Queer Eye Blues

I’ve just figured out that “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” is responsible for a little bit too much of what is going on in my life right now. No, I’m not wearing an ’80s tie as a belt (that, my friends, is gay — no straight man should try to pull it off), but I have been painting, worrying about decorating, and I stopped wearing my cell phone on my belt. And then, to top it all off, I entertained. That’s just not something I do. I blame television.

Speaking of blaming television, the story of Philo Farnsworth in “Carter Beats the Devil” made me wonder how close the novel was to the reality, so I’m now reading The Last Lone Inventor, the Philo T. Farnsworth story. It’s fascinating (though the book takes a lot of descriptive liberties), and amazing to know that this one genius, solely responsible for the invention of television as we know it, is almost unknown to us. Wouldn’t you think we’d celebrate the story of the 15-year-old who saw the future of communication in the lines plowed into his field, who predicted that someday we’d have instant news and information around the globe, who said that we’d find a way to send signals across the seas if we had to hang relays from balloons? We know more about the inventor of the cotton ‘gin, and no one’s seen one of those in a century. Odd . . . apparently all fallout from David Sarnoff’s largely successful attempts to prevent Farnsworth from getting the credit or the benefit of having invented this amazing device. What Sarnoff couldn’t do by buying scientists he did by hiring lawyers, and TV would have reached the masses two decades earlier if RCA hadn’t decided it wanted to monopolize the industry, both hardware and software (as we would see it now). Fascinating story.