Cranky Lesbian - Page 11 - Look what the homosexuals have done to me!

A sapphically-oriented guest bedroom nook.

It’s been a hectic week here, with my wife wrapping up a grant as I’ve prepared for company. When your homophobic in-laws are coming to inspect your new-ish digs for the first time, you want to pull out all the stops, which in my case meant framing some old gay pulp fiction paperback art for their viewing displeasure. Guest bedroom window nooks are now home to Daughters of Sappho (“A Heritage of Infamy!”) and Lesbian Queen (“Crowned campus queen, she chose to rule a small, hot female realm of off-beat lust”).

There are male-centric prints (like Gay Cruise) in the room currently serving as our gym, and of course men were the centerpieces of the pulp art in my previous home, where Hot Pants Homo was framed on the refrigerator alongside a dramatic photo of Jane Bowles. The Hot Pants Homo tagline is a doozy: “Women lusted after this handsome, virile jazzman… It took him years of agony to realize he wanted a man.” Wherever we live, the guest bathroom’s the same, featuring a large Gay Traders, a soapy visual feast where the naked women seem like more of a group-shower afterthought. “The trouble with swap is where to stop!” it warns. Who knows what the plumber thinks we’re up to.

Kate Jackson Does Time in Inmates: A Love Story

By Cranky Lesbian

On October 10, 2022

In TV Movies

*Killer Bees* were nothing compared to hard time.

Kate Jackson’s incarcerated again in Inmates: A Love Story (1981), and while it’s frustrating that her love interest is Perry King and not Meg Foster, we must learn to accept it and move on with our lives. (Gluttons for punishment will recall that Foster was King’s lesbian love interest in 1978’s seven-layer dip of offensiveness, A Different Story, in which he also played gay, but that’s a rant for another day.) If you can manage your disappointment, even as Jackson wears flannel and performs garbage duty, you’ll be rewarded with a bizarre, mostly enjoyable telefilm with a rare early ’80s lesbian subplot.

Jackson’s Jane Mount (no comment on the butch surname) is doing “a nickel to a dime,” as she puts it, at the Greenleaf State Co-Correctional Institution, an experimental coed facility. The men and women bunk in separate areas but fraternize in the cafeteria, prison yard and other shared spaces. Sexual contact is a verboten but couples pair off anyway, which is how Jane’s closest friend, young Grace (an affecting Fay Hauser), becomes pregnant. When Grace spots the baby’s father canoodling with another inmate, Jane tells her to leave and approaches the cad with her cafeteria tray — and a trademark mischievous Jackson smile that signals he’s about to receive a helluva comeuppance.

Quick Programming Note for Kate Jackson Fans

By Cranky Lesbian

On October 7, 2022

In Housekeeping

Kate Jackson, affectionately known here as Charlie’s Butchest Angel, celebrates a birthday later this month. If time permits I plan to look back on a few of her telefilms. First up will be Inmates: A Love Story (from 1981, the same year as Thin Ice), in which she again finds herself behind bars, this time in a co-ed institution with Shirley Jones as the prison superintendent.

Will sparks fly when the impossibly handsome Perry King shows up in a three-piece suit as a white collar criminal? Why is Tony Curtis loitering near the men’s showers dressed like a cross between a pimp, a cat burglar and the Gorton’s fisherman (by way of Johnny Cash)? We’ll attempt to answer all these questions and more next week, but I wanted to put this here now as a promise. Because, through a convoluted and predictably gay series of events, a few Jackson fans check in here almost every weekend looking for new Kate content.

Finally, an update on last week’s post about my anniversary. My wife and I don’t normally exchange gifts but since this was a milestone year I gave her a painting of the place where we got engaged. She gave me a Tom of Finland book that some of you will surely appreciate. Now the question becomes whether to leave it on the coffee table when her super-religious parents visit next week.

UPDATE: Here’s the Inmates: A Love Story review.

The Deliberate Stranger: Before There Was Netflix…

By Cranky Lesbian

On October 5, 2022

In TV Movies

Mark Harmon in *The Deliberate Stranger* (1986).

Netflix, the streaming giant once poised to join or overtake HBO as a premiere destination for prestige programming, now happily wallows in lurid filth—and, sadly, I don’t mean that in the best spirit of the phrase. Whether it’s the new Marilyn Monroe film (which I’m avoiding for reasons better articulated by Michael Campochiaro of The Starfire Lounge), or an endless parade of deeply exploitative true crime ‘documentaries’ that aren’t worthy of the name, I regularly receive promo emails from Netflix touting irredeemable content.

Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, one of its most recent ghoulish offerings, is produced by Ryan Murphy, a titan of tabloid tragedy who has never met a murder he wasn’t happy to exploit for profit. Even as real-life families of victims called the series re-traumatizing, it was quickly watched in its entirety by more than 56 million households. I’ve heard more than one viewer justify their decision by insisting they’re merely interested in abnormal psychology, which is absurd. No one is bingeing a 10-part series about a cannibal weeks before Halloween for academic reasons.

I Think I’m Having a Baby: A Teen’s Pregnant Pause

By Cranky Lesbian

On October 3, 2022

In TV Movies

Jennifer Jason Leigh, dressed in a red shirt, waves. — Jennifer Jason Leigh waves goodbye to her childhood in *I Think I’m Having a Baby*.

As strange a title as it is — it’s preferable to possess a degree of certainty about whether you’re expecting — I Think I’m Having a Baby is also perfectly in keeping with the utter cluelessness of this 1981 Afternoon Playhouse special’s 15-year-old protagonist. Laurie McIntire (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a child with the hair and makeup of a divorced and disillusioned single mother of two, has entered that hideous phase of adolescence where she’s constitutionally incapable of doing anything but mooning over an unimpressive boy.

Star athlete Peter (Shawn Stevens) dates her older cousin Phoebe (Helen Hunt), whose preppy sweater draped over the shoulders tells you all there is to know about her. Peter isn’t particularly bright (Phoebe does his schoolwork) and teases Laurie on the rare occasion he notices her at all. But when her best friend Marsha (Bobbi Block, now known as Samantha Paris) and little sister Carrie (Tracey Gold, years away from the torments of Lady Killer and Midwest Obsession) mock his ape-like walk across the football field, Laurie gets defensive. “He’s not really like that,” she insists.

Love, Soft as an Easy Chair

By Cranky Lesbian

On October 1, 2022

In BFFs

Barbra Streisand asks the eternal question in *A Star is Born*.

I have a thing about A Star is Born. Not the 1937 Janet Gaynor original or George Cukor’s 1954 musical remake starring Judy Garland, though I’ve seen both. It’s the worst of the bunch, the misconceived 1976 lovechild of Barbra Streisand and Jon Peters, that I love unabashedly, even though it’s a top-to-bottom disaster. (Was there anything about its conceptualization of Esther that wasn’t completely deranged?)

The excesses and eccentricities of that iteration of A Star is Born were at the forefront of my mind in 2018, as the October release of Bradley Cooper’s remake drew near. I almost revived this website, long-dormant at the time, to discuss it. Part of what drove me crazy was that my wife was unfamiliar with every telling of the story and couldn’t pretend to understand my excitement.

The Golden Girls: “On Golden Girls” Episode Recap

By Cranky Lesbian

On September 30, 2022

In Friends of Dorothy Z.

Blanche Devereaux is a woman of many skills—most notably, some that are impolite to discuss publicly—but it’s fair to say exemplary parenting and grandparenting weren’t among them. She acknowledges strained relationships with her (many) children more than once in the course of The Golden Girls, but we rarely see her do anything about it.

In “Even Grandmas Get the Blues” (S6E20), she pretends granddaughter Aurora, Rebecca’s baby, is her own to impress a potential suitor (Alan Rachins). A few episodes later, in “Beauty and the Beast” (S7E03), granddaughter Melissa comes to visit and Blanche forces the resentful child to participate in a pageant for her own vain reasons. As in her dealings with sister Virginia, Blanche focuses on herself to the exclusion of others, but it wasn’t always that way.

A Stranger Among Us: What’s New and Exciting?

By Cranky Lesbian

On September 26, 2022

In '90s Films

Melanie Griffith and Eric Thal are drawn to the unfamiliar in *A Stranger Among Us*.

The early ’90s brought viewers an unusual one-two punch from Sidney Lumet—unusual because the veteran filmmaker only managed to knock himself out. A Stranger Among Us (1992) and Guilty as Sin (1993) are the pictures in question, the former starring Melanie Griffith and the latter her then-husband, Don Johnson. That I recognize each as a dud does nothing to lessen my affinity for them, especially A Stranger Among Us, which bravely asks and answers the question: “What if we remade Witness with Hasidic Jews and cast Eric Thal as Kelly McGillis… and it sucked?”

Griffith plays Emily Eden, a flirty NYPD detective who jokes of her cowboy reputation that she’s Calamity Jane. (Our first hint that this was a questionable undertaking came in the form of its original title: Close to Eden.) Stranger opens with Emily and her partner Nick (Jamey Sheridan, adrift in a role that’s more conceit than character) reminiscing about both their first collar and their on-again, off-again relationship. “Cha-cha all night and then straight to the courthouse in the morning,” she recalls, before spotting a couple of sleazy perps she wants to take down without backup.

“God, It’s Killing Me”: Federer’s Final Match

By Cranky Lesbian

On September 23, 2022

In Tennis

You can all decide which of the Big Four are represented here as you please. I think Roger’s Dorothy and Rafa’s Trudy.

The match is over. Federer’s competitive career is over. The way he chose to go out, playing alongside Rafael Nadal, his fiercest rival and close friend—and in a team setting, no less (his European Laver Cup team also included the rest of the ‘Big Four,’ Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray)—was perfect.

People joke about Federer’s egocentrism because he’s so matter-of-fact in discussing his accomplishments. But the enormous respect and remarkable friendship he shares with Nadal, and their abiding belief that no one player is bigger than the sport, is a moving testament to the character of both men.

Nearly a half-hour after the post-match ceremony ended, my heart still feels as though it’s gripped in a vise. I had a hard time on the night of Serena’s retirement, but this was markedly worse for reasons that are impossible to articulate. Few things in my life ever meant as much to me as watching Roger Federer play tennis.

Dixie Carter Sings the Springsteen Songbook

By Cranky Lesbian

On September 23, 2022

In Bad Decisions

Roger Federer’s final competitive match, a doubles pairing with Rafael Nadal, will be underway shortly at the Laver Cup, as soon as Andy Murray’s clash with Alex de Minaur concludes. I’ll turn up the television’s volume once Federer takes the court, but until then I’m trying to distract myself with music and, while perusing my tablet, landed on Bruce Springsteen.

Today is Springsteen’s 73rd birthday, a shocking number to a kid who grew up in the ’80s and still thinks of him as the energetic young rocker whose tight ass (her words, not mine) my token straight aunt ardently admired. In my younger days I listened more to his earlier work, and even crooned “Rosalita” to a girlfriend who indulged such nonsense despite my inability to carry a tune in a bucket.

As a woman lurching uncertainly toward middle age, I prefer his ’80s output, some of which—like “Brilliant Disguise” and other tracks from Tunnel of Love—is far more devastating to 39-year-old ears than it was to a clueless 20-something. My favorite Springsteen song comes from that decade: “I’m on Fire,” also known as “the creepy one.”