Katha Pollitt and Andrew Sullivan

Hello, Andrew--Sorry I'm late. I got stuck in traffic going to and from my cheapskate Shangri-La, IKEA. Quite a slog, it turned out, for a bathmat and three jars of pickled herring!

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I have to say I like Paul Rudnick and I don't think it's because I'm a homophobe who likes to see gays camp up the cliches. Haven't seen In & Out, which my piano teacher, a very good judge of gay culture, thought was kind of dumb. but I loved Addams Family Values, which I saw 32 times when Sophie was six and seven and found it held up remarkably well. Also his movie reviews as Libby Gelman-Waxner for Premiere. I Hate Hamlet had me gasping for breath I laughed so hard. His AIDS play, Jeffrey, I enjoyed while I watched it, but then it fell apart when I thought about it later. I don't think he's a deep social thinker--but he's a clever guy. And--maybe I'm treading in quaky terrain here, but I'll plunge ahead recklessly anyway--I do think there's a gay culture, just as there is a Jewish culture, a black culture, a Manhattan-singles culture, an academic culture. Or perhaps there are several overlapping cultures for each of those groups.

Not every gay loves opera, just as not every Jew loves lox and bagels--but go to the Met, or City Opera and you'll see an awful lot of male couples. The Brooklyn Academy of Music is like Gay Pride Day with clothes on when Les Arts Florissants, the French Baroque opera company, comes to town. And ballet? Musical comedy? Barbra Streisand? You don't think when Vladimir Horowitz said "there are only three kinds of pianists: Jewish, homosexual, and bad" he was being homophobic and anti-Semitic, do you?

I think, as you say, there are moments when these cultures seem narrow and strangling, too inflected by marginalization. But then, a little later, that same culture can seem charming or subversive or comfortably familiar again. You write that blacks reject blaxploitation movies of the 60s and 70s--but that's not true any more! Those movies look different now. Nikki Giovanni, I read in the style section of the Times a while ago, collects black memorabilia--salt and pepper shakers, Mammy dolls, that sort of thing, which at the time of their original popularity were frankly racist objects. Culture is always changing, and the meaning of the past changes along with it.

Final note on Frank Sinatra. On NPR, Susan Stamberg went on for an hour, it seemed, about how fabulous "we all" thought he was, how sad "we all" now were and so forth. So: we stop at the toll booth for the New Jersey turnpike and the tolltaker has on a Frank Sinatra song. "He's dead," says Paul. "Yes and I'm happy," says the tolltaker. "I just won the Dead Pool. I picked him two years running. It's about time!"

Have a great weekend.

Cheers,
Katha

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