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Long or short, I can't help myself, I'm hooked on them. Whether it's obsessively figuring out which "friend" left a message calling me both fat and ugly, or what kind of toilet paper is best for my bum, I'm constantly making some sort of mental inventory of my crazy, queer life.
Still and all, I've never had it together enough to jot down my lists into a book. That's why I'm utterly mesmerized by the third edition of Leigh Rutledge's Gay Book of Lists. A tidy tome of homo highlights and lowlifes, this CliffsNotes to our queer culture embodies the characteristics of a lot of gay men I admire: It's shallow, dick-fixated and prone to stretching the truth to make a "homosexual love" connection.
Now, some of this stuff is pretty obvious. For instance, you'd expect a list of "renowned male nudes" to include Michelangelo's centerfold-worthy 15th-century sculpture of David as well as the 1972 Playgirl centerfold of a historically hirsute Burt Reynolds (the first male nude pictorial in any mainstream magazine). You'd also expect "hiding the salami" and "packing fudge" to be on any list of "colorful, slang expressions for butt-fucking." Beyond that, it doesn't take a gay brain surgeon to figure out the No. 1 lie sometimes told by gay men is: "My lover and I have an open relationship."
That aside, this fairly thin volume is a fascinating way to fill up from a buffet tray of idle gay gossip and cock-tale chatter perfect for any pool party.
For example, I didn't know the dude who ran naked across the stage at the 1974 Oscar ceremony, Robert Opel, was not only gay, but opened the first "leather" art gallery in San Francisco (where he was eventually murdered during the course of a robbery in 1979). And I was completely clueless that such disparate celebrities as Gene Shalit, Oral Roberts, Robert Guillaume and L. Ron Hubbard all had gay or bisexual sons. Who knew?
Besides taking pleasure in the outing of offspring of famous folk, this book made me a little sick to my stomach. How else could I react when I found out the list of items that have been removed from men's rectums in hospital emergency rooms include an ice pick, a cattle horn, a gun and a jeweler's saw? I also got queasy when I realized I've outlived almost all of the average life expectancies in eight African countries as a result of the impact of AIDS.
This book isn't as much of a bitchy downer as I might make it sound. Much more than a homo Harper's Index, it's actually a celebration of facts you're never going to hear on the evening news or read in any mainstream newspaper or magazine. Rather than putting our history in the margins, it puts in bold print stuff I've always wanted to find out (or at least without having to use the search engine Google, which, by the way, seems more captivated by gay sex than most perverts I know). For instance, did you know that the first use of the word "heterosexual" didn't appear until the 1890s, or that the first musical to celebrate anal sex was Hair? On the other hand, I'm pretty sure I could've gone my whole life without knowing six creative uses for semen or that dogs ejaculate about the same amount of semen as humans.
Believe it or not, this book even has a Portland connection. The last listing, on the next to the last list, tells the tale of two gay lovers who were buried together in the oldest cemetery in town in 1880. God bless William M. Evans and Dr. John T. Wells: Without this book, I'm sure I never would have known you.
By Leigh W. Rutledge (Alyson Books, 224 pages, $14.95)
WWeek 2015