Never Forget

Posted on December 25, 2011 by queerlefty

I approach the end of 2011 with mixed feelings: On the one hand, I can’t wait for it to be over. It’s been a terrible year. I lost one of my best friends in the terror attacks in Oslo this July, and several of my friends are what the media now call “survivors”. Even for someone like me, who didn’t experience the terror, only the loss and grief that came with it, these last five months have been tough to get through. Late in the year, I also had some health problems that tore my already shaky psychol0gical defenses down further. On the other hand, I’m almost afraid to let go of 2011. Continue reading →

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Early Gay Crushes: Adam Brody

Posted on October 16, 2011 by queerlefty

It’s been a while since I’ve done this, but the last installment in this series was on Jesse Eisenberg around two years ago. Back then, I wrote about how my Eisenberg crush was as much based on my wish to be (like) him as was about a desire to be with him. It’s not like a would have turned him down or anything, but my attraction to him has always been at least as much about a sense of personal chemistry as physical attraction. From the first time I saw him on screen, in Dylan Kidd’s Roger Dodger (2003), I fond his neurotic cuteness and intelligence extremely appealing. In that sense, it’s only natural that he’s succeded on EGC by Adam Brody, who made a name for himself by possessing the same qualities. Continue reading →

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Logan Lerman Is Still Beautiful

Posted on September 18, 2011 by queerlefty

For a while after the terrifying events of this summer, I’ve been struggling to write anything at all. I was unable to express precisely what I was feeling, apart from an immediate reaction of sadness, gratefulness and determination, but  it was more than that. If I couldn’t write about what had just happened, what could I write about? Everything that didn’t have to do with the terror attacks felt insignificant, and writing about something else felt almost improper. Now it’s been nearly two months, and while it still doesn’t go one day when I don’t think about and miss my friends, I wanted to see if I could try and write about something light and insignificant again. Continue reading →

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The Annual Re-Post

Posted on August 7, 2011 by queerlefty

Traditionally, August 7 has been my gayest day of the year. It’s the day I celebrate my anniversary for coming out for the first time, to my father. I will honor the tradition on this my fifth gay anniversary, but I’m not feeling gay today, just incredibly sad. The aftermath of the terror attacks in Norway is just beginning to sink in, and the full consequences will not be clear until much later. It’s is with great sorrow and gratefulness for the inspiration he was for me and so many others, that I dedicate this post to the memory of my great friend Tore Eikeland (1990-2011), who was killed on July 22. One of the last times I met him, we marched together for LGBT rights. Among many, many other things, he made me a prouder gay. Continue reading →

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Sad. Grateful. Determined.

Posted on July 29, 2011 by queerlefty

Today, it’s been a week since the terror attacks in Norway. A very close friend of mine was killed at Utøya, and a handful of my friends were among the survivors. I wasn’t on the island myself, but I am a member of the youth organization that was attacked, and I have been to the summer camp there six before, between 2001 and 2007. On Monday, I tried to formulate my thoughts over at Chris Baxter’s blog. I still feel the same way Continue reading →

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My 25 Favorite Bruce Springsteen Songs

Posted on July 21, 2011 by queerlefty

The death last month of Clarence Clemons, the iconic sax player of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, has affected me even more than I appreciated at the time. To sit down and listen intensely to Springsteen records wasn’t that much of a change from what I usually do – I usually play some Springsteen record on my Ipod every other day, anway – but still, it felt different now. Like I tried to articulate in my obituary, Clemons in many ways personified the energy and attitude of Bruce Springsteen’s entire act, and letting myself get immersed in those classic records to an even greater extent than usual, I was suddenly struck by a sense of loss that extended beyond that of losing an iconic sax player. It felt like I was bidding audieu to the very idea that Springsteen could ever again strive for the greatness that he captured with the E Street Band. Continue reading →

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My Favorite Pop Culture Podcasts

Posted on July 8, 2011 by queerlefty

Last year, I named my favorite political pundits, both as a matter of transparency (so that you would know a little bit about who shapes my opinions on American politics), and as a way to endorse their work. Now, I feel like the time has come to do the same for the pop cultural sphere. I listen to a number of culture podcasts every week, and ideas, provocations, news and views from them inform much of what I write on this blog, and often more than I remember to give them credit for. Maybe this list of five absolutely brilliant podcasts could be a start a first down-payment on my debt of gratitude. Neither of the podcasts mentioned are obscure, and you should be able to enjoy them thoroughly without prior knowledge of their dynamics, but in each case I certainly encourage you to check out their archives. They’re all golden. Continue reading →

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Gaga, Eurovisionary

Posted on July 3, 2011 by queerlefty

Writing about it six weeks after its release, I feel way late to the party on Lady Gaga’s Born This Way. Not just because six weeks is like an eternity in a world where news cycles are measured in minutes, but because the immediate hype that surrounded it seemed to die down pretty quickly, at least here in Norway. Of course, here the album was pretty widely dismissed, with a tone closer to anger than disappointment, as something of a second-rate Madonna album, while my impression is that its reception was more tempered, and more positive, in the US. In an American context, a defense of Born This Way may seem like a needless exercise, but bear with me. Continue reading →

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June’s SMA Winner, Three Years In The Making

Posted on June 30, 2011 by queerlefty

Once intended to be a monthly feature, and fulfilled as such  for the first year or so, there has not been a new Sexiest Males Alive list since October 2010. As the longest running feature of this blog, and by far the one that has garnered the most traffic over the years, it seems only fitting to return to the SMA now, as the month of its third anniversary is drawing to a close. Looking back at that first list, it’s clear to me that I didn’t really know yet what I wanted the SMA to be, but even then, I showed myself prone to the kind of prognostications that has made later installments more or less a parade of corrections and promises of future success. In that vein, I predicted that Skins co-stars Nicholas Hoult and Mitch Hewer could plausibly both see themselves topping SMA before long, all the while I was congratulating Jesse McCartney as the first winner of the title. Three years on, Hoult and Hewer’s trajectories on the SMA now differ wildly. Continue reading →

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Songs For ‘Adam’

Posted on June 26, 2011 by queerlefty

A year ago, I compiled a playlist for my friend Bryan Borland’s poetry collection My Life as Adam, and Bryan quickly followed suit with his own pop-cultural interpretation of his own book. It speaks to how deeply integrated these two forms of cultural representation are, and how silly it would be to think of them in hierarchical ways. When you open a book, you take a set of values and references with you into reading and interpreting it, and for me that means that fragment of music and movies will  always influence my experience of it. Continue reading →

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