TCM is inexplicably honoring terrible actor/”soft Corinthian leather” aficionado Ricardo Montalban with a seven-film tribute today. I fear this portends a full 24-hour block of William Shatner’s greatest non-hits when he kicks the bucket. Hopefully Shatner’s immortal and this will be a non-issue.
As Michael Abernethy notes when mentioning Addams’ recent induction into the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame: “That Addams was a lesbian is a matter of speculation, as Addams wasn’t gracious enough to leave an entry in her diaries that said ‘I’m a big ole lesbian.'” Still, I can’t believe that in the year 2009 grown men and women continue to debate whether she was gay.
Let me tell you a story about Jane Addams. When I was in fifth grade my history class learned about child labor legislation, settlement houses, female involvement in social and political activism, and all of that. Jane Addams was a big part of the unit. At the time I was an oblivious kid who’d yet to pick up on the fact that my aunt and her female roommate were more than roommates, but after reading a few paragraphs about Addams my gaydar started going off like Fannie Flagg — Match Game era Flagg, the gayest of them all — had entered the room.
The people who think Addams wasn’t gay, the ones who can somehow keep a straight face while trying to sell us that “romantic friendship” line, they’ll say that a ping (or twelve) on the gaydar is meaningless. Sometimes they’d even be right. But aren’t they also being kind of deliberately obtuse? The fifth-grade teacher who taught me about Jane Addams was a mild-mannered man in his mid-thirties who had never been married to a woman, professed not to have a girlfriend, but wore a wedding band anyway. He shared a house with, and routinely traveled with, his long-term male roommate.
What would the historians who are reluctant to concede that Addams was likely gay (after all, they’ve never seen Paris Hilton-style video footage of her having sex with Mary Rozet Smith) make of my teacher and his “roommate,” a man who was still in the picture years later when a friend’s sibling took the same class and had the same teacher? Would they try to act like the two men were just very close pals, or would they do a collective spit-take and shout “Bitch, please!” if asked to believe they weren’t a couple? I’m not a historian myself, but you can mark me down in the “Bitch, please!” camp when it comes to both Addams and my teacher.
From an interesting article written by Matt Kennard about ex-gays and ex-ex-gays:
Randy Thomas, 39, is the executive vice president of Exodus and an ex-gay himself. “I became a Christian at 24, but I didn’t come to Christ to not be gay,” he said. “It was only after a few months, I realized I didn’t have to be gay, so I decided to live according to my faith. That was 16 years ago.”
In the ex-gay movement there is spectrum of success. On one end are those who purport a full conversion to heterosexuality. On the other end are those plagued by guilt, unable to cleanse themselves of their urges. Thomas stands somewhere in the middle. “I have not experienced a full orientation shift,” said Thomas. “But I went from 100 percent exclusively homosexual, to where I would feel OK being a husband and having a wife.”
Isn’t that romantic? Imagine you’re the lucky woman who reels in this catch, and he proposes to you by saying that he, uh, really likes you and thinks he’d be OK with being your husband. The tears of anger and resentment happiness would never stop flowing!
And ladies, he’s single. His relationship with an ex-lesbian girlfriend went bust last year because, in his words, “we weren’t meant to be husband and wife.” (According to my handy Ex-Gay to Gay-Gay dictionary, that means: “She didn’t have a penis.”) And, as he told Kennard, “She was particularly ex-gay.” (Translation: “I vomited every time she tried to touch me.”) If you guessed the pair never had sex, you’re correct. But Thomas swears they had definite chemistry, which is easy enough to believe — I’m sure they were the Edmund Lowe and Lilyan Tashman of the ex-gay set.
2020 “Cranky’s Editing Old Posts After Moving the Blog” Update: Thomas, of course, eventually became an ex-ex-gay, and apologized for his involvement in that cruel and hateful movement (and announced his engagement to a man).
Criterion will release a 2-disc edition of Douglas Sirk’s Magnificent Obsession tomorrow, which is all well and good (it’s been years since Criterion released All That Heaven Allows and Written on the Wind), but when is somebody — anybody — going to release There’s Always Tomorrow on DVD? It’s a Sirk film I’ve read wonderful things about but have never been able to see, and some of its posters (not the one pictured above, obviously) bore the tagline: “The dangerous years are those married years…When love is taken for granted!” How can you not release a movie with a tagline like that on DVD? Especially when it stars Barbara Stanwyck! That’s just criminal.
BTW, for anyone who finds this while searching the internet for information about a There’s Always Tomorrow DVD release, the film is currently available as part of Sirk collections that can be purchased from stores in France or Germany. But before you go looking either of them up on Amazon.fr or Amazon.de, make sure the discs are compatible with your viewing equipment. And note that neither comes with attractive artwork, which is just a slap in the face when you consider the cost of each set in U.S. dollars.
2020 “Cranky’s Editing Old Posts After Moving the Blog” Update: There’s Always Tomorrow was later release on DVD (and even Blu-ray) in the United States, both as part of a Stanwyck collection and in standalone format.
Who would have guessed there are still people who think Tintin is straight? British journalist Matthew Parris devoted a column to the character’s sexuality earlier this month, making such a strong case for Tintin being a ‘mo that more than a week later, people around the world are still talking about it. One paper, the Times of India, asked Tintin fans in Chennai to weigh in on the subject. Hilarity, inevitably, ensued. Sample response:
Kicking off the debate on Tintin’s orientation, actor Shaam confesses to be quite astounded on hearing this news. “Never in my dreams would I have thought Tintin would be gay. Just because his best friend is a male sailor, it does not mean that he shares any romantic feelings for Haddock. I simply cannot digest this theory,” he says.
The male fans arguing in defense of Tintin’s alleged heterosexuality are the comic geek versions of Claymates. What will they say when Tintin announces that he’s expecting an in-vitro baby with Bianca Castafiore?
The Australian Open starts in five hours (the official website has a countdown clock), and I’m so excited about it that I feel like an honorary Pointer Sister. American viewers, here’s the TV schedule. And readers, be warned: If Roger Federer makes an early exit, I’m going to be even crankier than usual. Enough so that the Department of Homeland Security will have to raise my crankiness alert level to red, scaring schoolchildren and delighting Wolf Blitzer in the process.
On this day in history three of the great American women of the last hundred years were born: Ethel Merman, Susan Sontag, and yours truly. No need to send me a present, I don’t want anything and hate having to feign enthusiasm when opening gifts anyway. But if you want to bake me a cake, that’s fine, just wash your hands first. And no chocolate cake, please. No ice cream cake, either, because there’s just no reason for that. Oh, and no cheesecake. Cheesecake is fine if you’re on The Golden Girls, but until I’m in my sixties and have my own lanai, I’m staying away from it.
On second thought, let’s nix the cake idea altogether. Cake is overrated, in addition to being the name of a so-so band. The only thing it really has going for it, at least in my book, is its importance to the immortal Hole lyric “I want to be the girl with the most cake.” So let’s let Courtney have her cake, and we can have cookies and toast my parents for not aborting me or putting me up for adoption. That was very generous of them and something I’ll take into consideration when the time comes to choose their nursing home.
In honor of Ethel Merman’s birthday — she’d have turned 101 today — here’s a clip of her singing “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” from the film of the same name. When I was a kid I used to torture my dad by watching it every time it was on AMC, and in retrospect I probably owe him an apology for that. It’s a horrible movie, and 55 years later it’s still impossible to imagine why anyone ever thought it was a good idea to cast Mitzi Gaynor in anything, but I was fascinated by Ethel — and by Marilyn Monroe’s “Heat Wave” performance. Two early signs that I was a lesbian, but it would take a little while longer for me to realize that.
Did any of you realize this lame-ass website turned one year old earlier this month? I’d forgotten all about it until I saw an ad for The L Word the other day (its reign of ridiculousness is almost over: an abbreviated final season starts on Sunday) and remembered that I’d started this blog in January of last year with the intention of using it to complain about the new episodes that were about to air.
As it turned out, the fifth season of The L Word was so execrable that it wasn’t worth watching, much less commenting on, and so I found other things to complain about instead — everything from the religious right to Rivers Cuomo’s awful mustache. Now, as I look back on a year of posts (something like 30% of them had to do with my thinking Thandie Newton is attractive, so I’ll try to mix things up a little in 2009 and drool over a wider array of actresses), it occurs to me that as far as personal blogs go, this one hasn’t been very personal at all. With that in mind—and because there’s been nothing going on in the news to talk about here and I don’t want this page gathering dust in the meantime—I’m going to reveal ten things about myself that most of you don’t know.
You might want to prepare yourself before reading these. They’re the kind of explosive, emotionally devastating revelations normally found in a Tennessee Williams or Edward Albee play. You’ve been warned.
1.) Marie was my favorite Lubbock sister on the late, lamented Just the Ten of Us, which seems an unlikely choice until you consider the fact that I’ve always been partial to nerdy characters. That’s why Elizabeth was my favorite Wakefield twin (though I’ve never understood what she saw in Todd, a massive tool), and Mary Anne my favorite member of the Baby-Sitters Club. (Speaking of the BSC, was anyone else annoyed when Kristy dated Bart? That character was so dykey that her last name might as well have been McNichol. Pairing her with a guy made no sense. Same with Stacey having that boyfriend who was always on Fire Island. Why didn’t Claudia ever pull her aside and tell her she was dating a queen?)
2.) Sometimes, just to keep myself amused, I like to pretend I’m a character from an old film noir whose every move is accompanied by preposterously hard-boiled voice-over narration. You know, something like: “I never saw her in the daytime. We seemed to live by night. What was left of the day went away like a pack of cigarettes you smoked. I didn’t know where she lived. I never followed her. All I ever had to go on was a place and time to see her again. I don’t know what we were waiting for. Maybe we thought the world would end.” That’s from Out of the Past, which also has the classic line: “Build my gallows high, baby.” Everyone should say that at least once in his or her life. Next time you’re at the grocery store and the bagger asks paper or plastic, just ignore the question and put on a Robert Mitchum voice and say “Build my gallows high, baby.”
3.) I hate the words “snark” and “dawg,” and love the words “kerfuffle” and “obstreperous.”
4.) For some reason, I don’t know why, I’m fucked up about my pillowcases. I want to sleep on a freshly laundered pillowcase every night, and by now my pillowcases are so sick of being washed that they start sobbing like Meryl Streep in Silkwood (or Amy Poehler in Baby Mama) every time I throw them in the washing machine.
5.) If I were a member of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, I would want to be Black Mamba. Not because she’s the last one standing, but because she has the coolest name.
6.) The single biggest regret of my life is that I wasn’t alive and working as a Hollywood screenwriter in the 1930s, because back then I would’ve maybe, just maybe, had a shot with Greta Garbo. It sounds crazy, I know, but if Mercedes de Acosta and Salka Viertel stood a chance, who’s to say there wouldn’t have been hope for the rest of us as well?
7.) I’m uncoordinated and frequently spill, drop, and walk into things. I also have enough difficulty walking in a straight line that my dad has been known to warn me, “You’d better hope you’re never pulled over on suspicion of drunk driving…”
8.) It is my fervent belief that blue M&Ms are hideously ugly and should never have been introduced into the M&M family.
9.) The most listened to song on my iPod is Otis Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness,” but the song I spend the most time trying not to break into in public is the Fifth Dimension’s cover of “Wedding Bell Blues.”
10.) I’ve had an irrational fear of being buried alive ever since it happened to Carly on Days of Our Lives in the early ’90s. My mom watched that and Another World every afternoon (Linda Dano’s shoulder pads and dramatic rouge-streaked cheekbones still haunt me), and while Marlena’s demonic possession story line never freaked me out, I was so shaken by Carly’s plight that I left a note marked “Read This If I Die” in my top desk drawer instructing my parents to have me cremated. I was ten at the time, and my plans haven’t changed in the intervening years; I still shudder at the thought of Carly being trapped in that coffin every time I hear the word “burial.”
I know you’ve all been busy with the not being gay in Senegal thing, so I hate to add more to your plate, but this is very important: Make sure you don’t set your ex on fire. And make sure you’re not set on fire by your ex. It might not seem like it in the heat of the moment, but there are better, less criminal ways of expressing yourself. (Personally, I’m more the silent treatment type, but others have found great success in collaborating with Timbaland on kiss-off singles or in writing one of the worst films Mike Nichols ever directed.)
Lesbians should pay particular attention to the no-fire edict; between the Celestia debacle and 40 years’ worth of negative portrayals in film and television, enough people already think we’re bonkers without yahoos like this tabloid-courting heiress broad — whose name I won’t mention because I like security guards not knowing who she is — fanning the flames. So to speak.
OK, so the movie isn’t particularly good. But it isn’t as bad as many critics made it out to be, mostly because Annette Bening and Jada Pinkett Smith can make anything watchable. It isn’t something I’d recommend to everybody, but for a certain segment of its potential audience (and by certain I mean lecherous), well, I think the screen grab speaks for itself.