“I used to play doubles with Dana Fairbanks, if you catch my drift.”
Wimbledon starts in just under eight hours, and questions about the tournament abound: Will the swashbuckling Rafael Nadal make it to the finals again? Will Ana Ivanović continue to pump her fists every two seconds? Will Novak Djoković’s family continue to annoy me from the stands? And perhaps most importantly, what will Maria Sharapova and Roger Federer wear? We’ll find out soon enough, provided there aren’t any rain delays on Monday. American viewers can look up TV scheduling information here, and don’t forget that ESPN 360 will stream 250 hours of live coverage and press conferences as well.
“Just because a woman owns all eight seasons of Bad Girls…”
You can file this one under breaking news: Valerie Singelton, the beloved British TV and radio host, wants you to know she likes guys. A lot. She loves penis the way Mel Gibson hates Jews. She’s had affairs with men, lots of men, and that talk you heard about her having a relationship with Joan Armatrading thirty years ago? A bunch of bollocks. All she ever did was interview her, and though she doesn’t specify, it sounds like they had their clothes on the whole time and kept their hands to themselves.
Still, the rumor, which Singelton thought was so silly that it would eventually go away on its own, settled in like an unwelcome houseguest — like Monty Woolley in The Man Who Came to Dinner, if you will — making Valerie self-conscious to the point of public rudeness. As she tells The Daily Mail‘s Peter Robertson:
“Many years later, I was approached by Joan as I was leaving Broadcasting House after presenting PM. She said: ‘Hello Val, do you remember me? I’m Joan Armatrading.’
“I thought: ‘Oh my God, I can’t be seen talking to her in the middle of the BBC reception,’ so I rudely rushed past her shouting: ‘Sorry, but I can’t stop as I’m late for the theatre.’
“She must have thought me very abrupt. Apologies, Joan.”
Misconceptions about her sexuality, she claims, plagued her to the point that bartenders and receptionists she’d never met before just assumed she was a lesbian:
“Every single friend of mine has at some point had to deny the rumour. And, even when there’s a denial, you get reactions such as: ‘There’s no smoke without fire.’
“It really is rubbish. I’m very honest and if I were that way inclined I’d have said so.
“The truth is I have always been the complete opposite of gay.”
And just in case there is any lingering confusion about her sexuality following those remarks, Singelton proceeds to list men she’s found attractive (including “gorgeous older cousins”), men she’s made out with (including a young Albert Finney), and men she’s had relationships with (a married coworker and a TV broadcaster who later paid for her to have an abortion).
It must be a real pain in the ass to have everyone think you’re gay when you’re not. I know that from the time I was born it was just assumed I was heterosexual, and that got rather tedious after awhile. Coming out hardly seemed to help anything; it just resulted in classmates and relatives asking “Are you sure?”
“Are you sure?”, for the record, is what you ask when someone suggests doing something crazy, like seeing the new Tim Allen movie. It is not what you ask when someone tells you they’re gay. (We’re not always sure how to spend our movie-going dollars; more often than not, we’re sure what our genitals respond to.) And once you’re fully out of the closet, that thing, that having to declare yourself, never really goes away. You still meet new people almost every day who simply take it for granted that you’re heterosexual.
The only way to avoid having to constantly come out, I think, is to permanently wear a sandwich board that states, in bold letters, “I’m Gay,” and even then you’d have illiterates and people who left their glasses at home to deal with. But Valerie Singelton, she has access that most of us don’t. She can take to the pages of publications as noxious but compulsively readable as The Daily Mail to assure the public of her heterosexuality, even if the end result seems oddly Onion-esque.
Usher: Smokes large phallic objects, then performs in Broadway’s Chicago
When MediaTakeOut reported earlier this week that Usher, the abs-of-steel-having singer and actor, was a homophobic twit, I didn’t pay too much attention to it. It didn’t seem possible that he could really be that stupid. He’s been in show business for a very long time; surely he must know, and be friends with, gay people. But several days have passed and, as far as I can tell, no one in Usher’s camp has stepped forward to refute these quotes from Vibe magazine:
“It can never be bad to have a foundation as a man—a black man—in a time when women are dying for men. Women have started to become lovers of each other as a result of not having enough men.
“Are you not studying the stories? Wake up! Black love is a good thing.”
usher to vibe magazine
While I agree with Usher that Black love is a good thing (though I’m not sure he’d have phrased it quite like that had he known it would make him sound like Martha Stewart), I don’t know what stories he’s talking about. Perhaps there’s more to the quote that the full article will explain. And I’m not sure what he means by having a foundation as a man. Is he talking about cosmetics?
On second reading, what really struck me about Usher’s remarks was how they sort of echoed sentiments expressed in a now-infamous sermon delivered by Reverend Willie “Membranes” Wilson of the Union Temple Baptist Church in Washington, DC in 2005. (Warning: Link goes to a YouTube page with very explicit audio content.)
Wilson had a lot to say about homosexuality, particularly gay sex (what is it about religious types that they can’t stop thinking about hot, sweaty, naked man-sex and toy-inclusive girl-girl action?)—and his straight son’s difficulty in finding a prom date who doesn’t TiVo The L Word. But mostly he rails against the social ills he thinks are driving women to lesbianism, which he apparently imagines is sweeping the nation like a dance craze. At one point he tells his congregation that it’s “about to take over our community.” Later, he shouts “It’s destroying us!”
Lest anyone get the wrong impression of him, Wilson takes pains to clarify that he’s in no way a bigot, saying, “I ain’t homophobic, because everyone in here got something wrong with ’em.” While there’s no way of knowing from those Vibe quotes just how kooky Usher is about the gay thing, I have to say I’m disappointed in him.
I thought he had something real with Ellen, but if he possibly thinks she’s only with Portia because of a shortage of good men (it’s unclear from the MediaTakeOut blurb whether he attributes lesbianism among white women to other factors), that’s some crazy shit. Maybe what he meant to suggest is that women are becoming lovers of other women because the bees are disappearing. At least a bee mention would indicate he’s living in 2008 instead of 1950.
Cyd Charisse, as everyone who regularly goes anywhere on the Internet already knows, died today at the age of 86. I have nothing insightful to say about her career. All things considered, I have nothing insightful to say about anything. But I did happen to catch her in East Side, West Side, a Mervyn LeRoy melodrama, a few months ago when it came out on DVD, and I have an observation to share with you bunch of homosexuals.
First, the set-up. The movie is a pretty typical Barbara Stanwyck vehicle: Stanwyck’s husband, played by James Mason, is cheating on her with Ava Gardner. That doesn’t make Stanwyck happy. Then Van Heflin comes to town, and that does make her happy. (You’ve got to hand it to Heflin: All he ever really did was wear a suit and act like a smart-ass, but in every other movie released in the 1940s attractive women were dying to fuck him.) Problem is, he’s dating Charisse, which leads to some brief tension between her character and Stanwyck’s.
Big deal, I know: Stanwyck had tension with everyone in her movies. Her characters were nothing if not tense. What’s different about her big scene with Charisse in East Side, West Side is that she doesn’t seem to be impatiently waiting to snap her next line; she seems to be considering, with some appreciation, the hotness of her younger costar. There was, for the record, a lot of hotness to consider.
Isn’t that a heartwarming remembrance? Yeah, well, I don’t have a lot to say about her — but I think Barbara Stanwyck would’ve hit it. I feel very classy right now.
… As told by Ann Bauer in tomorrow’s Salon. (Bet you didn’t know I could time travel like that.) I have to say I’m underwhelmed. I mean, on top of everything else, Henry & June isn’t one of Philip Kaufman’s better films.
Okay, so it’s a crush that isn’t anything new. I first fell for Richardson when I was 10 years old and she hosted Saturday Night Live. It was her sketch with Phil Hartman, the one where she’s an actress who thinks of her father’s horrific death when she has to film crying scenes (“His head was in my lap!”), that did me in. I grew up wanting to write something funny for her to say.
It would be years before I saw her in anything again, and even then it was just the “New Best Friend” episode of Absolutely Fabulous. All I really knew about Richardson was that she starred in movies my parents wouldn’t let me see, so I became determined to watch The Crying Game and Damage as soon as I was old enough to rent R-rated movies. She is wickedly funny in the former as an IRA soldier who, if she had any martial arts training, would fit in perfectly with the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad. And her meltdown as a grieving mother in the latter is powerful enough to make you forget all the overwrought naked calisthenic exercises Jeremy Irons and Juliette Binoche had spent the previous 90 minutes engaged in.
Her most acclaimed performance came early in her career, in Mike Newell’s Dance with a Stranger, but I never felt that was an adequately passionate telling of the Ruth Ellis/David Blakely affair. Though Richardson took great care to show Ellis as a real woman and not a one-dimensional tabloid villainess, she generated about as much heat with Rupert Everett as Jodie Foster did with Matthew McConaughey in Contact. It was her openhearted take on another demonized woman, Vivienne Haigh-Wood, that resulted in what remains her most indelible performance.
Tom & Viv is a mostly meandering portrait of T. S. Eliot’s doomed marriage to the famously erratic Haigh-Wood, who suffered from what used to be called “women’s troubles” or “moral insanity,” and it doesn’t judge Eliot (or Vivienne’s brother Maurice) harshly enough. One scene actually finds Eliot pressing his head to the chest of an Anglican bishop for comfort, a single tear rolling down his cheek. Sentimental music plays as he chokes out, “I’m married to a woman that I love, but everything we do together falls apart. I crave companionship but I am completely alone.” Only briefly, near the very end of the movie, does anyone stop to consider how alone Vivienne must have felt.
A role as manic as Vivienne might seem like an open invitation to overact (and it has been suggested by more than one critic that Richardson is prone to scenery-chewing), but Richardson’s work in Tom & Viv was subtle and deeply intelligent despite the broad dramatic strokes of the screenplay. She showed her wildly misunderstood character far more tenderness and respect than the filmmakers could be bothered to summon, and the result was one of the most thoughtful, underrated movie performances of the 1990s.
But enough of my mindless film-geek prattle. This wasn’t supposed to be about any of that, it was supposed to be about a Q&A Richardson did with The Guardian this weekend and how her responses to their mini-interrogation only add to her already considerable crushworthiness. I think you’ll agree that on paper we’d make a fantastic couple. Look at all the things we have in common:
She likes Arcade Fire, I like Arcade Fire. They’re right here on my iPod, nestled snugly between Annie Lennox and Arctic Monkeys. (Don’t give me any shit about the Arctic Monkeys, people. How many songs have you ever heard that contain references to both Duran Duran and Shakespeare?)
South Park keeps her awake at night, and rarely a week goes by that I don’t find myself singing “Uncle Fucka” while doing the dishes or feeding my cat.
She’s fond of the word “enfilade,” I know how to spell the world “enfilade.”
She hates Mugabe, I hate Mugabe. Most people hate Mugabe, but Mugabe’s fun to type and that’s why I put it here. See? Mugabe, Mugabe, Mugabe.
She’d want to be played by Peter Lorre or Eddie Izzard in a movie of her life. How cool is that? I’ve often thought that Peter Lorre would make an excellent me in a movie of my life, seeing as we’re both diminutive Jews with morphine addictions. (Of course, I’d also settle for Edward G. Robinson. I’ve never smoked cigars or run an underground crime syndicate, but he would’ve found a way to make it work anyway.) As for Izzard — who is also on my iPod, right between Eddie Floyd and Edwin Starr — he looks better in a dress than I do, so I’d just as soon he play my love interest. Or, you know, if the movie is really realistic and shows me reading Patricia Highsmith novels instead of going on dates, he could always play my mom, regularly probing me about my personal life and despairing that if I don’t get my act together he’ll never be a grandmother.
Of course, “on paper” means nothing. On paper I’m an art collector (I own a few vintage Jean-Pierre Melville movie posters), an expert skier (I’ve walked down icy hills once or twice without falling) and a skilled jazz pianist (I enjoy listening to Thelonious Monk). Still, I think the next time Miranda Richardson visits the United States she should look me up. My Peter Lorre and her Eddie Izzard could do things together that Goebbels would’ve only dreamed of putting in a Nazi propaganda film about degeneracy.
Disclosure: This post contains rental/purchase links. As an Amazon Associate I earn a small commission from qualifying purchases.
From the department of creepiness comes this ABC News story about Rosanne Strott and Emily Niland, two Massachusetts College of Art and Design students who were filmed “during an intimate encounter without their knowledge” by David Cunha and David Siemiesz, shithead perverts from a nearby dormitory.
Cunha and Siemiesz then uploaded the video to the Internet, where it made the rounds for several months before being brought to the attention of Strott and Niland, who are now pursuing legal action against the voyeurs and would like to see them expelled from the Wentworth Institute of Technology.
Siemiesz admits that recording them felt “kind of wrong” and preposterously claims “we didn’t understand the severity of the situation when we were taping it.” Wentworth is currently conducting its own investigation of the incident. Says Niland:
“Blinds open or not, I have nothing to be ashamed about. I might be embarrassed, I might feel violated, but I have nothing to be ashamed about. They are the ones who have something to be ashamed of.”
Unsurprisingly, many of the moronic reader comments that follow the story go like this:
“This looks like they need to buy some curtains. Just because they are gay doesn’t mean they can do it in public and if they are able to been see from the out side then it is public.”
Never mind the pesky fact that nobody was doing anything in public, or that no one is asking for special treatment on the basis of their sexuality: Any opportunity to complain about “the gays” is an opportunity that must be seized.
What the ABC News article leaves out, but the Boston Heraldhas already covered, is Strott’s comment that the men can be heard “remarking on her body and chanting antigay slurs” as they taped the encounter. In the same article, Siemiesz disingenuously maintains that, “I didn’t feel like a creep. I didn’t feel like a Peeping Tom. I felt like this type of thing happens a lot.”
The 18-year-old daughter of Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick came out in Bay Windows, a New England-based GLBT newspaper, today. Katherine Patrick, who will attend Smith College in the fall, was interviewed with her father, a longtime champion of gay rights, and her mother, Diane. Rather adorably, the governor got teary-eyed when his daughter praised his successful effort to defeat a proposed anti-gay marriage amendment to theMassachusetts Constitutionin 2007. Katherine also noted, of her initial coming out to her parents, that “the first thing my dad did was, [he] wrapped me in a bear hug and said, ‘Well, we love you no matter what.'” Which reminds me of my own coming out, if I might digress.
It was a muggy night in August, just weeks before my senior year of high school was about to start,and I was alone with my parents. (That isn’t something that happens very often when you have three siblings.) I’m not sure how the conversation came about, just that I was very nervous. I’m afraid it might have gone something like this:
Mom: So, how ’bout that heat?
Dad: Yeah, it’s really something.
Me: I’m gay! I’m a homosexual! I like girls!
Because sometimes, when I’m anxious about something, I have trouble following conversations. (I also have trouble following conversations even when I’m not anxious about anything, but that’s not your problem now, is it?) If memory serves, it was quiet for a while. I remember my face feeling red, which tends to happen anytime I talk in front of anybody, and my parents exchanging one of those very parental glances, the kind that lets you know they’ve secretly been discussing this very subject behind your back for weeks or months or possibly years. Then my dad slowly extended his hand, not to pull me into an emotional embrace but to demand the $50 he bet my mom that I was a big ‘mo.
Anyway, read the interview with the Patrick family. They all sound very cool.
As the state of California prepares to start issuing marriage licenses to gay couples next week, a piece in today’s New York Times examines “the egalitarian nature” of same-sex relationships.
When asked to comment on whether they think it’s true that same-sex couples “fight more fairly” and are better at dividing household chores than their heterosexual counterparts, my parents got into a vicious argument that started with my father saying “There’s no such thing as a fair fight with your mother,” and continued with my mom snapping, “Your father would have to know what chores are before he tried doing any.”
Realizing that thirty years’ worth of grievances were about to be rehashed in clinical detail for the 3,758th time, I hightailed it out of there without asking any follow-up questions. Good times!
“I’m thinking new window treatments for the Lincoln Bedroom.”
Asked who he’d “boff, marry or kill” between Hillary Clinton, John McCain and Barack Obama, Alec Baldwin (the talented Baldwin, the one nine out of ten dentists recommend) answered that he’d sleep with Hillary and wed the senator from Illinois. Baldwin told The Observer:
“Barack would just be my long-term companion, as they say. I’d have to have sex with a woman because I’m not gay. I wouldn’t want to have sex with Barack Obama or McCain. Obama’s wife perhaps. Anybody’s wife — Bush’s wife, McCain’s wife, but no men — not even operating the video camera.”
Alec baldwin
As for McCain, Baldwin isn’t willing to kill him off:
“Maybe I’d lead him out into the woods and leave him there, and I’d come back and tell you that I’d killed him. But I’d lie, I wouldn’t really kill him. And knowing McCain, knowing his past in Vietnam, he’d make it back, he’d survive.”
alec baldwin
You know, as much as I like Michelle Obama (and I’ve kind of loved her since reading this New Yorker profile back in March) I’m intrigued by the idea of Baldwin as First Spouse. I imagine him promoting literacy to schoolchildren à la Laura Bush, but instead of sitting there all glassy-eyed and quiet he’d pound on desks and say things like, “We’re adding a little something to this month’s reading contest. As you all know, first prize is a Cadillac Eldorado. Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you’re fired.” It would really inspire children to pick up books, I think. Kids love bland, boxy luxury vehicles and free cutlery.
