proud blog

A wonderful piece from New Yorker Jonathan Wallace, who keeps the Ethical Spectacle.

Great piece, Jon —

Loathsome and clever: Hetracil — that’s really very good, you must admit.

But,why stop there? LOL.

With the right brand name from Landor Associates and an expensive TV spot campaign paid for with Angel Funding, you could turn this thing into a real household name — more fetishized by the self-loathing, gender-vacillating teen than even mighty Ritalin was.

For the TV spots, we’d get lots of close-up shots of guys that look like Simon from 7th Heaven, as they are giving intense facial evidence of wanting to fuck (or so the scary-good editing makes it appear) lots of girls that look like… Who…is that? Is that Kirstie Alley …under there…? Hmm, the door closes and the scene fades to black before I can get a good look at her face.

And for the brand name, how’s about:

---

Homosexuality as a Choice

by Jonathan Wallace

I received an email from a fellow named Ben, asking me to look over an essay he claimed he was working on for the New York Times Magazine. The essay was a paean to the effects of an “anti-effeminate” drug named Hetracil and an indignant attack on the efforts of an ACLU attorney named Rachael Sondheim to introduce a federal law named “Proposition 313″ which would prevent minors from being prescribed the drug.

Nothing about this rang right to me, particularly the idea of a drug stamping out feminine characteristics in men which had already been prescribed, per the essay, to millions of Americans without any publicity. I went onto Google and found a scant eight references to Hetracil, of which four or five had Ben’s name on them. Another was a Hetracil web site, supposedly maintained by the inventor, a physician with a long Indian name; but the site itself had a thin, unconvincing feel, with only four or five pages of information and no address or phone for the company allegedly making the drug. The site itself however was clear about something at which Ben only hinted in the essay: Hetracil was intended to cure the medical complaint of homosexuality.

gay | nature or nurture | gay rights

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 10th, 2005 at 11:51 pm and is filed under generally proud. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Edit this entry.