In Las Vegas, the comedian Wanda Sykes surprised a crowd of more than 1,000 rallying outside a gay community center by announcing that she is gay and had wed her wife in California on Oct. 25. Ms. Sykes, who divorced her husband of seven years in 1998, had never publicly discussed her sexual orientation but said the passage of Proposition 8 had propelled her to be open about it.
You can read more of Wanda’s Las Vegas statements here. She’s one of my favorite comedians and I applaud her for finally coming out. It can only help her stand-up routine; now she can let loose in her bit about gay marriage in a way she couldn’t before.
Remember how Senator Bond, Kit Bond, tried to rile up a crowd at a Sarah Palin rally in Cape Girardeau, Missouri last month by telling them that Barack Obama, if elected president, would threaten the very (starchy white, with a pointed hood) fabric of our democracy by possibly appointing judges who don’t hate “the teenage mom, the minority, the gay, the disabled.” That was fun, wasn’t it?
You know what else is fun? Joining outraged citizens across the country in protesting the passage of California’s Proposition 8, which people will be doing tomorrow. In Cape Girardeau.
Ever wondered what happened at Tara when all the men were off at war?
Do you ever find yourself sitting around wondering what it is that Atlanta-based lesbians do in bed? Yeah, me neither. (I assume they do what the rest of us do, except maybe the un-PC sports fans among them throw in a tomahawk chop or something.) But in 2005, sociologist Kathleen A. Dolan approached 162 women with the kind of probing personal questions that are usually only asked by Howard Stern, and for some reason I’m just hearing about it now, via this Southern Voice article by Laura Douglas-Brown.*
The statistic that really startled me would have to be the 21% of women who reported engaging in heterosexual intercourse within the last year. Call me old-fashioned, but I leave the sex with guys stuff up to gay men, just as God intended. Curiously, none of the lesbians interviewed by Dolan reported doing what I do in bed, which is read grisly Ruth Rendell novels and obsessively check my alarm clock to make sure it’s properly set (which isn’t really necessary since I wake up before the alarm goes off anyway, but try telling my OCD that). Maybe those activities are unpopular with the lesbians of Atlanta because they don’t call for any man-penis…
* Those of you who worry about clicking the wrong link at work should know that the article is accompanied by a large photo of a lesbian liplock. Far more troubling than that, in my opinion, and even more distracting than the unusually large earrings both women are wearing, would have to be the ads for a Hilary Duff Greatest Hits CD that are plastered all over the website. I’m hoping it’s 12 tracks of silence, but that seems unlikely.
Six years later, Buffy fans are still angry about Tara’s death.
Last week I was a tad pessimistic about tonight’s episode of Grey’s Anatomy; I thought there was a chance from the preview that Erica Hahn’s mangled corpse might be wheeled into Seattle Grace. While common sense would dictate the last thing the Grey’s writers, or ABC for that matter, would want to do right now is piss the gays off even more by dusting off the dread Dead Lesbian cliché, Grey’s Anatomy isn’t a show that’s known for its sensible writing.
What made me think that such a development wasn’t outside the realm of possibility was a flashback I had to the creepy way ER once dispatched of one of its interns (played by Omar Epps), who — as I remember it, but I saw the episode a long time ago and the details are hazy — left work one night and returned hours later as an unidentified (until his beeper went off) patient who’d been run over by a subway train.
Since there had been no resolution to the Callie/Erica storyline, since it had been reported that Brooke Smith would not be appearing in future episodes, and since her character was last seen heading to her car after threatening to bring serious legal action against the hospital, there didn’t seem to be many options for tidily wrapping things up for “Callica” outside of having Erica get hit by a bus or something.
In the end, she wasn’t deemed an important enough character to merit a proper sendoff. Within the first minute or so of tonight’s episode, Cristina, who had a contentious relationship with Erica, flopped into bed with Meredith and Derek to announce that “Hahn is gone.” (Ah, lazy writing. It’s a concept I’m well-acquainted with, as anyone reading this can tell.) She quit following her “no gray area” fight with Callie last week.
As if to compensate for the inevitable “Ding-dong! The witch is dead” joke made at Hahn’s expense, Derek reacted to news of her departure by saying, “It’s too bad, she was really talented.” Erica’s replacement, a cardiothoracic surgeon played by Mary McDonnell, was swiftly introduced; like her predecessor, she instantly rubbed a few coworkers the wrong way, but she has been given an autistic spectrum disorder that will presumably make viewers sympathetic to her in a way they never were to Hahn.
Judging by what we saw tonight, it’s possible that “Callica” could resume contact off screen and viewers could get a Hahn update at some point. It’s unlikely I’ll be tuning into Grey’s Anatomy again anytime soon, so I won’t know about it unless someone mentions it to me.
It’s been almost a week since I last mentioned Jodie Marsh (whose lesbionic backstory you can read about here), and I think we’d all agree that’s been almost a week too long. Just as you can never have enough hats, gloves and shoes, you can never have enough news about Britain’s favorite attention-seeking clown hooker.
With that in mind, I point you in the direction of Dlisted, the brainchild of the gayelle-crazed homosexual Michael K (not to be confused with Gregory K, the kid who divorced his parents, or Kafka’s Josef K — I’m not sure how either Gregory or Josef would feel about Michael’s one true love, the celebrated lesbian folk hero Rojo Caliente), and its recap (complete with image gallery) of Jodie lezzing out for photographers the other night with her girlfriend Nina.
“There she goes again, mentioning us to Matt Lauer!”
Timothy Egan, the Times writer and noted author, wonders what the hell is going on in Alaska, and the resulting blog post is a thing of beauty. Seriously Alaskans: WTF?
Speaking of Alaskans and WTF?, Sarah Palin gave her first press conference today. If you guessed that it was barely longer than a Ramones song, you are correct and deserve some kind of prize. (Truly, Jason Biggs lasted longer with that pie than this woman who wanted to be the vice-president of the United States lasted in front of reporters. It’s insane.)
You can choose from the lovely assortment of paperclips on my desk (there’s a green one, a pink one and a bunch of boring old regular ones) or the Louise Brooks videocassettes I can’t bring myself to throw out despite the fact that Pandora’s Box and Diary of a Lost Girl are now available on DVD. It seems morally wrong to send anything bearing Louise’s image to the landfill, even though I’m relatively certain the tapes and their cases don’t have feelings.
I know I’m a bit late on this — I was away from my computer most of the day yesterday — but having finally read what Scott Eckern, who resigned as artistic director of the California Musical Theater on Wednesday amid protests over his $1,000 donation to the anti-gay Yes on Proposition 8 campaign, had to say for himself, I gotta admit: I’m a bit baffled.
In what universe does a statement like “I understand that my choice of supporting Proposition 8 has been the cause of many hurt feelings, maybe even betrayal. It was not my intent. I honestly had no idea that this would be the reaction” make sense? He’s been working with the gays for more than 25 years; he knows we’re a bit on the sensitive side even when we’re not being stripped of newly granted marriage rights by our “loving and supportive” friends and relatives and coworkers.
In response to this bit of teeth-gnashing earlier in the week, I was pointed in the direction of Channel 4’s amusing Gay-O-Meter, which — drum roll, please — tells me I’m 33% gay and even refers to me as “straight acting.”
That, my friends (sorry, I’m still having John McCain flashbacks), is poppycock. It is categorically false. It is untrue and inaccurate. I’m running out of words here, but rest assured that I’m half-tempted to have Bert Fields send the Gay-O-Meter a letter that’s heavy on mentions of defamation and retractions and public apologies. If necessary, I could produce a sworn written statement from my aunt, who claims she knew I was gay by the time I was a toddler. (And she knows from these things, having once been a gay toddler herself.)
While I liked the Gay-O-Meter quiz, I couldn’t help but feel I’d been penalized for not having tattoos, not being handy with a wrench, never having worn leather pants, and being non-violent. So I retook the test, changing my answers to those questions, and suddenly I was 17% gayer. But does that really make sense? Since when are lesbians members of the Village People?
If you want to get all technical, Sarah Palin didn’t really vow to never stop being stupid. But she came pretty close when she lashed out at bloggers in an interview with Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren, calling them “kids in pajamas sitting in the basement of their parents’ homes” — ostensibly because they’ve been critical of her. (FOR BEING AN IDIOT!, I might add.)
I guess she’s forgetting the part where she probably owes her selection as John McCain’s running mate to the efforts of a college student and blogger named Adam Brickley. As Jane Mayer wrote last month in The New Yorker:
In February, 2007, Adam Brickley gave himself a mission: he began searching for a running mate for McCain who could halt the momentum of the Democrats. Brickley, a self-described “obsessive” political junkie who recently graduated from the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, told me that he began by “randomly searching Wikipedia and election sites for Republican women.” Though he generally opposes affirmative action, gender drove his choice. “People were talking about Hillary at the time,” he recalled. Brickley said that he “puzzled over every Republican female politician I knew.” Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, of Texas, “waffled on social issues”; Senator Olympia Snowe, of Maine, was too moderate. He was running out of options, he recalled, when he said to himself, “What about that lady who just got elected in Alaska?” Online research revealed that she had a strong grassroots following; as Brickley put it, “I hate to use the words ‘cult of personality,’ but she reminded me of Obama.”
Brickley registered a Web site — palinforvp.blogspot.com which began getting attention in the conservative blogosphere. In the month before Palin was picked by McCain, Brickley said, his Web site was receiving about three thousand hits a day. Support for Palin had spread from one right-of-center Internet site to the next. First, the popular conservative blogger InstaPundit mentioned Brickley’s campaign. Then a site called the American Scene said that Palin was “very appealing”; another, Stop the A.C.L.U., described her as “a great choice.” The traditional conservative media soon got in on the act: The American Spectator embraced Palin, and Rush Limbaugh, the radio host, praised her as “a babe.”
Palin’s rise from obscurity, her $150,000 wardrobe, her trip to Saturday Night Live, can all be traced back to a kid blogger. Shouldn’t she be thanking the blogosphere instead of telling it to fuck itself?
And by the way, Sarah, when I write hurtful things about you from my parents’ basement, I’m usually dressed in waders, the better to navigate the flood of bullshit that’s unleashed every time you talk to the press.
Well, okay, that’s a bit of a sensationalistic headline, but I wanted to make sure I have your attention. Just moments ago, as I was looking at this, my very own website (which I only peek at through my fingers, like I’m watching a horror movie or a live Liza Minnelli performance), an advertisement caught my eye. It said something like: “Are You a Lesbian? Take This Test and See!”
I had a few minutes to spare, so I thought I’d take the test and find out. Even though I consider myself to be pretty obviously gay, others aren’t always as convinced. My siblings, for example, didn’t believe me when I came out to them. It took my sisters several months to realize I wasn’t kidding. Even after I got my parents to vouch for my gayness (I remember it like it was yesterday, calling them into the room so I could wave towards my sisters and impatiently demand, “Will you tell them I’m gay?”), they regarded me with skepticism, convinced I was secretly dating a male friend.
