When Cyndi Lauper appeared on the Howard Stern Show last Thursday to promote the upcoming True Colors Tour, she knew what to expect. The singer, after all, has a decades-long history with Stern, a self-professed Lauper fan who admits to getting choked up when he hears her sing “True Colors.” So when Stern’s line of questioning turned, inevitably, to Lauper’s sexual history, she was able to deflect his more intrusive queries with relative ease.
I think you’ll agree that nothing in this exchange, one of many on the topic of Cyndi’s experimental teenage years, rivals the magic of, say, a Tracy Morgan appearance on Stern, but then again, what does?
Howard: Did you ever have lesbianism in your life at all? Did you ever make love to another woman?
Cyndi: Uh… (Laughs) Um…
Howard: So that’s a yes.
Cyndi: Yeah.
Howard: You did.
Robin Quivers: I was gonna say, you can’t think that long on a no…
Cyndi: No, it isn’t that. It’s ’cause I got kids.
Howard: Cyndi — kids, shmids. So what’s wrong with being gay? Nothing wrong. You’re bisexual —
Cyndi: No, no. My sister has been living with her partner for — they raised two kids, two boys together. They’re very — my sister is amazing.
Howard: Is that why you tried lesbianism, Cyndi?
Cyndi: I wouldn’t say that I’m —
Howard: Cyndi, is that why you tried lesbianism, because of your sister? You said, ‘Well, if she’s — ‘
Cyndi: No, no. When I was a teenager, all my friends came out.
Howard: They did?
Cyndi: And then I figured, okay, me too. And then afterwards, it was like, uh, it’s not really my thing. And then I had to tell them I was straight.
Howard: Was it awful? To tell people you were straight?
Cyndi: Well, because they were — they were gonna ditch me. And they did ditch me. And then when my sister came out, I was like, “Well, you’re not ditching me. I don’t care.”
Howard: You’re right, in a sense. I grew up in a black neighborhood and I used to be so angry that I was white, because it wasn’t any fun for me. Everybody else was dating and having a good time and I was the one lone honky. So I would imagine —
Artie Lange: Was it hard to come out that you were white, though?
“I got girls, girls all over the — wait, that’s private.”
What the hell kind of malfunctioning gaydar does Joan Jett think we have? The legendarily badass rocker, who is part of the True Colors tour this summer and is slated to release a new greatest hits package later this year, recently told Spinner that she hasn’t divulged her sexuality to the public because she’s not in the business of ruining fantasies. As she explained to writer Jessica Robertson (you can read the full interview, including the usual “It’s about setting boundaries” spiel, here):
It really boils down to this: I want to please everybody. I want every guy and every girl thinking that I’m singing these songs to them, because I am. If I make a hard, fast case on where I stand then that takes away a lot of the fantasy. Music entails a lot of fantasy. I want people to be able to go there with me. Some people might think it’s a cop-out. I don’t care. That’s how I feel.
Whether or not you approve of her stance, it’s an incredibly honest answer that neatly encapsulates the ultimate dilemma of the “closeted” celebrity, which is this: actors and musicians are packaged and sold as products, and if they want to be successful, they’re going to make every effort to appeal to the largest possible base of consumers. And her explanation serves a dual purpose, because the way Jett approached the subject, she turned it into one of those non-answer answers that’s really only a non-answer if you’re obtuse.
In other news…
Cynthia Nixon was honored by the Point Foundation last night for not trying to appease lust-crazed Sex and the City fans by keeping mum on her personal life. Accepting the Point Courage Award for being a LGBT role model, Nixon said, “When you’re a young gay person, you yearn for nothing so much as the presence of other gay people, most especially, an older generation of gay people who can encourage and inspire you.” Continues PEOPLE.com:
That being said, Nixon – who had two children with her longtime boyfriend Danny Mozes before their 2003 split – acknowledged that she was not an out teenager. “That is part of what I look back on now as … my straight period,” she said.
I get where she’s coming from, though my own straight period was considerably shorter, lasting only a few months when I was in preschool back in ’87.
And a postscript for those of you wondering why I’m commenting on the Jett interview five days after the fact…
I’d like to offer this in my defense: In addition to being swamped at work, I’ve been methodically working my way through the latest Warner Bros. Bette Davis collection in my spare time. Did you know that All This, and Heaven Too is about eight trillion hours long? Not that Charles Boyer isn’t worth it, but I haven’t been this emotionally depleted since the Hellmouth collapsed in the final episode of Buffy.
Rock Hudson: Never photographed at a gay pride parade.
How do you prove you’re gay? It’s a question that’s been troubling me since I heard about the case of Kulenthiran Amirthalingam, a gay man whose refugee claim was recently rejected by immigration muck-mucks in Canada when he couldn’t provide sufficient proof of his homosexuality. Amirthalingam was sent back to Malaysia, a country known for its hostility to members of the GLBT community; he has already spent time in prison there for being gay. From a Canada.com article about the deportation controversy:
Michael Battista, a Toronto lawyer who has expertise in dealing with gay and lesbian refugee claims, says the problem is there is no consistency of analysis. If claimants have pictures of themselves at a gay pride parade, proof of participating in online gay-chat rooms or witnesses who can testify they have had gay partners, then the adjudicator has some evidence.
How many of us have never been photographed at a gay pride parade? (You can’t see me right now—at least I hope you can’t, because I’m so not dressed for company—but I’m raising my hand.) How many of us don’t have proof of participating in gay chat rooms? (This is where I raise my hand again.)
For that matter, how many of us don’t have witnesses who can testify that we’ve had gay partners? (What about gay men and lesbians who’ve always been single or hidden their relationships from others?) Finally, how many of us are enormously, spectacularly, almost egregiously gay? (I started off raising both my hands. Now I’m bending my arms to form the letters Y-M-C-A as a disco ball that just magically descended from the sky shimmers beatifically overhead.)
Proving your gayness to Canadian immigration officials sounds even harder than proving your Jewishness to the rabbinate in Israel if you wanna get hitched. It got me thinking: If I weren’t a US citizen, if I lived in a country that meted out harsh punishments to those found “guilty” of being homosexuals, if I couldn’t furnish witnesses to testify that I’m a ‘mo (“Hello, Canadian Refugee Board. I’m here to tell you about the time Cranky Lesbian and I kept rewinding Morocco to see Marlene Dietrich kiss a woman”), and if I sought asylum in a country like Canada, how would I prove my gayness? It’s not like we’re tagged or chipped or an examination of our bodies would turn up the Mark of the Homo (which I imagine would resemble a miniature version of this).
Everything I came up with sounds like a lame joke. I’d probably point to my sneakers first. If that didn’t do the trick, I might hand over my iPod. The problem with relying on your MP3 player to establish your orientation to a bunch of strangers—or rather, my problem with relying on my MP3 player to establish my orientation to a bunch of strangers—is that its contents point more to me being a drag queen than a lesbian.
Mixed in with all the classic R&B and New Wave music, all the Beatles and Beach Boys and Ella Fitzgerald, you’ll find Barbra, Bette, Cher, Judy, Madonna, a little Cheryl Lynn, some Donna Summer, the original Broadway cast recording of Gypsy, the classic Charlene campfest “I’ve Never Been to Me,” Whitney Houston dance remixes, a curious cover that finds Liza Minelli turning “You’re So Vain” into “You’re Sho Vain,” and more Nellie McKay and Rufus Wainwright than you can shake a stick at—and that’s just off the top of my head.
What if the authorities still weren’t fully convinced of my gayness? I could recite the plot lines from various episodes of Ellen: The Post-Coming Out Years from memory. (Remember the time Ellen and Paige and Audrey went to that Lilith Fair-type event and Rena Sofer wanted to hook up with Ellen but Ellen only cared about Laurie and hilarity ensued? Doesn’t it warm the cockles of your heart just thinking about it? No? Yeah, me neither. That wasn’t one of the show’s finer episodes.)
I could name my favorite transgender character from a Pedro Almodovar movie. (That would be All About My Mother‘s Agrado, of course.) I could get online and show them a catalog of my book collection at LibraryThing, pointing out all the queer tomes I own and that my alias there is a tribute to my favorite Mink Stole character from a John Waters movie. If even that wasn’t enough to convince them of my all-time champion gayness, I could tell them the exact moment Betty and Rita start to earn that R-rating in Mulholland Drive. (That would be 1:40:16, which sounds like a Lynchian Bible verse.)
Other than that, what do I have? Coming out to my friends, coming out to my relatives, and accidentally coming out to all of the seventh grade when I wore that plaid shirt to school on picture day, those aren’t things I could prove if I was alone in a foreign country. The Canada.com article continued:
With no witnesses, photographs, love-letters or other documents indicating a gay lifestyle, refugees are often left showing up before the refugee board acting flamboyant or acting on other gay stereotypes.
How are witnesses and photographs and love letters proof of anything? Witnesses can lie. Photographs can be faked, their contents misrepresented. Love letters can be forged. Sure enough, journalist Tiffany Crawford writes that “witnesses and letters are dismissed as hearsay and claimants are accused of fabricating lies to stay in Canada.”
Maybe one of you, in your infinite wisdom, someone who stumbles across this in cyberspace, can explain to me how you determine whether a person is gay. I don’t want any smart-ass answers, any of that, “I don’t know, ask if they’ve dated Penelope Cruz” business. Me, I can’t figure it out.
All over America, and in parts of Canada and Israel, everyone has been asking: Why have I been so quiet lately? (That’s I as in me, the person writing this, and not I as in them, the people asking it. If they had been quiet lately, they’d probably know why. Normally that clarification would introduce a rambling, incoherent parenthetical aside, but I’m pressed for time and will have to settle for this.)
After all, I’m over my illness and haven’t been incarcerated recently, despite a run-in with my parole officer last week. (Here’s a rambling, incoherent parenthetical aside I do have time for — who knew that running guns to Cuba was a parole violation? Shouldn’t they be happy when rehabilitated criminals show a little entrepreneurial spirit? They’re so big on “get a job, get a job, it’s a condition that you have a job,” but then you get a job and all they do is complain.) The answer is… well, I don’t know.
What has there been to talk about? We all know that Sally Kern is a bigot and Eliot Spitzer likes paying for it. Some stories are so widely commented on that mentioning them seems a complete waste of time. And this blog has never been something I intended to use for much in the way of deeply personal writing, so there will be no rambling late-night posts about exes or life-changing events. Nor do I believe that anyone is interested in reading a catalog of the minutiae of my day-to-day life. (When it comes down to it, even I hardly care about what I had for lunch yesterday or the last CD I bought.)
This thing, this so-called blog, is only meant to be an outlet for the occasional outburst or silly observation, something that lets me write when I want to write and maybe reach a few people who are exhaustively searching the Internet for naked pictures of Ken Berry. (If you think I only wrote that sentence so I can monitor how many people actually search the Internet for naked pictures of Ken Berry, you are absolutely correct.) The simple truth is, I’ve been outburst and observation-free for much of March, though I’ve kept an eye on several news sites hoping to find something inspiring. The results, some of which I’ll share with you now, have been largely disappointing:
Jodie Foster is still in the closet, hiding behind that dress you bought for your cousin’s wedding several years ago and haven’t worn since.
Mandy Moore, who is a much better comic actress than most people give her credit for, may or may not have multiple mommies. The National Enquirer, that bastion of journalistic integrity, is reporting that her mother has taken up with a female tennis player. Since it’s not Gabriela Sabatini, I doubt most of you are interested.
Meredith Vieira, ever the kidder, told attendees of a recent National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association benefit that while she’s not gay herself, she “did spend nine years with the lesbians of The View.” Oh, the hilarity! But wait, Barbara Walters did beard for Roy Cohn. Cue the suspenseful music.
Taylor Dayne, who is promoting a new album (does that mean the crowds at every Pride festival on the face of the earth will hear something besides “Tell It to My Heart” come June?), can’t spell. Or count. And that’s O.K., because she can still sing and tease her hair like nobody’s business.
Openly gay theater critic Nicholas de Jongh has written a play, Plague Over England, about actor John Gielgud’s famous 1953 arrest for some Larry Craig-like behavior. It’s getting good reviews and de Jongh spoke about it, and his own personal life, to The Observer last month.
Photo explanation: It was surprisingly difficult to find a gay-oriented, state of the union-ish photo to accompany this post. It was either use a picture of Katharine Hepburn in State of the Union or Photoshop my face onto George Bush’s body, and the latter option made me feel dirty.
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.
