Wednesday, Jul 9, 2008
Gay Pride marches on, leaving its lesbian sisters to cough up the dust. Plus: The Boston Phoenix reports on Starbucks' latest conquest and why pheromone perfumes only make you stink.
Jun 25, 1999 | Village Voice, June 23-29
"Planet Queer" by Richard Goldstein
It has been 30 years since a small riot in Greenwich Village blossomed into the Gay Pride movement of today. Most city papers will mark the occasion with a straight, reported article and a few garish photos from the weekend celebrations -- leggy men in dresses and bare-chested women on motorcycles. It's up to alternative weeklies, with their less conservative advertisers and classified ad-buying readers, to explore Gay Pride from a crotchless-chaps perspective.
In honor of the 30th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, the Village Voice looks beyond its home turf, where it all began, to the movement's supposed impact on the rest of the world. "As ambitious as gay liberation was from the start ... its creators never expected their movement to become a global phenomenon. Yet ... gay liberation reverberates across wildly different cultures," Richard Goldstein explains in his introductory essay. The articles -- touching on cross-dressers in Thailand, transsexuals in Israel and gay immigrants in New York -- paint a global picture of the current state of gay rights.
There's just one problem: Where are the lesbians? The dykes? The loud, proud, rug-lickin' mamas? I know, "gay" is the blanket term, but why is it just Gay Pride instead of Gay and Lesbian Pride?
The pieces in the Voice's package are about gay men, not women; sodomy laws and cocksucking, not cunnilingus; drag queens, not drag kings; women who used to be men, not the other way around. Even stories that claim to focus on gays and lesbians lead with an anecdote about a gay man. When lesbians actually are addressed, it's only after the male side of the story has been explored, as in Martin Foreman's piece, "'Yab Daudu' and Proud," on same-sex relationships in African culture, or George Gurley's New York Observer report on "gay quotients," in which no women are mentioned until the article is almost two-thirds over. When writers search history for homosexuals, they're usually searching for men -- like Abe Lincoln or Walt Whitman.
The Village Voice is obviously not alone in giving editorial precedence to the phallus. I honestly can't remember the last time I read an article addressing major gay issues that gave any thought to lesbian mothers being forced to give up their children, or abusive women-women partnerships. No, it's always men wanting to adopt, or the hazards of bare-backing. And you can't blame only the journalists. Just read Inga Muscio's angry, poignant essay on the misogyny of gay men and the anti-woman bias of the Gay Pride movement to get a sense of how deep this problem goes.
Commendably, gay writers and thinkers are rethinking the ideology behind Gay Pride -- as evidenced by Dan Savage and Andrew Sullivan's musings in The Stranger (Seattle) last week -- in a way they haven't since AIDS started killing off their friends and loved ones. As Gay Pride seeks to mature its image and purpose, let's hope that future celebrations and related coverage will not forget gay women.
"Mod, Mod Relaxation" by David Kushner
The online selling of products that used to be only available offline is no longer news, even if the products in question do involve people shooting water up their butts or wearing magnetized vests. Why not just write about the at-home enema kit sensation itself instead of pretending there's a tech angle here? OK?
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Feed, June 21
At the core of Feed's fine special section on the brain are eight essays by brain experts on their favorite lobes. Joseph LeDoux waxes rhapsodic on the neural wiring of the amygdala, which causes us to sense fear. Steven Quartz draws from an encounter between his 2-year-old son and a chimpanzee at the zoo to explain what aspects of the prefrontal cortex separates humans from apes. In addition to these odes to the lobes are several provocative pieces and interviews, including an essay by Erik Davis on how Buddhism fills the gaps left by neuroscience and an interview with "Listening to Prozac" author Peter Kramer on the "future of cosmetic pharmacology." This package is a timely and stimulating read -- timely, because the zeitgeist has recently shifted back to biological explanations of human behavior, and stimulating, because the section presents its discoveries in crisp, smart, accessible prose. Feed proudly defies the conventional Web wisdom that more content is better -- which means they have time to create brilliant offerings such as this one. Let's hope they continue to stay behind the times, even while staying on top of things.
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