The literature of rejection

June 9, 2018

I tend to use this headline to write about young men who have a disproportionate rage at the world and take it out on others as mass murderers, assassins, terrorists and serial killers. I’ve also written about a number of literary works that deal with such young men – Homer’s “The Iliad,” John Milton’s “Paradise Lost” and Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights,” among them.

But I think it is also an appropriate title for a post about the Lambda Literary Awards, which I attended Monday night at New York University’s Skirball Center for the Performing Arts as a nominee. My book “The Penalty for Holding,” published by Less Than Three Press, the second novel in the series “The Games Men Play” was a finalist in the Best Bisexual Fiction category. (When I got the news, I had two thoughts: This must be an email for somebody else. And, were any of the characters in my book bisexual? It goes to show that the readers sometimes know more than the authors do.)

As I sat there, I had a feeling of disassociation. I didn’t know anyone …

Why are women so hard on one another?

June 2, 2018

In my guise as editor in chief of WAG magazine, I had a pleasure of sharing a moment with Ashley Judd on the red carpet of the Greenwich International Film Festival (GIFF) in Connecticut Friday night. She is an exquisite-looking woman who is, more important, exquisite in her manners and manner. I began by thanking her for her work as one of the leaders of #MeToo and asked her if she thought that this time, the response to the sexual harassment women have suffered would really be different.

It already is, she said, and the result will be an improvement not only in the lives of women but of men as well. …

Below the Barr

May 31, 2018

ABC, which is owned by Walt Disney, cancelled “Roseanne” immediately after star Roseanne Barr tweeted that Valerie Jarrett, former senior adviser to President Barack Obama, was the progeny of the Muslim Brotherhood and “Planet of the Apes.”

One poster on The New York Times’ website suggested that Barr was riffing on the political commentary offered by the movie. But racists have been comparing blacks to apes for centuries. Barr has built her career on what can only be called white trash humor. Somehow I don’t think she was aiming for political allegory. …

Would you immigrate to Trumplandia?

January 12, 2018

You have to hand it to President Donald J. Trump. He really knows how to commemorate an occasion with a bang. On the anniversary of the Haitian earthquake and Martin Luther King Jr. weekend, Trumpet decided to let the world know that people are not to be judged by what King called “the content of their character” but by what one witty Washington Post poster called “their country of origin.”

Trump apparently told Senators Lindsey Graham and Richard Durbin – who thought they were at the White House to negotiate the bipartisan immigration “bill of love” that “Apprentice” Trump spoke of Tuesday when he was trying to disprove the lunatic persona portrayed in Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury” – that we don’t need people from Haiti, El Salvador and “s---hole” countries in Africa. No, what we need is immigrants from places like Norway. ...

‘Darkest Hour’: a timely tale of courage

December 31, 2017

Hindsight, they say, is 20/20. If it is, it must be with prescriptive rose-colored glasses. Because the past has been completed – successfully or otherwise – we tend to think of it as having been lived with a foregone conclusion. We forget that at the time, the past was the present, the outcome never assured.

“Darkest Hour” – an inspirational new film directed with subtle tension by Joe Wright (“Pride & Prejudice”) – recounts several weeks in May 1940 when England stood alone in a world on the brink of totalitarianism. It stars a soaring Gary Oldman, virtually unrecognizable ...

Merry, well, you know

December 23, 2017

We hear a lot at this time of year about putting the Christ back in Christmas – or, more recently, putting the Christmas back in Christmas. Indeed, one of President Donald J. Trump’s campaign promises was that we would say “Merry Christmas” again – as if we ever stopped.

This used to be a religious campaign against the commercialization of the season. With the, um, advent of Trump, it has become less about the materialism of the season – it’s hard to believe that he and his administration object to anything that makes money – and more about reclaiming a Christian identity that, they think, has been co-opted by multiculturalism and political correctness. It is factionalism versus globalism and, inevitably, us versus them, whoever they are.

And you have to wonder: Why? ...