The Pridelets Files for October 15
On this day in 1998, "Out of the Past" makes its debut on PBS. The Sundance Film Festival "Audience Award"-winning documentary (narrated by Hollywood heavyweights Stephen Spinella, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Edward Norton) contrasts the courage of Utah high school student Kelli Peterson and her struggle to form a Gay-Straight Alliance against over 400 years worth of gay history, from the diary of 17th-century Puritan clerk Michael Wigglesworth and "banned" Boston "marriage" of Sarah Orne Jewett and Annie Fields to the work of civil rights dreamers Bayard Rustin and Barbara Gittings.
BIRTHGAYS (and the occasional straights)
* 70 B.C. - The poet Virgil
* 1696 - English courtier and political writer and memoirist Lord (John) Hervey
* 1928 - Historian Michael Foucalt
* 1930 - "Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places" author, sociologist, and activist "Laud" (Robert Allan) Humphreys
* 1941 - "The Early Homosexual Rights Movement" author and NAMBLA spokesman David Thorstad
* 1947 - "Sexually Dangerous Poet" author Walta Borawski
Q.UOTE
"Being gay is a spectacular irrelevance to getting on with your life." -- Clive Barker
THE BEDSIDE TABLE
"America's Boy : A Memoir" by Wade Rouse
In the tradition of such quirky and smart coming-of-age memoirs as Augusten Burroughs’s Running with Scissors and Haven Kimmel’s A Girl Named Zippy, America’s Boy is an arresting and funny tale of growing up different in America’s heartland.
Wade didn’t quite fit in. While schoolmates had crew cuts and wore Wrangler jeans, Wade styled his hair in imitation of Robbie Benson circa Ice Castles and shopped in the Sears husky section. Wade’s father insisted on calling everyone "honey"—even male gas station attendants. His mother punctuated her conversations with "WHAT?!" and constantly answered herself as though she was being cross-examined. He goes to school with a pack of kids called goat ropers who make the boys from Deliverance look like honor students. And he both loved and hated his perfect older brother.
While other families traveled to Florida and Hawaii for vacation, Wade’s family packed their clothes in garbage bags and drove to their log cabin on Sugar Creek in the Missouri Ozarks. And it is here that Wade found refuge from his everyday struggle to fit in—until a sudden, terrible accident on the Fourth of July took his brother’s life and changed everything.
Equally nostalgic, poignant, funny, and compelling, this is a story of what it is to be normal, what it means to fit in, and what it means to be yourself.
This work is copyright© 2006 Thomas Allen Heald, all rights reserved. Contact the author at tom@idontgetit.org and the latest column are always available at www.Pridelets.com.
BIRTHGAYS (and the occasional straights)
* 70 B.C. - The poet Virgil
* 1696 - English courtier and political writer and memoirist Lord (John) Hervey
* 1928 - Historian Michael Foucalt
* 1930 - "Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places" author, sociologist, and activist "Laud" (Robert Allan) Humphreys
* 1941 - "The Early Homosexual Rights Movement" author and NAMBLA spokesman David Thorstad
* 1947 - "Sexually Dangerous Poet" author Walta Borawski
Q.UOTE
"Being gay is a spectacular irrelevance to getting on with your life." -- Clive Barker
THE BEDSIDE TABLE
"America's Boy : A Memoir" by Wade Rouse
In the tradition of such quirky and smart coming-of-age memoirs as Augusten Burroughs’s Running with Scissors and Haven Kimmel’s A Girl Named Zippy, America’s Boy is an arresting and funny tale of growing up different in America’s heartland.
Wade didn’t quite fit in. While schoolmates had crew cuts and wore Wrangler jeans, Wade styled his hair in imitation of Robbie Benson circa Ice Castles and shopped in the Sears husky section. Wade’s father insisted on calling everyone "honey"—even male gas station attendants. His mother punctuated her conversations with "WHAT?!" and constantly answered herself as though she was being cross-examined. He goes to school with a pack of kids called goat ropers who make the boys from Deliverance look like honor students. And he both loved and hated his perfect older brother.
While other families traveled to Florida and Hawaii for vacation, Wade’s family packed their clothes in garbage bags and drove to their log cabin on Sugar Creek in the Missouri Ozarks. And it is here that Wade found refuge from his everyday struggle to fit in—until a sudden, terrible accident on the Fourth of July took his brother’s life and changed everything.
Equally nostalgic, poignant, funny, and compelling, this is a story of what it is to be normal, what it means to fit in, and what it means to be yourself.
This work is copyright© 2006 Thomas Allen Heald, all rights reserved. Contact the author at tom@idontgetit.org and the latest column are always available at www.Pridelets.com.
posted by Thomas @ 4:09 AM
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