For all the jokes about President Bush being borderline brain dead that have been made in the last eight years, you would think that the man would leave well enough alone once he left the White House and stopped being the world's chief source of ridicule.

But no. Our 43rd commander-in-chief wants to publish his memoirs as soon as he gets out of office, despite the fact that no one is buying books in this bad economy, and no one wants to buy a book written by the guy who gave us this bad economy. So that's a double neg.

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We knew it was coming and now it's hear: childbearing trans man Thomas Beatie finally published his memoir, the appropriately entitled Labor of Love: The Story of One Man’s Extraordinary Pregnancy. Here's a snippet of the description:

Labor of Love chronicles Thomas Beatie’s unique life experiences: his less-than-idyllic childhood in Hawaii; his transition from female to male; his marriage to his wife, Nancy; his legal battles to live as a man; his fight to conceive a child; and the birth of their daughter, Susan, in late June. Labor of Love is a groundbreaking book because it tackles social, political, and legal questions about gender, marriage, and family. Thomas and Nancy’s uphill battle to have a baby is both fascinating and touching. They are a normal couple who wanted a family, and yet the circumstances surrounding their desire to get pregnant and their journey to get there are truly extraordinary.

And astoundingly marketable!

Sarah Palin would not approve!

A Missoula, Montana, library board voted 5-0 this week to keep The Joy of Gay Sex on the shelves after local readers balked at the "pornographic" material:

Board chairwoman Carole Byrnes acknowledged the book, titled The Joy of Gay Sex, included graphic pictures and descriptions but said she viewed it as an instructional, education manual that shouldn’t be censored.

Helena resident Paul Cohen found the book during a visit to the library in February and requested that it be removed. He described the book as “pornographic” and said the library was negligent in providing a “safe place” for children and adolescents.

The library’s collection review committee recommended keeping the book, and director Judy Hart agreed. She said it was the library’s obligation to provide information to all elements of society.

Yes, even the buggers.

Edmund White spent his boarding school nights crouched in a toilet stall reading Rimbaud, the French poet who gained notoriety for his drunken violence and love of older men. Fast-forward some odd years and White's again thinking about Rimbaud, but under decidedly different circumstances.

No longer the teen clinging to dreams of the big city and loving men, White's made quite a name for himself on the literary scene, a name that led Atlas publishing company to ask the author to pen Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel.

White recently invited our editor into his home to talk about the book, but, as happens, the conversation veered in all sorts of directions - from Rimbaud's drunken days to White's evolving take on gay marriage; from Rimbaud as the "teen top terror" to how France changed White's writing style. It's a potpourri!

Take a peek, after the jump…

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Virginia-based Christian activists are crying "censorship" after a local library rejected their ex-gay texts.

Backed by the anti-gay Family Research Council, organizers in Fairfax, Virginia sent reviews of "pray-away-the-gay" books to their local library, but the library coordinator Susan Thornley flat out refused to consider the divisive texts, saying, "Donations should not be at the expense of minority populations or make the reader feel inferior… These books were not research based. There were not facts to back it up."

Gay foes failed to understand Thornley's argument, of course, and gathered yesterday to protest the library's allegedly anti-Christian stance. And, of course, they sent out about forty students to do their dirty work.

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When he left his gig at Gucci in 2004, Tom Ford declared that he wanted to go into the movie business. Most people just laughed and the dream seemed to die when Ford opened his eponymous design house.

Ford again fueled rumors last November, when he announced that he'd bought the rights to novelist Christopher Isherwood's 1964 novel, A Single Man, about a middle-aged gay professor.

Still, most people simply shrugged at the news, but now Ford seems closer to ever to achieving his big screen dreams, complete with A-list actors, says Marc Malkin:

Sources reveal exclusively to me that it looks like Colin Firth will star as a gay college professor who deals with the sudden death of his lover. The character is helped in his efforts by a lifelong female friend and one of his students.

Firth's rep tells me "he's in discussions" but it's not a done deal.

Julianne Moore will play the friend while Jamie Bell has signed for the student role, my sources say. The story takes place in 1962 in Los Angeles.

The movie, which has yet to find a studio, will begin shooting in November.

We're sure Sarah Palin wouldn't endorse this message from the Lambda Literary Foundation, which uses the Republican vice-presidential candidate's gay book banning ways to muster up some much needed dough:

In honor of the GOP's vice presidential nominee, who has attempted to ban books and pray away the gays, please join us as we drink dirty martinis, talk books, and pass the hat for the Lambda Literary Foundation.
…
We'll donate all funds raised to the Lambda Literary Foundation to help them 1) host the Lambda Literary Awards, 2) run the only LGBT Retreat for Emerging Writers, and 3) publish The Lambda Book Report.

Get all the details here. And look for us, too - we'll be slumped in the corner, reading like losers.

Tori Spelling is no longer just a New York Times best-selling author.

She is now a No. 1 New York Times best-selling author. On Sept. 14, her book, sTORI Telling, will move into first place on the prestigious newspaper's non-fiction list.

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"Concerned" citizens are already bitching about Uncle Bobby's Wedding, a children's book about gay marriage:

Uncle Bobby’s Wedding, the children’s book about a young guinea pig named Chloe and her uncle who marries his boyfriend, has received its first challenge.

A patron at Douglas County Libraries in Colorado asked that the book either be removed from the shelves, placed in a special area, or labeled “some material may be inappropriate for young children.”

It's a children's book! How bad could it be?!

Meanwhile, Library honcho James LaRue isn't taking the right-wing bait, telling the complainer that it's a library "job" to have contentious books.

Libraries, he points out, don't endorse books. They allow "access to the many different ideas of our culture, which is precisely our purpose in public life." Word.

[PS: We still think the "guinea pigs" look like gerbils.]