The Wockner Wire
Veteran gay journalist Rex Wockner flaunts his opinions in
"The Wockner Wire." Check in every Friday for a dose of politics and
entertainment according to Rex.
Squirm
Barbara Walters asked Ricky Martin if he's gay on her Oscar night
special. Ricky's talented mouth nearly stopped working as he tried to
respond:
Well, some, when they, when they have some -- sometimes,
some, some people from the media, when they have nothing to say, they
invent things. I'm not concerned about my reaction. I'm concerned about
my people's reactions. Like my nieces, they go to school
and they start reading things. My mom goes to the beauty parlor and
sexuality and homosexuality should not be a problem for anybody. I think
that sexuality is something that each individual should deal with in
their own way. And that's all I have to say about that. ... Thank you so
much for giving me the opportunity to express, the rumors. But, Barbara,
for some reason, I just don't feel like it [saying what my sexual
orientation is]. You know, it's, it's something so mine. I give it all
when I'm on stage. I give it all in interviews, but you've got to keep
something for yourself sometimes, and that's for me.
Barbara tried to coax it out of him, saying: "You know, you could stop
these rumors. You could say, as many artists have, 'Yes, I am gay,' or
you could say, 'No, I'm not.' I don't want to put you on the spot."
This approach got Babs nowhere so she concluded, "Of course ... if gay
people think you're gay and straight people think you're straight, hey,
it means a bigger audience."
"Exactly," replied Ricky.
Over the years we've watched other closeted celebrities squirm until they
were ready to say, "Yup, I'm gay." Their squirming looked a lot like
Ricky's.
Fingered
You may have heard about the latest homo research published in
Nature magazine, but many of the news articles were quite
confusing.
Let's try to simplify: Check out the relative lengths of someone's second
and fourth fingers on their right hand to learn how much androgen they
were exposed to in the womb and whether
they're therefore more likely to be gay.
In general men have shorter index fingers than ring fingers while in
women those fingers tend to be about the same length.
Lesbian fingers, however, have a tendency to follow the male pattern and
gay-male fingers have a tendency to exaggerate the male pattern --
meaning gay men got extra androgen in the womb and are hypermasculine
(well, some of us anyway).
This does fit with earlier research which found that the more older
brothers a man has the more likely it is he will be gay. Androgen levels
in the womb increase with each successive male fetus.
"It's possible that more androgen always results in more masculinity and
that in some cases hypermasculinity results in a gay orientation," said
University of California at Berkeley
researcher Marc Breedlove. "These data provide further evidence that
events early in life can influence human sexual orientation in adulthood.
... These data conflict with the idea that people just decide to be gay
because they weren't paying enough attention in Sunday school."
I'm a first-born male and as far as I can tell, my only brother, Gary, is
straight. When I hold my right hand up in front of my eyes, be it facing
inward or outward, I can't see much difference in the lengths of my
second and fourth fingers. But when I put my hand down on a piece of
paper and trace around my fingers, the index finger is clearly shorter. I
have therefore determined that I am male. Whether the difference is
enough to make me extra male, I don't know. But I am superhairy and
balding.
Dear Dr. Laura,
My legally registered domestic partner and I celebrated our fifth
anniversary this week by going for a hot-air balloon ride over the
Pacific coastline. It was expensive but five years is something to
celebrate.
Especially with malicious cretins like you evangelizing America's
rednecks to see us as "despicable ... unhealthy ... biological error(s)."
For all your straight listeners whose marriages or relationships have not
lasted five years, I shall pass on the secrets of our success.
We maintained independent lives rather than becoming joined at the hip,
we acknowledged on our second date that human males are not biologically
programmed for monogamy and dispensed with the whole jealousy abyss, we
kept our finances relatively separate so as to not fight over how we
spend each other's money, we are both involved in causes we care about
which means our relationship does not bear the onus of meeting all our
intellectual and social
needs, and we don't believe in any god-type stuff so we never argue about
religion.
Are these not the most common matters leading to divorce? Clearly, Jess
and I should dispense advice on the radio. When's your next vacation?
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