Letters to the Editor
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count
Two baskets. One for readers who are pleased with the return of Camille. One for those expressing, um, anything from vague distaste to wrenching dry heaves.
Compare relative weight of baskets.
Respond to decreasingly loyal and barely patient readers who are really getting disgusted with the drivel around here.
Whoever said that Salon seemed to be in danger of listing Slate-ward was not kidding. Let's let them have her and Hitchens too. (He was interesting back in the day, too. But we must move with the times and not become repulsive old raving narcissists just because we were sort of clever once, should we?) (No, we should not.)
And yeah, what's with the reticence re Obama? Is it that frightening to be sincerely and even publicly impressed by a man who is for once not an amoral, moronic mutant? I mean, there's that dread of being taken in, i know...
Salon is becoming nasty. Stupid nasty, which is the one of the nastiest nasties. And anyone who thinks that Rush is cute and wants to write about it may be allowed to publish and live and so on, but needs to be sent away from Salon straightaway: "shoo, shoo, silly ", like that, see?
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Gay happy camper
JesseK may be picking quotes, but what has been more telling to me about paglia's homophobia is the more general tone she adopts when criticizing men she doesn't like. She typically derides them as 'effeminate,' 'unmanly,' etc. while the guys she likes are always ballsy, tough guys. It's so thinly veiled it's not even code: she doesn't like sissys.
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"These verbal tics and clichés undermine the intellectual credibility of conservative critique."
That chestnut was about - are you ready? - Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity.
Intellectual credibility, indeed.
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Gays have arrived?
As for Matthew Shepard, what that quote really meant was that gays and lesbians had asumed that we had "arrived" — that somehow in the 90s homophobia was evaporating beacuse we had gay characters on TV and in IKEA ads.
Isn't that entire position just a charicature? How many gay people really think homophobia has evaporated? (Or how many straight people, for that matter?)
That doesn't even test the smell test - it is a straw man argument. "We still have a long way to go." No shit. Did anyone ever think otherwise? A huge portion of the gay community thinks that homophobia is dead because of Will and Grace? For real? I don't buy it.
What she's saying is that real equality comes when gays and lesbians are accepted on our terms, for who we are, not for trying to out-suburban the suburbanites.
What about gays and lesbians who *want* to be suburbanites? Are they lesser gays? Traitors to the cause?
The notion that there is one true gay culture is absurd. Who is the prototype gay man? The irony in your quote is delicious. Accept us for who we are - and by who *we* are I mean who I think we all should be! What our "our terms"? I think mean "MY terms."
Unless all gay people are exactly alike, in which case you are quite correct.
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Enough already!
Must you waste yet more bandwidth on this blithering, narcissistic twit? Despite her frequent identification with Madonna, she's more the intellectual equivalent of Emerson, Lake & Palmer: shallow, pompous, self-infatuated, overblown, and not even entertaining on a camp level.
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JesseK: You're absolutely right.
With friends like Camille Paglia, the LGBT community doesn't need enemies.
I always cringe at Paglia's cluelessness concerning gay men in particular. Here's a small piece of her defense of Mark Foley from a Salon interview with her last October:
It was gargantuan overkill, and I felt the Democrats were shooting themselves in the foot. I was especially repulsed by the manipulative use of a gay issue for political purposes by my own party. I think it was not only poor judgment but positively evil.
Yes, folks, the serial sexual harassment of teenage boys by a powerful fifty-something man is a "gay issue" and denouncing said harassment is "positively evil". Now, one of two things is happening in this instance: either she really believes this insult to gay men or she's just saying whatever pops into her head in order to be controversial. In the end, who cares which is true? Serial sexual harassment of teens is not a legitimate expression of gay male love anywhere outside of NAMBLA or, it seems, Camille Paglia's mind.
Besides her idea of what a gay man is or does, how about her political views? In the above instance, she believes that Democrats "were shooting themselves in the foot" by denouncing Foley. Earth to Paglia: the Democrats won that election and for the first time in six years the LGBT community doesn't have to waste precious resources to stop anti-family Republicans from enshrining hatred in the Constitution.
And this is one example from one interview! I consider Paglia's inclusion in Salon to be a slap in the face to all its LGBT readers. The fact that she herself is queer not only does not excuse her opinions, it renders them all the more mind-boggling and offensive.
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A Meditation
1) Read all the letters.
2) Click on Only Editors' Choices.
3) Ponder....
4) Try to resist the obvious conclusion, i.e., that when defending its own, Salon is only slightly more Fair and Balanced than Fox News.
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Not that it would make any difference
I had been on the fence as to whether to subscribe to Salom when Glenn Greenwald signed on, but seeing that this person was brought back within the week of Glenn's signing on, I decided not to.
I have reasons. First and formost, Ann Althouse has taken over the position of saying something -- anything -- that is assured of setting people off on opposing sides. If CP wants to regain that position, I would suggest that she try posting on Althouse's blog.
If CP wants to be relevant to our current culture, she will have to look outside of what she sees on teevee and in the cinema. People are far more connected now -- to state the obvious. CP seems to have stayed within herself and NOT experienced our cultural explotion. Her 1995 world has changed. Remember 9/11 CP? Despote the fact that the ones who run vids of that day constantly on their blogs, you, CP, seem to have forgotten. Everything changed after 9/11. That means everything.