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From Phyllida's Desk

Beauty and Truth

It’s a truism that people become actors because they want to be someone else. But isn’t it true for everybody?

I went to a Christmas Eve party with a man I met a week earlier, at the holiday party at the Center for Fiction (formerly the Mercantile Library). Steve won me over because he told me, completely spontaneously, that I look like Bette Davis.  Read More 
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The Aesthetics of Porn

In the recent movie The Kids Are All Right, an early joke is that the lesbian couple watches gay male porn. When their fifteen-year-old son discovers their stash and wants to know why they don’t watch movies about women, his biological mother, played by Julianne Moore, tries valiantly to come up with logical explanations.  Read More 
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Disinterested Love

A couple of years ago, when I was a regular participant in a “bisexual social discussion group,” I used to have fun with a good friend, a bisexual man married to a woman, debating the difference between a bisexual man and a gay man married to a woman. We weren’t seriously trying to name names or define other people—it was more of an amusing unresolvable question, the middle-aged successor to those college dorm philosophy all-nighters that some people supposedly enjoyed as undergraduates.  Read More 
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Likes Spiders and Snakes, Hates Art

I’m thinking of the Jim Stafford song from 1974: “She said, "I don't like spiders and snakes, And that ain't what it takes to love me, You fool, you fool.”

Gorgeous, inspiring art, from Oceania to Dutch Masters, from Neolithic cave paintings to Picasso? Hate it, hate it hate it! I hate it all.

Snakes, frogs, scorpions, centipedes and spiders? Love ‘em! Can’t get enough hairy-legged, slimy or scaly creepy-crawlies.  Read More 
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