Our interview with Fascinating Queers columnist, Lorette C. Luzajic, about her new book, “Weird Monologues for a Rainy Life (irreverent ramblings from the end of the world).”

For a long time, Jan Morris was known as the one who’d had the sex change, though as both James and Jan she was an historian and scholar who wrote some fifty books and traveled the world over. She has joked that when her roll is called up yonder, the papers will announce “Sex Change Author Dies.”

Who’s the President of the Malibu Stacey Fan Club and has the largest collection of Stacey dolls in the world? Well, good guess, but it’s not Lisa Simpson, who is most likely to burn her Barbies along with her bra as soon as she begins junior high. It’s Waylon Smithers, who also staged “Malibu Stacey, The Musical.” Poor Waylon Smithers is also the proud owner of just about every other stereotype of queer middle age.

Every good little girl wants to grow up to be a ballerina, and Vaslav Nijinsky was no exception. Born in the Ukraine in 1889 to two dancers, Vaslav was a child prodigy who grew into one of the greatest ballet dancers of all time. He was famed for his exquisite grace, his impossible flexibility, for his gravity-defying leaps, and for dancing en pointe like the ladies. But this genius of felinity and motion was stark raving mad.

I vowed a long time ago not to argue with people about Madonna. But there I was, at a pop art exhibit, ripping into the wine and calamari with gusto, when an unknown actress and I got into it over the Great Mother. “Yes, she is brilliant, a genius,” she sneered. “I’ve got to admire anyone with such a glaring lack of talent, who made it there on self-promotion alone.”

You know what? No one ever made it on talent alone. There are millions of talented people who no one has ever heard of. On top of talent, you need either luck or pluck, and usually both. Madonna has candidly confessed that her voice is not extraordinary. But she IS an extraordinary talent in dancing, choreography, masterminding sets, video stories, outrageous ideas, and running a multibillion-dollar business by the seat of her panties. How is it that a woman’s marketing genius, her staggering business acumen, is dismissed as lack of talent?

Financial guru Suze Orman is often criticized in the same way. It’s not her financial advice, critics say, that made her, but her marketing flare. Those old boys’ clubs can’t accept that there’s nothing wrong with being smart, pretty, AND popular. Ten years ago, Forbes grumbled that Suze used too many self-promotion tactics, including charitable participation. “A plug for charitable giving earns her huge amounts of free publicity,” lamented William P. Barrett in a story he called “Sizzling Suze.” “Too bad Orman didn’t include a chapter [in her new book] on “How to promote yourself without spending money on promotion.”