From the Archives: Former state legislator Terri McCormick asks ‘What Sex Is a Republican?’

Former state legislator Terri McCormick asks ‘What Sex Is a Republican?’
December 20, 2011 7:52 PM MST

A former state legislator from Wisconsin, Terri McCormick is the author of a memoir called What Sex Is a Republican? Stories from the Front Lines of American Politics.

One reviewer, the author noted, called it “the first Tea Party book” because of what McCormick identifies as its themes.

“It’s all about integrity of leadership,” she told the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner in an interview early in 2011, while she was attending the national convention of the Republican Liberty Caucus in Arlington, Virginia.

‘Founding principles’

“All the themes are centered around the Constitution, the founding principles, and what we need to do to be a better republic.”

The reason she published the book, McCormick explained, was that she had been asked to write about her experiences as a member of the Wisconsin Assembly, where she served three two-year terms beginning in 2000. She later twice ran for Congress, seeking the Republican nomination in Wisconsin’s Eighth District in 2006 and 2010.

It was while she was serving in the legislature, representing about 60,000 constituents in and around the cities of Appleton and Oshkosh, that McCormick discovered she was a libertarian.

“I didn’t even know that I was a libertarian Republican,” she explained, “until somebody had actually watched my work and said, ‘You know what? You believe in the constitution and free market.”

‘Core values’

To McCormick, that seemed just like common sense.

“I had a set of core values. I readily knew what they were: opportunities, free market systems, and I actually believed the constitution should apply to everybody.”

When it was pointed out that her statements and the legislation she sponsored manifested libertarian values and ideas, she “thought, ‘So that’s where I fit!’” Up to that point, she admitted, that she “didn’t quite know” what a libertarian was, or that she was one herself.

Running for Congress after her self-imposed term limits ended her time in the legislature “was interesting,” McCormick said, noting an odd paradox:

“When I ran for the state house, I was recognized as having ideas and [people] wanted me. When I ran for the U.S. House, I was recognized as an individual with ideas and therefore people didn’t want me.”

Legislative achievements

Prior to her first election to the Wisconsin Assembly, McCormick had worked with various civic groups and drafted the state’s first charter schools law. She helped form a group that lobbied for the law’s passage.

Once elected to office, she chaired the economic development committee, which became her platform for regulatory reform efforts.

Challenging entrenched interests in Madison, McCormick said she “took on the [state’s] capital investment company. In order to have more capital investment readily available, I wrote the small business regulation reform act.”

Her achievements, she added modestly, came about “just by listening to others and working with them.”


Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on December 20, 2011. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016.  I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

From the Archives: Virginia Enters the 20th Century -- in 2005

Nine years ago this week, the Virginia Supreme Court overturned a 19th-century law that forbade cohabitation by adults who were not legally married.  The Court based its ruling, in part, on the 2003 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Lawrence v. Texas, which overturned the Lone Star State's law against homosexual sodomy.

A few days after the Virginia Supreme Court issued its ruling in Martin v. Ziherl on January 14, 2005, I wrote about the case for The Hook, a Charlottesville weekly. (See this previous post regarding another article I wrote for The Hook on a quite different topic.)

This commentary piece was originally published on January 20, 2005, in print and on line.

Fornication 86ed: Virginia enters the Twentieth Century

By Richard E. Sincere

When the Virginia Supreme Court ruled in the otherwise obscure case of Martin v. Ziherl on January 14, it belatedly brought the Commonwealth into the 20th century.

How so? The court overturned a law dating to the early 19th century, which had not been enforced since 1847, banning sexual relations between two unmarried, consenting adults. It recognized that human beings living in Virginia have a liberty interest in protecting their private relationships from governmental interference.

While the case at hand addressed "fornication" performed by a heterosexual couple, the court made clear that, should a similar case come before it, involving two persons of the same sex and the state's sodomy law (also known as the "Crimes Against Nature," or CAN, statute), it would overturn that law, too.

The Virginia court relied almost exclusively in its reasoning on the U.S. Supreme Court's 2003 case Lawrence v. Texas, which said a Texas law prohibiting sexual relations between persons of the same gender was unconstitutional.

Virginia State Capitol in Richmond

Referring to the earlier federal case, Virginia Justice Elizabeth Lacy, writing for the court, stated: " ... this same liberty interest is invoked in this case when two unmarried adults make the choice to engage in the intimate sexual conduct proscribed by Code [Section] 18.2-344. Thus, as in Lawrence, the Commonwealth's interests do not warrant such encroachment on personal liberty."

In so doing, the court swept away the rationale for a raft of laws that infringe on the rights of individuals– gay or straight, single or married– to engage in private, consensual, sexual conduct. (The ruling does not affect, the court said, "the Commonwealth's police power regarding regulation of public fornication, prostitution, or other such crimes.")

The General Assembly has, on numerous occasions, considered legislation that would have had the same effect– repealing archaic laws that have no place in a liberty-loving society. Each time the state legislators had an opportunity to modernize the Virginia code's sections dealing with sexual conduct, they let it pass by. Thus it was up to the state Supreme Court to act.

Lest certain ideologues accuse the court of "judicial activism" and of being out of synch with public opinion, two points are in order:

First, the Court's opinion was squarely in line with precedent set by the U.S. Supreme Court. Thus, it respected the principle of stare decisis. (According to Bouvier's Law Dictionary, "stare decisis" means "To abide or adhere to decided cases," adding in explanation, "It is a general maxim that when a point has been settled by decision, it forms a precedent which is not afterwards to be departed from.")

Second, the Court's ruling reflects public opinion rather than contradicts it.

In January 2001, Rasmussen Research, an independent polling organization, conducted a statewide survey of Virginia voters to determine knowledge and attitudes about Virginia's CAN statute and related issues. Among its findings were:

* When asked "Should it be against the law for an unmarried man and an unmarried woman to have sex in the state of Virginia?" 71.1 percent of respondents answered "no," including 67.4 percent of self-identified Republicans (those voters one would most expect to answer "yes").

* When asked "Should it be against the law for a married couple to have oral sex in the privacy of their own home?" 81.7 percent said "no" (including 78.9 percent of Republicans).

* When asked "Currently, according to Virginia law, it is illegal for consenting adults to have oral sex in the state of Virginia; a proposal has been made to eliminate the Virginia law; should the Virginia law be eliminated?" 65.2 percent answered "yes", including 61.4 percent of Republicans.

General Assembly members have often maintained, off-the-record, that they are wary of changing Virginia's laws regulating private sexual conduct, because they think they will have hell to pay on election day if they do so. But they have nothing to fear. The Rasmussen poll also asked how voters would cast their ballots for legislators who support repeal of such laws. Overall, 82.9 percent of Virginians said that they would either be more likely to vote for such legislators, or it would have no impact on their vote.

Now, some might argue that a four-year-old opinion survey may not accurately reflect the current attitudes of Virginia voters. That may be true. But it would be up to the naysayers to provide concrete, scientifically valid evidence that proves it wrong.

The court's decision is cause for celebration by all Virginians, as it has removed one more layer of government intrusiveness from our lives. We are freer today than we were on January 13, unencumbered by unconstitutional laws that strike at the heart of our most personal liberties. At the dawn of the 21st century, Virginia is finally reconciled to the 20th.

Charlottesville resident Richard Sincere is author of The Politics of Sentiment.

Accompanying the article was this sidebar from The Hook's editor, Hawes Spencer:

As for sodomy... In 1993, a Richmond area woman, Sharon Bottoms, lost custody of her two-year-old child due to her "felonious behavior": oral sex.

Closer to home, both the Charlottesville and Albemarle Police departments utilized the "sodomy" statute in 1998 to threaten citizens with felonies. In Charlottesville, the goal was ridding West Main Street of prostitution. In Albemarle, 14 men were charged for using a restrooms at the Ivy Creek Natural Area as their little pleasure palace. So how to purify the parks?

House Bill 1054 from Dave Albo (R-Springfield) would convert an old anti-fornication, anti-cohabitation statute into a ban on sex in public places.– editor

I had earlier discussed the Bottoms case in the Free Lance-Star in 2001 and in a press release from Gays and Lesbians for Individual Liberty in 1996.

The issue is not dead. State Senator Tom Garrett (R-Lynchburg) has introduced a bill this year that would revivify the unconstitutional "Crimes Against Nature" statute in the Virginia Code, which was invalidated by Lawrence v. Texas in 2003, by amending the notorious § 18.2-361.

Garrett's bill passed the Courts of Justice Committee in the form of a substitute (the patron apparently tried to address some of the criticisms that had been leveled at his bill) and is now before the Committee on Finance for further consideration.

The comments on this bill found on Richmond Sunlight are enlightening.

Senate Candidate E.W. Jackson Contradicts Himself

E.W. Jackson (r) with George Allen

U.S. Senate candidate E.W. Jackson, a charismatic clergyman and fiery orator who has caught the attention of Virginia's political class, is clear on where he stands on the issues.  There is no question about what he is for and what he is against.

One thing he is against is gay marriage.  Another thing he is against is appointing openly gay judges, according to a report today in a blog at the Washington Post web site.

But in inveighing against gay people, Jackson has found himself caught up in a contradiction.

Per Laura Vozzella's report in the Post:

“Private sexual behavior, unless it is against the law, should remain private,” Jackson said.

Jackson does not follow his own admonition, however.

A look at the biography he has posted on his campaign web site reveals this statement:

He and his wife have been married for forty years, have 3 children and have resided in Chesapeake for 13 years.

The photograph accompanying that biography clearly shows Jackson wearing a prominent wedding ring.

It looks to me that, when it comes to not displaying sexual behavior in public, Jackson can talk the talk but not walk the walk.

If Jackson, as a candidate for the U.S. Senate, can openly talk about his spouse, than so can candidates for judicial positions -- even gay candidates.

For my interviews with E.W. Jackson, look here and here.

Finally, note that if one follows the logic of Jackson's statement -- "Unless it is against the law, private sexual behavior should remain private" -- then illegal sexual behavior should be made public, not private.  That is a bizarre position for a clergyman to take.

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Ambiguity Reigns in Signature Theatre’s New Play, 'Really Really'

When Haley, the sister of the protagonist in Signature Theatre’s new drama, Really Really, first arrives at the beginning of the second act, it’s as if a window has been opened to allow fresh air to blow across the stage.

No: A more accurate analogy is that a cork has been popped on a bottle of soda that was all shook up, because Haley, plainspoken to the point of being (really, really) offensive, stands in stark contrast to the other characters, who are each tightly wound and waspish, even the ostensible slacker of the group. Haley relieves the pressure that has been building for the first hour.

Even the names of the guys on the rugby team suggest old-moneyed uptightness. Cooper (Evan Casey), Davis (Jake Odmark), and Johnson (Paul James) are either surnames, or last names used as first names, but in any case seem to be WASP-y prep-school holdovers. Only Leigh’s boyfriend, Jimmy (Danny Gavigan), has an unmistakable first name. (Suffice it to say that Grace [Lauren Culpepper] turns out to lack it.)

After Haley (played by Kim Rosen) blows in, we find it hard to believe that she and Leigh (Bethany Anne Lind) are sisters. Despite Haley’s claims to the contrary, the two look nothing alike: Haley dark and buxom, Leigh willowy and flaxen.

Neither, it seems, do they have much in common in terms of character traits. Leigh, we gather, is a diligently studious college student who has distanced herself from a dysfunctional and poor family, while Haley embraces the trailer-trash lifestyle. (She’s living, she says, in a Super 8 motel outside Waterbury, Connecticut, with a guy named “Rico” and all that implies.)

Bethany Anne Lind (Photo: Scott Suchman)

Leigh prefers to keep tight control over her circumstances while sister Haley likes to snoop around and interfere, as long as her own aims can be advanced in the process.

As events unfold, however, we find that the two are not so different as they wish to appear.

Haley’s cubic zirconium entrance into a diamond-studded, ivy-covered world breathes life into the story, which up to that point has been merely a conventional he said/she said exposition of the two sides of a story about what might or might not have been a date rape at an off-campus party.

By coincidence, Really Really, written by first-time playwright and New York University graduate Paul Downs Colaizzo, had its premiere in the same week that New York University law professor Richard Epstein wrote about how the U.S. Department of Education has issued rules that skew the due process rights of college students accused of sexual assault.

Writing in reference to the recent case of Yale University football star Patrick Witt, who seems to have withdrawn from consideration for a Rhodes Scholarship because of anonymous accusations of sexual assault, Epstein notes of recent rules promulgated by the Office of Civil Rights in the Department of Education:

“The entire matter is shrouded in secrecy; the internal investigation cannot be postponed until the criminal charges, if any, are resolved; and the question of proof of guilt or innocence should be decided by the ‘preponderance of evidence’ standard. That standard puts a far lower burden on the complainant than the 'beyond a reasonable doubt' standard used in criminal cases or the 'clear and convincing evidence' standard used in many legal disputes (including defamation cases brought against the press by public officials) where some important constitutional right is at stake.”

Considering that the playwright began the first draft of Really Really in 2007, it is mere coincidence that the world premiere occurred even as the very real topic of sexual assault on campus, and the presence or absence of due process for the accused, was in the headlines. It means that Really Really is not just an entertaining and provocative dramatic work, but also a cultural artifact of contemporary relevance.

Jake Odmark, Evan Casey. Photo: Scott Suchman.

Comparisons of Colaizzo’s new play will be made with John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt, David Mamet’s Oleanna, and Rebecca Gilman’s Spinning Into Butter. Each comparison is apt, though, despite some similarities in subject matter and stylistics, there is no direct parallel for any of them with Really Really.  What they all have in common is an ambiguous answer to the question, Who is guilty?

Colaizzo, 26 years old, has a sharp ear and a knack for writing dialogue. He recognizes, and hence expresses, how 20-somethings in 2012 actually talk. While each of his characters starts off superficially as little more than party boys (and girls) with few distinguishing characteristics, by the final tableau we realize that each of them is siloed into his or her own, distinct personality – for better or for worse.

It’s difficult to describe what happens in Really Really because so much turns on what we learn in the last ten or so minutes of the play. To reveal too many details of the plot would be like telling a friend that Haley Joel Osment sees dead people and that’s why he can see Bruce Willis.

Suffice it to say that, within a running time of two hours, Colaizzo stuffs his play with highly charged accusations of sexual assault (already noted), class warfare, sibling rivalry, manipulative behavior, homophobic banter, unrequited lesbian lust, drunkenness, hangovers, and the potential for McCarthy-like guilt by association. It’s enough to fill a full day of Lifetime movies.

Director Matthew Gardiner keeps the action at a steady pace and he is ably served by a set, designed by Misha Kachman, divided into two living rooms that represent feminine order and masculine chaos.

There is nothing black or white about Really Really. It thrives on shades of grey and is built on uncertainty.

Audiences will find plenty to talk about during the ride home from the theatre, and there is enough disagreement on offer that couples may find themselves not talking about it at the breakfast table the next morning.

Performances of Really Really continue through March 25 in the ARK at Signature Theatre, with show times at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, 8:00 p.m. on Thursdays and Fridays, and Saturdays at 2:00 and 8:00 p.m. and Sundays at 2:00 and 7:00 p.m. Ticket prices range from $56 to $80 and are available by calling Ticketmaster at 703-573-7328 or visiting www.signature-theatre.org.

Really Really contains strong language and explicit situations and is recommended for mature audiences.

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'Beaded Curtain'

The other night, during his Tweets and emails segment, TV's Craig Ferguson naughtily coined a phrase:  "beaded curtain."

Well, he didn't coin it per se; the two-word term has been around for a long, long time.  What he did was add an air of mystery to it, making it a sexually suggestive phrase.

Shortly after the show signed off for the night, I signed on to Urban Dictionary to submit a new definition:

A vaguely sexual allusion intended to distract and confuse network television censors. Originally used by CBS late-night host Craig Ferguson on June 29, 2011, in response to a question posed by a viewer via email.

Geoff Peterson: "I enjoy a good beaded curtain now and again."
Craig Ferguson: "Go ahead, censors, look it up. We'll wait."

To my surprise and disappointment, Urban Dictionary rejected my submission.

I think that web site will come to regret this decision. "Beaded curtain" in this sense is going to begin to take root. The Robot Skeleton Army (the Craig Ferguson fan club, so to speak) has already taken up the cause of adding "beaded curtain" to the national lexicon:

Is Beaded Curtain a Thing?

If it wasn’t, it is now. Craig and Geoff’s conversation about beaded curtains got the RSA’s @doxieone1 inspired to come up with a fun poster.

Here's a link to that poster, which shows Geoff Peterson behind a beaded curtain.

I predict you'll be hearing the phrase "beaded curtain" before too long, and you'll titter when you hear it. (And maybe titter about it on Twitter soon afterward.)

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Obsessed with Sex

It's doubtful that I am alone in bringing up this question, but why, in debates about public policy or the place of gay men and lesbians in society (or in the conservative movement), are anti-gay conservatives always the first to bring up sex -- usually in a graphic and salacious manner?

I distinguish here between "anti-gay conservatives" and the bulk of conservative activists and normal Americans who believe that a person's private life is private and should not be talked about in public settings unless (or even if) he or she brings it up initially.

The dust-up involving Ryan Sorba, whose embarrassing tirade (his word) at last weekend's Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) led him to be booed off the stage, is only the latest example of this strange phenomenon of "conservatives" talking about their obsession with other people's sexual behavior.  The Sorba incident, including his off-stage encounter with my friend, Alex Knepper, brought the phenomenon into focus for me.

Sorba has written a "book" (for which he has been unable to find a publisher) called "The Born Gay Hoax." In its 95 pages, he uses the word "sodomy" 214 times.  He uses the word "sex" (sometimes in compounds like "same-sex") 153 times.  In contrast, the word "love" appears only 28 times and the word "affection" just once.  (He also uses "pederast" nine times and "pedophile" or "pedophilia" six times, for those keeping score.)

When gay men and lesbians speak in public about social or political issues that impinge on their lives, it is almost always in terms of "love," "affection," "marriage," "commitment," and "responsibility."

When anti-gay conservatives talk about those same issues, it is almost always about sex, genitalia, sodomy, fellatio, or other similar, graphic terms -- often with the clear intention to shock and chagrin their audiences.

For instance, a search of Peter LaBarbera's "Americans for Truth about Homosexuality" turns up 232 hits for "anal sex," 76 hits for "oral sex," 54 hits for "fellatio," and 16,179 (that is not a misprint) hits for "penis."

Just out of curiosity, I did a similar search on the web site of the liberal gay-rights organization, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), and got only 15 hits for "penis" (two of which were quotations from the Bible), two for "fellatio" (both links to the same document about state legislation), 183 hits for "oral sex" (many also linking to articles about legislation), and 25 hits for "anal sex" (again, most links were to "Law Briefs" on topics like Lawrence v. Texas).

Who is most obsessed with male sex organs?.  The answer is not "gay rights groups."  It's Peter LaBarbera.

Coincident with Ryan Sorba's rant at CPAC, conservative journalist Cliff Kincaid wrote two pieces last week on gay issues, one in which he says he approves of the Ugandan bill that mandates the death penalty for homosexuals, and one in which he asserts that the gay conservative group, "GOProud's commitment to constitutionally protected homosexual sodomy (i.e., anal intercourse) is not a position that appears on the agenda of any conservative groups."

I had my own bizarre encounter with Cliff Kincaid, whom I knew casually from conservative circles in the 1980s.  We were on friendly terms and I know that he had quoted me in articles he wrote about defense and foreign policy issues on several occasions.

In December 1990, I was running for the Virginia House of Delegates in the 49th District (the seat now held by openly-gay Democrat Adam Ebbin), in a special election to be held on January 8, 1991.

Kincaid invited me to appear by telephone on his local radio talk show. He had seen an article about my candidacy in the Washington Post and wanted to talk about it.

I was thrilled to get the media exposure in an obscure, off-cycle election that most voters did not even know was taking place.

Kincaid began the interview, which was scheduled to last 30 minutes, politely. But then he began to emphasize the fact that I was running as an openly gay candidate and got off the track I expected -- namely, the libertarian issues that motivated me to run, like reducing business regulation and taxes -- and began to ask graphic questions about my sex life.

Seriously, he asked me, on live radio, whether I put my penis in another man's anus or mouth, or if I let another man put his penis in my mouth or anus. I was flabbergasted and refused to answer.

He repeated the question, and again I refused to answer. He was persistent and snarled, "Well, if that's not what you want to talk about, why do you think you're on this show?"

As sweetly as I could, I responded, "Cliff, I thought you wanted me here to talk about cutting taxes and spending in Richmond."

Shortly after that, the interview was cut short and I sat at my desk, stunned that a grown man could ask such personal questions in such a public fashion.

The best thing about that interview is that it has given me a great story with which to entertain my friends at dinner parties for the past two decades.

Getting back to my point about gay people being more concerned with love and affection than about genitalia, I've concluded that anti-gay conservatives (not the nice, rational conservatives) are largely clueless about what it means to be gay.  That's the only explanation for Ryan Sorba saying to Alex Knepper "you mean you think you're gay" in a timid attempt to cast doubt on the veracity of Alex's claim to be gay.

These people don't understand that when a high-school freshman realizes he's gay and that he has a crush on his best friend, the first thing to come to his mind is not "I want to have anal sex with him."  The first thing he thinks is, "I want to kiss him."

The fact that anti-gay conservatives can't make the distinction between affection and lust says more about them than about the people whose rights (and, in Sorba's case, whose existence) they seek to deny.

Perhaps some anti-gay conservative -- the sort who booed Alexander McCobin of Young Americans for Liberty and cheered Ryan Sorba -- can answer my question:  Why are you always the first to bring up sex in a conversation about gay rights?  Is it a personal obsession, a mask for your true feelings, or is it in some convoluted way connected with rational thought?

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Why Dress in Texas?

DC Agenda (successor to the venerable Washington Blade) has an interview with two Arlington residents who help contestants in female beauty pageants.  One of their "projects" is the new Miss America, Caressa Cameron.

The story, by Tyrone Ford, begins:

Chip Brown and his partner, Scott Freda, have achieved their dream by helping someone else achieve theirs.

The two gay men recently assisted 22-year-old Caressa Cameron of Fredericksburg, Va., as she worked toward becoming the latest woman to win the Miss America crown. Brown and Freda, who started the Miss Arlington Scholarship Organization nine years ago in keeping with their love of pageants, worked with Cameron as the Miss Virginia champion prepared last month to compete for the Miss America title.

A member of the Miss Virginia and Miss America families, the Miss Arlington Scholarship Organization previously helped three women take the Miss Virginia title. Cameron is their first champion to win the Miss America contest.

Later we find this curious exchange:

Agenda: After being in the pageant business for nine years now, what do you personally do to assist these young women?

Brown: We help them with their platforms, we take care of the paperwork, we do mock interviews and we help them shop for outfits. Every year, I take Miss Arlington to Texas and I buy her a dress or have one made by a dressmaker in Texas.

If any answer cries out for a follow-up question, it's that one.

Why Texas? Not that there's anything wrong with the Lone Star State (my visits there have been pleasant and educational) but it's not exactly known for haute couture. One's inclination is to think that, if you want to dress up a beauty pageant contestant, you'd go to New York or Paris or Milan. But why buy a dress in Texas?

The answer is probably that Mr. Brown knows a fashion designer in Austin or Laredo. But Ford doesn't ask the implied follow-up question.

In related news -- since, unless things have changed in the 30 years since I last saw a Miss America Pageant, there is still a swimsuit competition -- the Sports Illustrated annual swimsuit issue is out, and it's a big moneymaker for the magazine and its parent company, Time Warner.

The cover model is Brooklyn Decker, opposite-sex spouse of tennis player Andy Roddick, and the issue is, as usual, getting a lot of buzz.

Dylan Stableford reports on The Wrap:

Make no mistake: the swimsuit issue is big business. Here are some hard numbers.

The issue generates 7 percent of the annual ad revenue SI generates. This year, SI sold 67 ad pages into its swimsuit issue, which was flat over last year. (In 2009, though, pages were down 33 percent -- so maybe that’s a sign the ad market is stabilizing.)

The magazine points out that more than a dozen advertisers created custom packages for the issue -- making it something like the print equivalent of the Super Bowl broadcast for print creatives on Madison Avenue.

And at the newsstand, the magazine usually sells well over a million single copies, or about 10-15 times how many regular issues of SI are sold.

I make no claim to understand the motives of heterosexual adolescent males, but aren't there a lot of other outlets for soft porn on the Internet? Perhaps the SI swimsuit issue is just a ritual or rite of passage, like getting a driver's license or a boy's first hangover.

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TV and Human Fertility

In an article on Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's plan to ban the sale of big-screen television sets in California (apparently he hasn't heard that Californians with cars can drive to Nevada, Oregon, or Mexico to go appliance shopping), the Daily Mail includes this paragraph:

Televisions account for about 10 per cent of residential energy use in California, the state with the highest population in the U.S., driven largely by the surge in sales of large flat screens.

So California's population growth is due to the sale of big screen TVs? What is it that people are watching there?

Does China have a two-plasma-TV-set-per-family policy?

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‘When I’m Bad I’m Better’

Here is my review of Dirty Blonde, now playing at Signature Theatre in Arlington. This review is scheduled to appear in The Metro Herald on Friday, August 21.

‘When I’m Bad I’m Better’:
Mae West on Stage in ‘Dirty Blonde’ at Signature
Rick Sincere
Metro Herald Entertainment Editor

This past Monday, August 17, would have been Mae West’s 116th birthday. That date would usually pass unnoticed nowadays except for the opening this week at Signature Theatre of Dirty Blonde, a play with music that is partially a biography and partially a tribute to West, who died in 1980 at the age of 87.

West was a multiple-threat performer who started as a child on the vaudeville stage and became a Broadway star, a top movie box-office draw, and a Las Vegas headliner, as well as a producer, director, playwright, memoirist, and cause célèbre.

What’s more, Mae West was transgressive in ways that would make cultural critic Camille Paglia stand up and take notice – and smile.

In fact, Paglia said in a July 2003 article by Ingrid Sischy in Interview magazine, “When Mae West was pushing the envelope in the 1920s and getting arrested for it, her work was all about innuendo and ambiguity. She had a juicy, luscious, relaxed sexual maturity. She portrayed sexual relations as a warm, forgiving comedy.”

From early in her career, West knew how to shock and titillate. She had an entrepreneurial eye that led her to borrow from “out” groups that enriched her performance and her persona. For instance, she was one of the first white performers to do the “shimmie,” which she borrowed from African-American dancers. Her famous (infamous?) attitude – posture, stride, pose, sneer, and costume – was borrowed from gay men and drag queens that she knew. She made no secret of, nor did she offer an apology for, taking from and enjoying the contributions of “Negroes” and “fairies” at a time when both groups were seen as inferior by “polite society,” which preferred to keep its distance from both.

West was also a champion of free speech and gay rights. Her 1926 Broadway play, Sex, whose main character was a prostitute (or, as West might say, “a woiking goil”) was shut down by law enforcement authorities after it played for nearly a year to capacity audiences. The subsequent controversy led to a New York state law (the so-called “Wales Padlock Law”) that effectively forbade the portrayal of homosexuality in theatres, and the threat of its enforcement remained for four decades.

Yet West tried to fight it. She went to jail in defense of Sex and used a later play, The Pleasure Man, to challenge the law in 1930. (The prosecution ended in a hung jury.) Her play about gay life, The Drag, never made it to Broadway, but she saw it as a pioneering educational effort. She later wrote about it:

“I admit that in my play ‘Drag’ I was a little premature. The public is still too childlike to face like grown-ups the problem of homo-sexuality. How few are the people who even know what the word means? Because of this universal ignorance I wrote ‘Drag’ with the intention of taking it to all the theaters in the country to teach the people.”

Reacting to these words, Duke University theatre scholar John Clum said (in his book, Still Acting Gay):

“Mae West presents herself as a noble sex educator bringing the truth of homosexuality to the entire nation via her cast of Greenwich Village drag queens. If the play was banned in New Jersey and New York City, one can imagine what would happen in the Bible Belt. The Drag was much more a piece of exploitation for West, but she does not stand far outside the world she represents. The woman who always presented herself as a sexual outlaw is allowing one group of gay men, also sexual outlaws, to play themselves. For 1928, this is a dangerous play. It would be forty years before anything this openly honest about one segment of gay life appeared on the legitimate stage.”

By the time the controversy over the sexually subversive content of West’s plays – which she wrote, produced, directed, and starred in – was winding down, she was on her way to California to become a Hollywood sensation. Along the way, she discovered Cary Grant, starred in about a dozen films, found herself banned from radio for 12 years (including the entire decade of the 1940s), and became the model for myriad Halloween costumes and female impersonators.

It is in this context that Claudia Shear’s much-lauded play (five Tony® Award nominations, five Drama Desk nominations, a Theatre World award for Shear, and 352 performances on Broadway) finds its foundation.

Emily Skinner plays the dual roles of Mae West and her fervent fan, Jo (both played in the original production by the playwright, Shear), while Hugh Nees and J. Fred Shiffman play 16 male roles between them – managers, husbands, boyfriends, lawyers, pianists, and more.

The play moves effortlessly back and forth from the present day to various periods of Mae West’s life and career. Jo meets Charlie, another fan (played by Nees), while visiting West’s grave in Brooklyn. They bond over their common obsession, becoming friends and sharing pleasant times together. The friendship is threatened when it begins to become too intimate and when Jo discovers Charlie’s closely-held secret.

An audience member looking for Heavy Significance in Dirty Blonde might be disappointed, but one who seeks little more than fun entertainment (with a heavy dose of nostalgia) will be pleased. The play deals not with Difficult Questions but – to the extent it reaches below the surface – with the little questions that each of us faces in life, the questions that help us determine who we are: what makes us tick and what makes us confident.

At nearly two hours without intermission, Dirty Blonde could be tedious if it just plodded along, telling Mae West’s story chronologically. With seamless scene changes (often supplemented by atmospheric photographic projections) and numerous and flashy costumes, however, the play’s dual plots zoom along. Dirty Blonde seems to be over as quickly as it has begun. A playing-the-dozens-like exchange of Mae West’s sassiest well-known aphorisms (“When women go wrong, men go right after them.” “When caught between two evils, I pick the one I never tried before.” “It’s better to get looked over than overlooked.”) leaves the crowd wanting more, much more.

Dirty Blonde will be running for almost two months at Signature Theatre in Arlington. If word gets around quickly, however, tickets will become scarce, as patrons want to see it more than once. As Mae West said, “Too much of a good thing can be wonderful.”

Dirty Blonde, directed by Jeremy Skidmore, continues at the ARK Theatre at Signature Theatre, 4200 Campbell Avenue in Arlington, through October 4. Show times are Tuesday and Wednesday at 7:30 p.m., Thursday and Friday at 8:00 p.m., Saturday at 2:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m., and Sunday at 2:00 p.m. and 7:00 p.m. Ticket prices are $47 to $71 and available by calling Ticketmaster at 703-573-7328 or visiting www.signature-theatre.org.

Signature’s 20th anniversary season continues with Show Boat, I Am My Own Wife, Sweeney Todd, [title of show], the world premiere of Sycamore Trees, and the world premiere run of “First You Dream” The Kander & Ebb Concert.

Production photos (above right, Emily Skinner as Mae West; above left, J. Fred Shiffman as Frank Wallace) by Scott Suchman; used with permission of Signature Theatre.

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Was 1959 the Year Everything Changed?

This book review was written for publication in The Metro Herald of Alexandria, Virginia. (Look for it in next week's edition.)

Was 1959 the Year Everything Changed?
A Book Review
Rick Sincere
Metro Herald Entertainment Editor

One could forgive a certain solipsism among readers born in 1959 who may think that Fred Kaplan's 1959: The Year Everything Changed is about them personally.

That it turns out not to be so does not diminish the book’s entertaining and informative readability. Yet what it lacks in particular egocentrism (the author himself was born five years earlier) it makes up in idiosyncrasy.

What is most unfortunate about Kaplan’s collection of loosely related essays is that it simply does not live up to its subtitle. Then again, it hardly could, since every year has been (and will be) pivotal in one way or another. Pick a year out of a hat and one could list dozens of discoveries, innovations, inventions, or events that “changed everything.” (1776? The Declaration of Independence and the Battle of Trenton. 1941? Pearl Harbor and Joe DiMaggio’s hitting streak. 1969? The moon landing and Woodstock. Try it yourself.)

What’s more, Kaplan stretches his pivotal year to include events that could properly be placed earlier or later.

Take for example, two scientific advances that truly did have titanic cultural repercussions. These two, in fact, were more influential with regard to how we live now than most any of the cultural, artistic, and political events discussed elsewhere in Kaplan’s book.

Kaplan devotes one chapter, “Toppling the Tyranny of Numbers,” to Texas Instruments’ introduction of the solid integrated circuit (or microchip) at an electronics trade show in March 1959 – even though the invention had been made by John St. Clair Kilby already in August 1958, when he demonstrated it to other TI scientists and executives.

Another chapter, “Andromeda Freed from Her Chains,” is about the birth control pill. Kaplan places this invention in 1959 rather arbitrarily, because the FDA hearing to decide whether to approve the Pill’s use for birth control purposes took place in late December of that year. But the Pill had already been approved for other uses and had been prescribed by physicians for two years by then; its final approval for specific labeling as a birth control drug came on May 11, 1960.

It is hard to imagine a 21st century without microchips – which make possible nearly all the devices that populate our daily lives, including the laptop computer used to write this book review – or the birth control pill, which really did unchain women and free them to pursue happiness and productivity outside of a narrowly defined role as housewife and mother, as well as continuing in that role as a matter of their own choice.

Kaplan may allude to the reasons for his book’s idiosyncratic choices late in its pages when, under the heading of “Acknowledgements,” he writes: “… several years ago, it occurred to me that some of the most important – or at least some of my favorite – books, movies, and record albums were made in 1959. Was this just coincidence, or was there something significant about that year? The more I looked into it, the more it struck me that this truly was a pivotal year – not only in culture, but also in politics, society, race, science, sex: everything” (p. 245).

For all his enthusiasm about “everything,” Kaplan has a crabbed view of society and culture.

For one thing, his book is highly – and almost annoyingly – New York-centric. On page after page, we are introduced to artists, musicians, philanthropists, publishers, and others who live in Manhattan and who meet each other at cocktail parties, jazz clubs, and museum openings.

It is fascinating, of course, to learn that Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, Ornette Coleman, Allen Ginsberg, and Norman Mailer all traveled in the same circles, and that they and their friends and associates shared ideas, built upon them, and diversified them in their different genres. But Greenwich Village is not the center of the universe; it really isn’t.

Even when talking about arts and culture in New York, Kaplan has a narrow definition of what is important. He devotes two chapters (out of 25) to innovations in jazz by Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman and their associates, but he says virtually nothing about the theatre (on- or off-Broadway). This was the year of Gypsy, for instance, often called the best musical play ever written, and of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, a pathsetting drama that broke the color barrier on Broadway. Neither are mentioned; nor are the Pulitzer Prize-winning Fiorello! and The Miracle Worker, which made stars of Patty Duke and Anne Bancroft.

Similarly, when he talks about movies, he mentions popular Hollywood films only to denigrate them in passing. He focuses on John Cassavetes’ semi-improvisational film Shadows – shot entirely in New York City -- and suggests (though not in so many words) that it was the first independent (or “indie”) film, which it surely was not. It might have been innovative, but it wasn’t fundamentally so.

Except for a passing reference to the growth of television set ownership over the decade of the 1950s, Kaplan ignores television – as an art form or as a means of communication about news and public affairs – completely.

There are also irritating little slips in the text, some that could have been caught and corrected by copy editors or fact checkers.

In a list of the seven Mercury astronauts, for instance, Kaplan renders Deke Slayton as “Duke Slayton” (p. 73) and, several pages later, he refers to Fidel’s Castro’s visit to the “Lincoln Monument and Jefferson Memorial” (p. 95). Out of all the structures dedicated to presidents in and around the Nation’s Capital, only one is called a “monument.” Lincoln, Jefferson, and Franklin Roosevelt have memorials. Taft, Wilson, and Theodore Roosevelt have bridges. Reagan has an airport; LBJ has a grove. Washington is the sole president with a monument.

There is also a strange bit of delicacy in his discussion of artists Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, of whom he says: “Soon they fell into an intense relationship, personally and professionally” (p. 174).

Well. In order to find out the whole truth – that they were gay and that they were romantic partners (the latter fact merely implied) – the reader must look up an endnote on page 289. Given that the endnotes are not marked in the conventional way within the text (that is, with a superscripted number to guide the reader to the note), it is unlikely that many will seek out this information on their own. Just whom is Kaplan trying to protect from this common knowledge?

We can grant that Kaplan can, and perhaps should, write about those subjects that most interest him (modern jazz, avant garde art, and Norman Mailer). If he chooses to ignore the wider culture in favor of a more elitist vision of arts, music, and literature, or to treat the rest of America as Saul Steinberg satirized Manhattanites in his famous “New Yorker’s View of the World” cartoon, so be it. That is his privilege as a journalist (and, perhaps, as a Brooklynite).

No matter how you look at it, however, Kaplan falls quite short in making the case for his hyperbolic claim that 1959 was the year that everything changed – or even the year that changed everything.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

1959: The Year Everything Changed, by Fred Kaplan. Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, 2009. 322 pp. (including notes, photographs, and subject index). $27.95.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

Rick Sincere was born on April 7, 1959, when everything changed for his parents and himself.

It is interesting to note, via a search of Amazon.com that there are other books with similar themes and titles, such as Bernard Diederich's 2007 book, 1959: The Year that Changed Our World, and Rob Kirkpatrick's book, released earlier this year, 1969: The Year Everything Changed, and -- even older -- 1998's What A Year It Was! 1959, by Beverly Cohn.

(Crossposted to Virginia Free Press.)




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You Say Potato, I Say Tomato

Hot off the press: Men and women have different opinions of what they find attractive in a potential (opposite-sex) mate.

Dustin Wood of Wake Forest University and Claudia Chloe Brumbaugh of Queens College wrote a paper for the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology based on interviews with 4,000 subjects who used a 10-point scale to rate the attractiveness of men and women in photographs they were shown.

United Press International distills their findings:

Most men agree on which women are hot, but some women can find a man attractive while others don't, U.S. researchers found....

Men's judgments of women's attractiveness were based primarily on physical features and they rated highly those who looked thin and seductive. Most of the men in the study also rated photographs of women who looked confident as more attractive.

The study, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, found that as a group, the women rating men showed some preference for thin, muscular subjects, but disagreed on how attractive many men in the study were. Some women gave high attractiveness ratings to the men, while other women said they were not attractive at all.

If UPI isn't clear enough, here's the abstract from volume 96, issue 6 of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (June 2009):

In this article the authors illustrate how revealed preferences (i.e., preferences inferred through an individual’s differential attraction to multiple targets) can be used to investigate the nature of mate preferences. The authors describe how revealed preferences can be estimated and how the reliability of these estimates can be established. Revealed preference estimates were used to explore the level of consensus in judgments of who is and is not attractive and whether revealed preferences are systematically related to self-reported mate preferences and personality traits. Revealed preference estimates were created for over 4,000 participants by examining their attraction to 98 photographs. Participants of both genders showed substantial consensus in judgments of whom they found attractive and unattractive, although men showed higher consensus than women. Revealed preference estimates also showed relationships with corresponding self-rated preferences and with other dispositional characteristics such as personality traits and age. Although the findings demonstrate the existence of meaningful individual differences in preferences, they also indicate an important role for consensual preferences in mate selection processes.

That clarifying summation should make it easier to talk about it at the bar tonight, as you're comparing comely lads and lasses with your friends.

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Who Is Nathan Hankins?

Longtime readers of this blog know that, by using SiteMeter, I am able to keep track of the search terms people use to find their way here. Some of those search terms have been odd and inscrutable.

Over the past week or so I have received repeated visits from somebody in Mountain View, California, someone who apparently works for Google. Although each visit lands on a different page (or blogpost), each one has the same search string:

nathan hankins sex pervert sheriff

Pursuing this search on Google does not shed much light. The first ten hits are completely unrelated and the individual words ("nathan," "hankins," "sex," "pervert," and "sheriff") do not appear near each other.

The first hit, for instance, leads to a a blogpost about the 2003 documentary film, directed by Andrew Jarecki, Capturing the Friedmans (which, by coincidence, I did see in a theatre when it was first released -- though I don't think I've ever written about it).

The second hit brings you to an incomprehensible alphabetical list of names.

The third hit goes to a page entitled "Walt Disney is EVIL!" (Need I say more?)

The fourth Google hit leads to my blog posts for the month of October 2006. To parse the mysterious search string, I find a reference to "nathan" in the context of Nathan Lane. The word "hankins" appears in a post about the Adrenaline Film Project at the 2006 Virginia Film Festival. "Sex" shows up in this headline: "New Jersey Court Rejects Same-Sex Marriage Rights" and in several other posts on a similar topic, the then-proposed (and since passed) Virginia Marriage Amendment (also known as the Marshall-Newman Amendment). "Pervert" appears only in a post about "the fallout from the Mark Foley scandal" and how people use the Internet to talk about sex. The word "sheriff" does not appear anywhere at all in that month's postings, which makes this whole situation even more confusing.

A Google search for the name "Nathan Hankins" (in quotation marks) turns up two Facebook profiles and an IMDB listing for someone with that name who has worked on the sound department of several films and TV shows. There are no hits for "Sheriff Nathan Hankins" (in quotation marks).

The mystery remains: Who is Nathan Hankins? Is he a sheriff or a sex pervert, neither or both? And what is his connection to Google or my blog?

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