In "In the Reign of the Gay Magical Elves," Bret Easton Ellis — author of "American Psycho" — complains of his victimhood, as a gay man...

... at the hands of "The Culturally Correct Gay Elite," who enforce a strict stereotype of gay men as victims, to be coddled like children and who punish any gay man who — like Ellis — "makes crude jokes about other gays in the media (as straight dudes do of each other constantly) or express their hopelessness in seeing Modern Family being rewarded for its depiction of gays, a show where a heterosexual plays the most simpering ka-ween on TV and Wins. Emmys. For. It."

Within the clenched world of the gay PC police there has been a tightening of the reigns. It’s as if in this historic moment for gay men we somehow still need to be babied and coddled and used as shining examples of humanity and objects of fascination—the gay baby panda—and this is a new kind of gay victimization. The fact that it is often being extolled by other gays in the Name of the Good Cause is doubly stifling.

Okay, Bret. Much as I agree with you about the problems of infantilization and political correctness, I've got to further victimize you. Not you, the gay man. You the writer.

1. A "tightening of the reigns"? Especially when writing under the title "In the Reign of...," you need to know your metaphors. There's a difference between what kings do in their domain and the leather straps a rider uses to control a horse.

2. If you're offering to be the cutting critic and what you're criticizing is putting gay men into the victim role, don't whine about your own victimhood. It's incoherent. Be cuttingly critical and take the consequences.

Factoid about Ellis: "Feminist activist Gloria Steinem was among those opposed to the release of Ellis' book ['American Psycho'] because of its portrayal of violence toward women. Steinem is also the stepmother of Christian Bale, who played Bateman in the film. This coincidence is mentioned in Ellis' mock memoir Lunar Park."

More recently, Ellis got in trouble with the "gay elite" for tweeting that "openly and famously gay Matt Bomer who is publicly married to his partner seemed a weird idea for the role of the very straight BDSM freako Christian Grey in the movie adaptation of Fifty Shades of Grey." Ellis needs people to understand — and he's hurt that he was disinvited from the GLAAD awards —  that he "never said Gay Actors Can’t Play Straight Roles." Rather, he "thought this because of Matt’s easy openness with being gay... and with baggage that I believe would distract from the heavy sexual fantasy of that particular movie."

A key exchange in the first section of the book is Anastasia’s open questioning of Christian’s sexuality and his insulted denials—with Bomer in the role, it becomes a very META scene. Right now, in this moment, this particular casting would be a distraction—the public/private life of the actor mixed-up with playing a voracious het predator.

Interesting insight... from a gay man who wrote about the ultimate "het predator" in "American Psycho." 20 years ago, when Steinem registered her complaint, we didn't know that Ellis was gay. He sat back and let the feminists develop all our theories about the violence in the hearts of heterosexual men:

A designer serial killer, ["American Psycho"] Bateman knows from Tumi leather attache cases and wool-and-silk suits by Ermenegildo Zegna and wing tip shoes from Fratelli Rossetti....

But his true inner satisfaction comes when he has a woman in his clutches and can entertain her with a nail gun or a power drill or Mace, or can cut off her head or chop off her arms or bite off her breasts or dispatch a starving rat up her vagina.

Can we go very META on that?

"Should a five-year-old have a gun?/Why Ann doesn't like to take positions on policy questions/Gun deaths are declining, but what about spree killings?..."

"Chris Christie: Can a fat man win the presidency?/Howard Kurtz, Jason Collins, Tina Brown, and honesty/Benghazi: scandal or hype?" — those are the basic topics, as framed by the Bloggingheads enterprise, as I talk for 70+ minutes with Bob Wright.

Here's the whole thing:



I'll pull out some choice bits in a little while.

"The story of Jason Collins is not just a story about being gay."

"It’s a story about how, to some degree, each and every one of us is scared to be ourself at work. Each of us has something we are scared to own about ourselves because we are scared people won’t like us. We’re scared the top people in our field won’t respect or like us. We each hide something that we think is particularly bad. And we all think, 'Other people might not need to hide this, but for me, it’s different.'"

"There are so many different things put under the heading homophobic."

"But I think the personal privacy question of whom one feels comfortable taking a shower with deserves distinct treatment. Maybe tough guys should be tough and not care who sees them naked, but the notion that you don't want anyone looking at your body who is sexually attracted to that kind of body isn't about hating others. It's about personal privacy. Maybe it's lame. I note that the French word for shower is douche."

I'm quoting myself, commenting in a Facebook discussion that began when Jaltcoh (my son) quoted something that I blogged yesterday. Sorry for the excess of me in all that, but I felt the urge to go big with my little French joke.

"Kurtz had a string of high-profile mistakes on his record and that had become a source of embarrassment for The Daily Beast."

And "he commanded a hefty paycheck, despite turning out fewer scoops than in the past," write  Dylan Byers and Katie Glueck, citing anonymous sources at the Daily Beast and CNN.

“People here have been groaning about Howie for years,” a source at CNN said. “He’s like the Dick Morris of media critics — just shoddy and out of the game.”...

“It became clear to folks here that Howie had a lot of other commitments, and that that wasn’t working,” a Daily Beast source said....

Despite having his own show on CNN, Kurtz has dedicated much of his recent time to a new venture: a website called “The Daily Download,” where he regularly appears in video segments with the site’s founder and editor Lauren Ashburn. That preoccupation seems to have taken a toll on Kurtz’s attention span and focus....

”What would I go to this site for? As another place Howard Kurtz does his able thing on the week’s media news? Okay, but why does he need that? And why do we? He’s got the Daily Beast and CNN: plenty of platform,” Jay Rosen, the New York University journalism professor, wrote in an email to POLITICO. “Daily Download resists understanding.”

"Resists understanding" is a nice phrase.

Why are the figures on our national stage so lacking in greatness?

I wonder — as I scan the news this morning for topics and stop to think about Howard Kurtz and Jason Collins. Kurtz isn't a bold or great writer. He was dependent on Tina Brown, and he crossed a line, got a little edgy but didn't bother to sharpen up for the attempted edginess, and he got cut. Tina Brown runs her various operations. Is she at the level that should awe us?

Jason Collins was never a great basketball player. It's pathetic — a literal joke — that must we look at basketball to find men to look up to. (They are tall.) But this week, we're expected to admire this athlete we hadn't heard of before not for any athletic achievement but for the miniature feat of revealing — after years and years of hiding — that he's gay. Did he risk anything? His revelation comes at the end of his lackluster career, he's receiving plaudits from everyone on up to Barack Obama, and since his college days, he's had powerful political friends including Chelsea Clinton and (his erstwhile roommate) Joe Kennedy.

Is Barack Obama a great man? He's reached the top position. That takes some doing. He scrambled up over a number of people — were they great? — and he maintained his position, but is he great? We — some of us — like him. He seems like a good person — to some people, the ones who feel comfortable enough with him because at least he's not Bush, he's got a nice smile that reminds us of hope and Republicans seem mean, and it's not really his fault that there are so many problems.

And how about those Clintons and Kennedys and — as long as we're listing American dynasties — Bushes? There are no giants here. Why are the figures on our national stage so lacking in greatness?

It must be us. This must be our doing. Our preference.

IN THE COMMENTS: Jonas quotes George Carlin:

"Now, there's one thing you might have noticed I don't complain about: politicians. Everybody complains about politicians. Everybody says they suck. Well, where do people think these politicians come from? They don't fall out of the sky. They don't pass through a membrane from another reality. They come from American parents and American families, American homes, American schools, American churches, American businesses and American universities, and they are elected by American citizens. This is the best we can do folks. This is what we have to offer. It's what our system produces: Garbage in, garbage out. If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you're going to get selfish, ignorant leaders. Term limits ain't going to do any good; you're just going to end up with a brand new bunch of selfish, ignorant Americans. So, maybe, maybe, maybe, it's not the politicians who suck. Maybe something else sucks around here... like, the public. Yeah, the public sucks. There's a nice campaign slogan for somebody: 'The Public Sucks. Fuck Hope.'"

Henry and Balfegor both mention Steve Jobs as the last great man. When I wrote "Kurtz isn't a bold or great writer," I immediately thought Christopher Hitchens.

"Howard Kurtz leaves Daily Beast following Jason Collins column mistake."

Kurtz, whose area of expertise is media criticism, made a mistake in the media that drew some criticism and what looks like swift retaliation.

... Kurtz mistakenly accused Collins of leaving out “one detail” in Collins’s Sports Illustrated essay disclosing his homosexuality. The detail, Kurtz said, was that Collins “was engaged. To be married. To a woman.”...

Kurtz initially amended his Daily Beast story, saying Collins “downplayed” the engagement and “didn’t dwell on it.” But the Daily Beast retracted the story entirely after the mistake and subsequent amendments drew heavy criticism from several Web sites.

IN THE COMMENTS: Bill said:

But Collins did attempt to obscure his engagement. This is what he wrote: "When I was younger I dated women. I even got engaged."

That sure sounds like someone who got engaged young, not someone who cancelled a wedding at the age of about 30 after an eight year relationship. While his statement was technically true (everything in our past was when we were younger), it had to have been intentionally misleading, especially coming from a Stanford grad.

I agree, and you put that so much better than Kurtz did in his correction. This is an important basis for criticism of Collins, who's being hailed as a hero. Giving up on living a lie is a good idea, but it's not heroic. Maybe 30 years ago, it was heroic to be openly gay, but even back then, if you chose to keep your sexual orientation quiet, it was still wrong to delude another person to the extent that Collins apparently did. Collins graduated from Stanford in 2001, and it's just ridiculous that someone who lived in that environment at that time — he roomed with Joe Kennedy and was friends with Chelsea Clinton — would be seriously burdened with backward ideas about sexual orientation. I'll refrain from lambasting the man for his deceit and cowardice, but extolling him as a hero is absurd. I think that's what Kurtz might have wanted to say, but he botched his attack.

It would be interesting to know which powerful Democrats, if any, interacted with Tina Brown over the downfall of Howard Kurtz.

"It's very emotional for me as a woman to have invested 8 years in my dream..."

"... to have a husband, soul mate, and best friend in him. So this is all hard to understand."

"Imagine you're in the oven, baking."

"Some of us know and accept our sexuality right away and some need more time to cook. I should know — I baked for 33 years."

Just catching up on the metaphors in the Jason Collins "coming out" piece in Sports Illustrated that everyone was talking about yesterday. I found this story boring, but somehow the comments on my post on the subject heated up — like you were in the oven, baking — and they're up to 788 comments. What's going on in there? In my book, a 34-year-old gay guy that has gone to a lot of trouble to stay in the closet — or the oven — in this day and age is hardly a courageous hero. Yes, he's in a major American team sport, but he's at the very end of his career, and who'd heard of him before? I see nothing but a career boost for this guy. What is the big deal? Someone left the cake in the oven for 33 years, and I don't think that I can take it, 'cause it took so long to bake it, and you were about to retire from basketball anyway, oh noooooo! O-oh nooooooo!



That cake metaphor came at the end of a paragraph that began:

The first relative I came out to was my aunt Teri, a superior court judge in San Francisco. Her reaction surprised me. "I've known you were gay for years," she said. From that moment on I was comfortable in my own skin. In her presence I ignored my censor button for the first time. She gave me support. The relief I felt was a sweet release. 

Sweet release with your aunt? Having ignored your censor button — for the first time? really? — you might want to find your editor button. I love that the aunt was all "I've known you were gay for years." The first person he came out to found his announcement boring. I'm with Aunt Teri. It's boring. This cake was baked long ago. I recall the yellow polyester shorts/Foaming like a wave/On the ground around your knees/The birds like tender babies in your hands/And the old men playing checkers, by the trees....

"I didn’t set out to be the first openly gay athlete playing in a major American team sport."

"But since I am, I’m happy to start the conversation."

Jason Collins has strong political connections. Bill Clinton said: “I have known Jason Collins since he was Chelsea’s classmate and friend at Stanford."

And Rep. Joe Kennedy (D-Massachusetts) was Collins's roommate at Stanford: "For as long as I’ve known Jason Collins he has been defined by three things: his passion for the sport he loves, his unwavering integrity, and the biggest heart you will ever find. Without question or hesitation, he gives everything he’s got to those of us lucky enough to be in his life. I’m proud to stand with him today and proud to call him a friend."

Collins has been in the NBA for 12 years and will be a free agent at the end of the season. Does he face abuse within sports? He says he's led a "double life has kept me from getting close to any of my teammates." There's always politics. The man has some powerful friends there.