Posted on March 25th, 2009 by Colin
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So I was super excited to post this when I saw it yesterday thinking I had found a diamond in the rough and then I realized that it just went viral today. I should have followed my instincts and just posted.
So maybe this isn’t as exciting and you all have already seen it. It’s still one of my favorite pieces of video art I’ve seen to date. Enter Neil Goldberg’s “She’s a Talker,” a short video which hits on the sublime by examining gay men’s relationships with their cats first created for the MIX festival in 1993 at The Kitchen.
In an interview in 1997 for the excellent local PBS program Reel New York (disclosure: I have worked on the past two seasons and it is probably my favorite program we show on Thirteen), Neil Goldberg explained that the motivation for creating the piece was personal.
The idea came out of a free-association moment where I found myself combing my roommate’s cat and said out loud, “She’s a talker,” and I thought, “Oh God, gay men across the city are probably all doing the same thing.” It was kind of a poignant moment, you know, you’re single and you have a cat, and you can feel a kind of fraught moment of endearing affection, or something. So, it was based on that little epiphany that I decided to set out on the project and I kind of defended the scope of it.
The full interview is here and definitely worth a read when you have time.
Mostly this got me wondering: Are cat gays a phenomenon as popular within our subculture as cat ladies are in staight culture? We already know that there is actual scientific merit that cat ladies are more likely to be crazy, thanks to the New York Times article. So does this mean that there are a bunch of crazy cat gays running around? I was bored last night and looking up information on various porn stars (I do these things, ok?) and ran across an email interview with muscle man Dillon Press who says, “I love the moviemaking and appearances and photo shoots, but only because I know I can go home and just be me. I’m a quiet kind of guy. A nap with my cat puts everything into perspective.”
Am I totally out of the loop here? Have the cat gays been part of the gay zeitgeist all along and I was just blind to it? Are single gay men turning to cats the same way single women do all this time and I just never noticed? Are men all over the world doing this?






