and without words; realities which no one has thought out, and which are excluded for lack of interpreters.”
Natalie Clifford Barney

Happy Birthday

 

Happy Birthday

Time and Reason

“Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages, are not YET sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favour; a long habit of not thinking a thing WRONG, gives it a superficial appearance of being RIGHT, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.”

Thomas Paine, Common Sense