Warren Allen Smith takes his regular
meander Stateside.
Although as a gossip
columnist I loved reading Walter Winchell
when young and Truman Capote when
older, neither was a dues-paying Humanist.
Nor are the two gay gossipers that I
currently enjoy, Michael Musto and
Dan Savage.
Musto is a humanities
humanist, not a dues-paying Humanist. Savage
is a non-closeted atheist, not a dues-paying
Atheist.
Michael Musto
Masterful with words,
Musto gets your attention in his column’s
first sentence, then concludes with a circle
ending that’s a toot. Flamboyant? Yes,
particularly if cameras are rolling.
Profound? Yes, when you read his work over a
period of time. Outwardly gay? Was Elizabeth
II Time’s 1952 Man of the Year?
Philosopedia lists Musto as author
of three works and innumerable columns and
articles. To me in 2001, he wrote:
I was born and raised
a Roman Catholic and went to catechism
every Wednesday, though the only church
I’ve been to in ages is the Limelight.
Deep down I don’t think we’re important
enough to have an afterlife, though
every time I’m faced with my own
mortality I suddenly feel otherwise.
Limelight was a
nightclub, a deconsecrated New York City
Episcopalian church on 6th Avenue and 20th
Street, noted (before it was closed down)
for trannies, drugged-up club kids and their
shepherd, Michael Alig, who is in
prison for the 1996 murder of the venue’s
resident dope dealer.
Asked by a journalist
what was the craziest thing he’d ever seen
in a nightclub, Musto responded with his
typical brashness, “There was this performer
named Lady Hennessy Brown who
performed at Susanne Bartsch’s
parties in the nineties. Her talent involved
squirting breast milk on the audience on
cue. She didn’t need any warm-up or
anything. I’d hold out my Kahlua and make a
White Russian out of it.”
As for growing up in
Bensonhurst, a section of Brooklyn,
“Everything was covered in plastic,
including my father. We didn’t only have bad
taste: we had no taste.”
His one-liners include, “Moulin
Rouge is as subtle as Khmer Rouge, but
it saved viewers a lot of drug money.” As
for who should be the next president: “Helen
Mirren. No, wait, that’s the Oscars.” If
you’ve never seen or heard Musto, click this
2008 video:
If there
were such things as angels . . .
Dan Savage’s sex
advice column, “Savage Love”, first appeared
in 1991 and is regularly found in Village
Voice, The Stranger and
alternative weeklies. Individuals describe
their problems, and Savage responds with
rational advice such as how he advised a gay
man who worried that, when he was having sex
with a man, he wondered if he was “being
watched [. . .] by God or angels in the
room.”
Savage: “Let me walk you
through this: If there were such things as
angels – which there are not – and if there
were such a thing as God – which there is
not – God and his heavenly host would have
more important things to do than stand at
the foot of your bed and watch you get
fucked in the ass.”
In 1998, he and husband
Terry Miller, a stay-at-home dad,
adopted Daryl Jude “DJ” Pierce. They
travelled to Canada in 2005 in order to be
married in Vancouver. To publicise the fact
that his home state of Washington did not
legally recognise gay marriage but allowed
gays to adopt, he empathised with Amy
Jenniges, his coworker, who was denied a
licence to marry her girlfriend Sonia.
So he and Amy applied for
a licence: “We emphasised to the clerk and
her manager that Amy and I don’t live
together, we don’t love each other, we don’t
plan to have kids together, and we’re going
to go on living and sleeping with our
same-sex partners after we get married. So
could we still get a marriage license?”
According to Savage, the Canadian
licence-department manager replied, “Sure.
If you’ve got $54, you can have a marriage
licence.”
Dan Savage
Savage, whose ancestry is
Irish speaks authoritatively about:
raising children;
women’s medical problems;
outing – he favoured
outing antigay activist Tyler Whitney
but advised a reader who asked about outing
a certain celebrity, “I advised him against
it because, as I wrote to him privately,
outing is brutal and it should be reserved
for brutes”;
medical
marijuana – he favours decriminalising small
amounts of pot;
Iraq – at first favoured
a war against Islamo-fascism, then found
that President George W Bush was
unable to sway the UN and NATO allies, and
for some time has insisted that we should
immediately withdraw our troops.
Also, he:
opposes proscribing sex
toys;
fought Pennsylvania
Senator Rick Santorum, who compared
homosexual sex to bestiality and incest,
leading to Savage’s campaign for his readers
to define “the frothy mixture of lube and
faecal matter that is sometimes a by-product
of anal sex” as santorum;
asked his readers to
define saddlebacking as “the
phenomenon of Christian teens engaging in
unprotected anal sex in order to preserve
their virginities”.
Read his latest column
here
and hear him in the video below:
He also has an article
critical of President Obama in a
recent
Advocate.
Bald queens,
missing bodies and
harem intrigue
In Asia, ancient rulers
listened to and decided cases involving
gossip, petty intrigue and quarrelling.
Voudon and voodoo priests similarly then and
now act as judges between fighting
gossipers. Ganymede was one of
Zeus’s lovers, so gossip even in
mythology was an educational tool. Plutarch
wrote that Androcles used false
witnesses who accused Alcibiades of
knocking the penises off statues.
YouTube unfortunately
fails to include videos of gossiping
prehistoric humans, but Ancient Egyptians
talked about a bald queen, royals who had
affairs, missing bodies, homosexuality,
harem intrigue and more. Or
so claims
the curator of the Rosicrucian Egyptian
Museum in San Jose, California, which is
financed by tax-deductible funds from those
attracted by the occult and mysticism.
Of
Shakespeare, Sybarites and St Paul
Shakespeare, as
could be expected, was the first who used
the infinitive to gossip, from the
Old English godsibb, a combination of
god and sibb, the term for
godparents in the 16th century. Originally,
it referred to one who likes idle talk and
is a tattler. “The words of a gossip”,
according to Proverbs 18:8, “are like
choice morsels: they go down to a man’s
innermost parts.”
Muslims allegedly
consider backbiting equivalent to eating the
flesh of one’s dead brother and do not
gossip about believers or nonbelievers
(possibly excepting satanic Americans).
Paul’s Epistle to the Romans (1:28–32)
thoughtfully lists all but one of the
following about how to sin by gossiping:
disbelieving in God, inventing evil things,
whispering about covenant breakers, being
disobedient to parents and whipping your
tied-up companion in a sling while laughing
about his impotence.
Sybarites,
particularly academic types who have never
been to ancient Sybaris or modern Sibari,
are known for describing certain older men
as being too proud to suck, too old to
futter. They also gossip about
pleasure-seeking girls who are sex fiends
and about guys whose preferences are A/C or
D/C, information that often ends up in court
cases enjoyed by members of juries chosen to
be uninterested in judging what they hear
and see, “so help me God”.
