The Goldberg clan is flourishing: Lucianne.com, sponsored by Jonah's formidable mother, Lucianne, is one of the most fascinating reads on the Web. Whenever I go online, the first thing I check is the Drudge Report (I respect Matt Drudge as a pugnacious American original and Web pioneer), and the last thing is Lucianne.com, which I reserve as a special pleasure for its cornucopia of political articles culled by readers from newspapers all over America and the world. It's an essential antidote to the overt partisanship and devious news management of the New York Times, whose standards have slipped alarmingly over the past 20 years.

Of course I cheered when George W. Bush recently called a New York Times reporter a "major league asshole," and I immediately began a mental list of major and minor league assholes not only at the Times but at the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the New Yorker, the Nation, the Village Voice, etc. After a decade as a controversial public figure, I've seen them all! Their flatulence may be a major factor in global warming.

Other summer matters: Given the verve with which this column has waxed acrimonious over Anne Heche's parasitic attachment to the hapless Ellen DeGeneres, some might well wonder about my reaction to the breakup last month of that publicity-addled pair. Was it a giggle, a guffaw, a horselaugh? OK, all of the above -- mostly at the image of the delirious, scantily clad Heche wandering like a pixie-cut John the Baptist in the California desert.

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Yes, it was as if Heche were reliving Marion Crane's flight from Phoenix in "Psycho" (in the very bad remake of which she very badly starred). But maybe Heche was hunting for the crop-dusting plane of "North by Northwest" to hop to Toronto for her next film gig and love victim. Ms. d.t.'s sure splatted a mushroom cloud of DDT over DeGeneres' extraordinary comic gift -- which is barely twitching these days in its suffocating cornfield of messianic p.c. clichés.

Given the virulent antipathy of the West Coast gay establishment to me and my views, it was ironic that Anne and Ellen imploded and Melissa Etheridge spilled the beans about her abusive upbringing just as the September issue of the San Francisco lesbian magazine Girlfriends, with me on the cover, was arriving at newsstands. Editor in chief Heather Findlay deserves enormous credit for pursuing the feature on me against resistance from inside and outside her staff. ("Are you nuts?" was among the more charitable things said to her, according to the editor's note.)

That it took 10 years for any lesbian magazine in the U.S. or U.K. to deal honestly with my life and work shows exactly what's wrong with the insular gay world, where outdated Foucault flacks and toadying campus careerists are mistaken for intellectuals. Too many gays who demand "tolerance" and "diversity" these days are viciously intolerant when it comes to opinions differing from their own. The Girlfriends interview (titled "Paglia 101: Confessions of a Campus Radical") explores hot-button issues like the genesis of homosexuality and the campaign against Dr. Laura Schlessinger. I hope that Findlay's editorial courage marks a turning point in the attitude of the gay press toward dissent and free thought.

Pop talk: two summer highlights. First was the riveting profile of Ingrid Bergman on Lifetime's "Intimate Portrait," where her fiercely glamorous daughters minced no words about her indifference to family relationships and her devotion to her art. The program wonderfully showed how Bergman (one of Alfred Hitchcock's favorite stars) lived for the camera. Her hieratic concentration is exactly what's missing from today's Oscar-gathering mouse herd of girly-girls and dough boys.

Second was the documentary "The Eyes of Tammy Faye," which made a sensation at this year's Sundance Film Festival and which I was lucky enough to see in a tape sent me by producer-directors Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato. I think this is the best film about American culture in years. It puts Hollywood productions like the specious "American Beauty" to shame. Bailey and Barbato's international production company, World of Wonder, is one of the most creative ateliers at work today. I have followed their accelerating careers with great interest ever since they were perhaps the very first to interview me on film at my university in the early 1990s. (It was for a documentary for British television on New York's drag festival, Wigstock, when few academics would go on camera to defend drag queens.)

Salon reader Jeff Percifield writes from Oakland, Calif.:

Like you, I'm a longtime soap fan but have finally been driven away by the networks' switch to sappy teen trauma storylines. "The Days of Our Lives," "All My Children," "One Life to Live," and your fave, "The Young and the Restless," have all sunk under a wave of adolescent angst that couldn't be less interesting. Even ballsy Jill on "Y&R" is reduced to fretting about the kids' prom. Give me a grown-up catfight any day between Nikki, Diane and Ashley over this watered-down "90210" dreck! Think this is the end of the line for soaps?

Mr. Percifield, you express my own angst with painful eloquence. I've been exasperated all summer by the boring, picayune, molasses-slow non-plot on "The Young and the Restless" -- though of course I always perk up when feisty, sensual Nikki or smoldering, high-testosterone Victor is onscreen. Have "Y&R" producers gone into suspended animation, like the ill-fated, crystal-casket travelers in "2001: A Space Odyssey"? How idiotic to bring back that redheaded tigress, the abundantly talented Michelle Stafford, and then make her hunker over a computer screen in trivial service to a passel of teenage dimwits. Soaps have steadily lost their emotional soul as well as their flamboyant high camp. Fans, let's storm the networks!

Thanks to the Salon reader calling herself (or himself) Greta Hohenzoellern, who alerted me to the very amusing feature by Lisa Whipple in McSweeney's, which ingeniously extracts and lists the self-describing appositional phrases and Iliadic epithets from my Salon columns over the years. May all believers in wifty "Grrrlpower" hear the true voice of the Amazon!

Postscript: I have been promoted to university professor at the University of the Arts, where I've taught since 1984. I have also left the Department of Liberal Arts to join the new College of Media and Communication, where I will focus on the development of interdisciplinary, inter-arts courses. However, I will retain the title professor of humanities and media studies.

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