Slut (Affectionately, of Course)

Sometimes my job as an editor gets a little personal. For instance, one phrase I detest is "start a family," when what's meant is "start to have children." Whenever I come across "They wanted to start a family," I either change it to something like "They wanted to have kids" or, if the wording doesn't fit with the tone or I have reason to think the writer could stand to be educated, I'll tell him or her that two people in a relationship are a family—and saying they aren't until they start reproducing devalues not only them but other couples who don't have offspring. So can we please come up with another way of saying this?

Last week, I was copyediting an article—that is, doing a second read after the assigning editor had done the main job. And also after our boss had read it, come to think of it, so two people had signed off on it before me. It was a somewhat irreverent piece about a hairdresser who happens to be openly gay. At one point, the author says the guy "goes through men like Kleenex," according to his gaggle of loyal female customers. 

I first queried the editor, saying I found that phrase unnecessarily judgmental. "So he sleeps around or has lots of boyfriends or whatever," I said. "Does this mean he 'disposes' of them? Maybe, maybe not. I don't know. Does [the author]—or these women?"

The editor said to ask the writer, which, because she's normally very opinionated and hadn't hesitated to address my other queries about the article, I took to mean either she thought it was a good question but wanted the author to come up with the actual rewording or she considered it a dumb, nitpicky question she didn't have the patience to address. So I asked the author, using pretty much the same words I'd used with my colleague.

The writer replied: "This was actually one of the milder descriptions. Someone else used the term 'slut,' affectionately of course—and just during my time with him, I was on hand to see one relationship go from prepping for third date (the sex date, he reminded me) to crazy love to kaput. But maybe something like: 'His clients say you need a program to keep up with his love life.' "

I forwarded that note to the editor, and since she'd been noncommittal before, I underscored my concern (just in case she was considering leaving it as is): "I still strongly feel—no matter what the women said—that it seems gratuitously judgmental to use the 'like Kleenex' line. So I favor the rewrite, or something like it. If it were a quote, I actually would have no problem, because then it would be specifically attributed to one catty person, but 'his clients say' he goes through them like Kleenex? That's a very specific simile attached to a not-at-all specific group of people."

We decided to change it, with the tweak of "you need a flow chart to keep up with his love life"—my idea since we agreed that "program" was a vague, bland word. I was fine with a vivid description of his love life—it was the shaming attitude that was uncalled for, and downright annoying. 

Do I think many straight people (which my colleague and the writer, a freelancer, are) are often clueless and Puritanical in their perception of casual sex, particularly among gay men? Yes, I do.

Weekend, a really beautiful movie not
unrelated to the subject at hand.

I'm sensitive to this subject because during a particular period in my life when I was single, I had a lot of sex with a lot of men I met online. Sometimes now when I can't fall asleep, instead of counting sheep, I'll count the number of guys I hooked up with between 2003 and 2007. I always come up with a slightly different total, which is what makes it challenging—kind of like a sexual Sudoku. The number is less than my age today, but that's all I'll say. 

I'm determined to settle it definitively one of these days, but for now it varies: In one tally, I'll forget the silver daddy with the pierced navel ("a reminder to keep my belly in shape"), or the guy who lived over the coffee shop I got together with after Thanksgiving dinner with my family, or the very first guy I met on the first night after my ex and I definitively broke up—the liberating encounter that started it all. 

They were almost all, each of them, lovely: courteous, warm, considerate, affectionate men—whether, as in most cases, I never saw them again or, as in others, we had a few assignations. Nothing degrading or dangerous happened once. (Lucky? Maybe. But the majority of people are, I found, basically decent.) 

So yeah, I was having tons of sex. Would that make me a "slut" in the eyes of some skinny horse-country lady with straw-colored hair extensions? Probably. And what about my two coworkers (one female, one male, both straight) who read the hairdresser article before me and didn't pause at the extraneous and irrelevant characterization of a gay man as someone who supposedly treated his sex partners like "Kleenex," based on nothing other than the mostly anecdotal evidence that he had many of them?

I think they'd consider me a slut, too. So I spoke up for all of us. 

Rainbows and Dust

Arthur Rothstein, Texas, 1936

Tonight I decided I didn't need to finish yet another so-so book. What sealed the decision was, of all things, a TV show—a rebroadcast of part 1 of Ken Burns's magisterial documentary The Dust Bowl, of which I'd previously seen most of part 2 when it aired in January. Riveted by the unstoppable tragedy, the dignity of its aged witnesses, the clear-eyed storytelling, with its sense of historical sweep and human consequence, I realized I was no longer interested in the rather inconsequential, padded, and self-involved contemporary memoir I was reading by Frank Bruni, a writer I otherwise admire. 

I expected Bruni to be a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize earlier this month, if not a winner (he was neither . . . this year) for his great New York Times columns in which, among other things, he determinedly hammers away on same-sex marriage and other gay issues. I loved his essay about his father's evolving acceptance of having a gay son:

"In the years before Mom died, I had my first long-term relationship, and I could tell that seeing me coupled, just like my brothers and my sister were, gave [my father] a new, less abstract way to understand me. I just wanted what they wanted. Someone special. 

"He welcomed the man I was with effusively. Took the two of us out to eat.

"Then Mom was gone, and all the parenting fell to Dad. He tapped reserves I’d never imagined in him. When I broke up with the man he’d been so effusive toward, he must have told me six times how sorry he was about that. It was a message—that he was rooting for my happiness, no matter how that happiness came to me."

But Bruni's memoir, Born Round, about his lifelong battles with weight and eating, doesn't have the feel of consequence that that single column has. So, thanks to The Dust Bowl, I'm not going to finish it.

Even the last book I read—courtesy of my old pal the Total Femme—felt more substantial than Bruni's: The Other Side of the Rainbow: With Judy Garland on the Dawn Patrol, an out-of-print sleeper by the surprisingly not bad writer Mel Tormé. The book—about the making, and unmaking, of Judy Garland's one-season-long TV show, which Tormé worked on—illustrates the frustratingly sad fate of an out-of-control addict with mammoth gifts who has not a single person in her life really looking out for her (including Mr. Mel Tormé).

I've been on a bit of a Judy Garland kick of late (which perhaps the Total Femme intuited), having seen the fabulous Broadway show End of the Rainbow last year as well as, more recently, Garland's underrated final film, I Could Go on Singing, in which she plays, wittingly or not, a spot-on version of herself in the last, frayed years of her downward spiral.

What all of this rambling adds up to is this: We all deserve to have someone looking out for us, whether a loving parent, the government, a colleague, or a perceptive friend.

Outward Bound

Seeing the wonderful movie The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel the other night got me thinking, and not only about how rarely you see older people in films depicted as anything but pathetic or clownish—which they certainly are not in this story, but rather as actual adults with ambitions, inner lives, and nuanced spirits. 
 

The movie—about a group of “seniors” (a word I’ve always hated; I makes me think, at what high school?) who are lured to an overpromised retirement home in India—is essentially about a junior year abroad for adults. I’ve written before about that kind of experience, which I knew as a young man, as well as my history of shying away from adventure. It's always heartening to be reminded that the door isn’t really closed. 

My 50th-birthday trip to Germany last summer made me think I’d like to do a two-week Goethe-Institut program in that country someday. Much like the movie, I've thought of it as a mini–junior year abroad for the adult me. I’m better equipped to roll with any disorientation and language problems than I was at age 20—and I’d better be, because two weeks goes by fast. Also because I took a German test on the Goethe-Institut site after I got back and was shocked to see, in stark numerical terms, the rudimentary level this former German major had devolved to. I mean, I knew from the trip that my street skills had atrophied (I had to be reminded by a phrase book how to ask for a restaurant check), but I’d always tested well! 

 

In my mind, I tend to define adventure in literal terms—travel, relocation, trying new activities—but it's worth acknowledging the smaller doors I've stepped through. During the four years I was single after my last long-term relationship, one of the biggest surprises to me was that it was possible to make new friends in your forties. Strangely enough, I never really doubted love was possible again, but I didn’t expect new friends—real ones, not the verbs but the nouns. A couple of them in particular helped sustain me during those years, just by being up for getting together on a Monday or Thursday night or a rainy Saturday at 4. Those times when the 15-year-old in you takes over and you think everyone else must be busy and why would they want to spend time with you on such short notice? When the riskiest adventure feels like picking up the phone to call someone you're still getting to know, and the nicest sound is that person saying, “Sure, let’s do it.”

Photo: Oberammergau, Germany
By Billy

Just Being

I was saddened by the recent death of Jill Clayburgh, an actress whose roster of leading or costarring roles is relatively small and who, I realized, I've seen in only a few things. But I've always liked her.

I remember when An Unmarried Woman came out in 1978. It was not a film I was old enough to see on my own, nor would I have had the opportunity had I wanted to—I was a 16-year-old boy; it was An Unmarried Woman. The pictures of a bearded Alan Bates intrigued me more than anything. I saw it a few years later in college, one of the free Saturday-night movies on campus. Because of my still-young age and the fact that the early '80s weren't so far removed from the late '70s, I don't think it resonated fully—how could it have? I remember liking it as a movie well enough. (I had by then seen Clayburgh's follow-up, the 1979 comedy Starting Over, and was familiar with her appeal.) And the bearded Alan Bates was just as sexy as I'd imagined.

This weekend, I rented An Unmarried Woman and was taken anew by it and by Jill Clayburgh. Would you believe that a 49-year-old man in 2010 could find a lot to identify with in the story of a thirtysomething woman in 1978 who is suddenly single and must navigate the world of dating, sex, independence, attachment, responsibility, risk-taking, and love (and not-love)? Well, it's true. I watched the whole thing through another time with the very interesting dual commentary by Clayburgh and director Paul Mazursky (who didn't seem to have been in the same room at the same time).

I also rented Starting Over, which I enjoyed when it came out (I think I saw it with my parents and brother). This time, it struck me as slighter than I remembered, but Burt Reynolds is totally endearing, as is Jill Clayburgh again, though to me it was more his film (yet she got an Oscar nomination, as did Candice Bergen, who was comical but wooden as usual).

Jill Clayburgh's acting has a low-key naturalness that's refreshing, like someone who's just being yet whose subtle illumination draws you to her. Her obituary in the Washington Post—which, surprisingly, was much better than the one in the New York Times—ended with this:

Ms. Clayburgh was proud of her understated acting style, believing it was more true to her characters and to life itself.

"I don't like being knocked out by performances," she told The Washington Post in 1978. 'I don't want anyone to say, 'what a fantastic actor' about me."

In the DVD commentary, Paul Mazursky said he originally offered the part to Jane Fonda, who turned it down because it wasn't political enough. He said, What do you mean? It's as political as you can get. After the movie came out, she told him he was right.

Fonda would have given the movie a different slant—I suspect much greater seriousness and overall angst. Had I seen that version, I probably would have come away saying, "What a fantastic actor."

After watching the actual movie—with Jill Clayburgh—I thought, "That was really, really good."

Loverly

Random obsession: Audrey Hepburn.This started when D. and I were at a B&B in Pennsylvania. I turned on the TV, and TCM was showing The Nun’s Story, which I’d never seen. I got sucked in.

I was struck by the almost documentary style—surprising for the 1950s—of the scenes in the Congo, where Hepburn’s nun works in a hospital, then by the seriousness and delicacy of her acting. I made a note to reacquaint myself with her.

My first stop was her official Web site, with a fascinatingly intimate trove of photos. I looked for biographies, and all seemed cheesy; what interested me most was a book by her son Sean Ferrer—not a memoir but presumably from a reliable source and full of more riveting photos. It turned out to be a rambling but sweet tribute. There’s an insularity and an idealism toward his mother that are both touching and odd—at her deathbed, you’d think he were an only child (he’s not; he has a brother, barely mentioned) and the only person with her in her final hours (hard to believe).

What I gleaned is that Hepburn was a truly kind, modest, humble, generous, family-oriented, loving, socially conscious person who probably was more complicated than her son cares to recall. Why should he? There was enough of the perfect to fill a book.

I’ve since read Fifth Avenue, Five A.M., about the making of Breakfast at Tiffany’s and “the birth of the modern woman.” It’s easy to read but has the feel of a quickie project (the author had written a book about Blake Edwards, who directed Breakfast, so the research probably didn’t require heavy lifting).

I saw Roman Holiday for the first time a couple months ago and rewatched Two for the Road recently, her second-to-last film before semi-retiring.

What next?

Nun's Story photo by Leo Fuchs
The Nun's story © Warner Bros. Pictures Inc. all rights reserved

Foreign Countries

Greetings from Provincetown. The last time I was here, it was New Year's, the population closed in on itself for warmth. It's now the height of summer—tattoos breathing for the first time in months, vacation beards sprouting, people relaxing into each other and themselves. One of the notes in the guest book of our condo, from two men, adds a P.S.: "We held hands walking down the streets of Provincetown." A big duh to anyone who has been here more than once or who is from a big progressive city, but a revelation when you've never done it before anywhere. The same couple: "It's like coming to another country from our beautiful but conservative Maine."

D. and I saw the Swedish movie The Girl Who Played With Fire last night. Excellent, complex, disturbing, but as far from Ikea's cheerful dining rooms and entertainment centers as you could imagine. Though Ikea is, funnily enough, among the credits.

History, Boys

I recently rented The History Boys and was especially struck by the matter-of-fact way this group of mostly straight boys in an British "public" (private) school accepted and joshed with and even sympathized with the gay kid among them, particularly his crush on the dreamiest straight guy of the bunch (Dominic Cooper). And at least as much by the matter-of-fact way the gay boy himself, even as he struggled with his feelings, openly talked about his attractions and identity.

It was refreshing to see, and I guess I have to assume it's not wildly implausible for the setting (England) and the time (1983), though the movie (and Alan Bennett play on which it's based) takes place only four years after I graduated from high school.

It couldn't be further from my experience in a private boys' school in the United States, in which heterosexism and homophobia ruled to such an extent that the gay boys either kept staunchly silent and softly invisible or let their peculiarities leak out (awkwardly queer mannerisms, penchants for sketching fantasy characters on every available surface) and were subjected to isolation, ridicule, even cruelty. One boy in the latter category (let's call him M.S.) when confronted with the message "M.S. is a fag" in large letters on the blackboard and all the erasers hidden—as well as a roomful of classmates waiting to see his reaction—had no choice but to wipe the words off with his own '70s-plaid polyester suitcoat.

I watched and said nothing. Guess which of the groups of gay boys I was in.

Where the Driveway Ends

Why has it been so hard for me to get back on track? Somehow my eight-week jury duty (with 22 people who, for the most part, I could not stand, hearing cases that were, for the most part, maddeningly repetitive and tedious, not to mention depressing) and my mother's fall (she's now almost fully recovered physically but much changed mentally) threw me off my blogging stride. The only way I'll ever get any words down is not to claim any continuity or structure for them.

I had one of NPR's much-touted "driveway moments" this evening when a story on Shel Silverstein came on All Things Considered just as I pulled up to D's house. I knew Silverstein wrote songs in addition to children's books (which, by the way, I never read as a child), but the only songs I knew he wrote were "The Queen of the Silver Dollar," on Emmylou Harris's great first album, Pieces of the Sky," and "I'm Checking Out," which Meryl Streep sings to amazing, triumphant effect at the end of Postcards From the Edge.

There's a new Shel Silverstein tribute album out, the subject of the NPR story, and who knew he also wrote those Top 40 songs of my youth "Sylvia's Mother" and "The Cover of the Rolling Stone," not to mention Johnny Cash's "A Boy Named Sue" and Marianne Faithfull's "The Ballad of Lucy Jordan" (which I love and haven't thought about in years)?

I had to sit in the car and hear the whole interview with the album's producers. And who knows -- maybe I'll buy it. See, there's still hope for me after all.

_______

Illustration by Shel Silverstein from Where the Sidewalk Ends.

The Blind Side

After this long blogging silence, the first thing I write about when I finally return is . . . Sandra Bullock?

A few months ago, I officially decided I couldn't stand her anymore. (Not that I was that much of an active fan to begin with.) What had started to get to me was that -- at age 45, with no biological children, and likely on the cusp of that unfortunate stage in a Hollywood actress's career when she's no longer "marketable" as a leading lady -- she was making a bit too much of a deal about how she really, really was maternal after all.

She seemed to bring it up in just about every story I saw about her. It came to a head for me in an article in Parade last November, in which she said that before she met her husband (the bandit Jesse James) and started helping raise his five-year-old daughter, "I was too selfish to have kids."

Yes, the old No Children = Selfish equation. What a fresh idea. Thanks for that, Sandy.

But that wasn't enough. She went on: "If you don’t have kids and animals, you don’t truly know what real life is about."

Okay, I have an animal (and have had animals plural), and I now find it hard to imagine living without them. But for many years I didn't have animals in my life (34 years, to be exact), and I'd never be so judgmental and presumptuous to declare that those without them don't know what life is about.

Life is about your life and what you make of it, period.

Sandy, I thought, you're just an insecure clod.

Now, as everyone knows, mere weeks after her genuinely moving triumph of winning an Oscar, she has been publicly humiliated by allegations that her husband serially cheated on her.

And I've felt for her.

In her Golden Globe acceptance speech earlier this year, she said that before she met her husband, "I never knew what it felt like to have someone have my back."
Lord, all of those quotes that have come back to haunt her.

I've been there myself. Do I think he could be seeing someone else? No. No way.I remember seeing a 20/20 segment in the '80s about people who couldn't get over the death of their pets. Who were in grieving support groups, who couldn't stop crying. Get a life, I thought. Anyone who's that attached to animals doesn't know how to deal with people.
Next Wednesday is the second anniversary of my beagle Charlie's death. I still pray for his soul sometimes.

It's probably best not to make sweeping declarations about what constitutes life -- yours or anyone else's. All you'll end up with is reminder of how human you really are.

Not such a bad thing, I suppose.

If It All Fell to Pieces Tomorrow, Would You Still Be Mine?

Last weekend, D. and I took a drive up to Adamstown, Pennsylvania -- Antiques Capital U.S.A., I'll have you know -- and as we were wandering through one antiques mall, "Take It to the Limit" came on over the sound system (antiques malls play '60s and '70s Top 40 more than any other genre of music), and I realized that that song evokes the 1970s -- not just the decade but my experience of the decade, whose latter half corresponded exactly with my adolescence -- more than any other song, period.

One of my sisters, my next-oldest sibling, loved the Eagles, so I heard a lot of them then. "Take It to the Limit," besides being a great radio sing-along when you're alone in the car, takes me back in an instant to the winter of 1976. (To confirm that my memory was placing it correctly, I Googled it just now, and indeed it was released as a single in November 1975.)

Nothing momentous happened. I was a high-school freshman in a Catholic boys' school. My sister and I were the only ones at home; our older brother and sister were away at college. It was a time of puffy down jackets, hair parted down the middle for guys, velour shirts. When you're 14, the shy youngest of four, you spend a lot of time observing your siblings, hearing about their dates, their friends, the concerts they went to (Jackson Browne, Little Feat), the movies they saw (Love and Death, Barry Lyndon), the parties, the summer jobs and the trips to the beach. Sometimes you fantasize about a time when you'll do all of those things -- see an R-rated film, have a girlfriend, get a down jacket or a velour shirt of your own.

You spend years learning about desire.

Next thing you know you're a fortysomething man wandering through an antiques mall in Amish country with your fiftysomething boyfriend -- surveying the Depression glass, the Stangl dishware, the back issues of Life magazine in plastic sleeves, the tchotchkes of way more generations than your own -- and a '70s pop song full of unabashed falsetto urgency comes on from somewhere unknown and fills you with an unaccountable longing, followed hard by a strange kind of pure satisfaction that where you are is just good enough.