queerbychoice: (Default)
queerbychoice ([personal profile] queerbychoice) wrote2002-05-22 12:57 pm

Queer Baseball Players and Francesca Lia Block

Major League Baseball Player Comes Out as Heterosexual

Hmm. I see the potential for progress to be made.

The Out magazine editor's I'm-not-naming-names-but revelation annoyed me, though. I mean, how many major league baseball players can an Out magazine editor be hanging around with? How hard would it have been for a reporter to follow him around and watch for a major league baseball player to show up? That revelation was playing with fire.

In other news, I read Francesca Lia Block's Weetzie Bat recently to find out why so many people on my friends list grew up obsessed with it. I almost threw it across the room and refused to finish it after the very first page, when the main characters were introduced as being a beautiful skinny blonde popular girl who's dating the best-looking guy in the school, and her boy friend, the best-looking guy in the school. Who wants to read books about popular people? Upon hearing this description of them, I immediately lost all interest in hearing anything about their lives and dismissed them as abhorrent, thoroughly unpleasant people to be around.

The book did get better from there, when I forced myself to keep reading. The book does an excellent job of supporting extremely unconventional family structures and the idea of inventing one's own family structure to suit one's own needs, and I'm sure these revelations about the appeal of hitherto unimagined family structures must have really revolutionized a lot of young readers' lives in a wonderful way. And even the characters managed to become a little less abhorrent. Still, there's something thoroughly plastic and unreal about the whole thing that I definitely don't like at all.

[identity profile] 24hrheartattack.livejournal.com 2002-05-22 02:50 pm (UTC)(link)
coincidentally, i was looking through old files on my computer today and discovered a very critical letter i had written to francesca lia block and planned to put in my next zine (whenever that gets its act together). i read weetzie bat when i was 12 or 13 and completely fell in love with it and wanted that life so badly. and though now i guess i don't believe in such a perfect existence (and don't really care), at the time i needed those goals to keep my going through a lot of adolescent shit i was dealing with. i still think weetzie bat is a beautifully written book and i would recommend it to other teenage girls looking for heroes. it's her other books (outside of the "dangerous angels" series) that i have real problems with. every one seems to glorify anorexia and self-destruction. it makes me so sad to imagine young girls reading these books and potentially being influenced to adopt really bad habits/lifestyles in the name of drama and beauty.