What bothered me most this week--if I had to totally pinpoint it--was the idiotic Guy Trebay profile of Kevin Bentley. Kevin Bentley, for the uninitiated, is the author of two memoirs about the halcyon days of 70s Castro:

...[H]is diary and subsequent memoir, while far from Horatio Alger stories, read as sweet reminders of certain worthwhile values that had probably been mislaid even before what Mr. Bentley terms "the Bad Thing" came along.

OK, I'm a big fan of Straight to Hell and Butt Magazine. However, I don't expect to see them featured on in the Gray Lady. How does this guy merit a front-page article? He's a little-known porno Pollyanna who writes tea-room stories! In comparison, that Stephanie Klein profile from a few weeks back is practically Pulitzer material.

It means only one thing: Somehow, somewhere along the way, Kevin Bentley got a hold of some Super-8 in which Guy Trebay is shooting firecrackers out of his ass and singing songs from "Mame" while naked Cambodian boys do highland flings in the background.

Out of curiosity I looked up one of his books on Amazon, assuming that it couldn't possibly be as bad as it seemed. I scanned the customer reviews. Here's the first:

Too much gay writing these days tries to ignore the very thing that makes us gay - men having sex with men. Kevin Bentley's frank diary entries puts gay sex where it belongs, right in the center of his narrative. Memoirs of gay life in San Francisco's golden age - between Stonewall and AIDS - are precious and few, in part because so many of the men who lived during that period are dead. "Wild Animals I Have Known", in my humble opinion, is the best memoir of 1970's San Francisco gay life that I have read so far. Though Bentley is as apolitical as most gays then or now - he ignored Harvey Milk and spent the White Night Riots getting the clap from a trick on a rooftop - by living an openly gay life he acted out the ideals of gay liberation. Bravo, Kevin!

Oh, thank HEAVENS that he managed to leave out all the unpleasantness of, y'know, the gay rights movement and the onslaught of AIDS so that he could fit in more stories of glory holes!But that's not my favorite part, actually. It's the "Statistically Improbable Phrases" that say it all: his cum, his dick, shipping room, hard cock, hard dick, his cock.

Yes, bravo, Kevin! And bravo to you, Mr. Trebay. This is truly your finest work. Thank you for presenting us with such a nuanced, respectable subject. I hope there are more home movies of yours floating around out there, because I've got a film projector and I'm just itching to promote my memoirs from my days working as a fluffer on a midget porn set.