vulnerabile and undesirable

Jaime Woo writes in Meet Grindr : "Simkhai is an attractive, smart man with a warm smile who has maintained a vulnerability … I can only imagine how competitive the New York dating scene must have been for him to feel undesirable."

Oofta — my imagination fails me! J.S. looks to me like one very hot little puppy. It is, however, perhaps indicative of what a difference there is between the Toronto scene and the New York one and how different Woo's book might have been had he lived and written in the latter.

Name & Logo

Grindr creator Joel Simkhai gave these answers in an interview with the Daily Extra:

Xtra: Can you explain what the name and logo are about?

Simkhai: The word Grindr comes from a coffee grinder. We’re mixing people up together, a bit of a social stew. It is a little bit rough – not to mix, but to grind. Our design, logo, colouring – we wanted something a little bit tougher, rough. It’s also very masculine. It’s a masculine word, sound. We wanted something that wasn’t necessarily about being gay. It could be anything.

We looked at this notion of meeting people and the idea is very much a basic human need to relax and to socialize. I went back to primitive tribal arts in Africa and Polynesia. One of the things I saw was these primal masks. It brings us back to basics, primal needs. Socialization is the basis of humanity.

"Such Times": Get This Book!

Greetings, Colleagues--

At our meeting this past Wednesday, the first essay we discussed in The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered (Tom Cardamone, editor) was Jameson Currier's tribute to Christopher Coe's second (and, alas, final) novel,  Such Times.

I've had that book for many years but, like so many others on my shelves, just never got around to it.  But this weekend I finally read it--something I've vowed to do every time we've read an inspiring essay  in the various anthologies we've discussed over the years, but never before actually did.

Perhaps the best tribute I can pay to Coe is this: I've always been a fast reader (perhaps too fast), but it has been years since any book captivated me enough to finish 300-plus pages in three days. Don't get me wrong: It's not a perfect book by any means, any more than is its narrator, Timothy Springer.  But if there is such a thing as a character who is redeemed by his flaws (and I tend to think there is), it is he.

Don't take my word for it, though: Discover  Such Times  for yourself. (But read Currier's essay first.)

And if, like me, you have a bucket list of books about which you've read reviews or essays, do yourself a favor and make the time to read at least one of them. Even if the experience doesn't fully live up to your expectations, it's still worth taking a chance.

Cheers,
Steve Honley

Haunting Douglas

Richard Canning's essay on Ghost Dance in 50 Gay … [Blah-Blah-Blah] didn't interest me all that much in Douglas Wright but looking at excerpts from Leanne Pooley's documentary Haunting Douglas certainly has. I'm tempted to spring the $35 for a NTSC copy. Check it out!

Until the acropolis …

Some people tweet, others facebook, I tumblr … in particular my favorite aggregator of images on the web, Foonman's Spiritual Remedy:

Clayton Coots (1936–1984)

Frank Rich has written a haunting memoir in the May 26 issue of New York about an older man who befriended his seventeen-year-old self at a troubled moment in his adolescence. An exemplary "life in the shadows" of a revenant in our triumphalist parades.

Inaugural Hatchet Job Award

Adam Mars-Jones' review in the Observer  of Michael Cunningham's By Nightfall — "killingly fair-minded and viciously funny" — won the 2012 (inaugural) Hatchet Job award, given to the writer of "the angriest, funniest, most trenchant book review" to have appeared in the preceding year.