I don’t plan on reading Andrew Morton’s new Tom Cruise biography that comes out on Tuesday—and even if I did, I wouldn’t admit it here (the Internet lasts forever, you know)—but early reports of its contents suggest a comic masterpiece on par with David Sedaris’s best work. Sayeth the website Digital Sky in its sneak preview:
Tom Cruise: An Unauthorised Biography claims the actor has chased women throughout his life.
Melissa Gilbert, who dated Cruise when he was 19 before being dumped for Heather Locklear, told Morton: “I can honestly say he’s a very sexual person. There was a lot of making out on the couch in my mom’s living room.”
One former date claimed he was homophobic after seeing his reaction to musical La Cage Aux Folles, saying: “Men dressed as women, he couldn’t handle it. We had to leave before the intermission. It really bothered him. He was definitely homophobic.”
Bert Fields, Cruise’s mega-lawyer, has called the book “outrageous, sick stuff,” and so far I’m inclined to agree. There has to be more to Gilbert’s couch story than Morton lets on, like maybe the room had such hideous window treatments that Tom was desperate for a distraction. Nor am I sold on the La Cage Aux Folles story, mostly because I have a hard time believing that someone so aggressively anti-gay would agree to star in Top Gun. (Or, you know, line up to see La Cage Aux Folles in the first place.)
Okay, so we know that dimwitted homophobic actors are occasionally tricked into playing gay roles or starring in films with a heavy gay subtext; we’ve all heard the Charlton Heston stories. But Top Gun is so spectacularly gay that even someone who believes in Xenu would pick up on the sexual tension between Maverick and Iceman, the special nature of Maverick’s relationship with the pornstachioed Goose, and the significance of Maverick’s love interest being a Kelly McGillis character named Charlie. It could only have been gayer if Bob Mackie designed the flight suits.
You can read more about Tom’s robust, lifelong appetite for heterosexual intercourse with biological women at Slate. I warn you, however, that it will leave a bad taste in your mouth, which is why I’m concluding this post with a photo of Tom’s former employee Penelope Cruz grabbing Salma Hayek’s ass to help cleanse your palate.
Millionaire Gerurdas Gerrit Heijne has been charged with murdering his partner, Frank Cianciosi, in their Perth penthouse.
Wacky pastor Ken Hutcherson is gaining allies in his bizarre fight/shameless publicity stunt against Microsoft, a company he has criticized for their lack of homophobic practices.
In England, school officials have denied charges that 14-year-old student Belinda Allen’s suicide was motivated by homophobic bullying at the hands of her classmates.
A Russian court has declined to press charges against gay rights activists, including Moscow Pride organizer Nicolas Alexeyev, who were detained while protesting against homophobic politicians during a December election.
Ralph Becker, the new mayor of Salt Lake City, Utah, has proposed a domestic partner registry that will be voted on by city council later this month. If Bill Henrickson and his wives really existed, they’d probably be scandalized by this. (With the possible exception of Margene, who wouldn’t mind registering with Ana.)
In Maryland, domestic partnerships have been defined and Republicans aren’t happy. However, it is important to note that most Republicans have been unhappy since Showtime canceled Queer as Folk, thus making it harder for them to get their weekly dose of gay action without having to intercept credit card bills so their wives don’t Google Sean Cody.
In Sydney, Australia, police have been accused of ignoring a rash of anti-gay hate crimes.
Finally, Kevin Spacey hasn’t tried his hand at writing or directing since Beyond the Sea flopped, but I think I’ve found the perfect story for him to option:
A gay man who had sex on the beach with three male prostitutes but was unable to pay was robbed of his cellphone and wallet, it was alleged in the Cape Town magistrate’s court on Thursday.
Court officials battled to keep straight faces as self-confessed prostitutes Reagon Adonis, 23, Steven November and Jamie Lee Davids, both 20, told of their experience with a client, Marius Jacobs.
They pleaded guilty to a charge of robbery, but magistrate Ingrid Freitag changed their pleas to not guilty after hearing their story.
If you’re familiar with Chris Matthews and his MSNBC show Hardball, you already know he’s kind of a jerk. He’s done little to hide it, what with all the tongue baths he has given the Bush administration over the years and his frequent swipes at Bill and Hillary Clinton.
You might have also noticed his tendency to lose interest in interview subjects who resist coaching, or the way he spits (sometimes literally, which might explain why so many of his guests appear via satellite) questions at his panel in a tone that suggests he cares less about their answers than about making his own not-so-subtle points with what he asks them. It is also hinted at in the way he sometimes says the word “gay” like he’s saying “date rape” or “chlamydia,” but that’s a post for another day.
His agenda-pushing was certainly on full display during his Iowa caucus coverage, in the language he used to describe Barack Obama. And for the last several weeks, it has been completely unavoidable when he talks about Hillary Rodham Clinton. Matthews attacks her so frequently, so viciously, with such unabashed glee, that it almost makes you wonder if his hatred isn’t hiding something deeper. Something private. Very private.
Fine, I’ll come right out and say it. What if his invective is a decoy, partly borne of subconscious self-sabotage, that must be deployed with increased frequency as he desperately struggles to smother an illicit and all-consuming sexual passion for a powerful and unattainable woman? Seriously, consider the language he uses when he talks about Clinton possibly defeating Obama and tell me he hasn’t dreamed of the senator from New York showing up at his dressing room with a riding crop in hand, ready to punish him for all the negative things he has said about her.
That is why I was thrilled to wake up this morning and see that Matthews, in the wake of Hillary’s New Hampshire victory, is being called on his boorish, unprofessional behavior. And not just in sloppily written, ultimately meaningless blurbs by jackasses like me. If you haven’t already, you might want to check out:
Need a little help getting over hump day? I suggest you clear four minutes from your schedule and watch the 1987 music video for “What Have I Done to Deserve This.”
As videos go it is pretty pedestrian, but the song is about as perfect as pop music gets and the video is so very, very gay that I challenge you to isolate the one element that could be crowned the gayest. Having to choose between the Pet Shop Boys and Dusty Springfield is hard enough as it is, but when you factor in the double Axel-esque leaping that occurs around the 2:20 mark and the fact that Dusty’s hair, makeup, and general demeanor give you an idea of what would happen if a drag queen and drag king mated, that’s when things start to get interesting.
“Why am I holding a large imaginary bowl during an interview?”
New Hampshire voters clearly haven’t forgiven Fred Thompson for his mistreatment of Roseanne Conner and her coworkers at Wellman Plastics. The actor and Republican presidential candidate received only 1% of the vote in the state’s primary on Tuesday.
While his Law & Order character famously denied harboring an anti-gay bias, Thompson is against gay marriage and told Fox News journalist Chris Wallace that he personally thinks civil unions are a bad idea, though he supports a state’s right to decide whether to allow them. His heartbreaking generosity in the “right to choose” arena does not extend to reproductive rights, naturally, because letting women decide what to do with their own bodies is crazy talk.
If by shocking you mean not at all shocking (I mean, check out the way I captioned this photo), and as transparent as Bert’s forbidden love for Ernie.
With that out of the way, the men of American Gladiators (original crispy edition, not new and improved with reduced frightening hair), spoke with Maxim recently about their glory days. Ben Widdicombe of the New York Daily Newsrehashed their comments about painkillers and steroids over the weekend, saving the best revelation, courtesy of Zap, for last: “Half the team was lesbians at one time. But it was just women with women; there were no gay guys on that show.”
Okay, Zap, if you insist. But I’m pretty sure their spandex occasionally said otherwise during Breakthrough & Conquer.
Stephen Fry, the brilliant actor, comic, writer, and all-around hot piece of ass, wants to know why the media lauds straight actors for playing gay roles. In an interview with the BBC’s Radio Times, he noted that gay actors are never told, “How brave of you to kiss that woman, that must have been very difficult for you.”
“It wouldn’t be that difficult for me to kiss a woman,” Fry continued. “I’ll kiss a frog if you like. It’s difficult to ride bareback backwards while unicycling, but to kiss someone isn’t difficult.” Perhaps we could start a collection to fly Stephen to Los Angeles, so he could explain this to the American media. Brokeback Mountain came out two years ago and I still have a headache from all the stupid questions that were asked of Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal. Given the opportunity, you don’t ask those two if it was hard to kiss. You ask them to apologize for The Four Feathers and Bubble Boy.
Queen Latifah is all smiles as she celebrates the Supreme Court’s decision.
Michael McDermott, an attorney who was unsuccessful in his attempt to overturn a 2006 U.S. Patent Office decision allowing everyone’s favorite decades-old organization of motorcycle-loving lesbians to trademark the name “Dykes on Bikes,” was slapped down by the Supreme Court Monday when they denied review of his appeal without comment.
McDermott originally argued that the phrase Dykes on Bikes was “disparaging to men” and “scandalous and immoral.” Having tried unsuccessfully for a good ten minutes to devise a Shangri-Las or John Travolta/Wild Hogs joke, I’ll now acknowledge that I have nothing to add to this story and was just itching to post that photo.
Mariel Hemingway prepares for a long career of playing lesbian characters.
Get your Netflix queues in order, because a landmark lesbian movie finally makes it to DVD tomorrow as Warner Brothers releases Robert Towne’s Personal Best.Starring Mariel Hemingway as Chris Cahill, a young Olympic hopeful who becomes involved with a fellow athlete played by real-life track star Patrice Donnelly, the film was celebrated by Pauline Kael at the time of its release in a manner normally reserved for works by Altman, Bertolucci and De Palma.Of Towne’s accomplishment, she marveled:
When he shows Chris and the other heroine arm-wrestling, he concentrates on their throbbing veins and their sinews and how the muscles play off one another. He breaks down athletic events into specific details; you watch the athletes’ calves or some other part of them, and you get an exact sense of how their bodies work—it’s sensual and sexual, and it’s informative, too. The film celebrates women’s bodies without turning them into objects; it turns them into bodies. There’s an undercurrent of flabbergasted awe. Everything in the movie is physically charged.
pauline kael, personal best review
Her gushing lasts a full four pages, ending with something I could have told her by the time I was twelve:
Watching this movie, you feel that you really can learn something essential about girls from looking at their thighs.
While Personal Best attained cult status, it made only $5.6 million at the box office in 1982, the same year another groundbreaking gay movie, the Michael Ontkean and Harry Hamlin romance Making Love, grossed $11.8 million.More than 25 years later, both films can be found on Box Office Mojo’s list of the 100 highest-grossing gay movies since 1980, a sad reminder that LGBT films have yet to enter the mainstream at American movie theaters.
The DVD, which currently has a pre-order price of $13.99 at Amazon, will include an audio commentary by Robert Towne and actor Scott Glenn. You can read Roger Ebert’s original four-star review at his website.
More Tuesday releases of note:
“Well, I was known for doing a certain thing that many of the other girls wouldn’t do.”
Jane Lynch, one of the greatest lesbians in the history of the world (pictured above in A Mighty Wind), appears in Gregg Araki’s Smiley Face, a comedy starring Anna Faris. As an added bonus, here’s a clip of Lynch performing the Guatemalan love song from The 40-Year-Old Virgin.
Holland Taylor and honorary gay Jon Cryer (don’t try to argue, you know Duckie was a lesbian) star in the second season of Two and a Half Men, a sitcom I’m largely unfamiliar with, though I know it features Melanie Lynskey of Heavenly Creatures in a supporting role.
Ellen Corby and Will Geer do the Ma and Pa Kettle thing in the sixth season of The Waltons.
Eddie Izzard, everyone’s favorite transvestite comedian, stars in the first season of The Riches, an FX series that costars Minnie Driver.
“Why does everyone think we’re gay?” a despondent Cary Grant asks Katharine Hepburn.
Republic Pictures has assembled an underwhelming Cary Grant box set that collects Indiscreet, Operation Petticoat, The Grass is Greener, and That Touch of Mink. Operation Petticoat, directed by Blake Edwards, is notable for pairing Grant with Tony Curtis, who mimicked him a year later in Some Like It Hot. That Touch of Mink, a romance with Doris Day, contains a dated, allegedly comic subplot with Gig Young, who is mistaken for homosexual.
Russell Crowe, the Oscar-winning actor, concierge-hating karate master, and noted Jodie Foster hag, stars in 3:10 to Yuma, James Mangold’s acclaimed remake of the Delmar Daves western classic. American Psycho alum turned Dark Knight Christian Bale costars.
For the Jake Gyllenhaal fans who will inevitably stumble upon this page while scouring the Internet for evidence of his lesbianism, Paramount double-dips with a Zodiac 2-Disc Director’s Cut. I’m not easily scared by movies—that’s what happens when your brother forces you to endure repeated viewing of Jerry Lewis flicks as a child—but will admit that I was jumpy for a good two days after seeing Zodiac. If you ever want me to kick you in the crotch, just sneak up on me while playing “Hurdy Gurdy Man.”
Finally, for the size queens among us, the same company that’s releasing the Beverly Hillbillies set has put together a Milton Berle collection. I’m not bothering with a link because Milton Berle was rude to RuPaul. If he didn’t like a 6’7″ drag queen, he wouldn’t like the rest of us either.
Willow and Kennedy weren’t the first lesbians to have sex on primetime television.
The fifth season of The L Word premiered tonight, and my expectations were not met. It wasn’t bad in a “so bad it’s funny” kind of way, it was bad in a “maybe I should be watching American Gladiators instead” kind of way. The only laugh of the night came during the show’s opening moments, when the special guest star credit went to Cybill Shepherd instead of the man who co-wrote My Dinner with Andre. Of course, the laughter died down pretty quickly when I realized that meant I’d have to deal with Cybill Shepherd.
