You’ll never catch Geraldine Granger saying things like that.
There’s more to the story at The Guardian, but this part — this is incredible:
A Church of England vicar could face disciplinary action for saying gay men should have “sodomy” warnings tattooed on their bodies.
The Rev Peter Mullen, who is a parish priest and rector in the City of London, made the remarks on his blog, which has since been removed from the web under an agreement with diocesan officials.
Mullen, 66, wrote it was time for religious believers to recommend the discouragement of homosexual practices in the style of cigarette packet warnings.
“Let us make it obligatory for homosexuals to have their backsides tattooed with the slogan sodomy can seriously damage your health and their chins with fellatio kills.”
What kind of tattoo would he suggest for a parish priest who has nothing better to do with his time than fantasize about the backsides of homosexuals?
Mullen later described his comments as “lighthearted jokes” and maintained that he isn’t prejudiced, saying, “Many of my dear friends have been and are of that persuasion.” Yeah, and from a very young age, his two greatest loves were always Jews and Cuban food.
Does this make anyone else want to rewrite the lyrics to “Vicar in a Tutu?” Maybe something like: “The monkish monsignor/With a head full of plaster/Said, ‘My man, get your ass tattooed.'”
Big Mama Morton keeps an eye on Shell Dockley and Nikki Wade during the Larkhall talent show.
Queen Latifah, recently seen registering a dozen or so perfect confused facial expressions as moderator Gwen Ifill in SNL’s epic vice-presidential debate sketch, is profiled in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine. She succeeds in dazzling writer Alex Witchel, dazzling her bosses at Cover Girl, and pretty much dazzling the normally dazzle-resistant me — until the lesbian issue comes up:
One topic of persistent speculation on the Web is Queen Latifah’s sexuality, particularly a supposed romance with a female trainer. She has never addressed her relationships publicly and was in no mood to start. “I don’t have a problem discussing the topic of somebody being gay, but I do have a problem discussing my personal life,” she said. “You don’t get that part of me. Sorry. We’re not discussing it in our meetings, we’re not discussing it at Cover Girl. They don’t get it, he doesn’t get it” — she gestured upstairs, toward Compere’s office — “nobody gets that. I don’t feel like I need to share my personal life, and I don’t care if people think I’m gay or not. Assume whatever you want. You do it anyway.”
It’s better than what we got out of her eight years ago on VH1’s Behind the Music, when she addressed gay rumors by laughing nervously and launching into an awkward, unconvincing, lady doth protest too much response about not being a “fruit,” but obviously there’s still room for improvement. I do think she’s poised to come out eventually, and if she does it while her career is still monster-sized it’s going to be one of the most socially important celebrity coming-outs we’ve ever seen; the question is, how long is she prepared to wait?
By the way, anyone else catch this bit of hilarity as Witchel followed Latifah around her production company:
We walked upstairs to Compere’s office, which was between a screening room and an editing room (they were cutting a reality show about the rapper Ja Rule).
Shakim Compere is Queen Latifah’s childhood friend and business partner in Flavor Unit Entertainment; Ja Rule, who four years ago starred in a Flavor Unit production, The Cookout, made headlines last year with a homophobic outburst that suggested homosexuality is “tearing up America.” Asked about a Congressional hearing into hip-hop, Ja Rule expressed outrage that rap lyrics were being treated as a national concern when more important things were happening, like the Jena Six protests in Louisiana. He could have left it at that and many people — most of us, I’d guess — would have agreed with him.
But after saying “Let’s get into shit like that, because that’s what’s tearing up America, not me calling a woman a bitch or a hoe [sic] on my rap songs,” he felt compelled to continue:
“And if it is, then we need to go step to Paramount, and fucking MGM, and all of these other motherfuckers that’s making all of these movies and we need to go step to MTV and Viacom, and lets talk about all these fucking shows that they have on MTV that is promoting homosexuality, that my kids can’t watch this shit. Dating shows that’s showing two guys or two girls in mid afternoon. Let’s talk about shit like that! If that’s not fucking up America, I don’t know what is.”
It didn’t take long for Ja Rule to backpedal and try to position himself as a social progressive with comments that were about as disingenuous as Latifah’s ancient declarations of non-fruitiness. He should have kept it brief and honest: “Gays aren’t okay when they’re on my TV, but I don’t judge ’em when they sign my paychecks.” I’m sure he’s seen Queen Latifah’s big number in Chicago and can relate to its message: “The folks atop the ladder/Are the ones the world adores/So boost me up my ladder, kid/And I’ll boost you up yours.”
UPDATE: Forgot to mention that Holland Taylor was also interviewed in the Times. No mention of her personal life, which is par for the course, but it’s a good read.
Classy reality TV personality and retired bisexual Abi Titmuss
“You are not bisexual, that is reserved for 15-year-old goths and Abi Titmuss, you stupid lesbian.”
That is from Laura May Coope’s account of her romance with Linzi Symons in this month’s installment of The Observer‘s Ex Files, which has both sides of a failed relationship dissect what went wrong. If I ever have the opportunity to say it to someone, I will do so with glee. And if I didn’t have a monotone, I’d make sure to deliver the line with the haughtiness and mock scorn it so richly deserves.
BTW, Coope’s assessment was correct and Symons now refers to herself as gay.
If you fuck with the miniskirt, you fuck with Debbie Harry. If you fuck with Debbie Harry, you fuck with the gays. You do not want to fuck with the gays.
James Nsaba Buturo, the Ugandan Minister of Ethics and Integrity who last month railed against the evils of the miniskirt, told reporters at a Saturday press conference that homosexuality is an “attempt to end civilization.”
Buturo, who is under the mistaken impression that gay people can’t reproduce, said: “Who is going to occupy Uganda 20 years from now if we all become homosexuals?” If I could take a crack at this, I’m pretty sure the answer is — wait for it — homosexuals. Am I right? Do I get a cookie? But Buturo should worry not; the gays are still too busy signing up everyone who wanders into West Hollywood to take a stab at Uganda anytime soon.
Someone finally gets it…
Campbell Brown, the CNN host who destroyed McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds on live TV not too long ago, explains to the New York Timeshow the media lost its way:
“As journalists, and certainly for me over the last few years, we’ve gotten overly obsessed with parity, especially when we’re covering politics. We kept making sure each candidate got equal time — to the point that it got ridiculous in a way.
“So when you have Candidate A saying the sky is blue, and Candidate B saying it’s a cloudy day, I look outside and I see, well, it’s a cloudy day. I should be able to tell my viewers, ‘Candidate A is wrong, Candidate B is right.’ And not have to say, ‘Well, you decide.’ Then it would be like I’m an idiot. And I’d be treating the audience like idiots.”
She’s absolutely right, though I’d change “Then it would be like I’m an idiot” to “That would make me an idiot.” There’s no ‘like’ about it. And I can already hear the Fox News faithful, who won’t settle for anything less than being treated like total idiots, taking umbrage at her analysis and shaking their tiny fists and screaming: It’s not your job to tell us about the sky! You’re not a meteorologist!
Also at the Times:
For all the starburst magic she worked on Rich “Never Going to Live This Down” Lowry, Sarah Palin failed to sexually arouse Gail Collins and Bob Herbert, whose post-debate columns were appropriately somber.
Collins concludes:
This entire election season has been a long-running saga about the rise of women in American politics. On Thursday, it all went sour. The people boosting Palin’s triumph were not celebrating because she demonstrated that she is qualified to be president if something ever happened to John McCain. They were cheering her success in covering up her lack of knowledge about the things she would have to deal with if she wound up running the country.
Herbert writes:
But after Senator Biden suggested that John McCain’s answer to the nation’s energy problems was to “drill, drill, drill,” Ms. Palin promptly pointed out, as if scoring a point, that “the chant is ‘Drill, baby, drill!'”
How’s that for perspective? The credit markets are frozen. Our top general in Afghanistan is dialing 911. Americans are losing jobs by the scores of thousands. And Sarah Palin is making sure we know that the chant is “drill, baby, drill!” not “drill, drill, drill.”
Bob is forgetting that the “baby” is important. It’s what sends things we’d rather not imagine ricocheting through Rich Lowry’s living room. Speaking of which, if you missed Keith Olbermann naming Rich Lowry the “Worst Person in the World” last night, you can watch the segment online. Lowry’s mention starts around the 90 second mark and it’s an instant classic.
Kristin Davis should join her next time…
Cynthia Nixon kicks ass, but you probably already knew that. Addressing a standing-room only crowd as she campaigned for Barack Obama in South Florida last week, Nixon ripped into Amendment 2, a superfluous anti-gay initiative cynically designed to drive homophobes to the polls on November 4. As she points out, that already worked in 2004:
“In Florida… [Republicans] have tried to do again what they did four years ago: they put anti-gay initiatives on the ballot to bring out the homophobes in droves. What happened four years ago was so horrible. It was such a kick in the stomach. We all felt like we were the scapegoat, like we were the target.”
Nixon went on to say:
“It’s going to be really close in Florida. But my hope is that when Barack Obama wins, we’re going to know that those were LGBT votes. And last time they used us as a wedge, but this time we’re going to be the edge.”
You can read more about Amendment 2 at SayNo2.com.
And finally…
I don’t get all the media interest in a supposed rivalry between CNBC anchors Maria “Money Honey” Bartiromo and Erin “Street Sweetie” Burnett. Maybe it’s that I can’t get past their sexist nicknames, which make them sound like wisecracking Joan Blondell characters trying to claw their way to social respectability in an early ’30s comedy. Maybe it’s that I’m not a sexually frustrated hedge fund manager with X-rated dreams of turning on the TV one day to find them in the heat of an erotically charged catfight over tech stocks.
Whatever the case, I found this Vanity Fair article about the two of them interesting because it mentions that Burnett played college field hockey. Have you ever seen a woman on TV and thought to yourself, She definitely played field hockey? It happens to me only rarely, but Burnett was one I felt very strongly knew her way around a stick. Which is one of the many reasons I cringed (and gagged, and cringed some more) when Hardball host Chris Matthews went all lecherous on her last year. Didn’t he see Red Eye? Didn’t it teach him anything?
“You were forced to lie every single day of your life. I lied to my parents, I lied to my teachers, I lied to get into the Army. Now you don’t have to lie anymore.” — Garrison Phillips, 78
“Way back then, being gay or lesbian was viewed as sinful. We hid. There were raids on the bars. Society looked down on us. A lot of people remained under the influence of that prejudice and kept their lives secret. We have to reach these seniors and let them know life is much different now. You have to speak up.” — Ruth Juster, 85
When you have a moment this weekend, I suggest reading this article about the unique challenges facing elderly gays, many of whom lack family members to help care for them and are fearful of being mistreated by homophobic doctors or nursing home staffers. Then head over to the SAGE website and see what you can do to help.
And note to SAGE: Assemble the remaining Golden Girls and have them record a PSA about this to run on Lifetime, LOGO, and Oyxgen. It sounds silly, but I’m not kidding. When Bea and Betty and Rue talk, the gays (and a whole lot of young straight women) listen. Trailblazers like Frank Carter, Garrison Phillips and Ruth Juster made it possible for the rest of us to come out, and we owe them more than we could ever repay. We need to be reminded of that.
Colonel Sanders on the importance of the surge… and honey mustard sauce.
“Oh, yeah. It’s so obvious I’m a Washington outsider complete idiot.” That’s what I got out of last night’s debate, which I had to watch with my thumb on the ‘mute’ button because Sarah Palin’s grating voice and cheerful vacuity were hurting both my ears and my brain. Has a politician ever gone on TV and seemed so happy not to know anything?
There was no escaping her intellectual inferiority last night. I tried to do so by reading her answers (which were technically non-answers) via closed captioning instead of listening to them, but all that did was make my eyes cross. The woman is fundamentally incapable of saying anything that makes sense.
Roger Federer’s so good that he often has ball boys hold books for him to read during matches. He won this point while engrossed in Dr. Zhivago.
Roger Federer, the tennis genius I refuse to call the Swiss Maestro because it makes him sound like a character from a Seinfeld subplot, has withdrawn from next week’s Stockholm Open. He explained his decision by saying, “I feel fortunate to be healthy again, but I want to remain at the top of the game for many more years to come and go after the No. 1 ranking again. In order to do that, I need to get a proper rest and get strong again so that I am 100 percent fit for the remainder of the year or next year.”
Good plan and everything, but why didn’t he try it earlier in the year when his game was suffering the most? I’m a Federer fanatic, as some of you might know, and I’ll probably be in therapy over his Wimbledon loss for the next several years. His performance at the U.S. Open made some of that anguish (yes, anguish — I was like a character in an Ingmar Bergman movie following that Wimbledon final) subside, though there were times during the Andreev match when I almost threw my remote at the TV in frustration.
Work prevented me from writing much of anything about the U.S. Open this year, but nearly a month later I can say this: It will be a long time before I forget the feeling of Zen-like calm that came over me when Federer dismantled Novak Djokovic in the semis. It was apparent that his desire to win was great enough that neither Nadal nor Murray would stand a chance in the final, and in many ways his win over Murray was anticlimactic.
As for Murray, while I’m appreciative of his improved game and enjoy his celebratory flexing, I’ve yet to buy into this “Murray as master tactician” line of thought. A master tactician wouldn’t have played Federer the same way he played Nadal — anyone could have predicted it would result in a loss.
On a tennis-related side note…
To everyone who finds this blog via the search string “maria sharapova lesbian” — and there have been a lot of you lately — let’s get something straight. Yes, I joke about Sharapova every now and then. She’s one of my favorite players and she’s someone who registers on quite a few gaydars, so for me it’s an ‘I kid because I love’ kind of thing. To save you any time you might waste poking around for previous mentions of her, here’s the deal: I haven’t written anything about her personal life. I don’t know anything about her personal life, though I’m aware of the rumors.
If asked to comment on her personal life, there are three things I would say:
1) I can’t believe people were stupid enough to fall for those fake Adam Levine quotes. (Please, don’t be fooled by Yakov Smirnoff, humor does exist in Russia.) Okay, fine, I can believe it. People are really stupid.
2) It comes off as pathetic when tennis commentators are eager to romantically link her to any male player she’s friends with. How often do you tune into an NFL game just in time to hear Joe Buck say, “And there goes #45, who is rumored to be boinking that redheaded cheerleader with the smokin’ ass!”
I know that just about everyone who makes a mint off the sport is eager to assure the viewing public that those “four in ten” figures Rennae Stubbs offered to The Age are baloney, but they should also understand that we don’t turn on tennis coverage expecting to hear breathless reports about the mating (or shopping) habits of the players. That’s better left to Entertainment Tonight. Mary Hart can sell that kind of crap. Tennis analysts can’t.
3) You’re off your ever-lovin’ rocker if you think the highest-paid female athlete in the world would come out in her early twenties, when she’s still a top player and raking in endorsement cash. That’s assuming she’s not straight, of course.
Anyway, let’s recap: Federer should have worked on the proper rest thing months ago. And if you’re looking for photos of Maria Sharapova playing naked doubles with Camilla Belle, you’re in the wrong place.
Rock Hudson and his lesbian wife, Phyllis, laugh at the stupidity of the public.
On the heels of last week’s New York Times article about gay actors finding work in Hollywood comes this piece by MSNBC contributor Michael Ventre, who declares the “days of Rock Hudson-style facades over” while acknowledging that discrimination remains an issue for entertainers seeking an audience of millions. The latter part we’re in agreement about; when it comes to the former, I don’t know what the heck he’s talking about.
Unquestionably, there has been a shift over the last few years in how closeted Hollywood celebrities conduct themselves in the media. Rather than going through the elaborate charade of cooking up fake heterosexual relationships for public consumption (not that those things don’t still happen as well), more celebrities seem to be adopting the “my private life is off-limits” approach their British counterparts have long taken, an efficient way of avoiding both coming out and being actively closeted.
However, the American way of doing it sometimes seems to miss the point. You’re not preserving your personal integrity when you tell reporters your private life is off-limits and then proceed to spend 20 minutes yakking about your children, all the while failing to mention the fact that you had them with a partner — the same partner who was probably making sure they did their homework while you were off on a press junket pretending to be a single parent. What that ultimately exposes is an astonishing lack of integrity, made only slightly more palatable by the fact that a phony heterosexual love interest wasn’t dragged into the mix.
That more gay celebrities seem resistant to the idea of entering into sham relationships is certainly encouraging, but I question how much of it can be directly attributed to that optimistic, familiar standby that society is evolving. When it comes to the public embracing openly gay entertainers, that evolution can only happen as quickly as famous gay people allow it to. They have to keep coming out if we’re ever going to get anywhere, and when you compare the number of gay Hollywood types to the number of out Hollywood types, it’s clear there is still a great deal of progress to be made. And it’s only natural to wonder how many recent comings-out have been completely organic and how many have been the function of an increasingly invasive, ‘open 24/7 on the Internet’ tabloid media.
Are celebrities rejecting the Rock Hudson facade on their own, or is Perez Hilton rejecting it for them? I think the two are inextricably linked, but I’m also cynical enough to believe that the significant challenge of being a public figure and remaining closeted in the year 2008 has led to more recent outings than any newly unearthed altruistic impulses on the part of gay celebrities. Which leads us to another point of Ventre’s that I have to disagree with:
When gays and lesbians in the entertainment industry come out these days, they’d probably be advised to throw lavish coming-out parties to ensure that attention will be paid. In the year 2008, when tolerance levels appear to be at an all-time high — not ideal by any means, and with lots of room for improvement — such an announcement is often quickly consumed by the 24-hour news cycle, and digested by a more enlightened populace.
How many lavish coming-out parties has Hollywood ever held? More often than not, at least in recent memory, a short statement is released, or a matter-of-fact acknowledgment is made in an interview, and the blogosphere takes it from there. Heather Matarazzo, Sarah Paulson, Cynthia Nixon, T.R. Knight, David Hyde Pierce, Neil Patrick Harris — none of them were looking for a media circus when they came out, and few had the stature to warrant one, though the “Same Sex and the City” headline opportunities presented by the Nixon story were too great for most newspapers to resist.
Clay Aiken bucked the trend last week with his double whammy People cover and Good Morning America appearance, but most celebrity outings remain relatively low-key affairs — and are likely to stay that way when the majority of those electing to come out are faded pop stars or actors who work primarily on stage or in television.
No, they’re not talking about Anderson Cooper — he isn’t a pundit, silly. And the “liberal” rules out FOX’s Shep Smith, which leaves us with the brilliant Rachel Maddow, whose new MSNBC show has garnered impressive ratings for the network since premiering earlier this month. It also has the distinction of being the only show on TV that my teenage sister and middle-aged father watch together, which I think could form the basis of an inspiring ad campaign.
You could start off with a family sitting in awkward silence at the dinner table. When they do speak, their comments are terse and accusatory. The teens are surly, the dad seems exasperated, the mother defeated. But later that night, as Maddow’s show is about to start — she can stand in front of a standard-issue network promo backdrop and smile benevolently with her arms crossed as this happens — the parents put down their copies of Nixonland or What’s the Matter with Kansas? and the teens silence their cell phones and lower their laptop screens for the first time all day.
They watch the show as a family, wearing similar expressions of slack-jawed disbelief as a torrent of clips showing John McCain referring to himself as a maverick plays (or maybe it should be a clip of Sarah Palin talking about Alaska’s participation in the Russian civil war and how they bravely rode into St. Petersburg on dinosaurback to fight on the side of Union because slavery was taking jobs away from Americans — I’m sure CBS has something like that on the cutting room floor).
Then Maddow would offer some kind of wry commentary and the family would relax and find themselves united in laughter. At which point one of those deep-voiced announcers who tries to make everything sound heartwarming would say: “Rachel Maddow, bringing families together in living rooms across America.” Accompanied, perhaps, by a small picture of Rachel at the bottom of the screen and a quickie voice-over: “I’m Rachel Maddow, and I approved this ad.”
Can you tell I’ve had too much time on my hands today?
Salon’s David Talbot scared me like Freddy (the world needs a Sugababes reference every now and then) two weeks ago with his article “The Pastor Who Clashed with Palin,” which explained why even 80-year-old retired Baptist ministers think the Governor of Alaska is “Jerry Falwell with a pretty face.”
The article detailed Palin’s interest in book banning (gay books, natch), her work as an anti-choice crusader, and her wacky creationist belief that man and dinosaur walked the earth at the same time in what had to have been an Odd Couple-esque “Dinosaur = Oscar Madison, Humans = Felix Unger” arrangement. Then there was the issue of her reported response to Philip Munger, an Alaskan political acvitist, when asked if she believed in the End of Days. According to Munger, “She looked in my eyes and said, ‘Yes, I think I will see Jesus come back to earth in my lifetime.'” (What about Elvis and Tupac?)
Now comes an article in today’s L.A. Timesthat determines Palin “treads carefully between fundamentalist beliefs and public policy.” It quotes John Stein, who helped her early in her political career, as saying “She’s got a fine-tuned sense of how far to push.”
Allison Mendel, an attorney who sued the state of Alaska seeking mandated health insurance benefits for same-sex partners of state employees, says Palin “has been careful not to squander all her political capital on social conservative issues.” All the Times has to say on the insurance matter was this:
Palin also did not challenge an Alaska Supreme Court ruling that mandated health insurance benefits for same-sex partners. Instead she signed a nonbinding referendum that asked voters their opinion on the issue.
While it’s true she didn’t challenge it, she had a few things to say about it, all pandering to bigoted voters.
The part of the Times article that really got to me, though it may seem trivial to some, goes back to Palin’s comments about dinosaurs. Bill McAllister, her chief spokesman as governor, is asked about it:
McAllister said that he never heard Palin make such remarks about dinosaurs and that Palin preferred not to discuss her views on evolution publicly.
“I’ve never had a conversation like that with her or been apprised of anything like that,” McAllister said. He added that “the only bigotry that’s still safe is against Christians who believe in their faith.”
If ever a statement deserved to be met with a chorus of boos and the throwing of rotten tomatoes, it’s that crap about “the only bigotry that’s still safe” being “against Christians who believe in their faith,” but I wouldn’t expect the anti-gay, anti-choice crowd to understand that.
