INSIGHT OUT IS OUT OF SIGHT. AND NOT IN A GOOD WAY
For those who care about gay books, the news was not good this week. Bertelsmann AG, a ginormous media corporation, recently swallowed Book-of-the-Month Club company Bookspan. Turns out Bertelsmann decided it didn't like everything it had bitten off in the deal. One of the casualties is Insight Out, the gay and lesbian book-of-the-month club which is going to be shuttered. What's so disheartening is that as of 2005, Insight Out was reportedly doing fine with 50,000 plus members and is only now being closed because Bertelsmann is dissolving all of their “niche” book clubs to focus exclusively on the biggies like Book-of-the-Month.

This situation is reminiscent of what happened with the chain books stores that initially featured large, vibrant GLBT sections when they had to compete with GLBT bookstores, but as those stores failed one after another, there was a noticeable decline in the maintenance of their gay sections (think dark alleys you're afraid to go down). As an author I myself, I am well aware of how hard it is to get out the word about a new book—and with Insight Out gone, it's now that much tougher.

In completely unrelated news, Nintendo says there will be 35 million Wii units out there by 2012.

THAT'S WHAT I YELL DURING SEX, TOO!
Most of the attention given to The View this week has been devoted to Rosie's political brawl with Elisabeth Hasseltwit, but something else happened on the show that I found very interesting. During a conversation about who amongst the ladies talks during sex, Rosie was teased about how much politics turned her on. Rosie said politics don't get her that hot and bothered and it wasn't as if during sex with Kelli she said, “Oh, yeah, honey. That's right. Oh, yeah. That's it! Oh, YEAH! IMPEACH!”

In other words, Middle America was hearing Rosie discuss having an orgasm with her partner and it was no big deal. I've already talked plenty about how great I think Rosie's presence on The View has been in normalizing gay relationships, and this just confirmed how much I'm going to miss her.

BTW, twice this week after Rosie and Elisabeth duked it out, several of the guests were less than friendly with Elisabeth. Doug Savant from Desperate Housewives at least acknowledged her before huddling with Rosie as he whispered to her.