Carried, Seize, Outreach

Media promotions aren't always trivial, and on the basis of the fact that she is touting yet another celebrity memoir, the fancy has seized me to pour out some of my anguish in reserved fashion to Mariel Hemingway, a contemporary, eclipsed in the fog of losing my poverty stricken battle in a majority black city. Then the entertainment articles triggered my envious memories of Mariel's beauty, not plastique in the least. Memory: watching Personal Best waiting for something subversive and passionate and never getting a graphic scene. Perhaps it was edited for television, but it was this film which drew my curiosity to homoeroticism, around the same year that Henry James's super-attenuation came to my attention, became a life long fascination, until the nursing aide and her obscene invitation to bring me "in the life." In the life-- that is code, cliched by now, in LBGT speak for the quest for pleasure, but let me not go tearing up the cushions on the divan too deeply just yet. Queer theory draws prurient attention like carrion draws maggots, and my trenchant retraction of equal treatment for sexual orientation is invariably the comfort food of liberal mockery-- but also, I am not satisfied with my plank. I'm not an evangelical, as such, and why should I care what gays do?

I don't, really, and don't focus much on the physical intimacy between my ex-friends. Jimmi is fat and pallid and Erik is a fleshed out version of Dr. Seuss in the morgue. Excellent aversion therapy, let alone me and my lovers, but I send Mariel's publicist a pity-the-cripple email. I know not to expect response and assume I would not receive one, but what if I did? She'd probably post, much as Niall Ferguson did, "I am sorry for your situation," and offer me the usual self-help pep talk, but why the urge to penetrate at all?

Because she and I are the same age, and why not share the misery with a celebrity I came up with, whose impact was more subtle than Jodi Foster's? Still, these compulsions of sentiment annoy me. She's just an actress, made famous in a particular point and time, in a particular way, with an interesting pedigree to an American writer who's oeuvre is basically full of shit. Ernest is a god damn con artist, a melodramatic spin doctor, over the top even in his Fascist Spanish Civil War era. Huff. I'm over a mild panic attack, hoorah.