From the Radio Netherlands website comes the strangest headline I’ve read all week: Lesbian Women Report Growing Intolerance. No word on whether lesbian men have been experiencing similar problems.
Cranky Lesbian is a disgruntled homosexual with too much time on her hands. Click for film reviews or to follow on Instagram.
This kind of stuff freaks me out. Jason Jones, a 26-year-old forklift operator, was arrested in May for the shooting death of a government witness in a drug case. Jones maintained his innocence and offered investigators an easy way to verify his alibi: they could check his MetroCard history to see where he’d been on the night of the murder. He said he had used public transportation to first stop at a cash-checking joint and later to visit his girlfriend, but police didn’t bother looking into it. That didn’t stop federal prosecutors from charging him with murder, which can carry a possible death sentence.
You can guess where this is going, right? A private investigator working for Jones’s attorney went to the jail where Jones had been held and found the MetroCard in question. He took it to the New York City Transit Authority, which was able to confirm that Jones had been on every bus and subway he said he’d been on that night. The investigator also found time-stamped, photographic proof that Jones had been at the cash-checking office with his coworkers just as he had always claimed. It was enough to get him released on bond, but the charges have yet to be dropped.
Aren’t the authorities supposed to check into these things before charges are filed, or is that the kind of silly, old-fashioned concept that’s essentially meaningless now, like the separation of church and state?
Cranky Lesbian is a disgruntled homosexual with too much time on her hands. Click for film reviews or to follow on Instagram.
Do you ever find yourself sitting around wondering what it is that Atlanta-based lesbians do in bed? Yeah, me neither. (I assume they do what the rest of us do, except maybe the un-PC sports fans among them throw in a tomahawk chop or something.) But in 2005, sociologist Kathleen A. Dolan approached 162 women with the kind of probing personal questions that are usually only asked by Howard Stern, and for some reason I’m just hearing about it now, via this Southern Voice article by Laura Douglas-Brown.*
The statistic that really startled me would have to be the 21% of women who reported engaging in heterosexual intercourse within the last year. Call me old-fashioned, but I leave the sex with guys stuff up to gay men, just as God intended. Curiously, none of the lesbians interviewed by Dolan reported doing what I do in bed, which is read grisly Ruth Rendell novels and obsessively check my alarm clock to make sure it’s properly set (which isn’t really necessary since I wake up before the alarm goes off anyway, but try telling my OCD that). Maybe those activities are unpopular with the lesbians of Atlanta because they don’t call for any man-penis…
* Those of you who worry about clicking the wrong link at work should know that the article is accompanied by a large photo of a lesbian liplock. Far more troubling than that, in my opinion, and even more distracting than the unusually large earrings both women are wearing, would have to be the ads for a Hilary Duff Greatest Hits CD that are plastered all over the website. I’m hoping it’s 12 tracks of silence, but that seems unlikely.
Cranky Lesbian is a disgruntled homosexual with too much time on her hands. Click for film reviews or to follow on Instagram.
When I last wrote about Grey’s Anatomy and its horribly botched attempt at a lesbian storyline, I ended my lengthy, lengthy (sorry about that) post with this:
There are people who will always be happy with crap, and there are networks that will always be happy to supply it. Will Grey’s Anatomy continue that trend? We’ll know soon enough.
That was a little more than a week ago. Since then, another episode aired. I had planned on publishing something about it later tonight or tomorrow. The thrust of the post, as presented in its opening line, was going to be “This storyline just isn’t going well at all.” I was going to briefly recap what happened in the episode (you can view the Callie and Erica-oriented scenes online) before moving onto this analysis:
Cranky Lesbian is a disgruntled homosexual with too much time on her hands. Click for film reviews or to follow on Instagram.
Remember the Swedish kennel owner who wanted to deprive an adorable puppy of the love of two mommies because she was a giant, unrepentant homophobe? Back in February she’d been ordered by a Stockholm court to pay her lesbian would-be customer damages for discrimination and harassment, a decision she disagreed with and later appealed. Today came word that her appeal was rejected, meaning she has to fork over 20,000 kronor (a little more than $2,500) for being a hateful jerk.
The weirdest part of the story was the kennel owner’s reasoning behind blocking the sale of the puppy: She didn’t want to sell a dog to a gay owner because of issues she had with transvestites, who she thought were involved with animal pornography.
What do lesbians have to do with transvestites? I know a lot of us are Eddie Izzard fans, but beyond that I don’t see much of a connection. And what do transvestites have to do with animal pornography? Everyone knows that transvestites are far too busy taking in old Steve Reeves movies and making a man with blond hair and a tan to get caught up in something as disgusting, and illegal, as that.
Cranky Lesbian is a disgruntled homosexual with too much time on her hands. Click for film reviews or to follow on Instagram.
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.
Cranky Lesbian is a disgruntled homosexual with too much time on her hands. Click for film reviews or to follow on Instagram.
From today’s New York Daily News, about Michelle Rodriguez’s weekend at the Mayfair Hotel and Spa in Coconut Grove, Florida:
Fellow guests at the recherché retreat say they were awakened at 9 a.m. Sunday to loud banging and the dulcet tones of Rodriguez, screaming at her roommate.
“I woke up Sunday morning to the sounds of two women yelling, and one of them was smashing the door knocker very loudly,” one exhausted guest tells us. “I peeked out and saw it was [Rodriguez]. She’s screaming, ‘Open up, let me in, b——!'”
The loud knocking continued for another five minutes, says the source, until the “Girlfight” star hollered, “If you don’t open up, you’re not getting your [pleasure toy] back.” The door creaked open.
The actress did not respond to requests for comment.
We’ve already established that I’m afraid of Michelle Rodriguez, so it’s probably best for me to slowly back out of the room right now without saying anything else. But this story is so magnificent that I just can’t help myself. Take her name out of the equation, replace it with anything that pops into your head (me, I’d go with Shirley Jones or Florence Henderson), and tell me it isn’t still comedy gold.
Of course, the fact that Rodriguez has a history of getting into headline-grabbing fights with women (see the third to last paragraph of the Daily News article), not to mention her (rumored) lascivious behavior in the company of mortified heterosexuals, might add a little something to it. That’s for you to decide. Personally, I want to believe this really happened. If it did, I will pay to see every one of Michelle Rodriguez’s theatrically released movies for the rest of my life. She’ll have earned it.
Cranky Lesbian is a disgruntled homosexual with too much time on her hands. Click for film reviews or to follow on Instagram.
I’ve watched this clip of Sarah Palin trying to explain her foreign policy experience to Katie Couric twice now, and I’ve read the transcript more times than that, and I still don’t know what the hell she’s saying. All I got out of it is that Sarah Palin can’t form a complete sentence, and that I’ve heard drunken winos — and Tracy Morgan — make more sense than this elected official who somehow ended up the Republican vice presidential candidate.
For example, what’s this business about “our next door neighbors,” which are “foreign countries,” being in Alaska? My elementary school must have had really crappy geography textbooks, because I thought Anchorage and Juneau were in Alaska. I didn’t realize foreign countries were also wedged into the state.
Makes all those stories my grandparents used to tell me about their grandparents fleeing to the U.S. from Imperial Russia to escape anti-Semitism seem kind of meaningless, doesn’t it? Turns out they were in “the state that [Palin is] the executive of” all along. And Canada? Also in Alaska. My sister, a baby dyke who’s obsessed with Tegan and Sara, and Canada by extension, will be disappointed to hear that. She was looking forward to visiting Montreal one day and it might dampen her enthusiasm to learn she’ll really just be going to Fairbanks.
Palin’s comment about Vladimir Putin and how he “rears his head” in Alaska by coming into their airspace is equally fascinating. Hopefully Couric followed it up with questions about whether he does so in a helicopter with Natasha Fatale at his side. If Palin answered yes, that raises all kinds of other questions, like why she hunts moose when we need Bullwinkle to thwart the Russians, and whether she advocates aerial squirrel gunning. If Bullwinkle must die to make burgers for Bristol and Trig, we at least need assurance that Rocky is safe.
Cranky Lesbian is a disgruntled homosexual with too much time on her hands. Click for film reviews or to follow on Instagram.
March, 2024 updates (yes, I’m updating an update’s updates) below.
03/18/24: A new review is coming tomorrow, with Patty Duke in a role that didn’t require crash dieting or child-beating. Apologies for not sharing an update here sooner; time got away from me a bit. The good news is that I wasn’t incarcerated or involuntarily committed, but the bad news is that Nancy McKeon’s Firefighter was next on the agenda and I’ve run into a problem — the print currently on Tubi has some sort of copyright protection that prevents screenshot captures.
My commitment to these retrospectives is such that I even tried my luck with a manufactured-on-demand DVD copy of the film. That, too, is locked down like Fort Knox. While I understand that piracy is a problem and agree that studios have to protect their investments, I question the wisdom of guarding a forgotten TV movie from 1986 more fiercely than popular new releases.
This leaves me with a couple options, should I proceed with the review: I can commission Crankenstein to doodle McKeon fighting fires or I can attempt to take photos of my screen. If I go the latter route it’ll probably be the gayest thing I’ve ever done, and I say that as both a woman with a wife and as someone who recently paged through Eve Arden and Arlene Dahl paper doll booklets.
Cranky Lesbian is a disgruntled homosexual with too much time on her hands. Click for film reviews or to follow on Instagram.
Is this big daddy a dangerously overweight cat or the furry dwarf cousin of incorrigible comic and former Hollywood Squares personality Bruce Vilanch? View all the pics and then you make the call.
Cranky Lesbian is a disgruntled homosexual with too much time on her hands. Click for film reviews or to follow on Instagram.
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