Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Cracked Closet


In the biggest celebrity non-news since Lindsay Lohan jumped the gun on her 21st birthday by about half a decade or since Paris Hilton did something retarded again, David Hyde Pierce (seen here signing my wife's Playbill after a showing of Spamalot) came out of a very large well-ventilated bay-windowed throw-pillowed closet.

It seems some AP news story made a reference to a partner with a decidedly masculine name. Now if this is news to you, you have managed to miss every episode, promo, and awards show clip ever from Frasier. I have always insisted that show only made sense if you pretended that Frasier and Niles were estranged former lovers and not brothers, not that those premises are mutually exclusive.

I last got this outraged over this trend of petty outings of extremely low hanging fruit (I can’t stop using that pun) when the Washington Post’s Hank Stuever got his panties in a knot because Sean Hayes from Will and Grace continues to coyly act ambiguously talented. Since then Neil Patrick Harris (who was fantastic on Broadway in Assassins not realizing it was his character in the crosshairs) was delicately shoved into the public to declare he was never meeting anyone's mother.

That’s after the shock that only one Backstreet Boy was wasting the time of all those screaming tweener girls. There was also some hunky actor from Grey’s Anatomy that got called a faggot behind his back and had to ‘fess up. You could trampled standing in front of the celebrity closet door lately.

This weekend also marked the passing of Charles Nelson Reilly who, with Paul Lynde, was the centerpiece of my naïve 70s gameshow obsession. I also had no idea as a child how campy the entire Sidd and Marty Krofft Saturday morning line-up was. The gayest moment in TV history could have been made if there had ever been a Lidsville/Sigmund And The Sea Monster crossover and I would never have noticed. Now I just wouldn’t care. I have just gotten beyond worrying about who sleeps with who and why. This stuff just fails to shock anymore.

However, I have learned that if you combine the word ‘gay’ and the name of any random celebrity, you get a certain amount of guaranteed drive-by Google traffic. In the interest of internet irony and blatant search-baiting, I have come up with my own version of the Death Pool I am going to call the Shallow Pool. All you have to do is pick one of the following celebrities and if they are the first to publicly announce their homosexuality, you win absolutely nothing. As a disclaimer, I have no idea whatsoever if any of these people are really gay. I am only interested in the media frenzy over all this silly outing. Repeat: I DO NOT KNOW IF THEY ARE GAY, NOR DO I CARE. Now make your choice.

Jake Gyllenhaal
Anderson Cooper
Kevin Spacey
Bradley Cooper
Richard Gere
Cindy Crawford
Hugh Jackman
Tom Selleck
George Clooney
Ricky Martin
Clay Aiken
Kenny Chesney
Randy Travis
Kanye West
Andre 2000
Derek Jeter
Mike Piazza
Brady Anderson
David Souter
Condoleeza Rice
Senator Larry Craig
Senator Tom Coburn
Tinkie Winkie
SpongeBob SquarePants
Bert or Ernie

In order to “win” the celebrity must declare their homosexuality or bisexuality either in person or through a publicist. In order to lose, continue to act shocked every time some phony newsrag tries to make headlines by outing some poor shmo who wasn't fooling anyone anyways.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: Make your own nominations.

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

Tom Coburn is totally obsessed with hot teenage girl-on-girl action (“Lesbianism is so rampant in some of the schools in Southeast Oklahoma that they’ll only let one girl go to the bathroom. Now think about it.") which is pretty much a guarantee that he's straight.

Anonymous said...

Clay Aiken. Definitely Gay. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

yellojkt said...

In politics, it's the gay-bashers you have to watch out for. I've added Seantor Larry Craig to the list. Coburn just seems to protest too much.

And it's not whether Clay is gay or not, it's whether he will admit it.

2fs said...

"you have managed to miss every episode, promo, and awards show clip ever from Frasier."

Yep - that describes me. Seriously. Really: watching popular TV shows is not like breathing. You won't die if you don't do it. (As long as I'm at it, I never saw an ep of Seinfeld during its run - only saw a couple of reruns in syndication. Never saw an ep of Miami Vice, Dallas...hell, all but a handful of (generally geek-oriented) network shows over the past 15-20 years.

(If anyone's wondering: of course this makes me morally superior to you. And a humorless snob as well, someone who wouldn't recognize sarcasm if it bit him tenderly and playfully in the ass.)

Anonymous said...

Yeah, there's the thing. I don't really care one way or another.

Even when Rock Hudson announced that he had AIDS, my reaction ran more toward "Wow, he's lost so much weight, he looks so different etc." (remember that AIDS, while known at that point, wasn't as prevalent in the news) rather than "YOW! He's GAY!?"

I'd like to think that it's not that far off in the future that this sort of thing won't even attract the attention of the non-news media.

Anonymous said...

uh, it's Andre 3000, not 2000. And I give props to anyone that hooked up with Erykah Badu, even if she does make you go crazy (viz. Common).

Your Mother said...

I have always thought Kevin Spacey was gay.

Mooselet said...

I have to admit that I never really thought about if DHP was gay or not - I found him funny and that's about as far as my thought process went. I could care if he's gay, straight or sleeps with aliens (does that make you extrasexual?) if I find someone funny I find them funny, and if I don't then I don't. Who they choose to spend their life with is, quite frankly, none of my concern.

As for the list - I'm going with Hugh Jackman. If I can't have him, no woman should.

yellojkt said...

Mooselet,
That's the same reason I have Geroge Clooney on the list. I just don't want my wife to have him.

Anonymous said...

< I have always thought Kevin Spacey was gay. >

Well, he's not, he's at least bisexual actually, if not straight, and what you think doesn't make any difference.

William said...

Here, I do not actually consider this will have success.
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