Queer Baseball Players and Francesca Lia Block

[queerbychoice]

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.

Comments

[lm.livejournal.com]

I never really got Block. I liked her retold fairy tales, and I like her writing style. But...I dunno. I went into them expecting all this urban fantasy stuff, and it wasn't really there. Her vision of L. A. is this upperclass white vision, which is something I never really saw or appreciated when I was there. The things I love about L. A. are the street performers--the bands set up on sidewalks who have only a beat-up Volkswagon and their instruments to their name, the improv comedians who are just actors waiting for their big break. I like the hope you see there. And Block doesn't really show that. She likes to talk about weird food and boring skinny girls who dream of things I don't give a crap about. It's not that I don't think she can write--I'm just not interested in what she's writing about.