Pride Of Place: Commemorating The Closet

An interesting piece by Dora Mortimer.

PS And should Rimbaud and Verlaine's house in Camden have a blue plaque?

The Guardian: Secrets

Christ, how many times can The Guardian use this crappy and closeting photo to illustrate an article about The Gays?

FFS.

Orlando: Omar

Omar Mateen, the gunman who murdered 49 people in a gay nightclub in Orlando early Sunday morning, may have actually been gay himself and was leading a double life.

Mateen's horrifying attack on Pulse nightclub was initially thought to be a homophobic attack rooted in extremist Islamic ideology.

But now his ex-wife, a former police academy classmate and clubbers have stepped forward to say they think Mateen was gay and had been visiting Pulse since 2013.

Investigators think he could have traveled to Pulse - which was a two hour drive from his home in Fort Pierce in Southern Florida - so he wouldn't have been seen.

It's also been revealed that Mateen used gay dating apps Grindr and Jack'd to chat to men online and was friends with draq queens at the club.

Signs that Mateen could have been gay emerged as far back as 2006 when he asked a male classmate out on a date.

At the time Mateen was said to be going to gay clubs and chatting up men.

Mateen's first wife, Sitora Yusufiy, 27, whom he met online in 2009 and married soon after, told Daily News his family think he murdered the 49 because he was in turmoil about who he really was - not because he was an Islamic extremist...

[Some say he was a regular at Pulse]

Daily Mail.

The Sun.

Oops!

The 'all homophobes are secretly gay' is a well-worn trope - but, despite several high-profile cases involving right-wing politicians and evangelical preachers, is rarely true.

It also serves to absolve heterosexuals from any blame for their homophobia.

Please bare in mind that just because someone says something - here, a woman spurned - it doesn't mean that it's true.

Though the evidence here seems rather compelling.

If it is true, this is still about homophobia, as Omar was a victim of it, too.

Turned this round quick, Dave. Guardian.

Mika: Good Guys

Mika makes almost quite good record shock!

And it's about TEH GAYZ!!!

If those gibberish lyrics can be said to be 'about' anything.

PS Some barely coherent blah about the song and sexuality from the formerly closeted singer.

Adam Lambert: If You Say So

Queen singer Adam Lambert boasted that he's romped with very famous fellas who unfortunately feel they have to hide their sexuality.

The 33-year-old refused to identify his high-profile lovers, but he did say: "I've been with a few of them."

The American Idol graduate blames Tinseltown's macho culture for preventing folk from expressing their true sexuality, suggesting it stops many stars from coming out of the closet publicly through fear it may harm their career.

When quizzed about why they felt the need to disguise their sexual preferences, he told Glamour magazine: "Whether it's music or acting, you've got to remember that those industries are primarily run by men, so maybe it's about that."

Before truthfully adding: "But with women being the primary moviegoers and record-buyers, surely it shouldn't matter so much?"

Word. It shouldn't matter at all.

Daily Star.

Word!

Anyone could claim to have 'bedded secretly gay stars' they don't name.  

And seeing as Adam is as fugly as sin, I doubt there'd be much of a queue.

Rock Hudson: Once I Had A Secret Love

"He was a sweetheart," says Garlington, 77, a retired stockbroker. "I adored him." ...

Garlington was a young film extra when he first met Hudson in 1962.

"He was the biggest movie star in the world, and the rumors were that he was gay," he says. "So I thought, 'Let me get an eye on him.' I stood outside his cottage on the Universal lot, pretending to read Variety, which was probably upside down at the time. He walked out and down the street. He looked back once. That was it."

A year later, after Garlington had broken up with his boyfriend, he got a call from one of Hudson's friends, asking if he'd like to meet the actor. "I think he had me checked out," he says.

"I was scared to death," Garlington says of their first meeting at Hudson's mansion on Beverly Crest Drive in Beverly Hills. "Of course, he was 6-foot-4, a monster. He offered me a beer, but nothing happened. Literally. I was too scared. He said, 'Well, let's get together,' and we did."

"I'd come over after work, spend the night and leave the next morning," Garlington says. "I'd sneak out at 6 a.m. in my Chevy Nova and coast down the street without turning on the engine so the neighbors wouldn't hear. We thought we were being so clever."

The two went to move premieres together, but each brought a female date.

"Nobody in their right mind came out," Garlington says. "It was career suicide. We all pretended to be straight. Once we met Paul Newman and his wife [Joanne Woodward] at a premiere. He looked at me and smiled. I just read in his face – that maybe he knew Rock and I were together. We kind of laughed about it."

Hudson never had to ask him to keep their relationship a secret. "He assumed I would and I did," Garlington says. "He wasn't paranoid." ...

Lee Garlington, Rock Hudson's lover between 1962 and 1965, talks to People magazine.

PS And in case you're so daft you think this doesn't happen these days, Jonathan Groff come on down!

Barry Manilow: Shocked!

With all due lack of respect, Fagburn seriously doubts that even many of the gormless geriatric Tory twats who read the Daily Mail were that shocked.

PS Brilliantly this article doesn't explain why MICHAEL THORNTON wasn't shocked.

Barry Manilow: Curiouser And Curiouser

The news that Barry Manilow has married his long-time manager Garry Kief, and can therefore be legitimately described as gay, belongs in that dusty drawer of the long-distance pop watchers’ memory labelled “didn’t we know this already?” The really surprising thing about Manilow’s marriage, which he hasn’t bothered to officially confirm, is that it took place months ago at his home in front of 30 friends, none of whom felt tempted to tweet about it or post a picture of the happy couple on Instagram.

In my time as a pop-watcher, I have seen the sexuality of performers move so far from being something it would be impolite to enquire about to being the subject that everybody expects to be front and centre that I have naturally assumed that all the artists who wished their public to know about their lifestyle had taken the necessary steps. It appears not.

Back in the late 60s, when homosexual acts were first de-criminalised, the line used to be “Legal? It should be compulsory!” – but it was still only uttered behind closed doors. In the current climate of over-share, it can only be a matter of time before some pop stars desperate for the exposure invites us to witness their first gay experience live via Periscope.

Let me tell you, it wasn’t always this way. When Barry Manilow first came to prominence in 1971 – as the pianist and arranger behind the up-and-coming Bette Midler – it simply wasn’t discussed...

Newspapers, whatever their politics or claims to be catering for the family, would not have printed an interview in which any artist talked about being gay and therefore the question wasn’t asked. Back then, let’s not forget, Elton John was straight, as was Rock Hudson, along with every other actor and actress on TV, every sports star in the world and all politicians. Outside of the magic circle of intimates, where someone’s sexuality would be taken for granted, it simply wasn’t an issue...

Marrying a man isn't the most curious thing Barry Manilow has ever done, David Hepworth, Telegraph.

Starts off really well, but runs out of steam/ideas halfway through.

A bit like Barry's career AMIRITE????

Popbitch: The Cost Of The Closet

An educational, informative and entertaining article from Popbitch.

Tab Hunter: Confidential

No idea when - or if - we'll see this in UK cinemas.

Sam Smith: Bullied

FOUR-time Grammy Award-winner Sam Smith tells today how he was verbally and physically abused by homophobes — and is now vowing to stand up for gay kids.

Sam came out at school aged 11 and was accepted by his loving family and supportive group of friends.

But he vividly remembers the darker side of growing up gay.

He was bullied, branded a “faggot” and punched by a stranger in the street.

And Sam warns that despite increased tolerance homophobia is still a major problem.

He says: “This is what angers me — especially in the UK, we think that everything is OK now. Not just in terms of homophobia, but racism too.

“But it’s so far from OK. There’s such a long way to go.”

At just 22, the Stay With Me star is one of the world’s most high-profile gay role models, proudly singing about his relationships with other men.

But he has waited until now — after four Grammys and two Brits — to speak publicly about growing up gay.

Sam — who we can also reveal will sing this year’s Comic Relief single with John Legend — explains: “At the beginning of last year I wasn’t talking about my sexuality as much. But I’ve sold loads of records now and I have a voice.

“I can speak about this from a position of power, compared to two years ago where it would have been p***ing in the wind. It wouldn’t have gone anywhere.” ...

The Sun.

An exclusive by Bizarre editor Dan Wooton - who appeared to enjoy bullying Joe McElderry when he was in the closet.

Sam Smith and John Legend perform this year's Comic Relief single, Lay Me Down, money raised will go to Metro, who offer support to young gay people. 

Or you could just give them some money.

Sorry, can't be arsed to link to the 'whacky' video.

BuzzFeed

Brooke Shields: I'm Your Man

It was her mother’s idea, apparently, that she should date George Michael. He was one of a number of “more gentle” men that her mother trusted when it came to her daughter’s innocence. She lists John Travolta and Michael Jackson (with whom she was just good friends) as two others.

Sure enough, George Michael made no attempt to pressure the 18-year-old Shields into bed. “No one had ever been willing to move so slowly,” she writes.

Did her mother know he was gay?

“I don’t think so. If I were doing a one-woman show, that would be the humour of it,” she says. She would talk at length about how miraculously happy he was to spend the whole time shopping. “But can you imagine what it must have been like for him, not to be living truthfully?”

The alternative interpretation is that he was a pop star who needed to appear straight, and you were America’s sweetheart, whose virtue was guarded around the clock. And he thought: “Aha.”

“Of course. I was such a known virgin. It was perfect,” she says. “We were both at this crazy height of fame. It made sense.” ...

Brooke Shields in The Times Magazine.

The Imitation Game: Making A Code

Respected straight actor plays tortured gay man? It's movie awards gold!

But what that galaxy of stars on the poster doesn't tell you is that even the most glowing reviewers had some serious reservations.

A problem summed up in the headline in The Independent, Benedict Cumberbatch's Alan Turing is superb - but the film is evasive over the character's sexuality.

The Daily Telegraph elaborates;

It's the lack of risk here that grates most. Turing was homosexual, got convicted for gross indecency in 1952, and committed suicide because of his persecution and loneliness. Cumberbatch can suggest all this, but only in outline, because the film backs away in embarrassment from showing a single encounter between him and another man. 

This project inches around the private life of a genius: though he gets to narrate, it adopts an extremely proper attitude towards what should stay private, which might strike some viewers as closer to 1952's prudishness than 2014's relative open-mindedness. 

It shouldn't matter in the slightest that Turing was gay. It shouldn't have ended his career in disgrace the way it did. But one can be forgiven, surely, for wondering, and wanting to see, if it mattered to him.

Peter Tatchell reminds Telegraph readers, Homophobia is still with us 60 years after the death of Alan Turing.

And the hundreds of comments from Telegraph readers show how right he is.

Mr Tatchell, most people welcome I'm sure the more enlightened times that we live in and are pleased to see the back of the pernicious laws that made life so miserable for Homosexuals. But please don't confuse a sense of weary indignation as being homophobia at having our noses rubbed in homosexuality (as well as diversity), and at having laws put on the statute books to try and normalise the abnormal. etc etc.

It's four stars from The Times, but they warn;

Directed by Morten Tyldum, the story goes from the homosexual and mathematical crushes of Turing’s Sherborne schooldays in 1928 to 1951, when detectives arrived at a botched burglary at the professor’s house in Manchester and began the investigation that led to his eventual prosecution for “gross indecency” and chemical castration at a time when homosexuality was still illegal. Yet, mysteriously, we never see Turing in an adult sexual relationship with another man.

All this sits uncomfortably with the rest of the detail provided: Turing’s gay crushes at school, his friendships, his near-marriage, his listlessness under chemical castration. Why not provide the missing piece of the human jigsaw and show that Turing could have as much passion for a man as he did for the Enigma machine? Do we detect the cold hand of the producers, who include American Harvey Weinstein, on the script, sanitising the story for the middlebrow and American market?

Tyldum is probably not to blame — the director’s fondness for dark, twisted drama was revealed in his recent Headhunters — but The Imitation Game has a whiff of Sunday evening telly conventionality. Either Turing’s hidden homosexuality should have been properly handled, or the drama should have focused purely on Hut 8.

Their review is complimented by an article; The Imitation Game’s makers on accusations of masking Turing’s sexuality

The oft-repeated complaint that the film doesn't show Turing being intimate with a gentleman has not been plucked from the pink ether either, an earlier script had a gay sex scene.

The Times quote the ever-hopeless Benedict Cumberbatch; “I would have been happy to play one of those [sex] scenes or not because to me it’s less about his sexuality than it is about love. That he loved men was just a fact for him.”

Good grief.

PS Did anyone else think the timing of Benedict's announcement of his engagement (to a lady!) just last week was, erm, timely?

Independent: Thinking

The Independent.

Looks more like Louis just wore a t-shirt with the old Apple logo on it, actually.

Unless mind-reading is one of this journalist/intern's many talents.

Update: Pop star completely misreads stupid article...

Understandable, as the media are always insinuating one of 1D is A SECRET GAY!

Then the silly journalist replies - and refuses to acknowledge she made the story up!

You couldn't make it up - except they do, all the fucking time.

Kevin Spacey: Ask A Silly Question

The Guardian.

I wonder if any regular viewers can think of a question they'd like Kevin Spacey to answer?

Kevin Spacey: Hollywood Unreported

The move to the U.K. allowed him to remain out of the Hollywood spotlight at a time when celebrities' offscreen lives became as newsworthy as their onscreen ones. Spacey, whose only permanent home is in London, fiercely guards his private life. In fact, his affable demeanor shuts off the moment he is asked about it. This might date back to a 1997 Esquire profile that infamously suggested Spacey was gay. He later denied the characterization, and his agency at the time, William Morris, vehemently discouraged its clients from cooperating with the publication."Let's let people live their lives and do it the way they want to do it," he says now. "All the chips will fall in the end, and we'll all be judged by a much higher power than Entertainment Weekly can."

Hollywood Reporter.

Thanks for clearing that up...

Toby Young: The Sound Of Straight Hands Clapping

What can the Conservatives do to lessen their exposure to these sorts of scandals in future? The solution, I believe, is for all gay and lesbian Conservative MPs to come out in a very public, headline-grabbing way. Not that many of them are "in the closet" in the conventional sense of the term, i.e. leading a double life in which they're pretending to be happily married. Most are bachelors who are neither in the closet nor out of it, but in a kind of antechamber where they don't pretend to be straight but, at the same time, don't draw attention to their homosexuality either. Well, I think the time has come for them to draw attention to it. What has previously gone unmentioned, tacitly accepted within the party with a nod and a wink but not publicly acknowledged, should now be brought out into the open. And what better time for the pink ’n’ blues to come out than right now, when same-sex marriage has just become legal thanks in large part to the leader of the Conservative Party?
Oh do fuck off you patronising straight Tory winker.

People can do what they want, isn't that what you profess to believe (he said hypocritically).

Simon Callow: For Weddings (GEDDIT???)

When I went to work at the National Theatre in the late Seventies — fully 10 years after the legalisation of sex between men — if I ever wrote or spoke about the man I was then living with, it was censored or repressed, either by the ever-vigilant press officer (“Simon, I can’t allow you to destroy your career”) or by the press itself, which helpfully refused to report any admission of homosexuality — they didn’t want to be told, they wanted to find you out. Never mind whether what they were doing was legal or not, they wanted to expose people. Even as late as the Nineties, Nigel Hawthorne, frail and frightened, was confronted on his doorstep, in his dressing gown, after being nominated for an Oscar, his filthy secret revealed to all the world: all these years he had been living quietly and happily with a male partner. Partners was the word now, a useful phrase, to be sure, nicely neutral — you could be business partners, after all, partners in a law firm, partners in crime, wha-hey!

Simon Callow writes on gay marriage and cultural change for the Evening Standard.

The Standard has a rainbow in its masthead today. Wha-hey!

Thought For The Day (June 28th 1986): George Michael

Rumour has it that the News Of The World has a George Michael scandal story that they’re not going to run until his crown starts to slip.

People do keep telling me there’s a story, but I can’t think what it would be. The News Of The World’s angle would have to be, if it’s big enough that they’re waiting, some kind of gay story. Either that or a pregnant girl. It’s unnerving to think that they’re only waiting because they think the public likes me enough at the moment. Hopefully they’ve got a long wait, and even then I’ll sue the arse off them, ha ha!

Guardian Music mark the return of the Yog by reprinting a 1986 NME interview.

Lots of today's papers have felched quotes from last night's BBC Radio 2 programme, Up Close With George Michael, eg...

For some strange reason, my gay life didn't get easier when I came out. Quite the opposite happened, really. The press seemed to take some delight that I previously had a 'straight audience,' and set about trying to destroy that. And I think some men were frustrated that their girlfriends wouldn't let go of the idea that George Michael just hadn't found the 'right girl'. Which is still what a lot of my extended family still think!

[On not judging celebrities who haven't come out] Because it's about family. In the years when HIV was a killer, any parent of an openly gay person was terrified. I knew my mother well enough that she would spend everyday praying that I didn't come across that virus. She'd have worried like that.

Getting banged up on nonce wing really turned me round and no mistake, guv. 

etc etc.

You can hear the first part on iPlayer here.

PS George is narrowly ahead of Kylie Minogue in the race for number one album.
Excitingness!
Who will buy more?
Middle-aged George-loving straight women?
Or middle-aged Kylie-loving gay men?

Charlie Condou: Openly Gay

Which brings me back to “openly”. There, wrapped up in that tiny little word are a whole bunch of assumptions and prejudices. As if they need to point out that not only is this person gay, they’re open about it. It harks back to a time when we were expected to be ashamed, to hide our sexuality, and when it was widely considered career suicide for public figures to come out. We may still have a lot of work to do in dealing with homophobia, but there’s no doubt that we have come a long way since those dark days. We have countless actors, musicians, politicians and increasing numbers of sportsmen and women who are coming out of the closet; what was once a trickle is becoming a flood. And yet the press still describe people like Clare Balding and Russell Tovey as “openly gay” as if the openness was not already implicit in the word “gay”.

It’s just a little word, but it reminds us of shame, fear and hiding. And it’s not necessary, so can we please lose it.

Attitude's new star columnist Charlie Condou has issues with the term 'openly gay'.

Though the people who most obsessively use it are often the dimmer reaches of the gay media.

Yes, we know Graham Norton is 'openly gay', no need to remind us every time you mention him...