By Ann Rostow
She’s Still Standing
My friends, I thought I was done with Kim Davis back in August. Yet every two weeks, the minute this column goes to press, the unpleasant Kentucky clerk manages to generate another headline or two that obliges us to recap her latest antics. Once again we find Kim and company on our story list, and I can only wonder what they will come up with a few days or week from now that will force us to run up her minutes of fame.
When I first heard that Kim and her latest husband had a private interview with the pope, I didn’t believe it. Then, I was disgusted and felt betrayed by the kindly pontiff. After another few news cycles, it seemed as if Francis was manipulated by his conservative subordinates. And then we heard from the pope’s former student, a gay man who did indeed spend fifteen or twenty private minutes with the pope along with his husband and some friends. The Davis meeting, by contrast, was part of a meet and greet between the pope and various strangers, organized in part by the Vatican’s antigay U.S. ambassador, Carlo Maria Vigano.
In the end, the publicity stunt backfired. The outcry in the U.S. was overwhelmingly negative. Davis and her lawyers overplayed their hand by exaggerating the situation, drawing annoyed terse statements from Rome as the pope attempted to distance himself from their toxic activism.
So what will be next? Will we be reading about Kim Davis in the October 29 issue of the San Francisco Bay Times? Maybe. She and her lawyers are still pursuing their pointless litigation. That said, for all the irritation, I still believe that our community benefits whenever Davis and her nasty entourage find the spotlight. As long as it’s Davis who personifies the fight for “religious freedom,” we win. For now, however, enough is enough.
Worst Aunt Ever
I’m back from an extended foray into cyberspace where I read about the fifty-something woman from Manhattan who is suing her 12-year-old nephew for $127,000 because he jumped into her arms when she arrived at his eighth birthday party and injured her wrist. Yes, four years ago the little boy rushed his mother’s sister, screaming, “Auntie Jen, I love you!” and leaping at her, leading her to fall and break her wrist. Oddly, she didn’t complain at the time because she didn’t want to spoil the party. Now, years later, her wrist still bothers her, making it difficult to hold an hors d’oeuvres plate at cocktail parties, she testified in court.
Oh, and in case you’re wondering how a 12-year-old could rustle up a six-figure settlement, one article implied that his mother, who died a year ago, left him money in a life insurance policy.
I tried to check to make sure this incident was not an urban legend, but it appears to be a true story. And like most of my original Internet discoveries, I expect it to be common knowledge by the time you read this column since I never seem to unearth the type of hidden tidbit that you won’t find anywhere else. Still, it’s worth a few lines for us all to pause and regard, with humility, the depths to which our shared human spirit may sink. What a lowlife!
Come Out Come Out
Last time around, I skipped over the mini-controversy ignited when Matt Damon said actors should keep their sexuality and private lives a mystery in order to better portray the various characters they inhabit in their roles. Well, he said something like that and he was referring to gay and straight actors alike.
I understood his larger point about acting. There are certain actors who are so public that you feel as if you’re watching the person, not the character. That said, heterosexuality is taken for granted, it’s only homosexuality that would have to be hidden. And hiding your homosexuality would entail forgoing marriage and family, so Damon deserved the criticism that followed his remarks, and indeed, he walked them back.
Further, the clueless comment implied that a straight actor can play a gay man or a lesbian, but an openly gay actor would not be believable in a straight role. That’s as ludicrous as the notion that a devout Christian can’t play an atheist or a married mother of three can’t play a single CEO. These are actors! That’s what they do.
But lastly, we all recognize by now that the closet is a debilitating place to live. October 10 was Coming Out Day, an important annual reminder that to hide your sexuality is to surrender to negative social forces that every GLBT individual should be fighting in their own way (and simply being open is one way to fight them). Those forces were once pervasive and dangerous. They are now isolated and weakened, but for those who still live in that atmosphere, coming out is hard.
But let’s be honest and politically incorrect. As a rule, it no longer takes tremendous courage to come out of the closet in today’s America as an adult. Unless you’re a pro athlete or surrounded by evangelical Christians, it does not carry the terrifying sense of personal exposure that it once did. Oh, and maybe if you’ve been in the closet for decades you might be stuck there at this point. But let’s agree that famous actors, with the possible exception of John Travolta, don’t have much of an excuse for pretending to be straight when they’re not.
Lastly, did anyone out there see Matt Damon’s fabulous performance as Liberace’s boy toy in HBO’s “Behind the Candelabra?” So what is it, Matt? You can convincingly switch hit for the camera, but a gay actor can’t?
I Was a Teenage Bear
Many people over the age of 12 do not dress up for Halloween, but then again, we are writing to a San Francisco readership that considers Halloween one of the major holidays of the year. With that in mind, here are a few of this year’s most popular GLBT costumes, as compiled by some website that I don’t want to retrieve at the moment.
Number one, you know it, Kim Davis! Get yourself a stringy wig, a weird apron dress that comes down to your knees, wire-rim glasses and a crazed expression and there you go! More difficult, but no less timely, would be a Caitlyn Jenner outfit or a pope mask. Or if you really want to put some effort into it, you could go as Empire’s Cookie Lyon. They also suggested Pizza Rat, although I’m not sure how that would be tailored. I guess you’d put on a rat face and whiskers and carry around a slice, right? Last, you could wear that gold and silver dress that befuddled everyone on the Internet earlier this year because some people thought it looked blue or something. Nice idea, but where would you get the dress?
I’m not sure I told you the story of the one time I went to a costume party as an adult. I was in my late twenties and it was a big wingding, so my partner and I decided to rent real costumes. I went as a bear, with a bear head, bear paws, bear suit, the whole deal. It looked great in the store, but, of course, I immediately had to remove the head and a paw in order to eat, drink and smoke. Worse, I had to carry these pieces around the whole night or risk losing a deposit. The experience made me question my core ability to think in advance and make decisions. It was a party. Did it even occur to me that I would be obliged to remove most of the costume at once and wander around all night in an unflattering brown fuzzy suit with one paw? No. I never gave it a thought.
Readers. Don’t be that girl.
Big Gay Diplomatic Corp
My news list includes numerous bits and pieces. Our gay ambassador to Denmark, Rufus Gifford, married his partner so congratulations to him. Did you know that we now have six gay ambassadors? In addition to Gifford, gay ambassadors serve in Australia, Spain, Vietnam, and the Dominican Republic. We also have a gay ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Under the circumstances, I’d say it was high time we had a lesbian ambassador.
Nancy Pelosi went to New York’s Big Gay Ice Cream store with comic Larry Wilmore, where she dished the GOP over a hot fudge sundae in her own inimitable manner. When asked whom she would throw out of a sinking hot air balloon— Boehner, McConnell or Trump—she said (with no hesitation) that she’d toss all three of them overboard.
There was a mix of headlines about the latest gay gene study, which as usual, concludes that sexual orientation is indeed genetic. That’s all well and good, but most of the stories noted that the researchers from UCLA used a sample pool of three people and then skewed the results to suit their hypothesis. Okay, maybe it was more than three, but let’s just say that their methodology reportedly did not meet scientific standards.
And the Christian Right is now ready to boycott Campbell’s after the company aired a cute ad featuring two gay dads who are feeding their son some Star Wars soup. The American Family Association’s hectoring subsidiary, One Million Moms, said Campbell’s “should not be highlighting who is attracted to whom or who sleeps with whom,” as if the commercial was staged in the master bedroom instead of the kitchen table. It never fails to amaze me how antigay conservatives inject sex into everything remotely gay and then accuse us of flaunting our sexuality in the most innocuous contexts.
Oh. The good news for Campbell’s is that boycotts from the American Family Association and their ilk have had zero impact on corporate bottom lines. That’s not surprising given that obedient Christian consumers are now in the position of having to boycott the vast majority of commercial enterprises in the U.S.
Can There Be Too Much Lesbian Sex?
Lea Seydoux, who won a top award at Cannes for her performance in the steamy lesbian romance ”Blue is the Warmest Color,” is gracing the cover of Vogue and is about to hit screens as the latest Bond girl, ergo she is in the news these days. I was reading along with little interest when I noticed that she said filming “Blue” was an awful experience and that she’d never work with director Abdellatif Kechiche again.
Say what? The 2013 Palme D’Or went to Seydoux, Adele Exarchopolous, and Kechiche, along with mostly rave reviews for the film that features Seydoux as Blue and Exarchopolous as her younger lover, Adele. I finally saw it on TV, and (to my astonishment) agreed with critics that the sex scenes were too long and verged on pornography. Hey, there’s nothing wrong with porn if that’s your thing, but I found myself fast forwarding to continue with the plot. One of the interminable bedroom romps lasted a full seven minutes.
Now I read that Seydoux said that she and Exarchopolous were ordered to repeat some of these scenes up to a hundred times by a director who was living out a “male fantasy.” I guess this is old news, but it’s new to me. I’m guessing that some of my lesbian readers who haven’t seen the movie will now be fact-checking this story. If I have any straight male readers, they might want to do some research as well.
Quickly, on a totally unrelated subject, the children of a Spanish duchess who married her lesbian lover on her deathbed in 2008, are trying to nab the bulk of her multi-million euro estate, arguing that Spanish law did not allow their mother to disinherit them. (Spain legalized same-sex marriage in 2005.)
The 21st Duchess of Medina Sidonia, Luisa Isabel Alvarez de Toledo, put her assets, which include priceless documents and art, into a foundation in order to keep her three children from liquidating the estate. She then married her secretary and lover of 20 years, Lilianna Dahlmann, and put her in charge of the foundation. Will these legalities be enough to trump Spanish inheritance law, which requires that at least a third of a family fortune be passed to surviving children? Her greedy children say no. Her lesbian sisters in San Francisco and Texas hope yes.
arostow@aol.com
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