Itching to read more about the upcoming book detailing Patricia Cornwell’s ill-fated affair with former FBI agent Margo Bennett? Times Online journalist Tony Allen-Mills is here to help. I’d post quotes for those of you who like one-stop shopping, but this story, once mildly interesting in a tawdry tabloid kind of way, seems rather moldy now, especially since Cornwell has become more forthcoming about her personal life.
The 17th Annual Kelly McGillis Classic International Women’s/Girls’ Flag Football Championship begins this weekend in Key West, Florida. You can read more by visiting the tournament’s official website, which informs us that not only does McGillis — whose guest arc on The L Word begins later this month — enjoy playing football herself, but one of the teams in this year’s competition is called the Diesel Daisies.
I was going to suggest that McGillis Classic scheduling might be to blame for the Spice Girls cutting their reunion tour short (you know how Mel C. is about her sports), but it turns out they’re not wrapping things up until February 26th.
In her review of David Rieff’s Swimming in a Sea of Death, a memoir of his mother Susan Sontag’s battle with cancer, Katie Roiphe quotes Rieff as writing that Sontag was “humiliated posthumously” by lover Annie Leibovitz’s “carnival images of celebrity death.” The personal photographs first caused a stir upon their publication in the Leibovitz collection A Photographer’s Life: 1990-2005 in 2006. Promotion for the book marked the first time Leibovitz spoke publicly about her lengthy relationship with Sontag.
Later this year, Rieff will oversee the publication of journals and notebooks his mother kept between 1947 and 1964. Previously published excerpts contain Sontag’s reflections on lesbian relationships with Harriet Sohmers and Maria Irene Fornes and comments like, “My desire to write is connected with my homosexuality. I need the identity as a weapon, to match the weapon that society has against me. It doesn’t justify my homosexuality. But it would give me — I feel — a license.” Sontag also wrote: “Being queer makes me feel more vulnerable.”
Other news and suggested reading:
Yesterday an appeals court ruled that Dr. Sneha Anne Philip died at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Philip’s disappearance was the subject of a 2006 New York magazine article that revealed a police probe into her personal life turned up stories of hidden alcohol abuse and bisexual affairs, which her family denied.
JFLAG, the Jamaica Forum for Lesbians All-Sexuals and Gays, has made a plea for government action in the wake of a mob attack on gay men in Mandeville. Their statement reads in part, “We are cultivating an uncivil society which seems to be itching for a reason to resort to mob violence as a redress for real or perceived grievances. When those with whom we entrust the responsibility of leadership fail to act decisively, they betray all Jamaicans.”
Where are gays in space? And Jodie Foster in Contact doesn’t count. We’re not talking about gays in front of bluescreens.
Newsday journalist Saul Friedman has written a nice piece about SAGE-LI, a new Long Island organization devoted to helping elderly GLBT individuals.
Turner Classic Movies kicks off their annual 31 Days of Oscar special tonight with a slate of films from the 1970s: Jaws, The Hospital, Network, and, my personal favorite of the bunch, Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces. Don’t just watch it because it contains what is arguably Jack Nicholson’s finest performance (he used to give good ones, you know), or because Karen Black earned a much-deserved Oscar nomination for her role as his needy girlfriend Rayette, whose hair, makeup and general dizziness paved the way for countless Jennifer Coolidge characters.
Watch it because Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe author and celebrated zany sweater-wearing Match Game panelist Fannie Flagg appears in a bowling alley scene. Watch it because of the comically angsty lesbian hitchhikers Palm and Terry (played by Helena Kallianiotes and “Mickey” singer Toni Basil), who are picked up by Nicholson and Black. Watch it because it has a wonderful supporting performance by Lois Smith. You won’t find any of those things in Jaws.
And gluttons for punishment, take note: Darling Lili, another of those Blake Edwards movies with Julie Andrews that manages to seem oddly gay even when the proceedings are assuredly heterosexual, will air after Five Easy Pieces for reasons known only to God, if God exists, and the TCM programmers. Andrews has about as much chemistry with costar Rock Hudson as Lily Tomlin had with John Travolta in Moment by Moment, for those of you who revel in that sort of thing.
Okay, my lesbian-crazed cyber friends: If Maggie Gyllenhaal didn’t make you her bitch with Secretary or Sherrybaby, let’s see if her new video in support of the WGA strike doesn’t do the trick.
The spot, which is archived as Episode 34 on the Speechless Without Writers website should our embedded code stop working, features Gyllenhaal as a woman who discovers her caddish boyfriend, AMPiTePa (that would be the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, for those keeping track at home), is cheating on her with not one but two other women.
Instead of making like Heather Graham and Natasha Gregson Wagner in Two Girls and a Guy and talking and talking (and talking) about it, this rowdy bunch gets tipsy together before Gyllenhaal retires to the hotel bed, asking her new friends if they want to “make an interim agreement” in AMPiTePa’s absence. Then a pizza delivery girl shows up.
If you haven’t given much thought to the writer’s strike, hopefully this video will change your mind. There’s a lot more at stake here than scribes getting screwed out of money — there are also lesbian orgies to worry about.
UPDATE: The video was interfering with the archive sidebar, so you’ll have to view the clip here.
The best new DVD release of the week is only slightly new, but it’s so good that it’s worth pointing out to anyone who missed it the first time around: Warner Brothers has re-bundled their two-year-old Val Lewton Collection with the new documentary Martin Scorsese Presents Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows, which recently debuted on TCM and will also be available separately.
For those of you with one-track minds, lesbian subtext found its way into several Lewton movies (he was Alla Nazimova’s nephew, after all), most memorably 1943’s The Seventh Victim, but what makes this set so remarkable is that it gives fans an opportunity to appreciate the scope of Lewton’s visionary ability to recognize directorial talent and emphasize psychological horror in response to budget constraints. Also, Simone Simon was the hottest “cat woman” ever, until Michelle Pfeiffer came along.
Also new on DVD:
Glenn Close fans can gorge themselves on 500+ minutes of her new FX series, Damages, as the complete first season makes its way to DVD. Rose Byrne, Ted Danson and Tate Donovan costar.
Sophia Loren is reliably gorgeous in El Cid, which gets the 2-Disc Deluxe Edition treatment, but you’ll also have to sit through two hours of Charlton Heston.
If you’re so inclined, you can relive Groundhog Day over and over (and over) again, this time with a Special 15th Anniversary Edition release.
Sony releases Monty Python’s Life of Brian in a new Immaculate Edition; the Criterion Collection edition is still available.
Spellbound documentarian Jeffrey Blitz focuses on nerdy kids again, this time in an acclaimed fictional film, Rocket Science.
Mary McCormack, who played Nia Long’s partner in The Broken Hearts Club, stars in Right at Your Door, a thriller about dirty bombs in Los Angeles that is bound to make you queasy.
Julie Christie looked great at the SAG Awards last night, just as you’d expect. Equally unsurprising, Juno star Ellen Page was born without the dress posture gene:
Five minutes with John Travolta would change all of that, but it’s imperative she bring along someone who can yank her out of the room when the E-meter comes out. I volunteer Diablo Cody.
Is Hayden Panettiere the new Jane Fonda? (These Washington Post reporters are referring to her activism, of course. While my exposure to Heroes is limited, I did catch Panettiere in Raising Helen and I don’t think we’ll be seeing her in a remake of Barbarella or Klute or Tout va bien.)
In an interview with New York Magazine, Clay Aiken forgets that he isn’t Lucinda Williams and journalist/fellow lesbian Ariel Levy isn’t Bill Buford as he plays up the Southern shtick. What you’ll learn, if you can hang with the Aiken for four excruciating pages, is approximately this: he’s a Democrat now, a shameless self-promoter, and he “has never had a romantic relationship with anyone, unless you count the girls he took to dances back in high school in Raleigh.” Sounds perfect for Raúl Esparza.
Reviews of Shelby Lynne’s Just a Little Lovin’ are coming in, and you can read them here and here. If you’re looking for Lynne’s contentious Advocate interview, we’ve got the scoop.
The Times points out that Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and Barack Obama have identical opinions on gay rights issues, while fear-mongering Republicans continue to pander to bigots.
Margo Bennett, the former lover of crazy lesbian novelist Patricia Cornwell, is blabbing about their relationship—you know, the one that made headlines when Bennett’s husband hatched a murderous plot that landed him behind bars—in an upcoming book called Twisted Triangle. In a passage that makes Cornwell’s schlocky prose sound downright Proustian in comparison, authors Caitlin Rother and John Hess write: “As they talked, Margo felt the blood coursing through her veins, very aware of the close proximity of her body to Patsy’s. It felt dangerous. Wrong. Thrilling.” Anyone else think this would make the perfect made-for-cable comeback vehicle for Kelly McGillis?
The Office for National Statistics, which carried out a poll of 4,000 UK residents, has reported that only one in 100 respondents described themselves as gay. The Office, which acknowledged that some survey takers didn’t understand the question about their sexuality and that researchers even failed to ask it in 15 percent of interviews, called the results “not a reliable estimate” of the gay population. Which should go without saying, shouldn’t it, when you’re talking about the same part of the world that embraced Blue, Boyzone, Samantha Fox, Kylie Minogue, Westlife, Robbie Williams and countless similar acts with such unbridled enthusiasm?
That’s right, Great Britain — or should that be Gay Britain? — we’re on to you. And it’s not just your questionable taste in music that raised a pink flag. It’s your devotion to AbFab and Helen Mirren. Your prurient interest in Cristiano Ronaldo’s sex life and BBC adaptations of Sarah Waters novels. You’re fooling about as many people as Morrissey, you sad wankers. Go on, call yourselves gay. If I could come out while attending high school in the friggin’ Midwest, in a town that has more churches than fast food restaurants, I think you can divulge your orientation to a stranger with a clipboard.
Yeah, that juvenile title was just to get your attention. Congratulations to Maria Sharapova, who beat Ana Ivanovic 7-5, 6-3 in the Australian Open final last night. In her victory speech, Sharapova cited an inspirational text message Billie Jean King sent her that read, “Champions take their chances and pressure is a privilege.”
Said Sharapova of King, “She’s always a person who texts me if I have a tough moment or a great win. I woke up this morning to the text. I had those great words in my mind during the match.” My guess is the text continued, “BTW, how long do you think this Shane celibacy thing is going to last?” but Sharapova chose to keep that quiet rather than risk alienating her sponsors.
Since posting this item about Shelby Lynne and her New York Times Magazine profile a couple weekends ago, I’ve been asked by several Googled-out lesbians for help locating the singer’s latest interview with The Advocate.
The article (written by Michele Kort, the Laura Nyro biographer and author of Dinah!: Three Decades of Sex, Golf, and Rock ‘N’ Roll, whose Portia de Rossi interview is one of the best I’ve read in The Advocate) isn’t online yet, so to read the whole thing you’ll have to go out and buy issue 1001 of the magazine, currently on newsstands. Out of the small amount of kindness that remains in my mostly-shriveled heart, I’ve assembled the gay-centric bits for you shameless gossips.
First, you must understand that this is no ordinary Advocate interview. Most Advocate interviews consist of a fawning reporter asking a Z-list celebrity what it’s like to be a gay icon. By the second paragraph of Kort’s three-page Lynne piece (five if you count all the photos), you know you’re in for something different:
Doing press is “kind of a nightmare” for Lynne, and when The Advocate ventured out to take some pictures and talk about her new CD, Just a Little Lovin’—on which she covers songs recorded by the timeless gay icon Dusty Springfield— Shelby self-medicated, shall we say. Throughout the long afternoon and into the evening her emotions ebbed and flowed, from insecurity to confidence, petulance to intimacy. One moment she was hugging me, the next walking off in a huff with my tape recorder. “Don’t worry,” said Lynne’s manager and friend, Elizabeth “Betty” Jordan, “she’ll bring it back.”
Cranky note: The nature of Lynne’s relationship with Jordan (then known as Betty Bottrell) was first questioned by a brave reporter in 2001, and it didn’t go over well with Shelby. Kort is more delicate in her approach to the subject:
In Elizabeth, Shelby found a manager, executive producer, and best friend. “It’s very important. Very personal,” Lynne says of their relationship. “I guess we were just there at the right time for each other. My life at that time was completely uprooted; all I had was that record that I was making. We’ve depended on each other now for eight years, for everything in life. And that’s all there is to that.”
I suggest that however Shelby describes it, the partnership seems primary. She agrees. “Primary is a good word, actually. Things that are that important you keep close as you can. You’re so lucky if you ever get something that important.”
Another Cranky note: So far, so good, right? Shelby hasn’t broken a bottle of Southern Comfort over a pool table and challenged Michele to a rumble yet. Unfortunately, trouble is brewing:
But talking about whom she loves, even in the most generic terms, turns out to be off-limits, despite The Advocate’s understanding going into the interview. In Palm Springs, Lynne got downright combative when I gingerly approached personal territory. “What’s the question?” she asked several times. But when I asked, “Are you in a relationship?” she immediately interrupted with “I don’t talk about my personal life.” It was confusing: Shelby seemed to be demanding that The Question be asked even as she fended it off.
So now, on the phone, I bring it up again. She still stonewalls, but more gently. “I just don’t think I want to ever be a part of a group of people who want to make announcements about their personal life,” she says. “Because, you know, that’s all you have.”
“Do you hate labels?” I ask, because I’m sensing what may underlie her reluctance.
“Tell me, do I? You already know the answer.”
When I call her a few days later for some follow-up questions, I ask one last time, in the gentlest way I can imagine, whether Shelby could subscribe to the sentiment Dusty famously expressed in a 1970 interview: “I know that I’m as perfectly capable of being swayed by a girl as by a boy.”
Shelby’s just not having any. “It’s fine that you keep wanting me to go there, but I just don’t believe I need to,” she says firmly. “I give away so much in the songs, man.”
“But did you not think The Advocate would ask such a question when you agreed to do the interview?” I finally ask.
“But it’s not anybody’s business who I sleep with or who I fuck!” she says, as frustrated as I am. “I don’t give a shit what the magazine is. People are going to come up with whatever they want to come up with on their own; I don’t have to make announcements. Come on!”
Cranky again: Oh, for fuck’s sake. The only thing I hate more than the closet-closet is the walk-in closet, that strange space that allows someone to acknowledge her “primary relationship” with another woman without using the word gay, while also giving her room to turn around and snap that she won’t “make announcements” about her personal life.
Lynne is right that it’s nobody’s business who she fucks (though asking whether someone is gay or straight or bisexual, or merely averse to labels, is hardly the same as asking for their partner’s name, date of birth, and social security number), but she didn’t have similar meltdowns when reporters assumed that person was male. And perhaps she’s making things a bit more complicated than necessary. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure her sister was able to acknowledge her relationship with Steve Earle without doing a “Yep, I’m Straight” TIME cover.
(Special thanks to H.M.C. for the magazine hookup.)
2/24/08 UPDATE: You can now read the complete article at Michele Kort’s website.
Same-sex couples are just as committed to driving each other insane — oops, scratch that last part, I meant just as committed — as straight couples, two new studies have found. Isn’t it charming and quaint that this is considered news?
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