Nick Jonas: Fisting The Night Away

Ryan Murphy: Glee & Meee!

If I look back to seven years ago, Glee was going to be about a lot of things — song, dance, Jane Lynch’s character being waterboarded — but for me, I wanted to do something personal on the show. I grew up in Indiana behind a cornfield and a church, and for me the only single person I knew who was gay was Paul Lynde. So with Glee I wanted to write about something personal, something about gay characters, something about creating your own kind of family no matter who you are or where you live.

I have always believed in the ideology of one of my friends and idols, Norman Lear, that the way to acceptance is understanding. You have to see it, experience it in your own house and your life, to empathize. I think the success of Glee and Modern Family brought gay kids and gay families to millions of people who think they didn’t know those kinds of people, and then suddenly, within the course of one month, they did. To me, that is the great legacy of these shows and is why public opinion, I think, has changed so radically and so quickly.

I have been told that seven years ago, before Glee and Modern Family and Transparent and Orange Is the New Black, that only 18 percent of Americans believed that a gay or nontraditional family was entitled to equal rights. Today, that number has grown to 52 percent. That is a great change, that is a great victory, shockingly in such a short amount of time, but there is more work to be done.

I started writing television in 1998, and I still have the network executive notes from my first show in my office. They were repeated misses that used to say the following, quote: ‘Could you please not have the cheerleader wear a fur coat?’ Code for ‘too gay.’ And ‘Could you please remove the gay characters holding hands?’ Code for the same. I am happy to say that I no longer receive notes like this, and I am happy to say that all the executives who gave me those notes are no longer employed...

Ryan Murphy accepting something called the Family Equality Council award.

Via Vanity Fair.

Remember when people used to watch Glee?

The Normal Heart: Kramer Vs Streisand

His [Larry Kramer's] efforts to get a movie made of “The Normal Heart” were delayed by jousting with Barbra Streisand, who had the film rights for years. He admitted to demanding “a lot of money” and that the story be told his way. Ms. Streisand has said she couldn’t raise the money; in Mr. Kramer’s telling, she also expressed discomfort about the subject of gay sex.

“I said, ‘I really think it’s important that after eons of watching men and women make love in the movies, it’s time to see two men do so,’ ” he said. “I bought her a book of very beautiful art pictures of two men making love, and she found it very distasteful.” In response, Ms. Streisand released a statement saying her intention for the movie was “to promote the idea of everyone’s right to love. Gay or straight!”

“Larry was at the forefront of this battle and, God love him, he’s still fighting,” she said. “But there’s no need to fight me by misrepresenting my feelings. As a filmmaker, I have always looked for new and exciting ways to do love scenes, whether they’re about heterosexuals or homosexuals. It’s a matter of taste, not gender.”

Referring to the gay couple at the center of “The Normal Heart,” she added: “I was trying to reach a large audience, and I wanted them to root for these two men to get married.”

Mr. Murphy initially used his own money to buy the rights, Mr. Kramer said, “which shows how much he wanted to do this, and how tacky it sort of is that Barbra never would think of something like that.”

New York Times.

The famously curmudgeonly Mr Kramer, there.

Fagburn wouldn't be surprised if his account is a complete distortion. 

The Normal Heart airs in the US on HBO Sunday.

The Fight Continues: 'Why Should I Be Respectable?'

Ryan Murphy made this!
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The Normal Heart: Beats At Last

Here's the full trailer for HBO's adaptation of Larry Kramer's play The Normal Heart
Directed by Ryan Murphy of the rather different Glee fame, and starring Mark Ruffalo, Matt Bomer, Jim Parsons and Julia Roberts, it airs on May 25th in the US.
Awards ceremonies here we come!

• And here's a very thorough article from Hollywood Reporter on the 30-year saga to get the movie made.

Ryan Murphy: Changing The Channels

“I was at a fundraising event at Rob Reiner’s house and I was talking to the lawyers who are fighting to get Proposition 8 overturned,” Murphy says. “And I asked them why they thought public opinion on gay marriage has changed so much in the last four years.” 
According to Murphy, the legal duo answered without a moment’s hesitation: “Television.”

“I remember being young and hearing my parents having a very derogatory conversation about Paul Lynde while they were watching him on Hollywood Squares,” Murphy recalls. “They thought every gay person was like him, and I thought, Well, I do like scarves, it’s true, but I’m not Paul Lynde,” he says dryly. “That memory stuck with me, so whenever I got any kind of ‘power’ in television, I tried to showcase different kinds of gay people and always made sure gay people were represented in my projects.”
Not that this showcasing came easily to Murphy. “When I first started working in the entertainment industry, it was out of the question to have an authentically gay character on television. Forget it! Forget it.” On his first TV show, Popular, a WB teen dramedy set in the Hobbesian world of public high school, Murphy would get notes from the network criticizing his straight characters as “too gay.” Other shows he pitched around town with gay characters, or even straight characters “with a gay sensibility,” as Murphy describes them, were turned down for being too polarizing and unfamiliar to audiences. “Now it’s like, if you don’t have a gay character, something is wrong with your show.”

Interesting interview with Ryan Murphy in the new issue of Out, with much discussion about how TV has changed over the years, and the potential for TV to change how the world sees The Gays.
The latter subject is this season's hot gay topic in the media, and Murphy may be slightly overstating his case - the first quote above is ridiculously reductive hyperbole.
If only it was that easy... 

The New Normal: The New Boring

The New Normal - the new sitcom from Glee creator Ryan Murphy - starts on E4 this evening.
It's about a gay male couple who have a surrogate baby.
That's right, they're gay dads, and wh...

Sorry, I fell asleep just typing that.
The only interesting thing about this is how quickly a subject that was once outré can become a cultural cliché. 

PS It's rumoured Elton John's had a second baby. Zzzz...

Glee: God Help Us If There's A War!

"The glee bros and I wanted to keep up our chops up over the hiatus so we formed a tribute band"
Posted on Twitter by Mark "Motorcycle Cop" Salling.
Glee co-creator Ryan Murphy is quoted in Deadline magazine that there had been talks about a spin-off show about Chris "US Marine!" Colfer, Cory "Red Injun" Monteith and Lea Michele moving to New York after they "graduate", but this may have been nixed by their bitching about being "fired".

Glee: "The Gayest High School In The History Of Mankind"

"This is Ryan Murphy's latest depraved initiative to promote his gay agenda.
"[William McKinley high school] is the gayest high school in the history of mankind.
"This is clearly Ryan Murphy's vision of what growing up should be, not most of America's. It's a high school most parents would not want to send their kids to."

Dan Gainor, culture critic for fundamentalist Christian gasbags, Media Research Center, whines to order on ABC News about the Born This Way 90 minute special episode of Glee, which was broadcast in the US last night.
I bet the silly old sausage hasn't actually seen it.

• And here's a clip of Blaine serenading Kurt from last night's show - which, admittedly, does make it look like the gayest high school in the history of mankind. Awww...

Update: Fox News Asks: Is Glee Gay Propaganda?
I was really hoping someone would ask this, and am so glad it was Fox News.

Glee: Straight Acting Gay (Not Bi)

"Blaine is NOT bi. He is gay, and will always be gay. I think it's very important to young kids that they know this character is one of them."

Glee creator Ryan Murphy, in a short statement sent to Perez Hilton.
Murphy was responding to a blind item on Hilton's blog suggesting Blaine would become bisexual - which went viral over the weekend.
Perez Hilton was presumably reading a little too much into a comment made by Ryan Murphy in a profile of actor Darren Criss in the latest issue of Out magazine.

"It’s my job as showrunner to keep them apart as long as possible," says Ryan Murphy. "Blaine will openly question whether bisexuality is real. I think that some people will love that discussion and some will not love it."
He’s even coy about whether they’ll get together at all. "When that moment comes - if it comes, says Murphy, "I want to treat that relationship like we treat all the other relationships on the show. I want it to be as flawed and as exposed as everyone else’s."

The delicious Mr Criss took a well-earned break from looking sultry and sweaty in Out's fashion photoshoot to add to the current debate about gay acting straight and vice versa;
"I think it’s more empowering to everybody, including myself, if I’m articulate about identifying myself as a straight male playing a gay character. Ultimately, that’s more powerful for both communities."

Glee Wars: "Fuck You, Kings Of Leon!"

"Fuck you, Kings Of Leon. They are self-centred assholes and they missed the big picture."
Glee creator Ryan Murphy in Hollywood Reporter after Kings Of Leon refused to allow one of their songs to be covered on the show.

"Dear Ryan Murphy, let it go. See a therapist, get a manicure, buy a new bra. Zip your lip and focus on educating seven year-olds how to say fuck."
Kings Of Leon drummer, Nathan Followill, on Twitter.

"That's a homophobe badly in need of some education, I'm all for manicures, don't wear a bra. Would guess most gay dudes don't. It's telling that Nathan can reduce a group of people to a mean-spirited cliché, in a time where young gay men are killing themselves all over the country because of hatred like this.
"That said, I would love to sit down with Nathan or any member of Kings and Leon [sic], and tell them how on Glee we actually love their music, and support their artistry… but cannot condone or even laugh at their clear disdain of gay people."
Ryan Murphy to Perez Hilton.

"I'm sorry for anyone that misconstrued my comments as homophobic or misogynistic. I'm so not that kind of person. I really do apologise."
Nathan Followill on Twitter.

"This whole Glee thing is a shock to us. It's gotten out of hand. At the time of the request, we hadn't even seen the show. It came at the end of that record cycle, and we were over promoting. This was never meant as a slap in the face to Glee."
Kings Of Leon singer, Caleb Followill.

"Glee is great. Kings Of Leon are shit."
Fagburn.