QZines by Christopher Wilde

QZines by Christopher Wilde
As published in the November 2007 issue of Queer Life News, Milwaukee, WI:Nov 2007

Up The Mainstream Without a Paddle


There exists a delicate dance among radical queer zinesters between “keeping it real” by choosing to keep a low profile through limited circulation and having a desire to have their messages shared with the wider queer world around them in the hopes they can reach audiences they couldn’t find on their own. As we here at the Queer Zine Archive Project celebrate the fourth anniversary of our founding in November 2003, we take time out to explore a critical nexus point in the development of queer zine history when queer zines were plucked from obscurity and thrust into the light of mainstream LGBT media.

Tell Me About Your Childhood
During forays into discovering the stories of how queer zinesters such as Larry-bob of Holy Titclamps and Queer Zine Explosion and Reb of Fanorama started their own zines, an off-handed comment kept cropping up. They both have stated in interviews that they stumbled onto the queer zine scene through articles by the rock critic for The Advocate, a mainstream gay and lesbian magazine published bi-weekly since 1967. The Advocate itself wasn’t always a glossy news mag, having roots as a Los Angeles area newspaper before going national. Twenty years later, the magazine was firmly entrenched as one of the few publications attempting to cover a wide range of political, social and cultural issues relating to a broad LGBT audience.

In the fall of 1988, the loaded sentence, “Where did you get this?” in the article entitled, “In Search of the Homo-Core Underground – A Beginner’s Guide to Gay ‘Fanzines,’” [The Advocate, 11 Oct 1988, pgs 52 – 53] launched rock journalist Adam Block headlong into the slam pit of queer zine culture. He had already established his alt-cred long before this article by bringing the whispered innuendos of queerness in rock and roll out of the shadows and put it up on stage for all to see. His take on the origins of the scene starts from the premise that queer folk have an uncanny knack for “tracking down banned books, illicit information, covert culture, and hidden history” and offers up lyrical evidence from a Patti Smith song as reasons why underground media for queers exists. From the late 1980s to the early 1990s, Block helped tease out amazing aspects of radical queer life in over a dozen columns. He interviewed each of the founders of J.D.s, talked to African American queer punk diva Vaginal Davis about her rock career, and told firsthand stories of the queer squats (take-overs of abandoned buildings) that popped up in the then newly freed East Berlin. He adeptly wove factoids into his music reviews, such as Deee-lite being the first major label band to buy ad space in zines.

Block wasn’t the only writer at The Advocate to sit up and take notice. Bill Van Parys, future executive editor of Jane and Details, chimed in with “Fag Rags Come of Age” [Issue 563, 6 Nov 1990, pg 70] and interviewed black editors of zines such as Fertile La Toyah Jackson Magazine and Chicago’s Thing about wide ranging topics. Glen Helfand’s “Not a Laughing Matter?” [Issue 576, 7 May 1991, pg 70] profiles Tom Shearer, first editor of Diseased Pariah News, the zine
that challenged everyone’s assumptions regarding the impact of the AIDS epidemic and brought politically incorrect humor and fighting spirit to the fore.

These articles peter out right about the time of the Queer Zine Explosion of the mid 1990s when the sheer numbers of published zines made them hard to ignore. The rise of the Internet and compendiums like Factsheet Five helped fans track down their favorite zines with little to no effort. While The Advocate was certainly never depicting radical queers on their cover and still don’t, it is nice to know that in some small way, their staff of accomplished music and cultural critics nudged radical queer zines into the limelight and paved the way for them to be found and appreciated by a larger audience.

The Queer Zine Archive Project is a free digital archive of past and present zines on the Web at qzap.org.

Faux Lesbian Heroines 4-1990

from the Advocate
Aptil 1990
http://erbe38.googlepages.com/FauxLesbianHeroines4-90(1).pdf

Delicate Revenge

The Advocate
Block on Rock
by Adam Block

http://erbe38.googlepages.com/DelicateRevengeFromSmithsMeatisMurde.pdf

Deee-Liteful Threesome 10-90

Deee-Liteful Threesome
by Adam Block
Block on Rock
The Advocate
10-90
http://erbe38.googlepages.com/Deee-LitefulThreesome10-90.pdf

David Lasley 5-14-85

David Lasley
Page 1 The Advocate
Block on Rock
by Adam Block

http://erbe38.googlepages.com/DavidLasley5-14-85.pdf

Page 2
http://erbe38.googlepages.com/DavidLasleyPage25-14-85.pdf

Berlin Diary 6-19-90

Berlin Diary
by Adam Block
From Block on Rock
The Advocate
6-19-90
http://erbe38.googlepages.com/BerlinDiary6-19-90.pdf

Louie Louie Book Review Art Forum

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_n4_v32/ai_14890815

The Last List of the Decade

The Last List of the Decade
Block on Rock
The Advocate
January 2nd, 1990
http://erbe38.googlepages.com/ThelastlistoftheDecadeBlockonRock.pdf

Scanning The Zine Scene

Jan 30 1990
Scanning the Zine Scene
Rumblings from the New Gay Underground
http://erbe38.googlepages.com/ScanningtheZineSceneRumblingsfromthe.pdf

Pfranc Talk

Block on Rock
February 27 1990
The Advocate
http://erbe38.googlepages.com/PhrancTalk.pdf

Adam Block Memorial

Adam Block Memorial can be found on http://adamblockmemorial.blogspot.com/

Living on Air, by Anna Shapiro

Unpublished Excerp from Living on Air, by Anna Shapiro © Soho, 2006

“You’re trying to do class-artist art,” the scathing Philip said to her one day as she labored over an etching, to which she was adding ever more fuss and flurry. He was a plump boy with white skin and sharply defined red lips, who continually tossed too-long greasy bangs off his forehead. “That has nothing to do with art .” The most obnoxious boy at school, and he was speaking her language. (Obnoxious, but people enjoyed his blatant dare to them to dislike him, and liked him for it.)

Weesie had just put aside a portrait. Her attempts at naturalistic representation were so bad she felt they pointed at her and said, You are a terrible person. You are terrible for creating us. “You know so much about art. I don’t get it,” Philip said, continuing to watch the finicky doodling. He had applied pieces of fabric to his etching plate and peeled them off again, leaving the imprint of their varied weaves.
“Could I try that?” said Weesie. “No! Why should I give my ideas to you?” he said, pushing up his glasses and tossing the pesky bangs. Then he looked up and smiled as if he’d done her a favor. She had to laugh. He looked more pleased than ever and went back to his work, removing a scrap of burlap with a bravura air. “Ah. A masterpiece,” he pronounced, looking at the sticky brown plate whose outcome was yet to be seen. “You know what you should do?” he said. “Just scratch out what you’re doing. Just scratch it out. That’s what abstraction is. Taking something and refining it to its essentials. Not that there are any essentials in that mess,” he added. Without looking down, she began viciously scratching at her drawing. He smirked. “You might vary the texture,” he advised her.

Weesie and Philip leaned over the acid bath companionably, watching the lines of bubbles eat away where the zinc had been exposed. The bubbles looked like the ones that formed on your skin if you stayed in the tub long enough. Philip removed his plate and put some more brown sticky stuff in spots; those spots would be less deeply etched than the others. “It’s an exercise in corrosion,” he said—something he knew more about than most people. “Process. Process. That’s the whole thing. Process, not product. To involve the viewer in the process, to expose the process so that people can like get into it. Action painting. Yeah!” he said, swooping his zinc plate back in with an endangering splash. “Philip!” He giggled. “That’s acid . You could have gotten my eye .” “Sorry, sorry. Sorry, sorry.” Flamboyantly gay, he mashed his greasy glasses up his nose with his square white hand and grinned at her. The smell of acid prickled on the nostrils like bleach.

They got to oils at last. Weesie quickly developed an accustomed spot before the easel. Within a few weeks, students sat around kibbitzing--watching. “ You are just an artist. I am an artiste,” said Philip to Weesie, pushing his greasy glasses up his little nose with a harsh movement and a smile on his lips, sharply red on his dead-white face. He tossed his bangs off the lenses and made himself more comfortable on the paint-stained counter, where he lounged like a portrait of an odalisque, though an odalisque in the east coast prep school uniform of tweed jacket, oxford shirt, and jeans.

A girl with the oversensitive face of one who cultivates melancholy kicked his work-booted foot with her ballet pumps. “Oo, that’s a tough answer,” Philip continued. “Yeah, now I really feel untalented.” “Up yours, Philip,” said the girl, without energy, evidently accustomed or resigned to his jibes. Another boy, with the refined, good-humored face and curly hair of an archetype that could be labeled “Sensitive intellectual cosmopolitan,” scratched away at an etching plate. He looked up at Philip and the girl who wore her gloom as an attraction. “You two -- you should be in vaudeville.”

The pair were always at loggerheads in the art room. She did traditional, representational work, very pretty--“decorative,” as Philip liked to say, scathingly. He did slabby, drippy abstractions, as messy as his flapping shirttails and the unwashed bangs that swung down to the tip of his nose. “Me, maybe,” said Philip, the critic, “but who would want her ?” “Jesus, Philip,” said a lanky girl in workboots. She was drawing him and either making him unrecognizably handsome or erasing that and having his chin come out grotesque when she tried to show the puff of fat underneath. “You should just be put away.” He grinned happily, as if he’d been paid a compliment, and pushed the glasses up again, tossing aside the bangs that had grown over his eyes. “Now, Weesie here--” “--Louise,” corrected the refined, good-humored boy, his cheeks pursing with suppressed laughter. Weesie had recently taken to asking people to use her real name. “ Louise -- has obviously looked at art. Looked and actually seen , unlike you bozos.” A kind of private smile appeared on almost every face at this insult, as if it were a love pat. “Oi oi oi ,” Weesie singsonged, continuing to wield her brush. “With friends like you, dahling . . .” She paused to study the effect of her marks, without turning around. “Oh, you mean just because she’s doing abstractions ,” said the melancholy girl, rolling her eyes. “Yes, just because she’s doing abstractions! That’s more than you could do. You’d want to put in flowers or some maiden in a dress . “Aw,” he said, “now I’ve made her cry.” The oversensitive girl blinked rapidly but said, “How could anyone take you seriously enough to make them cry?” Shortly thereafter, she slipped off the drawing table’s Jackson Pollock surface and slid from the art room.

Weesie sighed and stepped back for a better view of her creation. Bumping into a piece of furniture, she glanced behind her. “Jesus, don’t all watch me or anything,” she said, seeing that no one was doing their own work. “We just can’t help but be in awe of your artistic prowess,” said Philip. A rare serious note came into his voice. “Really. That looks like a real painting. A painting by an adult. Not like the amateur shit that’s all you see around here, with all their adolescent emotion . That’s a real painting,” he repeated. “It’s about --form.” He purled a plump but surprisingly manly white hand through the air. Weesie looked behind her toward his seal-like shape, stretched on one elbow along the counter, and went back to her work. “No no no no no!” he cried as she added three red dabs to her composition in blue, gray, and white. “Aah,” he said, sitting up and clutching his heart. She didn’t respond. He sighed. “Oh. All right.”

A teacher who had an office on this barn hallway leaned in, swiveled his head around, switched on the overhead lights, and withdrew. “Narc,” said the limp, unpretending, good-natured boy, of whom almost everyone felt protectively fond. “Yeah, just checking up,” said the lanky girl, “Never know what students might get up to if you leave them alone together.” “We might make art or something,” said the good-natured boy, including everyone. The fluorescent lights snapped. One of them flickered like lightning for a minute and then steadied, buzzing, like a rebuke to them for being inside while it was still light. A harsh atmosphere, like a hospital waiting room in the middle of the night, took over the studio despite its skylight. Someone switched the lights off again, zapping it. “Thank you !” said several. Thereafter, the only sound was the scratchings and scrapings of their industry.

Some of Adam's Writings

Fred Nemo has collected some of Adam's Writings and has kindly passed them on.
I post them below with thanks to Fred for his efforts in finding some traces of Adam's work.

Fred also has some photocopies of Advocate articles written before digitalization which I will try to scan and post later.

If you have any writings or letters you would like to add, please e mail them to blockd@masi.it

Letter - Changing Minds, Changing Bodies 2007

Friday, June 1, 2007

Changing minds, changing bodies

This week’s Newsweek has a letter responding to the previous cover story on gender identity. This person’s reaction was that the very idea that there were not two distinct sexual categories was “bone chilling,” a “grievous commentary on the fall of American morals. Have we strayed so far from the Bible that we have forgotten God created Adam and Eve?” Meanwhile, whereas the article largely concentrates on people who think they have the wrong equipment, the previous letter points out the reality that some people are born with both sets of equipment, or something in between. When your religious faith starts requiring you to deny actual reality, you need to get a new religion.

The same woman’s letter concludes, “Please don’t ask me to rethink gender.” This seems like the real crux of the issue. Even the nonbelievers like me don’t like having to rethink things we thought we knew. On gender identity, the Jeffrey Eugenides novel Middlesex is compelling, but for people already familiar enough with that issue to fling about expressions like “LGBT,” a documentary I saw on cable called Whole presented a rarer phenomenon. It dealt with people who wanted to become amputees, in some cases so desperately so that they’d resorted to home surgery or shooting off the offending limb (it was always a particular limb). Before you go dismissing these people as sick twists who need therapy, which was my initial reaction, listen to their stories. I remember one guy wore some kind of harness sometimes to feel like an amputee. Another had struggled years and years with his desire, therapy and all, but then found someone to operate on him and had no regrets about the surgery except not getting it earlier. If surgery immediately made him happy, and nothing else did, was it unethical for the doctor to operate?

There’ll probably never be enough of the wannabe amputees to constitute an identity group like transgendered people, but the idea does raise the same issue as people who want to alter their gender, about what is normal and whether it even matters if its normal. An Atlantic magazine cover story a few years ago, though largely sympathetic to the idea of people wanting sex changes, raised the idea that perhaps some people would not have felt themselves to be members of the other sex had they not known that there was a possibility that it could be done. In the future, technology will allow us even more new ways to make all sorts of changes to ourselves. Which of those changes will people begin to want when they learn about these possibilities, and which will become “identities”?

Letter from Adam Dexterity Test Oct 2007

Note to Fred Nemo Thursday, October 4, 2007

I Fail a Self-Devised Dexterity Test

So I’m walking home and I find some cents on the ground. There is always something pleasing about finding money on the ground, so much more pleasing than earning it. Or maybe that’s just me. I am listening to my iPod, but that alone is not enough to entirely distract me from noticing that I am walking alone, which I find boring. So I begin to manipulate the pennies in my right hand, and tried to count them. I found that, without looking at them, letting any out of my hand, or using the other hand, I couldn’t do it, although I could have guessed there were about twelve. An interesting experiment to try sometime.

I saw a black and white kitten too. It is the first time I have seen a cat on the street in Center City, at least without an apparent owner.

Note from Adam "12 Word Novel" Nov 2007

November 28, 2000 November 20, 2007


My 12-word novel

The NPR program On the Media has a Novel Challenge in which participants are invited to submit a “novel” in twelve words or less . This was my entry:

My life as a Movie:
childhood, 80 minutes; adulthood, 20; ambiguous ending.


Saturday, November 3, 2007

Candy Corn
Candy corn is the fruitcake of Halloween.


I lost the 12-word-novel contest

My favorite of the winners:

“There are no atheists in foxholes,” said the chaplain. “So get out.”

Adam's Letter to a Torture Supporter Nov 2007

Adam's letter to a torture supporter

What the supporter had written to the Philadelphia Inquirer on 11/16/07:
On the subject of torture, Gloria Gelman suggests that "our behavior is being judged by the rest of the world" (Letters, Nov. 9). The rest of the world and especially the terrorists are mocking us because we have become politically correct when it comes to terrorists. Does anyone actually believe that if we treat them with dignity they will tell us where their bombs are located? Waterboarding is a form of torture, but if it can save people from being killed or maimed, it is necessary.
Does it take another 9/11 for people to stop worrying about the welfare of terrorists? Let us be more concerned about the welfare of our children, grandchildren and all Americans who might be killed. We have to face reality when it comes to terrorists.

Elaine Lyons
Glassboro

My reply the same day:

It seems to me that your letter rests on two false assumptions. The first one is that torturing will be more efficacious in obtaining information. At least according to the many interrogation experts I have heard or read of who have written or spoken on the subject, this isn’t true. In fact, they say that developing a rapport with the captives can often extract information from very bad people, and that torture will often yield false information. (Obviously, this is also a risk of obtaining information in other ways, but the point is that torture is not a truth serum.) The second fallacy is the assumption that the prohibitions against torture primarily relate to the welfare of terrorists. The question is not simply whether we are prepared to torture terrorists. The question is whether torturing innocent people, as will inevitably happen, is an acceptable price to pay for any information that will come from the people who are truly terrorists. (There is also a third category of people, those who are not terrorists but may be sympathetic to them and/or have information that will be useful in identifying them.) I believe we prohibit torture to protect the innocent, just as we require search warrants and trials for criminal suspects.

For myself, I believe that torturing an Osama bin Laden might be morally acceptable if it would certainly save the lives of innocent people. However, the possibility of torturing an innocent person is so abhorrent to me that I don't believe it should be allowed as a matter of policy. The experience of other countries shows that allowing torture will inevitably lead to its use among people who turn out not to know anything. (To use an American example, it is clear now that large numbers of people transferred to Guantanemo Bay were not actually involved in terrorism or even insurgency, but it would not have been clear which ones those were when they were first picked up, and when the information they had would have been most useful. Could anyone have then reliably decided who to torture?) I tend to believe the experts that torture doesn't work well, and certainly not better than other methods. I remember hearing one (sorry, forget who, but he had decades of experience) on the radio say that the “ticking time bomb” scenario used to justify torture had never occurred in his experience. Thus it’s my belief that such a situation is so rare, and the possibility of torturing the wrong person so much more likely, that any interrogator who wants to torture should be so certain of guilt, and so sure it’s the best way of obtaining valuable information, that he should be prepared to accept legal consequences if he is, in fact, incorrect.

If you truly support torture and do think it is valuable, then you should be prepared to say that torturing an unknown number of innocents is worth that value, just as I will accept that there is an unknown possibilty that a particular piece of information that could be gained by torture will not be gained, and that therefore some other innocents will suffer.

She didn’t reply.


Sunday, November 18, 2007

Letter - January 2, 2008

Wednesday, January 2, 2008

Adam's answer to "When did disco die?" as posted on Wiki Answers

Although the backlash against disco gained momentum in 1978 with the success of Saturday Night Fever, there were still many successful disco songs over the next couple of years. July 12, 1979, was Disco Demolition Night at a Chicago White Sox game, and represented this backlash at its height. Fewer disco songs were being played on the radio by then, but disco sort of held on for another year so that Donna Summer's “On the Radio” was a hit in January 1980, Lipps, Inc.’s “Funkytown” was a worldwide smash in the spring, Michael Jackson’s “Rock with You” topped the US charts in February, and “Upside Down” by Diana Ross did the same as late as September. Ross’s follow-up single, “I’m Coming Out,” was also a big hit.

However, that was about the last hurrah. Groups like Chic, Boney M (popular in Europe), and the Village People had already declined in popularity. Donna Summer’s next hit was "The Wanderer,” which was in a different style. Until newer dance music like Michael Jackson's Thriller-era hits and early Madonna took hold, there were far fewer dance-oriented pop hits in the early 1980s as compared with 1978-1979. The biggest dance hits of 1981 were songs such as Blondie's “Rapture” and Olivia Newton-John’s “Physical” that weren’t disco, although Kool & the Gang's “Celebration” (#1 in February 1981) was sort of a bridge between disco and newer dance sounds, as was the Commodores hit “Lady You Bring Me Up.” The band Change (featuring Luther Vandross) had R&B hits that still sounded like disco into 1982; Earth, Wind, and Fire’s 1982 smash “Let's Groove” is funky disco, and even 1983's “Fall in Love with Me” has much of the same sound, but with a harder edge. Some people would make a case for even-later songs such as Kool and The Gang's “Fresh” (1985), but the production on these lacks the lushness of pure disco.

The disco sound was absorbed into newer dance sounds, especially house music, and it has recently made a comeback with songs by Madonna (“Hung Up”), Kylie Minogue, and other singers, though less so in the US than elsewhere. However, the original disco genre was almost completely dead by 1981, and certainly did not survive 1983.

No One Left on Earth Like Kris

No One Left on Earth Like Kris

by Don Baird

sf bay times - 11/15/01

It took me by complete surprise when I read it in an e-mail from a friend who obviously thought I knew about it already, as it had been in the gay newspapers locally but I somehow missed it. As far as I know, the queens didn't produce a makeshift shrine at the B of A on 18th and Castro like when Lucille Ball or Princess Diana died, so the actual news managed to evade me that our community lost a member who has always stood out in my mind as a true original, a master at her many creative endeavors, from her amazingly funny pitch-perfect work as a cartoonist, her incredible ability and masterful skill with the written word and the multitude of styles of writing she embraced over the years - poetry, prose, lyrics, speeches, sermons, spoken word and the nearly lost art of storytelling, perhaps what she was best at...

I believe I first met Kris Kovic at a staff meeting or party for a now-defunct local gay community paper we both worked for in the late 80's. She was a regular cartoonist whose contributions were hilarious depictions of dyke life, from ribald and sexually explicit to politically urbane and self-deprecating, Kris poked fun at the lesbian scene she was unquestionably a part of with a refreshing honesty and candor that really chiseled away at the walls of separatism between gay men and lesbians...

One time she invited us to one of her organized readings at Red Dora's Bearded Lady Café and we arrived just as they started to show a short film by a local dyke filmmaker. We were the only men present, me, Marc Geller and Adam Block. We took our seats and the film started, which was simply a series of odd tortuous things inflicted upon someone's penis, including pounding a nail in the end of it, and letting a jar of stunned wasps loose on it, and a few other choice, well beyond pleasurable manipulations. The dykes were roaring with laughter and various cat calls and when the lights were turned up they all turned around and looked at us and we looked back at them and we all burst into laughter. That was typical of Kris, pushing for a dynamic that was unfamiliar or unusual or just plain funny, linking varied people together who might not generally mix it up, often bringing talents together that could benefit from or inspire each other or collaborate or just have dialogue and conceive of new possibilities. She always seemed to be thinking of infinite possibilities and capabilities when considering her fellow artistic peers...

Her enthusiasm in this way never waned. One time about ten years ago Kris called myself and Marc Geller and Adam Block on the phone and asked if we would meet her at a bar in the Castro one early evening. We all assembled at the chosen place and Kris announced that it was her 40th birthday and after being clean and sober for eight years she had made the conscious decision to step off the wagon, and she couldn't think of three people she'd rather be in the company of for this auspicious occasion than us. I was so honored and couldn't help but think, if she's this much fun sober I can't even imagine how much fun she might be in her planned departure from abstinence. I was also reminded of her whole-hearted endorsement of my own proclivities towards certain illicit substances and the forthright pro-drug, pro-honesty mini-crusade I had begun in my columns. She supported my position and did so while she herself was still very much clean and sober. I was always impressed by this because in the late 80's AA groups were terribly rabid and overwhelmingly large and they knew it all and reminded me of the Jehovah witness people that used to go door to door when I was little with their glassy-eyed look and Night Of The Living Dead creepiness, telling you what to believe, knowing what you were and what you must do to save yourself...

Don, Adam and Dave

Don, Adam and Dave
by Don Baird

SF Bay Times - 7/27/95


As deadline rolled closer this week, I had never felt such a lost, unfocused, dreadful feeling that there was literally nothing to write about. Whenever that thought comes to mind, I know deep down that it really is not the case at all, but nevertheless, I still go through the motions of that certain anguish. It‚s like writers‚ block, but I could write if there were just something interesting to write about. It's faux writer's block, and when this affliction nails me, I break my frozen stare at the keyboard, pick up the phone and call fellow writer/rocker/culture vulture/drug taker Adam Block and see what he makes of this temporary drift in the doldrums. More often than not, this perks me right up, because Adam is a much more devout media monitor than I am. If there's something going on that I should know about in the areas of rock music, politics, star gossip or some absurd tidbit on the news that I could joyously vivify in that perverse, maverick, sick-fuck way for readers to enjoy or at least be shocked or amused by, Adam will let me in on It.

I phoned up and quickly stated my predicament to Adam, who responded, "Well, after that self-indulgent, why-can't-everybody-in-the-gay-community-just-get-along Dave Ford cover story with that picture of a guy sucking himself off, I wouldn't sweat it. You'll think of something."

I recalled the first few paragraphs of that particular article, remembering Dave's metaphorical reference to "dump truck-sized jello molds" of nutrition for the right wing in preparation for their wars/crusades, while the gay community feeds on itself, the less nutritional option. That is, except for the less tasty ones dipped in CK, chortle chortle ha ha. The article continues, dipping the community in a whole slew of socioeconomicaly far-fetched behaviors, activities and concerns that might lead one to believe that all fags and dykes are wealthy world-traveling bourgeois dilettantes who don't know where to eat when the Zuni isn't open on Mondays.

"How about that bit at the end that Dave Ford translates in Latin to: one who does nothing, and does it poorly‚" Adam continued. "Except compulsive shopping, something all fags do, according to Dave. And what about the cutesy way of apologizing for something and then continuing to do it in the article, like his run-on sentences."

"Yeah," I interjected with a hint of indignance. "Everyone knows I'm the champ in the run-on sentence department, only mine don't require any apologies, not for showy but senseless syntax or obtuse vocabulary choices."

"What's up with Dave these days, I wonder?" Adam said in disbelief.

"I'm not sure, but last time I saw him he was wearing a tie, looking all downtown and shit," I recalled, "I wouldn't doubt he's fallen prey to the Scientologists or something."

Adam resumed with a catch-you-up media report, while I wondered to myself if printing the gist of our conversation about Dave would be a good intro. Dave's a good sport and an old friend so he wouldn't get upset over a little ribbing. Maybe I'm wrong, though, maybe it would start a big rash of infighting at the Bay Times, then what would happen? Would we become the paper that eats itself, a microcosm of our troubled gay community and its never-ending "jungle red" kiss-and-kill bitch-fight tendencies which Dave speaks of? No, we'd probably Just laugh and throw our hands up and suc?cumb to the one activity or weakness shared by our illustrious community and just go shopping together like girlfriends˜with trust funds...


Enough of that, Lord knows how counterproductive in-fighting can be, downright cannibalistic even. Adam Block's area of expertise is most definitely Rock music, so that's what he dove into, rattling off tidbits of info, new releases, recent faves. Of course the first order of business in that particular vein was Courtney Love. We love Courtney Love just for her sheer fucked-up-edness...


Adam and I were cackling over all this stuff, and then he asked me if I was going to this year's Lollapalooza. I immediately said no. He said he was going to until he found out that Sinead O‚Connor had dropped out of the tour. No, Courtney had nothing to do with this departure as rumored. Sinead dropped out because she's pregnant with her second child. This news made me even more certain of my decision to skip the show, but suddenly I remembered that my dear friend Margaret (who I attended my first and only Lollapalooza with) told me that a film she developed conceptually and also starred in was being shown in the featured film tent at the Lollapalooza and I simply couldn't miss it. It's entitled Cream Corn Wrestling, which apparently she does, and thought it up all on her own. So I guess I'll be going. For you readers who are attending this year, don't forget to bring lots of cigarettes, for they are not sold anywhere at the Shoreline, which totally sucks. Plus, you'd be surprised what a teenage boy on Ecstasy with a slight sunstroke would do for a cigarette sometimes. You'll be surprised at the great number of brilliant-looking shirtless males around you. It's practically overwhelming, but don't be too confident of this event and its New Age positivity raising the con?sciousness of the crowd to new heights of socio-cultural harmony. I got called fag a handful of times by youngsters in groups, and youngsters come a lot bigger these days than they used to.

Adam and I ended our chat on the phone with him telling me in detail about the graphic testimony given in court by a girl named Jewel who was dutifully sexed up by David Koresh of the Branch Davidians. When it was all over, he told her to take a shower. She came back to the room clean and fully clothed, the bed was made and he then read to her from the Book of Solomon. You know there are records and CDs available of David Koresh performing rock and roll, his second passion in life...