“Touch my Melissa CD and I’ll break your neck, twerp.”
When former American Gladiator “Zap” told Maxim magazine earlier this month that “half the team was lesbians at one time,” the world replied with a resounding “Duh.” Okay, the world didn’t seem to react at all, but had it done so, you can safely assume the response would have been split between “Duh” and a puzzled “Only half?”
Last week, one of those lesbians announced herself on Access Hollywood, and it was none other than Lori “Ice” Fetrick, who once appeared on an episode of Ellen. Fetrick told the program that she has been gay since she was 18 years old, by which she probably meant she realized she was gay at 18.
To be fair, you never know with a gladiator: she might’ve graduated high school and decided to become a lesbian the way some people decide to become a mechanic. Gladiators are, after all, a special breed, and can become anything they want simply by setting their minds to it. (I once read that Hawk actually turned himself into a hawk.)
About her sexuality, Fetrick said, “It was something that when I was on the Gladiators I never talked about because I was in the height of my fame. You can’t talk about it, just like everybody says right now — you can’t talk about being gay when you are in the height of your glory.”
By which she probably meant — well, I have no clue what she meant. I’ve read that quote several times and am still lost. Words like “gladiators” and “height of your glory” simply don’t compute, although she’s obviously right that it was uncommon for public figures of that era to come out.
Despite that, the notion that Ice’s sexuality was unknown to her adoring public isn’t entirely true. I was a kid at the height of her fame (my brother and I spent our summers watching Gladiator reruns), oblivious to the concept of homosexuality, oblivious even to my own glaring homosexuality, and yet somehow I knew Ice was a lesbian of Gertrude Steinian proportions. She was my favorite gladiator because of it, and the reason I chose this photo to accompany a previous post.
Fetrick acknowledges as much in her Access Hollywood interview, coyly suggesting that some of her fans knew she was gay. Remembering the fun she had with fellow Gladiators, she said, “Nitro and myself used to have contests on the road.” Which means you weren’t imagining things when you thought they were both flirting with Ellen Morgan.
Samantha Fox, the faded “Touch Me” pop star and former Page Three model, will appear on the British edition of Wife Swap later this month with her partner, Myra Stratton. In the episode, Fox takes the place of comedian Freddie Starr’s wife and cares for his infant daughter. If this inspires American TV producers to have Taylor Dayne move in with Gallagher, we will know the apocalypse is nigh. For a photo of Fox with Starr, click here.
“I used to play doubles with Dana Fairbanks, if you catch my drift.”
North American viewers, take note: ESPN2’s coverage of the Australian Open begins tonight at 7 EST. The Australian Open, like all Grand Slam tennis tournaments, has special significance to the gay community. Every year, for two weeks at a time, it allows us to gawk at a seemingly endless parade of lesbians dressed in small amounts of clothing, locked in sweaty battle with their rivals. On the men’s side, there are the cheeky antics of Novak Djokovic to look forward to—and it’s just a matter of time before some crazy straight women start writing X-rated Federer/Nadal slash fiction.
As for me, my favorite part of the Australian Open is the commentary provided by Mary Carillo, who is more likely to quote Simpsons episodes as she deconstructs a player’s game than gab about her jewelry or what she had for lunch. (Yes, Tracy Austin, I’m looking at you. I don’t watch tennis to hear about your salad or what you’re wearing.) My love for Carillo, which blossomed when I read that she once explained a loss by saying, “I blame society,” and grew when I saw her spots with Johnny Weir during NBC’s Olympic Ice, is sometimes the only thing that keeps my TV off mute during ESPN2’s tennis coverage. One can only listen to so much Patrick McEnroe, Pam Shriver, Chris Fowler, and Mary Joe Fernandez before lapsing into a coma, and I’m expected at work this week.
UPDATE: The Internet is a truly magical place. Not long after I posted this, I was sent a link to Tennis Slash. While I’d never given much thought to a Safin/Federer pairing, I have to say, until Rafa cuts his hair and burns every last pair of those awful capri pants, it’s the hotter alternative.
If you’re familiar with Chris Matthews and his MSNBC show Hardball, you already know he’s kind of a jerk. He’s done little to hide it, what with all the tongue baths he has given the Bush administration over the years and his frequent swipes at Bill and Hillary Clinton.
You might have also noticed his tendency to lose interest in interview subjects who resist coaching, or the way he spits (sometimes literally, which might explain why so many of his guests appear via satellite) questions at his panel in a tone that suggests he cares less about their answers than about making his own not-so-subtle points with what he asks them. It is also hinted at in the way he sometimes says the word “gay” like he’s saying “date rape” or “chlamydia,” but that’s a post for another day.
His agenda-pushing was certainly on full display during his Iowa caucus coverage, in the language he used to describe Barack Obama. And for the last several weeks, it has been completely unavoidable when he talks about Hillary Rodham Clinton. Matthews attacks her so frequently, so viciously, with such unabashed glee, that it almost makes you wonder if his hatred isn’t hiding something deeper. Something private. Very private.
Fine, I’ll come right out and say it. What if his invective is a decoy, partly borne of subconscious self-sabotage, that must be deployed with increased frequency as he desperately struggles to smother an illicit and all-consuming sexual passion for a powerful and unattainable woman? Seriously, consider the language he uses when he talks about Clinton possibly defeating Obama and tell me he hasn’t dreamed of the senator from New York showing up at his dressing room with a riding crop in hand, ready to punish him for all the negative things he has said about her.
That is why I was thrilled to wake up this morning and see that Matthews, in the wake of Hillary’s New Hampshire victory, is being called on his boorish, unprofessional behavior. And not just in sloppily written, ultimately meaningless blurbs by jackasses like me. If you haven’t already, you might want to check out:
“Why am I holding a large imaginary bowl during an interview?”
New Hampshire voters clearly haven’t forgiven Fred Thompson for his mistreatment of Roseanne Conner and her coworkers at Wellman Plastics. The actor and Republican presidential candidate received only 1% of the vote in the state’s primary on Tuesday.
While his Law & Order character famously denied harboring an anti-gay bias, Thompson is against gay marriage and told Fox News journalist Chris Wallace that he personally thinks civil unions are a bad idea, though he supports a state’s right to decide whether to allow them. His heartbreaking generosity in the “right to choose” arena does not extend to reproductive rights, naturally, because letting women decide what to do with their own bodies is crazy talk.
If by shocking you mean not at all shocking (I mean, check out the way I captioned this photo), and as transparent as Bert’s forbidden love for Ernie.
With that out of the way, the men of American Gladiators (original crispy edition, not new and improved with reduced frightening hair), spoke with Maxim recently about their glory days. Ben Widdicombe of the New York Daily Newsrehashed their comments about painkillers and steroids over the weekend, saving the best revelation, courtesy of Zap, for last: “Half the team was lesbians at one time. But it was just women with women; there were no gay guys on that show.”
Okay, Zap, if you insist. But I’m pretty sure their spandex occasionally said otherwise during Breakthrough & Conquer.
Willow and Kennedy weren’t the first lesbians to have sex on primetime television.
The fifth season of The L Word premiered tonight, and my expectations were not met. It wasn’t bad in a “so bad it’s funny” kind of way, it was bad in a “maybe I should be watching American Gladiators instead” kind of way. The only laugh of the night came during the show’s opening moments, when the special guest star credit went to Cybill Shepherd instead of the man who co-wrote My Dinner with Andre. Of course, the laughter died down pretty quickly when I realized that meant I’d have to deal with Cybill Shepherd.
I admit it: I’m a blog virgin. There are a handful of blogs I might visit in moments of boredom, usually to skim the latest political headlines, but I don’t participate in comments sections or subscribe to any feeds. I’ve never tried my hand at writing an entry, and there’s an 80-20 chance I’ll lose interest in this and shut it down before the month is through. But something is happening tomorrow night that I might need to blog about. If you’re an ill-tempered, masochistic Showtime-subscribing lesbian like me, you already know what it is. It’s the return of The L Word, a show so horribly written that it’s almost enough to make you approach the huddled nebbishes on a WGA picket line and say, “That’s right, you strike! You strike and you stay struck until you apologize for that fucking tractor!”
Oh, but that wouldn’t be enough. You would have so much more to say, maybe starting with “What, do you think Mia Kirshner doesn’t have anything better to do with her time? Fine, she was in Not Another Teen Movie, but she got her break in an Atom Egoyan film, for crying out loud. What horrible crime against humanity did she commit in a past life that she wins a leading role on what should have been a groundbreaking TV show, only to have its writers systematically destroy her character, turning her into one of the most loathed fictional creations in the history of premium cable, a medium that gave us Dream On and The Mind of the Married Man? Why is she reciting Hebrew prayers in unspeakably asinine faux-arty carnival scenes while sporting Azrael Abyss-inspired eye makeup and adopting dying dogs in order to prey on innocent veterinarians while Sarah Polley writes and directs Away from Her?”
The list of grievances one could lodge against the writers of The L Word is quite possibly endless. There’s the humor that’s not funny; a deep resistance to acknowledging valid criticism of the show that routinely manifests itself in unresolved plot lines and Betty appearances that suggest the show runner is hostile to her own audience; and a glaring inability to write characters out of the show in a way that’s respectful to viewers, the characters, or the actors who play them. There are wasted casting opportunities, like hiring Elodie Bouchez, who won the Best Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival for the brilliant The Dreamlife of Angels, so she can – do what, exactly? Show up in the background of a few scenes with Jenny and then kiss Karina Lombard, a former series regular who was unceremoniously dumped at the end of the first season and brought back for two or three minutes several years later, presumably for little more than the private amusement of the people who canned her?
And then there is Papi. I still can’t figure out why she was created. The only way Papi could possibly work as a character is if Janina Gavankar were replaced by Rachel Dratch, who would serve the same function she did on 30 Rock, but while dressed in a variety of ugly sleeveless shirts and increasingly bizarre-looking hats. For example, if Alice and Shane ducked into The Planet’s bathroom to have an intensely personal conversation (which happens on The L Word with some frequency), Papi would emerge from a stall, wearing a tam-o’-shanter and holding a plunger. Dana Fairbanks would make it to the finals of a tennis tournament and there would be Papi, the overeager ball girl with an obvious crush, bedecked in a brightly colored knit rasta hat. (Oh, wait. Dana’s dead. Again I refer to a glaring inability to write characters out of the show.)
Looking back on it, as one often does when she realizes she has spent four years watching a show she sort of hates, we knew what we were getting from the very first episode. That’s when the supposedly intelligent Bette and Tina, the token long-term couple in a group of otherwise single friends, conspired to conceive a child by luring a horny straight guy into a threesome.
First of all, Ilene Chaiken stole that plot from an episode of I Love Lucy. But even more disconcerting than her flagrant pillaging of one of television’s most beloved comedies was that these two characters, who were longstanding, politically active, ostensibly socially aware members of the gay community, were going to have unprotected sex with a complete stranger because they had been suddenly seized by baby fever. Why would they do that? Was it because it’s not TV, it’s HBO?
Maybe that’s the problem. It’s not HBO, it’s Showtime, and Showtime is bad. It’s so bad it ought to be called NBC. When a network isn’t even partly redeemed by violence, nudity, graphic lesbian sex or the prettiness of Jonathan Rhys Meyers, it has more problems than Tom Cruise’s publicist. And don’t give me Weeds as an example of a Showtime show that works, because Mary-Louise Parker is practically superhuman; she could make anything work. Which begs the question, why isn’t Mary-Louise Parker writing The L Word? Fine, she’s straight, but she was in Fried Green Tomatoes. She knows from lesbianism.
“Yeah,” you’re saying to yourselves right now. “And the idiot who wrote this knows from stupidity.” You’re right. I won’t argue. I know that I’m stupid. I’m so stupid that I embrace my stupidity. I am volunteering, even, to broadcast it to all three of you who will read this. I know that if I hate The L Word so much, the obvious solution is to stop watching it. But where do I get my lesbian fix on TV now that Kynt & Vyxsin have been eliminated from The Amazing Race?
Nip/Tuck is out of the question, and even I can’t make it through an episode of South of Nowhere. (My standards may be thinner than Donald Trump’s hair, but they still exist.) The L Word is my only option, and surveying a big four network landscape that is virtually lesbian-free, I should probably be thankful for it. So what if it is, at its worst, one of the most embarrassingly badly written hour-long dramas in the history of television? At its best, it gives us—or gave us, prior to another of those signature sloppy character exits—innumerable scenes of Sarah Shahi awkwardly pretending to deejay and do other things I won’t mention because my family will probably find this and pass judgment. It’s hard to argue with that, though I expect to have a complaint or two come Sunday night.
