reader forum.

Heartburn 

Most gay actors apparently agree with Timothy Olyphant's assessment "Come out, work less" ["Broken Hearts Club," June 6]. So they stay in the closet and refuse to play gay characters. Straight actors like Olyphant seem to relish the challenge and the publicity they get from playing gay. The result, as director Victor Salsa says in his DVD commentary on Rites of Passage, is that "it's so funny [that] the straight guys always end up playing the gay guys and the gay guys end up playing the straight guys."

Oh, and regarding the photo shoot of Olyphant and Dean Cain: Their wet T-shirts would have been a lot more fun in white instead of black!

Henry X. Dudek, Madison, Wis.

Loved your article on Dean Cain, until I read in USA Today that he's a supporter of George W. Bush! My "crush" is crushed!

Tom Butts, Seattle, Wash.

Would it have been so hard to call Cain and Olyphant's new film "the latest example of that ever-popular film subject: the gay male circle of friends" on your cover? There are many of us in the community who find being referred to as "queer" demeaning, degrading, and hurtful. I am disappointed to see our nation's largest GLBT magazine following this painful trend.

Mare Paige, via the Internet

Friends indeed

In your June 6 article "You Gotta Have Friends," you surveyed gay-themed "buddy" movies to excellent effect. However, since you included Armistead Maupin's miniseries Tales of the City, I would submit that you overlooked the stellar U.K. miniseries Queer as Folk, currently being adapted for the American market. Many urban American gays saw this groundbreaking made-for-TV production, and its vivid, true-to-life characters left a lasting impression on many who, despite the cultural divide of the Atlantic, identified easily with several of the characters. The telepic also dealt skillfully with the common issue of longtime friends as would-be lovers.

Ian Rahn, Montreal, Quebec

Different drummers

I just read your article on the Millennium March ["Wish You'd Been Here," June 6]. Is this the message we want others to see? The people who are the "new" bigwigs in our community are people who stayed in the closet for years waiting until they made millions or were arrested to come out. That's not courage; that's bad role models. I didn't go to this march because all the advertising, media reports (including The Advocate), and local buzz made it sound like it was an exclusive party for those "beautiful" people. Sorry, but I believe in the diversity of the gay community--drag queens, leathermen, HIV-infected artists, local volunteers, dykes on bikes, guys in recovery. I think there are more of them in our community than circuit boys and celebrities who come out when it's cool.

Tom Sullivan, San Diego, Calif.

People may disagree with the success of the Millennium March, but it had a profound impact on my life. For one short weekend I felt completely normal. That feeling was missing in my life, and I never even realized it. The Millennium March empowered me! I looked the discrimination I face every day right in the eyes. I have become determined to fight that discrimination and do whatever it takes to end it, whether it be writing letters to politicians, marching, voting, or, most important, being out in everything I do. I came out to my immediate family and select friends 12 years ago. On April 301 came out to the world.

Steven P. Wagner, Orlando, Fla.

While at all three previous marches on Washington, activist organizations and gay-themed merchants had tables and booths accessible to all, this time they were surrounded by Cyclone fencing and armed police officers in a so-called street festival, to which a $5 admission fee was demanded. What of the teenage participants and other lower-income GLBT marchers? Were they not entitled to buy a T-shirt or button, sign a petition, get a snack, or meet fellow activists without paying $5 to get inside the fence? This callous disregard for the income disparities in our community was a clear and sad sign that opponents of the Millennium March were at least partially right in their claim that the organizers had ignored the grass roots of our movement.

Maia Ettinger, San Francisco, Calif.

Holy Toledo

I have my own list of questions I would like to pose to Elizabeth Toledo [Washington, June 6]. Too bad your interviewer chose to produce a polite little piece that only hinted at many of the problems that surround the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and the Human Rights Campaign. Your interview with Toledo, if it can be called an interview rather than an impromptu press release, proves once again that HRC, NGLTF, and The Advocate are in touch with only a select few in the community.

Randy A. Riddle, Mebane, N.C.

Cardinal ruin

In your Advocate Report item "Death Comes for the Cardinal" [Religion, June 6], you state that Roman Catholic cardinal John O'Connor was a hard-line opponent of homosexuality. However, the media have frequently reported that Roman Catholic clergy are continually being arrested for molesting, sodomizing, and having homosexual affairs with young boys. Was there a difference to the late cardinal relating to sexual acts between two consenting men, which he considered wrong, and an adult male clergyman and a young boy, who is incapable of understanding what is being done to him? Since the church always covers up for its clergy when they get caught, it must consider homosexuality acceptable only when a boy is involved, and not two adults.

Robert Cardew, Wallkill, N.Y.

As a gay man and a practicing Catholic, I was always put off by O'Connor's antigay stance. And when mourners of every age, race, and creed praised him as a great man, I wondered what His Eminence had done to merit those words. And then I read Mario Cuomo's words on the late cardinal. In 1983, the dark days of AIDS fear and ignorance, O'Connor opened up a wing of a Catholic hospital to care for people with AIDS, the only hospital in the city at the time to do so. And the cardinal personally attended to a number of PWAs. While I don't know if he could ever be thought of as a friend to GLBTs, I realize now he was a selfless humanitarian to everyone in his diocese, regardless of sexual orientation.

Rudy Fidelino, Watertown, Mass.

Poison pen?

In her column "Testosterone Poisoning" [Last Word, June 6], Urvashi Vaid decries poor use of sparse data, stating that writers who disagree with her positions "interpret bits of disconnected data to reassert" that with which she disagrees. But lack of data does not appear to constrain her. Regarding Andrew Sullivan's internal dynamics, she says, "Perhaps dealing with feelings of inadequacy as a gay man--created by parents who don't accept you fully, a church that shuns your sexual joy, and a society that derides you as a half man--is harder than reducing the `he in me' to a yellow liquid that looks like cooking oil." Beyond this psychic penetration of Sullivan's derivative motives, Vaid expands to psychic psychodynamics of entire groups of people: "It seems to me that these writers and thinkers resort to biology because they are threatened by the power of culture and the evidence of history."

Also interesting is her asserted insight into the motives of another writer with whom she disagrees: "Christina `I am not a feminist, but I make my money attacking them' Hoff Summers." Such an assertion raises the question regarding what Vaid is paid for columns such as this one.

Tom L. Smith, San Diego, Calif.

When Vaid referenced Thornhill and Palmer's book, saying they "speculated that rape is inevitable and even necessary," it showed she did not bother to read the book or read it thoroughly. Nowhere is it said that rape is inevitable or necessary. Indeed, the main theme of the book is that once rape is more fully understood in its biological context, it will no longer be inevitable. The statement that it is necessary seems to be derived from the fact that it is natural. However, one must realize that just because something is natural does not mean it is beneficial or even necessary. This may be seen as a danger to gays, because their sexual orientation is just as natural. We must not use the definition of what is "natural" or not to define what is good or evil, but rather whether it is "humane" or not.

Micah Haber, Westford, Mass.

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