Every time I try to put
RuPaul's Drag Race
in TiVo, Logo winds up showing that Robin Williams movie
The Night Listener
instead. Not that I got a beef with Armistead Maupin. But dang,
Logo, you are bumming me out. Or maybe it's TiVo's fault. I
don't know. But
RuPaul's Drag Race
is, I
hear
, something special on TV and I'm currently missing it. So
Logo, please get your schedule together. How am I supposed to
know what's going on in the cutthroat competitive world of fake
boobs, penis tucking, and extreme eyeliner otherwise? I mean
outside of watching endless reruns of
Real Housewives of Atlanta.
There's been so much
incidentally gay stuff cluttering up television in the past
couple of weeks that it can be difficult to sift through and
know what's truly important, what's really relevant to your
everyday life as a homosexual who wants to feel like there's
more happening in popular culture than some DILF getting to
second base with an endless series of TV-cute ladies in a hot
tub. And then dumping all of them. You want to know what's
being said about you or done in your name. So here's the
roundup, subjectively weighed and ordered for significance:
10. Sean Hannity got
upset that gays were seen kissing in movie clips on the Academy
Awards telecast. Sean Hannity likes to freak out when gays do
things that aren't his hair and makeup before he goes on the
air. So seeing Sean Penn and James Franco in a lip-clinch was
enough to send him into a hissy fit about how Hollywood is
sexualizing children and desensitizing them to violence. Yeah,
he brought up children and violence. Because Hannity knows
-- either from a good guess or from experience
-- that gay kissing, done properly, draws blood and
sears ideas about making out with Sean Penn into the brains of
second-graders.
9. Dustin Lance Black
appeared via Skype on the
Oprah
show to show off his Academy Award for writing
Milk
and to wear a really nice sweater. Oprah praised him for his
sweet and moving acceptance speech. (And it was too. I'm all in
favor of a gay getting up on national television and
reality-checking the folks at home about how much it actually
sucks to be a little gay kid having to grow up in one of those
adorable fag-bashing small towns in the heartland everyone
seems to dig so much.) But the best part of the brief
appearance came when Oprah talked to him for a bit about how
they hung out at an Oscar party. Then Gayle asked Dustin Lance
Black how it felt to talk to Oprah at that Oscar party. Was it
meaningful? How important was it for him to have Oprah talk to
him at that Oscar party? Now reports are surfacing that Black
keeps the Oscar in a bag and carries it around Los Angeles with
him. I hope this is true. And I approve. When I saw
Madea Goes to Jail
there were two fully grown adults in the row in front of me who
brought identically dressed Cabbage Patch dolls with them to
the movie and gave each tiny escort its own theater seat. It's
good to keep some perspective on this kind of thing.
8. Logo is going to
take over
The Sarah Silverman Program
because Comedy Central wanted to cut the production budget. Or
something like that. And in spite of the fact that I can't find
RuPaul in their lineup, I'm happy about this because that show
has the two best fat, always-stoned, always-farting gay
characters on TV.
7. Neil Patrick Harris
performed magic tricks on
Ellen.
He fake-bent a fake-bending spoon and showed how he did it. But
then he lit up a lightbulb with his mind and smashed it with
his brain waves. And I don't think it was a trick. I think he
actually has electricity inside him.
6. I know I wrote about
Jerry Springer in the last column I did about gay stuff in the
media, but now that I know that he's still on the air, I'm
reobsessed with him. I know I'll get bored again soon, and it's
his never-ending job to put loons and camera-needy opportunists
on the air, but I don't care. It's SO GOOD to see a born-again
Christian lesbian beating the shit out of the guy who came
creepin' around to steal her girlfriend away from her, you
don't even know. Best quote, obviously scripted, from the
girlfriend-stealing guy: "You're a fake man in a fake
relationship!"
5. Every little thing
that Rachel Maddow does is magic. She coolly takes political
wrongdoing and stupidity to task with charm and logic and
humor, and then she goes on
Jay Leno
and makes him her fan or bakes something on
Martha Stewart
and blushes like a little girl when Martha coos and flirts with
her. Best of all, she does this in little cowboy shirts and
glasses that are just like my husband's.
4. Does the
monumentally entertaining Nathaniel Glittery-Headband
(pictured), sadly booted off
American Idol
this week, understand that he and last season's Danny Noriega
and that Onch person from the Paris Hilton BFF show are part of
a superqueen paradigm shift? Think about it. Most gays on
television have been of the Will or Jack stripe. They're either
somewhat neutral or somewhat faggy but nothing too extreme on
either end. And then comes along someone like Nathaniel, who
clearly doesn't give one flying eff what anyone thinks about
his pranciness. And there are more coming, just watch. The kids
are declaring ownership of the space around them. They don't
care about Simon Cowell's digs at their homosexuality. They
know he's old and out of it. And if you're upset at TV
capitalizing on their showmanship, then you're out of it
too.
3. Mel White:
homosexual senior citizen, major activist who's always out
fighting for your rights, and now Iron Man impersonator. On
The Amazing Race
this guy para-glided off a cliff in Bucharest or somewhere like
that and he's at least my mom's age, if not older. I don't even
know exactly what para-gliding is. But this old gay is out
there doing it. That's inspiring to me because it means that I
can get old someday and watch some other old gay my age do the
same thing on TV.
2. In the last column I
wrote about the special that aired on one of my cable system's
religious channels called
Speechless ... Silencing the Christians
and was all excited to watch the follow-up special on the
"radical, militant, homosexual rights activists" called,
oddly enough, simply
Silencing the Christians.
I TiVo'd it and everything. And then?
The Night Listener
! Again! OK, just kidding. It was some southern gospel
quartet's concert. But still. I was disappointed. And it wasn't
going to be rebroadcast. So I went hunting online to
www.silencingchristians.com
and found that you can watch the entire one-hour special on
your computer. I also found out that lots of stations refused
to air the damn thing, so blithely unconcerned about my
entertainment that they forced me to watch it via a tiny laptop
YouTube-size box.
On this show I learned
that there's some magical book out there called
After the Ball
that lays out a blueprint for the radical homosexual takeover
of American culture. (I looked it up on Amazon and it's
conveniently out of print so that all references to it on this
special are difficult to fact-check unless you happen to own a
copy yourself.) A female host with one of those mean-matron
smiles spends the hour telling the audience that gays are
committing violence against Christians but that there's no
proof that gays have ever suffered violence from bigoted
Christians themselves; that gays are awful to the "ex-gays"
("Why doesn't the tolerance work both ways?" pleads one
"ex-lesbian" who came out of "the lifestyle" after
finding herself playing for an all-female church softball
league. I know, amazing); that stopping being gay is like
quitting smoking; that reading the picture book
King & King
to any child will cause that child to develop a permanent
frowny face (proved by a montage of really upset-looking kids
who just had to learn that gays exist); and that antigay
bullying in schools actually turns little kids gay, but
measures to stop antigay bullying are discriminatory against
Christians. That last one is like a trick puzzle even Neil
Patrick Harris couldn't crack. If you have a spare hour to
waste, you should totally watch this one. It's
The Gay Agenda
for a new generation.
1. Finally, Suze Orman,
who is probably the fourth richest lesbian in the United States
after Rosie, Ellen, and Mary Cheney, was back on
Oprah
again (she's been on a
lot
lately) giving even more money advice to really unhappy people
who can't decide whether to have their cancer treated or feed
their children breakfast. Because really, items number 10
through 2 are irrelevant if you don't have a job right now. And
this week alone, three of my gay friends got laid off, so
anything about how to fight the power by keeping yourself in
the money-having game is kind of automatically the most
important thing. Making the episode even more poignant was the
tension-thick air that grew more and more despair-filled when
it slowly dawned on each new guest that Oprah wouldn't be
bailing them out. Bummer.
Oh, and yes, I left out
the series finale of
The L Word.
That gets its own column next week. You think I could give Dawn
Denbo and Jenny Schecter the space they deserve in a measly
little paragraph?