By Ann Rostow
Coaches to Watch Out For
There’s something about writing this column, a combination of being online and having the urge to procrastinate, that too often leads me down cyber-warrens into pockets of useless information. Do you know the four things that you should never buy from Trader Joe’s? Well, I do, so there. Hint: sushi and fresh flowers make the list. I haven’t been in a Trader Joe’s for ten years, so why would I click on this headline? Answer that question and you’ll make a fortune in media marketing.
Well, what can we say about Denny Hastert? What a stereotype, the creepy wrestling coach feeling up the innocent equipment manager, or whomever and whatever. I saw a headline somewhere that said the Hastert situation is not a “gay story,” and, of course, it’s not. But still, Hastert does come from the generation that could not easily come out of the closet, and (assuming all these boys were at least 16) perhaps his life could have played out differently had he been born a decade or so later. Or maybe he’s just your run of the mill child molester.
An unassuming man from a small town rises to become second in line for the presidency, and yet his obituary will lead with a story of blackmail and child abuse. Very Greek tragedy.
What else is on our agenda, you ask. We can now get married in Guam. Yay! And one of my heroes, graphic artist and writer Alison Bechdel, just added to her many accolades with several Tony awards for the play version of her memoir, Fun Home. If you haven’t read Fun Home for some reason, put it on your summer reading list. Do you remember summer reading lists from school? We had to write book reports and everything. You know of course, that Bechdel wrote the weekly comic strip, “Dykes to Watch Out For.”
Yoko Ono Said What?
Now, the website “World News Daily Report” is not exactly filled with accurate information. But it’s still a little bizarre that they can write that Yoko Ono said she had an affair with Hillary Clinton back in the day, and that the story can be picked up and spread by dozens of other sites. Happily, we can count on our friends at the various watchdogs, like snopes.com, to shed light on this and other false rumors. Personally, I wish it were true, sort of. Speaking of Hillary, Olivia Cruise founder, Judy Dlugacz, organized a mostly lesbian fundraiser in D.C. the other day, which was expected to raise over $300,000 for the Democratic frontrunner. Clinton spoke to about 120 fairly wealthy attendees.
I just paid a visit to the main page of World News Daily Report, which for those unfamiliar with the site is the cyber sister to the tabloids of the 1960s. Recent headlines tell us that people have just discovered a boy raised by kangaroos, that a woman just gave birth to a 40-pound baby, and that a meteor fragment contained trace amounts of THC. My my! Those of us in the GLBT community will be interested to hear that someone has discovered the oldest remains of a homosexual couple near the ancient ruins of Sodom and Gomorrah. Oh, and a Black Canadian journalist says he’s the real biological father of Prince William.
Speaking of fake stuff on the Internet, did you read the New York Times article about the secretive Russian agency that is dedicated to spreading disinformation and fake news stories, presumably to advance the insidious agenda of the Red Menace far and wide? Perhaps they were the ones behind the take down of Trader Joe’s sushi.
Taking the Cake
All these stories of bakers and florists who won’t serve gay couples have started to merge and meld in my head to the degree that I don’t delve into each new incident as deeply as I should. So I was shocked to read that Patrick Stewart rose to the defense of an antigay Irish bakery in a recent BBC News interview. Captain Picard? Really? Say it ain’t so!
Turns out this bakery did not refuse to make a cake for a gay couple. Instead, they refused to decorate the cake with the message: “Support Gay Marriage.”
I find myself in a quandary, because there was a similar situation last April in Colorado where a baker said she would not produce a cake with antigay slogans like “homosexuality is a detestable sin.” The customer tried to get this baker charged with discrimination under the same ordinance that was earlier used by the Colorado Civil Rights Division to sanction a baker who refused gay customers, but to no avail. It seems clear that the friendly baker was not discriminating against a class of customers, but merely refusing to create a specific product that violated her beliefs.
Likewise, this Irish baker seems to be in the identical position, assuming of course that the baker would be happy to sell an undecorated cake to a gay couple. Further, don’t you remember the time when a grocery store refused to make a birthday cake for a child whose name was “Adolf Hitler?” The despicable parents talked some other store into designing the cake, but there was much ado over this incident back in 2008, and again, it seemed clear that baker number one had the right to refuse the assignment on principle.
Why go into such detail? Because we are on the verge of a sustained national argument over when and how antigay bigotry will be protected under the First Amendment, and to what extent anti-discrimination laws and the right to marry will be balanced against unpleasant personal convictions. It will never be illegal to believe that homosexuality is immoral. But to what extent can you manifest this belief in society? Can you be required to sell a cake to gay couples? Yes. Can you be required to write “Support Gay Marriage” on its surface? I think not.
Before we leave this topic, there’s a side issue surrounding the freedom to artistic expression. Some of our leading GLBT legal lights argue that photography, for instance, has an artistic component, and that obliging an antigay photographer to use his or her craft to memorialize a gay wedding offends the Constitution. I think, however, there’s a line between artistic expression and commercial enterprise. The same artistic argument could conceivably be made on behalf of the bakers or the wedding planners or the dressmakers. But when you’re in business, you must abide by the rules of business, including state anti-discrimination laws.
Still, these are not always clear-cut questions, are they?
Screen Time
Hey, everyone. I’m going to Amsterdam tomorrow to visit my stepdaughter and her family. Somehow, years ago, I wound up on the email list of an S&M activist group out of Amsterdam, and I’m thinking I should check in with them for fun. This is another reason why I can’t give up my AOL account. After 20 years of reporting for the GLBT press, I have quite the oddball collection of sources. I know. I can hear you regular gay male readers out there. Ann, given what you just told us, why have you devoted such scant attention to the S&M community in Amsterdam? I have no excuse.
Perhaps you’ve noticed that here we are on the verge of the most momentous turning point in the history of the modern gay rights movement, and we are spending our valuable column inches talking about Prince Charles and personal vacations. But it’s the calm before the storm, isn’t it? Thousands of words we have written and read in anticipation of this Supreme Court opinion, and there’s nothing more to say. The jury is out and all we can do is wait with fingers crossed just as we waited for Lawrence, we waited for Massachusetts, we waited for Windsor. Meanwhile, let’s just ramble, shall we?
I was distressed to see that one of my least favorite actresses is going to star in an indy lesbian movie called “Jenny’s Wedding,” due out July 31 with a July 10 premiere in L.A. This is none other than Katherine Heigl, the incredibly annoying Izzie on “Grey’s Anatomy,” who is renowned throughout Hollywood for being an obnoxious diva.
By the way, why did they kill off Derek? Why do characters have to die when an actor wants to leave the show? Heigl was effectively kicked off Grey’s Anatomy after being a pain in the ass and denigrating the show, but unfortunately they let Izzie drift away somewhere rather than giving fans the satisfaction of seeing her expire, maybe from that brain tumor. Heigl reportedly wanted to come back for some new episodes, but producer Shonda Rhimes said, “No way.” It wasn’t just Izzie, however. All of Heigl’s characters irritate me, including the CIA spy on the dismal State of Affairs, which lasted one season before being cancelled by NBC. There’s a smugness about her that shines through the script.
I will probably watch “Jenny’s Wedding,” which is about a lesbian who is not out to her conservative family. Eventually, as you can guess, she decides to get married and is obliged to let the cat out of the bag. I don’t know. Does this sort of thing still happen? It sounds more like a scenario from my day and age, but I suppose if your parents are extremely conservative and you lack the maturity to present yourself as an adult, then you might wind up in Jenny’s position. Who knows? I might even revise my view of Katherine Heigl, assuming her star turn as a lesbian impresses. The movie was filmed in Cleveland in October of 2013, but has been delayed as the gang raised postproduction funds.
She Is Cait
Have you all seen the cover of Vanity Fair? Caitlyn Jenner, shot by Annie Leibovitz, looks amazing, but I have also read a bit of backlash from classic feminists who wonder why she embraces all the stereotypes of the non-modern woman. Shoes, nail polish, girl talk with the girlfriends, bombshell looks, etc. Plus, she’s a Republican!
I have to say, Caitlyn Jenner can be whatever kind of woman she wants to be. She’s one person. It’s not as if she is defining the gender for the rest of us. My only objection (aside from the political affiliation) for her as for everyone on reality TV, is the hunger—not just for publicity—but for a life performed for an audience. I think it’s a strange obsession, these Duggars and Duck people and Kardashians and various housewives. I sort of understand the people who live in the wilderness. These are lives that teach something, if only how to build a cabin or catch a beaver. But what will we be watching on her new reality show, “I am Cait?” Will we be watching real Cait, or reality show Cait?
That said, Caitlyn Jenner has given many Americans their first sense of the extraordinary anguish of gender dysphoria and the extraordinary courage it takes to transition. That is an incredible achievement.
By the way, Buzz Bissinger, author of Friday Night Lights, wrote the cover story, and after I read it, I looked him up and found a fascinating first person account of his shopping addiction.
Written for GQ in 2013, Bissinger describes taking over $600,000 of inherited money and blowing it on leather attire, mostly from Gucci, over a relatively short period of time. He became such a good customer that Gucci flew him to fashion shows and put him up in five star hotels. The odd thing was that Bissinger was a dumpy kind of guy, who looked fairly absurd in, let’s say, skin tight orange leather pants, but that didn’t stop his personal Gucci shopper from feeding the monkey on his back, presumably telling him the whole time that he looked terrific. I gather he subsequently went to rehab and cured himself.
And on that irrelevant note, I bid you goodbye for this week!
arostow@aol.com
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