Those interesting little intersections between my gay heritage and my science-fiction geek child heritage. On a Facebook page I follow, dedicated to Retro Sci-Fi good stuff, someone posted the trailer to the George Pal film version of Frank M. Robinson’s novel, The Power. I wrote in the comments…

If you haven’t watched this, see if you can find the novel it is based on by Frank M. Robinson and read that first. It pulls a pretty impressive rabbit out of the hat at the end that you don’t see coming and the movie had a hard time giving it the same kind of impact. Pal gave it his best shot but he went for the science-fiction visuals and the book reads more like a dark cinema noir detective story.

I’d bought my copy whilst browsing the paperback shelves on the basis that it had been made into a George Pal movie and I was a fan of his. But it was better I read the book first, because as I say there it really throws you a very clever plot twist at the end that you don’t see coming, but it retrospect it was all there. Robinson played fair. And as I said, it read more like a dark cinema noir detective story than a science fiction thriller about a man with superhuman powers of mind over matter. It’s a good read…I highly recommend it.

While googling more about it I discovered this, from Robinson’s obituary in the New York Times…

Frank M. Robinson, a well-regarded science fiction writer whose credits include a novel adapted for the 1974 blockbuster film “The Towering Inferno”,and who was also a speechwriter and adviser to Harvey Milk, the San Francisco city supervisor assassinated in 1978, died on Monday at his home in San Francisco. He was 87…

He made his name as a writer on the basis of The Power, and got screen co-credit for two Irwin Allen blockbusters and with that money settled in San Francisco where he met Harvey Milk and worked for him as a speechwriter. He had a small role in the movie Milk and its star Sean Penn interviewed him extensively about his memories of Harvey…

Mr. Robinson had little or no dialogue in most of his scenes. But at one point he improvised a line, standing at a window to shout a profane coming-out announcement about his sexuality. I’ll tell my brothers!” he said. Mr. Van Sant liked the moment well enough to film it a second time.

Mr. Robinson had never told anyone in his family that he was gay, neither his parents nor his four brothers. And though the scene did not end up in the film, saying the words had made him tremble with emotion, he told The Chicago Reader. It had been his coming out.

“I suddenly realized I was saying goodbye to all that baggage.”

Power, power, who had the power…? You did Frank. Well done.

I just received my copy of Republican Gomorrah and cracked it open (after doing the usual book binding break-in thing…you all do this with the new books you get…right…?).  The book is subtitled: Inside the movement that shattered the party.  It purports to be about how the religious right subverted, then dominated republican party politics.

Opening it to the page after the dedications page, I came across this quote…

The great difference between people in this world is not between the rich and the poor
or the good and the evil.  The biggest of all differences in this world is between the ones
that have had or have pleasure in love and those that haven’t and hadn’t any pleasure in love,
but just watched it with envy, sick envy.

–Tennessee Williams, Sweet Bird of Youth, Act I 

I expect the author Max Blumenthal, understands his subject completely…

Anyone visiting my house for even a few minutes can see what a book lover I am.  Casa del Garrett is full of book cases and book shelves and they’re full of books I’ve been collecting since I was a kid.  Somehow during the move from Rockville to Baltimore I lost two boxes full of paperbacks and I still grieve over the loss of some of them.  But to all you Star Trek fans out there I still have, for example, a bunch of first editions of James Blish’s Star Trek books, including a first printing of Spock Must Die which was the first original Star Trek novel ever published. 

I have a first printing of Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001 in paperback, first editions in hardback of all his later sequels, 2010, 2061, and 3001.  A first hardback edition of The Songs of Distant Earth.  A first paperback printing of his Fountains of Paradise.  I have hardback first editions of Mary Renault’s The Fire From Heaven and The Persian Boy, and the paperback first edition of Funeral Games.  The seemingly odd mix of hardback and paperback editions tracks with times I had the money for the hardback and times I didn’t.

I have tons of other first editions on my bookshelves.  I tell you this not to present myself as a book collector, but just simply as a reader.  I keep nearly all the books I read.  Unless I really hate it, like I absolutely despise Frank Herbert’s Soul Catcher, which I threw across the room when I was finished with it, or unless a book bores me to tears, it will generally find a permanent home on my shelves..not as a collector’s item, but as something to pick up and read a passage from again, if not the whole thing, every so often. 

I love books.  They have been my escape ever since I was a kid. I can’t remember how many times I got caught in class reading a paperback hidden behind a textbook.  One teacher, who managed to make the history of World War II boring, gave me a good chewing out in front of the class for about ten minutes, demanding to know if my copy of Louis L’amour’s Flint was more important then history class.  It was all I could do to keep biting my tongue and not telling him no, just his history class.

I love to read.  I spend more time at home now web surfing then watching TV because it is an act of reading and what is more, discovering links between the things I am reading and other things I’ve never read before, as opposed to passively being entertained by the tube.  I am not at all averse to seeing words on a computer screen.  In fact I love it.  I love the way one thing can link to another, and then to another still.   I love how you can browse entire libraries of books and essays and articles on this and that all from home.  The Internet is the best encylopedia ever, the best instruction manual ever, the best library ever.  You can explore.  And it took me all of about a minute to get sick, thoroughly sick, of the hype over Amazon’s new Kindle…which is like the old Kindle, only new. 

Yes books take up space.  Yes, it would be nice to be able to read anything from my personal library while away from home.  Books weigh tons.  I’ve moved several times on the way from Rockville where I grew up to Casa del Garrett and I can tell you almost half the mass of moving my stuff is in the form of books…many, many boxes of them that just about break your back.  It would be nice to just have much of it, if not all, in electric form.  There’s a scene in Arthur C. Clarke’s The Songs of Distant Earth, where a space traveler reverently takes out of a sealed container his prize posession: a first edition of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories.  It was a prize because books off earth were so rare…almost non-existant.  If our books are to journey with us to the stars, they’ll have to weigh a whole lot less.

But here’s the problem:  Suppose you were offered a book that could only be read with a pair of reading glasses made by the publisher of the book.  Oh…and the glasses will cost you $360 dollars.  But you could use them to read a whole lot of other books from that same publisher.  But all those books could only be read by those glasses.  And whether or not those glasses kept on working was solely at the discretion of the publisher of those books.  Doesn’t take much thinking to realize that all you are buying when you purchase those books, is a dust jacket only those glasses can open up…not the right to read what is inside.  Those books can be closed forever to you, at the discretion of the publisher, at any time.

And it gets worse.  Suppose somebody decides that the contents of a particular book are offensive in some way.  Maybe its sex.  Maybe it’s political.  Maybe its an expose’ of corporate malfeasance that somebody in some corporate boardroom somewhere decides you shouldn’t be able to read anymore.  A flick of the switch from corporate headquarters and any book in that library suddenly vanishes…like it never existed.  And it happens to all the copies of that book, in everyone’s personal library, all over the world.  Just like that.  Snap.  Gone.  Censorship was never so easy, so simple, so beautifully invisiable.  What book?  There was never any such book.

No thank you.  I learned to read before I entered grade school.  I still remember a bit of how difficult it was to get what all those marks on the paper were telling me.  But mom was patient and eventually I got the hang of it and that was my key to the world books opened up for me.  And what a world.  Down the Navajo Trail, along the back alleys and side streets of Old London, across the sea to Treasure Island, down Persia to Babylon with Alexander and through the stargate and back again.  Corporate America can have my ability to read when they pry it from my cold dead eyes.

I’ve been seeing the "news" headline pop up on my Google News page, that Stan Lee is working on a new gay superhero he’s planning to debut soon.  Swell, thinks I, another mainstream gay stereotype, only this time in tights, is just what we need.  Not.  But no…as it turns out, there’s more to it.  Lots more.  Would you believe, that the actual creator of this new gay superhero, Perry Moore, is a gay Christian and the executive producer on the Chronicles of Narnia films?

Boy Gets Boy, Saves Earth: A Gay Christian Writer’s Plan to Change the World

What the hell do you care for the people of this planet?” a powerful savior-turned-villain bellows at Thom Creed, the eponymous teenage superhero in Perry Moore’s Lambda Award-winning novel, Hero. “They hate you, they call you names and they’re ashamed of you,” the bad guy says as he prepares to unleash a terrifying monster known as the Planet Eater. “You know I’m telling the truth. You’re all so stupid, and you’re killing this world anyway. I’m just giving you a little nudge, a gentle push.” Perhaps it’s not giving too much away to reveal that Thom, a young gay man whose sexuality is only one of several special gifts, manages to save the Earth and find true love by the novel’s last pages.

That dramatic arc may be unremarkable in a story where a boy-hero wins the heart of his ladylove, but as the scion of a literary genre—comic books—in which gay characters tend to meet a gruesome end, Hero is nothing short of revolutionary. And as Moore puts the finishing touches on the serialized small-screen adaptation of his novel for Showtime, it appears that the revolution will indeed be televised.

“Look at these tent-pole gay movies like Milk and Brokeback that straight people get behind,” Moore said in a telephone interview from his home in New York City. “The heroes die terrible deaths or endure terrible tragedies. And the characters like us that we see on TV are often the gay version of the Stepin Fetchit stereotype. Mine will be the first show where the gay character is a true hero and he isn’t doomed.”

Well Perry Moore has just won himself a fan.  That Tragic Gay Ending is one of my biggest beefs with mainstream pop culture’s representation of us.  Same sex love isn’t allowed to win.  It has to die horribly.  Either that, or the gay characters aren’t allowed to be whole people, just soulless, sexless, Stepin Fetchit stereotypes. 

“God has a really big mission for me,” says Moore, who’s producing the Showtime series with Stan Lee, the former head of Marvel Comics who has supervised the development of successful crossover storylines like Spider-Man, the X-Men, Iron Man and the Hulk. “A younger generation needs to supplant the older generation of bigots—that’s why Thom’s story is important.”

Ohhh…  Take that James Dobson.  I gotta go buy me this book…

The Polaris II from The Space Explorers. Well…actually, it’s Weltraum Schiff 1 from the German film Weltraum schiff 1 startet.

Back in the 1950s, William Clayton and Fred Ladd combined several films into one they serialized and syndicated to local TV stations for use on their daytime children’s shows. I was a pre-schooler and the stars in the night sky were fascinating. Mom bought me a little “Golden Nature Guide” book on stars…

…which, as you can see, I’ve kept all these years. That book I think, was my first step into the world of learning, and what it taught me about the heavens above was a revelation. The sky above was beautiful, mysterious, and yet understandable. My world, which until then compassed only the backyard of the apartment complex we lived in, and a small shopping plaza just down the street, suddenly became huge.

There were other kid’s space shows on TV back then, but The Space Explorers stuck in my imagination…largely for the beautiful imagery and background music Clayton and Ladd chose. One of the films they used was a Czech Russian educational film titled, Universe, which lent The Space Explorers some absolutely riveting (to my pre-school eyes) artwork of the stars, planets and moons. I have tried for years to get a copy of the whole, thing, but I suspect all the various copyrights to all the pieces Clayton and Ladd used to make The Space Explorers are just too hard to get all in a row and still make it worthwhile to put on DVD. But I am stumbling across more and more of the parts on YouTube now, and what’s impressive to me at age 55, is how detailed my memory of that cartoon serial was, compared with other things I watched from that period in my life.

In my scrap books are some of my earliest sketches and drawings and that little art deco spaceship is there among them. I tried for years to find a model of it somewhere. Finally, a small enthusiast shop, Fantastic Plastic, has come out with a model you can build. If this is the sort of thing that strikes your fancy, then you might want to explore their online catalog, as it is full of all sorts of spacecraft, well known and obscure, from science-fiction films past and present. I ordered two…one for practice since I haven’t built a model anything in years. For most of the 1980s I worked as a freelance architectural model maker and built custom models of new buildings and parks from scratch. So I’m not entirely without some skills in that regard. But by now they’re probably very rusty. The kits came in the mail last week and unpacking them, and examining the pieces, I could feel the seven year old boy inside of me get all wide-eyed and excited again.

I won’t paint them quite like I see in the shots on the Fantastic Plastic page, but it’ll be close. I want to try for an effect that’s more like smooth aluminum metal then silver paint. That’s what’s going to take some time investigating and practicing and why I bought two kits instead of just one. And the windows should look like they’re being illuminated from within, not dark. But as I can’t install lights in this thing that’ll be a trick to accomplish with paint. But with the right touch of the brush I think I can do it. Eventually one is going down in the art room, and the other in my office at Space Telescope. I’ll post some shots of the finished work here.

One more thing: As I was composing this post, I decided I wanted to include a scan of that old book on stars mom gave me back in my pre-school days, because it was one of those small but important things, a touchstone, for the direction my life would eventually take. I’ve said before that I was blessed in a way, to have entered school shortly after Sputnik scared the hell out of The U.S., because suddenly there was an emphasis on getting America’s youth a good science education. When I went to scan the book, I took another look at the back cover. Here it is…

Each guide has been written by an outstanding authority on science education… A lot of the information in that book, printed in 1956, is dated now. But the spirit is even more relevant now after decades of republican party and religious right assaults on science, reason and knowledge, then it was even at the height of the cold war. Science is not a dry collection of facts on display in a museum or a textbook. Science is a way of knowledge, where knowledge is understood to be something you actively discover, not something you passively receive. A science textbook is not a bible. It is not a political diatribe. It Wants to be challenged. You are Supposed to have questions when you finish it. And you are supposed to be unafraid to ask them.

My little golden book of stars. A relic of the cold war. It was a time in America of stifling, absolutely stifling conformity. But for a moment, for one brief and shining moment, the nation understood clearly, in the shadow of a nuclear, not biblical Armageddon, that the way you fight totalitarianism is by teaching your young to how to think for themselves, and that the pursuit of knowledge is a great adventure.

Per the previous post…

Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection (Hardcover)
by John T. Cacioppo (Author), William Patrick (Author)

From Publishers Weekly
Eleanor Rigby might have been in worse shape than the Beatles imagined: not only lonely but angry, depressed and in ill health. University of Chicago research psychologist Cacioppo shows in studies that loneliness can be harmful to our overall well-being. Loneliness, he says, impairs the ability to feel trust and affection, and people who lack emotional intimacy are less able to exercise good judgment in socially ambiguous situations; this makes them more vulnerable to bullying as children and exploitation by unscrupulous salespeople in old age. But Cacioppo and Patrick (editor of the Journal of Life Sciences) want primarily to apply evolutionary psychology to explain how our brains have become hard-wired to have regular contact with others to aid survival. So intense is the need to connect, say the authors, that isolated individuals sometimes form parasocial relations with pets or TV characters. The authors’ advice for dealing with loneliness—psychotherapy, positive thinking, random acts of kindness—are overly general, but this isn’t a self-help book. It does present a solid scientific look at the physical and emotional impact of loneliness.

A Cry Unheard: New Insights into the Medical Consequences of Loneliness (Hardcover)
by James Lynch (Author)
"Thirty years ago, anyone blaming loneliness for physical illness would have been laughed at," the editors of Newsweek observed in a March 1998 cover story…" (more)

Amazon.com Review
We’re a lonely society. Twenty-five percent of American households consist of one person living alone; 50 percent of American marriages end in divorce (affecting more than a million children); 30 percent of American births in 1991 were to unmarried women. These factors are linked to an increased risk of premature death, according to loneliness specialist James J. Lynch, Ph.D., who has spent almost four decades clarifying how loneliness contributes to a marked increased risk of developing premature coronary heart disease. "Mortality rates in the United States for all causes of death, and not just for heart disease, are consistently higher for divorced, single, and widowed individuals of both sexes and all races," writes Lynch in A Cry Unheard: New Insights into the Medical Consequences of Loneliness. An important point in this book is that loneliness in childhood has "a significant impact on the incidence of serious disease and premature death decades later in adulthood." School failure is a major contributor to this problem. Children who fail in school are socially isolated and deficient in the language and communications skills that could help them overcome their isolation. Lynch also explores the links between loneliness and premature death, and describes the biological power of human dialogue–which, he says, is more intimate than sexual intercourse, because dialogue involves the heart, not just the body. This is not a fluffy, feel-good book. There are no quick tips, no instant relief from loneliness, no "do now" lists of activities. This book is for readers willing to delve into the subject of loneliness and health risk. Lynch wants you to understand the magnitude of the problem, which he presents in a style that is both academic (with plenty of statistics and graphs) and accessible. He also wants you to understand the complex solution: contact, companionship, and communication. –Joan Price

From Library Journal
Psychologist Lynch’s The Broken Heart: The Medical Consequences of Loneliness (1977) was the pioneering work that linked mental and emotional states to physical well-being. In A Cry Unheard, he expands on the connection between the stress of loneliness and the state of one’s health. Drawing from his own and others’ research, Lynch contends that loneliness has become a silent epidemic, leading to depression and early death. He points out that parents’ use of language and school failure can result in alienation and antisocial behavior, which sow the seeds of loneliness. And while we may seem more "connected" through technology, Lynch warns that technology-induced loneliness is likely to increase and result in even more medical problems. Loneliness, writes Lynch, is a lethal but avoidable poison. While not a "how-to" book, this is worthy of inclusion in larger consumer health collections.
-Valeria Long, Van Andel Research Inst., Grand Rapids, MI 

A lethal but avoidable poison…   I’ve tried for decades to avoid it and all it got me were friends who think I never tried hard enough.  This is why I don’t think I’m going to make it out of my fifties alive. 

"A Brabus Maybach," he said, as she turned her head in time to see him give the wheel a little pat. "The firm of Brabus extensively tweaks the product of Maybach, to produce one of these."
-From chapter 17 of Spook Country by William Gibson

I must go buy this book…

Some years ago, I was living in a basement in Wheaton Maryland, and trying to date this cute guy who lived nearby.  I knew him from a gay BBS we were both on.  One day he invited me over and we sat around chatting for a bit, and he popped this cartoon he said he really liked into his VCR.  It was called The Brave Little Toaster, and on that basis alone I think I’d never have so much as touched it.  It just sounded like one of those suffocatingly cute children’s things I used to absolutely hate when was a child myself.  But it caught my attention instantly.  There was, I could tell right away, an insightful, and playful, and very very smart mind behind it.

There’s a scene in the movie I still distinctly remember.  The little toaster is walking through a grassy field (on its four tiny little toaster legs) and it walks past a flower.  The flower glimpses its own reflection in the toaster’s chrome sides and instantly perks up, attracted to the beautiful reflection it sees.  No, says the toaster (I’m trying to recall the dialogue from memory here…), I’m not a flower.  But the flower doesn’t understand.  It leans closer to the reflection it sees, utterly entranced…delighted…yearning…  No, says the toaster again, distressed.  That’s you, not me.  I’m not a flower.  And the toaster walks away.  And all the flower knows is that the beautiful flower it saw just walked away from it, and when the toaster looks back, it sees the flower wilting. 

It was just a little toss-off scene in the film, not really bearing at all on the action.  But the depth of it stunned me.  And I thought to myself A gay man wrote this…

But my attention was also distracted at the time, ironically, by the cute guy in the room with me, who would soon walk away from me too, and I never looked closely enough at the film credits to know who the creator of all this magic was.  Well, now I do. 

Alas and damn… 

Sci-fi Writer Thomas Disch Commits Suicide

Science fiction writer and poet Thomas Disch has committed suicide. Disch died July 4 and his body was discovered July 5, according to the New York City Police Department. He was 68.

The author of popular sci-fi novels Camp Concentration and 334, Disch had been openly gay since 1968. Following the 2004 death of his partner, poet Charles Naylor, Disch reportedly began suffering from depression.

Awarded many honors for his fiction, including two O. Henry awards, the genre-bending Disch also published more than a half dozen books of poetry, a whimsical Child’s Garden of Grammar (1997); a history of speculative fiction, The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of (1998); and the Brave Little Toaster series for children.

It got him.  His other half died and it got him.  I could feel it myself that week, like a dark shadow hovering over the earth, patiently watching for stragglers.  And, reading Anna Quindlen’s review of the book The Brave Little Toaster was based on, makes me wish I’d read it first before seeing the movie…

The publisher optimistically says ”for both children and adults,” but what would the average 10-year-old make of the information that flowers can speak only in verse and that ”daisies, being among the simpler flowers, characteristically employ a rough sort of octosyllabic doggerel, but more evolved species, especially those in the tropics, can produce sestinas, rondeaux, and villanelles of the highest order”? Besides, most of the jokes are too good for children. Like C. S. Lewis’s Narnia chronicles or ”The Phantom Tollbooth” by Norton Juster, ”The Brave Little Toaster” is a wonderful book for a certain sort of eccentric adult. You know who you are. Buy it for your children; read it yourself.

Yeah…

"…before any of the small appliances who may be listening to this tale should begin to think that they might do the same thing, let them be warned: ELECTRICITY IS VERY DANGEROUS. Never play with old batteries! Never put your plug in a strange socket! And if you are in doubt about the voltage of the current where you are living, ask a major appliance.”

Damn.  Rest in peace Mr. Disch.  I wish I’d known how good you were when you were alive…

”Once a mortal, soon to be in Heaven, I may be

your best chance to distinguish yourself

as someone specially Blessed and bound for Glory

without going to a lot of trouble or expense …

Start with a little Tom My God shrine beside the BBQ

and before you can say Glory Be the whole back yard

and all its gardening tools are tax-deductible!

If your tax returns are challenged, show this poem

to the judge and ask him how many believers

constitute a Faith …”

But I know now.  And if you and Charles aren’t together now in some better place, at least you lived to see a world where the two of you could be together in our memory.

Number 248 in a series of comprehensive test questions…

Were you a childhood bookworm?  Would you have rather stayed home with a good book then joined your friends in a rousing game of baseball?  Which of these sad goodbyes brought tears to your eyes as you read…

1) "Shane…Come Back!"

2) "Mary Poppins…Come Back!"

Actually…I cried pretty bitterly when Jody killed Flag too.  Absolutely couldn’t bring myself to watch Old Yeller after that…

Stephanie Conntz’ Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage just came in the mail today, and already it looks like a completely absorbing read.  I suppose when I get done with it I’ll be even more disgusted whenever some yahoo starts babbling about how same-sex marriage completely outrages the Long Held Traditional Understanding Across All Societies And Cultures Of The Meaning Of Marriage Being Between A Man And A Woman. 

The problem with knowing chapter and verse how and why that those jackasses are completely wrong is that you still have to listen to them, and they don’t really give a flying fuck whether they know what the hell they’re talking about or not.