I was on the set one morning when a chandelier fell and crashed a foot away from Truman. He chuckled. He said, “I guess Gore Vidal is in the wings!”
george christy on murder by death
Whatever your opinion of Truman Capote, you have to admit there was something inspiring about his passionate (and famously mutual) hatred of Gore Vidal. That is partly because, no matter your opinion of Gore Vidal, you have to admit that he was one of the premier trolls of the pre-Internet age. He out-Weeved Weev just by waking up each day.
If you want to read about the myriad ways in which Capote and Vidal were assholes, or the terrible things they said about each other, you could probably spend a few hours devouring articles with titles like “Gore Vidal, No Greater a Hater Than He” and “Gore Vidal’s Bitter Feuds” and each might contain a few insults that are new to you.
[This was not originally posted on Cranky Lesbian, it was posted elsewhere in 2014 and later migrated here.]
How do you open a blog? There’s no instantly recognizable HBO intro for blogs, something that signals quality (or, in the case of True Blood, the pretense of quality). That’s just as well, because you should never expect to find quality here.
Certain things, though, you know how to open. There’s that Motown signature drum roll and Woody Allen film credits in Windsor Light Condensed typeface against a black background. There are famous first lines in literary history that readers the world over can recite by heart. People who’ve never read A Tale of Two Cities can tell you its first 12 words.
My own favorite book opening comes from the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation of Notes from Underground: “I am a sick man … I am a wicked man. An unattractive man. I think my liver hurts.” Does it get any better than thinking your liver hurts?!
But I’ve never heard of a blog opening with a line that instantly captures anyone’s attention or is quoted years later, so let’s forget everything I wrote preceding this and pretend this blog began with something a bit more memorable. Let’s pretend it opened with the first line from the first chapter of Jackie Collins’ Hollywood Wives.
Elaine Conti awoke in her luxurious bed in her luxurious Beverly Hills mansion, pressed a button to open the electrically controlled drapes, and was confronted by the sight of a young man clad in a white T-shirt and dirty jeans pissing a perfect arc into her mosaic-tiled swimming pool.
jackie collins, hollywood wives
There. Doesn’t that make you want to keep reading? Aren’t you thinking to yourself, “Who is that young man in a white t-shirt and dirty jeans who is urinating — no, not just urinating, but flawlessly urinating — into a rich woman’s Beverly Hills mosaic-tiled swimming pool?”
I’ll give you the answer now, because if I were you I wouldn’t want to have to wait to learn something so monumentally important: He’s a sexy pool boy. Of course he’s a sexy pool boy.
Has the British diver Tom Daley, bronze medalist at last year’s London Olympics, just introduced us to the future of coming out? In a remarkable five-minute clip the 19-year-old posted on YouTube this morning (and linked to on Twitter, where he has over two million followers), Daley comes out as bisexual* and explains why he chose to do so in a homemade video and not the more traditional print interview or TV sitdown: “I didn’t want my words twisted.”
Actress Maria Bello, she of a zillion TV shows and movies more people should see (The Cooler, A History of Violence) has written a piece in this weekend’s New York Times about telling her son and the rest of the family that her friendship with a woman has turned romantic. But keep it in your pants, squealing Law &Order: Special Acronyms Unit fangirls, because that woman is not Bello’s BFF Mariska Hargitay. Bello’s article, part of the Modern Love series, is a pleasant, low-key read and in line with the growing trend of casual celebrity outings.
* Because there exist on the Internet a gazillion photos of Bello and Hargitay gazing at each other more adoringly than some couples who have been married for forty years, I will direct you to basic Google image search results rather than select a photo to accompany this post.
12/1/2013 Update: Bello’s announcement is starting to get picked up on gossip blogs and mentioned by bastions of journalistic integrity like the Daily Mail. As of this writing one of the Mail‘s top headlines is “Prisoners actress Maria Bello comes out as gay and reveals she has a long-term girlfriend.” This is not quite true.
Well, it’s true that her name is Maria Bello and that she appears in Prisoners, but anyone who bothered reading her piece in the Times (which the Mail article quotes at length, so presumably someone there at least tried to read it while copying and pasting the details) would know that she does not call herself gay in it and that her current relationship is still relatively new. That’s sort of the whole point of what she wrote, you see.
Janet McTeer in Daphne: “That’s what I get for not reading the script.”
Five years ago this Thanksgiving my life changed forever, but it would be months before I knew it. As I slept that night, a stranger who couldn’t sleep – a stranger then living hundreds of miles away – found herself watching the BBC Two production of Daphne and regarding the screen with increasing disbelief at its epic crumminess.
By the end, having watched a sullen and snappish Daphne du Maurier (lifelessly rendered by Geraldine Somerville) sulk and throw tantrums for 90 minutes because Ellen Doubleday (played by Elizabeth McGovern in the same pinched, pale style she now brings to her role as Cora on Downton Abbey), the publisher’s wife and heterosexual object of her desire, couldn’t magically turn gay for her – this while alternately rejecting Janet McTeer’s Gertrude Lawrence and having strangely unsexy extramarital rendezvous with her – the insomniac was borderline enraged.
Turning to Google, she looked for reassurance that she wasn’t alone in the opinion that Daphne was, for want of a more polite term, unmitigated crap. That’s when she found the review I’d posted months earlier. And then, with a click of the mouse, the insomniac and I were introduced, more or less by search engine algorithm. Had she conducted the same search a week earlier or later, had the tides of the Internet shifted, she might have been treated to different results. Sometimes in the present day, when I say or do something idiotic (an event that reliably happens in hourly intervals), she must turn toward the heavens and mournfully cry, “Why didn’t I use Yahoo?!” But Google brought us together that night, though it would be a while still before we met.
Boredom compelled the insomniac to read more of my posts (as boredom had once compelled me to write them), but I remained unaware of her existence until some months later, when she sent the tiniest of e-mails to congratulate me on a minor achievement. I responded with similar (and uncharacteristic) brevity. We did not know each others’ names then or really anything about each other. Our exchanges were short and impersonal. For weeks I was uncertain even of her gender and privately entertained the notion – it was possible, I knew, based on the demographics of my readership – that she was a drag queen.
So naturally it follows that we’d end up together within months (it turns out she wasn’t a drag queen), and that today we will celebrate our fifth Thanksgiving as a couple. We have marked the occasion in all of our previous Novembers together by watching Daphne on Thanksgiving, after spending the day before Thanksgiving groaning at the thought of having to watch Daphne. When I mentioned last week that it was almost Daphne time, the insomniac groaned, “Already?!”, much as she glares at me throughout the year when I sing “There Is Nothing Like a Dame” while preparing dinner or deliberately provoke her with cheerful references to “queer anti-climaxes” and “the most extraordinary thrill.”
Today would mark, for this poor woman who has been burdened enough by choosing me for her partner, the sixth year in a row of watching Daphne. To give her something to be thankful for this year, besides our health and our love and the life we’ve built together, I am officially releasing her from the bondage of Daphne. We don’t have to watch a “keen archer” stomp around the moors tonight, indignant that a straight lady won’t put out for her. We don’t have to listen to any of that business about being “a boy of eighteen” when one is actually a middle-aged woman. Instead we can watch whatever she wants, if she wants to watch anything at all. I do hope, though, that it isn’t Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. One viewing of that was enough.
In the wake of the recent Gay Girl in Damascus and LezGetReal blog scandals, I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to do something I should have done years ago: reveal my true identity. I, Cranky Lesbian, am really Darryl, a 54-year-old sheet metal worker from Mobile, Alabama.
(Okay, not really. Still a woman, still so gay I wake up singing Liza songs, and still too busy with other things to blog regularly. But I couldn’t resist posting that. Also, really, what self-respecting lesbian would call their website LezGetReal?)
As some of you might recall, this time last year I was blathering about cubic zirconias and fried chicken, as I’m wont to do throughout the year but particularly on our most romantic holidays (Valentine’s Day, Koninginnedag, Polish Independence Day, all the usual suspects).
This year I’ll be blathering alarmingly gooey “No, I love you more” stuff to the woman who has kept me away from this blog for months and months — an act of charity toward the Internet that reportedly has her in the running for a Nobel Peace Prize — but I wanted to dust off the old keyboard long enough to wish you all a Happy Valentine’s Day. And a special Happy Valentine’s Day to the mysterious Ms. Aarons (if that is your real name): You set my heart ablaze like Connie Stevens’ flaming baby “brother” in Susan Slade, dear, and I love you madly.
The plastic baby was a better, more emotive actor than Troy Donahue.
(Told you I’d find a way to post that screencap!)
(P.S. No babies were harmed in the making of Susan Slade, only the dignity of Connie Stevens and Dorothy McGuire.)
First there was “gayface,” and now there’s “gayfacebook,” as MIT students Carter Jernigan and Behram Mistree have found a way to determine whether male Facebook users are gay, regardless of whether the men disclose their orientation to all of the Internet.
Jernigan and Mistree’s homosexualist-spotting program was unable to help them zero-in on wily lesbians and bisexuals, and I’d make a lame joke that attempts to explain such a failure, except I’m not on Facebook (there’s already enough aggravation in my life without being alerted every time someone from my third grade class orders pizza), so I’ve got nothing. Just one more post this month, though, and I win…
It’s the question all of America is asking. (By “all of America,” I mean seven people, including two in the UK and one in Canada, none of whom will care enough to check back for an answer later this month unless they’re really, really bored at work or forget to clear their browsing history and accidentally select “Cranky Lesbian” on their drop-down menu when they mean to click something else.)
While Vegas oddsmakers don’t think it’s going to happen, I bet that it will. I wouldn’t place a large bet—I’m anti-gambling, mostly because I value my hard-earned money but also because Kenny Rogers put me off it—but maybe a dollar or two…
