Mark Caro of the Chicago Tribune wonders why there are no openly gay leading men in Hollywood. (For my part, I wondered why Mark Caro was asking such a silly question until I saw the accompanying promotional still from Milk.) There aren’t any openly gay leading ladies in Hollywood, either, but never mind that; the answer to Caro’s question is simple — the entertainment industry is full of cowards, the media is full of cowards, and the public is full of idiots.
Isabelle Huppert reclaims bathroom encounters for heterosexuals in The Piano Teacher
If you’ll permit me to act like a squealing fangirl for a moment, I’ve gotta get this off my chest: Isabelle Huppert is God. I challenge you to watch La Cérémonie and The Piano Teacher (or Gabrielle, though that’s better left to the advanced Huppert viewer) and disagree. Or watch her cry in anything (the final moments of Merci pour le chocolat immediately come to mind) and tell me I’m wrong.
There has never been an actress like her: she is formidable in ways that defy description. Her face is somehow capable of doing things other actors can only dream about — and most of them aren’t even imaginative enough to do that. We’re talking about an actress who, using only her eyes, can tell you more in two seconds than entire movies with casts full of big-name actors and armies of uncredited screenwriters and a mercurial director and tens of millions of dollars worth of CGI effects couldn’t begin to tell you in three hours.
Not only that, I’m pretty sure she has magical powers. She can probably transport things across the room just by looking at them, or cure people of insomnia by snapping her fingers. That’s the vibe she gives off in every movie she makes — it’s impossible to think there’s anything she can’t do.
In today’s Independent, she sounds off on a variety of topics, including her part in Joachim Lafosse’s Private Property (and she’s right that the film isn’t focused enough on her character, though it’s still very much worth seeing); whether David O. Russell deserved Lily Tomlin’s wrath on the set of I Heart Huckabees (naturally, the answer is yes); and current acting trends. Speaking of which, when Huppert told reporter Kaleem Aftab that:
“Because of the current fashion for biopics, in the past few years there is this view that acting is the ability to be someone else, which I don’t think it is. Now, the more visible a performance, the better people think it is.”
How much you want to bet she considered mumbling Marion Cotillard’s name under her breath?
In literary news…
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has died in Moscow at the age of 89, and the Times responded by publishing an obituary that is almost as long as A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Check out the accompanying slide show for nine amazing pictures of Solzhenitsyn’s rockin’ beard.
And in ‘Someone please tell my grandpa about this’ news …
Did you know there’s a “Jewish HBO?” Neither did I, but now I gotta find a way to get my local cable company to carry it. You see, my grandfather has been a little bored with Turner Classic Movies and The History Channel lately, and he’s under the mistaken impression that when he can’t find anything to do, it’s up to the rest of us to entertain him. I love him and everything, but if that retired bastard calls me at work one more time in the middle of the day to ask what I’m doing, I might have to throttle him.
Rich Uncle Pennybags was good friends with Merv Griffin
Seemingly unperturbed by our crumbling national economy, gays will continue to buy their daily Starbucks and keep their Internet porn subscriptions current, in addition to purchasing luxury items like televisions the size of small countries, according to a new study conducted by MergeMedia Group. The group surveyed 500 Judy Garland-loving gay men and lesbians online (which means at least 30 of the respondents were mentally unbalanced heterosexuals or tech-savvy prison inmates) and found that a mere five percent felt “more vulnerable to a recession” than heterosexuals.
These surveys always strike me as kind of ridiculous because gays lie the way everyone lies: frequently, and especially about money. And especially on the Internet, as almost anyone who regularly scours Gay.com and Craiglist for their M4M hookups could tell you. (How much do you want to bet that at least half of the guys who aren’t worried about their financial futures are also “straight-acting” and packing eight inches?) Still, I found this part of the “Hurray for Gays and Their Gobs and Gobs of Money” press release interesting:
Industry estimates put the total buying power of American gays and lesbians at $780 billion for 2008, and a recent report by economist Lee Badgett and the Williams Institute for Sexual Orientation and the Law at UCLA says gay buying power may reach $835 billion by 2011.
And that’s not even counting the personal fortunes of Oprah Winfrey and Barry Diller. Put all of our money together and American gays are rich, filthy rich, yet our own government, which taxes us the same as they tax everyone else, still treats us like second-class citizens. Oh, well. At least we have high-definition TVs.
In happier news…
You know how sometimes when oafish actors are asked stupid questions about playing gay characters, it’s a recipe for disaster that results in defensive answers like “Do you have to be a murderer to play a murderer?” Gael Garcia Bernal has already demonstrated that he’s not one of those jackasses, having observed with some bewilderment that he’s more likely to be asked whether it’s hard to play gay than if it’s hard to play a murderer (he also vocally supported the legalization of same-sex civil unions in Mexico), and now he’s at it again, making waves in the blogosphere for referring to his gay roles as “cool” and elaborating:
“I don’t see what all the fuss is about playing gay characters. When I did Y Tu Mama Tambien, I was asked, ‘Don’t you worry about what people will say to you in the street?’ It seemed like it was such a huge deal.
“Why would it be an issue for me? I think it is a very American thing. In Mexico, no one has given me any shit for playing gay roles, for playing a transvestite, whatever. They don’t confuse the actor with the role. I mean, they don’t think Al Pacino’s a cop!”
Finally, someone equates us with a character who is on the right side of the law.
And in granola news…
Actresses Emily Deschanel, Daniela Sea and Jorja Fox (guess she wasn’t in Japan after all) want you to stop feasting on animal carcasses and go green. I suggest they band together and present some kind of eco-friendly workshop at this summer’s Michfest, because massive hilarity would almost certainly ensue.
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.
… As told by Ann Bauer in tomorrow’s Salon. (Bet you didn’t know I could time travel like that.) I have to say I’m underwhelmed. I mean, on top of everything else, Henry & June isn’t one of Philip Kaufman’s better films.
The 18-year-old daughter of Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick came out in Bay Windows, a New England-based GLBT newspaper, today. Katherine Patrick, who will attend Smith College in the fall, was interviewed with her father, a longtime champion of gay rights, and her mother, Diane. Rather adorably, the governor got teary-eyed when his daughter praised his successful effort to defeat a proposed anti-gay marriage amendment to theMassachusetts Constitutionin 2007. Katherine also noted, of her initial coming out to her parents, that “the first thing my dad did was, [he] wrapped me in a bear hug and said, ‘Well, we love you no matter what.'” Which reminds me of my own coming out, if I might digress.
It was a muggy night in August, just weeks before my senior year of high school was about to start,and I was alone with my parents. (That isn’t something that happens very often when you have three siblings.) I’m not sure how the conversation came about, just that I was very nervous. I’m afraid it might have gone something like this:
Mom: So, how ’bout that heat?
Dad: Yeah, it’s really something.
Me: I’m gay! I’m a homosexual! I like girls!
Because sometimes, when I’m anxious about something, I have trouble following conversations. (I also have trouble following conversations even when I’m not anxious about anything, but that’s not your problem now, is it?) If memory serves, it was quiet for a while. I remember my face feeling red, which tends to happen anytime I talk in front of anybody, and my parents exchanging one of those very parental glances, the kind that lets you know they’ve secretly been discussing this very subject behind your back for weeks or months or possibly years. Then my dad slowly extended his hand, not to pull me into an emotional embrace but to demand the $50 he bet my mom that I was a big ‘mo.
Anyway, read the interview with the Patrick family. They all sound very cool.
As the state of California prepares to start issuing marriage licenses to gay couples next week, a piece in today’s New York Times examines “the egalitarian nature” of same-sex relationships.
When asked to comment on whether they think it’s true that same-sex couples “fight more fairly” and are better at dividing household chores than their heterosexual counterparts, my parents got into a vicious argument that started with my father saying “There’s no such thing as a fair fight with your mother,” and continued with my mom snapping, “Your father would have to know what chores are before he tried doing any.”
Realizing that thirty years’ worth of grievances were about to be rehashed in clinical detail for the 3,758th time, I hightailed it out of there without asking any follow-up questions. Good times!
Maria Sharapova has been ousted from the French Open by Dinara Safina. It wasn’t a surprising turn of events — Sharapova had struggled in all her previous matches, while Safina seems increasingly determined to prove she’s no Marat — but that doesn’t lessen my sadness over today’s results. Not only have I been robbed, cruelly robbed, of the chance to type this again at the end of the tournament, I’ve also been robbed of the chance to see Sharapova’s nifty Nike duds for the next week. At least Roger’s still around and looking dapper as ever.
In other news…
The New York Times ran an interesting piece today called “When Intolerance Becomes Intolerable.” Writer Marci Alboher profiles Lisa Sherman, a marketing VP who quit her job at Bell Atlantic fifteen years ago, after a diversity training seminar revealed her colleagues were a bunch of raging homophobes. Sherman’s exit from the company prompted chief executive Raymond W. Smith to take swift action in making Bell Atlantic a gay-friendlier corporation, and Sherman is now a bigwig at Logo, also known as the nonstop Bad Girls and Queer as Folk channel. Which is another way of saying that I wish Logo’s programming department would have some kind of diversity training seminar.
Krystal Freeman has written a remarkable essay called “Sakia Gunn: When Intolerance Breeds Murder,” that you need to read right now. Or five minutes from now, if that works better for you. Just read it. You know I’m serious when I post something that’s entirely free of goofy pictures and painfully unfunny one-liners.
