Happy Birthday Jake Gyllenhaal!

Honesty has a beautiful and refreshing simplicity about it. No ulterior motives. No hidden meanings. An absence of hypocrisy, duplicity, political games, and verbal superficiality. As honesty and real integrity characterize our lives, there will be no need to manipulate others.

- Chuck Swindoll

New Showmance - It’s Official

December 1, 2010

With movie Love and Other Drugs and new album promotion still on, Jake Gyllenhaal and Taylor Swift officially started showmance promotion by posing for Us Weekly.

Feels So Good That It Can’t Be Wrong

Ricky Martin, "Me" book signing, November 2010

There is something beautiful in witnessing a major celebrity in the throes of profound and real transformation. A week before we meet, Ricky Martin had made a surprise appearance at the annual Human Rights Campaign national dinner to pledge his support. “Something as simple as standing at that dinner and saying, ‘I’m gay,’ creates so may emotions I’ve never felt before,” he admits. “I didn’t do it earlier because of fear, and, bottom line, it was all in my head. I was seduced by fear, and I was sabotaging most of my life -- my music, my relationships with my friends, with my family, with everybody. That’s something I need to share because I know that a lot of people are going through what I went through, no matter what their age, and fear cannot control us.”

Ricky Martin is about to share big time -- with his new memoir, Me, a remarkably heartfelt account of his journey from teen group Menudo to fatherhood, delivered in a frank, conversational style that doesn’t economize on the truth. It includes accounts of his first passionate affairs -- with men and with women -- as well as his struggle to reconcile his conflicted yearnings with his rapid ascent in America. The pivotal year is 1999, at which Martin performed his World Cup anthem, “La Copa de la Vida,” at the Grammys. Largely unknown in the United States beyond Hispanic audiences, he left the stage as a breathless Rosie O’Donnell (the evening’s host) exclaimed, “Who was that cutie patootie?”

It was connecting the dots that led directly to Martin’s tweet last March. In his memoir, he recounts how friends and colleagues remonstrated with him to hold off: “I ignored all their recommendations, and by the end, when they came to me with the argument that I shouldn’t do it during Easter because it might offend my Christian fans, I said: ‘What part of ‘I can’t take it any more’ do you not understand? What about me?’”

Above all, he says he worried about Matteo and Valentino having to answer for their father’s untruths. How would they respond as they grew older? Would they have to lie on his behalf? “How could I teach my kids to lie?” he asks. “How could I teach them not to be themselves?” And, as simple as that, he realized he couldn’t and wouldn’t. “My children will grow up with no prejudice,” he says. “As parents, we need to create a new way of thinking for our kids, in which we accept, and we love, and we can vibe with everybody.”

Source: Out Magazine, Out 100: Ricky Martin

Love and Obstacles

Cynthia Nixon and family

October 4, 2010

This past weekend, the New Yorker held its annual festival, which -- as always -- includes a multitude of speakers and panels discussing a variety of topics. Top players in all professions were represented, including Stephen King, Malcolm Gladwell, Jake Gyllenhaal and Regina Spektor -- all chatting about themselves and their areas of expertise. Our favorite, though, would have to have been Cynthia Nixon on the panel discussion "Love and Obstacles: The Case for Gay Marriage."

Ms. Nixon, who is most known for her role has Miranda Hobbes in Sex and the City, and now is engaged to education activist Christine Marinoni, stole our hearts with her rather calm, well made argument. Not only does she make a good case, she makes an example of how to make said point.

“Gay people who want to marry have no desire to redefine marriage in any way. When women got the vote, they did not redefine voting. When African-Americans got the right to sit at a lunch counter alongside white people, they did not redefine eating out. They were simply invited to the table. And that is all we want to do. We have no desire to change marriage. We want to be entitled to not only the same privileges, but the same responsibilities as straight people.”

Source: Out Hero: The Cynthia Nixon Edition

A Place in the Sun

Montgomery Clift rolling cigarette
during shooting of 'Red River', circa 1948

The Advocate: There are so many biographies of Montgomery Clift and numerous websites devoted to him. What was the biggest surprise you learned about him while researching your book?
Amy Lawrence: I was most impressed by Clift’s canny understanding of his own image. Many biographers depict him as refusing to participate in the Hollywood star system, but that didn’t mean he was ignorant of it. He understood how an actor’s image was built and maintained. In giving interviews or choosing roles, he knew exactly how to shape a performance to achieve the effect he wanted — and to resist the efforts of others to simplify a character. For instance, he was aware that screenwriters and directors often wanted to make the hero perfect; Clift wanted to make the character human, complicated, and not always admirable.

Q: Clift is often spoken of in context as a “gay actor” or in conjunction with Marlon Brando and James Dean. What do you see as Clift’s singular legacy?
A: Brando and Dean both thought of Clift as singular. Brando saw Clift as his only major competition, and Dean saw him as a model, an ideal to emulate. Unlike those performers, Clift’s best work has not become dated. In Red River, From Here to Eternity, A Place in the Sun, I Confess, and half a dozen others, his performances are impeccable. At his best he is never mannered or predictable. His performances are subtle, intelligent, graceful, and deeply empathetic regardless of the character’s flaws.

Q: How did Clift’s being gay — or bisexual, as some suggest — when it was still taboo affect his drinking, drug taking, and ultimate downward spiral?
A: The homophobia of the time, which intensified nationally just as Clift’s career was beginning in the late 1940s and early ’50s, certainly exerted pressure on Clift. A serious relationship with choreographer Jerome Robbins in the ’40s threatened both their careers when Robbins was blackmailed into testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings regarding communists and other “subversives” in Washington and the entertainment community. I would be hesitant, though, to cast Clift as a “sad young man,” “self-loathing homosexual,” or fit him into any other category into which gay men were sorted from the 1950s to ’70s. Alcoholism affects everyone, and in the postwar period heavy drinking was routine across the board. By the time Clift’s drinking became full-blown alcoholism, it was impossible to disentangle from his devastating car accident, the prescription painkillers he needed at the time, and his professional fear regarding the damage done to his face. In the latter part of his career, his drinking and drug taking were so dominant in his life that he couldn’t function without them. Paradoxically, at the point when he worked with unsupportive or openly hostile homophobic producers and directors, the drugs and drinking sustained him as much as they destroyed him.

Q: You write about the fan magazines of the 1950s that frequently used sexually suggestive headlines such as “Who Is Monty Kidding?” How well known was the truth about Clift’s sexuality during that era?
A: Clift worked in a period when fan magazines were challenged by scandal magazines, each promising “the truth” about stars’ private lives. Ironically, even the scandal rags did not want any “truth” firmly established because that would rob them of the chance to repeatedly tantalize readers with the next promised exposé. Biographical information suggests that people who worked with Clift always “knew” in exact proportion to what they wanted to know. Fans likewise. Everyone minimized the complexity of Clift’s emotional relationships — with men, older women, young women — in order to maintain the image of the actor that appealed to them most.

Q: A recent article in Newsweek suggests audiences can’t accept gay actors as romantic leading men when we know the truth about their real-life sexuality and uses Rock Hudson as an example. How do you think this applies to Clift, who had such intense chemistry on-screen with Elizabeth Taylor and other actresses?
A: When audiences think they know something about an actor’s personal sexuality it becomes available as a touchstone to spectators watching a performance but is never mandatory. People judging a performance often appreciate it most the more it varies from what we think we know about the performer — casting against type, nice people playing psychos, beautiful actresses playing ugly. If we think of Clift as an actor, then his persuasiveness as a romantic lead opposite Taylor, Olivia de Havilland, or Jennifer Jones increases our appreciation of his skill as he seems to become inseparable from the role.

Another issue is history itself. As new generations are introduced to Clift and Hudson, they often react to the performers without knowing any biographical information about them. They are also less invested in “the truth” than those who experienced a change in their perception through revelations and the exposure of secrets. The freer sexuality of Brando or Dean, for instance, has not come to dominate their images.

Q: How do you think Clift would have fared personally and professionally if he began his career today, with the intrusion of the Internet and paparazzi?
A: The intrusion of the media today is offset by the openness of some gay performers — though not romantic leading men just yet. As Tom Cruise’s career shows, it is possible to withstand rumors and media speculation if you have the power and the will to do so. Because Clift was never as closeted as Rock Hudson, I don’t believe he would fight terribly hard to maintain the illusion of offscreen heterosexuality. He might be more likely to take a Keanu Reeves approach, where the actor neither courts nor tries to dispel the fantasies of any fan. In several roles in the severely repressive 1950s he even courted audiences to read his characters — and maybe himself — as gay in the casually flirtatious scenes in Red River, the rejection of heterosexual relationships in I Confess, Suddenly, Last Summer, and Freud, the material on gay Army life that acts as a subtext throughout From Here to Eternity, and the relationship with Frank Sinatra’s character in the film.

Source: Advocate, The Most Beautiful Man in Film

Baby Steps

August 4, 2010 - Proposition 8 ruled unconstitutional‎

From the ruling: "Proposition 8 fails to advance any rational basis in singling out gay men and lesbians for denial of a marriage license. Indeed the evidence shows Proposition 8 does nothing more than enshrine in the California constitution the notion that opposite sex couples are superior to same sex couples."

Source: Judge Hands Victory to Proposition 8 Opponents, Gay-Marriage Ban Overturned


Ricky Martin, Matteo and Valentino (born August 6, 2008)


Clay Aiken, Jaymes Foster and Parker (born August 8, 2008)

Looking Forward to 'Love and Other Drugs'

Anne Hathaway and Jake Gyllenhaal
Venice Film Festival, 2005