Wednesday, November 4, 2026
The Fantasticks (2*)
Sunday, November 1, 2026
Elke Sommer (1940 - 2026)
And I always thought she was Swedish, because of I'll Take Sweden, a silly movie that titillated me as a 12-year old, even though I now know that Elke Sommer didn't even appear in it. Instead, I must have been thinking of another Bob Hope turkey, Boy, Did I Get A Wrong Number! which also starred . . . Phyllis Diller, who surely was cast as the anti-Elke, or maybe I've got that backwards! Or more likely it was A Shot in the Dark in which Somer and Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau visit a nudist camp, the kind of place I associated with Sweden. Once again, memory proves unreliable.
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| 1964 |
In any case, it turns out Sommer was German, born in Berlin through no fault of her own at the height of Naziism. But to me, she and and Ann-Margret (a year younger and still kicking) were equally alluring, the kind of women I wanted to babysit me (Sommer, in fact, worked as a nanny). In retrospect, I realize they were the sex kittens I wanted to be, even though I'm a perfectly happy cisgender male.
Somer also colonized my adolescent imagination with a series of smutty Hollywood movies that were an early inkling of my developing fondness for camp and homosexual identity.
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| 1963 |
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| 1966 |
In the end, however, Sommer lingered in my consciousness only as a very pretty face. I didn't know she painted and I'm not sure I was even aware of the $3.3 million dollar defamation lawsuit she won against Zsa Zsa Gabor, a sum much larger than what either of them would have earned for appearing on "Circus of the Stars" where their feud began (paging Ryan Murphy).
But while perusing IMDB this morning I also learned that Sommer and Sharon Tate appeared together in a 1966 Dean Martin spy caper called The Wrecking Crew, old news to Tate-stan Quentin Tarantino. In Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, it's the movie for which Tate excitedly buys a ticket to see herself on screen.
More People I Loved:
Saturday, October 31, 2026
Destination Block
Life can be so strange sometimes.
When I began living in New York City, Halloween was one of my favorite nights because of the parade downtown in the Village. Gay wit reigned supreme when at least a minion of Joan Crawfords carried Christina dolls and beat them with wire hangers. The event was smaller and more intimate in those days and very DIY; I don't think I've been back since David and I joined as a Punkin' Rocker and a Rock Lobster, respectively. But the city was different then in other ways, too: a would-be mugger with a stocking pulled over his face nearly ruined the happiest night of my life but instead made the evening even more memorable after we resisted.
Half a century later, Halloween comes to me. Somehow my brownstone block has morphed into one of the most decorated streets on the Upper West Side with the crowds to prove it. Many of the neighbors go all-out but I prefer the stoops where creativity trumps deep pockets, not that it makes much difference to the real audience. Children of all ages have been screaming excitedly all week long.
As they have been since late this afternoon.
More Halloween:
Trick or Treat (2016)
Halloween Terror (2017)
Skeletal (2021)
Competitive Decorating (2023)
Downstate (4*)
Pedophiles are human beings, too.
That was my primary takeaway from Downstate, an extraordinarily provocative drama from Bruce Norris, who knows he's playing with fire. After all, the Booth Theatre's marquee asks, quoting the always unimpeachable New York Post, "How can you miss the play THAT WILL THOROUGHLY PISS OFF HALF OF AMERICA?"
But Downstate mostly made me uncomfortable perhaps because I know what it feels like to be reviled for a sexual orientation that during adolescence I desperately hoped to change, but couldn't. Still, this engagingly directed (Joe Mantello) and finely acted drama all around strands the audience on a very slippery slope: how DO you protect children from predators many of whom are a lot more monstrous than the four registered sex offenders that Norris depicts in a group home who have just been paid a visit by one of their former victims?
Both race and class enter the moral equation, too, muddying things in the way that real life does. The shame that well-to-do Andy still feels after the abuse he experienced at the hands of Fred (Francis Guinan), his mild piano teacher--wrenchingly described by Thomas Sadoski in a scene that recalls a similarly devastating monologue by Leslie Manville in last season's Oedipus in content if not quite in the skill of its delivery--inspires contempt in Dee (K. Todd Freeman, superb), a self-described Black, gay, elderly convict who has served 15 years in prison because he had what appears to have been a consensual relationship with a decades-younger gay teenager. Refusing to recognize the power imbalance, Dee calls what they had love, and offers six years of letters he received from the individual after his conviction as evidence. In Dee's socioeconomically disadvantaged eyes, honky suburban boy Andy doesn't know from suffering.
Gender differences also leak into the house dynamics. Ivy (Liza Colón-Zayas, as forceful here as she is gratefully accommodating in The Bear), the no-nonsense law enforcement liaison with the men, sees the actions of Felix (Adrian Martinez) and Gio (Al'Jaleel McGhee, the very personification of a live wire) two heterosexual offenders--both of whom cloak themselves in scripture the way their gay housemates do with Diana Ross and Frederic Chopin--through the prism of their young victims. This explains why Ivy pushes Felix, a Latino parking garage employee and certainly not the brightest bulb in the house, up against a wall. His determination to wish his 15-year-old daughter happy birthday results in the play's most shocking scene. It also exposes Andy's previously expressed assertion that death may be preferable to life in some circumstances as performative self-pity or possibly just acute depression, depending on your sympathies.
Gio, a loudmouthed hustler whose self-centered antics provide a welcome respite from the play's grimness, is perhaps the most relatable of the men as a "level one" offender which, IMHO, at least means that our judicial system has attempted to recognize that some offenses are worse than others, so long as both the perpetrator and his victim are heterosexual. Gio insists that any straight man who professes not to be attracted to teenage girls is lying. Norris and Mantello stack the deck a bit here: it's hard to imagine pert Effie (the inimitable Ivy Wolk, who elevates annoying to an art form), his co-worker at Staples and his smart-assed paramour lacking agency even in infancy.
While equanimity is certainly a laudable goal in our polarized society, I doubt that Norris will engender much consideration for the way sex offenders are treated. Most people will remain as myopic as Andy's wife Em (Cassie Beck), who represents the 50% of the audience Downstate will piss off or, more likely, the much vaster number of theater-goers who will refuse to see the play on the basis of its subject. Like Ivy says to Dee after he schools her on a tribe in New Guinea where young boys fellate their elders as a rite of passage ((I would have been a lot more dubious about this assertion if I hadn't also recently read an article in The New Yorker about a Nobel- winning prize scientist whose study of this particular tribe enabled his own pedophilia), "you know what you did is wrong."
What They Said: October 2026
“Gird yourself for the jackal with the belt of a lion,” announced Rear Adm. Liam M. Hulin, head of the joint task force for Operation Inherent Resolve, at a ceremony in Baghdad marking the complete withdrawal of U.S. troops after two decades.
“Perhaps what made Leo a success was that he had the charisma of the timid, if you will,” said Charles Mercier, an expert on Catholicism at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, a postgraduate college in Paris. “Paradoxically, what makes him charismatic is his reserved personality, bordering on shyness. He had a completely different charisma that was, in fact, able to arouse support in French public opinion.”(New York Times, October 1)
* * * * *
“Credit is like medicine,” said Lauro Gonzalez, a finance and debt professor at Fundação Getulio Vargas, a Brazilian research institute. “No one is against it, but in the wrong dose, it can become poison.”
“Just because a victim’s narrative evolves or changes doesn’t mean it’s untrue,” said Moira Penza, a former federal prosecutor. “But grand juries and trials can’t stop at ‘believe women.’”
“We will all, at some point in our lives, fall,” says Coach Eric Taylor at the end of the "Friday Night Lights" pilot, celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. (New York Times, October 3)
* * * * *
“Should you see Chief Justice John Roberts duck into Squid Ink coffee or the Port Clyde General Store this summer, consider letting him know exactly what you think of him and his illegitimate, ultraconservative court,” wrote Becca Shaw Glaser, a columnist for a mid-coast Maine newspaper, under the headline “We Need to Talk about Chief Justice John Roberts Blissfully Summering Off Port Clyde.”“Yell, boo, whisper, weep audibly, give him the thumbs down or the finger, hand him a note, refuse to serve him.”
“Growing up, I would visit my grandparents in China in the summers, and my friends there were all pirating ‘Gossip Girl’ to learn English,” said Alice Ma, the 31-year-old founder of Mad Realities, which is behind shows like “Keep the Meter Running,” a digital hit depicting interviews with cabdrivers. “The whole world is kind of obsessed with New York as a backdrop.”(New York Times, October 4)
* * * * *
“At some point, you do get conditioned by all that’s happened in the past,” said James Henson, the director of the University of Texas at Austin’s Texas Politics Project, expressing skepticism about the Democtratic Senate candidtate's edge in polls. “I mean, you look at the trends and you have to admit that something’s going on. But you still don’t want to believe your lying eyes, because you’ve been burned for so long.” (New York Times, October 7)
* * * * *
“People become real to us by frustrating us,” the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips once wrote. “If they don’t frustrate us they are merely figures of fantasy.” (New York Times, October 12)
* * * * *
“If liberalism is to rise again, it must be with the working class at its heart,” said Daron Acemoglu, a Nobel laureate in economics and professor at M.I.T.
“We’ll return you to 1970s rates, plus high gas prices, diesel shortages and bell-bottoms. Enjoy the nostalgia!” wrote Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of Iran’s Parliament. (New York Times, October 21)
* * * * *
“Oh and by the way,” Felicity Green, fashion editor of The Daily Mirror (a British tabloid) wrote in her Nov. 4, 1966, story, “I am assured by Those Who Know that the newest essential for really In-type modes is noise . . . Rustling, I’m told, is out. Rattling is in, so this dress is very in indeed, as the moment you move it sounds like a pop-crazy audience applauding the Beatles.”
“The Democrats have been librarians for too long,” said Jon Reinish, a Democratic strategist, referring to Chris Gallant, a Congressional candidate on Long Island who has leaned into his past as a kink model, as well as a Black Hawk pilot and an air traffic controller. (New York Times, October 22)
* * * * *
“I believe in an Islam that emphasizes God and my responsibility in his creation,” wrote Abdul El-Sayed, MD, the Democratic candidate for Senate in Michigan, in his 2020 memoir, Healing Politics. “The Islam I practice doesn’t judge people; it seeks to empathize with and empower them.” (New York Times, October 23)
* * * * *
“When I first ran for office, I thought of it as left versus right,” said James Talarico, Democratic candidate for Senate in Texas. “I’ve now come to see politics as not left versus right but top versus bottom.” (New York Times, October 24)
* * * * *
“The homosexual clique was a problem,” Abe Rosenthal, a former executive editor of the New York Times wrote in his journal, “because it was usually subterranean, which gave it a kind of conspiracy atmosphere, and because homosexuals in the clique always were convinced or tried to convince themselves that they were wiser, more acute, ‘better’ than the others — the old breed.”
“That was hurtful, and it gives us a chip on our shoulder — one that I still have today,” said New York Governor Kathy Hochul, a native of Buffalo. “People look down on us. You’re the Rust Belt. Your team loses four Super Bowls. You have the Blizzard of ’77, which was on Johnny Carson late-night jokes. People mocked us all the time. So that’s been our psyche. And I just thought, ‘But we’re not losers.’” (New York Times, October 25)
* * * * *
“I am concerned that we have an overheating of expectations,” said Molly Murphy, a pollster who worked on the 2024 campaigns of former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and former Vice President Kamala Harris. “People often assume in a wave you win everything, and what happens in a modern wave is you win far more than normal.” (New York Times, October 26)
* * * * *
“What does Xi [Jinping] want his legacy to be? I think first and foremost, it is a stronger Communist Party, perhaps even more than a stronger China,” said Neil Thomas, a senior fellow on Chinese politics at the Asia Society Policy Institute. “The first is the foremost prerequisite for the latter as far as he’s concerned.” (New York Times, October 27)
* * * * *
“When you want attendance to pop at your park or in your company, you don’t put in a carousel, you don’t put in a scrambler, you put in a roller coaster, and you name it ‘The Demon’ or ‘The Bat’ or ‘The Beast’ or whatever,” said Dennis Speigel, a global theme-park consultant and past president of the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions. “And people come out in droves to ride it.” (New York Times, October 28)* * * * *
“The ball is now in [Gadi] Eisenkot’s court. Whoever wants to remove Netanyahu and change his policies — we are ready to cooperate to topple his government,” said Yousef Jabareen, the leader of the Joint List alliance, an Arab political party that won more seats in Israel's inconclusive parliamentary elections this week than ever before due to high turn-out.
“It’s wartime," said André Janones, who masterminded a WhatsApp channel called "Lula’s Army" that contributed to the defeat of Flávio Bolsonaro, the right-wing candidate who had been expected to win Brazil's presidential election. "The time we’re living through today is not the time for us to do what we’d like to do. It’s the moment for us to do what needs to be done.” (New York Times, October 30)
Friday, October 30, 2026
The Living Realm (5*)
Jordan Tannahill almost lost me with the ecstasy-inducing teeter totter in the woods, but there's so much to admire about this unique, irreligious meditation on the meaning of human existence and the importance of gay community that I overcame my strong aversion to the supernatural.
The poetic metaphors in The Living Realm come fast and furious from this short novel's get go. Three friends are sunbathing on the Teufelssee, a lake in the Grunewald, "the forest that lay at the edge of Berlin like its shadow." Our unnamed narrator, an archaeologist who trained at Cambridge, moved to Berlin in 1991, at the height of the AIDS pandemic. Now, during a summer marked by Europe's worst drought in centuries, climate change has exposed history's past traumas, too.
As the Earth baked like a hot stone, the lake remained, even as the continent’s mightiest rivers ran dry and yielded their secrets . . . Scattered across the riverbed of the Danube lay the remains of Nazi battleships, like corpses resting in the positions in which they fell.
The narrator has begun experiencing the psychological equivalent of this stripping away through encounters with people from his past, most of whom lost their lives to AIDS. Although Tannahill is three decades older than his narrator, he nails the prevailing mood among gay men before the development of protease inhibitors in this description of his HIV-positive boyfriend, the first person he spots in the Grunewald and with whom he eventually ends up communing on the aforementioned teeter totter.
Everything about Lukas felt present tense, he had always lived as if no distant future existed, at least not for him, and this was how I loved him, as a deeply burning present. It was too painful to allow ourselves the fantasy of future projection, to imagine what it might have been like to grow old together, because we both knew, without having to say it, that we had been robbed.
Yet the narrator's memories aren't all tragic, and Tannahill employs them to reinforce his primary theme.
We watched the snow blow out from the sides of the train like wings as we crossed over the highest trestle on the continent, soaring above the turquoise ribbon of the Mala Rijeka, below us a winterscape of medieval villages dotting a valley like a Bruegel painting, and as we did, Lukas muttered to himself that even if humans lived another million years, they would never create anything so beautiful as Europe. I thought of all the old regimes, old empires, old faiths layered on top of one another like geological strata as we passed through forests that, within a matter of months, would echo with gunfire, before we plunged through another tunnel, and in the darkness I found my own face suddenly staring back at itself in the window.
Now retired, the narrator also experiences survivor's guilt when he sees Sebastian, another lover who also seroconverts.
Why had I not boarded that train with Sebastian? Why hadn’t I found a way to write or call him? Why had I never visited him in Regensburg? There was only one simple truth, now abundantly clear—I had been a coward. Too spineless, too terrified of sickness and death to be even proximate to it, I had somehow convinced myself I had no further obligation to Sebastian, our passions having already cooled the week of his departure at the first appearance of conflict, a passing dalliance from which I had been lucky to emerge unscathed. I let myself imagine that Sebastian had eventually returned to Berlin, and was living contentedly with new lovers, perhaps a steady partner, and that the decision to let our contact lapse had been a silent and gently mutual one. I could see now, all too clearly, that it had been a heartless one, made unilaterally without a shred of compassion or grace.
The narrator's recent intervention to rescue his elderly landlady from a nasty fall suggests that his retrospective self-assessment may be a little too harsh; it also gives Tannahill an opportunity to connect her world with his when the landlady (with whom he's never before had a real conversation) explains why the Grunewald is such a good place for sledding during the winter months: it rests atop the smashed bricks that she and other Trümmerfrauen removed after the Allies bombed Berlin to smithereens at the end of World War II.
She thought to herself: Is this how we are to live now? Like vultures, on the corpse of our own city?
Birgit, a fellow archaeologist, and particularly Gabor, a political refugee from Viktor Orban's Hungary, fear their friend has lost his mind when he casually mentions his pursuits of Lukas and Sebastian, as if they were corporeal. Birgit diagnoses him with delayed onset of PTSD while Gabor, in the flush of a new relationship, stops speaking to him altogether until the narrator receives an actual medical evaluation. After unexploded military ordnance threatens Teufelssee, the friend group re-forms and briefly increases by one.
The four of us spent the next several hours sitting together like a troop of saggy-titted gorillas, plucking from one another’s heads jokes and stories and half-recalled gossip, encountering friends, laughing at the antics of strangers, and at times sitting in silence, reading and reapplying sunscreen to each other’s backs.
Tannahill's ghost story soon morphs into something entirely different with the help of Elsa, a wild boar the friends have misguidedly rescued from euthanasia after she goes viral. The narrator fully embraces the pagan and finds peace in the circle of life. The ending of The Living Realm reminded me of a day decades ago when I drove my motorcycle to Croton-on-Hudson through peak autumn foliage--something I'd never really experienced before--and explicitly identified the divinity of nature in my mind for the first time.
The Living Realm also proves that the intense thrill I felt upon seeing Prince Faggot last year wasn't a fluke; Tannahill has an uncanny ability to precisely imagine scenarios that fall well outside of his personal experience (the narrator and Brigit, a dyke who conducts fisting seminars (!), listen to the Au Pairs, a rather obscure British band that contemptuously explored contemporary sexual politics) and describe some that don't with an understanding that I found to be instantly meshed with my own sensibility given that I explored a similar connection at more prosaic length in Homosaic, my memoir:
Gabor had once said to me that he believed cruising was the arena in which we best applied our tens of thousands of years of evolution as hunter-gatherers. I think a part of me was drawn to cruising for very much the same reasons other men loved to fish, less so for the catch itself than for the discrete rewards of patience, for the many long minutes of waiting spent in stillness, feeling time dissolve into place. It was about the careful observation of a landscape and the gradual accumulation, over many years, of a knowledge of that landscape; to know that in a certain grove, at a certain hour, on certain days of the year, men would congregate, or that if a man disappeared down a particular path, what the chances were that he would reappear in one or another clearing. One came to learn the intricate variations of eye contact, sustained and averted, how to distinguish an accidental brushing-past versus intentional contact, what was an invitation, and what was a rejection, how many times men would do a full tour of the paths before they decided to settle for who was there, and how likely they were to settle for you.
I can't wait to see what Tannahill does next.
Thursday, October 1, 2026
Transcription (5*)
I've now read Transcription twice and I still can't decide if it's about technology or parenting which is probably too simplistic an interpretation in either case. But no biggie; it's only 92 pages long and we can split the difference and call it a brain teaser about the impact of technology on three generations of human beings.
Author Ben Lerner (The Topeka School) divides the tricky narrative into three sections. All revolve around Thomas, a 90-year-old intellectual who recalls hearing Hitler's voice in the womb as his mother listened to the radio in Weimar Germany. He's a polymath of great cultural significance and in the first section, an unnamed narrator, a poet in his mid-40s (like Lerner), takes the train to Providence, where he went to school (like Lerner), to interview his media-shy mentor and get his final thoughts "on the record" before he croaks.
But accidentally knocking his phone in the sink before they meet for dinner at Thomas's house leaves the narrator "praying for the illuminated apple," more acutely sensitive to his surroundings and full of reverie about his student days when his current wife dumped him and he fell into the duplicitous arms of her then roommate.
I was experiencing a withdrawal indistinguishable from mild intoxication, the landscape made strange, the stones stonier, by my being suddenly offline, incapable of taking pictures, sending or receiving data packets, sharing my location, getting a MyChart alert or a work email or a small toxic hit of news or shitposting; I was having an unusual experience of presence—more aware of silicates glittering in the asphalt, the little plumes of vapor that were my breath, the articulation of branches and their shadows on the sidewalk—but I was also walking into my past, because this was a landscape so dense with formative memories and events, and because only in the past would I be deviceless.
Rather than postpone the interview until he can record it as intended, the narrator deceives Thomas and asks him to treat their evening as an opportunity for boundary setting. Thomas complies, forbidding any mention of either his wife, who committed suicide, or his son Max, a friend of the narrator's, but warns that anything they discuss now will sound "rehearsed" if it comes up again the next day. Thomas, assuming that the narrator has already begun recording , refers to the narrator's fried i-Phone as a "little black box," a spot-on metaphor for the public's expectation that it will provide all the answers after an inexplicable plane crash.
Free association powers their conversation, genuinely give-and-take (and occasionally way over my head). But it's also chock full of what Taylor Swift fans would call "breadcrumbs," including dreams, performance, the history of illumination, 19th-century glass flowers, even sauerbraten. At one point, Thomas insists the narrator has misremembered the place where they collaborated on a project and the reader, like the narrator, understands in real time that Thomas already is well on his way to dementia.
The second, briefest section takes place in Madrid, giving the narrator an opportunity to digitally stalk his wife's former lover two decades after their affair ended. He's there for a conference, along with Max, to pay tribute to Thomas, not long after the great man's demise and the publication of the narrator's article which remains unseen. After he reveals his deception to the assembly of acolytes, a colleague he may or may not have slept with confronts him privately, asserting that Max, in particular, is angry. The narrator defends himself.
“A section of the interview was based on memory. That’s a scandal? I was trying to describe this kind of field of force around him. It was my setup to talk about his thoughts about recordings, ‘technologies of capture,’ and so on, right? And if anything I was making fun of myself. And believe me, I left out plenty of personal—”
“It was conducted under false pretenses. That’s what you revealed.”
“It’s routine for these interviews to involve—”
“Come on. It’s not routine to be told you’re being recorded when you’re not. It’s ironic, since most people are worried about being recorded unawares. And also the man was cognitively diminished.”
“I was honest about this childishly dishonest thing I did, yes, about how I regressed or was feeling—I don’t know. As I said, he seemed to even suspect—”
“That was unsettling, too.”
A lengthy exchange between Max, a lawyer, and the narrator comprises the novel's third, most affecting section. It reads a lot like a transcription because it's nothing but two voices, mostly Max's. As if pleading a case in court, Max describes his daughter's eating disorder and his fury at Thomas's mildly reproving reaction to the solution, although he isn't entirely without self-awareness.
Regardless, you have to picture me sitting on the couch, seeing myself through my father’s eyes: ‘My son is eating neon-orange puffed corn, watching a babbling, purple-haired woman opening Mini Mystery Plushies on a tablet with my starving granddaughter.’ I mean, my dad used to go to concerts with Adorno!
Covid's arrival, of course, upsets everything and Transcription shifts from an almost entirely intellectual register into a highly emotional one, with Max describing what he believes are the final words that he will ever say to Thomas, using a nurse's i-Phone.
That "little black box" reveals the book's "secrets" (some of which remain open to interpretation) followed by an historical coda that suggests technology, in the end, hasn't changed what matters most in life much at all.
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