When former mayor Ed Koch died early yesterday morning, the accolades were quick to descend: he was a "a great man," who "did good," ebulliently pulling his city out of the worst financial disaster it had ever faced. Still, his incredibly long tenure also coincided with both the crack and AIDS epidemic, the latter of which, activist and documentarian David France writes in a piece for New York, he turned a blind eye to:
We haven't gotten our "next week in New York magazine email yet" that usually comes by now—but we hear David France's story on former Times and former Portfolio reporter and one-time kiddie-porn-ring investigator Kurt Eichenwald is running on Monday! (That was speedy.) Hoooo boy.
David France, who is so gay that he co-wrote Jim "Gay American" McGreevey's The Confession, has a long examination of the (pseudo)science behind gaydar in New York mag. It's endlessly long and contains few revelations—the ultimate conclusion is that sexuality is "about your soul." But if you're really interested in looking for physical signs of a gay gene, the article talks about three fun ones: "gay accent," lesbo-hands (index finger longer than ring finger), and hair whorl (gay men's may tend to go counterclockwise). The article cites a whorl study of "more than 50" short-haired gay men that took place at a pride festival, about 23 percent of whom had counterclockwise hair whorls. How scientific and conclusive! We decided to aid the research by taking a long, hard look at (who else?) ourselves.
