Valerie Harper Cancer Miracle
I think almost everyone I know over thirty has had to deal with cancer in one form or another, from personal experience to dealing with family or friends who’ve been diagnosed. Tony and I will be at Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York all day tomorrow and Friday while a family member has a third round of cancer surgery, and then helping out another family member over the weekend who was recently diagnosed with breast cancer. So when I see articles like this one about Valerie Harper and how hard she fights I think it’s important to point them out.
When I read and reviewed Harper’s book in 2013 I also posted about her cancer diagnosis.
After being diagnosed with terminal brain cancer, Valerie Harper was told by doctors that she could have as little as three months to live. That was 13 months ago. Now, Valerie is talking about her miraculous treatment with ET.
“There’s so much more I want to do and you are right there with me, ET,” said Valerie, 74. “I am not suffering. I am not in pain, so I’m really blessed.”
Valerie’s type of cancer is difficult to treat but fortunately she’s reacted positively to her medicine.
“I just had a great response to a certain drug,” Valerie explained. “I was supposed to be dead by Easter [2013].”
You can read more here. I think she’s another example of pure inspiration.
Matt Bomer Married
I actually just assumed this was the case, and that Bomer was married to his longtime partner/husband, Simon Halls. But it wasn’t officially announced until recently that Bomer and Halls were married in 2011 before Bomer came out.
The star of TV’s White Collar and of the upcoming HBO movie The Normal Heart has revealed that he and longtime partner Simon Halls have been married since 2011 to Details magazine.
The couple are raising three sons: an eight-year-old and six-year-old twins.
The fact that he didn’t disclose this sooner doesn’t surprise me either. Even though we wound up in a marriage documentary with Vermont Supreme Court Justice Beth Robinson marrying us, that was all an accident. Tony and I wanted to keep it all very quiet and simple. We’ve been together for twenty-one years and after all that time it becomes a very personal experience.
Shakespeare Gay?
I remember hearing these things back in college…maybe even high school when I took British lit. And I think we’ll always speculate on whether or not Shakespeare was gay or bi-sexual. This article lists twelve possible reasons that might prove he was.
What can we know about Shakespeare’s relationship to Anne Hathaway, an older woman, who he married and had three children with? Well, very little.
The two married when Shakespeare was 18, she was 26 and already pregnant with their first child Susanna. Most famously, when he died, Shakespeare gave her only one thing – the second best bed.
This is viewed by many as a slight and a claim of how he had come to dislike her, viewing the marriage as a trap away from his free life in London.
To be frank, none of the points mentioned seem very strong to me. But they’re still interesting to read.
Anti-Gay Words
I have posted about the word “tranny” often, as it relates as both a familiar term within a segment of the LGBT community and also an offensive term in other segments of the LGBT community. The debate continues. (I don’t use it.)And this next link talks about what words are appropriate or inappropriate nowadays. I saw a new romance novel out with “queen” in the title and even though I know it’s a word many gay men use when referring to each other I’m not sure I would ever title a book with the word “queen.” If I were to use it in a book I would explain that this is only how some gay men speak, not all. It’s not that I find it offensive. I just think it’s had its day.
The interesting thing is that with almost all of these words and terms there are two sides to the story.
In last month’s New York Time’s article The Decline of the ‘H’ Word Jeremy Peters wrote that while the word ‘homosexual’ for the most part is ‘inoffensive,’ ‘outdated,’ and perhaps ‘innocuous,’ the word nonetheless is viewed by many in our LGBTI community as a pejorative term.
According to George P Lakoff, a professor of cognitive science and linguistics at the UC, Berkeley, because many still associate the word ‘homosexual’ with sexual deviance, the preferred terms are ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’.
I find it hard to use the word “homosexual” in blog posts or even in books. In fact, I don’t think I’ve used it more than once in over 100 novels. I really do find it hard to use because it does have negative associations for me, and it’s also somewhat clinical…a term straight people use when they don’t know what else to say because the word “gay” makes them feel uncomfortable.
In any event, you can read more here. There are several important points, and all come with a certain amount of controversy.