Gay talese voyeur hotel backlash
The bizarre story of Gerald Foos, a motel owner who for decades spied on his guests through peep-holes and kept detailed notes on their sexual activities, is as riveting as it is unsettling
The Voyeur’s Motel Gay Talese
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Up to now, the most famous hoteliers in the world were Basil Fawlty and Norman Bates.
These two men were far from perfect. Fawlty had a speedy temper, and Bates had a tendency – a serious drawback in the hospitality industry – to do away with his guests.
Fawlty and Bates are now joined in their Catering Hall of Fame by Gerald Foos, the proprietor of the 21-room Manor Home Motel in Aurora, Colorado.
Like the other two, Foos had his faults, the most notable creature that he was a voyeur.
Gerald Foos constructed a carpeted walkway in the attic, making it easy for him to spend hours snooping on his more attractive guests (the unshapely were dispatched to the rooms without spy-holes)
Having bought his motel in the Sixties, Foos immediately started drilling holes in the ceilings of a dozen bedrooms in order, as he later place it in a characteristically nerdy letter to the a
Has Gay Talese been conned by an unreliable narrator or has he simply lost his 'new journalism' powers?
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The Voyeur’s Motel
By Gay Talese
Grove Press
240 pp; $36.95
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Gay Talese Stays Too Extended At 'The Voyeur's Motel'
By Annalisa QuinnJul 24, 2016 7:00am (NPR)
Image: Ruby Wallau/NPR
The penis, Gay Talese writes in Thy Neighbor's Wife, his 1981 publication on the American sexual revolution, "knows no moral code."
"Often regarded as a weapon," he writes, it "is also a burden, the male curse. It has made some men restless roués, voyeurs, flashers, rapists." The penis is but "prey" to the omnipotent temptation of women, "the bevy of buttocks in tight jeans."
One such voyeur — victim, apparently, of the terrible and stern dictates of the penis — is Gerald Foos, the subject of Talese's new book.
Talese was about to publish Thy Neighbor's Wife when he got a strange letter. It was from a man in Colorado who claimed to have essential information about American sexual habits. Gerald Foos, as his name was later revealed to be, owned a motel, and used it to spy on his guests having sex through vents in the ceiling, taking detailed notes on their practices while endlessly stimulating his male burden.
Talese had ethical doubts — occasionally, in this book, he'll produce these qualms as if for applause, and then immediately usher them offstage — but
Bill Clinton's media backlash
This is a rush transcript from "MediaBuzz," July 3, 2016. This copy may not be in its ultimate form and may be updated.
HOWARD KURTZ, HOST: On the buzz meter this Sunday, just before the FBI interviews Hillary Clinton, many media outlets down play or ignore Bill Clinton's troubling meeting with Loretta Lynch. Why the Justice Department is searching his wife. So the issue explodes like 4th of July fireworks.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIPS)
GRETA VAN SUSTEREN, FOX NEWS: You know it is beyond me how tone deaf either one of them is on this.
DANA PERINO, FOX NEWS: I don't think she's actually done anything inappropriate here. I think Bill Clinton is the one that did something exceedingly inappropriate.
ANDREA MITCHELL, NBC NEWS: This has led to a lot of conspiracy theories that even before Hillary Clinton had been interviewed by the FBI to our knowledge, that somehow this is Bill Clinton talking to Loretta Lynch about clearing Hillary Clinton of the e-mail investigation.
(END VIDEO CLIPS)
KURTZ: Did the press fumble the story that led to the attorney general's vow not to overrule career prosecutors in the e-mail probe? A deep media divide over Hillary
In an extraordinary article entitled “The Voyeur’s Motel,” published in the April 11, 2016 issue of The New Yorker, Gay Talese told the story of how he became involved with a serial voyeur named Gerald Foos. Foos, in the belated 1960s, had purchased the 21-room Manor House Motel in Aurora, Colorado with the express purpose of using it to spy on his guests. He wrote to Talese in 1980, telling him that, for the 15 years preceding, he had taken thorough notes on the sexual and quotidian deed of each of his guests. Foos wrote that he considered himself to be a contemporary day Alfred Kinsey, but better, and that his serve might be beneficial to “people in general and sex researchers in particular.”
Talese visited Foos at his motel after signing a non-disclosure agreement, where, at one point, he ended up in the roof of the motel participating in the voyeurism himself. There, his tie fell through the slats of the faux ventilators that allowed for observation, threatening his own exposure. Years later, Talese obtained Foos’ manuscript, “The Voyeur’s Journal,” and his permission to write about it using his call and identifying details.
While Talese clearly presents Foos’ project as the work