When I first clicked on a story called “In Argentina, a Camera and a Blog Make a Star” at the New York Times website this morning, I had no idea who it was about. But the second I saw a picture of 17-year-old Agustina Vivero, a popular “flogger” (or photo blogger) from Argentina whose Internet success has earned her modeling gigs, TV offers and promotional appearances, I thought to myself, “Do these teenagers know their ‘star’ is a lesbian?” As it turns out, they do. Writes Alexei Barrionuevo:
Her unlikely popularity is also redefining stereotypes of youth celebrity in Argentina. Ms. Vivero, who is openly gay, describes herself and other floggers as “androgynous” for their unisex clothing. She is comfortable with not being model-thin, eschewing dieting and boasting of her love of junk food and chocolate — a different message in a country where women have high rates of eating disorders.
The characters in Maurice tried to fight their gay “temptations,” and we all know how that turned out.
I kept waiting for this article to take an Onion-esque turn, but… no. I mean, WTF? Is it really considered newsworthy when a “religious gay man” promotes celibacy in an article that was posted to his personal blog after it was rejected for publication elsewhere? I don’t know what made my head hurt more, Ed Pacht’s blog post or Kilian Melloy’s regurgitation of it.
Here is a sampling of Pacht:
I have been strongly urged to forget my inhibitions and live the ‘gay’ lifestyle, and I have felt the rejection that arises when I admit what temptations it is that I experience, especially when I admit that, though I have never had improper dealing with a minor, my attraction is far stronger toward boys than toward men.
That’s major “oy vey” material right there, is it not?
And then with Melloy it’s all “Pacht describes,” “added Pacht,” “Pacht writes,” “Pacht wrote,” “wrote Pacht,” “declared the writer,” “continued Pacht,” blah, blah, blah. We get it! It’s all Pacht, all the time. (There’s also “Pacht went on to suggest,” “for his own part, Pacht wrote,” “Pacht went on to write,” “Pacht stated” and “summarized the writer.”) Except the guy’s not freakin’ Tolstoy, and he wrote nothing to merit all of that space.
There wasn’t even an attempt by Melloy to analyze any of the things Pacht wrote, described, declared, continued, suggested, stated, etc. No pithy asides or anything. You can’t let a guy tell gay Anglicans to stop sucking cock without at least attempting a pithy aside! I’d give it a go myself (the pithy aside thing, that is; the oral-sex-with-guys shebang is something I’ll leave to my gay male brethren just as God intended), but my own background is more of the Reform Judaism variety, which leaves me ill-equipped to deal with this sort of thing. Our religious leaders, despite their lingering obsession with foreskin, tend not to be so hung up on what we do with our genitals.
It’s been almost a week since I last mentioned Jodie Marsh (whose lesbionic backstory you can read about here), and I think we’d all agree that’s been almost a week too long. Just as you can never have enough hats, gloves and shoes, you can never have enough news about Britain’s favorite attention-seeking clown hooker.
With that in mind, I point you in the direction of Dlisted, the brainchild of the gayelle-crazed homosexual Michael K (not to be confused with Gregory K, the kid who divorced his parents, or Kafka’s Josef K — I’m not sure how either Gregory or Josef would feel about Michael’s one true love, the celebrated lesbian folk hero Rojo Caliente), and its recap (complete with image gallery) of Jodie lezzing out for photographers the other night with her girlfriend Nina.
If you want to get all technical, Sarah Palin didn’t really vow to never stop being stupid. But she came pretty close when she lashed out at bloggers in an interview with Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren, calling them “kids in pajamas sitting in the basement of their parents’ homes” — ostensibly because they’ve been critical of her. (FOR BEING AN IDIOT!, I might add.)
I guess she’s forgetting the part where she probably owes her selection as John McCain’s running mate to the efforts of a college student and blogger named Adam Brickley. As Jane Mayer wrote last month in The New Yorker:
In February, 2007, Adam Brickley gave himself a mission: he began searching for a running mate for McCain who could halt the momentum of the Democrats. Brickley, a self-described “obsessive” political junkie who recently graduated from the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, told me that he began by “randomly searching Wikipedia and election sites for Republican women.” Though he generally opposes affirmative action, gender drove his choice. “People were talking about Hillary at the time,” he recalled. Brickley said that he “puzzled over every Republican female politician I knew.” Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, of Texas, “waffled on social issues”; Senator Olympia Snowe, of Maine, was too moderate. He was running out of options, he recalled, when he said to himself, “What about that lady who just got elected in Alaska?” Online research revealed that she had a strong grassroots following; as Brickley put it, “I hate to use the words ‘cult of personality,’ but she reminded me of Obama.”
Brickley registered a Web site — palinforvp.blogspot.com which began getting attention in the conservative blogosphere. In the month before Palin was picked by McCain, Brickley said, his Web site was receiving about three thousand hits a day. Support for Palin had spread from one right-of-center Internet site to the next. First, the popular conservative blogger InstaPundit mentioned Brickley’s campaign. Then a site called the American Scene said that Palin was “very appealing”; another, Stop the A.C.L.U., described her as “a great choice.” The traditional conservative media soon got in on the act: The American Spectator embraced Palin, and Rush Limbaugh, the radio host, praised her as “a babe.”
Palin’s rise from obscurity, her $150,000 wardrobe, her trip to Saturday Night Live, can all be traced back to a kid blogger. Shouldn’t she be thanking the blogosphere instead of telling it to fuck itself?
And by the way, Sarah, when I write hurtful things about you from my parents’ basement, I’m usually dressed in waders, the better to navigate the flood of bullshit that’s unleashed every time you talk to the press.
Another day, another opinion about Grey’s Anatomy trying to straighten itself out like a Saturday Night Fever star hooked up to an E-meter. This time it’s Vancouver Sun blogger Shelley Fralic who caught my attention, mostly because I’m not entirely sure what she’s talking about:
Sometimes, even in television, relationships just don’t work out, lesbians and otherwise. And you have to wonder why the ABC executives would be skittish about a gay storyline. It’s not like this one was breaking any new ground: gay relationships are now almost standard fare on TV, and no one much bats an eye over them any more, whether they’re on daytime soaps or on primetime chart-toppers like Will & Grace and Brothers & Sisters.
That, of course, is incorrect. Eyes are still batted, and they’d be batted even more if network television bothered paying attention to lesbians, which they don’t. At all.
Bass originally approached People about coming out as Anne Murray.
In a vlog entry posted on his website yesterday, gossip guru Perez Hilton made some observations about the way the media treats the practice of outing queer celebrities that I thought bore repeating. If you want to watch the video yourself, the topic comes up around the 1:52 mark. If you’d rather read his remarks, I’ve transcribed them below:
The last thing I wanted to talk about today was something that I’ve really been thinking about recently. You know, a couple years ago I got so much crap, and I still get so much crap from people and the media for quote-unquote ‘outing’ celebrities.
Two years ago, I reported about Lance Bass’s secret relationship with his then-boyfriend, douchebag Reichen. I reported on the trips they would take together, I reported on the dates they would go on, I reported on the fights they would get into. All of this before Lance Bass officially came out of the closet — and helped his career by coming out, because he had no career before he came out.
Anywho, I got criticized so much for that, for reporting what I knew to be true. Well, I find it really interesting that the same thing is happening now, only it’s the mainstream media doing the outing. The mainstream media nowadays is reporting about Samantha Ronson’s alleged, reported lesbian relationship with Lindsay Lohan. And no one is calling them out on the outing. They’re not even using the word outing, they’re using the word reporting.
I don’t know if that makes me upset or it makes me happy, because I think actually it makes me happy that they’re treating them the same, and it’s to me a sign of equality. But also maybe it’s not.
Maybe it’s a sign of inequality. Maybe gay men and lesbians or bisexual women or Lindsay Lohan is held to different standards. Maybe it’s okay for Lindsay to be experimenting but for a guy, it could potentially be damaging to his career.
Like everybody still freaks out when I say Wentworth Miller is gay. Well, Wentworth Miller, star of Prison Break, is a homosexual. Yes, Wentworth Miller likes to suck cock. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Lindsay Lohan reportedly loves to eat pussy, and there’s nothing wrong with that, either.
What’s so interesting is even a ‘safe’ media outlet like People magazine who loves to play it safe reported in their most recent issue that Samantha Ronson and Lindsay Lohan are, quote, ‘definitely together.’ People magazine is saying that Lindsay and Samantha are ‘definitely together.’
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that ‘definitely together’ means they’re in a relationship, they’re dating. People magazine outed Lindsay Lohan. How come nobody is calling them out on it? I don’t know. Or should they, should they not? Is the fact that no one is calling them out on it a good thing? I don’t know.
I’m not going to write a treatise on the ethics of outing, or what constitutes an outing, or anything like that. For one thing, I need to conserve my energy since I have a long day of tennis-viewing ahead of me. (It really wears you out watching other people run around like that.) For another, I’m lazy even when not in energy conservation mode. But I will suggest that celebrities like Bass and Lohan effectively out themselves when they don’t attempt to hide their same-sex relationships, which is why I take exception to the argument favored by Hilton’s critics that his so-called outing campaigns are tantamount to some kind of a gay witch hunt.
And to briefly touch on Hilton’s question of whether there’s a gender-driven double standard at work in how the media goes about outing celebrities, I think he’s right to a certain (possibly large) extent. However, it’s reductive to simply call it a discomfort-with-male-sexuality issue. In reality, there are all kinds of gender politics at work, from the way society has a tendency to be utterly dismissive of lesbianism and female bisexuality to the way celebrity-obsessed magazines and tabloid TV shows so aggressively exploit women in general and young women like Lohan in particular.
