David Ehrenstein

Time of Misery

David Ehrenstein
Illustration by Richard Down When you’re gay, 57 years old, HIV-negative, and three-quarters of the friends and loved ones who’ve meant the most to you in life are dead, it’s odd the way little things can set you off. That’s what happened to me, watching the new film adaptation of......

Swallow This, Deep Throat

David Ehrenstein
Illustration by Julie West At the end of the day, it’s all about Mary Tyler Moore’s frightened little man. Cast your mind back to 1974 and the start of The Mary Tyler Moore Show’s fifth season. There was news co-producer Mary Richards uncharacteristically alone in the WJM-TV office for a......
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Hollywood Splendor

David Ehrenstein
Photo by David Ehrenstein “I came here in the winter of ’56-’57,” Gavin Lambert recalls, somewhat wistfully. “The studio era was going to be over pretty soon. There were big cracks in the walls, even though the building was still standing.” For the next five decades, this great British writer......

Death in the Afternoon

David Ehrenstein
IT WAS ONLY TWO YEARS PRIOR TO THE BIRTH of the L.A. Weekly that I arrived in Los Angeles. Back then the city seemed to me a sprawling, sleepy empty place — Altman’s The Long Goodbye captured its ultracasual look and feel perfectly. “But there’s nothing there,” my East Coast......

The Perp of Pop

David Ehrenstein
“History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce,” a puckish German wit once quipped. But were Karl Marx alive today, he would doubtless find both tragedy and comedy in the pedophile scandals of that most egregious piece of late-20th-century detritus, Michael Jackson. War in Iraq, turmoil in Turkey, continued......

Get Me to the Church on Time and a Half for Overtime

David Ehrenstein
“Why would a guy want to marry another guy?” “Security!” Moviegoers chuckled when Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon had that exchange in Some Like It Hot back in 1959. Forty-four years later it’s still funny, but also a matter of fact — and the center of a cultural maelstrom. Same-sex......
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Sexual Snobbery

David Ehrenstein
Illustration by Geoff Grahn DO PEOPLE REALLY CHANGE WITH THE TIMES, or do they just learn how to finesse themselves more subtly? That's the question that comes to the fore when reading Joseph Epstein's latest, much-discussed book, Snobbery: The American Version. "Jews and homosexuals have always felt themselves the potential......