Yesterday, CNN and BuzzFeed announced a partnership, and immediately began publishing listicles on the cable news outlet’s website. One of the first to pop up, timed to the HBO biopic Behind the Candelabra, was a list of 20 straight actors who have played gay characters both on film and television. While the intro suggested that the pair of actors in the Liberace biopic, Michael Douglas and Matt Damon, was the impetus for the list (“Here are 20 other actors that successfully pulled off playing a different sexuality on screen,” the author wrote), the list still included them, meaning the author only managed to come up with 18 straight actors who have played gay roles sometime in the last 20 years. (The earliest film on the list was Philadelphia.) That’s not the only issue with the list: it’s indicative of not just the mindset that straight actors who play gay characters should be heralded for their bravery, but also of the poor and limited cinematic depictions of the gay experience.

While there’s little subtext to the list itself — it is merely a quick collection of actors who have gone gay on film, with no particularly surprising choices and little variety — it’s representative of the larger issue in Hollywood: the lack of gay roles on film. There are 20 roles included on the list, but they represent only 12 movies (and two television shows). Multiple actors from the same films are listed, reminding us that roles for LGBT characters tend to be grouped together.

Here is my response to an unsurprisingly lazy listicle from a straight dude about other straight people who have played gay people on film (and one transgender character, because, you know, we’re all the same, etc). It really pissed me off! 

The presence of Taylor Swift looms over Westerly, Rhode Island this weekend, and she’s practically unavoidable. Yesterday we had lunch in Watch Hill, just a ten-minute drive from Shelter Harbor (where we are staying and are planning to get married next June). Right before we drove back to the house, we stopped into one of those beachside stores for women of a certain class — there was a wall of Vera Bradley bags and a selection of tea towels with cute, sassy little sayings on them, as well as the anchor-themed bags and packages of sea biscuits and starfish that caught my eye. As soon as we walked in, I nearly doubled over when I heard they were playing Taylor Swift on the stereo; we were just steps away from the home she bought, which also sits right on the street and is two doors down from a 300-room hotel. (Some local guys were over last night drinking cocktails, and one told me that the proprietors of Ocean House are not thrilled that Swift moved in next door. He also told me he had worked an event at the home, and it doesn’t have heat. It’s cold this weekend, and I bet she is freezing.) It’s a bit odd that someone of her fame-level wouldn’t purchase a more secluded home, but, you know, she’s a 23-year-old. 

Today we drove over to Charlestown and stopped in an antique store on the way back. While I was waiting to pay for my purchases, the antique dealer told us, unsolicited, that we had just missed Taylor Swift. “I felt really bad for her,” she said. “She didn’t say a word, and was followed around the store by some girls who wouldn’t leave her alone. Her bodyguards paid for her while she went back into the car, and I penned a note telling her that if she ever wanted to come back, I’d close to the store for a couple of hours for her.” (She also commented that she was too thin.) I’m fascinated by celebrity like this: we revile them, we are sympathetic. I don’t care much about Taylor Swift, but it is a bummer that she can’t be left alone. Of course, she chose this profession, this status, so I guess I can’t feel too bad? But on the other hand, there’s someone like Amanda Bynes, who also willingly puts herself in front of an audience and is unable to control how she is depicted, and we use her for our own entertainment: she’s pathetic and sad and we pop-psychologize her, and it’s all a bit of a bummer. Not to be sanctimonious, but it grosses me out whenever I see someone I know tweeting at her, egging her on in some anonymous way, as if you’d walk up to a stranger on the street and tell her how disgusting she was for having whatever mental issue you’d recently diagnosed her with. 

Basically, I think it must be really shitty to be famous. 

LITERALLY ALL I EVER WANT TO DO IS TALK ABOUT CATS! Luckily, the ladies at The Gloss asked me to play Wed/Bed/Dead (their version of Fuck/Marry/Kill, naturally) with characters from Cats. THAT IS MY DREAM. Obviously, I would fuck Rum Tum Tugger.

thematerialworld:

[Photo by Adam Feldman]

Last night, Adam Feldman (theater critic for Time Out New York) organized a midnight vigil for Mark Carson, the Black gay man who was killed in the West Village Friday night.  We gathered on 6th Avenue and West 8th Street, on the corner where he was shot in the face.  It was an intense, emotional event.  I’m bad at estimating these things, but I think there were around 100 [edit: 300] people there.  While a few speakers betrayed an upsetting short-sightedness about how violence operates in our society, most were eloquent and inspiring.  In no particular order:

• Performer and playwright Justin Sayre started things off with a volcanic, passionate sermon about the perceived danger of queer love — how the straight world fears us for the very thing that makes us most powerful, and so the only response is to love harder, love louder, and love more than ever.  His tone set the stage for the event, and allowed people to fully feel the emotions we’d all been locking up tight.
• Photographer and ACT UP vet Jon Nalley revealed, shockingly and emotionally, that Mark Carson is also the name of a fallen ACT UP comrade.  Jon schooled the crowd about the true cause of AIDS death (not the HIV virus, but government neglect and institutional heterosexism), highlighting the connections between one Mark’s death and the other’s.
• Long-time activist and Stonewall vet Jim Fouratt pointed out something that SHOULD be obvious, but which hadn’t occurred to me — that there used to be a hospital TWO BLOCKS from that corner, but in the wake of St. Vincent’s closing, Mark had to be rushed to Beth Israel all the way across town.  Perhaps, in the distance between these hospitals, Mark’s life could have been saved.  In that sense, the politicians that allowed St. Vincents to be converted to a luxury condo high rise — politicians like lesbian mayoral candidate Christine Quinn — may have gay blood on their hands.  Jim helped us understand how depriving a gay neighborhood of a hospital is inherently homophobic and violent.
• A trans woman who was once homeless in that same neighborhood spoke intensely about how vigils shouldn’t be the only time we come together, and how we must take our struggle to the U.N. to fight for queer safety internationally, and hold the U.S. to the highest possible global standard.
• Eugene Lovendusky, a member of Queer Rising read a first-person account of the Stonewall Riots, in which a gay rioter’s head was injured on that very corner, his blood pouring into the street.  Another rioter screamed into the city, “THIS IS THE BLOOD OF YOUR BROTHERS!”  It was chilling, to consider the bloody history of that location.
• Another Queer Rising member, Ben Strothman, pointed out that this murder was allowed to happen because the killer had access to a gun, and that the supporters of gun rights, deep down inside, are primarily afraid of the specter of the Black gunman, who will infiltrate their towns and homes.  These gun rights advocates feel they need weapons to protect themselves from their racist fantasy.  It underscored how racism fuels violence against ALL peoples.
• Khaela Maricich from The Blow was like: we’re all going to die anyway, and it’s better to die being yourself and expressing your love and your identity than hiding it and living longer.  Her comment was somewhat insensitive to queers in greater danger than her, like trans people and people of color, but I understood what she was trying to say.
• An older trans man shared that he was attacked in Manhattan only a few days ago, and reminded the crowd, with tremendous grief in his voice, that trans people are killed CONSTANTLY in this country.
• A straight mother spoke because her adult son in another city asked her to, so she could share her love and support with us.
• Interestingly, a straight young woman who lives on that block confessed that her initial impulse was to text her gay friends, warning them to “dial it down” so that no one on the street would know they’re gay, but that, after hearing the speakers, she realized that this was the wrong lesson - that we should “dial it up,” to demand our right to exist.  ”DIAL IT UP” became a chant, briefly.
• A Black gay man spoke with great anguish, commenting on how not many other men of color were in attendance, and laying out so clearly how different queer people have unique challenges and specific circumstances — that Mark Carson’s life as a Black gay man was significantly different from the lives of the white gay men who made up the majority of the crowd.
• A few speakers mentioned the importance of hate crimes legislation, and thanked the police for their cooperation with the vigil, and one speaker even said, “THANK YOU TO THE NYPD OF TODAY FOR NOT BEING THE NYPD OF 1969!” and though I had been resisting the urge to speak, that was my last straw

I got up on the box and said something like this:

I hope this doesn’t sound callous, but I was not surprised by this death. Queer people are killed in this country all the time.  I have always thought of myself as someone who is vulnerable to murder.  Four trans women were killed in the month of April alone — four in one month!  So when things like this happen in our neighborhoods, we need to ask ourselves what this violence means.  And we have to be skeptical about solutions like hate crimes legislation, which just feeds the prison industrial complex — an industry that profits from the imprisonment of queers and people of color.  One third of all adult Black men in the U.S. are in prisons, and trans people are disproportionately arrested and locked up.  We cannot continue to support this!  And while I’m sure individual NYPD officers were polite in the lead-up to this vigil, we cannot forget that the NYPD ritually harasses trans people and people of color in this city!  Trans women are arrested simply for walking down the street!  So when we talk about how queer people need to be “safe,” we have to ask ourselves what “safety” really means — because the NYPD does not makes us safe!  It harasses and imprisons us!  We must reckon with these connections — that Mark Carson’s death is an extension of the violence that oppresses so many others, from the institutional violence of governments to the random violence of a crazy guy with a gun.

I make a living speaking in front of people, but talking at this vigil was terrifying.  As I spoke, I felt myself hyperventilating, and I worried I would vomit.  After I stepped down, I sat on the curb a few yards away from the crowd, catching my breath.

I wish I had specifically named the Stop & Frisk policy that makes queers and people of color vulnerable to police harassment.  I wish I had called out Christine Quinn for supporting this policy.  

I wish I had acknowledged a previous speakers’ disappointment about the lack of people of color in attendance.  I wish I had pointed out the sad truth: that our queer “community” is still so segregated, such that when a white person organizes a vigil and spreads the word through his social networks, that message will not automatically filter into Black queer circles.  When I mentioned this afterwards to Ted Kerr from Visual AIDS, he added that many queers of color are not willing to make [edit: cautious about making] themselves vulnerable to the kind of police surveillance that surrounded the event.  This hadn’t occurred to me, and reminded me that so many aspects of our queer condition are so complicated, and we all have so much to learn and understand about each other.

When the event was over, I was surrounded by friends and colleagues.  People whom I respect, and who inspire me on a regular basis — the people I came to NYC hoping to meet, and the people who keep me here.  I was proud of Adam for making this happen, and proud of my community for showing up.

But I was sad too — not just about the senseless death of this man — but that there didn’t seem to be anyone at this vigil who knew him.  It seemed indicative of the intense divide amongst queer people in this city.  

Tomorrow night, there will be another rally — this one sponsored by the (often idiotic) LGBT Center and featuring Christine Quinn herself — the lesbian mayoral candidate whose policies hurt queer people and may have allowed Mark Carson to die.  I will not be in town for this event, but I am fixated on it.  Will there be resistance to the party line?  Will Quinn be heckled?  How can we best honor Mark Carson’s death?  What comes next?

[CORRECTION: The earlier riot on that corner was not Stonewall, as I write in this post.  Here’s the clarification from John Knoebel:

“This was not an incident from the 1969 Stonewall Riot […] but happened at the somewhat larger riot of the next summer in August 1970. This was when hundreds of activists pulled off a large demonstration in Times Square against police harassment of gays and lesbians there and then ended up marching all the way to the village where a violent confrontation with police involved many more hundreds from Sheridan Square to 8th Street.]

Dan Fishback is an amazing person who is able to put our anger and frustrations into much more powerful words than I am. 

I go to Craigslist for the poetry.

The sad fact about the way LGBT characters are portrayed in the media is this: each one must fit into a convenient packaging, and each one must represent what the straight world believes to be true about those who fall under the LGBT umbrellas. While we’ve made massive strides in representation in the last decade, there’s still a very narrow gaze pointed at LGBT characters, particularly those on television shows created, produced, and marketed to the straight mainstream. It’s impossible not to politicize any gay character on television, and Modern Family’s Cameron and Mitchell, like the gay characters who paved the way for them, are safe, subdued, “normal” gay men whose typical lives spark little debate on the show (and therefore provide fodder for much discourse among critics). That marriage is their chief concern is telling about the straight world’s idea of gay men; that Cameron and Mitchell might not want to get married didn’t cross the minds of the people who launched the ACLU campaign.

Here’s a thing I’m angry about: the ACLU is trying to convince Modern Family’s producers to include a gay wedding next season. 

Here’s some old news I decided to casually mention on Facebook today because I’m sick of old pictures of everyone’s moms stealing my thunder.