“Should I clean the garage when I’m done with the lawn?”
The New York Times Magazine recently visited Rachel Maddow at home in Massachusetts and asked her a whole bunch of questions about her house, her favorite things, and how she spends her free time. Since my sister idolizes Rachel Maddow, I’d like to direct her attention to the first photograph at the link. Her eyes will immediately go to Rachel’s jeans and T-shirt, because she’s toyed with the idea of starting a “Free Rachel” campaign that would urge MSNBC to let their new “liberal queen of US news” dress however she wants on her show.* Once she’s done admiring her casual attire, I urge her to look at what’s behind Rachel.
That’s right, there are books. Lots of them. That’s because smart people read books. So would you please, sister whose name I won’t mention here, leave me alone about the size of my library from now on? You can continue to mock everything else you mock about me (though I wish you’d stop laughing maniacally at the thought of me getting lost in the grocery store; you know that never happened), but the books deserve a rest.
Also, take a look at how Rachel answers the question of what’s by her bed: “I read comics sometimes and graphic novels. I appreciate that genre.” You see that? Comics and graphic novels! So you can also shut up about my Buffy comics and graphic novels while you’re at it. If you meet me halfway on this, it’s possible I might — I stress the word “might” here, because it will be exceptionally difficult — stop making fun of your encyclopedic knowledge of Tegan and Sara’s tattoos.
Now, if we can awkwardly segue back to the Times piece, here are some other things we learned about Rachel Maddow: She’s a mustard person. She loses sleep worrying about loose nukes. To put her own mark on a house that mostly reflects her partner’s style, she placed a squirrel sculpture near the kitchen table. Writing makes her “want to blow [her] head off.” She has clown shoes, a Ford pickup and a Massachusetts fishing license. Most intriguingly, she says, “I have a little stockpile of lawn mowers, some of which it has been years since they worked. But it seems wrong to get rid of lawn mowers, so I keep them.”
Sadly, interviewer Edward Lewine wasn’t intrepid enough to ask the hard-hitting follow-up questions: Are they all walk-behinds or are there a few riding lawn mowers mixed in there as well? Are we talking about old-school reel mowers or more newfangled equipment? Has she tried a robotic lawn mower yet?
Robotic lawn mowers are pretty cool, except they don’t look robotic enough for my tastes: I want a lawn mower that’s modeled on Rosie from The Jetsons. Looking out your window to see an actual robot-looking robot cutting the lawn would go a long way in lessening the sting of the $1,500 price tag on most Robomowers. Or, what if there was a Short Circuit-inspired lawn mower? Throw in an extra $1,000 and you could probably get Steve Guttenberg and Ally Sheedy to show up with a leaf blower and hedge trimmers and finish your landscaping themselves.
UPDATE (7:22 PM): More good news about Rachel’s ratings can be found here. Also, my sister responds to the NYT Magazine piece: “Awww, that’s such a cute picture.” A few minutes later: “OMG! I always wanted a Ford Ranger when I was a kid!” Still no word on whether she’ll back off my library, but I’m choosing to be optimistic.
*After giving more consideration to how MSNBC promotes The Rachel Maddow Show, I’ve decided they should just use the tagline “Rachel Talks You Down.” She doesn’t really talk you down, mostly she just reassures you that you’re right to panic, but that’s why people like her and it’s why they like Keith Olbermann. Viewers find it comforting to know they’re not the only ones who are angered and appalled by what’s going on in our country. So it’s either something encouraging like “Rachel Talks You Down” or something completely honest like “Fox News is for Fucking Morons. MSNBC Isn’t.” (Then there could be a disclaimer that says, “Except for Morning Joe, David Gregory and Pat Buchanan.”)
Anyone else transfixed by it? I’m a non-Minnesotan who donated $50 to Elwyn Tinklenberg’s campaign yesterday after seeing his unhinged opponent, the incumbent Rep. Michele Bachmann, froth at the mouth about “anti-American” Democrats on Hardball. Hitting the ‘refresh’ button every time I’m near my computer, I’ve watched his donations grow from $15,000 or $20,000 to $131,000 and counting in less than 24 hours. It’s far more entertaining than anything on TV.
UPDATE: Tinklenberg has raised around $450,000 in the 24 hours since Bachmann’s Hardball appearance first aired. That is more than his campaign had raised in the last three months and “total nearly half of what it has raised to date,” according to newspaper reports. So the Internet has had its say, and the Internet voted against Michele Bachmann.
This is the part of the faux-lesbianism debate where we get a glimpse into Don Vito Corleone’s childhood in Sicily, his voyage to America, his adventures in rug-stealing with Clemenza, and the totally awesome way in which he disposed of Don Fanucci. (And that’s not even getting into Michael Corleone’s trip to Havana and his dealings with Hyman Roth, or Fredo’s fatal Johnny Ola slip-up.).
Sorry, I got confused there for a minute. This is the part of the faux-lesbianism debate in which an actual lesbian — Jane Czyzselska, editor of Diva magazine, which is Europe’s answer to Curve — weighs in, managing to do so in a non-sucky way. You know, unlike the Australian article that I complained about so bitterly earlier this week. Czyzselska was responding to Jodie Marsh’s recent declaration that she’s giving lesbianism a whirl.
Greta Garbo disguised herself as a lesbian to spy for Germany. Or maybe not.
This is a really dumb article. One of the dumbest I’ve ever read, and I used to read Seventeen and Teen Beat faithfully.
The problems start with the headline, which asserts that “bogus lesbians” are “causing emotional damage.” There are two possible responses to this. The first is a joke about it being old news to actual lesbians that fake lesbians cause emotional damage. The second isn’t a joke, just a confused “Who to the what now?” We’re only headline-deep and the article already feels unintentionally funny, not to mention rather quaint.
Then there’s this:
Several high-profile relationships involving “real lesbians” and women more often linked to men — such as MTV’s Ruby Rose and Jess Origliasso, and Samantha Ronson and Lindsay Lohan — have reportedly encouraged a wave of “fauxmosexuals” on the real life party circuit.
Oh, please. If Lindsay Lohan can’t get leggings to catch on, how is she going to convince a girl who wasn’t already interested in kissing girls to kiss another girl? Let’s give women (yes, even young women), a bit of credit here — they do have minds of their own. And let’s be realistic: “fauxmosexuality” (which is sometimes more complicated than someone simply craving attention, but it’s easier to pretend everyone is completely one-dimensional, isn’t it?) is nothing new. Perhaps the media only recently caught onto it, but “the gays” have been dealing with it, and in many cases rolling their eyes at it, forever.
And then there’s this:
Gay social commentator Tim Duggan has described the “lesbian trend” as a fad which is actually doing “more damage than good”.
“Experimentation is healthy — what it leads to can sometimes be a great thing, but you need to wonder what effect [fake lesbians] are having on women,” said Mr Duggan, co-founder of gay and lesbian site SameSame.
“Women who pretend to be lesbians do it to titillate men.”
Why does lesbianism always, always, always come back to men? I know that not everyone understands this, and that even some gay men have difficulty looking at women’s issues without trying to relate them back to men, but not all experimenters are women who are “pretending to be lesbians,” and not all of them are doing it to titillate men. Certainly there must be a way for concerned social commentators to tackle the subject of “faux lesbianism” without diminishing the complexity of female sexuality and apparently dismissing the notion of bisexuality altogether.
(And why do these lectures always seem oddly prudish, like there’s something inherently distasteful about straight girls wanting to titillate their boyfriends in this manner? Not every girl who kisses a girl to get a reaction from a guy does so under duress. Sometimes — gasp! — women are in control of their own sexuality, know what they’re doing, and like kissing other women and like turning on their boyfriends.)
Finally:
Online gay forums are abuzz with talk of the “bogus lesbian” craze, with some questioning whether the trend is putting real homosexuals at risk.
“Where do these fauxmosexual fads leave queer teens once they’re packed away in the cupboard (with other fads)?,” user timbo84 wrote.
“The statistic of 30 percent of teen suicides in the US being gay or lesbian teens is very distressing.
“Here’s hoping pop culture moves on to focus on people like Ellen and Ian McKellen and not those who are just ‘out’ to make a buck!”
Pop culture hasn’t moved away from Ellen and Ian McKellen. They both have successful careers and legions of adoring fans who respect them for coming out. But let’s back this up a bit: An obscure (outside of Australia) MTV VJ being photographed in a clinch with an almost equally obscure (outside of Australia) pop star might be putting real homosexuals at risk? If ever a remark called for a heavy sigh and a major “Oh, Mary,” that has to be it. (Or “Oh, Martina,” if you prefer, if you’re dealing with a clueless woman.)
I was a teenage lesbian. (That is also the title of my next pulp novel.) That was way back in the ’90s and the early aughts, before Tila Tequila, or whatever the hell her name is, had her own bisexual dating show — a show I’ll admit I’ve never bothered to watch. It was before The L Word existed, before South of Nowhere was on a cable channel aimed at young adults, and, most lamentably, it was before YouTube fulfilled the promise of the world wide web by giving everyone with an Internet connection free and immediate 24-hour access to gay content.
The only lesbians the public knew at that time were Ellen DeGeneres, Melissa Etheridge, Billie Jean King, k.d. lang, and Martina Navratilova. There was also Janis Ian, but the song “At Seventeen” depressed everyone and they tried not to think about her. (As a side note, who have we added to the list since then? A tennis player here, a WNBA player there, a few awful singers with acoustic guitars and the occasional relic from the ’60s. Maybe the world can only handle five powerful lesbians at once. I know I’ve tried to handle six before and after a while it just got confusing.) Back then, even after I started coming out to friends, no one believed I was gay. My sheltered Midwestern classmates seemed to think lesbians were like the Abominable Snowman: “Personally, I don’t believe they exist, but I know this guy who says he saw a picture…”
They thought it was a phase, or that I was simply confused. (A few objected on the grounds that my hair wasn’t short. Yes, my school was obviously crawling with geniuses). They were confident that one day I’d meet the right guy and burst into the home-ec room singing, “Gonna wash that gay right out of my hair!” or something equally catchy. I was fifteen at the time and none of my classmates were openly gay, though we were pretty sure about Tom, a cute Southern Baptist who proudly served in the color guard and loved to quote Designing Women.
A number of my classmates were outspoken homophobes, which was more common than not in the 1990s, in a town that had more churches than bookstores, where PTA moms would stop each other in the grocery store to share their disappointment about Ellen on the cover of Time. Some days I thought I heard the words “gay” and “fag” in the hallway more than I heard the words “and” and “but.”
Nearly ten years later, at the exact same school, my sister came out of the closet. No one thought she was going through a phase. No one thinks she’s going to magically turn straight. (Maybe it’s because she has short hair. We’ll have to gather data.) There are still homophobic students. There are still teachers who do too little to rein them in. Comments are still made and hostile looks are still felt. Sometimes lockers are even defaced. But the school now has a gay-straight alliance, which would have been unthinkable 10 years ago.
And there are so many gay, lesbian and bisexual students that I still get confused when I hear my sister gossip about this girl dating that girl or this guy being interested in that guy’s boyfriend. “Are we talking about the same school?” I want to ask. When I was 13 there was talk the prom would be canceled if the only openly bisexual student in the entire high school brought her girlfriend. Now her gay friends are running student council and planning school dances. It doesn’t compute. (Her response would probably be, “Like we’d let straight kids plan the dances.”)
These teenagers are blazing their own trail. They don’t particularly care who Jess from the Veronicas is spotted kissing, and neither do their heterosexual peers. Jess from the Veronicas doesn’t attend their GSA meetings or write on their Facebook walls. Not only do they not feel their quest for equality is imperiled by Lindsay Lohan’s relationship with Samantha Ronson, they’d roll their eyes at the suggestion that their straight classmates would either assume the Lohan-Ronson union is a publicity stunt or react to news of a Lohan-Ronson breakup by saying, “If the girl from The Parent Trap isn’t really gay, then you’re probably a bunch of impostors as well! We don’t take you seriously now, and once we’re allowed to vote we’re going to make sure you can never get married!”*
Really, how fucking stupid do these people think kids are?
UPDATE (10/14): To answer a few questions, the reason Rosie O’Donnell was left off my “the only lesbians the public knew at that time” list is because … drum roll, please … she wasn’t out of the closet yet. She came out in 2002, five years after Ellen, and I’d graduated from high school by then. As for the “five powerful lesbians” concept, I’m sticking with it for now but would add that Rosie replaced k.d. lang on the list quite some time ago.
Oh, and the point of the post — and I think most people got this, but in case there are any questions — wasn’t that it’s wrong to discuss so-called “fauxmosexuality.” My point, as the first sentence of the post makes clear, is that this particular article on the subject is dumb. It’s a terrible, terrible, shallow, worthless article that reads like it was put together in two seconds. And I’m an expert on sloppy effort, as anyone who has perused this website knows.
* Gay teens do love Lindsay Lohan, though. Call it the Mean Girls factor. The new gays quote that movie as much as the old ones quoted Heathers. The “too gay to function” line is a perennial favorite.
While grown-up Mormons living in Utah prove that state boundaries are no match for their all-consuming hatred of non-heterosexuals by eagerly awaiting the opportunity to help quash gay marriage in California, first-graders from the Creative Arts Charter School in San Francisco spent Friday afternoon celebrating the wedding of their lesbian teacher. The children, whose parents supported the field trip to City Hall, threw rose petals at the brides and said things like, “She’s a really nice teacher. She’s the best. I want her to have a good wedding.”
Maybe one of the church elders from Salt Lake City who plans on making phone calls to Californians asking them to vote yes on Proposition 8 could get in touch with these bigotry-free six-year-olds and explain to them why the teacher they’re so nuts about shouldn’t be allowed to get married. An education is obviously in order here, and these kids seem more than qualified to teach men like L. Whitney Clayton a thing or two.
It might also be worth noting that McCain is trying — and failing — to connect with Hispanic voters.
When you attack your opponent for his so-called “otherness,” when you make his “otherness” an issue in venues packed with angry, mostly white evangelical types, aren’t you basically telling every voter who has some “otherness” of his or her own to fuck off?
Aren’t you also, by extension, telling every voter who doesn’t seem like an “other” (whatever that means) but still appreciates “otherness” (rather than fearing it) to fuck off as well? What kind of voter base does that leave you with, other than the dregs of society and, uh, Pat Buchanan?
When you’re reading a review of a cabaret show and come across a description that says “over the course of 60 minutes, and in about 10 songs” the performer sings about “the ubiquity of fanny packs on lesbians, the need for upper-body strength in lesbian sex, finding your soulmate on the Internet, and an affinity for U-Hauls,” the first thing that probably comes to mind is: Oh, Pink’s collaborating with Linda Perry again.
The culprits are actually Amy Turner and Kathryn Lounsbery, a musical-comedy duo I hadn’t heard of before reading this review of That’s What She Said! — a review that’s particularly charming because gay-but-not-lesbian critic Richard Dodds doesn’t know what the hell they’re talking about with the upper-body strength thing.
A bit of research shows that Turner and Lounsbery are trying to “make the world smile — one dyke at a time” (good luck with that, you crazy kids) and that they share a fondness for colorful jackets; you can check out their music online. For their next trick, I want them to write a song about how every third lesbian is named Amy. That function was previously filled by the ever-popular Tammy, but then the ’90s happened and many a young Amy who’d been born in the mid-to-late seventies discovered the riot grrrl scene and women’s studies programs. Just like that, Amy was all the Sapphic rage.
Sapphic rage, by the way? Another great topic for a song. Or an opera. An opera set at MichFest. Lea DeLaria can star. Anyone who wants to develop this idea should contact my people immediately, before Joel Schumacher snaps it up for Gerard Butler.
From today’s New York Daily News, about Michelle Rodriguez’s weekend at the Mayfair Hotel and Spa in Coconut Grove, Florida:
Fellow guests at the recherché retreat say they were awakened at 9 a.m. Sunday to loud banging and the dulcet tones of Rodriguez, screaming at her roommate.
“I woke up Sunday morning to the sounds of two women yelling, and one of them was smashing the door knocker very loudly,” one exhausted guest tells us. “I peeked out and saw it was [Rodriguez]. She’s screaming, ‘Open up, let me in, b——!'”
The loud knocking continued for another five minutes, says the source, until the “Girlfight” star hollered, “If you don’t open up, you’re not getting your [pleasure toy] back.” The door creaked open.
The actress did not respond to requests for comment.
We’ve already established that I’m afraid of Michelle Rodriguez, so it’s probably best for me to slowly back out of the room right now without saying anything else. But this story is so magnificent that I just can’t help myself. Take her name out of the equation, replace it with anything that pops into your head (me, I’d go with Shirley Jones or Florence Henderson), and tell me it isn’t still comedy gold.
Of course, the fact that Rodriguez has a history of getting into headline-grabbing fights with women (see the third to last paragraph of the Daily News article), not to mention her (rumored) lascivious behavior in the company of mortified heterosexuals, might add a little something to it. That’s for you to decide. Personally, I want to believe this really happened. If it did, I will pay to see every one of Michelle Rodriguez’s theatrically released movies for the rest of my life. She’ll have earned it.
One of the many things John McCain did last night that irritated me was repeatedly invoke the names of Russ Feingold and Joe Lieberman. It felt like a very calculated shout-out (we know how much his ticket likes shout-outs) to Jewish voters, who are turning their backs on him when he needs them the most.
If he wants to pander, that’s fine. What else can he do right now but pander? I’d just like to see him really commit to it, if that’s how he wants to play things. I want to see him take the stage in a yarmulke. I want newsreel footage of him dancing the horah in South Florida — though I don’t know what the occasion would be since he currently has nothing to be happy about.
Most of all, I want him to announce that if he becomes president he will appoint Fyvush Finkel, the beloved Yiddish theater actor and star of TV’s Boston Public, as secretary of the treasury. I mean, you say the name Fyvush Finkel once and it’s like saying Feingold and Lieberman twenty times.
What better way to get your point across? And it might actually sway some of my grandparents’ friends. Oh, sure, they’re all aghast at McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate, and it’s true their rabbi belongs to Rabbis for Obama and is outspokenly anti-Palin. But they all loved Finkel on Picket Fences. That has to count for something.
“The fundamental difference between myself and Senata Obama is that I’m completely insane and he isn’t.”
Oh, that John McCain. Saying “my friends” as much as Sarah Palin says “betcha” and “gosh” — and sounding just as insincere. Telling joke after joke that fell flatter than … I don’t know, something that’s really flat. (And how about that terse exchange between Chris Matthews and McCain flack Mike DuHaime on the late edition of Hardball? Matthews clearly wanted to issue a Philly-style beat-down as they went back and forth about McCain’s Tom Brokaw/treasury secretary barb, and I’d guess a fair number of viewers were encouraging him from their couches.) Visibly seething with anger and resentment for 90 minutes as Barack Obama wiped the friggin’ floor with him. He’s really quite the character.
I couldn’t sleep at all last night, just as I couldn’t sleep the night before the vice-presidential debate. (Couldn’t sleep after the vice-presidential debate, either. It took hours for my brain to recover from the trauma of trying to understand Sarah Palin’s answers.) I’m tortured by the thought of having to endure another four years under another Republican president. I don’t know what repulsive stunts the McCain campaign might pull at this point to improve their flagging poll numbers. Part of me thinks they can’t sink much lower than what they’re already doing. Another part of me, the part that has lived around Republicans for 25 years, expects to turn on the news tomorrow to find Sarah Palin delivering a stump speech in Imperial Wizard garb — to rapturous applause and Nazi salutes.
What I do know is that after tonight’s “wipe-out,” as Andrew Sullivan is calling it, I’ll finally get a bit of sleep. Then tomorrow night I’ll start worrying again, if any of you want to join me.
