Is new PBS series a ‘Vicious’ stereotype?

June 29, 2014

In the show “Vicious,” which bows on PBS Sunday, June 29, Sir Derek Jacobi and Sir Ian McKellen play two bitchy old queens, for want of a better description – indeed the Britcom was originally titled “Vicious Old Queens” – who’ve been lovers for 50 years.

Both are among the greatest actors of this or any century and long out of the closet. And the series was picked up in its native England for a second season. But some critics complained – and some here wonder – whether it plays into gay stereotypes, or whether we’re all too sensitive to political correctness.

“It’s actually a sign that we’ve all matured, and now it’s perfectly respectable to have an exaggerated, farcical representation of two people who are gay,” McKellen said in Dave Itzkoff’s piece for the June 29 New York Times’ Arts & Leisure section. “And for us to accept that they can be figures of fun, just in the same way as a farce about straight people would be.”

Maybe so, but I asked myself...

Rape culture and the games men (and women) play

June 13, 2014

OK, so he didn’t do it – which was apparent early on in the story.

But now its official: Colin Kaepernick, fellow San Francisco 49er Quinton Patton and Seattle Seahawk Richard Lockette won’t be charged with sexual assault in an April incident involving a woman who had had a brief affair with Colin.

She visited Lockette in Miami, where he, Patton and Colin were training together, in the hope that her “relationship” with Colin would be rekindled. Then things got “Exorcist”-style crazy in Lockette’s hotel room, Colin split and the woman wound up in the hospital claiming that she may have been sexually assaulted.

May have been, might’ve been – that didn’t stop TMZ from portraying Colin as one knife short of Jack the Ripper.

TMZ’s reporting – I use the term as loosely as possible – is just one problem in a culture that has such a cavalier attitude toward rape and in which men and women leave themselves vulnerable to “he said, she said.”

Why, for instance, would a young woman go to a hotel room where only men were present, men who were said to be drinking and smoking pot? Sounds like a 911 call waiting to happen. But then, she was apparently trying to turn a one-night stand into a meaningful relationship even though Colin had cut off contact with her last year when she claimed she was pregnant as an April Fool’s joke. Some joke. Then she tried to cry rape. It’s an insult to the men, women and children who have suffered such a heinous act and those who have been falsely imprisoned because of it.

Let’s be clear, however: Colin and company may be innocent of a crime but they are hardly blameless here.

What if New York had the Olympics?

February 9, 2014

With the Sochi Games now open, The New York Times has been wondering just that, with drawings that imagine the Big Apple as an Olympic winter wonderland. (This year we certainly have the snow for it.) But readers need wonder no more. In my new novel “Water Music,” it does.

This first of the series “The Games Men Play,” two pairs of athlete-lovers who are at the heart of my story – swimmers Daniel and Dylan and tennis players Alex and Alí – meet at a Summer Olympics in Manhattan, where shifting professional fortunes signal shifting personal alliances.

Having awarded New York the Summer Games, I’ve gone on to give Omaha its own football team. The Omaha Steers are center stage in my second book in TGMP series, “In This Place You Hold Me,” about a quarterback’s search for identity. (Omaha, I know you were disappointed that Peyton Manning – who always uses Omaha as one of his audibles – and his Broncos lost the Super Bowl. I hope my giving you your own team takes the sting out of that – but I doubt it. Art can’t make up for real life.) Read more