Salon telephoned femme provocateur Camille Paglia for thoughts on Elizabeth Taylor, her ideal "Babylonian pagan woman -- the goddess Ishtar, the anti-Mary," with whom she has been obsessed since she was 11 or 12. From her many books of essays, you've already heard Paglia praise Taylor's "volcanic," "animalistic," "maternal" sexuality and complain about Hollywood's, and feminism's, efforts to "destroy" it in women ever since. Here, she also notes Taylor as gay buddy:
"It's interesting what a profound rapport she always had with gay men, beginning with Montgomery Clift. She was a great friend and counselor to him early on, when he was struggling with his homosexuality. Then when he had that terrible car crash that deformed his face, I've read that she ran down the road to his aid and saved his life by pulling his tongue out of his throat. It was a bloody scene -- he was choking to death. She always had a gift for intimate communication with both gay and straight men."
I suspect the Salon editor, mindful of the site's demographics, wanted to keep the topic on today's women -- particularly Meryl Streep ("she's always doing drag") and Gwyneth Paltrow's android skinniness -- rather than digging deeper into Taylor's queer connections. Unfortunately, they never discuss James Dean or Rock Hudson or George Cukor or Tennessee Williams or Michael Jackson, or Taylor's historic, heroic, hellfire determination to do something about aids when Hollywood and Washington desperately, despicably ignored the pandemic. Nor does Paglia mention lesbians' relationship to Taylor but she does comment on The Kids Are All Right:
"Lisa Cholodenko's The Kids Are All Right is a truly wonderful film, but Julianne Moore and Annette Bening -- who is fabulous in it and should have won the Oscar for her portrayal of a prototypical contemporary American career woman -- were painfully scrawny to look at on the screen. This is the standard starvation look that is now projected by Hollywood women stars -- a skeletal, Pilates-honed, anorexic silhouette, which has nothing to do with females as most of the world understands them."
A "luscious, opulent, ripe" thank you to Sandy Leonard for sending the article.
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