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French Open Highlights and Kasatkina’s Gay Q&A

On June 1, 2022

Tournament Highlights

What a great French Open this has been so far, scheduling snafus aside. And we still have the women’s semifinals and finals to go, while the men wrap up their remaining quarterfinals (I’m hoping Cilic and Ruud win theirs). Among the highlights:

The emotional retirement ceremony of Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, one of my favorite ATP players, at his home tournament.
Gille Simon’s magical late-night first-round upset of Pablo Carreño Busta. Simon, who will retire at the end of the season, could barely stand as the fifth set drew to a close but was carried along by a rapturous home crowd while his excited kids watched from the stands.
Carlos Alcaraz’s 131 mph overhead bomb that fueled his second-round comeback against Albert Ramos-Viñolas.
Nadal’s quarterfinal victory over Djokovic, which wasn’t as close as the fourth-set scoreline might suggest.
Daria Kasatkina’s run to the semifinals. She’s a stealthy all-surface threat who is often overlooked by commentators due to her weak serve. She had a favorable draw at Roland Garros this year and made the most of it. (For those of you who found this page by searching for “Kasatkina lesbian,” click this post, scroll down a bit, and we’ll get to that.)
The ascendance of both Coco Gauff and Italy’s Martina Trevisan, a journeywoman who is radiant both on the court and in her writing. I found this piece about her recovery from an eating disorder quite moving (here’s an English translation). My wife battled anorexia for a very long time. She, like Trevisan, shares her story widely in hopes of helping others, and it takes a lot of guts to do it. The worst part of a Gauff/Trevisan semi is I’d like them both to win.
Iga Świątek continues to not only kick ass but to comport herself exactly as you’d expect from someone whose head is always in a book, whether she’s forgetting her age or experiencing chronic confusion about whether it’s a changeover.
Updated to add: Ruud just prevailed over the homophobic assclown Rune, and Rune barely shook Ruud’s hand at the net afterward, prompting Ruud to shake his head at his opponent’s immaturity. My wife, who has heard me complain about Rune before, looked up from her phone to joke “Would’ve been kind of funny if Ruud had said ‘Allez, f*ggot.'” (When Rune got in trouble for using anti-gay slurs, he claimed it was self-directed.)

RIP, Bo Hopkins

By Cranky Lesbian

On May 28, 2022

In Obituaries

Dolly Parton and Bo Hopkins harmonize not with vocals but scowls in *A Smoky Mountain Christmas*.

Most obituaries for actor Bo Hopkins, dead at 84, will mention American Graffiti, The Wild Bunch and his baffling Dynasty arc as Matthew Blaisdel. Like many homosexuals who watch too much television, I will remember him fondly for his guest appearances that reliably made shows like Murder, She Wrote and Charlie’s Angels a little bit weirder, if only for a few moments at a time.

And, more than anything, I will treasure his unusual performance in A Smoky Mountain Christmas (1986), the Dolly Parton musical-fantasy classic directed by Henry Winkler. A film that defies both description and sobriety, you either understand its brilliance or you don’t—it’s the El Topo of made-for-TV movies. Hopkins plays a role of some importance, that of a sheriff who jails Parton and is mixed up in a bad romance with a vengeful mountain witch (Anita Morris, whose wig is as sublime as her performance). If you’ve not yet seen it, you have a new weekend assignment.

Weekend Viewing: Roland-Garros Begins

By Cranky Lesbian

On May 21, 2022

In Tennis

After all the excitement of our Mother’s Day Marathon, what with Patty Duke terrorizing her family, Loni Anderson whoring around, Elizabeth Montgomery’s sundry acts of deviousness, and Stockard Channing dramatically vowing not to help her daughter become a lesbian, I took a little break to watch a bunch of tennis.

From my couch I savored every dazzling moment of Carlos Alcaraz’s triumph in Madrid and Iga Świątek’s ruthless brilliance in Rome. My wife, a Tolkien fanatic who is about as interested in tennis as I am in Middle-earth, took notice of Świątek’s dominance and asked what “bagels” and “breadsticks” were in tennis parlance, and then dutifully sent me memes such as this:

A Mother’s Homophobia in The Truth About Jane

By Cranky Lesbian

On May 8, 2022

In TV Movies

Stockard Channing rejects her daughter in *The Truth About Jane*.

Being a gay teenager wasn’t particularly easy in 2000—ask me how I know! When Lifetime decided to examine the subject (two years after Jean Smart’s husband tumbled out of the closet in Change of Heart), it was appointment viewing for me. At the time, it felt underwhelming. It was a “message” movie and the conflicts were so easily, if imperfectly, resolved. At my house, it took much longer than 87 minutes for the arctic chill between a lesbian high school student and her conservative parents to thaw.

Revisiting The Truth About Jane as an adult perilously close to middle age, how differently would I feel? It turned out I liked it quite a bit more. Distance had dulled all the edges that were too sharp back then. I appreciated the clarity, and simplicity, with which writer-director Lee Rose captured what it was like to come out as a kid in the late ’90s/early aughts. And the homophobia of Stockard Channing’s character was much funnier to me than it had been back then, for reasons we’ll get to later.

My Mother’s Secret Life … as an Escort

By Cranky Lesbian

On May 6, 2022

In TV Movies

Loni Anderson (un)dresses for success in *My Mother’s Secret Life*.

The big daughter-seeks-birth-mom TV event that everyone remembers from 1984 is, of course, the miniseries Lace. History has unfairly forgotten My Mother’s Secret Life, and I’ll be pleased if I can get even one person to revisit it. It’s an engaging (and unintentionally funny) telefilm that is perhaps best described as “Loni Anderson’s Charlene moment.” I encourage everyone to get in the mood right now by listening to the song of which I speak.

Now that we’ve taken the hand of a preacher man and made love in the sun, I think we can continue. My Mother’s Secret Life opens with Anderson’s Ellen Blake draped in about 30 lbs of designer clothes and furs. It’s all soon to be removed with artful precision in a demanding john’s penthouse suite. “I’m the buyer here,” he tells her aggressively. “I want to know what I’m buying. You do come at a premium rate.”

Elizabeth Montgomery’s Sins of the Mother

By Cranky Lesbian

On May 4, 2022

In TV Movies

Elizabeth Montgomery raises a toast to an appalling lack of boundaries in *Sins of the Mother*.

If ever a film review deserved the headline “Bebitched,” it is Elizabeth Montgomery’s Sins of the Mother (1991). Adapted from Jack Olsen’s true crime novel Son: A Psychopath and His Victims, Sins does for motherhood what Montgomery’s The Legend of Lizzie Borden (1975) did for daughters.

Wooing her son one minute, tearing him to shreds the next, her Ruth Coe has the colorful vocabulary of Moira Rose; the histrionic tendencies of Rose and Lucille Bluth; and enough sinister Cluster B features to fuel an HBO limited series. On a cinematic scale of mother-son immorality, ranging from Psycho to Savage Grace to Ma Mère, Ruth’s relationship with son Kevin (Dale Midkiff of Back to You and Me) is mercifully mild. They are, in some ways, a more respectable version of con artists Lilly and Roy from The Grifters.

Please Don’t Hit Me, Mom Spotlights Abuse

By Cranky Lesbian

On May 2, 2022

In TV Movies

Patty Duke and son Sean Astin costar in *Please Don’t Hit Me, Mom*

TV movie titans collide in Please Don’t Hit Me, Mom (1981), an Afterschool Special starring Patty Duke and Nancy McKeon. It begins in the typical style of such films, with McKeon’s Nancy Parks comically flying over the handlebars of her bicycle. Sprawled on the ground, she’s introduced to brothers Mike and Brian Reynolds (Lance Guest and Sean Astin). In the rare meet cute that intersects with child abuse, Nancy and Mike learn they’re new neighbors and will attend the same high school.

While the teenagers make eyes at each other, Barbara Reynolds (Patty Duke) angrily drags the younger Brian inside. The camera rests on the home’s exterior as she yells at him. We feel unsettled, a condition that extends to Nancy’s conversation with BFF Judy (Deena Freeman) about prom wear. “I blew my clothes allowance this month on a fantastic sweater,” Nancy admits. “So what do I wear to the prom?” She envisions unaffordable designer jeans.

Doris Day Marries a Klansman in Storm Warning

By Cranky Lesbian

On April 29, 2022

In '50s Films

It’s cloudy with a chance of racism in *Storm Warning*.

A genre-blending mess of a film that takes frosty relations between in-laws to extremes, Storm Warning is also notable for its unusual denouement, in which Ginger Rogers is lashed (seven times!) with a whip. Alas, that is only the beginning of her suffering — her pregnant sister still has to die in her arms. We could debate whether Warning is more film noir or melodrama, but the question I kept returning to was whether its final 20 minutes might qualify as a primitive iteration of torture porn.

Dennis Weaver’s Angst in Cocaine: One Man’s Seduction

By Cranky Lesbian

On April 27, 2022

In TV Movies

Dennis Weaver in *Cocaine: One Man’s Seduction*.

There are endless ways to confront the pedestrian stressors and ennui many of us face as we hurtle toward middle age. Sports cars and extramarital affairs are usually the self-treatments of choice for forty-something family men in TV movies (rarer breeds make dirty phone calls), but Cocaine: One Man’s Seduction entices us with a hit of something different. In this 1983 offering that plays like an Afterschool Special for quadragenarians, Dennis Weaver escapes his professional and familial pressures by sniffin’ the devil’s dandruff.

Barbara Mandrell Fights a Coal Mining Crisis in Burning Rage

By Cranky Lesbian

On April 25, 2022

In TV Movies

Barbara Mandrell struggles to save a small town from mine fires (and itself) in *Burning Rage*.

The most depressing thing about Burning Rage, Barbara Mandrell’s dramatic debut, is how contemporary it feels. In this 1984 telefilm, stubborn Americans would rather jeopardize their own safety, and that of their families, than listen to government scientists. There’s even a scene in which menacing goons try to prevent a scientist from conducting important research. They slink off when told, “Now if you have any problems with that you best take it up with the federal government!” These days, such an invitation might elicit a very different response.