Nathanial Hone the Elder’s “Portrait of Catherine Maria ‘Kitty’ Fisher” (1763-64).

Art history 101 in the #MeToo era

October 2, 2018

History cannot be read backward. People of earlier times did not have our standards.

It is, however, equally disingenuous to disregard the contemporary lens through which we see and evaluate those earlier times….

#MeToo meets me first: Christine Blasey Ford testifies against Brett Kavanaugh before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Throwback Thursday for the Class of ’82

September 27, 2018

The historical past is always with us to offer encouragement or caution. But the social past – the who said what to whom on Thanksgiving – is dead to us as it must be if we are to move on. The exception to this is the egregious act that we never confront and that therefore continues to fester into a cancer….

The literature of rejection

June 9, 2018

I tend to use this headline to write about young men who have a disproportionate rage at the world and take it out on others as mass murderers, assassins, terrorists and serial killers. I’ve also written about a number of literary works that deal with such young men – Homer’s “The Iliad,” John Milton’s “Paradise Lost” and Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights,” among them.

But I think it is also an appropriate title for a post about the Lambda Literary Awards, which I attended Monday night at New York University’s Skirball Center for the Performing Arts as a nominee. My book “The Penalty for Holding,” published by Less Than Three Press, the second novel in the series “The Games Men Play” was a finalist in the Best Bisexual Fiction category. (When I got the news, I had two thoughts: This must be an email for somebody else. And, were any of the characters in my book bisexual? It goes to show that the readers sometimes know more than the authors do.)

As I sat there, I had a feeling of disassociation. I didn’t know anyone …

A half-baked Supreme Court decision

June 5, 2018

In a 7-2 ruling, the United States Supreme Court has decided that Colorado baker Jack Phillips’ civil rights were violated when the Colorado Civil Rights Commission apparently “ridiculed” his religious beliefs for refusing to bake a gay couple’s wedding cake. It may seem that Phillips’ religious objections to gay marriage trumped David Mullins and Charlie Craig’s civil rights as a gay couple. But had the commission not gotten “hostile,” it might’ve gone the other way.

Here, however, is what the “offending” commissioner actually said …

The Met’s #MeToo moment – ‘Tosca’

January 30, 2018

The Metropolitan Opera’s new production of Giacomo Puccini’s “Tosca” – an opera about sexual harassment – was rocked by that now seemingly ubiquitous phenomenon. Already reeling from the loss of the original stars and conductor, the production took a giant step back when the second conductor, former music director James Levine, was hit with sexual abuse allegations and suspended a little less than a month before the New Year’s Eve premiere. Ten days after Levine’s suspension, Bryn Terfel, scheduled to play the villain, withdrew, citing vocal fatigue.

Sometimes, however, you get not what you want but what was meant – or who was meant. That The Met pulled off this ‘Tosca’ is a relief. That it’s as wonderful as it is, is nothing short of a miracle. ...

The pit and the pendulum of sexual harassment

January 14, 2018

Every revolution has a counterrevolution. We push a pendulum away from us and it comes back to us with equal force. That’s just physics.

And, as it turns out, politics. A pair of Catherines – actress Deneuve and writer Millet – have joined with 100 Frenchwomen to sign a letter in Le Monde stating that #MeToo has gone too far. They want men to be treated fairly. They don’t want women to appear as wimps. And, most of all, they don’t want sexual freedom curtailed. The “freedom to bother” – as in a man bothering a woman – is “indispensable to sexual freedom.” ...

#MeToo: My story (ies) of sexual harassment

October 19, 2017

I once had a movie producer kiss me on the neck.

How’s that for an opening sentence? Pretty good, huh? Got your attention, right?

It was at the end of an interview when, shaking my hand goodbye, he suddenly lurched forward and kissed me on the neck. (It may have been more of a bite than a kiss, but I don’t actually remember and don’t want to overstate what was a pretty bizarre sendoff.)

Afterward, the embarrassed publicist apologized, concerned that I would be writing about this. But I was a young journalist and had, as a woman, been raised to soldier on. So I said, wrote and did nothing about this. And I hadn’t thought about it until Harvey Weinstein’s alleged sexual harassment of, well, just about every woman on the planet opened the floodgates of ew-ness. ...