After three consecutive years of winning best actor at Speech and Drama Teachers Association Drama Festival during high school in Los Angeles, Paul Winfield received an offer of a scholarship to Yale. It was 1959 and he turned it down. Nine years later he played Diahann Carroll's boyfriend on the groundbreaking tv series Julia. In 1972, he earned a best actor Oscar nomination for his starring role in Sounder
(AP photo via)
Comic Liz Feldman has shared in four daytime Emmy wins for Ellen's talk show but many lesbians love her best for her own no-budget web broadcasts from her kitchen table, This Just Out. The delightful amateurism has entinced big indie stars like Tegan and the ladies of the L Word to be interviewed with goofy, earnest questions. No surprise, her manner is several parts Ellen, along with some Michael Cera, a little Rachel Maddow, and a snatch of Sarah Silverman. The internets hasn't seen much of Liz lately because after a stint with Leno, she's gone from success to success: writer-producer on Hot in Cleveland and writer-supervising producer on 2 Broke Girls. Last year she proposed to singer-songwriter Rachael Cantu, who accepted.
It wouldn't take Perry Mason to figure out Raymond Burr was "acting" when he invented heterosexual details about his life in order to hide his gay relationships. His alleged first wife, "Annette Sutherland," was supposedly a British actress who died in the plane crash that killed Leslie Howard, but, as you've already guessed, British Equity has no record of an actress with that name and the fatal plane had only three women on it, all of them otherwise accounted for. Later Burr claimed to have had a son who died at ten of an incurable disease, possibly leukemia, and he even said he took a year off to travel the country with him as his dying wish. Yet his publicist at the time said Burr was working steadily that entire year, 1953, and that Burr "never mentioned any wife or son." However, one short-lived marriage can be documented.
Happily, Burr did have a very long relationship with fellow actor Robert Benevides. They met on the set of Perry Mason, together bought an island in Fiji where their passion for orchids eventually became a business back in California, sold their Fiji land in 1983, and spent their time on their farm in Sonoma, where they later started a vineyard. Among his many movie roles, his menacing turn as the killer in Rear Window came three years before his beloved television series Perry Mason which ran for 271 episodes from 1957 to 1966, and remained so popular it was later revived in 26 tv movies. Burr's next series, Ironside, ran for 195 episodes from 1967 to 1975 and it too spawned a tv movie comeback in 1993, the year Burr died of cancer. One of his nieces fought with Benevides over Burr's vast estate, questioning his right to it. They were together thirty-one years. Read Michael Starr's Hiding in Plain Sight: The Secret Life of Raymond Burr.
Riding the hype of the HBO movie on May 26, Tantor today releases a new paperback of Behind the Candelabra: My Life With Liberace
Director Soderbergh told New York: “I wanted to make something really intimate. I liked the Sunset Boulevard aspect of Lee and Scott—older, younger; powerful, not powerful. With some show business thrown into it. During his career, Liberace was the most successful act to play Vegas—he made up to $400,000 a week during the seventies—but he was very private. The film is about a part of his life that he didn’t share with anyone; it is an act of imagination, but I wanted it to be sincere. I didn’t want it to be unkind, because everyone loved Liberace. He was the nicest man.”
Not quite. A famous gay author posted on FB how mean Lee was, but now I can't find the link.
Growing up in a prominent conservative Southern family in North Carolina, Armistead Maupin always knew he was gay yet his natural reserve kept him from acting on those feelings until after college, after serving in the Navy, when he was twenty-six. He came out the year he turned thirty. Good thing, because 1974 is also when he began publishing his panoramic observations about San Francisco and its pansexual inhabitants in the Marin paper, The Pacific Sun. In hindsight the next steps look obvious -- move the column to the Chronicle in 1976, morph them into a novel called Tales of the City
A contemporary heir to Patrick Leigh Fermor's genius in travel writing, Bruce Chatwin's literary talent was matched by his personal panache. So brilliant, so handsome, so acclaimed, so willing to buck British convention, yet so tormented by his own prejudices. Unable to accept that he was gay, he married a woman, Elizabeth Chanler, in 1965, when he was twenty-five, and exclusively pursued men throughout their fifteen years of marriage. (She didn't mind, although she did ask for a separation in 1980.)
Chatwin's reflex for making up cover stories appears to have extended into his nonfiction. The local people of his marvelous travel books like In Patagonia
Rupert Smith's output is so big and versatile he needs three names to cover it. His own literary fiction includes most recently the award-winning Man's World
Could a plastic bag caught in the wind on a lower Manhattan street change your life? Alan Ball watched one float for ten minutes and made it a hallmark of his first movie script, American Beauty, which won five Oscars including best picture, best director, best actor, and his own best screenplay. He parlayed that success into writing and directing his gay-positive mortuary series Six Feet Under
Last Wednesday an online poll to rank viewers' favorite web series of all orientations put the gay L.A. series Husbands (The New Normal minus the baby) at #3 with 2,249 votes and the gay Brooklyn series The Outs (Girls minus the females) around #40 with 52 votes. Back when it started, NPR's Ira Glass called Husbands "the future -- of tv, of America." It has the better pedigree, particularly in the form of co-created Jane Epenson, a veteran writer of Buffy, Firefly, Gilmore Girls, the O.C., Game of Thrones, and Warehouse 13, which she created. Also, that funny cameo from Joss Whedon. And a visit from Jon Cryer. It was not so far-fetched for Husbands to boast it was "the most critically successful show ever to emerge in new media," with strong reviews from mainstream critics like Time ("more complex and interesting...than The New Normal") and The New Yorker ("totes adorbs").
This Wednesday, the Atlantic profiled The Outs, citing cooler mags like Interview calling it "the most accurate and essentially human portrayal of young gay men today" and Paper insisting it's "the best web series ever." The article has gotten some attention for quotes from the show's creator and star, Adam Goldman:
"I'm not necessarily knocking what's on television," Goldman says. "I just think there is always room for more well-rounded stories."
"The democratization of media is really exciting," Goldman says. "Particularly for minorities or underrepresented people. You don't have to wait for a studio to say now we are going to make your show. You can look to everyone and say, don't we need this? And if they say yes we do, then you get to make it."
"...But Goldman bristles at being lumped in with a wave of 'gay shows.'
"What's a gay show?" he says, seeming annoyed. "It just doesn't mean anything. There aren't definitions of these things. I don't think of every other show as a straight show. Is it gay because I suck dick? Or is it gay because it's about two gay men? It just doesn't mean anything.
"As soon as people give the label that you are speaking for a whole group, there's just too much pressure. There are black gay people, Asian gay people, trans people...There's no such thing as the voice of a generation for the gay community."
What's a gay show? If you really don't know, try Hunting Season, based on the unshy blog-to-novel, The Great Cock Hunt. The series is co-written by the excellent Adam Baran who curates Queer/ Art/ Film with Ira Sachs.
Or find Where the Bears Are, an amusing romp as familiar types juggle jokes, tricks, and a mystery. They describe the show as The Golden Girls meets Murder, She Wrote. Season two starts next month.
Much of Alan Bennett’s career as a playwright, screenwriter, author and actor been devoted to wry or gently comic emotional cripples, inhabiting worlds where happiness is as suspect (very) as it is unlikely (highly) and where unrequited love is a redundancy. His best known works are the adaptation of Prick Up Your Ears (gay playwright Joe Orton murdered by his lover), An Englishman Abroad (gay traitor Guy Burgess), The Madness of George III (crazy king), A Question of Attribution (another gay traitor, Anthony Blunt), and of course The History Boys. In 2011 reader Gary reminded me about Bennett's highly successful series of humorous and touching monologues, Talking Heads, which can be seen online. (Lovingly spoofed by Stephen Fry in drag.) The son of a Northern butcher, Bennett was accepted at Cambridge but, following a boy who didn’t like him, switched to Oxford where he took a first in history and, in 1960, joined Dudley Moore, Peter Cook, and Jonathan Miller to appear in the instantly famous comedy revue Beyond the Fringe. He also performed in The Secret Policeman’s Ball and The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball. Although he has been with his current partner, Rupert Thomas, for nearly 20 years, only recently has he felt comfortable discussing his gay life. And he's begun to create unqualified delights, such as the one even Michiko called “a completely charming entertainment: a small gem,” his novella The Clothes They Stood Up In
Of all the gay and gayish comedians on Chelsea Handler's roundtable, the feyest is 33 year-old Ross Mathews. He squeals. He flaps. He gushes. Yet unlike some of the apolitical girlie men of yore -- and all the butch closet cases of all time -- Ross is a serious and loud proponent of equality, often lambasting phobes. Also, in place of tittering innuendo he is straight-forwardly sex positive, openly discussing his romantic exploits with his partner of five years, Salvador Camarena. Most of all, in an industry where performers are constantly, desperately offering to be whoever you want them to be, Ross is defiantly himself. His confidence can outlast titanium.
Today is the release of his first book Man Up!: Tales of My Delusional Self-Confidence
See Ross on tour tonight in NYC, or in DC Thursday 5/9, Boston 5/11, LA 5/13, SF 5/16, Portland 5/17, Seattle 5/18, Chicago 5/28, Austin 5/30, Philadelphia 6/2, Miami 6/4, and Atlanta 6/6.
In the wake of Chelsea's many bestsellers, the roundtable has spawned more than half a dozen books:
Sarah, Life As I Blow It: Tales of Love, Life & Sex . . . Not Necessarily in That Order
Heather, My Inappropriate Life: Some Material Not Suitable for Small Children, Nuns, or Mature Adults
Josh, It Takes Balls: Dating Single Moms and Other Confessions from an Unprepared Single Dad
Jen, I Can Barely Take Care of Myself: Tales From a Happy Life Without Kids
Loni, Love Him Or Leave Him, But Don't Get Stuck With the Tab: Hilarious Advice for Real Women
Chuy, Little Nuggets of Wisdom: Big Advice from the Small Star of Chelsea Lately
A troubled teen coming of age in the 40s and 50s, Anthony Perkins escaped into acting. He told an interviewer, "There was nothing about me I wanted to be, but I felt happy being somebody else." Uncomfortably gay all his life, he had affairs with Nureyev, Sondheim, Tab Hunter, Christopher Makos, and a six-year relationship with choreographer Glover Dale. At 21 he got his first film role from George Cukor (The Actress written by Ruth Gordon) and he was 28 when Hitchcock cast him as Norman Bates in Psycho. A superstar terrified of being outed and unhappily typecast as a homicidal maniac, he fled to Europe where he worked with Ingrid Bergman in an adaptation of a Francoise Sagan novel and with Orson Welles in his rehash of Kafka's The Trial. Perkins was 39 before he finally had sex with a woman, his co-star Victoria Principal. When he was 41, he married Marisa Berenson's sister Berry on Cape Cod and they had two sons, named Oz and Elvis, though he continued to have sex with men. Having never been tested, he was horrified in 1990 to learn he was HIV+ from a headline in the National Enquirer, which had obtained a sample of his blood. Still closeted, he worked with aids charities, recorded an epilogue to And the Band Played On, and issued this statement, released upon his death from aids on September 12, 1992: "There are many who believe this disease is God's vengeance. But I believe it was sent to teach people how to love and understand and have compassion for each other. I have learned more about love, selflessness and human understanding from the people I have met in this great adventure in the world of aids than I ever did in the cutthroat, competitive world in which I spent my life." Returning from a vacation on Cape Cod on September 11, 2001, his wife died aboard AA flight 11. Their sons are an actor and a musician. Two biographies are Anthony Perkins: Split Image
Born Graham Walker in Bandon, County Cork, he popped over to London to train as a drama instructor but justly wound up on stage and in front of the camera. His success as an interviewer was instantaneous, like champagne uncorked. Effortlessly fun and engaging, he often outshines his guests. His childish delights ought to be embarrassing -- as he admits, "Now, this isn't big or clever," -- but those antics are often very, very funny, especially when he employs his best telephone manner. He called a sheriff's office in a Midwestern state about their law prohibiting intercourse with live fish, and, with Roseanne as his witness, rang up the Austrian tourist board to ask about visiting the north central village called Fucking. ("Is Fucking nice in winter?") It oughtn't be funny, but just try to remain stone-faced during his interview with speed daters. Frodo laughs so hard he kicks up his feet and rolls off the sofa. Norton's two books are a memoir, So Me, and greatest hits from his advice column, Ask Graham.
Celebrate with the brilliant biography of cultural impresario, founder of the Ballets Russes, and Nijinsky lover Sergei Diaghilev [Kindle] who turns 141 today, or with Barney Frank: The Story of America's Only Left-Handed, Gay, Jewish Congressman, 73, or a memoir by the Beverly Hills native and long-closeted mini-series sensation Richard Chamberlain, 79, or a cd from a lesbian comic who came out early, Suzanne Westenhoefer, 52.
After losing the Spirit Award to Kirby Dick's important doc The Invisible War
Last week, ABC optioned a scripted miniseries that will be more or less based on people in the documentary, covering the core years 1987 to 1996. David France is writing it and he said the cast "will be a tight ensemble. A handful of people with almost nothing in common but their shared battle against the epidemic."
EW had more:
"France, and his producing partner Howard Gertler will both serve as Executive Producers on the project, alongside former Focus Features president of production John Lyons (Boogie Nights, Pieces of April). "ABC is really the perfect match for this. ABC is the network that brought us Roots and so many other enormous and seminal miniseries. But Roots is such an important touchstone for me because it was really about the arrival of the African American people to full citizenship, and how that happened," France said. "That’s the same kind of trajectory that we see with the arrival of the gay and lesbian community to full involvement in public life. That happened in a much quicker timeline, but in a way I think that How To Survive A Plague the miniseries will tell that parallel story. And ABC knows how to do that. I was thrilled that they wanted to do this, and that they saw that it was part of their cultural tradition to tell these enormous stories that really changed the way generations of people think about a certain part of our history."
by Wanda Corn and Tirza True Latimer.
Two-time Oscar nominee James Bridges wrote and directed The Paper Chase, The China Syndrome, Urban Cowboy
Speaking of Harvard (from which he graduated with honors in 1978, followed by his MA in journalism from Berkeley), and speaking of 80s queer dancing, here's a clip from Marlon Riggs' famous Tongues Untied. The best part is the poem by Essex Hemphill. Riggs' 1989 documentary about black gay culture was funded by an NEA grant and shown on PBS, making it a prime target for right wing attack groups. But its breakthrough honesty (and snap lessons) also made it perfect for Cannes and Berlin, as well as the many American events where it won awards: San Francisco's Frameline, Atlanta's film fest, and New York's documentary festival. His next work, Color Adjustment, examined television's "unflattering" portrayal of black characters from 1948 to 1988. After that he made Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien, interviewing HIV+ black men. When he was doing preproduction on his Black Is...Black Ain't (viewable in three parts starting here), he died of aids. He was 37.
Comedian, college dropout after one semester, #1 NYT bestselling author, sitcom star, chat show mogul, record company wannabe, vegan, animal lover, and lesbian wife, Ellen DeGeneres was named the funniest person in America by Showtime way back in 1982 when she was twenty-four. Johnny Carson, a big fan, considered her a girl Bob Newhart, though she also cites Steve Martin and Woody Allen as significant influences. Her sitcom Ellen ran from 1994 to 1998 including her character's history making coming out in The Puppy Episode, seen by a record setting 46 million people. In 2003 she voiced Dory in Finding Nemo, Pixar's most successful movie ever. That September she premiered her talk show, which has become a mega hit, dancing its way to thirty-two Daytime Emmys. During the height of the Prop 8 campaign to rescind gay marriage in California, she wed her wife, Portia De Rossi, fifteen years her junior, and screened this video on her show. Do we still have to hear the lie that stars can't be out, vocal in their support of gay rights, and popular with middle America? Ellen has won five consecutive People's Choice Awards as Favorite Daytime Talk Show Host. In 2007, she hosted the Oscars, earning higher ratings and more viewers than Jon Stewart in 2006 and 2008 and Hugh Jackman in 2009. In 2008, at fifty, she became the face of Maybelline's CoverGirl, in 2010 she was a judge on American Idol and appeared as herself on The Simpsons, and in 2011 Hillary Clinton made her a Special Envoy for Global Aids Awareness. Her newest book is now in paperback, Seriously...I'm Kidding
GALECA, the Gay and Lesbian Entertainment Critics Association, has announced the winners of this year's Dorian Awards:
FILM OF THE YEAR: Argo
FILM PERFORMANCE OF THE YEAR – ACTOR: Daniel Day-Lewis in Lincoln
FILM PERFORMANCE OF THE YEAR – ACTRESS: Anne Hathaway in Les Miserables
LGBT FILM OF THE YEAR: Keep the Lights On
DOCUMENTARY OF THE YEAR: How To Survive a Plague
VISUALLY STRIKING FILM OF THE YEAR: Life of Pi
CAMPY FLICK OF THE YEAR (TIE): Magic Mike
UNSUNG FILM OF THE YEAR: Bernie
TV DRAMA OF THE YEAR (TIE): American Horror Story: Asylum and Homeland
TV COMEDY OF THE YEAR: Girls
TV PERFORMANCE OF THE YEAR – ACTOR: Damian Lewis in Homeland
TV PERFORMANCE OF THE YEAR – ACTRESS: Jessica Lange in American Horror Story: Asylum
TV MUSICAL PERFORMANCE OF THE YEAR: Jennifer Hudson, Tribute to Whitney Houston, The Grammys
LGBT TV SHOW OF THE YEAR (TIE): Modern Family and The New Normal
CAMPY TV SHOW OF THE YEAR: Liz & Dick
UNSUNG TV SHOW OF THE YEAR: Happy Endings
TV OR MOVIE TITLE OF THE YEAR: Don’t Trust the B—- in Apt. 23
WE’RE WILDE ABOUT YOU (NEWCOMER AWARD): Ezra Miller
WILDE WIT OF THE YEAR: Jon Stewart
WILDE ARTIST OF THE YEAR: Ryan Murphy
TIMELESS AWARD: Sir Ian McKellen
Typically mixing the meritorious, the mediocre, and the misguided, GLAAD today announced nominations in 33 queer categories of TV, movies, music, theater, journalism, blogs, and comic books (but no real books). Eight awards honor media work in Spanish. For every worthy and important nominee like Rachel Aviv's recent Netherland profile of homeless queer youth for The New Yorker, there is a grandstanding canard like that nonsensical piece calling Obama the first gay president which exists solely to grab attention for its author.
As America grows ever more accepting of gay equality, Hollywood reduces our visibility in mainstream features. Again this year, GLAAD's five nominees for best wide-release film are straight movies with only
marginal lgbt characters. Some of these perpetuate the worst tropes, including The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel's sad old bugger who, of course, is the only one of the jaunty elderfolk to die. The lesbian in Your Sister's Sister
The documentaries are Chely Wright: Wish Me Away; Codebreaker about Alan Turing; Hit So Hard
In 1985, the year after she graduated from Des Moines' Drake University, Tracy Baim and three men co-founded Chicago's lgbt newspaper Windy City Times. Two years later she left to start a new queer paper, Outlines, which she ran for 12 years until she bought WCT and merged the two publications. While so many other gay weeklies folded, WCT is thriving and Baim is still publisher and executive editor. She was also co-vice chair of Chicago's Gay Games VII from 1999 to 2007, and with her new free time in September 2008 she launched the website ChicagoGayHistory.org in tandem with the release of her book Out and Proud in Chicago [Kindle]. Among her many other books are Obama and the Gays: A Political Marriage
After two years of plot twists, fans of the British drama series Hollyoaks finally got what they wanted the week before Christmas: Ste Hay left his husband Doug Carter to return to his Irish ex, Brendan Brady. Former bad boy Ste (prison for car theft) is played by Kieron Richardson who came out at 24 in September 2010. He said he was inspired by Joe McElderry, the X-Factor winner who came out at 19 two months before him.
If Kieron's agent or manager told him to tone it down, he didn't listen. He posed for this cover of Gay Times. He had already skated his way to 3rd place finish wearing tight, hot pink spangles on Dancing on Ice.
Last year he began co-hosting a weekly "lifestyle and entertainment gossip programme" on the Gaydio radio network from Manchester, which you can listen to live every Sunday.
You can also follow him on The Twitter.
