New Hampshire became, on Wednesday, the sixth state to allow same-sex marriages. The third by legislation, after Maine and Vermont. Even video games are joining the party... Lyle Masaki, who writes a blog at AfterElton.com, tested Sim 3 and found out that gay couples can marry in the latest version of the popular video game!
Towleroad this week published an information that caught my attention: Gay penguins hatch, adopt chick in Germany. It's exactly the story told in And Tango Makes Three (Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson, Simon & Schuster, 2005, 32p), the children book which was the most challenged book in the United States, according to the list compiled by the American Library Association, for three years in a row: 2006, 2007 and 2008. Roy and Silo, two male penguins at the Central Park Zoo in Manhattan who had become inseparable for several years, were given a fertile egg that needed to be incubated. One month later a chick, Tango, was born, after the two penguins had alternatively sat on the egg. The two happy fathers raised Tango, as any other couple...
Cynthia Crossen writes an entertaining column in the Wall Street Journal every Saturday, Dear Book Lover, where she answers questions from readers. This week a reader from New York asked her for help, since although he wanted to read before going to bed at night, he felt too tired, after spending most of his day reading at work. Cynthia Crossen suggested that he read short stories... Which reminded me of a collection of short stories I wanted to look at, not that I feel tired myself... A footnote in the very good edition of Imre that I mentioned last week referred to the "insightful Introduction" of Mark Mitchell and David Leavitt's anthology of gay writing, Pages Passed From Hand to Hand - The Hidden Tradition of Homosexual Literature in English from 1748 to 1914 (Houghton Mifflin, 1997). I did not find it at the Pat Parker/Vito Russo Center Library at the LGBT Community Center in New York. Instead I borrowed the Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories, edited by the same authors (Viking, 1994, 655p). In his introduction, David Leavitt writes about discovering his first gay books and about his feeling saddened by the stereotypes: " What I found myself longing for was a gay literature that, rather than fawning over angels made flesh, transformed homosexual experience into human drama." If that's the program of the anthology, the second story in the book, Arthur Snatchfold by E. M. Forster, fits perfectly. The note introducing the story explains:
Shortly after the appearance of his last and most successful novel, A Passage to India, Forster made the decision no longer to publish fiction since he felt he could not in good conscience write any more novels that took place in a heterosexual milieu. As he observed in his diary late in life, 'I should have been a more famous writer if I had written or rather published more, but sex prenvented the latter.' For the next forty-five years - half his life - Forster's literary output consisted chiefly of essays, memoirs, and biographies; in addition, he wrote many short stories on homosexual themes - among them Arthur Snarchfold - none of which saw publication until after his death in 1970.
I now want to read the other stories...
2009.06.07
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