Jerry Smith was an All-Pro NFL football player for the Washington Redskins. His anonymous coming as gay led to teammate David Kopay's public coming out, which led to the eventual reality that hundreds of professional athletes are gay, lesbian, bisexual and even transgendered. Smith was a pioneer who didn't even want to be one.
The NFL has produced a series of short documentary segments about Smith's life and legacy as part of their 'A Football Life' series.
A friend posted a link to an article I wrote about Jerry Smith a decade ago. I also included two of his playing cards in Sporting Life, the exhibit I guest-curated for the San Francisco GLBT Historical Society in 2005. Poet and pal Alex Gildzen contextualizes it in his eloquent blog entry.
Readers of a certain age (i.e. older) may recall Spy Magazine's pithy and satirical features and columns, specifically those with a focus on New York's crass 1980s cultural buffet of absurdity. Before I had even finished my first novel (which was published second), the Logrolling in our Time column stuck out for its deft exposure of cronyism in mainstream publishing.
One author would write a praise-filled jacket blurb for a fellow author, and then, later on, that author would do the same for his/her colleague.
"See?" my frustrated twenty-something wannabe author self would mutter internally (and often externally). "That's why I'll never get a publishing deal!"
Actually, the reason was that my work at the time wasn't very good. But it is true; logrolling, that is. One famous author offers a generous superlative, and readers and potential reviewers are then supposed to be impressed enough to like that book. 'Well, Famous Author #45 says it's good, so it must be.'
And so, books get sold, and trees get felled. At least that's what my naive self thought was the derivation of the term logrolling; the publication of books led to trees being sacrificed for authorial ambition.
This is a photo of me with author David B. Feinberg at an ACT UP New York meeting at Cooper Union in 1990. Maybe it was 1991, or 1992. I don't remember.
What I do remember is my desire to capture us together while the meeting took place in the historic East Village hall, where the AIDS activism group, having outgrown its weekly space at the LGBT Community Center in the West Village, continued to develop ideas for protests and information-gathering groups in the fight against the AIDS pandemic.
On that early evening, some thought in the back of my mind might have been, "He's going to die some day, and this photo, with the very interesting checkerboard tile pattern, may be one of our only documented moments together."
As any blogger does, I'm interested in which topics interest my readers. I should not be surprised that one post, "The Body Electric," that continually gets the most views is about hunks, particularly model and veteran Alex Minsky.
Not surprisingly, when a man poses nude or nearly nude, as Minksy has done (repeatedly, thank goodness), I should also not have been surprised that the top search phrase for my blog, most recently, has little to do with my novels about a gay couple, one of them who is a paraplegic, but about the hottie.
For the record, and the guys who keep typing "Is Alex Minsky gay?", no, he is not. He is hot, and a self-described "modely model" who appreciates his gay fans.
Minsky has also generously shared info about another handsome veteran, Christopher Van Etten, a double amputee who has posed nude for photographer Michael Stokes. Check out more (possibly NSFW) photos on Stoke's Tumblr.
