Band of Thebes

Born October 30: Néstor Almendros

Like so many great artists, Néstor Almendros did not follow a straight path to his genius. Born in Barcelona in 1930, he became disgusted with Franco's Spain by age eighteen and followed his father to Cuba, then went to film school in Rome, tried and failed to work in New York, left for France, was ready to give up at thirty-four, and got an absurdly lucky break: He happened to be on set the day the director of photography quit a short project with Eric Rohmer. From there Almendros became one of the world's  greatest cinematographers, carefully composing each frame and using natural light like a painter on over fifty films, including, in order, Two English Girls, Chloé in the Afternoon, The Story of Adele H., The Marquise of O., Days of Heaven for which he won an Oscar, Kramer vs. Kramer, The Blue Lagoon, The Last Métro for which he won a Cesar, Still of the Night, Sophie's Choice, Pauline at the Beach, Places in the Heart, Heartburn, Imagine: John Lennon, and Billy Bathgate.

For anyone seriously interested in cinema, his book A Man with a Camera is essential reading. Not only does he clarify how the director of photography differs from the cameraman (union rules prohibit the DP from operating the camera) but he devotes a brief chapter to each of forty films. He describes the challenges and innovations of working with directors (again and again it's Rohmer, Truffaut, or Robert Benton) to decide which colors they want the costume and set designers to use and how Almendros will light and shoot each scene. They usually start with fine art. Their initial inspiration for Kramer vs. Kramer, set on the Upper East Side of the 1970s, was Piero della Francesca, with a little Hockney and, for the child's bedroom, Magritte. For The Blue Lagoon, he concentrated on Gauguin. For the Meryl Streep - Robert DeNiro psycho-thriller Still of the Night, he looked to old Fritz Lang movies and Edward Hopper. Remarkably generous with the secrets of his working trade, his autobiography completely ignores his private life. And yet, even though he was closeted, when he had the opportunity to direct his own movie in 1984, he chose to make a documentary about Cuba's persecution of gay men, Mauvaise conduite [Improper Conduct], which won the audience award at Frameline. He also shot ads for Calvin Klein and Armani. He died of aids in 1992 at age sixty-one. Human Rights Watch gives an annual film award named in his honor.

ONE Museum of LGBT History Opens in Los Angeles

Beating London by years, the city of West Hollywood donated a former storage garage to the ONE Archives for a museum of gay history, which opened Saturday, on Coming Out Day. The inaugural exhibit looks at Los Angeles' gay pride parades from the beginning. The president of the board and curator of the collection is Joseph Hawkins, a professor of gender studies and anthropology at USC. He tells the LA Times the artifacts "show that we've been having this fight for a very long time, longer than most people think." Early editions of ONE's magazine call for "homophile marriage" as far back as 1953. Future exhibits will be devoted to lesbian pulp fiction and photographs of nude musclemen. Starting small, the space is 600 square feet and is open for four hours three days a week: Fridays from 4:00pm to 8:00pm, Saturdays and Sundays from 1:00pm to 5:00pm at 626 N. Robertson Blvd. Admission is free.

Photos by Anne Cusak/LAT.

Born October 2: Annie Leibovitz

Given the boldness and confidence of her photographs, you might expect Annie Leibovitz to be brash and overbearing, but in fact she's very thoughtful and, despite her decades of success and fame, she's uncertain about her work. Giving a slideshow of her images at a Chelsea gallery in November 2006, many times she looked at the screen and said, "I'm not sure that even is a photograph," saying instead it was simply a record of the moment. After Susan Sontag, her partner of fifteen years, died at the end of 2004, Leibovitz worried that she had never truly captured her on film. (Her favorite picture of Susan is this one by Peter Hujar.) She told wry stories about Susan complaining that Annie never took any pictures of them at home or on trips, and how Susan always ended up mad when they did a shoot for her book jacket photos. Leibovitz gave birth at 52 to her first child, Sarah Cameron Leibovitz, whom she named in honor of pioneering photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, and had twin daughters, Susan and Samuelle, via a surrogate mother  four years later, five months after Sontag's death. Her father always insisted the six Leibovitz children smile for photographs, which Annie felt was hugely unfair and fake. Forty-odd years later, Leibovitz struggled to take an important portrait of her mother, who was ill. (She showed us the image, a beautiful black-and-white  picture taken outdoors with natural light.) Her father hated it. He said, "She's not smiling!"

Among her favorite photographers are Sally Mann, Nan Goldin, and Richard Avedon. Leibovitz told the crowd that after Rolling Stone ran her photo of Bette Midler lying among roses, Avedon sent Jann Wenner a letter to say "the cover worked out." Leibovitz's editor interrupted her to explain, "Avedon said it was the best photograph of the last 20 years." Technological advances have allowed her to create images that are not what they seem: Many of her group portraits are photoshopped, joining subjects shot alone. Of the 20 covers for Vanity Fair's Africa issue, only two of the pairings seen sharing a whisper or leaning on each other were actually photographed together. On the other hand, she does her own stunts. She stood unsecured on one of the Chrysler Building's gargoyles off the 61st floor to photograph dancer David Parsons who posed nearby. It was a windy day. She didn't fall. John Loengard got the shot.

Leibovitz will be at the Union Square B&N on December 11 promoting her new book, At Work, which goes on sale November 18.

Right now you can watch her at work in this video, shooting a "feisty" Queen Elizabeth II. At least watch until Leibovitz suggests the monarch remove her tiara [which Annie endearingly calls her crown] because it would be "less dressy." Two words Her Majesty repeats in abject horror and indignation, very probably having never heard them spoken before.

Born September 30: Truman Capote

When he was eleven he began writing three hours a day and when he was nineteen he won an O. Henry Award for his short story "Shut a Final Door." His first published novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, is the autobiographical story of a thirteen year-old in rural Alabama coping with his mother's death and his budding homosexuality. Typical of the rest of his career, the book equally impressed and scandalized its readers, not least for Capote's calculated, overtly sexual author photo. It spent nine weeks on the NYT bestseller list and brought him the fame he craved. Ten years later, after several books, a play, a screenplay, and a Broadway musical, Capote wrote Breakfast at Tiffanys, a smash success. The following year, 1959, he saw a brief article about a family murdered on a farm in Kansas and embarked on what would become a years-long odyssey into the lives of everyone involved, including the killers. The New Yorker serialized In Cold Blood in 1965 and it became an international bestseller when it appeared as a book in 1966. Capote's genius legitimized the true crime genre and invented the "nonfiction novel." Later that year he hosted the Black and White Ball, what many consider to be the party of the century. Adding to residences on Park Avenue, Long Island, and Switzerland, he bought a house in Palm Springs, downgraded his relationship with Jack Dunphy, and sank into heavy abuse of alcohol and drugs for the next eighteen years. Claiming to be writing an American version of Proust's epic, Capote never finished more than four chapters of his endlessly delayed Answered Prayers. When they finally appeared in Esquire as short stories in 1975-6, his betrayal and mockery of the society wives he had swanned among for so many years cost him most of his friendships. His alcoholism and drug addictions worsened, as did his judgment: He often appeared on talk shows drunk, erratic, and boring. In 1980 he published Music for Chameleons to surprising acclaim but the renewal was short-lived. He talked big, hyping the nonexistent Answered Prayers and a revival of the Black and White Ball in Los Angeles, but nothing happened. He died in 1984 at fifty-nine. His royalties supported Dunphy until his death, then established a literary prize in honor of a former boyfriend, Newton Arvin, the brilliant National Book Award winning biographer and professor whose life was destroyed when he was fired from Smith College for being gay.

Pineapple Express & The House Bunny

1.) If you can't go to R movies, because you're too sensitive or not the right age, stop reading. The quotes from the movies are unabridged and NSFW.

2.) Yes, it is still August, because I was away.

PINEAPPLE EXPRESS

The mix of stoner comedy and violent killing worked for Roger Ebert but not for me. I laughed some. I stayed awake by counting just a few of these, uh, jokes for you.

In the opening scene, a b&w flashback: Bill Hader tells his commanding officer, "This is your dick!" then pantomimes holding it and performing oral sex from three different angles.

Friendly, buff high school senior saying farewell to Seth's girlfriend: "Time to suck today's dick!"

James to Seth: "What if I gave you a handjob?"

Somebody: "Bro-mosexual."

Hitchhiking, to attract a ride James sticks his thumb out through his fly and wiggles it. They get picked up by an older man.

Girlfriend's angry dad to Seth and James: "Or I will take you outside and fuck you in the street!"

James to Seth: "They say Don't Dip Your Pen in Company Ink, but I'm totally glad I dipped in your ink."

Police officer, describing students: "Eyes as red as the devil's dick."

Extended visual prank of James rubbing his wrists tied behind him against Seth's belt buckle as they both hump up and down for friction, moaning. Switches to Seth using his mouth.

Killer Asian: "Prepare the suck the cock of karma!"

Other Killer Asian: "Suck my balls twice!"

Seth or Red: "Is that a boner coming on?"
Red or Seth: "Is that us getting an apartment together?"

Seth to Red, who may fall asleep: "That's ok, we won't put our piece in your mouth."

Danny McBride's character, Red, talks about his wife in prison but he might mean "wife" because after he drives over someone and shoots him, he says, "You just got killed by a gay [inaudible]!"

Some bloggers say Craig Robinson's hitman character is gay. Maybe I missed more than that inaudible.

THE HOUSE BUNNY

Great idea badly realized. Effervescent Anna Faris rises way above the weak script (by the Legally Blonde duo) as a ditsy Playboy Playmate who becomes house mother to cliched sorority losers. The bizarre casting includes a spawn of Tom Hanks, a spawn of Bruce & Demi, a star from American Idol, and the star of The All-American Rejects. In a better world, Anna might have been full of daffy but spot-on observations about men, but here she gets only one.

"Boys like what other boys like."

"The eyes are the nipples of the face."

"My heart is pounding like a nail!"

"You're a butterfly! You're not an earthworm anymore!"

Friend: "What if he's one of those guys who wants to have a conversation before he hooks up?"
Anna: "Wait, he's gay?"

Born September 18: Greta Garbo

Was Garbo a control freak because in her early years she was so often blindsided by the unexpected? When Greta Lovisa Gustafsson was fourteen, her beloved father, a janitor, died and she had to quit school to work fulltime in a barbershop. She became a salesclerk in a department store in Stockholm, also modeled for them, made a promotional short film, a feature, and was discovered by a gay director, Mauritz Stiller, who gave her the name Greta Garbo. Louis B. Mayer saw their Gosta Berlings Saga in Berlin and brought them both to Hollywood. By the next year, 1926, she was a major star, with silent movies like The Temptress and Flesh and the Devil, and when her only sister died of cancer at twenty-three, MGM wouldn't let Garbo go back to Sweden for the funeral.
    She had an affair with her co-star John Gilbert; they moved in together; and he proposed to her three times. In a reverse of the cliched ultimatums, Garbo wanted to quit working if they got married, he wanted her to continue making movies. She finally agreed to a wedding; the day came; and she left him at the altar. The next year, after dinner with Garbo, her former co-star and fellow Swede, Einar Hanson, died in a car crash driving home. Delaying the inevitable, knowing it had ruined many careers, she finally made the transition from silents to talkies with Anna Christie in 1930 and again she was a towering success, earning her first Academy Award nomination. Her second Oscar nod came with her second movie, Romance. In 1931 she had four starring roles, including the lead in Mata Hari, and began her relationship with actress Mercedes de Acosta. (She also had affairs with Louise Brooks and Marlene Dietrich.) The following year she made Grand Hotel. In 1933 she used her clout to get Laurence Olivier removed from Queen Christina and replaced by her ex-fiancee John Gilbert, now fading. Her stardom skyrocketed throughout the 1930s with Anna Karenina, Camille, and Ninotchka (whose original poster said, "Don't Pronounce It -- See It!") In 1941 she made Two-Faced Woman, her second movie with Cukor, then took a break from acting. In 1949 Garbo did test shoots for a comeback in Walter Wanger's La Duchesse de Langeais, which couldn't get financed and was never made. She turned down every other role she was offered. She left Hollywood for New York (450 East 52nd St.) but was awarded an honorary Oscar in 1955. She furiously shunned Mercedes de Acosta when she published her memoir including her lesbian affairs, Here Lies the Heart, in 1960; survived breast cancer; survived People magazine publishing photos of her swimming nude in 1976; and died at eighty-four in 1990. Famously frugal, she left $20 million to her niece.
    For the record, she never said, "I want to be alone." Her character said, "I want to be let alone," which was true of Garbo offscreen as well: She avoided interviews, never attended premieres, did not reply to fan mail, never signed autographs, and elaborately eluded paparazzi. Obvs, the mystery increased people's fascination. The Guinness Book of World Records named her the Most Beautiful Woman Who Ever Lived. In 1950, she was voted Best Silent Film Actress of the Century, and in 1999 AFI named her the fifth greatest film actress of all time.

Born September 17: Bryan Singer

Adopted at two months, an only child, a child of divorce, Jewish in a largely Catholic neighborhood, and gay, Bryan Singer has often spoken about feeling like an outsider as he grew up and how that awareness has made him a better filmmaker. His first movie to be widely released, The Usual Suspects, won two Oscars. His next was Apt Pupil, and after that he made the record-shattering X-Men, in which all kinds of minority moviegoers saw an allegory about themselves. Openly gay, he often hires family, giving bit parts to his mother, father, and stepmother, and major roles to Ian McKellan, Patrick Stewart, and Kevin Spacey. His next film stars Tom Cruise with Stephen Fry and Eddie Izzard. It is Singer's second Nazi movie and it looks as awful as its abysmal buzz. Officially, it has had five different release dates, from June 08 to February 09, and is currently scheduled for December 26. Although his movies have homoerotic moments, homo-friendly subtexts, and a really serious uniform fetish, Singer has yet to make a gay movie. He was attached to direct The Mayor of Castro Street but was beat out by Gus van Sant's Milk. He is also executive producer of the smash hit tv show House, the most watched series of the 2007-08 season.

GQ Titles Cover Story "Megan Fox Was a Teenage Lesbian!"

If Megan Fox, now 22, somehow didn't become an icon to lesbians after Transformers, in which she fixed cars and wielded powertools while looking ultra hot, she might now. She told GQ about her affair with a female stripper, when she was 18, and they called their cover story "Megan Fox Was a Teenage Lesbian!" She also listed some other women who turn her on.

"Look, I'm not a lesbian," said Fox. "I just think that all humans are born with the ability to be attracted to both sexes. I mean, I could see myself in a relationship with a girl -- Olivia Wilde is so sexy she makes me want to strangle a mountain ox with my bare hands. She's mesmerizing. And lately I've been obsessed with Jenna Jameson, but ... oh boy."

The "I could see myself in a relationship with a girl" statement is no reflection on her total commitment to 35 year-old actor Brian Austin Green, to whom she is engaged.

Live Long and Prosper: George Takei Marries Brad Altman

Yesterday George Takei and his partner of twenty-one years, Brad Altman, were married in a Buddhist ceremony at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles. Takei, best known for playing Mr. Sulu on Star Trek, is 71 and Altman, a business manager, is 54. The nearly 200 guests included Chekov and Uhura but not Kirk or Spock. Takei, who was interrned in American camps during WWII, has been a lifelong human rights activist and vocal gay rights supporter since coming out. And he's funny. During the ceremony he called his husband an "organized, detail-obsessed, punctuality-driven control freak" adding that he himself is "easygoing with details, so we're a good fit." They wore matching white tuxedos and, after the bagpipe procession, entered to the Chorus Line song "One Singular Sensation." They will honeymoon in Argentina and Peru.

Wedding Video

After all night and all day on three airplanes, I was a little loopy but still alert enough to eavesdrop on my two female neighbors' conversation with the flight attendant. The two women were very attractive with matching long blond hair, matching track suits, and matching Nikes, so frankly I was surprised when each one mentioned her husband. Aisle, terrific looking at forty-one, told the flight attendant she got married five weeks ago. The flight attendant's first utterance was, "What went wrong at your wedding?" Without missing a beat, Aisle answered, "My first row was empty. My friends sat in the back thinking that was reserved for my family. And I forgot my slip. So my dress---[inaudible]" Somehow this lead to the confession that she only had still photographs of her wedding, no videotape to replay. The flight attendant said, "You DIDN'T VIDEO YOUR WEDDING???" with such incredulity she might have been saying, You didn't show up?

So, whatever mistakes they've made in the past [Anne Heche, Edtv], Ellen and Portia got their video. And how.

MILK Trailer

Hello, Oscar. The movie opens November 26.

Born September 1: Lily Tomlin

Detroit's funniest daughter, Mary Jean Tomlin was featured on Merv Griffin when she was twenty-six and landed a spot on Laugh-In when she was thirty, creating the telephone operator Ernestine (seen here talking to a young Cher; not funny but interesting as a weird time capsule). Wanting to expand another character, Edith Ann, the bratty child in the big chair, Tomlin found the Peabody winning after school special writer Jane Wagner. They clicked. They've been life partners and collaborators for forty-five years. Compared to other longterm couples, say, Blake Edwards and Julie Andrews, their output has been phenomenal. Wagner wrote and directed Tomlin projects ranging from Grammy winning comedy albums and Emmy winning tv specials to hit movies (The Incredible Shrinking Woman) to super flops (Moment by Moment, co-starring John Travolta; what a mixed-up set that must have been) to Tony-winning Broadway megahits (The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe). Beyond her endeavors with Wagner, Tomlin most frequently worked with Robert Altman (Nashville, Short Cuts, A Prairie Home Companion), and gave star performances in 9 to 5, All of Me, Big Business, and Flirting with Disaster. She's had recurring roles on the television shows Murphy Brown, The West Wing, and Will & Grace. In March 1977, when Time was still a news magazine, Tomlin was its cover story; Wagner is identified first as "a friend" but later the article says they share a house off the Sunset Strip. Tomlin co-produced and narrated The Celluloid Closet, an act many took as her coming out. She's a hysterical actress, of course, but is she also a little hysterical? Her monumental freakouts on the set of I Heart Huckabees are more than a little salty yet fascinating as the realest "making of" clips you'll ever see; and her understandable frustration at the constant changes is nothing compared to the colossal tantrum thrown by the director. Remember, nothing is harder than comedy.

Mamma Mia! Here I Go Again

If Manhunt is the third horseman of the apocalypse destroying gay culture, isn't the fourth and final horseman the straightening of ABBA? The movie Mamma Mia ought to feel like Sydney's Mardi Gras filmed like Moulin Rouge. In 2008, wouldn't the freshest way to handle lyrics like "Does your mother know that you're out?" be as an ode to young closet cases? Yet at every turn the film chooses the safest, straightest path. 

Look, it's summer, the movie is fun, the second half is really enjoyable, you should go; Meryl, Christine, Julie, and Colin all have terrific nanoseconds; but I sat in the theater dismayed that the gayest pop hits this side of YMCA were being played out in a story entirely devoid of gay content. Except for Pierce Brosnan, there's not even good eye candy. Pretty colors yes, but the camera seems terrified of flesh. In his swim trunks the fiancee is mainly shot from the shoulders up (the cocky bastard from The History Boys). The dock dance is shot too far back, the guys are thirty-five and wearing flippers so they can't dance and some are cloaked in hideous Tommy Bahama short sleeve shirts unbuttoned. In Greece! I was on several Greek islands last summer and, happily, I can report that at beach dances everyone was shirtless and no one was over twenty-four, except my partner and I who moved invisibly through the crowds like Scrooge (me) and the Ghost of Christmas Past (him).

Then, in the movie's final moments, one of the girl's three potential fathers announces he's gay. It's extremely muddled but apparently he only realized his orientation the night before. He's almost fifty. At least he chose a very attractive man with whom to make up for lost time, but again the camera hurries past them.

It's disappointing because the director is an out lesbian, Phyllida Lloyd. Making her feature debut with a global franchise property she obviously wouldn't have had much autonomy, yet it's also clear given her background in English opera, she's closer to Wagner than HSM.

But, you know, The history book on my shelf is always repeating itself. No surprise that timid Hollywood still lags behind America on gay issues. We haven't had a major gay movie since Brokeback, and the next one, Milk, is another historical pic in which the main out character gets murdered for being gay. The tired lie that multiplex moviegoers "aren't ready" for the gays is refuted on this week's newsstand: The main cover of middlebrow, middle America People is Ellen and Portia's wedding, not the straight, goldenboy swimmer's eight Olympic medals.

If you need further proof that ABBA has been irrevocably usurped by the straights, help comes from John McCain. Blender asked both candidates for their top ten lists. (Worth the click to see all ten.) McCain's number three is Take A Chance on Me, and his number one favorite song of all time is Dancing Queen. Gay culture, we loved you; now, RIP.

John McCain's Top Five Songs

1. Dancing Queen, ABBA
2. Blue Bayou, Roy Orbison
3. Take a Chance On Me, ABBA
4. If We Make It Through December, Merle Haggard
5. As Time Goes By, Dooley Wilson

Barack Obama's Top Five Songs

1. Ready or Not, Fugees
2. What's Going On, Marvin Gaye
3. I'm On Fire, Bruce Spingsteen
4. Gimme Shelter, Rolling Stones
5. Sinnerman, Nina Simone

Born July 14: Arthur Laurents

Arthur Laurents turns eighty today, and really the man has a lot to celebrate. Born in the Jewish section of Flatbush, he wrote the book for the musicals West Side Story, Gypsy, Anyone Can Whistle, and Hallelujah, Baby!; the novels and the screenplays for The Way We Were and The Turning Point, the screenplay for Rope (starring his then-love Farley Granger); the play that became the movie Summertime; and he directed I Can Get It for You Wholesale, La Cage Aux Folles, Anyone Can Whistle, and the Broadway versions of Gypsy in 1974 and this year's triple Tony winning revival starring the Patti Lupone. Laurents was openly gay even during the McCarthy era, when he received less work but avoided being blacklisted. Smart people can discuss the obvious and subtle gay substitutes and outsider figures who run through all of Laurents' work. His candid autobiography is called Original Story By. He and his partner Tom Hatcher lived together fifty-one years, mainly in Quogue, Long Island, until Hatcher's death in 2006.

Born July 11: Tab Hunter, Vito Russo

The blond movie star and the brilliant movie watcher.

Born July 7: George Cukor

You might make the case that Katharine Hepburn owed her career to George Cukor. He gave Hepburn her first movie role in A Bill of Divorcement, then cast her as Jo in Little Women, then as Sylvia Scarlett. Their last collaboration was 47 years after their first, when Cukor directed her in The Corn Is Green for television. He famously paired her with Cary Grant in Holiday and The Philadelphia Story, and perfected the Hepburn - Tracy subgenre with Adam's Rib and, less so, with Pat and Mike. According to William J. Mann's biography Kate, she was also indebted to Cukor for the way he perpetuated the fabled Hepburn - Tracy offscreen romance, which Mann says was fabricated to mask the never married star's lesbian affairs. Cukor was much more open in his own gay pursuits, hosting weekly Sunday afternoon pool parties where Hollywood's brightest mingled with aspiring actors and rough trade. Depending which version you choose, Cukor's being fired from Gone with the Wind after two years of prep and three weeks of filming was either because Clark Gable refused to be directed by a "fairy" or because Gable was terrified Cukor knew about his own past gay relationships. Nevertheless, even after Victor Flemming took over, Cukor continued to coach Vivien Leigh and Olivia de Havilland on their roles. As for his way with male actors, no director has coaxed more performances winning the Oscar for Best Actor than did Cukor. Among his other great achievements are Dinner at Eight, David Copperfield, Camille, Romeo and Juliet, The Women, Gaslight, Born Yesterday, A Star Is Born, It Should Happen to You, Travels with my Aunt and My Fair Lady.
 

Born July 1: Farley Granger

Early last year, the 1940s and 50s movie star Farley Granger finally confirmed his many same sex affairs in his autobiography with the Goldwyn catchphrase title Include Me Out. Bravo, for someone about to turn eighty-two, and yes he can be included out as of 2007. Yet like so many people who wait too long to be honest, Granger wants to rewrite the past to cast himself as braver than he really was. Of his sexual life, he claims, "I never hid it or felt guilt about being who I was, but I didn't blare it either." I never hid it? An interview in The Villager with Granger and Robert Calhoun, his co-author and partner for the past 45 years, offers an even more delusional exchange:

It seems to me you’ve never actually been in the closet, the journalist said to the actor. “No, I never was.” Granger quietly replied.
“That’s why he resents labels,” Calhoun said. “And ‘gay’ — in itself, destruction of a perfectly good word — is just another way of saying faggot.”

Granger's breakthrough role, in Rope, was based partly on the real life Leopold and Loeb case from 1924 in which two bright gay homophile lovers, 19 and 18, committed a murder apparently for the excitement of seeing if they could get away with it. In the movie the debonair killers are in their twenties, played by Granger and John Dall, also gay Uranian in real life. As filming began Granger had just fallen in love with the screenwriter, Arthur Laurents, and the couple would soon move in together. If no one were hiding anything, a studio flack just might find a publicity hook in all this. No chance. Granger and Laurents told everyone they were merely roommates, and publicly, in order to go out together, they dated women. (Laurents wrote about this in his own autobiography, As Written By, which Knopf published in 2000.) Granger's greatest role, again directed by Hitchcock, was in Strangers on a Train, and it too had a strong gay Sodomite subtext and pedigree, coming from the much more explicit novel by Patricia Highsmith, a lesbian Sapphist. Obviously in the era of McCarthy witch hunts, a movie star could no more be openly gay Pederast than openly Communist. Granger would earn more respect if he admitted, "I felt I had to hide it," and he might have done more good if he had been more open when it really mattered.

The Hollywood Reporter: Why Gay Films Fail

Writing in The Hollywood Reporter, Gregg Goldstein examines the failure of gay films to find audiences in theaters. Last year, Strand Releasing put twenty-two movies in art house cinemas and their total gross, combined, was $462,000. Even the New Fest's director, Basil Tsiokos, says most lgbt film festivals have devolved from launching theatrical runs to launching direct to DVD releases. But no one knows why. The photo above is from C.R.A.Z.Y. the internationally praised movie that swept eleven Genie Awards (Canada's Oscars) in 2006 but still can't find a U.S. distributor because it's g.a.y.

Born May 21: Raymond Burr

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. He claimed to have had three wives and a son. 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." One marriage, short-lived, 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.

Born March 14: Kevin Williamson

Kevin Williamson was accepted at NYU Film School but couldn't afford to attend, and after graduating from East Carolina University, and drifting through a series of dead-end jobs in New York then Los Angeles, he wrote his first screenplay in three days so that he would have a sample of his work when applying for tv writing jobs. Instead, his script sparked a bidding war between rival studios and the finished movie, Scream, became the highest grossing horror movie of all time. After the success of Scream 2, Scream 3, and I Know What You Did Last Summer, and after coming out publicly, Williamson tried television. The result was the autobiographical, allusion-packed Dawson's Creek, the generation-defining teenfest that made the WB. So important was the show to the new channel that when the network went off the air in September 2006, the final program they played was the Dawson's pilot. His recent projects, the movies Cursed and Venom and the tv series Wasteland, Glory Days, and Hidden Palms, have not met with the same success, but the man has bank. Apparently his parties are still so crowded with cute it's scary.