Cranky Lesbian

Look what the homosexuals have done to me!

Tag: Books Page 1 of 2

A Heritage of Infamy: Pulp Art and Movie Posters

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On October 14, 2022

In Crass Consumerism

A sapphically-oriented guest bedroom nook.

It’s been a hectic week here, with my wife wrapping up a grant as I’ve prepared for company. When your homophobic in-laws are coming to inspect your new-ish digs for the first time, you want to pull out all the stops, which in my case meant framing some old gay pulp fiction paperback art for their viewing displeasure. Guest bedroom window nooks are now home to Daughters of Sappho (“A Heritage of Infamy!”) and Lesbian Queen (“Crowned campus queen, she chose to rule a small, hot female realm of off-beat lust”).

There are male-centric prints (like Gay Cruise) in the room currently serving as our gym, and of course men were the centerpieces of the pulp art in my previous home, where Hot Pants Homo was framed on the refrigerator alongside a dramatic photo of Jane Bowles. The Hot Pants Homo tagline is a doozy: “Women lusted after this handsome, virile jazzman… It took him years of agony to realize he wanted a man.” Wherever we live, the guest bathroom’s the same, featuring a large Gay Traders, a soapy visual feast where the naked women seem like more of a group-shower afterthought. “The trouble with swap is where to stop!” it warns. Who knows what the plumber thinks we’re up to.

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A List of Things Susan Lucci Finds Glamorous

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On March 29, 2022

In Books, Susan Lucci

Last month, we embarked on what I called a beautiful literary journey through the life of Susan Lucci. Having recently written about several of her made-for-TV movies (with more reviews still to come)—and having been an All My Children viewer during the days of Erica Kane’s daughter Bianca’s overwrought coming-out—I was curious about her 2011 memoir, All My Life.

It’s a guarded autobiography, padded by flowery, repetitious gushing (about everyone from Regis Philbin and Marvin Hamlisch to private drivers and her family’s treasured nanny) that holds readers at arm’s length. She references this in the first chapter of the book, when discussing her roots:

I believe in mystery. I am drawn to it and am very comfortable being surrounded by it. Maybe that is part of why I chose to keep an air of mystery over my own life as I stepped into the limelight years later. Maybe.

susan lucci, all my life: A memoir

At times her relentless cheerfulness, humility and gratitude lend the volume a MadLibs quality. The word “wonderful” appears at least 35 times; “beautiful” 25. Here is a full accounting of things she calls “gorgeous”:

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Susan Lucci vs. Snooki

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On February 27, 2022

In Susan Lucci

A heartbreaking work of staggering, uh, something.

You’d never know it from the trashy books I tend to write about here (apologies to Rielle Hunter, Loni Anderson, and whoever was responsible for Hedy Lamarr’s Ecstasy and Me), but my personal library is mostly full of works by serious authors. Alas, we aren’t here today to discuss Ivy Compton-Burnett, our favorite Graham Greene novels (The End of the Affair), or whether Pevear and Volokhonsky translations are overrated. We’re here to begin a beautiful literary journey through the life of Susan Lucci.

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A Terribly Important Quote from Edie: An American Girl

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On August 31, 2014

In Books

As a companion piece of sorts to “A Touching Tale of Truman Capote’s Hatred of Gore Vidal,” I submit without comment my favorite quote from another George Plimpton oral history:

“I can tell you, I’m nearly the last person in the world who
would ever consider doing a sex scene for a movie in a rubber raft in the middle of an indoor swimming pool at the health club.  But that’s the way we wound up with it.”

Richie Berlin in Edie: An American Girl, by Jean Stein and George Plimpton

Wait, I lied, I do have a comment: If you read their autobiographies, a lot of DeMille actresses shared similar stories. 

Ivy Compton-Burnett’s Love for Margaret Jourdain

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On August 27, 2014

In BFFs

You can’t understand Ivy Compton-Burnett without understanding her love for her partner, Margaret Jourdain.

“Anyone who picks up a Compton-Burnett finds it very hard not to put it down.”

Ivy Compton-Burnett to Elizabeth Sprigge

Compton-Burnett, capable of making any reader’s brain ache in 100 words or less, died on this day in 1969. Legendarily dour, and one of my favorite writers, she was as uncompromising in her work as in her personal life. She knew her characters so well—their quandaries, quarrels, and especially their conversations—that she saw no point in slowing down to explain them to the rest of us.

She once told Jourdain, “I do not see why exposition and description are a necessary part of a novel.” This explains why, in some strange way, you don’t read Compton-Burnett’s novels so much as they happen to you. It’s a bit like being thrown into a bottomless lake and left to fend for yourself in the dark. Foreign, potentially sinister objects might brush against your skin, while, overhead, emotionally crippled people say devastating things to each other. (Some of you might call that ‘the holidays.’)

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Inside Rielle Hunter’s Illicit Love Affair with Salad

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On August 25, 2014

In Books

Ahem: “John Edwards, Salad, and Me.”

If you were unfortunate enough to read Rielle Hunter’s What Really Happened: John Edwards, Our Daughter, and Me (I didn’t have much choice; some things in life are beyond our control), the first thing you probably noticed is that she’s an absolute idiot. The second is that she loves salad.

With each new chapter of this slender — but not slender enough — volume, it seems she’s traveling to yet another dreary hotel for an assignation with Edwards. (She calls him “Johnny” almost as relentlessly as she eats salad, for “Johnny” is what’s on his birth certificate and thus most representative of his true self. If you search the Kindle edition of her book for “Johnny,” the device will pant and wheeze before the results exceed 500 and it stops counting.) He is so busy with campaign commitments and marital spats that a bored Hunter has no choice but to console herself with salad. Lots of salad.

Let’s stroll with her down a lettuce-strewn memory lane, shall we, and revisit these tender scenes from her past.

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A Touching Tale of Truman Capote’s Hatred of Gore Vidal

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On August 22, 2014

In Books

I was on the set one morning when a chandelier fell and crashed a foot away from Truman. He chuckled. He said, “I guess Gore Vidal is in the wings!”

george christy on murder by death

Whatever your opinion of Truman Capote, you have to admit there was something inspiring about his passionate (and famously mutual) hatred of Gore Vidal. That is partly because, no matter your opinion of Gore Vidal, you have to admit that he was one of the premier trolls of the pre-Internet age. He out-Weeved Weev just by waking up each day.

If you want to read about the myriad ways in which Capote and Vidal were assholes, or the terrible things they said about each other, you could probably spend a few hours devouring articles with titles like “Gore Vidal, No Greater a Hater Than He” and “Gore Vidal’s Bitter Feuds” and each might contain a few insults that are new to you.

One of my own favorite anecdotes never seems to make the cut, and so I’m reproducing it here as a public service. Like the George Christy tale above, it’s recounted in George Plimpton’s engrossing Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career, and it’s beautiful.

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Hi, It’s Me, Blog

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On August 21, 2014

In Your Webmaster

[This was not originally posted on Cranky Lesbian, it was posted elsewhere in 2014 and later migrated here.]

How do you open a blog? There’s no instantly recognizable HBO intro for blogs, something that signals quality (or, in the case of True Blood, the pretense of quality). That’s just as well, because you should never expect to find quality here.

Certain things, though, you know how to open. There’s that Motown signature drum roll and Woody Allen film credits in Windsor Light Condensed typeface against a black background. There are famous first lines in literary history that readers the world over can recite by heart. People who’ve never read A Tale of Two Cities can tell you its first 12 words.

My own favorite book opening comes from the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation of Notes from Underground: “I am a sick man … I am a wicked man. An unattractive man. I think my liver hurts.” Does it get any better than thinking your liver hurts?!

But I’ve never heard of a blog opening with a line that instantly captures anyone’s attention or is quoted years later, so let’s forget everything I wrote preceding this and pretend this blog began with something a bit more memorable. Let’s pretend it opened with the first line from the first chapter of Jackie Collins’ Hollywood Wives.

Elaine Conti awoke in her luxurious bed in her luxurious Beverly Hills mansion, pressed a button to open the electrically controlled drapes, and was confronted by the sight of a young man clad in a white T-shirt and dirty jeans pissing a perfect arc into her mosaic-tiled swimming pool.

jackie collins, hollywood wives

There. Doesn’t that make you want to keep reading? Aren’t you thinking to yourself, “Who is that young man in a white t-shirt and dirty jeans who is urinating — no, not just urinating, but flawlessly urinating — into a rich woman’s Beverly Hills mosaic-tiled swimming pool?”

I’ll give you the answer now, because if I were you I wouldn’t want to have to wait to learn something so monumentally important: He’s a sexy pool boy. Of course he’s a sexy pool boy.

Kansas Woman Can’t Stop Thinking About The Joy of Gay Sex

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On February 20, 2009

In Bad Decisions

Who sits around and obsesses about The Lesbian Kama Sutra being on local library shelves? (Pretend that was said with an Austin Powers-esque “Who throws a shoe? Honestly!” tone of incredulity.) Concerned Topeka resident Kim Borchers, that’s who. And in addition to her lurid fascination with flexible naked women having all kinds of bendy sex with each other, Borchers objected to her local library keeping The Joy of Sex, The Joy of Gay Sex (if gay means happy, isn’t all gay sex joyful?), and a book about quickies where anyone could find them. Because sex is dirty, you see, and needs to be hidden.

Borchers made the availability of the books enough of an issue that the Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library’s board of trustees voted last night on whether to restrict minors’ access to them; it ruled 5-3 in favor of censorship. (If you read more at The Topeka Capital-Journal, you’ll note that the three dissenting votes were cast by women; three of the five ‘yes’ votes were cast by men.) The controversial decision caused one of the ‘no’ voters, Michele Henry, to get teary-eyed and announce, “I can hardly sit here. I am sickened to be a part of something like this.”*

Does anyone else think this would make a great Lifetime Original Movie for John Waters to direct? Valerie Bertinelli could play Michele Henry, and the role of Kim Borchers has Mink Stole written all over it.

*I guess that means Henry’s unaware of the national epidemic of kids going to check out Encyclopedia Brown books and stumbling across guides to spicing up your gay sex life instead. It happened to my cousin a few years ago and he still hasn’t recovered.

More on Sontag’s Diaries

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On November 16, 2008

In Uncategorized

The first volume of Susan Sontag’s diaries (edited by her son, David Rieff) will be published in the U.S. by Farrar, Straus and Giroux next month. In England they’ll have to wait until January, but today’s Independent quotes a couple of passages dealing with Sontag’s sexuality, including this one that she wrote at the age of 15: “I am very young, and perhaps the most disturbing aspects of my ambitions will be outgrown … so now I feel I have lesbian tendencies (how reluctantly I write this).”

She sounded less reluctant a year later, when she wrote about having sex with another woman, but if the Times excerpts are any indication, Sontag continued to have a complicated relationship with her sexuality for many years to come. In December of 1959, at the age of 26, she wrote:

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.

I am just becoming aware of how guilty I feel being queer. With H., I thought it didn’t bother me, but I was lying to myself. I let other people (e.g. Annette [Michelson, film scholar]) believe that it was H. who was my vice, and that apart from her I wouldn’t be queer or at least not mainly so.

. . .

Being queer makes me feel more vulnerable.

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