If I Were Gay

Today is National Coming Out Day and while I have nothing to announce, I just want to share this video clip which is Bert and Ernie mashed up with my fourth favorite Avenue Q song.



My absolute favorite Avenue Q song is still "The Internet Is For Porn" in its many incarnations. Coming in second and third respectively are "Everybody's A Little Bit Racist" and "You Can Be as Loud as the Hell You Want (When You're Makin' Love)". Now ranking your favorite Avenue Q songs could be considered a little bit gay, but not nearly as gay as Noel Fielding from the Britcom "Mighty Boosh".



Now a good blogfriend insists that Noel is straight and I have no reason to doubt it. After all, I also indulge in activities that make people suspect my orientation. On a recent trip to New York I did all of the following things in a single twelve hour period:

• Had brunch in Chelsea.
• Saw Next To Normal, which is not gay in and of itself but hanging around the stage door afterwards for autographs is a little suspicious.
• Went to a cabaret show at Don't Tell Mama. This could have been a lot gayer since our perform was an ostensibly straight Latina. While waiting at the bar we did see the Judy Garland performer come in sans drag.
• Ogled Hugh Jackman and Daniel Craig in a show with aforementioned post-show stalking.
• Staked out Jude Law leaving his performance just because we were there.

Throw in my love for Glee and my nearly complete lack of interest in professional sports and the case against me grows. But it's not like I'm Lyle The Effeminate Heterosexual. But then it's not like most of the gay men I know are particularly swishy. There were two gay guys in my wedding party, The Greatest Roommate Ever and The World's Biggest Cher Fan (who saw her 'farewell' tour three times, which even he admits is pretty gay). For those long-time readers of this blog, through the miracle of Facebook, my wife has hunted down WBCF who is living in New York. On the day after my Big Gay Day described above, we met for brunch in the East Village (which is hardly gay at all any more) to catch up.

Since we last saw him twenty years ago, he has bounced around in a few careers and then learned he had leukemia while uninsured. He seems to have licked it but it took three years of his life and all his life savings to do so. He is now couch surfing in Brooklyn while training to become a social worker.

And here is where the Very Special part of this post comes in. There is much more to life than sexual orientation. Health and friends and self-worth are much more important than who you want to sleep with. Someday I hope there is no need for a Coming Out Day. We should all be appreciated for who we are and not who we like.

And just to mellow out, let's have one more YouTube clip. And this time let's all sing it with the kick-steps.

Celebrity Closet Watch Online

Gawker discovered this site that asks silly questions including nearly 80 about which celebrities are gay. As Gawker discovered, the general public are idiots. Case in point: If Mario Lopez is really gay, he's a far better actor than his stint on Saved By The Bell would indicate.

(click here for better version)

Closet watching is a time-honored avocation here at Foma* Central but clearly a few people taking this poll are behind the curve or have let their People magazine subscription lapse. Several of the celebs on this list are either out-out or so lightly closeted that they might as well hang their clothes in Times Square. A few other results are so inexplicably off that I can only assume there is a huge wishful thinking contingent of gay folk out there stuffing the ballot box, so to speak.

When people can spend months even debating Adam Lambert while Zachery Quinto gets a collective shoulder shrug in the zeitgeist, the whole concept of being closeted has been subverted. Most gay celebrities have found ways to tip-toe around their personal life without any outright deceit. In my mind, the only people that can even justify trying to cover up their orientation nowadays are Republican governors and the costars of Sandra Bullock romantic comedies. These are the only two groups whose livelihoods are threatened by an inadvertent outing. And in either case, they would kinda deserve it.

Still, in the world of gossip, it's a fun game as long as there's no malice involved. But at least it's cute to see Anderson Cooper and Jodie Foster still so close together. Which proves the power of open closet plausible deniability.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: What is the most surprising position on this list?

Battlestar L-Word

The following post contains plot elements from Season 3 of Battlestar Galactica. Do not read if you don't know who the four secret Cylons are.

Two of my favorite cult TV shows are returning for their final season this weekend. Each features hard-hitting ripped-from-the-headlines controversial storylines. Both are also complicated serial dramas with large casts and intertwining relationships that can confuse the viewer who is not up on all the backstory. While they may not seem that similar at first, they are more alike than most people realize. To the casual channel flipper, separating the two shows may be troublesome if you didn't know how to tell them apart. Here is my guide:

	Battlestar Galactica	The L-Word
Cast Photo
Premise	A motley assortment of preternaturally attractive astronauts search the galaxy for the lost colony of Earth.	A motley assortment of preternaturally attractive lesbians search Los Angeles for love and sex.
Episodes Remaining	10	8
Final Season Mystery	Who is the Final Cylon?	Who killed Jenny Schecter?
Parental Figure	As commander of the Battlestar Galactica, Admiral Adama is the patriarchal figure that everyone brings their problems to.	As the owner of The Planet coffee shop, Kit Porter is the matriarchal figure that everyone brings their problems to.
Morally Conflicted Leader	President Laura Roslin has to often wrestle with her conscious on how to do the right thing for the people whose lives depend on her.	Dean Bette Porter has to often wrestle with her conscious on how to do the right thing for her friends and lovers who depend on her.
Emotionally Troubled Second In Command	His fellow shipmates are shocked when it is revealed that he is a Cylon, but Saul Tigh continues to be a team player.	Her friends are shocked when she goes back into a straight relationship, but Tina Kennard rejoins the lesbian team.
Straight Arrow Moral Center	Lee Adama is the goody-goody hot shot pilot who is always the center of all the drama and action.	Alice Piescecki is the goody-goody hot shot journalist whose Chart is the center of all the drama and hook-ups.
Duplicitous Villain	Evil scientist Gaius Baltar uses his charm and wit to betray everybody.	Evil writer Jenny Schecter uses her charm and wit to betray everybody.
Rebel Everybody Wants To Sleep With	The hard living and tomboyish Starbuck is the best pilot in the fleet and lets everyone know it.	The hard living and tomboyish Shane is the most promiscuous lesbian in LA and everyone wants to know her.
Hottie With Amazing Powers	Caprica Six is the unbelievably beautiful manipulator that can get people do anything through her Cylon skills.	Helena Peabody is the unbelievably beautiful manipulator that can get people to do anything through her enormous wealth.
Identity-Conflicted Mechanic	Galen Tyrol is a genius engineer that can fix anything but is troubled to learn that he is a Cylon trapped in a human body.	Max Sweeney is a genius programmer that can hack anything but is troubled to learn that he is a man trapped in a woman’s body.
Airtime	The SciFi Channel on Fridays at 10	Showtime on Sundays at 9

In one short blog post I can only touch on a few of the characters in the two show, but I hope this post has been helpful as a guide to what series finale you should be watching.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: What’s your pick, Cylons or lesbians?

The Streets of San Francisco

My wife and I were in San Francisco this weekend on a mini-vacation and having done all the really touristy stuff a few years back, I decided we would go on a tour of some of the more famous neighborhoods of San Francisco, particularly two iconic streets that couldn’t be more different in tone or atmosphere despite being less than a mile from each other.

Street
Claim To Fame	Summer of Love and the counter-culture, i.e. hippies	Center of the San Francisco gay community
Flag Flown	Freak	Rainbow
Typical Store	Tibetian handcrafts	Men’s leather fetish wear.
Vibe	Seedy and crowded. Anybody heading west towards Golden Gate Park was carrying a bottle or can in a brown paper bag. The sidewalks were crowded with a mix of neo-hippies, wide-eyed tourists, and homeless panhandlers. While vainly waiting for a bus, we crowded under an awning with a group of women that spoke only French.	Quaint and friendly. While there wasn’t a lot of street traffic, the bars and restaurants were doing a healthy early dinner business. In addition to the HUGE rainbow flag flying over Harvey Milk Square, the two or three block business district was festooned with rainbow flags all up and down the street.
Authentic Cultural Sight	Three guys sitting under a telephone pole passing around a pipe at three in the afternoon.	Plenty of guys holding hands. And more.
Uncomfortable Encounter with a Random Stranger	While trying to hail a taxi, a obviously homeless guy starts telling me riddles to try to get me to give him some money.	After taking a picture of the sign for The Sausage Factory, a guy runs after me and asks if I took his picture. I said “No, just a sign.” He says, “You better not have been.” And then he stormed off.
Final Impressions	Not a place to spend a relaxing afternoon at. If you aren’t in the market for obscure records or hemp-based products, not a lot to do.	Has a small-town community vibe. Just don’t go there shopping for women’s fashions.

Neither place was quite what I expected, but Haight was the far more disappointing venue. While I was fine with perusing the shops, my wife couldn't get out of there fast enough. Castro Street was much more subdued and a pleasant place to spend an afternoon. My wife was even ready to leave me there if I was so inclined. Not that there is anything wrong with that.

I Kissed A Girl

The other night my wife was listening to songs on the internet and one had a very familiar title, but not a melody or lyrics that I recognized. Newcomer Katy Perry has a catchy summer hit with her song “I Kissed A Girl”.

YouTube has disabled embedding for this video.
Clicking on the image will launch the video in a new window.

According to an Entertainment Weekly article, Perry is the product of a strong Christian home and has "Jesus" tattooed to her wrist. Her other ironically titled single is "UR So Gay".

The identically titled song that I remembered was by Jill Sobule from 1995. The video featured Fabio as a hunky boyfriend.



In the pre-Ellen/L-Word/Will and Grace world, that song was mildly shocking. Now a far inferior song with tune-cootie-ish hook will be hummed and sung my middle-schoolers for years to come. Interestingly, neither video features any actual kissing.

One of the signs of my incipient geezerdom is my perplexment at kids these days. Lindsay Lohan is just the latest celebrity to join the “does she or doesn’t she?” method of piqueing the public interest.

The whole Lesbian Chic and LUG phenomenon is puzzling, not that I mind.
The American male interest in sapphic soiries is of course purely prurient. Since I am unlikely to ever breach the gates of the Michigan Womyns Music Festival, one of the items on my bucket list is to visit Palm Springs on Dinah Shore Weekend.

Colleagues warn me that I am bound to be disappointed since Real Life Lesbians rarely resemble Porn Star Lesbians, but then few adult entertainers bear any similarity to real life people in any dimension. Still, I’d like to check it for myself.

In the meantime, I will have to settle for The L-Word and back issues of Girlfriend for my vicarious enlightenment. But I at least have hard-wired erotic responses to blame.

While I'm all for tolerance and openness, I think this trend could be a mixed blessing for the genuinely confused young women out there that are trying to come to terms with their sexuality without lots of mixed signals. With all this 'experimentation' going on, some hearts are bound to be broken when the novelty wears off. Just ask Melissa Etheridge.

The girl-on-girl infatuation stage seems to be an ironically chaste response to society’s hypersexual mixed messages. This new silly song may someday become as innocuous as kiddie party staple YMCA. But in the meantime, at least we can all agree that it is fun to kiss a girl.

Nothing Wrong With That In P-Town

As I mentioned on a previous post, we spent a day in Provincetown while on vacation in Cape Cod. P-Town is part beach resort, part gay mecca, and part open-air carnival. And I say that in the most Seinfeldian “Not that there is anything wrong with that” way possible. After all, I had a gay roommate for three years and even dated a pre-out lesbian for a while.

And what delighted me about the tip of the Cape was the openness. It seems like the straight couples were the only ones not holding hands. If you are not comfortable with same-sex displays of affection, you are not going to be comfortable here.

The attraction of the area as a family destination is a bit puzzling. The pervasive sexuality approaches the Tenderloin district in scope. One poster for a gay-themed play featured two guys in bed in a state of dress that makes Calvin Klein billboards seem demure.

Some parents were gripping the hands of their pre-teen kids in tow just a little too protectively, but most families were taking in all the sights in stride. Overall, kids seemed oblivious to the bent of their surroundings. A bunch of kids were amusing themselves in funhouse mirrors just below posters pitching drag show cabarets.

My high-school-graduate son who is no stranger to actual and potential members of his school’s Gay-Straight Alliance seemed a little curious about the overall culture and the general lack of dress in general. There was a general deficit of shirts even accounting for the proximity to the beach. He even missed the most flamboyant display of the day, a foursome of shirtless hunks in tightie-whiteys and speedos parading up the street at a pace that approached a skip.

This led to discussion of physical attractiveness and being proud of your body and the ends some people will go to in order to appear desirable. My wife had a hard time refuting my son’s conclusion that gay men are much pickier than straight women. For which I am eternally grateful.

Beyond gay-gawking, there is a lot to do and see in Provincetown. The main street shops are widely varied and endlessly interesting. I had to drag my family out of a huge store specializing in games and puzzles.

While my son was buying techno CDs from the music store, I got talking with the clerk about the autographed box set of John Waters movies. I mentioned that I was from Baltimore and had met Waters once at a museum gallery opening. She nodded and said that we each got John for half the year. Both Baltimore and Provincetown share a self-aware funkiness that is hard to identify and impossible to replicate.

Part of the appeal of P-town is the remoteness. In this hyper-connected world, physical isolation is not so critical, but I love knowing that places still exist where flags of all varieties, both freak and rainbow, can fly. DisneyWorld calls themselves the Happiest Place On Earth. I’ve been to Atlanta, San Francisco, Greenwich Village, and Key West and feel comfortable in declaring Provincetown the Gayest Place On Earth. And there is absolutely, positively, nothing wrong with that.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: Are gay-friendly resort areas suitable for family vacations?

Dumbledore's Closet Mates

J. K. Rowling has outed Albus Dumbledore, the headmaster (snicker, snicker) of Hogwarts School in the Harry Potter novels, as being gay. In hindsight this is forehead slappingly obvious. Here was an elderly bachelor whose calling in life was teaching young wizards how to control their wand. And not to give away any spoilers (and the Harry Potter Spoiler Free Period has long expired), but Deathly Hallows (which I reviewed here) has a very touching and even more tragic backstory on the tale of Dumbledore's one true love (which wasn't Harry and calls into question the whole relationship with Snape).

The reaction has been mixed, mostly lining up against Rowling for revealing details outside the canon of the printed works. I defend her on the grounds that she had to stop a line from getting into the next movie that would have been untrue to the character. Still, I am uncomfortable with having to reveal the sexual orientation of a character where it plays no significance to the story. Besides we shouldn’t be spreading rumors about the deceased (and that WAS a spoiler).

Normally I eschew outing celebrities against their will, but this revelation has made me wonder about other fictional characters. I did a survey on ambiguously gay comic strip characters earlier this year, but there are some characters in popular movie and television series that I wonder about just a little.

	Scotty – While wishful thinking fans literally invented the slash fiction genre with their Kirk/Spock fantasies, Scotty is the one that seemed married to the ship. He always had some excuse to tend to the warp cores while Kirk ran around chasing every skirt in the quadrant. I’m no Star Trek: TOS expert, but I’m not sure our favorite engineer ever got some trim that wasn’t related to the navigational systems.
	Chewbacca – Making fun of the prissy ways of C3P0 is just too easy, but we shouldn’t confuse effeminate with gay. When it comes to a big hairy critter, nobody is a bigger bear than Chewey. His unrequited crush on Han is what kept him on board the Millennium Falcon and saving the galaxy’s ass more than once. While the non-canonical Holiday Special hints at a family life, can you really tell Wookie genders under all that fur?
	Starbuck – I mean Starbuck from Battlestar Galactica: The Original Series with Dirk Benedict, not Kara Thrace from the remake (not that that wouldn’t fulfill some fantasies as well, but I think we have too much on screen evidence of Kara’s proclivities). Between the blinged-out uniforms and the feathered hairdos, Apollo and Starbuck would have looked as home in Studio 54 as they did in a Viper. It doesn’t help Dirk’s case that he went on to be “Face” on The A-Team. Talk about typecasting.
	Gabrielle - There isn’t even subtext here. The blatantly Sapphic trysts on Xena: Warrior Princess became a running joke. I just needed an excuse to Google a picture of Reneé O'Connor so that this post doesn’t look like a complete sausage-fest.
	Pikachu – The love between a Pokemon and its trainer dare not speak its name. Pikachu! I call you! A closet case.

For more suspect fantasy characters see this post on Cup Of Joe or the thread on ExtremeSkins (the fact that this is a football message board worries me just a little).

BlatantCommentWhoring™: What otherwise innocuous characters have been hiding in the closet?

Is Your Congressman Gay?

Matthew Kayser has written a practical article for wives concerned about their husband’s sexual orientation. He has come up with five signs to help out the curious spouse. Some tips like he “consistently viewed homosexual pornography” are particularly good, but some are a little vaguer.

Less than half the population has a husband, but we all have elected representatives and a surprisingly large number of them have turned out to be gay. Normally, I don’t advocate the outing of closeted celebrities, but politicians have power over our private lives and full disclosure would be helpful in making voting decisions.

Some politicians are loudly and proudly gay or lesbian. Others don’t disclose their sexuality because it may look bad as they vote for or against legislation that affects fellow gay Americans. As a public service, I have come up with some warning signs based on case history. So here are my six signs that your congressman (or governor or assemblyman) MIGHT be gay.

He gives money to someone in a public restroom. Very few legitimate financial transactions take place near toilets. While it is called filthy lucre, that is usually just a metaphor. Florida state representative Bob Allen allegedly included an offer for oral sex with his cash transaction. He has had several explanations about how this might appear gay, but really isn’t. I’m going to stay skeptical.

His boyfriend runs a call-boy ring out of the house. There are gay politicians on both sides of the aisles, but for some reason the threshold level for scandal for gay Democrats is higher. Barney Frank’s poor choice of boyfriends caused him some bad publicity at the time, but the voters seem to have forgiven him.

He has hot chats with teenage guys. Usually, straight elected representatives have very little reason to exchange masturbation technique tips with high school kids. Mark Foley was a little unclear on crossing this line until the parents of the kid came forward. Hopefully he has figured this out now.

He admits to having sex with a page. An even stronger sign would be if he admits to having sex with a male teenage page. Gerry Studds admitted to such an affair and was re-elected six more times.

He has an affair with his homeland security advisor. Even an affair with another grown adult could come to light like it did with New Jersey governor Jim McGreevy. While he eventually announced that he is a “gay American”, some people refuse to believe him.

He goes on television to announce that “I am not gay. I never have been gay.” Most revelations of your sexual orientation tend to be more private and usually clear up any misunderstanding pretty quickly. If, like Senator Larry Craig, you have to drag your poor wife onto a podium in front of television cameras to declare your relentless heterosexuality, some may feel you doth protest too much.

While these tips may not be all encompassing, they are important clues. What you do with this information is up to your personal political views. And if your elected official is spending a lot of time in airport bathrooms, he might not be gay. It could just be a bad prostate. Either way it’s a warning sign.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: Any other indicators?

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.

...Trapped In A Man's Body

I'm Patty, which ambiguous dyke are you? Quiz by Turi.


I'm not sure I'm that sporty. I feel I am way more Marcie. But this will do.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: And you?

NCCCC: Best Ambiguously Gay Duo

Suspiciously close buddy characters have been staples of the comics scene since at least Mutt and Jeff. Often these character seem to be much more than friends. Inseparable, the characters share a bond that dare not speak its name in a family newspaper. Well before Robert Smiegel immortalized the phrase, the Ambiguously Gay Duo has been in the closet of the funny pages for ages. For the last catagory in this years National Coolest Comics Character Competition, we need to uncover which ones are the best.

First, lets eliminate a few that didn’t make the cut. While Rex Morgan is clearly the biggest flamer since Rock Hudson in Pillow Talk, his string of boy-toys (and Troys) don’t ever stick around long enough to form the lasting bond we are looking for here. Another good nomination was Ted and Sally Forth. I’m on the record defending Ted’s masculinity and I can’t reverse my stance now, no matter how much recent strips seem designed to mock me. I am also ruling Mike Patterson and Weed ineligible since I outed Mike in great detail recently. And finally, while we all dream of being the bacon in a Margo/LuAnn/Tommie club sandwich, it just isn’t going to happen. Get over it.

Breed standards: Subtext is the key here. Everything should pass the “dirty minds only” test. The couple should be defendable as “just friends”. Peppermint Patty and Marcie are the gold standard in this category.

Faults: Any hint of camp or self-awareness ruins the effect.

Lets put the nominees under the proctoscope:

Sarge and Beetle Beetle Bailey	Pro: The sub-dom roleplay that goes on everyday at the parade field of the most don’t-ask/don’t tell army base this side of Advanced Language School is shocking. The vicious sado-masochistic rituals that Sarge and Beetle engage in makes me think that at least one of them has forgotten the safe word.	Con: At a post with Lt. Fuzz, Julian, Plato, Sgt Lugg, and Private Bipps, Beetle doesn’t even qualify as the gayest character in his own strip.
Hagar and Lucky Eddie Hagar the Horrible	Pro: These two spend an awful lot of time together. Sailing ships, raiding castles, even getting stranded on deserted islands. What are two Vikings doing spending so much time in the tropics anyways? Eddie even tags along with Hagar on dates with his wife. They form the ultimate bear/nellie couple.	Con: Eddie has pretty poor fashion sense for such a nancy-boy. And if I were married to Helga, I would spend a lot of time with my cabin boy, too.
Herb and Jamal Herb and Jamal	Pro: The awkward glances and frequent longing stares make you wish these two would get a room. While Herb is ostensibly married, his frequent declarations of devotion to Jamal are just short of Brokeback Mountain obvious. Jamal should have scored ages ago with Yolanda if he had any interest whatsoever. Which he obviously doesn’t.	Con: The relationship is sappy, verging on cloying. These brothas need to do a better job of keeping things on the down low.
Frank and Ernest Frank and Ernest	Pro: Have you ever seen these two apart? This inseparable couple have way more than just a straight man/stand-up relationship. A zombie strip that has never been funny at any level, let alone subliminal. Let's face it, the cleverest thing about the strip is it's title.	Con: These two are way too slobby to ever get any action at any of the good bars.
Bernice and Delta Luann	Pro: Since Wheelchair Guy left the scene, Bernice has been wearing more and more comfortable shoes. And Delta has never been seen with any romantic interest at all. My guess is that when wet blanket Luann isn’t around, they listen to a lot of Tracy Chapman together.	Con: It’s just not sexy. Not in the least. Besides, a Bernice/Delta/Tiffany triangle is about the only permutation that hasn't been tried.
Dennis and Joey Dennis The Menace	Pro: At least we know who is the pitcher and who is the catcher in this couple. Joey’s too small, too tight clothes just scream future rent-boy. It would also explain Dennis’s reluctance to ever play doctor with Margaret or the hot-to-trot Gina.	Con: Opening that can of worms calls into question the whole Dennis/Mr. Wilson relationship, which is a place I don’t want to go.

Take a stab in the dark and shed some light into the comics darkest closets. As always, feel free to explain your choice or make a suggestion of your own in the comments.

Melissa And Friends

Last week was the Michigan Womyn’s Musical Festival and I was once again a no-show. Since I first learned about this annual event, I have wanted to go, but I fear it is a dream that will elude me forever. You see, I have a penis, and people with those are not allowed. And even if I wanted to, radical surgery wouldn’t gain me entrance since only “womyn born womyn” meet the eligibility standards. Even if they did change their policy, it’s unlikely that I would attend anyways. Camping in the woods in the August heat with several thousand feminists of the most militant variety is not a vacation I would be able to talk my wife into. So I have to just pout in a sour grapes way.

So instead of seeing Jill Sobule and Lez Zeppelin on the MWF mainstage last Thursday, I did something better. I got over my snit that she overlooked me and went to see Melissa Etheridge in concert at Constitution Hall in DC. I’m not sure that the mostly female audience was even aware of the irony of seeing America’s most famous lesbian musician at a venue that once snubbed African American singer Marion Anderson. Still, the DAR hall is a great place to see a show. Our seats were in a box just behind the floor seating. We had great sightlines to the oddly decorated stage, which consisted of a series of boxes that looked like glowing cubist strawberries.

This was my third time seeing Melissa live. We first saw her as the opening act for the Eagles on their Hell Freezes Over tour. She may have been still in the closet to most people, but she wasn’t fooling any of her fans that surrounded our seats. The second time was a few years ago on her solo (but by no means acoustic) tour. With just a guitar and some backing tracks, she rocked the Warner Theater.

At the DAR, we had to share our box with three other people. When we arrived, the first person was already there. She was very young and this was her second time to see Melissa. She had used her MEIN membership to get tickets to the Madison Square Gardens stand before she knew Melissa was playing DC. We had a fun time chatting and sharing celesbian gossip (Jodie Foster has been married for thirteen years, destroying another one of my dreams). Our final two boxmates were a twenty-something high-strung farmgirl that had just come out and her mother. Everyone complimented her mother on supporting her daughter so much. The mother’s attitude was that at least she didn’t have to worry about any unplanned pregnancies.

Melissa took the stage just five minutes after the nominal start time, surprising many of the attendees still lingering in the lobby, and proceeded to rock for nearly three hours. Melissa’s stage style is very Springsteenesque. She interacts with the audience a lot and likes to tell stories and ramble on. She introduced one song with a poignant story of a girl she had a crush on just after high school. The girl vanished one day because her parents had institutionalized her to keep her from spending too much time with the wrong crowd, meaning Melissa. Melissa also made multiple references to wasting ten years with the wrong person. We all knew whom she was talking about.

Good music is good music and Melissa Etheridge makes some of the best. In recent years she has had to carry a heavy burden as a role model and leader in the lesbian community and as a breast cancer survivor. She also plugs the Al Gore movie that she wrote a song for and (as a Kansas bred liberal) touts biodiesel fuels. Despite all this, she rocks hard and gives her fans what they want.

Melissa has a core group of loyal fans that will follow her everywhere. Judging by my boxmates and the enthusiasm of the audience, a Melissa Etheridge concert is part tent revival and part rite of passage. Melissa accepts that she will never be an arena-headlining superstar, which is fine with me since that lets me see her in great intimate venues. I don’t even mind sharing the men’s room with the women’s lounge refugees. And my wife doesn’t worry about any fellow groupies trying to pick me up. I’m just glad to be counted among Melissa’s great fans and friends.

Celeb Closet Watch Update

In Sunday's Washington Post, Hank Stuever, the Post's ambassador to all things queer, writes about the whimpering end of Will and Grace titled 'Will & Grace' And Gays: The Thrill Has Been Long Gone. Stuever lays on some very heavy dollops of faint praise. It's hard to belive W&G was once the daring risk-taking post-Ellen show that was going to bring gay culture into the mainstream. Maybe it did and that's why it jumped the shark somewhere near the end of year 2 of its seven year run.

Hank Stuever has never seen a closet door he didn't want to yank off the hinges, as I have discussed before. Near the very end of the Will and Grace article he gets off some fish-in-the-barrel shots at, of all people, Sean Hayes.

Jack: FYI, most people that meet me do not know that I am gay.

Will: Jack, blind and deaf people know you're gay. Dead people know you're gay!

Another sore point for those who had the energy to feel let down in a political sense by a sitcom was the elusive refusal of "Will & Grace's" breakout star, Sean Hayes, to discuss publicly whether he is gay. This made him essentially unavailable for the marshal's float at the June pride parades, even though his logic for keeping his sexuality private would strike almost anyone as somewhat sound: Hayes said over and over again that he didn't want any role he was playing, now or later, to be overshadowed by the perception that the actor is gay.

In my Celebrity Closet Watch post, I listed Sean Hayes as the lowest of the hanging fruits to be picked in a list of potentially closeted actors. His very inclusion induced eye-rolling and moans of "Oh please, girlfriend." That Stuever takes umbrage at any gay celebrity that doesn't wear a pink Speedo on the cover of The Advocate is becoming a very weary diatribe of his.

Since this is an update post, I do have to note how many blog-hits I get from people Googling® "Bradley Cooper gay". To set the record straight, so to speak, I said I was gay for Bradley Cooper. Kitchen Confidential was a show killed before it's time and Cooper tends to get more favorable reviews than the rest of the Three Days of Rain cast. About his romantic life, I have no clue one way or another which side of the plate Bradley stands on. Obviously someone knows more than me or there is a lot of wishful thinking going on.

I missed Cooper's surprise return to the also ending Alias when it aired a few weeks back. I did catch the ABC TV streaming archive of the episode. I think it's great that Alias is trying to wrap up their astoundingly complicated plot line and giving some air time to old stories like the under-used Will Tippen character. I wish more networks had online archives. It definitely was worth a few Toyota and ATT ad screens to fill me in on everything that has happened in the past three seasons since I quit watching.

CommentWhoring™: What ending television series are you sad to see leave the air this season? And which shows are you surprised lasted this long? Here's a list of other shows ending this season to refresh your memory.

Love Is Love

Mary Cheney, the daughter of the lawyer-shooting vice-president, has a book coming out about her life in politics. She is doing the full press publicity tour including ABC News, People, Vanity Fair, etc. Inevitably the topic comes up about how she reconciles being a lesbian in the political party that is trying to make gay marriage a campaign issue when she clearly disagrees with the policy. I would hesitate to call her a Log Cabin Lesbian, but that clearly is what she is.

An article in the Washington Post by Jennifer Frey points out, perhaps too subtly, the irony that Mary Cheney who has been married (her word) to Heather Poe for over 14 years is nearly invisible when in the same green room with Nick Lachey, who has made a stunningly well publicized mockery of the institution being denied to thousands of very committed same-sex couples.

The article further summarizes Mary’s very brief coming out to her parents story:

She was 16. She and her first girlfriend had just broken up. She skipped school, crashed the car, came home and decided it was time to just do it. Mom cried ("Your life will be so hard") but quickly came around. Dad said he loved her and just wanted her to be happy. The end.

I find it interesting that Mary Cheney, and her parents, knew was she was a lesbian since she was in high school or before. The high school years are very emotionally tough times for people, particularly for those establishing a sexual identity that doesn’t square with the conventional expectations. Sometimes people try on a lot of roles that don’t seem to fit until they can become comfortable with who they are.

I know that because in high school I dated a girl that in all hindsight I now know was lesbian. I don’t take credit or blame for this (although a certain amount of teen-age awkwardness on my part couldn’t have helped matters), since I know sexual attraction doesn’t work that way. We met in English class (where I met nearly every girl I dated in high school) and had homeroom together. She was funny and always smiling. Her family had moved from Texas and she didn’t know a lot of other people in Florida.

She was a big fan of Kris Kristofferson and was impressed that I knew he wrote “Me and Bobby McGee”. I had my dad’s exhaustive pirated country music collection to thank for that hook. Being from Texas, she was also a huge Dallas Cowboys fan, but I barely knew half the players she had posters of on her wall. She was way more athletic and sports-oriented than I ever was.

In the fall of my junior year we started to go on the typical high school type dates, football games and movies. On one date, we went to a mall sporting goods store looking for a gun rack for her brother’s pick-up. I didn’t find gun-rack shopping odd since there were a lot of pick-up trucks and gun racks and even a few Confederate flags in our school parking lot. Our high school band drum major knowingly and ironically kept his marching baton in his gun rack.

The most interesting date I ever had was one Friday night when we got back to her house from the movie or whatever and she got all excited because her brother’s truck was in the driveway. He had gone on a hunting trip and was supposed to be away until Sunday. Sure enough, he was back early because he had bagged a buck and had it hanging from a tree in the back yard of this suburban cul de sac house. I spent the rest of the evening watching the entire family gut and dress that deer, wrapping everything in freezer backs for weeks of meals of venison. While I knew other hunters and had eaten venison, I had never seen this part of the process so up close and personal before or since.

I tried to be a good potential boyfriend. When she had knee surgery, I bought some flowers and visited her in the hospital. That cheered her up because the knee operation had ended her career as a softball catcher. Rather than give up the game, she took up coaching some youth leagues and loved telling me stories about her girls at practice. At one point, we had an awkward conversation where she wondered if she came off as too “butch”. Being romantically interested in her, I tried to reassure her she wasn’t, but there had to be a grain of truth in there. We eventually just drifted apart, but always stayed friendly.

In our senior year, we had the same homeroom still, but she spent a lot of time giggling and talking with another girl in our homeroom that was clearly very butch. These two worked the same shifts at the local ice cream place, and I would always say “hi” when I went through the drive-thru. Any potential relationship between those two didn’t even register with me because I had moved on romantically and was dating my future wife by then.


She wrote a very sweet note in my high school yearbook and perhaps the word “smart” is code for “straight”. Or not. I was a bit of a geek in high school and a lot of other people wrote similar things. In retrospect, clues about our incompatibility should have been falling on me like anvils. She never really “came out” to me and she didn’t owe that to me since it really didn’t matter at that point. We dated, broke up, and stayed friends. Nothing more to say or do. I haven’t seen or heard from her in over twenty years since she doesn’t attend any of the high school reunions I make a point of going to, but I hope she has found love and happiness. We all deserve that. Love comes in all shapes, sizes, and colors.

Mary Cheney knows that, and her father should too.

Greatest. Roommate. Ever.

Every gay man has a “coming out” story. A narrative of how and when he knew he was gay. I have the opposite story. I know for a fact that I am straight and I know how I know. I have my college roommate to thank for this. My roommate in college came out of the closet in the middle of my sophomore year. I didn’t need to, since straight people don’t have that ordeal to go through, but but his experience sure changed my preconceptions and perceptions.

I met my roommate because when he and his current roommate wanted to live off-campus and needed a third person to split the rent. That was me. The two of us didn’t know each other, but we shared the two-bedroom townhouse for an entire summer while the other roommate was back home working a summer job. I drew the lucky straw and had a room to myself. When school started in the fall, the other two guys would go shopping together at Ansley Mall Krogers, which was the closest grocery store to our apartment. I would kid them about what a cute couple they made since many of the other patrons were gay.

In the middle of the year, something about my roommate changed. My other roommate and I were noticing some rather anvil sized clues, but couldn’t quite put the pieces together. He broke up with his girlfriend of two years. He would often stay out all night on weekends. He bought “It’s Raining Men” as an extended dance mix single. I read in the paper that his favorite bar won the Southeast Gay Softball Tournament. We couldn’t quite figure out what was causing all this new behavior. Remember, this was the mid-1980’s and not many people had their gaydar as finely tuned as today.

He finally sat down one evening and explained that he had come out of the closet. As part of that process, he was admitting that he was gay to people he thought ought to know, including, of course, his ex-girlfriend, me, and our other roommate who he had a crush on. The other roommate decided he was moving back in the dorms to become more active in campus life. My roommate needed to know if I wanted to keep the apartment when the lease was up. After some soul-searching, I decided that we got along together too well for me to go looking for someone new to live with.

Over the next couple of years, I picked up a lot of gay culture. My roommate would tell me all about his weekends. He’d explain things I didn’t understand in the gay nightlife magazines he’d bring home. A “Labor Day Parade” is very different event at a gay bar than at a union rally. He would point out people on campus he knew from the bars but wouldn’t talk to him at school. He wouldn’t bring tricks home, but I met a lot of his platonic friends. We would all occasionally go out to eat or drink together in the evenings before he hit the bars. He lived his life and I lived mine.

The key was we were still roommates struggling through college and still friends. I would help him with his homework. We would fight over stupid things. We would have long philosophical discussions over religion and philosophy. I was very active in the campus Catholic group and he attended an Episcopal gay/lesbian ministry. We’d make late night runs to Krispy Kreme on Ponce De Leon together. Since we are both redheads, we would frequently get mistaken for brothers.

Over the next year we had a revolving door of third roommates, straight, gay, and undecided. Each was a trip and story unto themselves. When he graduated, we refigured the rent so we would each have a room to ourselves. When my fiancée and I started planning our wedding, I asked him to be my best man. He threw me a very traditional bachelor party at the world famous Cheetah III. As the only straight guy in the group, I tipped the dancers while the rest of the party just sat back trying to figure out what the big deal was.

After I go married, the lease on our apartment was up and we were both searching for new apartments. We ended up renting places next door to each other. He had a washer and dryer and gave us a key to his place. For the next year, it was like a sitcom where the wacky neighbors are always barging in.

After I graduated and moved to Florida, I would look him up whenever I was in Atlanta. One visit when we came through town, there was no answer at the last phone number I had for him. We went by his townhouse and no one was home. That was about ten years ago. I don’t know where he is now, but I still remember what great times we had in college.

I lived with a gay man for three years and have now been married for nearly twenty. As a member of the school band and drama group, my son meets people that learn and accept their sexual orientation much earlier than when I was his age. I have raised my son to be tolerant and accepting of all people. I only hope that his roommate in college is as great a friend as mine was.