boy culture

Meredith Baxter Comes Out: Seeing The Forest AND The Trees

It's so cool that Meredith Baxter has come out of the closet as a lesbian. She can't even really be criticized for doing it late in life (age 62) like Richard Chamberlain and others who waited past their Hollywood expiration date to confirm the obvious—in her case, despite a brief lesbian affair in 1996, she didn't fully come out as a lesbian to herself and her family until she was 55 years old. (She had "not a clue" she was gay when she did that 1993 special Our Mothers, playing a lesbian.)

Gotta admit, she wasn't the one who pinged by gaydar! 

She tells The Advocate, in her first interview, that she's been "hiding in plain sight" for a while, attending public events with her partner of four years without any ensuing gossip:

Wolf's Bane

The Advocate looks at the question of whether author Stephenie Meyer's status as a devout Mormon means supporting her books and movies is indirectly supporting anti-gay initiatives like Proposition 8. Maybe a stretch since she isn't out-spoken (or even -spoken!) about political or social topics.

However, having seen the (deadly dull, laughable—sorry, my personal opinion) movie, one thing that really struck me is that Jacob (Tayor Lautner) talks about being a werewolf in terms that are very gay-vibing—he has a secret he can't tell anyone, Bella (Kristen Stewart) should already know it from hints he's dropped and he at one point even states "it's not a lifestyle choice." It's the latter that bothers me; he says it in a nasty way, and I can't think of anything that comes to mind faster than homosexuality when people are saying "lifestyle choice."

Just interesting to think about.

Firth, Do No Harm

Something that didn't cross my mind but did cross the collective minds of VGL and The Advocate: Is the marketing for Tom Ford's film A Single Man (adapted from Christopher Isherwood's classic gay novel) too straight? 

I don't know if it's a bad thing that the Weinsteins are attempting to lure a broader audience in this way...for me, the real tragedy would be if the film were de-gayed.

The Original Fierce Advocate Is Now A Fierce Insert?

UPDATE: Regent is claiming that the Queerty story is false, though the long-winded letter about the future of the magazine does not flatly say "there is no truth to this" so much as it says they're "making strategic and sometimes difficult staff changes," all to strengthen The Advocate's brand. Is Queery just not a fan of Regent in the way it's not a fan of Barack Obama—to the point where any negative story is better than the truth? Or is Regent b.s.ing  and a year from now The Advocate doesn't exist? Read Regent's full reply here.

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I can't think of one snarky thing to say about the death of the leading gay-issues newsmagazine, The Advocate—it has been announced it will now be a 32-page insert inside Out. Which itself will die at some point, probably not years and years from now. It's hard to overstate the loss to the gay community. 

The Advocate has been around for 40 years chronicling gay news, following politics, tracing fads, providing a means by which stars (gay and straight) could directly reach a captive LGBT (not just G and not just L) audience. The death of The Advocate feels like a symptom of the admittedly slow death of "gay" as an identity. More and more, LGBT people are of the mindset that gay shouldn't matter. It shouldn't, but it does—abandoning it prematurely is only going to lead to things that will make us wish for it back again.

  

 When Boy Culture premiered, the party was sponsored by The Advocate. Having its imprimatur on that party made me so proud. I also once did a phoner with Harvey Fierstein for The Advocate. How gay was that sentence? And in a move that thoroughly enraged my slightly older, infinitely less everything else boss, I was chosen as one of "30 under 30" by the magazine—an honor I still can't believe I was lucky enough to receive.

The death of the gay print media (the rest are not long for this world and will also be missed) is a microcosm of the death of all print media (ditto). It's going to be up to bloggers and other on-line reporting/opinion-making to pick up the slack—and frankly, I don't think we're up to the job. For one thing, for many of us, blogging isn't a "job," even if it's hard, time-consuming work. (Queerty is where I found out about The Advocate, and Queerty is no Advocate.) I'm not trying to get a swelled head about it—just the opposite!—but face facts: The surviving print media doesn't give two shits about gay rights and gay issues unless it's that one, nationally appealing case (Matthew Shepard) that comes along every decade.

I will genuinely miss The Advocate—and I think once its absence settles in, many of us will miss what it takes with it.

Out FOXed

FOX's Glee has its first out actor in 19-year-old Chris Colfer, who plays gay Kurt Hummel. Colfer gives a coming-out interview to The Advocate in which he says he wasn't able to be out in high school like Kurt:

"Oh, no. People are killed in my hometown for that."

He goes on to praise Glee for upping the number of gay series regulars on TV:

"Very cool! I think it's extremely important for gay youth out there to see that it's actually OK and that they are being represented in these shows. It's extremely important."

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A Friend Of Kathy

In the context of a chatty Q&A with The Hills star Kristin Cavallari, The Advocate all but outs actor Jonathan Bennett—who I famously consider to be the best-looking act ever—by referring to him as a "friend of Kathy Griffin" (this is a modern-day version of "friend of Dorothy"), publishing a still from a movie he made with Cavallari and then quoting Cavallari as saying she has a gay actor friend who's thinking about coming out.

Please come out, Jonathan...we need more openly hot, openly gay actors in this world.

Fun Is The New Nice!

Robbing the lip-synch cradle.

I just got an e-mail from Advocate.com asking me to link their interview with the "Party in the F.I.P." guys—ironically, the story uses my screengrab from my original posting of the video. (Not that I was first; I saw it via Pink is the New Blog.) And it's entitled "The Boys of Summer," while my cap under the jumping pic was the slightly campier "The Girls of Summer."

But there is no room for irony or camp in this story anyway—all the guys (who I'm guessing are late 20s to early 30s? guys?) talk about how much they like the song (of the 16-year-old self-professed virgin) and how they thought doing the video was fun.

I guess I'm jaded, because I remember a time when gay guys were a bit cooler than just fun. Wow, wait, I really am jaded!

Anyway, they sound nice—another word like fun—and happy that their video is making the rounds.

We Need Less "Fierce!" And More Advocacy

The Advocate (September 2009) has a very interesting and layered look at the  Obama Administration's approach (or lack thereof) to gay issues that is not well served by the less nuanced negative cover, a take on Shepard Fairey's now-iconic HOPE poster. "NOPE?" is says, altering President Obama's eyes to make him look either regretful or, more likely, shifty. (I won't dwell on the unfortunate word choice inside that "The hero was a player after all" even though it would make no sense had it been written about a non-black person since I don't think the thrust of the piece, written by Michael Joseph Gross (pictured), or the thrust of Obama's LGBT critics is race-based. But for the record, "player" or playa is not the opposite of "hero.")

The question mark on the "NOPE?" is less noticeable on the cover than it is represented in the story, which takes pains to remind us of Obama's pro-gay positions and speeches, his positive achievements, his politically-motivated ball-dropping and our own culpability in his so-far less than stellar overall record. 

Seizing on a remark made by Obama during that Stonewall party in the East Room that the protesters at Stonewall were "folks who had been marginalized and rose up to challenge not just how the world saw them but also how they saw themselves," Gross's interviews with everyone from Patrick Guerriero (pictured) to Larry Kramer illustrate how prominent members of our movement (this includes you!) see themselves, and how this affects our effectiveness as advocates.

Log Cabin Republicans are probably over-represented in the story*, perhaps not surprising considering Gross was a speechwriter for Massachusetts Governor William Weld (a Republican who nevertheless backed Barack Obama) with ex-head Patrick Guerriero (now executive director of the Gill Action Fund) asking, "Are you ready to own your own responsibility to the movement?" and founding president Rich Tafel sounding like an ACT-UP activist stating, "I want the chaos, the anger, the truth, whatever it is, to come out. Otherwise it's a big Kabuki dance in Washington, fund-raising letters about nothing. Who's willing to fast? Who's willing to get handcuffed? This president will actually care. The last one didn't."

Most controversially, Gross uses the old accusation about self-loathing in a whole new way, suggesting that when the convincingly self-loving Larry Kramer (pictured) states that gay people are hated too much and must become "our own heroes," the statement contains "a toxic measure of self-pity and sentimentality that ignores the progress we have made." Kramer's point is that there are fewer and fewer LGBT people willing to be "gay first and foremost" (undeniably true); Gross's is that this may not be a bad thing. He even considers that outlook to be a way of making "a fetish of our separateness."

Maybe They Were Busy Tweeting About Jacko?

Despite valid complaints across the blogosphere and some pretty overheated rhetoric over at the otherwise excellent AmericaBlog, the controversial LGBT DNC fundraiser yesterday made significantly more than last year's ($1 million, up from $750,000), Vice President Joe Biden received multiple standing ovations for his pledges to follow through on the administration's promises on DOMA, DADT and more and there was only a group of 25 (or "about 40") people there to protest.

So much for shaming the traitorous attendees in every gay living room from now until the end of time.

On a separate note, I've been guilty of this myself, but...why is it that gay people seem incapable of fighting for our rights without screaming "black! black! black!"? I think there are valid comparisons between the gay and the black struggle for rights in this country, but it's becoming an embarrassing, lazy crutch. (I mention this because of the "Gay Uncle Toms" sign that was captured in Towleroad's coverage.)

We deserve equal rights. No need to bring race into it like we're jealous little sisters. "Marcia! Marcia! Marcia! African-American! African-American! African-American!"

Biden's best:

"I want to thank you for being a critical—critical—voice for keeping the nation focused on the unfinished business of true equality for all of our people; and I know, and this administration knows, that we have so much more to do. I promise you, I promise you, with your help we'll get there in this administration."

His Brother's Keeper

Scott Evans—only the second openly-gay actor on daytime TV (which is...quite unbelievable considering the odds!) and the brother of Chris Evans—opens up to The Advocate on his One Life to Live job and such topics as why his brother doesn't really accompany him to gay bars after all:

"He does not come to the gay bars. We definitely all hang out and go out with him, but it's more me not wanting him to hang out in gay bars than him. I don't want to have him deal with some things and rumors. I mean, someone getting or snapping the wrong picture of Chris Evans at a gay bar is going to end up in places nobody wants to see. People have trouble minding their own business when it comes to that sort of thing."

Protective!