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?
