Remember earlier this month when I speculated that maybe parents of teens and pre-teens in Australia wouldn’t act like fuckheads about the upcoming lesbian kissage on Home and Away? I was wrong. The Australian is now reporting that “Since the lesbian story-line began two weeks ago, 100,000 viewers have turned off and complaints have been flooding in,” prompting producers to edit the kiss, which was reportedly “no more intimate than any kiss shared by a heterosexual couple” on the show, to make it less explicit.
You’d think concerned parents in Australia would have bigger things to worry about than a simple TV lip-lock, but maybe that’s part of the problem—they’re too busy watching TV and bitching about ‘the gays’ to make sure their kids aren’t depressed or pregnant. (It’s almost like they think they’re Americans…)
UPDATED (04/01/09): For some reason it’s making headlines that the controversy-stirring kiss in question aired on Home and Away in Australia on Tuesday as planned. I’m not quite sure what all the hullabaloo is about, as you’ll recall that the original report never said the kiss was being scrapped altogether, just that “some of the more intimate close-up images of policewoman Charlie Buckton and deckhand Joey Collins sharing a passionate kiss” would be cut. That fits with what network honcho Bevan Lee had to say about the episode; from the Telegraph article linked to above: “Home and Away bosses had decided to air the first, more gentle kiss, without the ‘more lusty’ follow up because it fitted better with the storyline.”
In other words, this isn’t much of a victory, it’s exactly what we were told was going to happen back when this first made news, even if Lee maintains the decision to show a tamer kiss was merely “artistic” in nature.
Quick, someone call John Lithgow. This madness must be stopped! A policewoman character on the Australian soap opera Home and Away is about to find love with a female deck hand (is it safe, then, to assume they don’t have lumberjacks in Australia?) in a story line that will feature kissing and — I advise you not to read any further if you’re easily offended — dancing. On the count of three, let’s all shake our heads like we’re convinced the world is going to hell in a handbasket and say it together: Won’t anyone think of the children?
A group called Pro-Family Perspectives is doing just that; its director has been quoted as saying, “The plot lines that young kids and teenagers should be presented with should be about really authentic relationships that are not just sexualised.”
Whether that means they disapprove of homosexuality or they’re merely opposed to the idea of a lesbian relationship being used as a possible ratings stunt, I couldn’t tell you. In any event, there’s been little sign of widespread public outrage yet, maybe because parents have viewed their own teenagers’ MySpace pages and are smart enough to realize that their kids won’t be seeing anything on Home and Away that they haven’t already taken countless pictures of their drunken friends doing at parties.
UPDATE:Alas, the parental outrage, manufactured or real, did happen.
“I used to play doubles with Dana Fairbanks, if you catch my drift.”
The Australian Open starts in five hours (the official website has a countdown clock), and I’m so excited about it that I feel like an honorary Pointer Sister. American viewers, here’s the TV schedule. And readers, be warned: If Roger Federer makes an early exit, I’m going to be even crankier than usual. Enough so that the Department of Homeland Security will have to raise my crankiness alert level to red, scaring schoolchildren and delighting Wolf Blitzer in the process.
Rachel Griffiths and Toni Collette ABBA it up in Muriel’s Wedding.
Celesbianism was not the buzzword of 2008, and don’t let the Australians, who spend all their time shoplifting and listening to ABBA records*, tell you otherwise. The “celesbianism” movement is as dumb as the “gayelle” revolution. If we have to talk about this subsection of the gay community at all, let’s stick to fauxmosexual, another word the Australians, who spend an inordinate amount of time worrying about how to best label seemingly bisexual female celebrities, recently promoted.
*During the course of my previously mentioned vacation, which is now drawing to a close, I saw Muriel’s Wedding, and I’ve been waiting for an opportunity to say “You’re terrible, Muriel” ever since. So far nothing has presented itself, but I remain optimistic about what the coming week might have in store.
Greta Garbo disguised herself as a lesbian to spy for Germany. Or maybe not.
This is a really dumb article. One of the dumbest I’ve ever read, and I used to read Seventeen and Teen Beat faithfully.
The problems start with the headline, which asserts that “bogus lesbians” are “causing emotional damage.” There are two possible responses to this. The first is a joke about it being old news to actual lesbians that fake lesbians cause emotional damage. The second isn’t a joke, just a confused “Who to the what now?” We’re only headline-deep and the article already feels unintentionally funny, not to mention rather quaint.
Then there’s this:
Several high-profile relationships involving “real lesbians” and women more often linked to men — such as MTV’s Ruby Rose and Jess Origliasso, and Samantha Ronson and Lindsay Lohan — have reportedly encouraged a wave of “fauxmosexuals” on the real life party circuit.
Oh, please. If Lindsay Lohan can’t get leggings to catch on, how is she going to convince a girl who wasn’t already interested in kissing girls to kiss another girl? Let’s give women (yes, even young women), a bit of credit here — they do have minds of their own. And let’s be realistic: “fauxmosexuality” (which is sometimes more complicated than someone simply craving attention, but it’s easier to pretend everyone is completely one-dimensional, isn’t it?) is nothing new. Perhaps the media only recently caught onto it, but “the gays” have been dealing with it, and in many cases rolling their eyes at it, forever.
And then there’s this:
Gay social commentator Tim Duggan has described the “lesbian trend” as a fad which is actually doing “more damage than good”.
“Experimentation is healthy — what it leads to can sometimes be a great thing, but you need to wonder what effect [fake lesbians] are having on women,” said Mr Duggan, co-founder of gay and lesbian site SameSame.
“Women who pretend to be lesbians do it to titillate men.”
Why does lesbianism always, always, always come back to men? I know that not everyone understands this, and that even some gay men have difficulty looking at women’s issues without trying to relate them back to men, but not all experimenters are women who are “pretending to be lesbians,” and not all of them are doing it to titillate men. Certainly there must be a way for concerned social commentators to tackle the subject of “faux lesbianism” without diminishing the complexity of female sexuality and apparently dismissing the notion of bisexuality altogether.
(And why do these lectures always seem oddly prudish, like there’s something inherently distasteful about straight girls wanting to titillate their boyfriends in this manner? Not every girl who kisses a girl to get a reaction from a guy does so under duress. Sometimes — gasp! — women are in control of their own sexuality, know what they’re doing, and like kissing other women and like turning on their boyfriends.)
Finally:
Online gay forums are abuzz with talk of the “bogus lesbian” craze, with some questioning whether the trend is putting real homosexuals at risk.
“Where do these fauxmosexual fads leave queer teens once they’re packed away in the cupboard (with other fads)?,” user timbo84 wrote.
“The statistic of 30 percent of teen suicides in the US being gay or lesbian teens is very distressing.
“Here’s hoping pop culture moves on to focus on people like Ellen and Ian McKellen and not those who are just ‘out’ to make a buck!”
Pop culture hasn’t moved away from Ellen and Ian McKellen. They both have successful careers and legions of adoring fans who respect them for coming out. But let’s back this up a bit: An obscure (outside of Australia) MTV VJ being photographed in a clinch with an almost equally obscure (outside of Australia) pop star might be putting real homosexuals at risk? If ever a remark called for a heavy sigh and a major “Oh, Mary,” that has to be it. (Or “Oh, Martina,” if you prefer, if you’re dealing with a clueless woman.)
I was a teenage lesbian. (That is also the title of my next pulp novel.) That was way back in the ’90s and the early aughts, before Tila Tequila, or whatever the hell her name is, had her own bisexual dating show — a show I’ll admit I’ve never bothered to watch. It was before The L Word existed, before South of Nowhere was on a cable channel aimed at young adults, and, most lamentably, it was before YouTube fulfilled the promise of the world wide web by giving everyone with an Internet connection free and immediate 24-hour access to gay content.
The only lesbians the public knew at that time were Ellen DeGeneres, Melissa Etheridge, Billie Jean King, k.d. lang, and Martina Navratilova. There was also Janis Ian, but the song “At Seventeen” depressed everyone and they tried not to think about her. (As a side note, who have we added to the list since then? A tennis player here, a WNBA player there, a few awful singers with acoustic guitars and the occasional relic from the ’60s. Maybe the world can only handle five powerful lesbians at once. I know I’ve tried to handle six before and after a while it just got confusing.) Back then, even after I started coming out to friends, no one believed I was gay. My sheltered Midwestern classmates seemed to think lesbians were like the Abominable Snowman: “Personally, I don’t believe they exist, but I know this guy who says he saw a picture…”
They thought it was a phase, or that I was simply confused. (A few objected on the grounds that my hair wasn’t short. Yes, my school was obviously crawling with geniuses). They were confident that one day I’d meet the right guy and burst into the home-ec room singing, “Gonna wash that gay right out of my hair!” or something equally catchy. I was fifteen at the time and none of my classmates were openly gay, though we were pretty sure about Tom, a cute Southern Baptist who proudly served in the color guard and loved to quote Designing Women.
A number of my classmates were outspoken homophobes, which was more common than not in the 1990s, in a town that had more churches than bookstores, where PTA moms would stop each other in the grocery store to share their disappointment about Ellen on the cover of Time. Some days I thought I heard the words “gay” and “fag” in the hallway more than I heard the words “and” and “but.”
Nearly ten years later, at the exact same school, my sister came out of the closet. No one thought she was going through a phase. No one thinks she’s going to magically turn straight. (Maybe it’s because she has short hair. We’ll have to gather data.) There are still homophobic students. There are still teachers who do too little to rein them in. Comments are still made and hostile looks are still felt. Sometimes lockers are even defaced. But the school now has a gay-straight alliance, which would have been unthinkable 10 years ago.
And there are so many gay, lesbian and bisexual students that I still get confused when I hear my sister gossip about this girl dating that girl or this guy being interested in that guy’s boyfriend. “Are we talking about the same school?” I want to ask. When I was 13 there was talk the prom would be canceled if the only openly bisexual student in the entire high school brought her girlfriend. Now her gay friends are running student council and planning school dances. It doesn’t compute. (Her response would probably be, “Like we’d let straight kids plan the dances.”)
These teenagers are blazing their own trail. They don’t particularly care who Jess from the Veronicas is spotted kissing, and neither do their heterosexual peers. Jess from the Veronicas doesn’t attend their GSA meetings or write on their Facebook walls. Not only do they not feel their quest for equality is imperiled by Lindsay Lohan’s relationship with Samantha Ronson, they’d roll their eyes at the suggestion that their straight classmates would either assume the Lohan-Ronson union is a publicity stunt or react to news of a Lohan-Ronson breakup by saying, “If the girl from The Parent Trap isn’t really gay, then you’re probably a bunch of impostors as well! We don’t take you seriously now, and once we’re allowed to vote we’re going to make sure you can never get married!”*
Really, how fucking stupid do these people think kids are?
UPDATE (10/14): To answer a few questions, the reason Rosie O’Donnell was left off my “the only lesbians the public knew at that time” list is because … drum roll, please … she wasn’t out of the closet yet. She came out in 2002, five years after Ellen, and I’d graduated from high school by then. As for the “five powerful lesbians” concept, I’m sticking with it for now but would add that Rosie replaced k.d. lang on the list quite some time ago.
Oh, and the point of the post — and I think most people got this, but in case there are any questions — wasn’t that it’s wrong to discuss so-called “fauxmosexuality.” My point, as the first sentence of the post makes clear, is that this particular article on the subject is dumb. It’s a terrible, terrible, shallow, worthless article that reads like it was put together in two seconds. And I’m an expert on sloppy effort, as anyone who has perused this website knows.
* Gay teens do love Lindsay Lohan, though. Call it the Mean Girls factor. The new gays quote that movie as much as the old ones quoted Heathers. The “too gay to function” line is a perennial favorite.
David Lee Roth or Siegfried of Siegfried and Roy? You be the judge.
First there was the sickening “lesbian vampires” murder case. (Who would have guessed that lesbian vampires existed outside of late-night Cinemax movies?) Then there was the woman who made a sex tape with two underage girls. Now here’s the story of Roslyn Moore, an Australian psychologist who has been accused of having a short-lived affair with a female client. Because that isn’t quite sleazy enough on its own, it has also been alleged that Moore “offered reduced fees and used inappropriate treatment methods to ‘cure’ the woman of her homosexuality.”
Yet the strangest part of the whole story just might be reports that Moore is obsessed with the rock band Van Halen. No word on whether the disgraced psychologist is currently sporting a mullet, but I’m betting if she doesn’t have one now we can surely find one somewhere in her past.
Monday: Australia, despite being home to the Minogue sisters and that queen from Savage Garden, can’t get its act together when it comes to legally protecting their gay and lesbian citizens. (Who do they think they are, the United States?) While Americans spent the week passing judgment on the teenage spawn of that guy with a mullet who sang “Achy Breaky Heart” and eagerly awaiting the release of Iron Man, Australians spent it having the same old argument about civil unions versus gay marriage. Meanwhile, proposed changes in the law will come too late for those who were already denied pension benefits after losing their partners.
Tuesday: Woody Allen confirmed what every Woody Allen fan already knew by saying the hype over the “extremely erotic” Penélope Cruz/Scarlett Johansson action in the upcoming Vicky Cristina Barcelona is just that: hype. As he told Entertainment Weekly: “Because it was Penélope and Scarlett and Javier, it got out that there was torrid sex in the picture. People who come and expect those exaggerations are going to be disappointed.” But we’ll always have our imaginations. And Photoshop. Don’t forget Photoshop.
“I haven’t been this excited since I found those Mulholland Drive clips on YouTube!”
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.
“I used to play doubles with Dana Fairbanks, if you catch my drift.”
North American viewers, take note: ESPN2’s coverage of the Australian Open begins tonight at 7 EST. The Australian Open, like all Grand Slam tennis tournaments, has special significance to the gay community. Every year, for two weeks at a time, it allows us to gawk at a seemingly endless parade of lesbians dressed in small amounts of clothing, locked in sweaty battle with their rivals. On the men’s side, there are the cheeky antics of Novak Djokovic to look forward to—and it’s just a matter of time before some crazy straight women start writing X-rated Federer/Nadal slash fiction.
As for me, my favorite part of the Australian Open is the commentary provided by Mary Carillo, who is more likely to quote Simpsons episodes as she deconstructs a player’s game than gab about her jewelry or what she had for lunch. (Yes, Tracy Austin, I’m looking at you. I don’t watch tennis to hear about your salad or what you’re wearing.) My love for Carillo, which blossomed when I read that she once explained a loss by saying, “I blame society,” and grew when I saw her spots with Johnny Weir during NBC’s Olympic Ice, is sometimes the only thing that keeps my TV off mute during ESPN2’s tennis coverage. One can only listen to so much Patrick McEnroe, Pam Shriver, Chris Fowler, and Mary Joe Fernandez before lapsing into a coma, and I’m expected at work this week.
UPDATE: The Internet is a truly magical place. Not long after I posted this, I was sent a link to Tennis Slash. While I’d never given much thought to a Safin/Federer pairing, I have to say, until Rafa cuts his hair and burns every last pair of those awful capri pants, it’s the hotter alternative.
