Finally, one finds awards that are not televised: the Sissies.
The June 27 Advocate, the glossy national gay and lesbian weekly, announces its fifth annual jab at “bigots, bullies and homophobes,” taking aim at an eclectic crew including Madonna, Newt Gingrich, Jerry Seinfeld, the Northwest Herald and, one must admit, our colleague and chum Ann Landers!
“There must be a certain cachet to making our dishonor roll; otherwise, how do you explain the swelling ranks of folks who use their powerful offices to make life difficult–if not downright impossible–for gays and lesbians the world over. And let us not forget the poseurs and turncoats whose words du jour are `lip service’; with friends like those, well you know the rest.”
I guess.
Anyway, the Sissy of the Year is Madonna, having committed the sin of telling a British magazine that she planned to tone down her image and adding, “I have good friends who happen to be lesbians and the public assumes I’m sleeping with them . . . I’m not a lesbian. I love men.”
The weekly finds this hypocritical, verging on heinous deceit, noting that this news might surprise an Ingrid Casares, “the Formerly Big M’s gal pal-plus, who of course must not be a lesbian either. Wow. Sure had us fooled.”
Seinfeld committed the indiscretion of kissing co-star Michael Richards on one episode and then telling a newspaper interviewer it “wasn’t that bad. It was like kissing a dog, you know.” With magnanimity, the Advocate informs that, “It was Richards who was kissing the dog.”
But Seinfeld’s crime seems grand larceny compared with Landers’ jaywalking. She’s ridiculed for telling an Air Force wife who bemoaned her “tough life” that, “It is apparent that the Armed Services is not the place for sissies.”
The Herald is bashed for one of the century’s less subtle headlines, changing the name of the Enola Gay, which dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, to the Enola Homosexual.
Give ’em a break. None of the above are a match for a Tacoma, Wash., lesbian and her two gay roommates who tearfully decried the destruction by homophobic vandals of the church they were renting. After much public sympathy was inspired, the Advocate notes, it was disclosed they had staged the attack to collect $50,000 in phony insurance claims.
“Hey, kids, aren’t there enough talented professional bashers out there without a few bumbling sissy amateurs like you getting into the act?” the Advocate asks.
Quickly: Revisionist piece of the week is in June 26 Newsweek where Secretary of State Warren Christopher, overseer of a catch-as-catch-can, weak-kneed foreign policy and heretofore viewed as a visionless bumpkin, is now transformed into a productive “oasis of calm” who personifies,”The Virtues of Being a Grown-Up in Washington,” as the story is headlined. . . .) Huh? . . . June 26 Time has a typically fine Robert Hughes essay on the little-chronicled reaffirmation of Europe’s artistic energy after World War II and the movement of the art world’s center to New York from Paris. It was, indeed, a revival against hefty odds after the Nazis in Germany and Central Europe, the Fascists in Italy, and Stalin in the Soviet Union “had wiped entire countries off the map of modernist culture” . . . July-August American Enterprise, from the decidedly pro-business American Enterprise Institute, has a handy chart on “Business Welfare,” noting the more than 125 federal programs that subsidize private businesses ($5, 1150 17th St., N.W., Washington,D.C., 20036). . . .June San Francisco Focus profiles Laura Tyson, head of President Clinton’s National Economic Council and catches her, alone, on an Amtrak train to Philadelphia: “Just another working woman with a nasty cold and a cellular phone. Except that her phone just happens to be programmed to speed-dial the White House”. . . .The Winter-Spring Urban Institute research report raises doubts about the congressional rush to get welfare recipients into jobs, concluding that tax rates, child care and transportation costs, and loss of various benefits, can easily leave former welfare recipients with less money, especially if the job pays somewhere around the minimum wage (available via 2100 M St., N.W., Washington, D.C., 20037).
