“I got girls, girls all over the — wait, that’s private.”
What the hell kind of malfunctioning gaydar does Joan Jett think we have? The legendarily badass rocker, who is part of the True Colors tour this summer and is slated to release a new greatest hits package later this year, recently told Spinner that she hasn’t divulged her sexuality to the public because she’s not in the business of ruining fantasies. As she explained to writer Jessica Robertson (you can read the full interview, including the usual “It’s about setting boundaries” spiel, here):
It really boils down to this: I want to please everybody. I want every guy and every girl thinking that I’m singing these songs to them, because I am. If I make a hard, fast case on where I stand then that takes away a lot of the fantasy. Music entails a lot of fantasy. I want people to be able to go there with me. Some people might think it’s a cop-out. I don’t care. That’s how I feel.
Whether or not you approve of her stance, it’s an incredibly honest answer that neatly encapsulates the ultimate dilemma of the “closeted” celebrity, which is this: actors and musicians are packaged and sold as products, and if they want to be successful, they’re going to make every effort to appeal to the largest possible base of consumers. And her explanation serves a dual purpose, because the way Jett approached the subject, she turned it into one of those non-answer answers that’s really only a non-answer if you’re obtuse.
In other news…
Cynthia Nixon was honored by the Point Foundation last night for not trying to appease lust-crazed Sex and the City fans by keeping mum on her personal life. Accepting the Point Courage Award for being a LGBT role model, Nixon said, “When you’re a young gay person, you yearn for nothing so much as the presence of other gay people, most especially, an older generation of gay people who can encourage and inspire you.” Continues PEOPLE.com:
That being said, Nixon – who had two children with her longtime boyfriend Danny Mozes before their 2003 split – acknowledged that she was not an out teenager. “That is part of what I look back on now as … my straight period,” she said.
I get where she’s coming from, though my own straight period was considerably shorter, lasting only a few months when I was in preschool back in ’87.
And a postscript for those of you wondering why I’m commenting on the Jett interview five days after the fact…
I’d like to offer this in my defense: In addition to being swamped at work, I’ve been methodically working my way through the latest Warner Bros. Bette Davis collection in my spare time. Did you know that All This, and Heaven Too is about eight trillion hours long? Not that Charles Boyer isn’t worth it, but I haven’t been this emotionally depleted since the Hellmouth collapsed in the final episode of Buffy.
George Takei performs a rare jazz hands variation on the Vulcan salute.
George Takei, the official announcer of Howard Stern’s satellite radio show, is back at SIRIUS for a weeklong stint, and I’m so happy I could cry. Takei isn’t just the greatest guest in the history of the Stern Show (and when they aren’t asking strippers questions about geography, they’ve had a lot of interesting guests), he’s quite possibly one of the best guests in the history of any talk show ever.
He’s charming, funny, has an incredibly distinctive and infectious laugh, and he’s knowledgeable about a vast array of subjects. He sounds genuinely interested in everything the people around him say, and he’s not afraid to tell the truth about William Shatner and young Mexican boys. His candor, especially when probed about the particulars of his sex life and his early attempts at heterosexual relationships, is stunning, and his outspokenness on the importance of fighting homophobia and advancing gay rights has brought an amazing richness to what is often a very heterocentric program.
In addition to providing Takei with a powerful political platform, his presence on the show has revived his acting career and earned him legions of new fans who respect him not just for his classic sound bites (which have been used to create songs and prank phone calls, and are perennial favorites of sound effects maestro Fred Norris), but for his integrity. Listeners never call in to criticize or insult him like they do with so many other guests, but they do call to say they wish he were on every day. And the affection Stern fans have for Takei is only part of the equation: Howard himself, along with his crew, regard him with a kind of reverence reserved for very few guests.
Unfortunately, Takei’s cuddly muffin, comedian Artie Lange, wasn’t in the studio today to welcome him back. Lange is an exceptionally popular Stern show cast member whose frequent anti-gay outbursts have turned so vicious that just last week LIFEbeat, an organization devoted to raising AIDS awareness, refused a donation of $10,000 from Crumbs, a bakery that sold a special Lange-created cupcake with the intention of donating a portion of its proceeds to the charity. Artie and George have developed an Odd Couple-esque relationship on the show, and for months prior to (and again in the wake of) Lange’s latest homophobic meltdown, Takei urged him to record a public service announcement for the Human Rights Campaign.
Today, George revealed that an HRC staffer has been trying unsuccessfully for quite some time to get in touch with Lange. George also expressed concern that Lange’s proposed PSA, which was supposed to be about not using anti-gay slurs, would sound less than believable in light of his latest argument with Howard 100 producer High Pitch Mike, and questioned whether Artie’s absence might have something to do with wanting to avoid an on-air discussion about the language he used during the blow-up.
Regular listeners of the show know that Artie calls in sick with alarming frequency and that callers are usually met with lame excuses from Howard and producer Gary Dell’Abate when they phone to complain about his chronic absences. This morning Howard wasn’t in such a generous mood, sounding annoyed as he noted that, “You know, I do have to have the conversation with Artie, we work a four-day week. I mean, it ain’t the roughest gig in the world to get in here.”
Hopefully he’ll make it to work on Tuesday, when George will be joined by Brad Altman, his partner of more than 20 years, for a segment called The Newlyweird Game. They’re scheduled to take on the elderly porn star Blue Iris and her husband, as well as frequent Stern show guest “Evil” Dave Letterman and his girlfriend, in a battle to see which couple knows each other best. Howard and co-host Robin Quivers have already predicted a Takei-Altman victory, which prompted George to laughingly admit that all these years later, he’s still making discoveries about Brad.
Upon hearing that the contest is being sponsored by an adult website service, Robin asked George whether he enjoys Internet porn. To which the 70-year-old actor, soon to be seen on the CBS competition series Secret Talents of the Stars, replied, “You know, I used to love that. I really like that, but Brad doesn’t approve.” In true Stern fashion, this revelation prompted a round of questions about Takei’s masturbatory habits, which he gamely answered, extolling the virtues of “sensuous” showers, which he enjoys for their “warmth, the steaminess, and the soapiness.” Oh, my.
It has been a lazy weekend here at Cranky Central, a rare occurrence I’ve done my best to enjoy since it might not happen again for another five or six years. This morning I did all the usual Sunday things: went for a jog, worked on the yard, attended church — and if you believed a word of that, you are, I’m sorry to say, a complete sucker.
There was no jogging this morning, only sleeping late and trying not to trip over the cat as I finally shuffled into the hallway. There was certainly no church-attending, for reasons an upcoming unruly parenthetical aside make clear (but if not, never fear, we’ve previously tackled this subject). There was no working on the yard, just reading (Glenway Westcott’s Apartment in Athens, if you must know) and catching up on some movies I’d recorded off cable. Robert Duvall’s British accent was atrocious in The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, but Alan Arkin was very cute as Sigmund Freud.
(Just don’t tell my grandfather I said that or he’ll renew his hope that I’ll end up with a Jewish doctor yet. The kind of Jewish doctor with a penis, I should clarify, because my grandma, who is more pragmatic than her crazy dreamer of a husband, has conducted exhaustive research on the matter and found that openly lesbian Jewish doctors do exist. In fact, she’s planning to start a televised nationwide search for one next fall on NBC. Lainie Kazan is currently in negotiations to host.)
I also devoted approximately five minutes of this somewhat dreary, overcast Sunday afternoon to thinking of a decent subject for today’s blog entry. Checking my Google alerts for topics that might be of interest turned up little worth writing about. For example, there was no way lesbian filmmaker Kimberly Peirce’s Stop-Loss wasn’t going to tank at the box office following the financial failures of the approximately 953 recent studio releases about the war in Iraq, so what is there to say about it?
My eyebrows went up a little when I saw that several hours ago, TMZ published a blurb possibly questioning the Penélope Cruz/Javier Bardem romance, but it appears the story, originally titled “No Country for Old Girlfriends,” has disappeared from the site, meaning we might never know how this sentence, previewed via e-mail, ended: “The smokin’ hot actor has been romantically linked to Penélope Cruz for the last year, but Friday, in a little corner at the Chateau Marmont in LA…” (I know that Cruz is a 30-something actress in the international spotlight, which means it’s a matter of time before she marries some biological male type in order to reproduce, but once she extricated herself from painfully unconvincing PR-engineered relationships with her oddball Hollywood costars and started wearing suits and grabbing Salma Hayek’s ass in public, I briefly hoped she’d turn into something of a rebel.)
As I dutifully purged my inbox of links to wacky right-wing editorials about the evils of homosexuality and reviews of regional productions of Edward Albee plays, it hit me: Why not take this opportunity to celebrate the lovely and talented actress Emmanuelle Béart? It might be considered a bit off-topic, as it doesn’t have anything to do with the previously introduced subjects of today being Sunday (FYI, I have it on good authority that Béart is attractive all week long), or Javier Bardem, or homophobic editorials, or “The Goat, Or Who Is Sylvia?” being staged in New Hampshire, either, but that doesn’t make it a topic any less worthy of discussion.
Béart, who was born in 1963, has worked steadily since the early 1980s and came to international prominence with a starring role in Claude Berri’s Manon of the Spring in 1986. (It was the second of four films she would make with her future ex-husband, the actor Daniel Auteuil, who will probably earn his own “In praise of…” here eventually because I’ll continue to love him no matter how many bad comedies he makes.)
Tutoring Isabelle Huppert on the art of seduction in 8 Women
It was Chabrol who famously described Béart as having “the face of an angel and the body of a whore,” a comment that, nearly fifteen years later, still appears in every fourth article about her. (Curiously, he said nothing about François Cluzet, her L’enfer costar, having the face of Dustin Hoffman and the body of your next-door neighbor.)
While she is undeniably gorgeous and frequently appears in sexually charged material, the fact of the matter is that Emmanuelle Béart is a talented and underappreciated actress whose characters are often complex, conflicted women whose curves are irrelevant. Even in a fluffy musical comedy like 8 Women, there is more to her French maid Louise than meets the eye, like the revelation that her indiscreet affair with the man of the house was borne less of desire than from a twisted need to ease the marital burdens placed on his wife (played by Catherine Deneuve), the true object of her affection.
If you’ve seen 8 Women, you know that Deneuve’s haughty character ends up in a clinch with her sister-in-law and arch-nemesis, a bisexual schemer played to perfection by Fanny Ardant. But unless you’ve seen director Anne Fontaine’s relatively obscure Nathalie…, you’d have no way of knowing that Béart and Ardant went on to have a kinda-sorta lesbian entanglement of their own.
Béart is a prostitute in Nathalie…, an inscrutable character hired by the troubled Ardant, who believes her husband (played by Gérard Depardieu) is straying, to seduce him and report back with all the pornographic details. If it sounds tortured and psychosexual and hopelessly French, that’s only because it is. What makes this movie memorable is that the only real tension in its bizarre love triangle is between Béart and Ardant, who is obsessed with other people’s sexual desires because she’s unable to express her own.
With Fanny Ardant in Nathalie…
Don’t seek out Nathalie…, a somewhat tedious exercise in painstakingly crafted art-house ambiguity, expecting to see a lesbian love scene. The closest you’ll come in Béart’s oeuvre is some kissing in one of her early efforts, a gauzy David Hamilton film about teenage girls and sexual awakenings; and a brief but explicit sex scene with Pascale Bussières La Répétition, which was directed by Catherine Corsini. (Yes, the same Pascale Bussières who left her Calvinist college and boyfriend to experience a lesbian awakening of her own under the big top in Patricia Rozema’s ridiculous When Night is Falling.)
There’s no love to speak of in La Répétition (and be warned, the title is an apt description of the screenplay), just obsession — a frequent theme in Béart’s movies — and about 87 varieties of fuckedupness. The actresses play friends whose bond is fractured in college; they are reunited ten years later, by which time Béart’s character has become a successful stage actress and Bussières a raving lunatic with stalkerish tendencies.
Their dysfunctional relationship eventually takes a sexual turn despite a serious lack of chemistry between the pals, who, in a small detail that might explain why the scene contains little in the way of eroticism, seem fundamentally straight. Though it’s the pathological behavior of the Bussières character that drives the plot of the movie, the murky motives of Béart’s insecure actress steal the show.
Related viewing: Béart’s lesbian-tinged films are hardly her best, though they’re overlooked enough that I wanted to give them some space here. A good overview of her work that’s available on DVD in North America would include Manon of the Spring, Un Coeur en Hiver (also known as A Heart in Winter), Nelly and Monsieur Arnaud and 8 Women (for the fabulous ensemble cast more than anything else). Hopefully André Téchiné’s The Witnesses, about the early years of the AIDS epidemic, will come out on DVD this year and join the list.
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You might never have guessed from my writing, which critics across the globe agree is peppier than a cheerleader on amphetamines, but I’m a bit of the flat affect type. Enthusiasm never creeps into my voice, only mild and sometimes not so mild irritation. I’m Ben Stein, basically, except shorter, female, outspokenly liberal, have never had my own game show, and don’t wear suits. (On second thought, I’m not like Ben Stein at all. Forget I ever mentioned it.)
According to my mother, who knows these kinds of things, I was a toddler the last time I expressed unrestrained excitement about anything. I was at my grandmother’s house and she had turned on a Pointer Sisters record, and during the song “I’m So Excited” I jumped up and down and repeatedly clapped my hands in delight. That would have been in the mid-1980s.
I’m sharing these qualifications with you so you will understand the enormity of what I’m about to say, which is this: I’ve finally found something I’d squeal about, were I one for squealing. It’s the latest and final entry in the new Masterpiece Theatre: Complete Jane Austen series, an adaptation of Sense and Sensibility that was written by the prolific Andrew Davies, who penned the most celebrated of Austen movies, the BBC’s 1995 version of Pride & Prejudice; as well as Northanger Abbey just last year, and Tipping the Velvet whenever it was that Tipping the Velvet was made.
It premieres on PBS this Sunday and concludes on April 6th. The reviews I read this morning were incredible; behold the USA Today headline: “PBS’ Sense and Sensibility is truly a masterpiece,” and consider these words by Mary McNamara of The Los Angeles Times as she compares this Sense to Emma Thompson’s Oscar-winning adaptation, which excised several plot points from the novel:
Rejoice, Austen purists, here they are, miraculously restored in a two-part production that is just as lush and star-studded as the film version. If Andrew Davies’ script is a tad more steamy, it is also less glossy, painting a more nuanced portrait of genteel poverty, and the trials four women on their own would face. This “Sense and Sensibility” is truer not only to Austen’s narrative, it more successfully captures the quiet precision of her singular mind — she was the master of finding poetry in domestic detail, and for that, the small screen is much better suited than the large.
If that’s not reason enough to geek out over this TV event, how about this: Janet McTeer, she of Portrait of a Marriage and Tumbleweeds (and, more recently, the British miniseries Five Days, which played in the States on HBO and was released on DVD earlier this month), plays Mrs. Dashwood.
I’ve always been in awe of McTeer, not only because of the quality of her work and the roles she accepts — that I didn’t have the chance to see her on stage in an all-female version of The Taming of the Shrew (she played the part of Petruchio, telling Variety, “I can’t possibly turn that down. I go from playing an archetypal martyr [in ‘Malfi’] to a drunken male and finally get paid to scratch my balls. I just think that’s hysterical”) is one of those missed opportunities that will forever nag at me, like the time I turned down the role of Han Solo in Star Wars because I was underwhelmed by the script; or when I politely rebuffed the advances of a drunken Mary-Louise Parker lookalike just because she was heterosexual — but also because she’s refreshingly direct in interviews, even as she thwarts the attempts of journalists to dig into her personal life. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, check out this article from eight years ago, when she was newly Oscar-nominated for her performance in Tumbleweeds. Tell me, with her ball gown misery and childhood fights with her parents about feminism, is she not a woman after your own heart?
Related links: You can read more about this production of Sense and Sensibility at the PBS website, and find interviews with cast members at the BBC’s website. And if you don’t have access to Portrait of a Marriage on DVD, you can view it in installments on YouTube for the time being.
Pedro Almodóvar, one of the world’s greatest (and, it should go without saying, gayest) living filmmakers, will blog about the making of his next movie, Broken Hugs, when it begins filming in May. Almodóvar’s Spanish website will publish English and French translations of the blog entries, much to the consternation of Babel Fish, which was hoping to cause more gender confusion than anything we’ve ever seen in one of Pedro’s movies by translating the director’s anecdotes for non-Spanish speaking cinéastes around the world.
“Never mind designer frocks, I find my clothes in the windows of abandoned VW Transporters.”
British soul songstress Joss Stone, once known as a ferociously talented teen phenom, now known as a wearer of dresses that look like bad LSD trips, will join Depends spokeswoman and Black Eyed Peas member Fergie in the ranks of singers-turned-movie-lesbians when she makes her big-screen debut in something called Snappers. Stone says she will share a “long, lingering French kiss” with a female costar.
Her fellow Janis Joplin disciple Melissa Etheridge could not be reached for comment (probably because no one tried to contact her), but we imagine she’d say something like, “Who cares?” And she’d be right, because the only upcoming long, lingering lesbian movie kiss that matters is the one between Penélope Cruz and Scarlett Johansson in Vicky Cristina Barcelona.
In other news…
Women’s football aficionado and recent L Word guest star Kelly McGillis has found religion. The kind that still lets her use electricity, in case you were wondering. What I’m wondering is what that means for her personal life, but that’s something she doesn’t talk about now that she’s divorced, so the world may never know.
In other other news…
Thandie Newton, star of the new David Schwimmer movie Run, Fatboy, Run, is gorgeous. Okay, so anyone with the gift of sight already knew that. But did you also know that she’s friends with Saffron Burrows, or that the last book she read was Justine Picardie’s Daphne? Well, now you do. Don’t you feel very strongly that this information, or at least the picture I’m about to post, profoundly enriches your life in ways you can’t describe?
I mean, jeez. That photograph makes me want to dance around the room like Gene Kelly. And I have stacks of books all over the place and I’m a world-renowned klutz, so that could be dangerous, not just for me but for my pets, my antique lamp, and most of all, my pride.
Richard Widmark, who died Monday at the age of 93, will no doubt be best remembered for his debut role, that of the gleefully psychopathic Tommy Udo in Henry Hathaway’s Kiss of Death. It was a dazzling introduction to moviegoers and critics alike; Widmark was electrifying and unpredictable and his Udo became an indelible creation, the kind of shockingly vile, violent weasel Steve Buscemi played in Fargo nearly fifty years later.
But Widmark, when his characters weren’t pushing wheelchair-bound women down staircases with wild-eyed, giddy abandon, was also capable of projecting an easy con man charm (even when his characters were morally conflicted, as in Samuel Fuller’s gritty Pickup on South Street), and, in Jules Dassin’s classic Night and the City, such palpable desperation that you’ll break into a sweat just looking at him. He was a fascinating actor, one of my favorites, and if you haven’t seen his work in the films mentioned here, you should head over to Netflix and add them to your queue.
Programming note: Widmark will be remembered by Turner Classic Movies with a 3-film retrospective on Friday, April 4th, but they’ve inexplicably chosen to show movies that kind of suck. What were you thinking, TCM programmers? Is The Tunnel of Love really the best you can do?
We here at Cranky Lesbian, LLC have nothing to say on the subject of Mariah Carey’s sexuality. In fact, we have little to say on the subject of Mariah Carey at all, other than we were recently shocked to learn that the title of her upcoming album has nothing to do with butterflies or rainbows.
We weren’t even going to take time out of our incredibly busy (if by busy you mean we’ve been listening to The Magnetic Fields and playing computer solitaire all day) schedule to mention that the notoriously inaccurate and more-than-occasionally homophobic-sounding gossip site MediaTakeOut is reporting that Mariah Carey and Da Brat were spotted canoodling in L.A. this weekend. Reporteth one of their spies:
I just wanted to tell you guys that Mariah Carey and Da Brat are definitely dating [each other]. They were at [Villa] last night and for almost the whole night Mariah was sitting on Da Brat’s lap. And they were both sharing the same drink – FROM THE SAME GLASS!!!
The way those two were carrying on, I thought they would start kissing right there in front of everyone. BTW Da Brat was looking kinda hot … No Homo.
It’s not that we find it so hard to believe that Carey and Da Brat, who’ve collaborated in the past and are known to be friends, might get their L Word on in private. We know that female sexuality is complex, like a Beach Boys vocal arrangement or doing your taxes with nothing more than a pencil and a calculator.
There are, in fact, only a handful of women on the face of the earth we simply wouldn’t believe lesbian rumors about. (Dr. Laura, Laura Bush, and my grandma come to mind. Well, my paternal grandma. The maternal one’s a bit of a free spirit.) It’s more that we don’t give much credence to reports that contain lines like: “BTW Da Brat was looking kinda hot … No Homo.”
The reports are in, and the only lesbian relationship that Dame Julie Andrews, everyone’s favorite singing nun and medicine-peddling nanny, cops to in her new autobiography, Home: A Memoir of My Early Years, is her lengthy marriage to filmmaker Blake Edwards. As Daily Mail writer Michael Thornton recounts for anyone who has been cryogenically frozen for the last forty years and isn’t aware of rumors that romantically linked Andrews to her BFF Carol Burnett:
Just before she left the Broadway cast of Camelot, Andrews filmed a TV special with the American actress and comedienne Carol Burnett, her closest friend. It was titled Julie and Carol at Carnegie Hall.
Two-and-a-half weeks later, Andrews discovered that she was pregnant. When her daughter, Emma Walton, was born on November 27, 1962, Carol Burnett became her godmother. But was she also a lover?
This is the extraordinary suggestion which has found its way onto the internet, a rumour that in fact goes back as far as 1965, the year in which Andrews made The Sound of Music.
On January 18 of that year, prior to their appearance on stage at President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Inaugural Gala, Julie Andrews and Carol Burnett were observed kissing passionately in public in a Washington hotel.
The clinch, which both women later claimed was a stunt staged to amuse their friend, actor and movie director Mike Nichols, was witnessed by the President’s wife, Lady Bird Johnson, who unexpectedly stepped out of the hotel elevator at that moment.
This incident, sadly, is missing from Dame Julie’s new book, in which she says of her chum Carol, “I loved all that she was, all that she exuded — we bonded instantly,” adding: “I lost my own inhibitions and felt free beside her.”
“And I loved making her yodel like Tarzan in bed,” the passage most assuredly does not continue.
Why hasn’t the whimsical “We were doing it to amuse Mike Nichols” defense caught on, by the way? I’ll do my best to use it next time I’m caught in a compromising position, but can you imagine if federal agents had approached Eliot Spitzer and “Kristen” about their hotel room tryst and they both replied, “Oh, that? We were doing it for Mike Nichols. He loves that kind of stuff!” (Better yet, what if the agent countered, “We’ve already talked to Mike Nichols, sir, and he was in Los Angeles the night of your appointment.” To which Spitzer would be forced to sputter, “Did I say Mike Nichols? I meant Elaine May.”)
P.S. Because no Julie Andrews item would be complete without it, here, once again, is a link to The Scene from The Sound of Music.
“Yeah, my Subaru’s in the shop, so I’ll be driving this for a while.”
When she isn’t dallying heterosexually with fourth-rate rockers in Europe, part-time actress and full-time tabloid fodder Lindsay Lohan is caught in a lesbian love triangle with DJ Samantha Ronson and professional rich kid Courtenay Semel.
I’m on Team Ronson (hey, her brother’s talented), and so far it appears she is winning, because Star magazine reports that Lohan and Semel are no longer roommates and England’s The Sun has pointed out that Lohan was recently photographed wearing a ring with Ronson’s initials on her ring finger.
Of course, Star is basically The Weekly World News with a focus on Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie instead of Bigfoot, and The Sun is, well, The Sun, so this is all completely meaningless and only merited space here today because I’m bored at work.
Rock Hudson: Never photographed at a gay pride parade.
How do you prove you’re gay? It’s a question that’s been troubling me since I heard about the case of Kulenthiran Amirthalingam, a gay man whose refugee claim was recently rejected by immigration muck-mucks in Canada when he couldn’t provide sufficient proof of his homosexuality. Amirthalingam was sent back to Malaysia, a country known for its hostility to members of the GLBT community; he has already spent time in prison there for being gay. From a Canada.com article about the deportation controversy:
Michael Battista, a Toronto lawyer who has expertise in dealing with gay and lesbian refugee claims, says the problem is there is no consistency of analysis. If claimants have pictures of themselves at a gay pride parade, proof of participating in online gay-chat rooms or witnesses who can testify they have had gay partners, then the adjudicator has some evidence.
How many of us have never been photographed at a gay pride parade? (You can’t see me right now—at least I hope you can’t, because I’m so not dressed for company—but I’m raising my hand.) How many of us don’t have proof of participating in gay chat rooms? (This is where I raise my hand again.)
For that matter, how many of us don’t have witnesses who can testify that we’ve had gay partners? (What about gay men and lesbians who’ve always been single or hidden their relationships from others?) Finally, how many of us are enormously, spectacularly, almost egregiously gay? (I started off raising both my hands. Now I’m bending my arms to form the letters Y-M-C-A as a disco ball that just magically descended from the sky shimmers beatifically overhead.)
Proving your gayness to Canadian immigration officials sounds even harder than proving your Jewishness to the rabbinate in Israel if you wanna get hitched. It got me thinking: If I weren’t a US citizen, if I lived in a country that meted out harsh punishments to those found “guilty” of being homosexuals, if I couldn’t furnish witnesses to testify that I’m a ‘mo (“Hello, Canadian Refugee Board. I’m here to tell you about the time Cranky Lesbian and I kept rewinding Morocco to see Marlene Dietrich kiss a woman”), and if I sought asylum in a country like Canada, how would I prove my gayness? It’s not like we’re tagged or chipped or an examination of our bodies would turn up the Mark of the Homo (which I imagine would resemble a miniature version of this).
Everything I came up with sounds like a lame joke. I’d probably point to my sneakers first. If that didn’t do the trick, I might hand over my iPod. The problem with relying on your MP3 player to establish your orientation to a bunch of strangers—or rather, my problem with relying on my MP3 player to establish my orientation to a bunch of strangers—is that its contents point more to me being a drag queen than a lesbian.
Mixed in with all the classic R&B and New Wave music, all the Beatles and Beach Boys and Ella Fitzgerald, you’ll find Barbra, Bette, Cher, Judy, Madonna, a little Cheryl Lynn, some Donna Summer, the original Broadway cast recording of Gypsy, the classic Charlene campfest “I’ve Never Been to Me,” Whitney Houston dance remixes, a curious cover that finds Liza Minelli turning “You’re So Vain” into “You’re Sho Vain,” and more Nellie McKay and Rufus Wainwright than you can shake a stick at—and that’s just off the top of my head.
What if the authorities still weren’t fully convinced of my gayness? I could recite the plot lines from various episodes of Ellen: The Post-Coming Out Years from memory. (Remember the time Ellen and Paige and Audrey went to that Lilith Fair-type event and Rena Sofer wanted to hook up with Ellen but Ellen only cared about Laurie and hilarity ensued? Doesn’t it warm the cockles of your heart just thinking about it? No? Yeah, me neither. That wasn’t one of the show’s finer episodes.)
I could name my favorite transgender character from a Pedro Almodovar movie. (That would be All About My Mother‘s Agrado, of course.) I could get online and show them a catalog of my book collection at LibraryThing, pointing out all the queer tomes I own and that my alias there is a tribute to my favorite Mink Stole character from a John Waters movie. If even that wasn’t enough to convince them of my all-time champion gayness, I could tell them the exact moment Betty and Rita start to earn that R-rating in Mulholland Drive. (That would be 1:40:16, which sounds like a Lynchian Bible verse.)
Other than that, what do I have? Coming out to my friends, coming out to my relatives, and accidentally coming out to all of the seventh grade when I wore that plaid shirt to school on picture day, those aren’t things I could prove if I was alone in a foreign country. The Canada.com article continued:
With no witnesses, photographs, love-letters or other documents indicating a gay lifestyle, refugees are often left showing up before the refugee board acting flamboyant or acting on other gay stereotypes.
How are witnesses and photographs and love letters proof of anything? Witnesses can lie. Photographs can be faked, their contents misrepresented. Love letters can be forged. Sure enough, journalist Tiffany Crawford writes that “witnesses and letters are dismissed as hearsay and claimants are accused of fabricating lies to stay in Canada.”
Maybe one of you, in your infinite wisdom, someone who stumbles across this in cyberspace, can explain to me how you determine whether a person is gay. I don’t want any smart-ass answers, any of that, “I don’t know, ask if they’ve dated Penelope Cruz” business. Me, I can’t figure it out.
