Q&A: Alan Cumming

Q: When were you happiest?
A: A couple of summers ago, walking through a forest illuminated by fireflies, with my man and our dogs.

Q: What is your greatest fear?
A: Dying on the same day as someone much more famous than me.

Q: What is your earliest memory?
A: My mum and brother lifting me up to look out of a window to prove to me it was still dark and too early to get up to open my birthday presents.

Q: Which living person do you most admire, and why?
A: Mary Darling, my mum, for leaving my father and finding happiness.

Q: What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
A: Being an open book.

Q: What is the trait you most deplore in others?
A: Being closed off to the world.

Q: What is your most treasured possession?
A: Wild Thyme Way, my country retreat in the Catskill Mountains.

Q: What would your super power be?
A: To zap angry, bigoted people.

Q: What makes you unhappy?
A: Our obsession with the worthless and unimportant, like Sarah Palin.

Q: If you could bring something extinct back to life, what would it be?
A: Socialism.

Q: Who would play you in the film of your life?
A: Cate Blanchett. She'd pull it off.

Q: What is your favourite smell?
A: Rosemary. I rub it in my armpits.

Q: What is your favourite book?
A: The Trick Is To Keep Breathing, by Janice Galloway.

Q: What is your guiltiest pleasure?
A: Being in the first-class cabin and not refusing anything that is offered.

Q: What do you owe your parents?
A: My mum always told me I was precious, while my dad always told me I was worthless. I think that's a good grounding for a balanced life.

Q: What, or who, is the greatest love of your life?
A: Grant Shaffer, my husband.

Q: What does love feel like?
A: Being hit on the head with a brick, and like a bowl of hearty soup.

Q: When did you last cry, and why?
A: An hour ago, on a plane, watching a show about teenage mums.

Q: What single thing would improve the quality of your life?
A: The Obama administration keeping their promises and granting equal rights to the LGBT community.

Q: What do you consider your greatest achievement?
A: When someone tells me that I have inspired them.

Q: How would you like to be remembered?
A: By people who love me raising a glass and laughing and remembering fun times we had.

Q: What is the most important lesson life has taught you?
A: This above all: to mine own self be true. And it must follow, as the night the day, I canst not then be false to any man.

Q: Tell us a joke
Q: How many therapists does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: Why do you think the lightbulb is so keen to change?

Source: Guardian, UK, Q&A: Alan Cumming

Beach Boy

.002 percent

Director Todd Holland on gay actors coming out.

"I’m an out gay director and producer.

Coming out is the single most important event in my life. I came out in 1992 while directing and producing on "The Larry Sanders Show." I was scared, sure. But I did it -- because I needed to live authentically.

My parents were slow to come around. Being Republicans and big-time Christians, they love me, I know. But I think they still have a hard time accepting the gay me. That hurts but, hey, that’s the real world.

And for me, living authentically means living in the real world. And maybe that’s how I came to be the anti-queer poster child of the week.

See, I work in this factory called Hollywood. It’s a strange place. (But remember, we make dreams here -- so it’s bound to have a few quirks.) And here are a few of the things I’ve learned.

One: No one cares that I’m gay. Like ... no one.

Two: there are still prominent creative people living in the closet.

No one cares that they’re gay, either. They care -- mostly because they feel incapable of enduring the perceived rejection of their families.

Three: As far as actors go, if you’re a character actor or a woman, no one cares.

Four: If you’re a guy, no one cares ... unless you're in that fractional .002 percent of the young male actor population, and you really have the goods to become a true leading man. Then there may be obstacles to both living authentically and achieving that Holy Grail of dreams: real, tent-pole-sized Hollywood Stardom.

Gatekeepers abound at every level. Studios are like feisty Chihuahuas -- they are inherently fearful, and if their bottom lines are at risk, they’ll bite. Agents and managers do not push rocks up hill -- they’ll push level (but prefer downhill).

And their bottom lines are also at risk. Casting directors (sometimes gay ones especially) are often very reluctant to promote openly gay actors fearing, I imagine, some “what the f--- are you thinking?” response from straight employers.

My damning words were: "If you are that .002 percent ... I can't tell you to come out."

I never said stay in the closet. And that matters. My meaning in "I can't tell you to come out" is inherently parental.

Translation: “If you take the path of coming out, you will be living authentically -- and that is a great achievement in anyone’s life. But I can't promise you're going to skirt the gatekeepers or scale the hurdles the system has in place.”

To me, that is a real and honest answer. Yes, it is neither activist nor idealistic -- but it is the real world I work in every day. It is the world in which I live authentically."

Source: The Gatekeepers at Hollywood's Closet Door, The Wrap

The Price of Success

July 13, 2009

At Outfest on Sunday afternoon, three-time Emmy winning and openly gay director Todd Holland told a small audience that he advises young, gay male actors to "stay in the closet." The remark came during a panel at the Directors Guild of America titled, "Taking It to the Streets: LGBT Directors Get Political." Outfest, which pushes the slogan "protecting our past, showcasing our present, nurturing our future," is one of the premiere gay and lesbian film festivals in the United States.

Holland, who was talking as one of the featured panelists, and who once worked as a director on the critically acclaimed HBO sit-com The Larry Sanders Show, explained that it's a necessary career choice if a gay actor wants to succeed in Hollywood.

Fellow panelist and filmmaker Kirby Dick, director of Outrage, a 2009 documentary about gay politicians who stay in the closet to further their political careers, told Holland: "I know where you're coming from, but it's a regressive argument."

Holland, who was legally married before Proposition 8 was passed by California voters in November, responded that he was just being realistic, but Dick, who is heterosexual, believed that if "an A-list actor came out, it would have more impact on the culture than an A-list politician."

No one talked about the personal repercussions of a gay actor succeeding in Hollywood by lying about his sexual orientation to the general public.

Holland's comments underscore a decades old problem in Hollywood, where gay and straight studio executives, agents, and other major players often advise up-and-coming gay, male actors to live in the closet. Rarely, though, has someone like Holland been so public with that advice.

Besides Holland and Dick, "Taking It to the Streets" featured filmmakers Jamie Babbit, Katherine Brooks, Frieda Lee Mock and Charles Herman-Wurmfield, and was billed as a discussion about how gay and lesbian filmmakers "are taking a more active role in creating social and political change."

One audience member, openly gay filmmaker Matthew Mishory, later told Queer Town that Holland's mind set is pervasive throughout the entertainment business.

"This stuff doesn't just extend to actors," says Mishory. "We've been told, as gay filmmakers, not tell queer stories or else we'll get pigeonholed."

Mishory has just finished a film about legendary gay director Derek Jarman called Delphinium. Through that work, Mishory has come to believe that "the promise of the New Queer Cinema of the 1980s and 1990s has not necessarily been delivered."

Before the panelists started their discussion, blogger and lesbian filmmaker J.D. Disalvatore warned Outfest crowds on her blog, The Smoking Cocktail, that several of the filmmakers "were not particularly political, so looking forward to seeing what they pull out of their asses for this one."

A few hours later, the 47-year-old Todd Holland publicly shared his "advice," with young, gay and lesbian filmmakers sitting in the audience. One person who heard the remark, and didn't want to be identified, told Queer Town, "What kind of message is that for an older gay filmmaker to send to young gay filmmakers? It's the kind of thing that will keep people in the closet."

Source: Queer Town: Emmy-winning Director Todd Holland to Young, Gay Actors: 'Stay in the Closet', LA Weekly

'Brothers'

Screen captures from 'Brothers'
Directed by Jim Sheridan.
With Jake Gyllenhaal, Natalie Portman, Tobey Maguire.

Source: 'Brothers' trailer, ET Online

I Dish, Therefore I Am

On March 10, 2005, gossip columnist Ted Casablanca ran an item online under the heading "One Adorable Blind Vice".

The story was similar to numerous blind items Casablanca has run since bringing his column, "The Awful Truth," to E! Online in 1996. He relates a potentially scandalous story, usually with the kinds of revelations a major media gossip columnist would avoid, but disguises the object of his gossip behind a fanciful name like Morgan Mayhem, Furrowed Frank or Toothy Tile.

The ongoing saga of Toothy Tile says a good deal about Internet gossip, its place within the gay community and its function as a moral compass. It also points to some interesting intersections of gossip and gendered performance.

Hollywood gossip, of course, was around long before the Internet. Usually dated from the start of Louella Parsons' syndicated column in 1925, the field has traditionally been female-dominated, with Parsons and her chief rival, Hedda Hopper, engaged in an often-uneasy power struggle with the movie industry. The film studios used them to promote their films and personalities but also dreaded the effect of a personal attack or untimely revelation. One unwritten rule, however, was that the most damaging items — criminal arrests, long-term affairs and homosexuality — were not for publication in any but the least reputable venues. Parsons, Hopper and most of Hollywood may have known that Ramon Novarro was gay, but they weren't about to publish the fact. And if a writer broke the rules — as Bill Robinson did when he wrote about Spencer Tracy's drinking problems and his relationship with Katharine Hepburn in a 1962 issue of Look — the offender was cut off from industry sources.

Even with the decline of the studio system, some restrictions still hold. Unless a star's drug use is impossible for the media to ignore, it's kept out of the gossip columns. And "outing" is still considered off-limits, at least to columnists working in the major media.

For the gay on-line community, gossip serves a variety of purposes. If nothing else, it provides its readers with a sense of titillation as they vicariously enjoy celebrities' lives, even when the object of interest is masked behind the veil of the blind item. Like many on-line discussion boards, gay gossip sites provide their geographically dispersed users with a sense of community.

One element unifying gossip communities is a shared sense of morality. Gay gossip unites the gay and lesbian community by establishing behavioral norms for that community, creating insiders aware of those norms and outsiders unaware of or opposed to them.

In the case of Toothy Tile, the nature of those norms depends on whether one is inside or outside the gay community. Within the world of heteronormativity, Toothy Tile is at fault both for being gay and, more important, for wishing to make a public proclamation of that fact.

Despite the social changes of the past 50 years, the entertainment industry appears to be dealing with sexual orientation by the same standards in operation when Universal Pictures forced Rock Hudson to take a wife to forestall suspicions of homosexuality. The current attitude is described quite simply in one publicity-shy, or rather gay-publicity shy actor's legal complaint against a porn star who had claimed a relationship with him: "While plaintiff believes in the rights of others to follow their own sexual preference, vast numbers of the public throughout the world do not share his view and, believing that he had a homosexual affair and did so during his marriage, they will be less inclined to patronize [his] films, particularly since he tends to play parts calling for heterosexual romance and action adventure. " No doubt, these are the same audiences who would expect the actor to know how to pilot a jet fighter in real life.

Who, then, is thought to be the perpetually closeted Toothy Tile? Consensus gives the honor to Jake Gyllenhaal.

So, what team is Jake playing for? How many beards do you see in this picture? And...well, do I really have to say anything.

Source: I Dish, Therefore I Am: Performing Toothy Tile and Ted Casablanca by Frank Miller, Georgia State University

Bearding isn't Cool

Adam Lambert on making his sexuality public:

There are so many old-fashioned ways of looking at things, and if we want to be a progressive society, we have to start thinking in a different way. There's the old industry idea that you should just make sexuality a non-issue, just say your private life's your private life, and not talk about it. But that's bullshit, because private lives don't exist anymore for celebrities: they just don't.

I don't want to be looking over my shoulder all the time, thinking I have to hide, being scared of being found out, putting on a front, having a beard, going down the red carpet with some chick who is posing as my girlfriend.

That's not cool, that's not being a rock star. I can't do that.

Source: Adam Lambert in His Own Words: Sexuality, Kris Allen and Life After Idol, Rolling Stone