Okay, I’m not going to be the only one to diss you, but I want to put some facts up front. I, too, am an artist. I’m good. But I work a barely-paying job that I detest in a field not related to my goals. I am struggling to make it in a big city that provides inspiration and acceptance for artists, but is also highly expensive. I have some good breaks. Friends who have made things easier for me, and given me an extraordinary deal on living arrangements. Encounters with people who have opened up new doors to me. I expect my situation to improve and to do well here. So while I'm a bit emotionally strained over conditions in my life, I can beyond that.

I cannot tell you how much I hate your letter and your whiny, complacent attitude. Aww, poor baby who has his own studio, makes enough to cover the expense of it, produces television shows and from his twenties was regularly placing articles and selling scripts.

Please take a reality check. Recognize your extreme luck. Recognize that you probably do have confidence in yourself as an artist, as you’ve constantly sold your writing and your visual art, and have had the confidence to show your work to “smart people, the people I’d hoped would like it, and they like it for the right reasons.”

I don’t begrudge you your success. I heavily begrudge you your selfish “Enough is not enough, I want more even though I’ve been visited with extreme good fortune” appeal. Read a bio of Van Gough sometime. Or Dostoevsky. You’re doing pretty well, and I mean that as much from an artistic standpoint as one of finanical security and career success. It sounds like you have time to devote to your art. In fact, it sounds like you make enough that you could chuck the television career and still have enough savings to keep you going.

I’ve resolved not to sling profanity at you for your unreasonable demands and silly angst. Or to insult your intelligence, maturity, or artistic sensibility for being so spoiled and ungrateful. I’m doing this to be nice.

I'm gay, but I'm not particularly intersested in sports. In fact, I have kind of a gripe with the rush to join softball teams as well as the constant use of baseball caps as fashion accessories, and "sporty" clothes to give one the healthy, masculine edge in the clubs. Because it always strikes me as a costume. It strikes me as forced as when all the young men draped scarves around their necks and sang the entire score to Mame around a piano in the pre-Stonewall days. In other words, it strikes me as conformity. So I was prepared to dislike this article.

That's not what this article is about. It's about a genuine appreciation for sport, and an awareness of the complexity of gay identity (not all sterotypes are lies, but people are not stereotypes). It struck me as honest, and so it was interesting. I've never even looked at Outsports, I'm interested in sports. I will now, to experience another perspective. Thanks.

they don't become the television host eqivalent of Metallica.

There seems to be a lot of speaking negatively about "the ghetto" here. I'm not sure there is literally such a thing as a gay ghetto, because with the exception of bars themselves (and not always in these cases either, not where I live) there really are no "gay only" or "gay men only" locations. Most such ghettoes are generally out-of-the-mainstream, artsy, or strictly urban spaces that cater to a variety of people who don't wish to live the suburban life.

And let me say: I love them. I love that something like a ghetto exists, and I don't consider it limiting. Maybe that's because so many gays do choose to live elsewhere (even in those suburbs where they play out their variations on Ozzie and Harriet), and so no one is forced into the identical way of life. But the size of the gay population is small. If we really were sprinkled out throughout the rest of the community with no place to band together or find each other or have an night on the town together, how much harder it would be to meet others. How much harder to make contact with people who have experience and desires similar to yours. No, I can't see the ghetto as a restrictive place, even as a conceptual space. Christopher Street was a "ghetto" publication. It brought to prominence important writers who were not finding an audience otherwise. I think that proverbial "gay grocery store" might do a similar thing in its field.

My supporting the so-called ghetto doesn't mean I think gay men and women should be forced to live in such a place, or that any stereotype of either group should provide the pattern from anyone's life. But I think for many practical, as well as idealistic, reasons, it has it's place in our society.