As a follow-up to last week’s New York Times article in the City section about The Cock, in which the name of the bar was not explicitly stated, today there’s this letter:

To the Editor:

In “Looking for Mr. Right Now” (March 13), you refuse to identify the subject of the article, a gay bar in the East Village, by its name. You coyly describe the bar, the Cock, as being “named for the red neon rooster in the window.”

As you know, the word “cock” has more than one meaning, only one of which might be considered inappropriate enough to suppress for fear of what your more tender-eared readers might say.

The owners of the Cock gave their bar an amusing name that can pass in civil conversation while carrying a more adult indication of the establishment’s nature. Your decision to exclude the bar’s name from the article reflects both a depressing lack of humor and a disturbing allegiance with the campaign against “indecency” that steadily threatens to turn our society into one big day care center.

Matt Larsen
Lower East Side

I’ve long been annoyed at the Times’s insistence on censoring profane language in its pages. What’s even more inane is that it’s okay to run a piece about cruising at a gay bar and print these words:

“I love it here, it’s so whorish,” he said. Like everyone else interviewed, he declined to give his full name for the sake of privacy. And a little discretion. “If you want to find sex, this is the place.”

But god forbid these same readers should be exposed to the word “cock.”

The Times needs to get over itself.

Does it really make sense anymore for one theater critic at the New York Times to have the power to make or break a show? I read Mike’s remark this morning about Ben Brantley (jeez, Mike – 4:14 AM? do you ever sleep?) and it reminded me of something I thought about when Dirty Rotten Scoundrels opened a couple of weeks ago. Brantley didn’t like Scoundrels very much. His review, while it made some good points, was unnecessarily snotty. This morning he praises Spamalot more highly, although he doesn’t love that, either.

The theater critic at the New York Times, by nature of the position, has always had the most clout. But why should one person with such mean-spirited opinions have so much power? There is no such thing as oracular, objective truth when it comes to the arts. The Times has been expanding its arts staff and now has two main theater reviewers, Ben Brantley and Charles Isherwood, as well as a few other people. Why not assign high-profile shows to more than one critic and publish multiple reviews? It happens with books — one person might review a book in the daily Arts section, and another will review it for the Sunday Book Review. Why not for theater, too?

There are other newspapers, of course, and there’s also word of mouth (which is possibly even more influential). But a vast majority of New York-area theatergoers (particularly in the suburbs, where I grew up) probably take their cues from the Times. As media continues to evolve, the Times may have less and less clout in the theater world. I’m sure it already has less clout than it used to. But for now, the paper could benefit from including multiple points of view when it comes to theater criticism. There’s no reason why one person’s opinions, particularly those of someone as cranky as Ben Brantley, should count for so much today.

Emdashes: a blog about the New Yorker. Cool.