My generation was one of the first to come across gay people in TV series and books without having to look for them. We didn’t have to go to specialized bookstores or video stores. During my childhood I saw that television included homosexual characters as an emblem of modernity in the Spain of get-rich-quick culture and gay marriage. In less than 20 years, that representation has spread as wide as the market’s imagination. On streaming platforms there are gay Christmas romantic comedies, gay Nordic dramas, and movies based on gay novels in which gay English princes marry the bisexual son of the president of the United States. As you might expect, all of these stories that I watch and read avidly are deeply unsatisfying in their desire to shoehorn the gay into contemporary (Western, capitalist) life.
Henry Kissinger, former U.S. Secretary of State under presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, Nobel Peace Prize winner, and a widely documented instigator of human rights violations in Latin America and Asia, died last week at the age of 100. Journalist Spencer Ackerman, author of his obituary in Rolling Stone, will not miss him. “Henry Kissinger, war criminal loved by the American ruling class, finally dies” was the headline with which Ackerman dispatched the politician. In the very first paragraph, just in case there was still someone waiting for a laudatory comment in the text, the author recalled the figure of the white supremacist Timothy McVeigh, the murderer with the highest number of confirmed deaths (168 people, including 19 children) executed by United States, to then point out: “McVeigh never remotely killed anywhere on the scale of Kissinger.”
Biden says Congress must approve Ukraine aid this month: ‘We can’t let Putin win’ North Country Public Radio