The men who write for The Stranger are a most conflicted bunch, indeed. On the one hand, they want to be seen as "street tough" and "full of vim and vinegar" like that young Negro boxing phenomenon Cassius Clay. On the other hand, they are perhaps the most limp-wristed collection of sissies who have ever put on pants. These mincing little laudanum addicts apparently had the run of the place this week, and the end result is one of the most feminine issues of this glorified gay hygiene pamphlet to ever hit the beleaguered streets of Seattle.
Take, for example, BRENDAN KILEY's far-too-long essay about the blue-collared riffraff who renovated a theater's marquee last week. One can imagine the reedy Mr. Kiley posturing and preening with the big, burly lunch-pail brigade, asking awkward questions about emotions and making everyone feel uncomfortable until finally, gasping for breath at all the sweaty physical exertion he has just witnessed, The Stranger's resident foppish dandy makes his way back up to Capitol Hill to write purple prose about muscular arms and tawny skin.
Next, the morbidly obese crossdressing Lesbian who identifies as PAUL CONSTANT composes several off-key odes to manhood in this week's edition. "He" pens a far-too-long love letter to Sherman Alexie (a writer who previously published an obscene, homoerotic paean to the Seattle SuperSonics in these very pages), then follows up with a lament for the shoddy state of men's-studies sections of bookstores. (Men, "Mr." Constant, do not read the kind of books found in "men's studies" sections.) And then, for the Triple Crown of Penis Envy, "he" basks in the imagined glow of a bebop recording artist. One can imagine this musician's alarm at being so openly and embarrassingly coveted by a cross-gendered she-beast in print, even though Constant only refers to him by his initials: J.Z.
Speaking of embarrassing love letters, elsewhere drug-smoking pedant DOMINIC HOLDEN begs mayoral candidate Mike McGinn to become his "Sugar Daddy." Of course, when "Sock-'em" Joe Mallahan crushes "Hippie" McGinn in the general election (counter to the potty-mouthed recommendations of THE STRANGER ELECTION CONTROL BOARD, which you will also find infecting this issue of the carnie freak's preferred weekly reader), Holden will no doubt change his tune and begin sucking up to Mallahan, who will then throw Holden in the county jail for his prostitution disguised as journalism.
Though less prominently, the distaff sex is also featured in this week's paper: LINDY WEST scribbles up some pornographic ad copy and tries to pass it off as content, JEN GRAVES continues her long descent into incomprehensibility, and BETHANY JEAN CLEMENT continues to barely disguise her drinking problem as a career in journalism. Let this be a lesson to all those bra-burning suffragettes who made the middle part of the last century so unbearable: If you want gender equality, you must drag both sexes down into the gutter. Men and women both fail equally at The Stranger; Gloria Steinem must be so proud.
