We don’t even have pronouns for this.

That’s what accounts for the clumsy grammar of the statement parent Kori Doty issued about Doty’s newborn baby, Searyl Atli Doty. For that matter, it also accounts for the clumsy grammar of the sentence you just read.

Anyway, Kori Doty’s statement read: “It’s up to Searyl to decide how they identify, when they are old enough to develop their own gender identity. I am not going to foreclose that choice based on an arbitrary assignment of gender at birth based on an inspection of their genitals.”

As noted, the English language is not ready for this. For all its splendors, English offers no gender-neutral singular pronoun except “it.” Who wants to be an “it?”

If the language is not ready, well, truth to tell, neither is your humble correspondent. It’s a jarring realization.

The New York Public Library will keep six controversial Dr. Seuss books on the shelves despite this week’s decision to cease their publication due to racist imagery.

The library, which serves Manhattan, the Bronx, and Staten Island, said it does not censor books and will keep the controversial titles in circulation until they are no longer in suitable shape to lend out, a spokeswoman said.

They found that regardless of age boys and girls were more likely to write about characters with a traditionally male name.

With only half of girls writing about boys in their stories, the researchers say it shows boys will continue to write about their gender as they grow up, but girls will still write as much about boys as they do their own gender.

Can gay people whistle?

Add John Waters to the camp of people who don’t think they can.

It’s one of many subjects the filmmaker, writer, and gay icon has been pondering while in quarantine because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Waters said he recently read British author Julian Barnes’ latest book, The Man in the Red Coat, a biography about surgeon and sex addict Samuel Jean Pozzi and life in England and France during the Belle Epoque. He said he was surprised to read that people back then supposedly judged others based on whether they could whistle.

“There was a thing in the Oscar Wilde days that people believed that gay people couldn’t whistle,” Waters said. “And it’s true. Gay people can’t whistle. I’ve asked every gay person I know and they can’t.”

According to David Niven, debonair star of films including Wuthering Heights, Around the World in 80 Days, and Bonjour Tristesse, not all full-service brothels in the golden age of movies were run out of gas stations, as in Ryan Murphy’s Netflix series Hollywood. One was housed in a stately colonial-style mansion right under his window in the North Hollywood hills, run by a “Baroness” and filled with whips, kinky costumes, and two beautiful failed actresses deeply in love.

This tale and many more are recorded in Niven’s 1975 memoir, Bring on the Empty Horses, which has long been considered by those in the know—including (strangely enough) conservative commentator William F. Buckley Jr.—one of the best books ever written about Hollywood in its studio-system heyday.

The memoir is a follow-up to his equally delightful 1971 autobiography, The Moon’s a Balloon. In Horses, the British-born Niven reveals a generous but clear-eyed view of Hollywood from the 1930s to the early ’60s. “[It] was hardly a nursery for intellectuals, it was a hotbed of false values, it harbored an unattractive percentage of small-time crooks and con artists, and the chances of being successful there were minimal,” he writes. “But it was fascinating, and if you were lucky, it was fun.”

Fun yes, but also freaky. Through a series of thematic vignettes, Niven spills the tea on the passions and pretentions of stars like Humphrey Bogart (a real softie), Mary Astor (at her best in bed), Fred Astaire (a terrible dancer in public), Greta Garbo ( a big fan of skinny-dipping), and Charlie Chaplin (a pompous bore). He does so with such grace and panache that one is almost unaware secrets are being revealed—but revealed they are, much to every Hollywood fan’s gossipy delight. Ahead, six of the juiciest tidbits from Niven’s pen.

For years I’ve noticed the divergence between my straight friends and my gay friends. While one half of my social circle has disappeared into relationships, kids and suburbs, the other has struggled through isolation and anxiety, hard drugs and risky sex.

None of this fits the narrative I have been told, the one I have told myself. Like me, Jeremy did not grow up bullied by his peers or rejected by his family. He can’t remember ever being called a faggot. He was raised in a West Coast suburb by a lesbian mom. “She came out to me when I was 12,” he says. “And told me two sentences later that she knew I was gay. I barely knew at that point.”

This is a picture of me and my family when I was 9. My parents still claim that they had no idea I was gay. They’re sweet.

Jeremy and I are 34. In our lifetime, the gay community has made more progress on legal and social acceptance than any other demographic group in history. As recently as my own adolescence, gay marriage was a distant aspiration, something newspapers still put in scare quotes. Now, it’s been enshrined in law by the Supreme Court. Public support for gay marriage has climbed from 27 percent in 1996 to 61 percent in 2016. In pop culture, we’ve gone from “Cruising” to “Queer Eye” to “Moonlight.” Gay characters these days are so commonplace they’re even allowed to have flaws.

Spend any amount of time talking about slavery on the internet, and you’ll eventually encounter the claim that there were “black Confederates” that fought for the South. “Over the past few decades, claims to the existence of anywhere between 500 and 100,000 black Confederate soldiers, fighting in racially integrated units, have become increasingly common,” writes historian Kevin Levin in his new book, Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth.

“Proponents assert that entire companies and regiments served under Robert E. Lee’s command, as well as in other theaters of war.” Look, believers say (directly or subtextually): The Confederacy can’t have been so bad for black people. Otherwise, why would they have defended it?

Levin’s book explains how this myth came about—while neatly dismantling it. We spoke recently about actual Confederates’ perspectives on black soldiers; why former “body servants” attended Confederate reunions during Jim Crow; and how the World Wide Web gave this story legs.

The recent outrage over Disney's casting of black actress Halle Bailey to play Ariel in the live-action Little Mermaid film has taken over social media, but people crying foul over the entertainment giant "changing" the source material have another thing coming. First of all, as author Tracey Baptiste points out in an article for The New York Times, mermaids have always been black. Second of all, there are plenty of fairy tales that Disney has changed over its 80-plus-year movie-making career, and I've got 10 of them explained for you below.

Book nerds should know by now that no page-to-screen adaptation can be 100 percent faithful to the original. Everything diverges from its source material in degrees, and fairy tales are no exception.

As you know, Disney’s 1985 animated film The Little Mermaid is being made into a live-action movie. And while some white fans are upset that the titular heroine will be played by black R&B singer Halle Bailey, many others overlook the story’s interesting gay origins.

When Danish author Hans Christian Andersen wrote “The Little Mermaid” as a short fairy tale in 1837, he did so as a way to illustrate his failed attempt to woo a heterosexual man named Edvard Collin. Many biographers say that Andersen, who was attracted to both men and women, long pined for Collin even though Collin was of a higher class and disapproved of Andersen’s romantic overtures towards him and possibly one of his sisters.

Vargas came out about his immigration status publicly in 2011 and has since devoted his entire career to fighting for the rights of undocumented people.

Now Vargas is ready to focus more energy on himself, starting with his sexuality. "I'm trying to understand the gay thing," Vargas says. He makes a point to say that he's 38 years old and has never had a serious romantic relationship. Being undocumented has colored his entire life, even his personal relationships he's still discovering.

On this week's episode of LGBTQ&A, Jose Antonio Vargas talks about becoming more comfortable with his queerness, why the mainstream media's coverage of immigration is so dangerous, and the silver lining of the Trump era.

Early in his salacious new book about homosexuality in the Vatican, the French journalist Frederic Martel asks a source to estimate the number of Vatican clergy who are "part of this community, all tendencies included."

"I think the percentage is very high," says the source, identified as an Italian journalist who left the Vatican and the priesthood after he was discovered viewing gay sex websites on his Vatican computer. "I'd put it around 80%."
That estimate from Martel's book, which is scheduled to be published on February 21 in eight languages and 20 countries, has already made international headlines.

It is ironic that Neil Simon, who died today at 91, got his inspiration to become a comedy writer from the movies into which he constantly escaped to forget the circumstances of his poor depression-era childhood. Even though he grew up in Washington Heights, much closer to Broadway than Hollywood, it was always the movies of the likes of Chaplin , Keaton and others that stuck with him and led to one of the most sterling careers ever for a writer. Yet by far his greatest success and appreciation came as one of the most successful playwrights of all time, a record of accomplishment that included a whopping 17 Tony nominations and three wins, a Pulitizer Prize for drama, and even as the rare playwright to have a theatre named after him. “I always feel more like a writer when I’m writing a play because of the tradition of the theater … there is no tradition of the screenwriter, unless he is also the director, which makes him an auteur. So I really feel that I’m writing for posterity with plays, which have been around since the Greek times,” he once said about his career trajectory.


This probably explains why In his prime his works were often staples in the Tony Best Play category, but in movies he never got nearly that kind of recognition despite over 25 screenplays , most based on his own plays, that brought the Neil Simon magic to the masses.

My mother tried to stab Magdalena with a steak knife. There, I said it.

For years I’ve wondered if I might have imagined the moment when my mother picked up the knife she’d been using to saw through a not-quite-defrosted Entenmanns’ coffee cake and attempted to plunge it into the flesh of my good friend and occasional lover Magdalena.

Television writer Ryan Murphy talked about how his personal life affected his new series, Pose, with the Television Critics Association.

Pose is a series about New York City‘s ballroom culture in the 1980’s. The show will make history with the largest cast of transgender actors in regular roles for a series.

Describing a scene where “a father finds out his son is gay and beats him bloody with a belt,” Murphy said, “That happened to me.”

A new book on Richard Avedon claims that the iconic photographer carried on a “decade-long secret affair with director Mike Nichols,” we hear.

The two have only been reported as great friends and collaborators.

The tome “Avedon: Something Personal” — by Avdeon’s former business partner Norma Stevens and writer Steven M.L. Aronson, out Nov. 21 — is being described as “part-memoir, part-biography” that “exposes the twice-married Avedon’s hidden love life.”