Posts - April 2008

I am SO happy. For the past two months I’ve thought that I was going to owe about $2,500 in taxes to New York State and New York City this year. Today I realized I was wrong – I’d overlooked the boxes on the W-2 form that list the amount of taxes withheld by the city and the state. (Since I work in New Jersey but live in New York, I get W-2s for each state, but for some reason I’d looked only at the New Jersey W-2 and not at the New York W-2.)

So instead of owing the state and city about $2,500, I get a refund from them of about $114. Since I’d already mentally removed the $2,500 from my bank account, I feel like I’ve actually gotten a $2,400 $2,600 bonus.

Note to self: never overlook the “taxes withheld” box. Of course, it would be easier to realize this if the box actually said “taxes withheld” instead of just “taxes.” Leaving out past participles is NOT helpful.

Everything you were afraid to ask about “Battlestar Galactica.” A complete primer. Season 4 starts on Friday night.

Two disheartening stories today about lesbians and the U.S. government.

First up, a woman in a DOJ department affiliated with the U.S. Attorneys’ Office might have been fired for being a lesbian.

Second, the U.S. military tried to prevent Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin from bringing her partner with her on a military flight to Europe for an official trip. (Via Deke Rivers.)

It’s 2008. This kind of shit is completely unacceptable.

TV Squad presents a list of 15 great New York TV shows.

I’m so happy to see that How I Met Your Mother is on that list, and that it won out over Friends. Even though it’s not filmed there, HIMYM just *gets* New York in a way that Friends never did. Friends would never come up with something like Dowisetrepla.

The apartments are still way too big for Manhattan, though.

Marc Acito’s new novel, Attack of the Theater People, comes out later this month. Anyone who loves theater should read his first novel, How I Paid for College: A Novel of Sex, Theft, Friendship & Musical Theater; a funny, heartwarming and sexy story about New Jersey theater geeks.

Anyway, Marc has posted a short video promoting the book. I love it.

Who hasn’t thought about making out with a poster of Cheyenne Jackson?

Tomorrow marks the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Here’s the speech Robert F. Kennedy made on the night of King’s assassination. I get chills whenever I listen to the crowd react to the news.

RFK, of course, would himself be assassinated two months later.

I had never actually seen this; I was overseas at the time. But I’d always heard about it. Who hasn’t?

We watched Enchanted on Saturday night. What an adorable, sweet movie.

I cannot get enough of this number. I had to watch it three times before putting the DVD back in the Netflix envelope and irrevocably sealing it shut. And then it dawned on me to check YouTube. How long must it have taken to film this?

A question to my readers: can any of you recommend a real estate broker for rental apartments in Manhattan? Matt and I have been considering using one.

Apartment-hunting is stressful. I think I’m more stressed out about it than Matt. The stressful part is trying to make a snap decision about whether you want a particular apartment or not. Everything we’ve seen so far has been flawed in some way. Small living room without windows, or too dark, or whatever. But perhaps decent enough to live in. We still have a couple more weeks in which we can look, so if we keep seeing similar things, we might take one and might not need a broker.

Thing is, we’d really like to find a building that has laundry facilities in it, and either an elevator or no higher than a 2nd-floor walkup. Our top budget is $2400/month. We’re looking on the Upper West Side, up to anywhere south of Columbia. We might not need a broker after all, but if a broker can widen the opportunities, we might be willing to use one.

(Feel free to email me with recommendations.)

Stephen Colbert was apparently on the Today show this morning. You can watch the video.

How did we wind up with George W. Bush in the White House?

That’s not just a rhetorical question. I’ve occasionally asked it over the last 7+ years, because I genuinely wonder how we managed to get ourselves such an awful president. Was it just dumb rotten luck, or was it due to inherent problems in the system? And by “the system” I mean everything that surrounds us – the political system, the media, the American people.

I guess it’s a little bit of everything. For us to get into the horrible situation we’re in, where the next president is going to have a devil of a time trying to correct what went wrong, required a convergence of factors.

First, George W. Bush got nominated. And he got nominated because (a) he decided to run, and (b) he locked up most of the Republican establishment as early as 1998, the year he was re-elected Texas governor. There are times when an upstart can upset the establishment candidate (example: Democrats, 2008), but most of the time, if you’ve got the establishment behind you, you’ve got the nomination.

Second, he had a vulnerable opponent. Al Gore ran at the tail end of almost eight years of prosperity – and yet he only barely won the popular vote (by a mere half a percentage point), because he wasn’t a very good politician.

Third, we had a horrible press corps that had no idea what’s important in electing a president. That could be because…

…Fourth, we were in a period of apparent peace and prosperity, where many people thought it didn’t matter who got elected. (And yet we’re now in a time of fear and recession, and the press still doesn’t do a good job.)

Fifth, just plain horrible luck. Theresa LePore and her butterfly ballot cost Gore more votes than hanging chads ever did. And that led to the Florida debacle. People might have expected some states to have close votes, but who could have predicted the freakish closeness of the Florida vote? And who could have predicted that the national electoral vote would be so close that neither candidate could get 270 electoral votes without winning that freakishly close state? After all, it’s not just that Florida was freakishly close but that Florida mattered. The country went down the rabbit hole that night.

All of this helps explain how W got the presidency. But it doesn’t explain why W managed to be so awful.

Historians are always looking for the causes of events. Sometimes the causes are inherent in the system, but sometimes events are just random. Bush’s ascension to the presidency required a little of both.

I don’t know if I’ll ever fully understand how we got here. It’s almost literary, really. If only it weren’t fiction.

I’m reading a terrific new book right now: Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood, by Mark Harris. It’s about the five movies that were nominated for the 1967 Oscar for Best Picture and how they illustrate the enormous changes Hollywood was undergoing in the late sixties.

The five films included three revolutionary pictures — Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, and In the Heat of the Night — and two throwbacks, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and Doctor Dolittle. Starting in late 1963 and culminating in the Oscars ceremony in the spring of 1968, the book deftly interweaves the stories of the five films as they go from conception to casting to filming to release to awards. You learn about the old guard, such as Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn (Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner was Tracy’s last film and he died soon after filming ended), Rex Harrison, director Stanley Kramer, and Jack Warner of Warner Brothers; the new guard, such as Warren Beatty, director Mike Nichols, and Dustin Hoffman; and in the middle, Sidney Poitier, fed up with old Hollywood and the racial box it had put him in, but somewhat reluctant to give up his safe, heroic image.

One of the many treats of the book is reading about the fiasco that was Doctor Dolittle. Movie musicals were big in the early sixties — My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music, and Mary Poppins were all big hits within the course of a year — and some people figured, hey, since those worked, let’s make the Doctor Dolittle novels into a movie musical too! Sure, it requires a huge menagerie of animals, but that’s no problem, right? Of course, it became a huge problem.

Here’s one passage, during filming in a picturesque English village where nobody realized it typically rained throughout the summer:

The fields where many of the animals were kept became so saturated with rain that they turned into swamps. The rhinoceros got pneumonia… Even a shot as simple as one in which Dolittle addresses a few lines to an attentive parrot and squirrel who are standing on a railing became a nightmare when the recalcitrant squirrel wouldn’t stay still. When crew members tried to wrap tiny wires around its paws and then attach the wires to the rail with tacks, the squirrel became understandably agitated. The production broke for lunch, and [director] Fleischer, furious, went off to find a local veterinarian to find out how the squirrel could be sedated. In the afternoon, trainers filled a fountain pen with gin and fed it to the squirrel drop by drop. Finally… they got “a few seconds of film showing the squirrel… nodding and swaying” before it passed out cold.

This was compounded by the fact that Rex Harrison was apparently an asshole throughout the shoot and was accompanied by his drunken basket case of a wife who would act out in restaurants.

If you have any interest in film, you’ll love the book.

Mark Harris, incidentally, is playwright Tony Kushner’s husband. (They had a commitment ceremony a few years ago.)

I think this was the most dejecting weekend of our apartment search so far. We’ve expanded our search from no-fee apartments to broker apartments, but even using brokers we’re not finding places in our price range that we’re comfortable with. There’s something wrong with every place that we’ve seen. Yesterday we saw three places on the Upper West Side; today we looked at a place in the West Village and two places in Chelsea; on Friday evening we saw three places in a building near us, south of Columbia.

I spent much of the weekend depressed and/or anxious. Matt felt some anxiety at a few points, but not as much as I did, and he subsumes his anxiety in activity, while I just… express it.

Last night we went to bed around midnight. I somehow woke up at about 3:40 in the morning and spent the next three hours awake, trying not to think about apartments. It was awful.

At times, I’ve been ready to take a particular place but Matt has wanted to keep looking. There was this one place Matt liked but I didn’t like at all. A couple times, he’s been able to convince me why a particular place was problematic. There was a very nice little place on West End Avenue, but it was essentially a first floor apartment (really second floor, but the first floor was sunken a little below street level, so the second floor was more like the first-and-a-half floor), and it had no bars on the windows even though it faced the street.

Late this afternoon we went for a long walk, starting from our apartment on 109th Street and ending at Fort Tryon Park in Inwood, to see what different neighborhoods were like. Most areas north of Columbia are crap, until you get to maybe the 170s, where it seems to get nicer but un-Manhattan-like. Using this, I calculated that we walked just over 5 miles.

I’ll tell you something – this whole search has been very healthy for our relationship. We’re learning how to communicate better with each other about what we want and don’t want, and Matt’s getting better at giving me the affection and TLC I need when I’m feeling ragged. As I’ve said before, I am a dog and Matt is a cat, but lately he’s been trying to be more attentive to my canine-ish need for affection.

Maybe in 10 or 15 years we’ll get a nice little place out in the country with a stream in the backyard and a real dog…

[Update: Matt didn't even tell me he blogged this morning. Some similar thoughts there.]

We’ve put in an application and refundable deposit on an apartment. My tension has just melted away.

We saw a very nice place on Friday evening in a building we had looked in before. I thought it was great but Matt was hesitant. So we didn’t act on it. Then over the weekend Matt started to warm to it. But I thought it would be gone by now. I emailed the management company agent last night and she got back to me today and said it was still available. So we acted FAST. She emailed me the application and I put together all our paperwork (since we’d already put most of it together in anticipation of finding a place).

It has pros and cons but mostly pros. I feel very happy. It’s in the area south of Columbia University.

I was tense and frantic all morning. The agent said that someone else over the weekend had expressed interest in it (true? not true? who knows, who cares) so I wanted to get all our papers together and get the necessary money orders and hightail it back into the city (Matt couldn’t get away from work today).

So that’s all done and we just have to wait for approval. There’s no reason we wouldn’t be approved, but I like to worry. Well, my body likes to worry. My body is all keyed up and tensed up from a weekend of stress and a morning of worry and it hasn’t quite realized it can relax now.

At any rate, I AM SO RELIEVED.

Alan Keyes officially leaves GOP and hardly anyone notices. Heheh.

We got approved to rent the apartment. We’re happy.

One of the great things about blogging is that you can ask people for recommendations, which I’ve done several times on this blog.

So my next request for recommendations is: can anyone recommend a mover in NYC?

I love this picture.

I watched the debate tonight. And I can’t believe I’m saying this, but: I think Clinton definitely had the better evening. Obama seemed off his game. The questions were appalling — Charles Gibson and George Stephanopolous both seemed to be channeling Tim Russert, and they brought up every possible scandal that has been raised against Obama. Including the flag pin thing! Are you kidding me?

Nothing about Mark Penn or his Colombia trade deal. But questions about Wright, and some Weatherman guy.

But Obama didn’t respond well to the questions at all. He sounded halting and hesitant and defensive when he spoke.

Clinton, meanwhile, seemed polished and prepared and seemed to know her stuff. If this were the only debate I’d seen, and I were voting in the Pennsylvania primary, I might vote for her.

Not that she has a chance of getting the nomination anymore, but she might very well be a better candidate against McCain than Obama would be. She’d certainly be better than either John Kerry or Al Gore at going on the offensive and standing up for herself.

Obama sometimes seems to be morphing into Adlai Stevenson before our eyes. We might get killed again this fall with him as the nominee.

Obama works under the assumption that people are smart. Case in point: his wonderful speech on race last month.

Clinton, on the other hand, works under the assumption that people are dumb and need things explained to them in simple terms.

Unfortunately, I think most people are dumb.

I don’t necessarily mean that as a knock against Clinton. It’s just the way things seem to be.

Why is running for president such an impossible job? And why (until lately) have Clinton and Obama been so close in national polls? Because we don’t know what the hell we want in a president.

From The Paradoxes of the American Presidency, by Thomas E. Cronin and Michael A. Genovese, here’s a list of paradoxes that shows how confused the American people are about what they want. Some of these seem to apply to the Democratic primary contest.

Paradox #1. Americans demand powerful, popular presidential leadership that solves the nation’s problems. Yet we are inherently suspicious of strong centralized leadership and the abuse of power. Thus we place significant limits on the president’s powers.

Paradox #2. We yearn for the democratic “common person” and simultaneously a leader who is uncommon, charismatic, heroic, and visionary.

Paradox #3. We want a decent, just, caring, and compassionate president, yet we also admire a cunning, guileful, and, on occasions that warrant it, even a ruthless, manipulative president.

Paradox #4. We admire the “above politics” nonpartisan or bipartisan approach, and yet the presidency is perhaps the most political office in the American system, which requires a creative entrepreneurial master politician.

Paradox #5. We want a president who can unify diverse people and interests; however, the job requires taking firm stands, making unpopular or controversial decisions that necessarily upset and divide.

Paradox #6. We expect our presidents to provide bold, visionary, innovative, programmatic leadership, and at the same time to respond pragmatically to the will of public opinion majorities. That is to say, we expect presidents to lead and to follow, and to exercise “democratic leadership.”

Paradox #7 Americans want powerful, self-confident presidential leadership. Yet we are inherently suspicious of leaders who view themselves as infallible and above criticism.

Paradox #8. What it takes to become president may not be what is needed to govern the nation.

Paradox #9. The presidency is sometimes too strong yet at other times too weak.

Paradox #10. Presidents affirm the existing order and major traditions of society, yet often must also create a new order and boldly depart from the norm.

Oh hell yes. Here’s my candidate.

I love 2:28.

This is a must-read about the travesty of a presidential debate Wednesday night. George Stephanopolous defended the vacuous questions he and Charles Gibson asked, saying that voters were concerned about electability. Ed Kilgore rips apart this argument.

I’m still mad about that debate.

This is my second Talking Points Memo link today, but I like it. Josh Marshall points out the absurdity under which Clinton and Stephanopoulos seem to be operating:

Organized campaigns of falsehoods, distortions and smears used to be something most people thought of as a bad thing…. Now, however, members of the prestige press appear to see it not as a matter of guilty slumming but rather a positive journalistic obligation to engage in their own organized campaign of falsehood, distortion and smear on the reasoning that it anticipates the eventual one to be mounted by Republicans. In other words, we’ve gotten past the debatable rationale that journalists have no choice but to cover smears and distortions once they’re floated into the mainstream debate to thinking that journalists need to seek out and air smears and distortions on the grounds of electability, as though the mid-summer GOP Swiftboating was another de facto part of the election process like primaries, conventions and debates.

It’s an expansive rationale under which Gibson and Stephanopoulos may have failed their civic responsibility by not pressing the point of whether Obama is a hereditary Muslim or his mother had a predilection for dark-skinned socialists.

As I’ve noted it’s pretty nauseating and disillusioning that Sen. Clinton has now also convinced herself that she’s providing a service by mounting her own Swift Boat campaign.

It’s ridiculous. What was it that Tom Lehrer said about Henry Kissinger winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973? “It was at that moment that satire died.” Well, we keep finding new ways to kill it. This is why “The Daily Show” is funnier than SNL’s “Weekend Update”: because news clips today are comedy in themselves. You don’t need to add anything. Reality is its own joke.

I really wish the media would stop letting the Republicans define the narrative frame. It’s got to stop.

George Stephanopoulos moderates the Lincoln-Douglas debates.

LINCOLN: In my opinion, slavery will not cease, until a crisis shall have been reached and passed. “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Excuse me, did an Elijah H. Johnson attend your church?

LINCOLN: When I was a boy in Illinois forty years ago, yes. I think he was a deacon.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Are you aware that he regularly called Kentucky “a land of swine and whores”?

LINCOLN: Sounds right — his ex-wife was from Kentucky.

By the way, I’ve been getting very good at spelling “Stephanopoulos.”

I love the New Yorker, but one thing that has always bothered me about the magazine is its snooty insistence on using accents that nobody else uses. Who writes elitism as élitism? Who writes cooperation as cöoperation or premiere as première?

The New Yorker, that’s who. No accents, please; we’re American. It’s not le Nouveau Yorker.

I guess it’s their way of being stylistically hyper-correct. The weird thing is, the magazine is totally incorrect when it prints a month followed by a year. Articles constantly use the formulation, “In November, 1962…” That comma between the month and the year annoys me to no end.

And now back to important things.

Tomorrow’s the Pennsylvania primary? Already? It arrived faster than I thought.

I’m serious. Seven weeks ago, when we had the Texas and Ohio primaries, I agonized that we were going to have to go through another seven weeks of this. Now those seven weeks have passed, but it doesn’t feel like that long. I don’t know why. Maybe time moves more quickly when primaries or caucuses aren’t happening every week.

The whole nominating contest is a blur at this point. I’m numb. I almost don’t care who the nominee is anymore. Obama is bruised and battered, and Clinton has morphed into Richard Nixon with a universal health care program. In other words, Lyndon Johnson. Well, Lyndon Johnson minus Vietnam. Actually, Lyndon Johnson minus Vietnam doesn’t sound so bad.

Hillary Clinton = (Nixon + universal health care) – Vietnam

Hillary Clinton = Nixon + (universal health care – Vietnam)

Hillary Clinton – Nixon = universal health care – Vietnam

As of tomorrow, time elapsed since the Iowa caucuses: 110 days.

No, seriously.

What’s up with the three gay A&F-wearing dorks standing right behind Obama while he gives his speech? And don’t answer your frickin’ cellphone while he talks. It’s distracting! Stop talking to each other and fooling around! Pay attention to the candidate! You’re pulling focus!

[Update: I'm not the only one to notice. More here, here, and here. Two of those three bloggers have no gaydar.]

[Update 2: Yes, it's a little thing. But campaign events, especially major prime-time events, should be well stage-managed, and I'm surprised those three tools made it onto the stage right behind the candidate.]

[Update 3: Keith Olbermann on MSNBC: "If you have the sudden urge to run out and buy a fleece..."]

[Update 4: Here, here, and... oh, hell, just go here.]

So, other than the Obama/Abercrombie/Fitch dorkwads…

I wanted to write some sort of insightful post about the Pennsylvania primary results. Unfortunately, I can’t think of anything insightful. It just goes on and on. Hillary Clinton’s candidacy just won’t die. She’s like the Anti-Monitor in issue #12 of Crisis on Infinite Earths.

Seriously, though…

Not that it matters, since I already voted (2½ months ago!), but I think I’ve returned to being neutral in the Democratic race. Or at least I feel less personally invested in an Obama victory. If for some reason he doesn’t get the nomination, I won’t feel personally offended like I would have after the Texas and Ohio primaries.

He still has my heart, but Hillary’s been starting to win my head. (Al Gore in 2000 had both; John Kerry in 2004 had neither.)

Hillary’s a dark lord, but she’s our dark lord. She has an intuitive understanding of how the Republicans play the game. At the same time, that’s what I don’t like about her. She’s adopted the Republican narrative. She’d endorsed the Republican way of playing.

Obama either doesn’t understand the narrative, or he doesn’t feel he needs to play it. “Why can’t I just eat my waffle?” Indeed. I’m increasingly frustrated by his unwillingness to play the game. Look, you’ve got the youth vote locked up already. Can you finally start turning your attention to the working class and elderly? Not everyone will go to your website and look at your specifics. Will you please deign to talk about them and play the game? There are some idiots out there who need to be led by the hand. They’re not going to seek out your positions. You have to talk about them.

Hillary Clinton’s transformation is unbelievable. She’s morphed from a “liberal elitist” enemy of the right into a gun-toting, shot-drinking, working-class hero. She’s practically the waitress who served Obama his uneaten waffle and topped off his coffee.

Oh, and she’s ready to nuke Iran.

What the frak happened to her?

I’m not as sure as Eric that McCain’s a goner. By all rights, George W. Bush should never have been reelected. Never underestimate the stupidity of the American people. On the other hand, McCain should be benefitting greatly from the internecine Democratic warfare right now, and yet he still can’t break his 45 percent ceiling, so who knows what will happen.

See? Like I said. I have nothing useful to say.

Here’s David Tennant and Catherine Tate together in a comedy sketch. Doctor Who fans will enjoy this.

Nick was turned on by my use of the word internecine in this post. I decided to look up its origins, never having studied Latin, and it turns out that our modern use of the word is due to an error in interpretation made by Samuel Johnson in his famous dictionary:

The prefix inter– was here used not in the usual sense “between, mutual” but rather as an intensifier meaning “all the way, to the death.” This piece of knowledge was unknown to Samuel Johnson, however, when he was working on his great dictionary in the 18th century. He included internecine in his dictionary but misunderstood the prefix and defined the word as “endeavoring mutual destruction.” Johnson was not taken to task for this error. On the contrary, his dictionary was so popular and considered so authoritative that this error became widely adopted as correct usage. The error was further compounded when internecine acquired the sense “relating to internal struggle.”

This reminds me of one of those Passover Haggadah passages about rabbinical analysis that someone at the table reads aloud while everyone else is getting impatient for dinner.

You know what’s weird? Every Democratic presidential candidate who has lost a general election since 1972 is still alive. George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, John Kerry — all are still alive.

I’m envisioning some big forum or parade of Democratic losers somewhere. Maybe held at some university think tank and aired on C-SPAN.

(I’m sure some snarky Republican wants to add to that total.)

Thinking again about the Obamacrombie boys, I dug up this Salon.com profile of Abercrombie & Fitch’s CEO from two years ago. It’s worth reading because of how creepy and obnoxious the guy comes across. (I linked it here when it originally ran.)

He wants desperately to look like his target customer (the casually flawless college kid), and in that pursuit he has aggressively transformed himself from a classically handsome man into a cartoonish physical specimen: dyed hair, perfectly white teeth, golden tan, bulging biceps, wrinkle-free face, and big, Angelina Jolie lips…

As far as Jeffries is concerned, America’s unattractive, overweight or otherwise undesirable teens can shop elsewhere. “In every school there are the cool and popular kids, and then there are the not-so-cool kids,” he says. “Candidly, we go after the cool kids. We go after the attractive all-American kid with a great attitude and a lot of friends. A lot of people don’t belong [in our clothes], and they can’t belong. Are we exclusionary? Absolutely.

Two years later it still makes me want to vomit.

Teenagers are letting their electronic communication styles creep into their schoolwork.

And as the English language evolves, he said, some e-mail conventions, like starting sentences without a capital letter, may well become accepted practice.

“I think in the future, capitalization will disappear,” said Professor Sterling, who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. In fact, he said, when his teenage son asked what the presence of the capital letter added to what the period at the end of the sentence signified, he had no answer.

Hmm… prescriptivism vs. descriptivism strikes again.

People who annoy me: those who write on All That Chat and say what they think of a show and call it “My review of…” or “Here is my review.”

It’s not your “review.” It’s your opinion. You’re not a theater critic. A review is something formal that appears in a newspaper or on a theater website. If you’re a random schmo saying what you think of a show, it’s not your “review.” It’s your opinion.

I know it might seem weird that this annoys me, because everyone has a right to give an opinion of a show and theater critics can be clueless or woefully misguided. But it still annoys me. Take your self-promotion elsewhere. Get a frickin’ blog.

The cover story in today’s New York Times Magazine is about gay couples in Massachusetts who get married in their 20s.

Last November in Boston, Joshua Janson, a slender and boyish 25-year-old, invited me to an impromptu gathering at the apartment he shares with Benjamin McGuire, his considerably more staid husband of the same age. It was a cozy, festive affair, complete with some 20 guests and a large sushi spread where you might have expected the chips and salsa to be.

“I beg of you — please eat a tuna roll!” Joshua barked, circulating around the spacious apartment in a blue blazer, slim-fitting corduroys and a pair of royal blue house slippers with his initials. “The fish is not going to eat itself!”

Coincidentally, the piece is written by Benoit Denizet-Lewis, who wrote the piece about the Abercrombie & Fitch CEO that I re-linked to the other day.

DJRainDog is disappointed that in my post about the New York Times article on gay couples getting married in their 20s, I didn’t express an opinion. So… here goes.

I really want to talk about the accompanying photos. But first, the piece itself.

I’m happy for all the gay couples that get married in their 20s. It surprises me that gay couples would do this so young, because I think people in general get married at a later age than they used to, and this seems to go against the trend. But as gay people come out younger and younger than they used to, their life stages might start to parallel those of their straight peers. If straight couples can get married in their 20s, gay couples should be able to do it, too.

But I envied several of the couples mentioned in the piece. It made me feel old, and it brought up all my old feelings of regret about not coming out until I was 24. Now that I’m 34, age 24 doesn’t seem quite as old as it used to, but I still regret that I never had a college boyfriend (at least not while I was in college — I did date a college freshman for two months during my final year of law school). Those were crucial years that I wasted, and I’ll never get them back, no matter how hard I’ve tried to make up for it.

Lewis, who is in his early 30s and came out at 23, captures it well:

There was a reason, of course, why so many gay men my age and older seemed intent on living a protracted adolescence: We had been cheated of our actual adolescence. While most of our heterosexual peers had experienced, in their teens, socialization around courtship, dating and sexuality, many of us had grown up closeted and fearful, “our most precious and tender feelings rarely validated or reflected back to us by our families and communities,” as Alan Downs, the author of “The Velvet Rage: Overcoming the Pain of Growing Up Gay in a Straight Man’s World,” puts it. When we managed to express our sexuality, the experience often came booby-trapped with secrecy, manipulation or debilitating shame.

No wonder, then, that in our 20s so many of us moved to big-city gay neighborhoods and aggressively went about trying to make up for lost time. And no wonder that some of us — myself included — occasionally went overboard.

“The expectation for many years was that if you did any dating in your 20s, they were essentially ‘practice relationships’ where you did what heterosexual kids get to do in junior high, high school and college,” says Jeffrey Chernin, a Los Angeles psychotherapist and the author of “Get Closer: A Gay Men’s Guide to Intimacy and Relationships.” “But for many gay men, your 20s were about meeting a lot of different people, going out to bars with your friends and having a lot of sex. That has long been considered a rite of passage in the gay community.”

I don’t know what I miss more: that I didn’t get to have all that casual sex earlier or that I didn’t get to have a relationship earlier. I’m envious of these people who have gotten their shit together so young.

Then again, getting married doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve gotten your shit together. And I wonder how many of these young gay marriages will end in divorce? Some will, some won’t. Sometimes straight people get married too young and it winds up being a mistake; that’s bound to be true for gay couples as well. Lewis does, in fact, profile two 26-year-old men who have each been through a same-sex divorce.

So it was an interesting article.

But those photos.

The photos were the first thing I noticed about the piece, of course — including the magazine cover. The photos are fun and campy, even if ironic faux-1950s style has become overdone. But what really struck me was that they were all photos of white guys. And that bothered me.

Lewis does address this, briefly:

To find out [what these marriages are like], I spent time over the next few months with a handful of young married and engaged gay couples — including Joshua and Benjamin. All were college-educated and white. (A 2008 study of gay and lesbian couples in Vermont, California and Massachusetts — three states that offer some form of legal recognition for gay couples — found that “couples who choose to legalize their same-sex relationships . . . are overwhelmingly European American.”)

Should he have sought out some non-white or mixed-race couples in the name of diversity? Or is diversity irrelevant because the article is about the people who most exemplify the phenomenon of same-sex married couples, and those people happen to be “overwhelmingly” white? I can’t answer that without knowing how many people “overwhelmingly” means or how much of an effort Lewis made to find non-white people. I’d be curious to know what some non-white gay men think about this aspect of the piece.

The photos also bother me because they play into the stereotype that all gay men are affluent and privileged and don’t really need the economic benefits that marriage would bring or the job protections that an employment nondiscrimination law would bring. They also play into the stereotype that we’re all fabulous curiosities instead of real people who don’t have equal rights.

Regardless of the benefits of marriage, I just don’t like being stereotyped. Matt and I are both white and make an okay combined living for New York City. But I’m still paying off my student loans and my savings aren’t nearly as high as they should be. We don’t have oodles of fabulous friends. We’ve never thrown a dinner party. Neither of us really knows how to cook. We both dress pretty plainly. We don’t accessorize. We don’t fly off on fabulous vacations.

Gay people are not all supercool. Enough already.

Another thing I don’t like about the photos: they really seem to paint an unrealistic portrait of marital bliss. Haven’t we learned anything from the 1950’s, when insecure housewives desperately tried to create the perfect roast and keep an immaculate home? Are those photos going to turn me into poor Laura Brown, Julianne Moore’s character in The Hours? Am I going to collapse into a heap of tears after I try to bake a cake and it comes out a lumpy mess?

It’s bad enough that we have to look like HX cover models. Now we have to learn to cook, too?

Still, I’d rather be tyrannized by some idealized vision of same-sex married life than not have the right at all.

I guess that’s what it comes down to.

Give us our rights; we’ll figure out the rest.

Aha. Here’s a good reason why we should keep using capital letters:

Using capital letters to start sentences is similar to indenting, or doublespacing, to indicate paragraph divisions. The practice makes it easier for readers to move through a piece of prose.

As a reader, it is harder to keep one’s place, or to locate a key passage, if one is faced with a large block of words. If writers stop using caps, the next step may be the elimination of spaces between words.

As a former teacher of writing and rhetoric, I emphasized that writers should be sensitive to the needs of their audience. Keeping caps in standard English is one way of showing concern for readers.

The purpose of linguistic rules is to make communication easier. If we all agree on a set of such rules, we can more easily understand each other. That said, the rules do change over time, and the human mind is adaptable. Once a critical mass of people has adapted to new rules, those new rules become the norm.

The Flash is back! Barry Allen, that is.

(That link also explains “Crisis on Infinite Earths,” which I referenced the other day.)