Category Archives: LGBT

Second Look(ing) – HBO Drama Gets Second Season Pickup

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Glad to report that HBO’s drama, Looking, focusing on three gay friends in San Francisco has been picked up for a second series. The seventh of the original eight half-hour episodes airs this weekend.

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One of my favorite British imports, Russell Tovey, who plays Kevin in HBO’s Looking. He’s been upgraded to a series regular for the second series. The final two episodes in the first season begin airing March 2 in the US.|Image: HBO

I’ve become a real fan of this series after it had a pretty rocky start for me. I’m still of the opinion that the creators and HBO really screwed the opening. When they needed a home run — or at the very least a triple — they walked a guy. (Look at me with the baseball metaphors!)

That’s why it got the “boring” wrap. It wasn’t. It isn’t. It was just packaged incorrectly. The first two episodes needed to be one hour-long episode to hook people. There were no hooks in episode one. Some of us came back because we needed more gay content than just Will and Sonny — not that we don’t LOVE Will and Sonny, but you’d never get the equivalent of Looking Episode 5 on daytime!

Anyhow, even better, main character Patrick’s hottie Latino love interest, Raúl Castillo, his hunky English boss, Russell Tovey, and Dom’s hilarious roomie, Lauren Weedman, have all been upgraded to regulars for the new season.

Here’s a great piece, including an interview with series creator Michael Lannan, by Jim Halterman. I’m pretty much in agreement with Halterman’s assessments of the show.

Previous Looking Post … And the one before that.

Times Keep a-Changin’

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This week it’s Cook County, Ill. and the state of Oregon leading the charge for equality. In case you haven’t heard, a federal district court judge in the Land of Lincoln has said there is no lawful impediment for making same-sex couples in Cook County wait to get married. So, Chicagoans, head down to the Court House!

And out in the Pacific Northwest, the attorney general of the Beaver State — *chuckle*; I’m five years old — has said that her state’s constitutional ban on marriage equality “cannot withstand a federal constitutional challenge under any standard of review.” Attorney General Ellen Rosenbaum said that while her office will not defend the ban, the state will continue to enforce the law until such time as it is overturned.

We are reaching the tipping point, friends, where these state constitutional bans on marriage equality are beginning to fall like so many dominoes. And that’s why you are seeing so many last minute crazy grabs to hold onto the past in places like Arizona, Kansas and Indiana.

Fifty years ago, Bob Dylan wrote and recorded these words:
Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don’t stand in the doorway
Don’t block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There’s a battle outside
And it is ragin’
It’ll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin’.

©Bob Dylan|Special Rider Music

They resonate for us today as much as they ever have.

That was the Gay Week That Was

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The Week of February 10, 2014 is really one for the history books. The LGBT history books, for sure.

February 10 would have also been my dad’s 84th birthday. I wonder if he would recognize this brave new world?

Red EqualsMy old home, the Commonwealth of Virginia, had its constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage struck down this week. This comes after the new Virginia attorney general determined that he could find no legal foundation, since the Windsor decision, to support upholding the statute, outraging conservatives.

The courts also held this week that Kentucky had to recognize same-sex marriages of Kentuckians who were married in Equality States but who resided in the commonwealth. Now same-sex couples are asking that Kentucky allow same-sex marriages to happen within its borders. So, keep a weather eye out for this; still a developing story.

Also in Nevada, the Silver State’s attorney general said that his state’s constitutional same-sex marriage ban was “no longer defensible.” An about-face from a state where the constitutional restriction was put in place more than a decade ago.

Of course, this comes on the heels of recent decisions in Utah, Oklahoma and New Mexico.

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#52 from Mizzou, Michael Sam comes out. |Image: nbcnews.com

College football’s best defensive end, an odds-on favorite in the upcoming NFL draft, boldly came out this week before the draft. Michael Sam‘s decision set the entire sports world on its ear and prompted lots of conversations about gays in pro sports in places where they normally wouldn’t talk about such things. Good on him.

It also elicited this:

Dale Hansen is my new hero. Other people think so, too, which is how he got a trip here:

The magnificent Ellen Page came out at an HRC event and gave a terrific, moving and uplifting speech. Overnight, she has gone from quirky young star to just full-on awesome.

It wasn’t all good LGBT news, of course, because it seldom is, when you are fighting for what is right. The legislature in Indiana passed the first round of a same-sex marriage constitutional ban. The only good thing about this is that the earliest it could possibly go before Hoosier voters is 2016. Hopefully by that time, it will be so out-of-step with the rest of the country that it won’t go forward.

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Kansas: Trying to become the Inequality Heartland of America

And in Kansas — Oh, Kansas, moan ‘Friends of Dorothy’ everywhere — the legislature was caught up in a time-travel drama that sent their collective consciousness back to concocting Reconstruction Era policies. Some say the Kansas bill to enshrine LGBT discrimination into law under the (laughable) guise of being non-discriminatory — I know, I know — won’t pass, but I am afraid that stranger things have happened.

And there’s Sochi, and Nigeria, and, and, and ….

But, on Valentine’s Day, daytime television’s only gay supercouple, Days of our Lives‘ Will and Sonny, officially got engaged. I am fairly confident that this is a first for daytime, although some have said that Kyle and Oliver of One Life to Live were the first. I’m not sure that’s correct, but I’ll happily be proven wrong. We’ve come a long way since January 2009 when As The World Turns’ Luke and Noah, daytime’s very first gay male couple finally consummated their relationship, but were never shown in bed together! DAYS gets a gold star in my book for the way they’ve been treating these guys. Here’s a sample:

I wonder what next week will bring? An early spring? Please? Anyone?

What’s the Deal with Bathrooms? | Part I

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Maine Court Rules In Favor Of Transgender Pupil.| Huffington Post Jan. 31, 2014

PORTLAND, Maine (AP) — School officials violated state anti-discrimination law when they would not allow a transgender fifth-grader to use the girls’ bathroom, according to a ruling by the highest court in Maine that’s believed to be the first of its kind.

The family of student Nicole Maines and the Maine Human Rights Commission sued in 2009 after school officials required her to use a staff, not student, restroom.

“This is a momentous decision that marks a huge breakthrough for transgender young people,” said Jennifer Levi, director of the Boston-based Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders’ Transgender Rights Project after the Maine Supreme Judicial Court’s ruling on Thursday.

This is the latest round of judicial tug-of-war over transgendered persons and use of restroom facilities.

I AM COMPLETELY BAFFLED BY OUR SUDDEN WORRIES OVER PEEING!

I’ve more to say on this — perhaps that’s obvious as this is labeled “Part I” — but if you have anything to say on the subject, please leave a comment below or send me a tweet.

Looking at ‘Looking’ Again: A New Look

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We’re now halfway through the first season of eight episodes of the new HBO series Looking and I thought it was time to cast another critical eye in its direction.

The show has opened to mixed reviews, including a few that were downright hostile. And today, unlike a few years back, much of the audience has its own platforms on which to weigh in, as well. (Hi, howya doing?!) A lot of those unsolicited reviews and comments have bandied around this dreaded word: boring.

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Murray Bartlett, Jonathan Groff and Frankie J. Alvarez in Looking on HBO. |image: John P. Johnson

In my initial take, I did not use that word (you’re welcome), but I wasn’t overly positive, either. That was after one episode.

After the second episode I was not sure whether I was coming back for a third time. I did, though, and I was glad of it. I felt that Looking was beginning to find its footing in the third episode. It made me eager to come back for number four.

That episode, Looking for $220/Hour, did not disappoint. In addition to continued realistic and nuanced performances from all of the principals, Groff’s palpable tension with guest star Russell Tovey (someone whom American audiences have seen far too little of), a nuanced little turn from Scott Bakula and another utterly captivating taste of Lauren Weedman’s Doris, we saw a storyline pull together that had been set up in the previous episodes, but the strings were just revealed here.

A lesser series, I am sure, would have had Groff’s Patrick falling in bed — or into those office chairs that could have so easily doubled as sex swings — with Tovey’s Kevin instead of letting us feel Patrick’s rocky emotional footing during the “fried chicken” scene leading to a reunion with Richie (Raúl Castillo) that was both beautifully executed and sexy as hell without being overt.

Actually, I think the problem was in how the series was originally packaged. Often, I think Americans expect “more, more, more” and expect that more to be better. Of course, that’s not always the case. (Generally, it’s not, in fact.) I do think that a half-hour is the right length for these episodes, but I do think that packaging the first two together would have given the series a stronger basis to build upon. (And I would have re-written them a bit, too, but maybe that’s just me!)

Groff told Michelangelo Signorile that he believed in Looking more than anything else he’s been a part of. Good for him. I think he should. For whatever faults it has, this is an intelligent series. Smartly written and directed and chock-a-block with canny performers.

So, boring? No. Well done? Yes. Worth another look? Absolutely.

What is homophobia? Why straight men are right to be afraid of homosexuality.

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Clearly, men in America have grown up learning to be scared of gayness. But not only for the reasons we typically think—not only, in the end, because of religion, insecurity about their own sexuality, or a visceral aversion to other men’s penises. The truth is, they’re afraid because heterosexuality is so fragile.

via What is homophobia? Why straight men are right to be afraid of homosexuality..

This is an intriguing article, but like some who commented on Facebook, I don’t like the title, either.

Here’s the thing: this intense aversion to male-to-male closeness is a twentieth century construct. It comes, in large part, out of Eisenhower era fears — communism, segregation, ‘women’s lib’ — as much as anything. Not that there was no homophobia before the 1950s, God knows, but we became intolerant, intransigently so, during the McCarthy years, and we haven’t veered off of that path very much in the years since.

This goes hand-in-hand with how we make boys stop showing affection to other boys when they reach a certain age. We need to stop that, too.

H/T Steve Grand

The Last ‘Tales,’ Closing the Doors on 28 Barbary Lane

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That address, 28 Barbary Lane, is, I would argue, the most recognized address in gay literature. It is, of course, the sprawling apartment building overseen by transgender landlady Anna Madrigal. It is a place where, if you were a new arrival from Cleveland in the 1970s your welcome might be a joint taped to the door. Or where your new GBF would introduce you to a world that you didn’t even know existed back in the Midwest. Or where, for awhile, a lunatic lived on the roof before he fell off a cliff and was gone for good. Or was he?

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The last one. Armistead Maupin caps nearly 40 years of stories about the denizens of 1970s San Francisco and their offspring in the ninth and final installment in the Tales of the City series.

The godfather of gay serial fiction, Armistead Maupin, has said that with the release of The Days of Anna Madrigal this month, the nearly 40-year-long run of Tales of the City will come to an end. Maupin said, in an interview with BuzzFeed’s Louis Peitzman, “I’ve taken a great deal of care with all nine of these novels, and I want to leave on a high point. I’m also going to be 70 in May, so I’d like to leave a little space for myself to explore some new ideas.”

Like so many gay men of a certain vintage, Tales had a tremendous effect on me. I have no recollection about how I heard about the books, but I did, and with great trepidation, lest some bookstore clerk think I was gay —gasp— I purchased Tales of the City and subsequently devoured it, then More Tales, Further Tales and then 1984’s Babycakes, which dates my discovery to around 1985 or so. I was 21 years old.

I bought Significant Others as soon as it came out in 1987 and 1989’s Sure of You when it hit the bookstore shelves and I read and re-read them all multiple times.

To me, these books allowed me access to a world that I had not even known to dream about, my worldview so stifled at the time by my conservative upbringing in North Carolina; but I was far from the only gay man in the 1980s who ever-so-tentatively stuck a toe out of the closet because of Armistead Maupin and Tales of the City.

By 1993, when the first mini-series aired on PBS, I was living in Washington, D.C., nearly 30 and mostly out and my friends and I would gather each week to watch Tales unfold on the screen while I taped the episodes on my VHS recorder to watch over and over again.

I have such a distinctive recollection of Mouse (Marcus D’Amico) and Dr. Jon  (Billy Campbell, who I had such a crush on!) waking up in bed together and Michael sneaking off to brush his teeth. When he returns to the bed, they carried  on their conversation like it was the most normal thing in the world. Because it was, right? Except that we had never seen anything like that on television before. Men. In bed. Together. The morning after.

And instead of the expected follow-up of, “You will now be damned to hell,” Mona brings them breakfast and Jon sticks his finger in the marmalade pot and licks it off in perhaps the sexiest post-breakfast average morning scene ever put on film. We were mesmerized.

This is really on PBS? It was, and it was so amazingly controversial that it took five more years to get the funding to shoot More Tales and until 2001 to do Further Tales.

Today, I can’t think of the radiant Laura Linney — gifted actress though she is — without first thinking about Mary Ann Singleton. Nor can I imagine anyone else ever in the history of the world playing Mrs. Madrigal other than Olympia Dukakis.

Today, we have HBO’s much-hyped series about gay men in San Francisco, Looking, we have multiple gay-themed series on the web and on cable, we have a cable channel devoted to gay and lesbian programming, and we even have a front burner positive gay storyline on mainstream Days of our Lives. How far we’ve come since it was a scandal to see Billy Campbell’s ass.

We’ve got a long way to go, but through the first quarter century and first half-dozen books of Tales, and after all three TV mini-series, no same-sex couple could get married in the United States. Now you can, in 16 states (depending on what’s being litigated today). That’s an impressive leap forward.

I can’t imagine being that scared, closeted, young gay man that I was when I first found Tales of the City. It’s not often that we can point to a particular piece of literature and say, “This changed the world.” The nine books of the Tales series have done just that. And they’ve probably saved lives, too.

Thank you, Armistead Maupin. Your work has made an indelible impact.

Looking: Pay TV Goes Where The Web’s Been Before

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HBO’s much ballyhooed Looking premiered last night and a lot of gay folks were hanging an awful lot of expectation on this half-hour. Trying to be everything to everybody would be a surefire way to set yourself up for disaster, so I wasn’t looking — as it were — for that. I didn’t have any expectations; I just wanted it to be good.

And it was, but I can’t help but feel a bit like Brad Bell, the co-creator/writer/star of Husbands, the hilarious marriage equality sitcom, who tweeted this:

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I’m going to come back to that in a second, but I also noticed that Rob Owen’s review in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette called Looking the “latest descendant of Queer as Folk.” Well, I don’t buy that at all. It’s closer to a modern day Tales of the City.

Of course, the San Francisco parallels are obvious and Armistead Maupin’s classic stories are classic for a reason and they are more layered because there are simply more layers on the canvas, but Looking’s Dom (Murray Bartlett), the mustachioed waiter nearing 40 who is always on the pull, is a gay clone of Tales‘ Brian Hawkins, not QAF’s Stuart Allen Jones (or Brian Kinney, in the American version). And that’s not taking anything away from Bartlett — he’s lovely — but it bothered me throughout the episode.

I also have to admit being bothered by the opening scenes featuring Jonathan Groff’s Patrick going for a quick handjob in the park because that is exactly what would have happened in Tales of the City in the 70s and 80s; except that it wouldn’t have been interrupted by a cellphone call. If director Andrew Haigh (I am such an enormous fan of his work) and writer Michael Lannan were trying to be ironic, it didn’t read. It came off as another depiction of gay men being completely and utterly driven by sex alone. And, quite frankly, in 2014, we desperately need to get beyond that because, well, straight people.

Then again, see above re: being all things to all people. (And for the record, back in the day when I could have possibly pulled a trick I was too bloody terrified to contemplate it and now that I’m too old and married, I’m awfully too old and married!)

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Frankie J. Alvarez, Murray Bartlett and Jonathan Groff in HBO’s Looking, which follows the lives of three gay men in San Francisco. |Image: HBO

Look, Jonathan Groff is a wonderful, subtle, earnest performer and he’s so enjoyable to watch. Bartlett and Frankie J. Alvarez are equally competent hands on the tiller and you are interested in what will happen to them all enough to tune back in for the next episode. Also, it was nice to see people like Ann Magnuson,  Matt Wilkas (from the delicious indie comedy Gayby) and Tanner Cohen (Were the World Mine, the Shakespeare-inspired gay fantasy) who sports one of the most hilarious tattoos I’ve ever seen on screen.

Back to the Web
But, like Bell intimates, haven’t we seen some of this before? Is Patrick going through the same “slutty phase” as Jack in The Outs? Or are his attempts to find someone who is “not boring” akin to Thom in EastSiders? I have sense that we’ve been down this road already.

What set EastSiders and The Outs apart were the disintegration of a relationship (EastSiders) and the rebuilding of a different kind of relationship after a breakup (The Outs) and while Looking is not the same, it struck me as being a network version of a mashup of these two independent series. Maybe it’s just me, but I didn’t feel that Looking lived up to its hype. Not that it’s not good — because it is — but that there was too much lead in.

Then again, we’re so damn starved for entertainment in the gay community; so desperate that someone will turn that mirror back on us, that when there is something out there in the mainstream that may validate us, we want it to be as good as it possibly can be. And we’re always disappointed when it doesn’t meet all of our expectations.

It is unfair for me to compare The Outs and EastSiders to Looking, because they are each different animals, but I would urge you to look at their world views, too, if you haven’t already. The Outs is available here and EastSiders is available as individual episodes and cut as a full-length feature at logotv.com.

As for Looking, I’ll be looking in on it again next week because, since I just told a bunch of folks to give a recast on Days of our Lives a chance to settle into the role, it would be disingenuous of me not to allow this show to do the same.

P.S. — Don’t take my word for it. HBO has just released the first episode on YouTube for non-subscribers to see.

New Doc Premieres About Jerry Smith, Gay Washington Redskin

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You know I don’t “do” football, but if you live in Washington long enough (and I did) you start to absorb Redskins knowledge by osmosis. Jerry Smith was one of those Redskins who achieved a mythic quality among a certain generation of fans. And he was gay.

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Tight end Jerry Smith during his playing days with the Washington Redskins. |Image: Outsports.

And he couldn’t admit it.

It’s astonishing — I just wrote a post about a same-sex proposal on mainstream Days of our Lives — and here’s a reminder of how far we have come and how far we have to go. Pro football has given us many strong equality advocates recently, people like Chris Kluwe and Brendon Ayanbadejo, but we still don’t have an out player in the NFL. Soon, I hope.

Anyhow, this looks like a terrific documentary. Reporting from Outsports below.

Documentary delves into life of Redskins tight end Jerry Smith, a star who hid that he was gay – Outsports.

‘Sonny’ Skies or Clouds on the Horizon? The New Normal Comes to Salem

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Who could resist this face?

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Sonny Kiriakis (Freddie Smith) proposes to a headless Will Horton (Guy Wilson) on the NBC drama Days of our Lives.

Evidently, the new incarnation of Will Horton on Days of our Lives; that’s who.

Will said “no” to Sonny — actually, he first said “Wow!” — and then explained himself and the couple ended up in the sack anyway at the end of a rather sweet scene that had a few subtle comedy bits thrown in for good measure.

The most interesting thing about this scene to me was the fact that a network television show actually showed a man proposing marriage to another man. A first for daytime; a first since the DOMA and Windsor decisions last summer; and a first not to make a distinction between same-sex and opposite sex couples. It’s a powerful step in the right direction and I have to applaud DAYS for it.

Anyone who follows this blog knows that I was no fan of how Will ended up becoming a father, but the soapy aftermath — including Freddie Smith’s bravura comedic performances delivering the baby and his beautiful monologues at Will’s bedside after he was shot — has cemented my love for this couple.

I desperately want DAYS to keep them together because they can be significant role models for gay youth; a powerful arrow in the quiver of hope for young people who believe they cannot find a solid relationship. I really don’t care if they make them a crime-fighting duo (might be fun) or have Sonny and Will take over the sketchy Kiriakis empire from Uncle Vic and do battle with a new generation of DiMeras or maybe Sonny, Will and T could roll the Brady pub into a burgeoning Salem nightspot conglomerate. Whatever. But I would like them to do it together and not fall into the old, old soap opera trope that finds only old people happy together.

When Will and Sonny began seeing each other, Sonny’s mother, Adrienne, sort of “poked the bear” in the guise of Will’s father, Lucas, telling him that the way the world was changing, who knows, they could end up as in-laws. Evidently, a lot has happened since then because Salem, according to Sonny’s proposal, is now in an Equality State. That made me laugh, I have to admit, but it’s also another gold star in DAYS’s column. Historically, soaps have been far, far behind the curve of social change — let us not forget that the very first same-sex male kiss in daytime was Luke and Noah on As The World Turns in 2007!! — so it’s nice to see a daytime serial in touch with the zeitgeist.

Read all about the episode in the fantastic (as always) blow-by-blow liveblog courtesy of “snicks” on The Backlot: Liveblogging “Days Of Our Lives” A Decent Proposal – thebacklot.com.

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Three episodes in and Guy Wilson has already been proposed to! Must be something in the water in Salem — and I don’t mean Nick Fallon!

The New Guy
I’m kinda tired of the nonsense in the comments on articles about Guy Wilson and whether or not he’s going to be as effective in assaying the character of Will Horton as two-time Emmy winner Chandler Massey.

Soap fans can be just downright nasty sometimes, forgetting that recasting is a part of life for a continuing drama. It was assumed, once upon a time, that nearly every role would be recast at some point. When there were two dozen soaps on the networks, it was always an interesting day when the announcer would say, “The role of Nola Reardon will be played today by….” It was like having a substitute teacher. The actor could be sick, but the story never stopped.

And pre-Internet spoilers when you didn’t know everything in advance, “The role of Nola Reardon will be played today by” was how you knew that it was a temporary recast. But when Dan Region intoned, “The role of Tom Hughes will now be played by”  that meant a new contract player.

What I’m saying is, suck it up, folks. Recasts happen. Guy might be the best thing that’s ever happened to this character. You don’t know. Or, he could just suck. You don’t know that either. Just give him a chance to settle into the role. Ultimately, the character is more important than the actor in the broad scheme of continuing drama.

You should just be happy that DAYS decided that the character and the couple were important enough to the landscape to invest in a new actor.