Classy reality TV personality and retired bisexual Abi Titmuss
“You are not bisexual, that is reserved for 15-year-old goths and Abi Titmuss, you stupid lesbian.”
That is from Laura May Coope’s account of her romance with Linzi Symons in this month’s installment of The Observer‘s Ex Files, which has both sides of a failed relationship dissect what went wrong. If I ever have the opportunity to say it to someone, I will do so with glee. And if I didn’t have a monotone, I’d make sure to deliver the line with the haughtiness and mock scorn it so richly deserves.
BTW, Coope’s assessment was correct and Symons now refers to herself as gay.
No, they’re not talking about Anderson Cooper — he isn’t a pundit, silly. And the “liberal” rules out FOX’s Shep Smith, which leaves us with the brilliant Rachel Maddow, whose new MSNBC show has garnered impressive ratings for the network since premiering earlier this month. It also has the distinction of being the only show on TV that my teenage sister and middle-aged father watch together, which I think could form the basis of an inspiring ad campaign.
You could start off with a family sitting in awkward silence at the dinner table. When they do speak, their comments are terse and accusatory. The teens are surly, the dad seems exasperated, the mother defeated. But later that night, as Maddow’s show is about to start — she can stand in front of a standard-issue network promo backdrop and smile benevolently with her arms crossed as this happens — the parents put down their copies of Nixonland or What’s the Matter with Kansas? and the teens silence their cell phones and lower their laptop screens for the first time all day.
They watch the show as a family, wearing similar expressions of slack-jawed disbelief as a torrent of clips showing John McCain referring to himself as a maverick plays (or maybe it should be a clip of Sarah Palin talking about Alaska’s participation in the Russian civil war and how they bravely rode into St. Petersburg on dinosaurback to fight on the side of Union because slavery was taking jobs away from Americans — I’m sure CBS has something like that on the cutting room floor).
Then Maddow would offer some kind of wry commentary and the family would relax and find themselves united in laughter. At which point one of those deep-voiced announcers who tries to make everything sound heartwarming would say: “Rachel Maddow, bringing families together in living rooms across America.” Accompanied, perhaps, by a small picture of Rachel at the bottom of the screen and a quickie voice-over: “I’m Rachel Maddow, and I approved this ad.”
Can you tell I’ve had too much time on my hands today?
Unhappy with the roles he was being offered, Bogarde considered joining The Village People
A collection of Dirk Bogarde’s personal letters is set to be published in England later this month and, if anyone’s interested, The Telegraph offered their first batch of excerpts this morning. I gave them a skim to see whether Anthony Forwood, Bogarde’s partner of several decades, was mentioned (he is, repeatedly), and found myself amused by this recollection of the 1984 Cannes Film Festival, where Bogarde served as president of the jury, that was sent to Kathleen Tynan:
24 in 12 days, starting at 8.15am! I got rather to like it all… but some pretty crummy movies flashed over the screen I assure you! And if I have to look at another pubic-hair or another shot of a cow being slaughtered, a horse being drowned, a fat man having his orgasm, I’ll choke. All that, I may add, jammed with Lesbian-Love scenes of extreme explicity, at eight of a morning is really not adorable.
Bogarde’s description of art-house movie hell is just about perfect, but we’re not on the same page when it comes to lesbian love scenes. While I agree that 8 AM is a bit early for such viewing (I’m not at my most lecherous until later in the evening), I’d say the same of sex scenes featuring two men, a man and a woman, or threesomes of any variety. That he jokingly singles out lesbian love scenes as being enough to put him off his breakfast is a little obnoxious, but more than that I resent that he wasn’t specific.
How many films with such scenes of “extreme explicity” were being made in the early ’80s — and screened at Cannes, no less? The only film from that era that I could think of that might have played at the festival was Diane Kurys’s Coup de foudre (released as Entre Nous in the U.S.), which is famous for its lack of lesbian love scenes. Obviously I’m overlooking something, but what could it possibly be?
All My Children‘s Erica Kane: “I love my dead gay son!”
… Upon hearing they’re finally getting a lesbian neighbor. A source at Granada (the TV production company, not the Andalusian province; they already have lesbians in Spain) has told the News of the World that writers of the popular British soap will introduce a lesbian character at some point in the (presumably near) future, explaining, “‘Corrie lags behind on issues of race and gender. Executives want to create a soap which is representative of society in 2008 and they are acutely aware they need more gay characters.”
Which: duh. Coronation Street has been on the air for approximately five hundred thousand years, and this will be its first lesbian character. To put this in some kind of historical context, lesbians have existed in England since at least 1965, when Mrs. Peel first appeared on The Avengers and the sight of Diana Rigg in a leather catsuit turned thousands of schoolgirls across the UK gay overnight.
That means Corrie writers have been ignoring us for decades, which is more than a little ludicrous when you consider that lesbians have been stealthily infiltrating seemingly ordinary streets in seemingly ordinary towns in Great Britain and the United States for many years now, ever since Elton John and Billie Jean King reorganized the Velvet Mafia and unveiled a newer, more aggressive gay agenda around the time “Philadelphia Freedom” hit the charts in 1975.
Anyway, here’s hoping the Coronation Street lesbian, whoever she ends up being, is treated with a little more respect than America’s token lesbian soap opera character, Bianca Montgomery of All My Children, has been shown. Bianca — and correct me if I’m wrong about this, because I’ll take a Douglas Sirk melodrama over a standard TV soap any day of the week — fell in love with a corporate spy; was raped by a family enemy (who later became her brother-in-law); became pregnant from the rape; had the baby in the middle of some kind of disaster and was told her baby died; eventually found out the baby was alive and had been switched at birth; and then annoyed viewers by falling for a transgender character whose name was Mork or Alf or Nerf or something unusual like that.
In between all of that, Bianca killed her rapist and lapsed into a coma for some reason or another. Eventually she woke up and headed off to Europe, the better to oversee the international goings-on of her family’s cosmetics empire. (You might call Bianca Montgomery the ultimate lipstick lesbian.) It all sounds pretty fucking moronic, doesn’t it? Yet I have to admit that back in 1999 or 2000, whenever it was that Bianca’s coming-out storyline was first announced, I tuned into All My Children just to see how they’d handle it.
It seemed like it took Bianca, who was a teenager at the time, months to come out, but once she did the hilarity factor went through the roof. Every conversation she had with her mother, the legendary Erica Kane, included a half-dozen mentions of Bianca’s sexuality. The words “gay” and “lesbian” always came after long, dramatic soap opera pauses, so a scene might play out like this:
Erica: I, I don’t want to talk about … this.
Bianca: What, Mom? What don’t you want to talk about what? That I’m … gay?
Then there would be a commercial break, after which the action would continue:
Erica: I don’t know what you’re talking about. This has nothing to do with your being… Your being…
Bianca: What, Mom? Why can’t you just say it? Gay. My being gay.
Then there’d be another commercial break, before the conversation would resume with more of the same:
Erica: Oh, that word. That word —
Bianca: What word, Mom? Gay?
It was hilarious. Cheesy soap music would play in the background and Susan Lucci would do a “Love Me, Emmy Voters!” flinch every time she heard the words “gay” or “lesbian.” One or both characters were often on the verge of tears during these heated exchanges, and then ABC would cut to laundry detergent commercials with happy-bouncy music and sunny images of toddlers and golden retrievers before diving right back into a Straight Mom/Gay Daughter throw-down.
It made me want to spice up my own interactions with my mom by getting similarly defensive about my sexuality. Every time she’d ask whether I’d done my homework or unloaded the dishwasher, I imagined turning to face her, fists clenched defiantly, my chin quivering with emotion and my eyes filled with glycerine tears as I raised my voice to demand, “Is this because I’m a lesbian?” (It was like stepping into the Twilight Zone years later when I learned of this now-infamous Law & Order clip. My “Is this because I’m a lesbian?” would have been so much better than that one.)
By the way, in a perfect world, this post would end with a link to video of the old SNL sketch “All My Luggage,” which starred Susan Lucci. Alas, NBC Universal are bastards — or bastard people, as Corky St. Clair would call them — and I couldn’t find the clip online anywhere.
Remember that ludicrous Jacqui Smith business from earlier this week, when the Home Secretary of the United Kingdom was stupid enough to suggest that Iran is safe for homosexuals? All they have to do, she more or less advised, is spend their lives hiding in the closet. Then they won’t have to worry about being hanged or seeking asylum in the UK.
Well, Smith is again commenting on homophobia, only this time it’s the kind that happens on her own soil. A Stonewall-commissioned report released on Thursday found that one in five gay, lesbian and bisexual people in Britain have been a victim of some kind of hate crime or homophobic incident since 2005, and that 3/4ths of them declined to file police reports about it.
The results of this poll have been called shocking, but I was immediately reminded of another survey about gay Brits, and have to say that if you’re not willing to divulge your sexuality to a random census-taker, chances are you’re not going to walk into a police station and say you were just assaulted or verbally harassed for being gay. (You could argue that it isn’t a fair correlation to make, as the Stonewall report obviously used self-identified gays and lesbians as their sample group; additionally, respondents cited perceived police indifference as a reason for not filing reports. But I think that taken together, the results of the surveys indicate a sizable percentage of gay men and women in the UK don’t feel as comfortable standing up for themselves as they should.)
Curiously, given Smith’s own indifference towards gays in Iran, she responded to the report swiftly and decisively, stating:
“In the 21st century no one in Britain should ever feel under threat of verbal or physical violence just because of their sexual orientation.
“We’re determined that lesbian and gay people should have the confidence to report crimes to the police knowing that they will be taken seriously, the crime investigated and their privacy respected.
“Our key priorities are to increase reporting; increase offences brought to justice and to tackle repeat victimisation and hotspots.”
All sentiments that are very nice and proper, but how about extending that sense of justice to people who are in danger of being executed because of their sexuality?
And while I’m complaining…
This is admittedly shallow — inappropriate, some might say, given the seriousness of the subject matter we just dealt with — but why does it seem as though ESPN and NBC, in their coverage of Wimbledon, conspired to keep me from staring at Dinara Safina’s arms? She’s out of the tournament now, having been ousted by Israel’s Shahar Peer in a close three-setter earlier today, and what did NBC show instead? A Venus Williams match that’s result was old news.
I’m demanding better treatment next year. You hear that, you programming bastards? I’m like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction: I will not be ignored. I don’t care if Americans played earlier in the day, I want live tennis. Live! If you do not meet my demands, I will not watch the rest of your network’s offerings. And if I’m already giving your shows the cold shoulder (sorry, NBC, but you know you suck), well … I don’t know. I’m sure I’ll come up with better threats over the coming months.
According to the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, women in the Army and Air Force are being kicked out in record numbers under “don’t ask, don’t tell.” From the Times:
While women make up 14 percent of Army personnel, 46 percent of those discharged under the policy last year were women. And while 20 percent of Air Force personnel are women, 49 percent of its discharges under the policy last year were women.
As Aubrey Sarvis, the executive director of the SLDN, notes, “Women make up 15 percent of the armed forces, so to find they represent nearly 50 percent of Army and Air Force discharges under ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ is shocking.”
The Pentagon hasn’t offered an explanation for the increase in discharges of lesbian military personnel, but I have to wonder: could this be the start of the Tasha effect?
“Just because a woman owns all eight seasons of Bad Girls…”
You can file this one under breaking news: Valerie Singelton, the beloved British TV and radio host, wants you to know she likes guys. A lot. She loves penis the way Mel Gibson hates Jews. She’s had affairs with men, lots of men, and that talk you heard about her having a relationship with Joan Armatrading thirty years ago? A bunch of bollocks. All she ever did was interview her, and though she doesn’t specify, it sounds like they had their clothes on the whole time and kept their hands to themselves.
Still, the rumor, which Singelton thought was so silly that it would eventually go away on its own, settled in like an unwelcome houseguest — like Monty Woolley in The Man Who Came to Dinner, if you will — making Valerie self-conscious to the point of public rudeness. As she tells The Daily Mail‘s Peter Robertson:
“Many years later, I was approached by Joan as I was leaving Broadcasting House after presenting PM. She said: ‘Hello Val, do you remember me? I’m Joan Armatrading.’
“I thought: ‘Oh my God, I can’t be seen talking to her in the middle of the BBC reception,’ so I rudely rushed past her shouting: ‘Sorry, but I can’t stop as I’m late for the theatre.’
“She must have thought me very abrupt. Apologies, Joan.”
Misconceptions about her sexuality, she claims, plagued her to the point that bartenders and receptionists she’d never met before just assumed she was a lesbian:
“Every single friend of mine has at some point had to deny the rumour. And, even when there’s a denial, you get reactions such as: ‘There’s no smoke without fire.’
“It really is rubbish. I’m very honest and if I were that way inclined I’d have said so.
“The truth is I have always been the complete opposite of gay.”
And just in case there is any lingering confusion about her sexuality following those remarks, Singelton proceeds to list men she’s found attractive (including “gorgeous older cousins”), men she’s made out with (including a young Albert Finney), and men she’s had relationships with (a married coworker and a TV broadcaster who later paid for her to have an abortion).
It must be a real pain in the ass to have everyone think you’re gay when you’re not. I know that from the time I was born it was just assumed I was heterosexual, and that got rather tedious after awhile. Coming out hardly seemed to help anything; it just resulted in classmates and relatives asking “Are you sure?”
“Are you sure?”, for the record, is what you ask when someone suggests doing something crazy, like seeing the new Tim Allen movie. It is not what you ask when someone tells you they’re gay. (We’re not always sure how to spend our movie-going dollars; more often than not, we’re sure what our genitals respond to.) And once you’re fully out of the closet, that thing, that having to declare yourself, never really goes away. You still meet new people almost every day who simply take it for granted that you’re heterosexual.
The only way to avoid having to constantly come out, I think, is to permanently wear a sandwich board that states, in bold letters, “I’m Gay,” and even then you’d have illiterates and people who left their glasses at home to deal with. But Valerie Singelton, she has access that most of us don’t. She can take to the pages of publications as noxious but compulsively readable as The Daily Mail to assure the public of her heterosexuality, even if the end result seems oddly Onion-esque.
Okay, so it’s a crush that isn’t anything new. I first fell for Richardson when I was 10 years old and she hosted Saturday Night Live. It was her sketch with Phil Hartman, the one where she’s an actress who thinks of her father’s horrific death when she has to film crying scenes (“His head was in my lap!”), that did me in. I grew up wanting to write something funny for her to say.
It would be years before I saw her in anything again, and even then it was just the “New Best Friend” episode of Absolutely Fabulous. All I really knew about Richardson was that she starred in movies my parents wouldn’t let me see, so I became determined to watch The Crying Game and Damage as soon as I was old enough to rent R-rated movies. She is wickedly funny in the former as an IRA soldier who, if she had any martial arts training, would fit in perfectly with the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad. And her meltdown as a grieving mother in the latter is powerful enough to make you forget all the overwrought naked calisthenic exercises Jeremy Irons and Juliette Binoche had spent the previous 90 minutes engaged in.
Her most acclaimed performance came early in her career, in Mike Newell’s Dance with a Stranger, but I never felt that was an adequately passionate telling of the Ruth Ellis/David Blakely affair. Though Richardson took great care to show Ellis as a real woman and not a one-dimensional tabloid villainess, she generated about as much heat with Rupert Everett as Jodie Foster did with Matthew McConaughey in Contact. It was her openhearted take on another demonized woman, Vivienne Haigh-Wood, that resulted in what remains her most indelible performance.
Tom & Viv is a mostly meandering portrait of T. S. Eliot’s doomed marriage to the famously erratic Haigh-Wood, who suffered from what used to be called “women’s troubles” or “moral insanity,” and it doesn’t judge Eliot (or Vivienne’s brother Maurice) harshly enough. One scene actually finds Eliot pressing his head to the chest of an Anglican bishop for comfort, a single tear rolling down his cheek. Sentimental music plays as he chokes out, “I’m married to a woman that I love, but everything we do together falls apart. I crave companionship but I am completely alone.” Only briefly, near the very end of the movie, does anyone stop to consider how alone Vivienne must have felt.
A role as manic as Vivienne might seem like an open invitation to overact (and it has been suggested by more than one critic that Richardson is prone to scenery-chewing), but Richardson’s work in Tom & Viv was subtle and deeply intelligent despite the broad dramatic strokes of the screenplay. She showed her wildly misunderstood character far more tenderness and respect than the filmmakers could be bothered to summon, and the result was one of the most thoughtful, underrated movie performances of the 1990s.
But enough of my mindless film-geek prattle. This wasn’t supposed to be about any of that, it was supposed to be about a Q&A Richardson did with The Guardian this weekend and how her responses to their mini-interrogation only add to her already considerable crushworthiness. I think you’ll agree that on paper we’d make a fantastic couple. Look at all the things we have in common:
She likes Arcade Fire, I like Arcade Fire. They’re right here on my iPod, nestled snugly between Annie Lennox and Arctic Monkeys. (Don’t give me any shit about the Arctic Monkeys, people. How many songs have you ever heard that contain references to both Duran Duran and Shakespeare?)
South Park keeps her awake at night, and rarely a week goes by that I don’t find myself singing “Uncle Fucka” while doing the dishes or feeding my cat.
She’s fond of the word “enfilade,” I know how to spell the world “enfilade.”
She hates Mugabe, I hate Mugabe. Most people hate Mugabe, but Mugabe’s fun to type and that’s why I put it here. See? Mugabe, Mugabe, Mugabe.
She’d want to be played by Peter Lorre or Eddie Izzard in a movie of her life. How cool is that? I’ve often thought that Peter Lorre would make an excellent me in a movie of my life, seeing as we’re both diminutive Jews with morphine addictions. (Of course, I’d also settle for Edward G. Robinson. I’ve never smoked cigars or run an underground crime syndicate, but he would’ve found a way to make it work anyway.) As for Izzard — who is also on my iPod, right between Eddie Floyd and Edwin Starr — he looks better in a dress than I do, so I’d just as soon he play my love interest. Or, you know, if the movie is really realistic and shows me reading Patricia Highsmith novels instead of going on dates, he could always play my mom, regularly probing me about my personal life and despairing that if I don’t get my act together he’ll never be a grandmother.
Of course, “on paper” means nothing. On paper I’m an art collector (I own a few vintage Jean-Pierre Melville movie posters), an expert skier (I’ve walked down icy hills once or twice without falling) and a skilled jazz pianist (I enjoy listening to Thelonious Monk). Still, I think the next time Miranda Richardson visits the United States she should look me up. My Peter Lorre and her Eddie Izzard could do things together that Goebbels would’ve only dreamed of putting in a Nazi propaganda film about degeneracy.
Disclosure: This post contains rental/purchase links. As an Amazon Associate I earn a small commission from qualifying purchases.
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.
Fox: “Can anyone help me? I seem to have misplaced my career.”
Samantha Fox’s episode of Wife Swap, in which she goes to live with the widely loathed comedian Freddie Starr while Starr’s put-upon wife shacks up with Fox’s partner, Myra Stratton, is getting bad reviews! Who would have guessed? You can watch a rather long, uncomfortable interview with Samantha and Freddie on ITV’s This Morning below by clicking here.
