James Franco: Real Men Do Eat Quiche

Henselmann

Karl-Marx-Allee 75, Berlin

Vegetarian quiche x2 €15

Cappuccino x2 €5

Total €20

Here's the bill for today's Lunch With The FT, probably the British newspapers' gayest regular column (that doesn't involve some bloke going on about being a gay dad).
The delicious James Franco's clearly a cheap date - whoopee!
Today he's promoting not a fillum, but his art piece installation thing, Gay Town.
Any good?

The exhibition is a sprawling, infernal mess. Mixed media from an evidently mixed-up mind: videos, printed rugs, neon signs, many of them profane, all questioning the motives of a culture that simultaneously values and trashes those to whom it assigns celebrity status. A recurring image is one of a crudely-drawn Spider-Man figure, with the words “Fuck Spider-Man” scrawled across it. (Franco featured in all three of Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man films, as the hero’s friend-nemesis Harry Osborn, aka the New Goblin.)
The show’s title is a reference to speculation on Franco’s sexual preferences – just one of the preoccupations of the gossip-mongers, fuelled by some of the actor’s professional choices: he played alongside Sean Penn as gay politician Harvey Milk’s lover in the biopic Milk (2008), the gay Beat poet Allen Ginsberg in Howl (2010) and has just co-directed and brought to the Berlin Film Festival Interior. Leather Bar, a sexually explicit reimagining of some “lost” scenes from Cruising, William Friedkin’s infamous 1980 gay police thriller starring Al Pacino [Neglects to mention the new Oz film - FB].
We are a long way from that degenerate world as we take our seats in Henselmann, a bright and empty café-restaurant with cheery yellow seats, named after the architect who designed several of the local buildings...

"Degenerate world"? 
Uh-huh.

Actually, although it all sounds a bit "Next stop, Pseuds Corner", it doesn't look too bad.

PS And here's an interview with Noam Chomsky from yesterday's FT, his favourite newspaper; "My impression in general is that the business press is more open, more free, often more critical, less constrained by external power and external influences.”

James Franco: Straight Acting Gay For Today

'Unusually for Hollywood, Franco is sanguine over speculation about his sexuality. He has a girlfriend, but has joked, after all the gay roles he has played (including Sean Penn's boyfriend in Milk), "maybe I'm just gay". Watching Howl, which is also a love story, you wonder if playing the gay Ginsberg is something only a demonstrably straight actor could risk.
"It's possible," says Franco. "I remember when Brokeback Mountain was being cast, people saying, 'Gosh, I wouldn't want to do that. A gay cowboy?' And I still get it – that's the bloggers' favourite topic, how many gay roles I've played. So it's territory where people pretend they're OK with it, but based on the amount of coverage that a straight person taking one of those roles gets, it shows that there's still a big bias. It's easier for a straight actor to play a gay role than it is maybe for an out gay person to play it; my sense is that a gay actor still feels he or she, if they came out, would be typecast and couldn't play straight roles after that. I don't know the ins and outs of Rupert Everett's story, but he certainly claims that happened to him."'

James Franco - interviewed in The Guardian - adds his two cents to the eternally gripping Straight Acting Gay/Gay Acting Straight debate.
By happenchance The Advocate has just put up an article online; "And the Gay Razzie Goes To... Forget about The Oscars. From J.Lo to Al Pacino, The Advocate looks at some of the actors who've perpetuated stereotypes and turned in terrible performances by going gay."
I'll put up the link when it fucking works!
Update: There we go...

The photo shows James Franco and Aaron Tveit in the movie Howl echoing a famous photograph of Allen Ginsberg and his lover Peter Orlovsky.