The 17th Annual Kelly McGillis Classic International Women’s/Girls’ Flag Football Championship begins this weekend in Key West, Florida. You can read more by visiting the tournament’s official website, which informs us that not only does McGillis — whose guest arc on The L Word begins later this month — enjoy playing football herself, but one of the teams in this year’s competition is called the Diesel Daisies.
I was going to suggest that McGillis Classic scheduling might be to blame for the Spice Girls cutting their reunion tour short (you know how Mel C. is about her sports), but it turns out they’re not wrapping things up until February 26th.
In her review of David Rieff’s Swimming in a Sea of Death, a memoir of his mother Susan Sontag’s battle with cancer, Katie Roiphe quotes Rieff as writing that Sontag was “humiliated posthumously” by lover Annie Leibovitz’s “carnival images of celebrity death.” The personal photographs first caused a stir upon their publication in the Leibovitz collection A Photographer’s Life: 1990-2005 in 2006. Promotion for the book marked the first time Leibovitz spoke publicly about her lengthy relationship with Sontag.
Later this year, Rieff will oversee the publication of journals and notebooks his mother kept between 1947 and 1964. Previously published excerpts contain Sontag’s reflections on lesbian relationships with Harriet Sohmers and Maria Irene Fornes and comments like, “My desire to write is connected with my homosexuality. I need the identity as a weapon, to match the weapon that society has against me. It doesn’t justify my homosexuality. But it would give me — I feel — a license.” Sontag also wrote: “Being queer makes me feel more vulnerable.”
Other news and suggested reading:
Yesterday an appeals court ruled that Dr. Sneha Anne Philip died at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Philip’s disappearance was the subject of a 2006 New York magazine article that revealed a police probe into her personal life turned up stories of hidden alcohol abuse and bisexual affairs, which her family denied.
JFLAG, the Jamaica Forum for Lesbians All-Sexuals and Gays, has made a plea for government action in the wake of a mob attack on gay men in Mandeville. Their statement reads in part, “We are cultivating an uncivil society which seems to be itching for a reason to resort to mob violence as a redress for real or perceived grievances. When those with whom we entrust the responsibility of leadership fail to act decisively, they betray all Jamaicans.”
Where are gays in space? And Jodie Foster in Contact doesn’t count. We’re not talking about gays in front of bluescreens.
Newsday journalist Saul Friedman has written a nice piece about SAGE-LI, a new Long Island organization devoted to helping elderly GLBT individuals.
Cranky Lesbian is a disgruntled homosexual with too much time on her hands. Click for film reviews or to follow on Instagram.