Author: Helen Boyd

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John Money, 84, Dies

For more obituaries and articles, check the mHB message boards.

After consulting with Dr. Money in 1966, the parents of a young boy whose penis had been destroyed in a botched circumcision decided to raise their son as a girl. In 1973, Dr. Money reported that the child, who had been castrated and furnished with dresses and dolls, was doing well, and had accepted the new identity as a girl.
But in a 1997 report in The Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, a pair of researchers provided a detailed follow-up: the boy had repudiated his female identity at age 14 and had even had surgery to reconstruct his genitals.
The report caused an uproar, and Dr. Money was criticized in news reports and in a book on the case.
In 2004, the man who had reclaimed his sex committed suicide. His family blamed the effort to change his sex.
Dr. Money was mortified by the case, colleagues said, and as a rule did not discuss it. “Given what the field knew at the time, Money made the right call about what to do” with the child, said Dr. Richard Green, a former colleague and an emeritus professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. “It’s easy in hindsight to say it was wrong, but I would have done the same thing.”

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Bleary-Eyed

I was hellbent on finishing a complete draft tonight, and though at one point I was actually wondering whether I intended to write “horse” or “house,” I did it. I may wake up tomorrow and decide that nothing I wrote in the past few hours makes a damn bit of sense, but the important thing to me, right now, is that I have the shape of the whole book.
That said, there is still a lot more work to be done, so I’m off to sleep. It’s nice to get to bed early enough to squeeze in an hour or so next to my honey.

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I (heart) Buster Keaton

I haven’t quite given up on my youtube.com addiction, but instead of hunting out 80s music videos, I’ve been hunting up other interesting things.
And by “other interesting things” I mostly mean Buster Keaton clips. Because (I confess) I love him.
There are a couple of Buster montages that have been set to music (like a Sherlock Jr. trailer that’s set to Air’s “Sexy Boy” and a montage set to ELO’s “Don’t Bring Me Down”) but one of them actually made me cry because it’s just that beautiful. The montage is all of Buster’s romantic scenes with his leading ladies* set to the very treacly but effective “Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman?” by Bryan Adams.
And since I’m supposed to mention gender, do notice that some of Buster’s “I’m so in love with this crazy girl” moments are very fey, indeed. The scene from One Week where Buster’s character finds his on-screen wife drawing hearts on the wall of their new house is especially cute.
Of course my ultimate goal is to make damfinos of the lot of you. Or at least convince you that Buster was not just about gags, but also had a screen presence like no other, was a stuntman like no other, and directed with the best of them. There are moments in the love scenes where the expression on his face is heart-wrenching.
_______________________
* The very last leading lady in the montage is Eleanor Keaton, the wife who made Buster very, very happy toward the end of his life, after a bunch of crappy years and two bad marriages. That’s what made me cry, in the end; it was a very romantic touch.

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Book Covers


Betty took this photo of me not too long ago, and the funny thing about it was that we accidentally got some nifty stuff in the background: the beige thing, far left is (1) a galley copy of Virginia Erhardt’s upcoming book Head Over Heels: Wives Who Stay with Crossdressers and Transsexuals (Haworth, Winter 2007); the reddish thing, taped to the wall is (2) mock-up of a groovy cover by our own Lucy & Mary, which unfortunately got rejected for being “too abstract” but which I really loved, and right behind my head, with white text, is (3) the current mock-up of the intended cover, but with a model who is not Betty.

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Gay Marriage in NY – Not a No-Brainer, Apparently

Congressman Anthony Weiner, a Brooklyn Democrat, said, “This must be the way people felt when the Dred Scott decision came down.”

and

Out gay Senator Tom Duane, also a Chelsea Democrat, was perhaps the angriest speaker of all. “I guess the best legal minds in our community cannot go up against a bunch of Neanderthals,” referring to the court majority.

and

West Side Democratic Congressman Jerry Nadler, said, “We must not vote to confirm any judge who does not support same-sex marriage,” a question that doesn’t seem to have been raised by anyone in the 12 years Republican Governor George Pataki has been packing the courts with right-wing judges.

(All courtesy of Gay City News, and thanks to Andrea for supplying the link.)

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Study: Aeneas, Part 4

box surprise
What cats find comfortable baffles me, though my boy is particularly fond of cardboard boxes, even moreso than the average cat. I call them his square cardboard wombs.
Do notice the Zappo’s box – they contained my birthday shoes, Megans by Dansko:

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They're Not Just Surprised Women Can Count, Either

In response to my post of earlier today, a friend writes:

Just to let you know, black folks get this one all of the time. He is so “well spoken” and “eloquent” as if the assumption that you are black that you cannot be well spoken. Think about it, when was the last time you heard of a white male or female thought of as well spoken? There is a tacit assumption that all white folks, both male and female of a certain class are inherenlty able to use the english language. While it is of course the exception not the rule for black folks.

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Melinda Gates

The good news: there’s an article in today’s NY Times about Melinda Gates, who largely runs the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
The bad news: the tone of this article, which in talking about Ms. Gates’ accomplishments, seems to sound a little like, “look! we found a horse who can count up to 10 with his hoof!”
Why is this acceptable in this day and age? Why is it so astonishing that a woman with an MBA from Duke who married an equal is smart? Or that her husband respects her intelligence and engages her at a very high level?

But to portray Mr. Gates as the analytic strategist and Ms. Gates as the humanizing influence, the nurturing woman, would be a stereotypical distortion of their partnership, former foundation officials said.

Well then why bring it up at all?
And where’s the profile on the woman who just left the Foundation to run CARE instead? Do we only report on smart, successful women who happen to be married to famous guys?
Thanks to Joanne for the article. There’s a reason I can barely stand to read the papers some days.