General Election 2015: Those Celebrity Gay Backers In Full

Conservatives: Christopher Biggins.

Only patron of LGBTory who's not an MP!

Though they can also count on Ivan Massow and David Starkey*, too!

What a right bunch of right-wing gay cunts, eh?

Lib Dems: Patrick Smugtwit?

Probably.

He is Britain's most boring wet liberal poove.

And it's a family affair!

Green: Peter Tatchell.

And who better to dispel the myth that the Greens are all a bit nutty, than the publicity shy campaigning celeb?

Pete's probably said somewhere that he founded the Green Party, if not Planet Earth itself.

Bless.

Labour: Owen Jones.

No, really, he is. Trust me on this one.

SNP: Alan Cumming.

Was often wheeled out during the 'Yes!' campaign.

But like their most famous celeb supporter, Sean Connery, Mr Cumming is an ex-pat. Oops!

'England for the English...' etc etc.

Ukip: Morrissey.

"I nearly voted for Ukip. I like Nigel Farage a great deal," he told Loaded in 2013.

"His views are quite logical – especially where Europe is concerned."

And La Mozza's views are highly logical, too.

She loves England so much she's spent much of the last 20 years living abroad in tax exile, cos it's been flooded with foreigners, innit?

Silly old queen.

* Dr Starkey threatened to do a big queeny flounce and leave the country if Cameron didn't win the 2010 General Election. Paul O'Grady - a man Fagburn much admires - has said he'll leave if the Tories win again this time. It's usually the most unbearable right-wing shits who do this - I am unaware if anyone has actually carried it out.

PS If you decide how to vote because of something a famous person has said, may I implore you not to vote tomorrow?

Update: Undecided/Undeclared - Will Young. Former politics student Will Nice-But-Dim offered his astute analysis to Digital Spy; 'I don't know, it'll be a hung parliament and it all just feels like a wet fart.'

Alan Cumming: Oh The Guilt!

Cumming is promoting a film called Any Day Now, which has already earned a glut of film festival awards. It tells the story of a gay couple in late Seventies LA — a recently out of the closet lawyer and a drag artist — and their struggle to legally adopt a boy with Down’s syndrome. “To begin with I was anxious about the tone of it,” he admits. “I thought, ‘Oh, here we go, I’m playing a drag queen — because every gay man is a drag queen in the movies’ but I thought the result was genuinely moving without being schlocky or schmaltzy. Which is kind of miraculous when you think of all the elements.”
Any Day Now is, on one level, a message film, “hopefully not in a knock-you-over-the-head-with-it way,” he says. “But like any phobia — and you could include homophobia in that — as soon as you’re exposed to it you see it’s not that scary.” He says that he’s incredibly proud of the end result. “And there are very few things I would say that about. I can count, probably on one hand, films I am very proud of.”
This is not, incidentally, the sort of thing that actors tend to say to journalists. But he keeps talking.
“A lot of the films I do I wouldn’t go and see if I wasn’t in them. I mean, I can sometimes watch a film like The Smurfs,” he says, frowning at the ceiling. “But it’s just that it doesn’t take up much of my life, being a Smurf.”

The Times.

Alan seems a nice-enough chap, but I don't think I've ever seen any film that Mr Cumming's been in.
And I've never got the feeling I've missed out.
Looking forward to his book though, May The Foreskin Be With You.
It is, as they say in the trade, forthcoming...

Censorship: Cut!

Alan Cumming - funny name, funny guy etc - claims to have been commissioned by the Wall Street Journal to write an article about circumcision.
No, me neither.
Anyway, apparently they didn't publish it - telling Mr Cumming it was "too raw" (fnar fnar) for their readers. 
So Alan's put it on his website.
Enjoy!

'No man will deny that it feels pretty great to have someone gasp at your penis.

'Well, that’s what happened to me when I first moved to America and started to show people the contents of my underpants.  But their gasping was not due to my gargantuan girth, (though no complaints so far, thank you very much!) but more to the fact that I, unlike the vast majority of American males, have not been genitally mutilated. I have a foreskin. I am intact.

'The gasping was due to the fact that most people had never seen a real, unadulterated, uncircumcised penis before, and some of the people who were seeing mine had, to be frank, been round the block a few times so their reaction was all the more surprising and on refection, upsetting.

'For not only did they have no idea of what a foreskin looked like, they also had no idea how to deal with it when we got down to business. I had to give quite a few seminars on how it worked. Can you imagine being in your thirties and suddenly having to explain to lovers how your genitals functioned, or having them gush that they’d never seen one like yours before, or, worse, recoil in disdain and say ‘what do you even do with that?’

'It made me feel that I was the weird one, I was deformed, I was not normal, when of course it was they who had had a piece of the most sensitive part of their bodies removed. I was the intact one. I was complete, I told myself. They were the ones who were lacking, literally, and who needed to be counseled and awakened to these facts...'

Now read on...

Will Young: Straight Acting Gay/Gay Acting Straight

This week's Popbitch gave us a fascinating little glimpse of what it's like to be at a press screening...

'Sky Living recently held a press screening for its new haunted house show, Bedlam, which stars Will Young. Unsurprisingly, the pop star was the focus of most of the Q&A. And we got a glimpse of what it's like to be one of the only prominent gays in pop.
So was poor Will asked anything about the show or his acting? Well, he was asked if
kissing a girl in the series was "rubbish".
To which he rather cooly replied "Do you mean because I am a homosexual?"
It got worse...'

Fagburn's sure that it did.
Today's Daily Mail have regurgitated Will Young's press call quotes into a feature; 'Will Young isn't spooked by success: Star shows different side in ghostly TV drama'
Like the tease - or possible double entendre - in the title, it's obsessed by the "gay plays straight" angle.

'You could almost believe Will has been possessed by one of the troubled spirits that haunt apartment block Bedlam Heights, as he recklessly kisses and caresses his young and attractive landlady Kate (Charlotte Salt).
A bit of a shocker, isn’t it, Will?
"I think the series has the potential to shock, although I hope you’re not ­suggesting it’s shocking because I am a gay man who gets passionate with a woman," says the singer, his indignation perhaps only partly for comic effect.
"There are plenty of straight actors who have played gay men. Why not a gay actor in a love scene with a woman? I think it’s quite refreshing."'

Fagburn really liked the way Will Young handled this vaguely offensive daftness.
But the thing is gay male actors have been playing romantic straight leads since before the dawn of Hollywood - all that's new is that many big name gay actors are now out.
Hence "Gay playing straight" has become a media trope in the US last year - partly prompted by a Newsweek article by Ramin Setoodeh, Straight Jacket, that argued that out actor Jonathan Groff was unconvincing playing it straight in Glee.
The cat was let out of the closet again more recently by Richard Chamberlain [Left] - an old school TV matinee idol, and quite a dish in his day.
Chamberlain told The Advocate in December; "There's still a tremendous amount of homophobia in our culture.
"For an actor to be working [at all] is a kind of miracle, because most actors aren't."
"So it's just silly for a working actor to say, 'Oh, I don't care if anybody knows I'm gay' - especially if you're a leading man.
"Personally, I wouldn't advise a gay leading man-type actor to come out."
Rent-a-quote ex-rent boy Rupert Everett told BBC Radio 1 he thought Richard Chamberlain was right - claiming the good non-gay parts dried up after he came out; "I just never got a job [in Hollywood] and I never had another job here for, I don't know, ten years probably after [coming out]."
There is an elephant-sized irony in all of this, of course.
All actors are acting, they get paid for playing someone they are not.
A further irony is that when a straight man plays a gay man it's often Oscar Gold!
The Bafta may well be in the goodie bag for Matt Smith playing Christopher Isherwood on the BBC later this year.
"I think that's fine," said Everett, "but that does mean the gay actor who used to just get to play the gay part - like me - has been reduced to drag really."
Hmm...
I'll leave the last few hundred words to Alan Cumming, talking to The Guardian last month;

'"I think it's so mean-spirited. If you're living a lie, that's not healthy, and I think it is really irresponsible of [Chamberlain] and Rupert to say these things."
But do they not have a point – that audiences don't seem able to accept actors who they know to be gay playing heterosexual lovers onscreen, and therefore their acting opportunities are instantly limited?
"But it's not about your work," he says, scornfully biting out the last word. "It's about how you exist as a person in the world, and the idea that your work is more important than you as a person is a horrible, horrible message. I always think about a little gay boy in Wisconsin or a little lesbian in Arkansas seeing someone like me, and if I cannot be open in my life, how on earth can they?
"Anyway, it's an academic question: how can you know [that coming out affects your career]? Some people get less work than others and it has nothing to do with sexuality."'

I wonder if he's talking about anyone we know?