Every Day Is Lesbian Day

Quick hi from Wyoming, where at the lodge's breakfast this morning a white haired gent wore a t-shirt emblazoned with, "Even duct tape can't fix stupid." Did you realize Wyoming's motto is "Equal Rights" and that it is the least populous of all fifty states?

Which brings us to the epic short story, Tits-up in a Ditch, by Annie Proulx in The New Yorker's fiction double issue (June 9 & 16). It's mandatory reading and not just because it coolly decimates contemporary Wyoming and includes a lesbian soldier and two (off-screen) lesbian goat farmers. A comment by a rancher in Tits-up in a Ditch gives Proulx's third collection of Wyoming stories its title, Fine Just the Way It Is, to be published in September. Her first such collection, Close Range, contains Brokeback Mountain.

As for another PEN/Faulkner Award winner, Kate Christensen's novel The Great Man, recently out in paperback, is about three women connected to a deceased famous portraitist in New York: his mistress, his wife, and his sister, a butch lesbian abstract painter. One of Christensen's earlier novels, Jeremy Thrane, is about a gay man in a longterm relationship with a closeted movie star.

An adaptation of a knockout novel with 100% lesbian themes, which takes place in the world of clairvoyants and gentle ladies who charitably visit women's prisons in Victorian London, Sarah Waters' Affinity, is the opening night film of Frameline tonight in San Francisco.

Another international film, The Edge of Heaven, playing across America this summer, features a lesbian couple at the center of its multiple storylines crisscrossing Germany and Turkey. Made by Fatih Akin, the director of Head-On, it has garnered rave reviews and many awards: best screenplay at Cannes, best screenplay at the European Film Awards, and it won four top prizes at the German Film Awards including Best Picture and Best Director.