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Political football
The right to sue may be tossed around for the next year.
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[10/11/99]

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[10/08/99]

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Back pain is no guarantee your doctor will see you, even at the best clinic.
By Stephen G. Bloom
[10/07/99]

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I was a little leery about subjecting myself to the 12-step way. I see many gay men -- having suffered the fallout of obsessive-compulsive behavior and various addictions -- who have turned to 12-step groups like a new drug, and sometimes the effects are as numbing as any pill they could pop in at any club. In an attempt to remove pain completely from their lives, they walk around like Stepford wives with pecs. They don't drink, smoke or do drugs. They smile a lot, and hug one another, like the Teletubbies. They are the new gay fascists -- skeptical of irony, downright hostile to whatever constituted a "bad attitude," yet still looking for the supreme male specimen. (That never changes.) Luckily they're in the minority of gay men.

Finding the Boyfriend Within By Brad Gooch Simon & Schuster, 192 pages Nonfiction Buy Finding the Boyfriend Within by Brad Gooch Also Today You've got male How did America Online become the bathhouse of the Internet? Size matters. By Michael Alvear

But the bottom line was that I was suffering. I needed -- and was willing -- to experience the shock of recognition, so I went. For the record, this meeting wasn't full of gay Stepfords; these were men who were feeling all kinds of things, including an inordinate degree of negativity and isolation, and by the end I felt lightheaded from a mixture of empathy and despondency. But there was a moment of levity: During the meeting one of the participants wryly mentioned a new book of self-help he'd bought, called "Finding The Boyfriend Within," and even in a roomful of co-dependent gay men in pain, this was greeted with a hearty, knowing laugh. Apparently, more than a few had been down this path before.

Gay men in particular seem to be ideal customers for the self-improvement trade, whether they're self-anesthetizing types or smart people simply struggling with the external pressures of homophobia as well as the internal pressures of maintaining body and soul in an extremely unforgiving queer world. Books like "The Principles: The Gay Man's Guide to Getting (And Keeping) Mr. Right" and "How to Survive Your Own Gay Life" reflect this. "Finding the Boyfriend Within," the newest addition to the canon, was written by Brad Gooch, former model. For those familiar with Gooch's work, you could see this coming from the Fire Island Ferry, and revel in the delirious preciousness of it all. The author of one respectable book ("City Poet," a biography of Frank O'Hara), this is also the same man who only a few years ago wrote a novel called "The Golden Age of Promiscuity," with its cover art a glory hole. Not one to lag behind the times, Gooch has now embraced the healing power of aloneness. (That for many gay men there is a direct corollary between promiscuity and being alone is one of the many ironies Gooch glosses over.) Whatever you want to say about the age of promiscuity, it wasn't golden, and neither is celibacy, but unfortunately those are too often the only choices gay men give themselves.

Next page | Could I find the self-love to be my own boyfriend?