KISS AND CRY: MY YEAR IN REVIEW. I’m spending the tail-tip of 2010 researching, re-reading, and watching figure skating instead of movies, so it should be safe to do the best-of now. I can always edit if something happens in the next five days.

Best books read (nonfiction): Jay Prosser, Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality
Paul W. Kahn, Putting Liberalism in Its Place
Ellis Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism
Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas, Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage
Joy Goodwin, The Second Mark: Courage, Corruption, And the Battle for Olympic Gold

Best books read (fiction/whatnot): Good grief, I read so little of this. 2011 will be so much better!
Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes
Janos Nyiri, Battlefields and Playgrounds
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot
Nalo Hopkinson, Brown Girl in the Ring
Edmund White, A Boy’s Own Story

Best movies watched (for the first time): “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”
“Police, Adjective”
“Spider Baby” (and more!)
“Salome” (1923) with the Silent Orchestra

also deserve mention, and I can’t pick among them: “The Business of Fancydancing,” “The Comedians,” “Hidden Fortress.” And I should say that my mind has returned to the rancid, cruel, sad “Deadgirl” many times since I watched it; I wrote about it briefly here and here.

Best theater: “Richard III” (Hole in the Wall Theater, New Britain, CT)–yes, I’m going to bat for this as the most committed, insightful, and just plain awesome show I saw this year.
“The New Jerusalem” (Theater J)
“Passing Strange” (Studio Theater)
“In the Red and Brown Water” (Studio Theater)
“Antony and Cleopatra” (Synetic Theater)

Best blog posts/series (six, not five, as is traditional)–super double extra gay this year, apparently: My series on Jay Prosser’s book, which begins here.

My exchange with John Corvino on gay marriage: Ross Douthat, Andrew Sullivan, John Corvino, me, Corvino again, me again here and here.

Famous Authors’ Texts from Last Night.

“Poker Face” (on the closet as a near occasion of sin). Prompted this exchange w/Jendi Reiter.

“Home and Dry” (what I think is the most beautiful argument for gay marriage).

“Order from Confusion Sprung” (my problems with the language of homosexuality as “intrinsically disordered). Much more here.

Best things I wrote (nonfiction, non-blog): “Live Through This”:

To be a Catholic is to accept certain questions as things to be lived through rather than to be answered.

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“The Great Unweaving”:

I’m sitting outside a downtown Starbucks with two George Washington University undergraduates, talking about sex, politics, and religion. Michele Walk and Conor Joseph Rogers fit my stereotype of contemporary American college students. They’re sincere, confident, and hyperaware of the ways in which they’re different from their parents.

Michele and Conor also represent a growing demographic: They consider themselves both pro-life and supporters of gay marriage.

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My Gay Catholic Whatnot piece for Reality magazine, available for 1.70EU here.

“Six Imperfect Metaphors for Conversion.”

My review of the National Gallery of Art’s Spanish sacred painting and sculpture exhibit (subscribers-only).

Also, I finished the novel. I’m looking for an agent, so if you have suggestions (or if you can help hook me up!) I would be deeply grateful. It’s a queer coming-of-age story I guess, with stigmata geekery, feminism and its limits, and morning sickness. Lit-mainstream, if you can believe it.