Resident Gay

Apparently, I finally passed some kind of "resident gay" test.

(Read more here.)

It wasn't enough that I reviewed the Truman Capote movie Infamous or, for that matter, Another Gay Movie (with one of my favorite, and most accurate, headlines: "Just Another Coming of Age Fuckfest").

It wasn't enough that I wrote a cover story about gay parents and the R-G's homophobic birth announcement policy.

I actually don't know what it was (perhaps my standing up at a Queer Eugene-sponsored LGBT Town Hall and calling myself "the gay at the Weekly"?), but finally, the outside world has noticed. (Perhaps my not-as-scathing-as-it-might-have-been review of Andrea Askowitz's My Miserable, Lonely, Lesbian Pregnancy?)

I may never know, but I think it's pretty official. I expect a button soon. Today, in my box, I had two packages. Well, correction, three, but one was a replacement item for something stolen along with my backpack, so it doesn't go into the Gay Count.

One was the, like, 10th anniversary edition of The Brandon Teena Story, which I remember being competely traumatized by. I mean, I'm glad it exists. I watched Boys Don't Cry at the theater with a group I was leading at the UIowa Women's Resource and Action Center; the group was called The Gender Puzzle and was possibly my best idea ever. We got to be traumatized together by these movies — at least my MTF and FTM and genderqueer friends didn't have to watch the movies alone. Anyway, might be I should watch this again. With Kleenex close at hand.

Another package was, how to put this, a gay boy mystery. I read approximately 257 Naiad Press lesbian mysteries while housesitting for friends in Iowa City during my grad school salad days. (It's possible to read 4-6 a day, based on length and difficulty, but the books were like the Little Debbie snack cakes they had in their freezer: Tasty as you consumed them but essentially quality-free. Except that they were queer, which made the books way better than the snack cakes.)

There are some good gay and/or lesbian mysteries, don't get me wrong. I'll let my trusty readers judge from the blurb for the one I just received:

Kurt Smith longs to push. Will you be the next one? Us Ones in Between is a story of sexual obsession turned violent in New York's East Village. Kurt can't get over his ex-boyfriend, and when his failure to reconnect becomes more than he can handle, the line between fantasy and reality becomes blurred — and even Kurt can't be sure he's not responsible for the killings making local headlines.

But really, I'll read it and let y'all know. The author, Blair Mastbaum, won a Lammy (Lambda Literary Foundation Award) for his first book, and that's a good thing. So. We shall see.

I'll keep up the Gay Count. If you're a movie producer, publisher or cultural maven, oh, or news maker, and you're queer, send me your stuff. (Except for the bad stuff. I do not want the bad stuff, OK? Straight or queer, the bad stuff's gotta go.)

In the meantime, Official Gay signing off to go do Gay Things like work out, make dinner, research freelance stories and watch Buffy.