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ROBERT PATTINSON REVEALS HE "PLEASURED" HIMSELF FOR REAL ON-CAMERA FOR GAY FILM

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Robert Pattinson, shown here in the 2008 Spanish film Little Ashes

(Photo still courtesy Kaleidoscope Entertainment)

Before matinee idol Robert Pattinson won international fame as a vampire in Hollywood's Twilight franchise, he portrayed artist Salvador Dalí having a love affair with poet Federico García Lorca in the 2008 Spanish film Little Ashes.

Now, in a new interview in the September issue of Germany Interview magazine, Pattison admits he masturbated on the set during a sex scene.

“My orgasm face is recorded for eternity,” Pattison said, pointing out that faking it “just doesn’t work, so I pleasured myself in front of the camera.”

In other words, Pattison whacked off on film. This is what they call “method acting.”

Watch it here in GIF form:



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Before Robert Pattinson won international fame as a sparkly vampire, he starred in a little known Spanish film called Little Ashes.
Released in 2008, the British actor played artist Salvador Dalí exploring his friendship and love affair with poet Federico García Lorca.
According to an interview with a German magazine, Pattinson said he chose to approach the role using, well, method acting.
He said he pleasured himself to completion in a scene, as faking it ‘just doesn’t work’.
‘My orgasm face is recorded for eternity,’ he joked.
Pattinson also says the production was the ‘worst’ as working around other naked male actors was ‘mortifying’.
While critics hated the movie, describing it as ‘dry’ and ‘dull’, they certainly gave him a hand for his performance.
- See more at: http://www.gaystarnews.com/article/robert-pattinson-reveals-he-%E2%80%98pleasured%E2%80%99-himself-real-gay-film040913#sthash.HgLZCoRV.dpuf
Before Robert Pattinson won international fame as a sparkly vampire, he starred in a little known Spanish film called Little Ashes.
Released in 2008, the British actor played artist Salvador Dalí exploring his friendship and love affair with poet Federico García Lorca.
According to an interview with a German magazine, Pattinson said he chose to approach the role using, well, method acting.
He said he pleasured himself to completion in a scene, as faking it ‘just doesn’t work’.
‘My orgasm face is recorded for eternity,’ he joked.
Pattinson also says the production was the ‘worst’ as working around other naked male actors was ‘mortifying’.
While critics hated the movie, describing it as ‘dry’ and ‘dull’, they certainly gave him a hand for his performance.
Last year, Pattinson made headlines for when he revealed he was caught in a 'gay dogging' raid at his favorite biking spot.
Check out a montage of scenes from Little Ashes below
- See more at: http://www.gaystarnews.com/article/robert-pattinson-reveals-he-%E2%80%98pleasured%E2%80%99-himself-real-gay-film040913#sthash.HgLZCoRV.dpuf
Before Robert Pattinson won international fame as a sparkly vampire, he starred in a little known Spanish film called Little Ashes.
Released in 2008, the British actor played artist Salvador Dalí exploring his friendship and love affair with poet Federico García Lorca.
According to an interview with a German magazine, Pattinson said he chose to approach the role using, well, method acting.
He said he pleasured himself to completion in a scene, as faking it ‘just doesn’t work’.
‘My orgasm face is recorded for eternity,’ he joked.
Pattinson also says the production was the ‘worst’ as working around other naked male actors was ‘mortifying’.
While critics hated the movie, describing it as ‘dry’ and ‘dull’, they certainly gave him a hand for his performance.
Last year, Pattinson made headlines for when he revealed he was caught in a 'gay dogging' raid at his favorite biking spot.
Check out a montage of scenes from Little Ashes below
- See more at: http://www.gaystarnews.com/article/robert-pattinson-reveals-he-%E2%80%98pleasured%E2%80%99-himself-real-gay-film040913#sthash.HgLZCoRV.dpuf
Before Robert Pattinson won international fame as a sparkly vampire, he starred in a little known Spanish film called Little Ashes.
Released in 2008, the British actor played artist Salvador Dalí exploring his friendship and love affair with poet Federico García Lorca.
According to an interview with a German magazine, Pattinson said he chose to approach the role using, well, method acting.
He said he pleasured himself to completion in a scene, as faking it ‘just doesn’t work’.
‘My orgasm face is recorded for eternity,’ he joked.
Pattinson also says the production was the ‘worst’ as working around other naked male actors was ‘mortifying’.
While critics hated the movie, describing it as ‘dry’ and ‘dull’, they certainly gave him a hand for his performance.
Last year, Pattinson made headlines for when he revealed he was caught in a 'gay dogging' raid at his favorite biking spot.
Check out a montage of scenes from Little Ashes below
- See more at: http://www.gaystarnews.com/article/robert-pattinson-reveals-he-%E2%80%98pleasured%E2%80%99-himself-real-gay-film040913#sthash.HgLZCoRV.dpuf

XAVIER DOLAN KICKS ASS - AND KISSES IT - AT VENICE FILM FESTIVAL

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(Xavier Dolan. Courtesy of Ixion Communications.)

Glory be! Proud Montrealer and 24-year-old film wunderkind Xavier Dolan finds himself once again rubbing elbows with filmmaking royalty at the Venice Film Festival where this week Dolan’s latest film Tom a la ferme was awarded the critics’ prize by the Federation internationale de la presse cinematographique.

A couple of years ago, at the Cannes Film Festival, Dolan was already a star and drank it all in.

"I was at Cannes for 10 days, did 160 interviews, drank too much alcohol and smoked too many cigarettes!" Xavier told me, laughing lightly. "[Then] I had this Cannes glamour moment where at some mini-shindig I walked into some bar with Benicio Del Toro and this French actress, and suddenly my life changed. These people were [no longer up] on the screen. They’re chatting with you and you’re talking to them about cinema and your life and their life and you’re laughing [together]!"

Dolan paused.

"I don’t want to make it sound shallow, but I felt like part of a family."

That family just got more glamourous.

Dolan's award-winning film Tom a la ferme is adapted from the play by Quebec playwright Michel Marc Bouchard, a drama about a young man Tom (Dolan) who meets his lover Guillaume’s family for the first time after Guillaume’s death and he’s shocked to learn that the family has no idea of his existence and that his lover’s mother didn’t even know her son was gay.

Dolan called it “a notable honour” to receive the award.

I love how Dolan doesn't shy away from anything gay. He is proud, and I love him for it. 
As Dolan told me, with defiance in his eyes, "There is still danger today for gay people, even in broad daylight."
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STAR TREK LEGEND GEORGE TAKEI ON SOCHI, HOLLYWOOD CLOSET AND WILLIAM SHATNER

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George Takei starred as Captain Sulu in the original Star Trek TV series and six movies
Bugs' new interview with George Takei was first published in XTRA. This is the longer version of that interview.

Star Trek legend George Takei has been the ultimate outsider for much of his life. Interned in American “War Relocation Camps” during World War II, Takei later dealt with racism and the Hollywood closet during his Tinseltown years.

Takei is currently advocating for the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics to be relocated to a country that respects gay civil rights.

George Takei
“I remember the terrible morning when [I was five-years-old in 1942] my parents got my younger brother and baby sister up early, and I saw two soldiers with bayonets on their rifles flashing in the sun, stomp up the porch and knock on the front door,” Takei, now 76, remembers. “They ordered us out of our home. My mother was the last to come out and she was carrying the baby in her right arm and held a huge duffle bag in  her left hand and tears were rolling down her cheeks. I remember that vividly.”

Takei's personal experiences in WWII internment camps would later inspire the 2012 play Allegiancein which Takei also starred.

“I remember the barbwire fences, but I also remember chasing butterflies,” Takei says. “A child is amazingly adaptable. It wasn’t until I became a teenager after the war, talking with my father, that I learnt how degrading and humiliating it really was for my parents.”

By the time Takei got to Hollywood in the 1950s, he was relegated to playing stereotypes. But Takei told his father, “I’m going to change that.” 

Today, Takei chuckles: “Ah, the arrogance of young people.”

When TV executives threatened to cancel the original Star Trek TV series after the second season, Takei — who played Sulu in the series and in six Star Trek movies — says, “My father wrote a letter to NBC that said, ‘I’m George Takei’s father, so I am biased. But I think Star Trek is making an important contribution to diversity. Please renew this show so this message to America can continue.’ I was deeply touched by his letter. My father told me he was proud of me for doing what I set out to do.”

As for coming out, Takei – who knew he was gay in grammar school – admits that, as a teenager, “I wanted to be – in quotes – ‘normal’ and so I played the game. I wanted to be an actor in Hollywood where they find all sorts of reasons to say, ‘I’m sorry, you’re not right for the part.’ You’re too fat, you’re too tall. Being gay wasn’t going to help, so I hid that part.

“Today we have a whole different climate with the US president supporting LGBT equality and the U.S. Supreme Court supporting same-sex marriage. There still are closeted matinee idols [who still] have too much of an economic gain as risk. They won’t come out. Like my Star Trek colleagues knew I was gay but remained silent because they didn’t want to be destructive, I’m not going to name any names. It’s up to them to make that decision. They are the ones who have to live their complicated lives in the closet.”

Takei – who knows a thing or two about being an Internet sensation (“I never thought my being on Facebook would become such a big deal!”) – also has a few words about Star Trek pop icon and Montreal native William Shatner using the Internet for Shatner’s own gains.

After Takei wed his partner of 26 years in 2008, Shatner claimed he had not been invited to the wedding. “We sent him an invitation and all my Star Trek colleagues RSVPed except for Bill,” Takei says. “No big deal. The wedding happened and then two months later he goes on YouTube and rants and raves about not being invited. Then my husband [Brad] and I were driving down Sunset Boulevard and there was this big billboard promoting Shatner’s new talk show. To promote it he needed controversy, so that’s why he complained. Whenever Bill needs a little publicity, he revives the wedding-invitation controversy.”

Besides attending comic conventions across North America, Takei is also campaigning to take the Sochi Winter Games out of Russia because it is a dangerous place for LGBT people and their supporters.
“They are literally being killed,” he says. “I think Vancouver would be ideal to host the next winter Olympics.”

Takei is looking forward to Montreal Comiccon, but admits he’s never been to any of that city’s famed gay strip joints before. “Can you give me an address?” he asks.

I give Mr. Takei two, and wish him a good time. “Now with your help, I will!” he laughs. “Merci beaucoup and au revoir!”

George Takei will sign autographs and do photo ops during all 3 days of the 2013 Montreal Comiccon, which runs Sept 13-15 at the Palais des congrès de Montréal. There will also be a George Takei Q&A on Sept 15. Advance tickets recommended: www.montrealcomiccon.com

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FAMED AUTHOR AMELIE NOTHOMB COMES OUT AS BISEXUAL

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Amélie Nothomb’s new novel La Nostalgie Heureuse


Internationally-acclaimed Belgian author Amélie Nothomb’s new novel La Nostalgie Heureuse is racing up the bestseller charts. But back in 2009 when her memoir Tokyo Fiancée topped the charts, I asked Nothomb about her love affair with a – gasp! – man that she famously documented in her memoir.

“I loved a Japanese boy and it was a nice and strange experience,” Nothomb told me. “But then I escaped and I wanted to explain this poetic place. He wanted to marry and marriage is not for me.”

Why not? Are you a dyke?

“I am very open to that state of mind and most of the characters in my books are quite indefinite when it comes to their sexual identities,” Nothomb replied. “Indefinite like their author.”

That’s as close to publicly coming out as Amélie Nothomb has ever come.

THE HANGOVER: DIVA LAS VEGAS!

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The Go-Go boys at Krave Las Vegas take 5 to pose for Three Dollar Bill 

(Photo by Bugs Burnett)

This travel column originally ran in the October 2013 issue of Fugues magazine
I pretty much didn’t draw a sober breath for five days when I visited Las Vegas this past summer with a motley crew of some of the world’s finest gay journalists. It was also my birthday, so I had a legit excuse.

Bugs enters Vegas limo with refreshments
But after listening to Old Vegas stories from my buddy, onetime chorus line dancer Michael Doughman, pretty much any excuse is reason enough to party in Vegas.

“Like any high-tourist town, local people tend to band together,” Michael told me. “They have their little groups and aren’t anxious to mingle with passers-though, invest time in people just for a few days and never see them again. Tourists are star struck when they come to Vegas, so there’s that starfucker mentality going on: ‘Oh yeah, I slept with one of the guys from this show or that show.’”

Michael knows of what he speaks: He got his start in Vegas in 1970 dancing one season for Ann-Margret (“She had a very a strong work ethic and didn’t make us feel like we were slaves to the star”) before moving on to the Folies Bergeres for the next seven years.

  

“There were between four and six of us sharing an apartment [on Paradise Road] at any given time, but there was this great cul-de-sac off Sombrero [Drive] where Totie Fields, Mitzi Gaynor and Eydie Gormé all lived. They would gather from time to time with the neighbourhood girls,” Michael recalls. “I [also] met Liberace several times. Lee loved hanging out with the chorus kids. I never went to his house, but I did meet [his lover] Scott [Thorson] who I really think was fond of Lee.”

The iconic Vegas sign
Michael didn’t think much of Debbie Reynolds (“She was a bit difficult”), liked Carol Channing (“That voice is for real, maybe a little over-accentuated on stage – the only time it disappears is when she gets angry and then she cusses like a sailor!”) and adored Joan Rivers. “We became well-acquainted,” Michael says. “In those days Joan was undoubtedly the hardest working and most-driven performer in Vegas. She would open for anybody. Off the stage she could tell true-life stories and make them very funny.”

Michael moved to Dallas in 1980, where he became an LGBT community pioneer and today runs the Dallas Tavern Guild which organizes Dallas Gay Pride. Meanwhile, Vegas morphed into one of the world’s premiere playgrounds, and not just for the rich and famous.
Michael Doughman today

As Michael says, “I miss the old Vegas, but I still like going to see shows at the MGM because they still have the lavish old-style productions with the showgirls, feathers, beads and jewels. Now Vegas is all mega-shows like Celine. Not that there’s anything wrong with that … “

Fittingly, the week I was in Vegas I stayed at the fabulous MGM Grand – centrally located smack in the middle of the strip – and I also got to check out Celine Dion’s newest show at Caesar’s Colosseum. A decade after she opened the joint and silenced the naysayers, nobody does Vegas cheese better than our Celine.
Celine at Caesar's
Vegas also boasts a sparkling constellation of drag stars, thanks to trailblazing female impersonator Kenny Kerr, who died on April 28 at the age of 60. Kerr was the bad girl Las Vegas fell hard for in the 1970s, and became a Strip star at a time when over-the-top and garish were the town’s defining characteristics.

“He paved the way for all female impersonators working on the Las Vegas strip today,” says my friend, female impersonator and Vegas legend Eddie Edwards of The Edwards Twins.

Cher also hired drag queens J.C. Gaynor and Kenny Sasha to perform with her at Caesar’s Palace back in 1979. “The crowd thought the drag queens were actually Diana Ross and Bette Midler—they had no clue,” Cher says today.

When I arrived in Vegas, the Strip’s longest-running headliner was hands-down Joan Rivers-impersonator Frank Marino, who’s long-time partner and Divas Las Vegas associate producer Alex Schechter proposed to Marino onstage on July 3.

But if it’s down-home trashy drag you want, look no further than one of my all-time fave drag bars, Drink & Drag on Fremont Street, heart of the Old Vegas still anchored by the Golden Nugget casino across the street. The bar staff here are all drag queens. 
Temptation Sundays
at The Luxor

Next door to Drink & Drag, you’ll find Krave Massive, which at 80,000 square feet (!!!) is the world’s largest gay nightclub. The Go-Go boys here may even persuade you to forget exploring Fremont Street below Las Vegas Blvd. which is quickly transforming into a hipster neighbourhood.


  
The boys are also pretty hot at Temptation Sundays, the gayest pool party in town, at the Luxor, in a city known for its outrageous pool parties (you might also want to check out the straight-but-entertaining Palms Casino Resort’s pool parties). 

My fave stop on this trip was hands-down the U.S. National Museum of Organized Crime & Law Enforcement, better known as “The Mob Museum.” It’s all here – the original wall from the St Valentines Day Massacre, the barber’s chair in which Murder, Inc. co-founder Albert Anastasia was murdered, Lucky Luciano’s fedora and a section devoted to James Gandolfini of The Sopranos.
Old Vegas on Fremont Street


But I’ve kept my fave Vegas story for last: One boozy night I lost my iPhone in a nightclub on the Strip. Unbelievably, some angel found it, gave it to security at The Mirage Hotel and Casino who went beyond the call of duty and shipped it to me via UPS.

Which just goes to prove, what happens in Vegas doesn't always stay in Vegas.

WHERE TO STAY

The MGM Grand Hotel & Casino is centrally located on the Vegas strip. Excellent service and spotless rooms. Surf to http://www.mgmgrand.com/

WHERE TO EAT

Chef Shawn McClain combines farm-to-table produce, artisanal meats and sustainable seafood in a classy setting. Surf to http://www.arialasvegas.com/dining/restaurants/sage. Best burgers in Vegas at Park on Fremont. Surf to http://parkonfremont.com/. Best brunch: Simon’s at The Palms: http://www.palms.com/casual-dining/simon.

HOW TO GET THERE

Several airlines fly direct from Montreal to Las Vegas.

GAY VEGAS

Get more Gay Vegas info from http://www.thecenterlv.com/ and http://gaylasvegas.com/.

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BOWIE'S BISEXUALITY ON DISPLAY AT AGO: "I CAN'T DENY I'VE USED THAT FACT VERY WELL"

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Photo from the “David Bowie Is” exhibit at the AGO in Toronto. Album cover shoot for Aladdin Sane (1973), design by Brian Duffy and Celia Philo, make up by Pierre La Roche. (Photo courtesy AGO)

Who doesn’t love David Bowie? Except for maybe the voters at the Grammy Awards, who snubbed Bowie during his peak creative years and finally awarded him a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006.

The Grammys aside, Bowie is widely-revered as one of the great visionary talents of the late 20th century, and he finally gets his due in the massive “David Bowie Is” exhibition currently drawing capacity crowds at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto.

The man appeals to just about everybody, alternative and mainstream, gay and straight. Like Bowie once famously quipped, “It’s true – I am a bisexual. But I can’t deny that I’ve used that fact very well. I suppose it’s the best thing that ever happened to me. Fun, too.”


I first saw the “David Bowie Is” exhibition at London’s massive Victoria and Albert Museum (The V&A) this past spring. The ticket was the fastest seller in the V&A’s history, and history appears to be repeating itself at the AGO: Evening hours have been added, a second block of tickets are now on sale and the exhibit continues to November 27 before moving on to the Museum of Image and Sound in Sao Paulo, Brazil, from January to April 2014.

The exhibition itself is breathtaking: The V&A was given unprecedented access to the David Bowie Archive to curate the first international retrospective of Bowie’s career. Over 300 objects are featured, from handwritten lyrics, set designs created for the Diamond Dogs tour (1974), to Bowie’s own instruments and album artwork. On display are more than 50 stage-costumes including Ziggy Stardust bodysuits (1972) designed by Freddie Burretti, Kansai Yamamoto’s flamboyant creations for the Aladdin Sane tour (1973) and the Union Jack coat designed by Bowie and Alexander McQueen for the Earthling album cover (1997).

The dazzling exhibit looks at how Bowie’s music and individualism both influenced and was influenced by wider movements in art, design and contemporary culture. The exhibition also shows how Bowie has inspired others to challenge convention and pursue freedom of expression.

The lay-out at the V&A was much airier and spacier than that at the AGO, which I found cramped with long line-ups. Still, this is a must-see exhibition that will easily take you a good two hours to wander through.

David Bowie is continues at the AGO in Toronto until Nov. 27. Time slots do sell out. Advance ticket purchase is highly recommended, and the best times to visit are Tuesday to Friday, 10 am to 4 pm. Click here for more info and tickets.
 
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THE TRUE COLOURS OF CYNDI LAUPER

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Cyndi Lauper, circa 2013 (Photo courtesy Equipe Spectra)

Bugs' brand-new uber-queer interview with Cyndi originally ran in Daily Xtra. (A second, more mainstream interview ran in The Montreal Gazette.)

Queer audiences know Cyndi Lauper’s anthem, “True Colors,” is the theme song of the many star-studded True Colors tours she created to empower LGBT youth and benefit LGBT organizations and support groups across America.

But few people know that New York City’s True Colors Residence for homeless LGBT youth — which Lauper’s non-profit True Colors Fund built in partnership with New York’s West End Intergenerational Residence — was inspired by her close long-time friend Gregory, who was kicked out by his parents at the age of 12 when they discovered he was gay. “Gregory slept on park benches,” Lauper says today.

Shortly after Gregory died of AIDS in 1985, “True Colors” (written by songwriters Billy Steinberg and Tom Kelly) was offered to Lauper.

“Songwriters pitch you songs in your style, and this song was originally written for Anne Murray. All I had was the melody and lyric. I sang it really softly,” a teary Lauper told me a year before the True Colors Residence opened in 2011. “And as time went on, I realized that with the True Colors Residence, Gregory [would] finally get his wish.”

Lauper recently told me that on opening day, “I put a little plant for Gregory in their garden.”

Fresh off winning Best Original Score at the 2013 Tony Awards, for the hit Broadway musical Kinky Boots (“I didn’t stop to think I was the first woman to win that award [solo because] there were a lot of men involved, people who understood me, like [playwright] Harvey Fierstein”), Lauper is currently in the middle of a world tour celebrating the 30th anniversary of her breakthrough album, She’s So Unusual.

She’s So Unusual made rock and roll history: it catapulted Lauper to international stardom as the album sold more than 22 million copies worldwide and Lauper became the first female singer to have four top-five singles from one album on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart. She then won Best New Artist at the 1985 Grammy Awards.

“I won one [award], but that year everybody looked at me to be the next Michael Jackson and leave with an armful [of Grammys],” Lauper says. “We were really the little train that could. I mean, the videos that I did cost about $38,000; the top one we spent maybe $60,000. Meanwhile, Michael Jackson was making movies!”

Lauper also fought hard to ensure the memorable “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” video was multiracial and intergenerational. When MTV refused to air Lauper’s videos, she got into the ring with World Wrestling Federation champ Hulk Hogan and company. “The WWF enabled ‘Girls’ to be played on TV — they weren’t playing it on MTV or the radio. It started there. It enabled me to be heard. And I had a great time doing [the WWF]. I had a lot of laughs.”

Lauper also says “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” written in 1979 by Robert Hazard, was originally misogynistic. “Just by having a woman sing it changed it. The song was a puzzle until I asked the guitar player to play a Motown kind of riff. Then we had a reggae riff with the electronic beat, and that’s when ‘Girls’ really came into shape.

“One of the big influences was ‘The Safety Dance’ song by [Montreal band] Men Without Hats. Before that [‘Girls’] was a mess and we weren’t going to do it. You change a few things, change a few pronouns, and you can actually make an anthem that will affect people, as opposed to just having a hit song.”

Looking back on her career, Lauper, now 59, says, “I didn’t want to be the little sex-symbol girl. I’m the kind of person if you tell me, ‘This is how it’s done,’ I always, always think, ‘Okay, that’s how you know it. Maybe there’s another way.’ If they say no to me, in the back of my mind, I’m like, ‘For you, maybe, not for me!’ I never fit in with normal anyway: I wasn’t Madonna, I wasn’t going to be like Prince or Michael. I wasn’t going to be like any of them. The best I can do is to find my own authenticity. I wanted to define a different kind of sexuality where a woman could be who she was and be revolutionary. That really was against the grain, and that it caught on was a miracle.”

Lauper will sing the entire She’s So Unusual album onher current tour. “We got a kickass band. It’ll be a fun night,” she says. “It’ll also be the last time I sing She’s So Unusual as it was recorded.”

SHYAM SELVADURAI ON GAY LIFE, GAY LIT AND ADVICE OF NOBEL PRIZE WINNER ALICE MUNRO

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Award-winning author Shyam Selvadurai (Photo by Richard Burnett)

Bugs'interview with Shyma Selvaduria originally ran in the November 2013 issue of Fugues magazine
 
The last time I interviewed author Shyam Selvadurai was way back in 1998 when his sophomore book Cinnamon Gardens shot up the bestseller charts. He was a young sensation then, still riding the triumphant success of his 1994 debut novel Funny Boy.

“I experienced a lot of pressure when I wrote my second novel, Cinnamon Gardens,” Shyam told me recently. “It’s not just an external pressure, it’s also internal. You want to achieve a higher goal. Each book has its own problems and challenges. I remember I met [2013 Nobel Prize-winning author] Alice Munro soon after Funny Boy came out and she asked me how I was dealing with all the pressure. I told her I was having second-novel syndrome and Alice replied, ‘I’m having ninth-book syndrome! It never gets easier.’”

Shyam Selvadurai was born in 1965 in Colombo, Sri Lanka, then came to Canada with his family at age 19 and grew up in Toronto’s sprawling suburbs.

“Toronto has and hasn`t changed – some of the suburbs are just grim, but they are more ethnic than when I came and people have learnt to make lives for themselves,” says Shyam, who today divides his time between Toronto and Colombo where he is the founder and Project Director of Write to Reconcile, a creative writing project in English undertaken by The National Peace Council of Sri Lanka. Selvaduria spends up to five months each year in Colombo.


“The suburbs of Toronto are a grim place for immigrants, but it is a place where they – like my parents – can forge a new life. When I go back there now I don’t feel nostalgia, but I do feel contentment. I no longer live in Toronto’s suburbs so I don’t feel l trapped. When I was younger, I couldn`t wait to finish university so that I could get the hell out of there,” says Shyam, who got a B.F.A. from York University where he studied creative writing and theatre. “I even lived in Montreal for 18 months, in 1991 – 92. Then I ran out of money and moved back into my parents’ basement and wrote Funny Boy.”


When Funny Boy was published, The New York Times and London’s The Literary Review both raved, and the book would go on to win a Lambda Literary Award. “But I didn’t do the rock star thing,” Shyam says. “When people on a plane sitting next to me ask me what I do, I tell them I’m a teacher.”

 

While he is proud Funny Boy did so well, he is also a little dismissive of book awards in general. For instance, he never knew that Funny Boy was nominated and then won a Lambda Literary Award.
 
“Nobody thought to tell me!” he says incredulously. “But winning [an award] is like a lottery ticket. That’s all it is, it’s a crapshoot. Whether you win or not does not mean your book is good. The good thing about awards is it brings you more exposure, and the more exposure you have, the more books you sell, and the more time you have to write another book.”


It took Selvadurai over a decade to write his new book, The Hungry Ghosts, which he began writing in 1999. As his publisher Random House explains, “In Buddhist myth, the dead may be reborn as “hungry ghosts” – spirits with stomach so large they can never be full – if they have desired too much during their lives. It is the duty of the living relatives to free those doomed to this fate by doing kind deeds and creating good karma. In Shyam Selvadurai’s sweeping new novel, his first in more than a decade, he creates an unforgettable ghost, a powerful Sri Lankan matriarch whose wily ways, insatiable longing for land, houses, money and control, and tragic blindness to the human needs of those around her parallels the volatile political situation of her war-torn country.”


The novel centres around Shivan Rassiah, the beloved grandson, who is of mixed Tamil and Sinhalese lineage, and who also – to his grandmother’s dismay – grows from beautiful boy to striking gay man.


“As the novel opens in the present day, Shivan, now living in Canada, is preparing to travel back to Colombo, Sri Lanka, to rescue his elderly and ailing grandmother, to remove her from the home – now fallen into disrepair – that is her pride, and bring her to Toronto to live out her final days. But,” the hardcover dustjacket notes explain, “throughout the night and into the early morning hours of his departure, Shivan grapples with his own insatiable hunger and is haunted by unrelenting ghosts of his own creation.”


The Hungry Ghosts is also a very Buddhist novel, with Buddhist themes,” Shyam tells me. “It is about what it means to be like someone like me out in the world. Without being autobiographical, this book is who I am. Around the year 2000 I became very involved in Buddhism, so it became important for me to get that down. I wanted to incorporate Buddhism into a book organically, and not just as exotic trivia. I wanted it to engage the reader as literature.”


While he doesn’t consider himself a “gay author,” being gay is central to Shyam’s identity.

“When I came out I did have to deal with racism in Canada, and with the hierarchy of beauty in the gay bars,” Shyam says. “But there is always a hierarchy no matter where you are or where you go. When I came out [in the early 1980s] you could still discriminate against gay people. AIDS was a big issue, so we all developed strong survivor instincts.


“I also think in our early twenties that identity is important to you: ‘Who am I?’ You are released from your home, your family, the rigidness of your high school years,” says Shyam, who is now aged 48. “All of that has been cut from you. So as an intelligent young person you ask yourself the question. I admire that in young people. Those who don’t deal with this angst I think are dull people.


“But I never thought about my gay identity as such – I just lived it. I think how you identify first depends on which identity is under threat. Then that identity becomes primary. When it’s not under threat, then it takes its place in you.”



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SAL CAPONE EXPLORES BEING GAY IN THE WORLD OF HIP HOP

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The cast of Sal Capone: The Lamentable Tragedy Of (Photo courtesy Black Theatre Workshop)


The debut play by Montreal-born playwright Omari Newton,Sal Capone: The Lamentable Tragedy Of, is wowing audiences at Montreal’s Black Theatre Workshop. The play tells the tale of gangster hip-hop trio Sal Capone who have a shot at the big time when their gifted DJ, Sammy, is shot nine times by local police on the eve of Sal Capone’s big musical launch. Sammy falls into a coma, leaving his bandmates, rappers Freddy (Tristan D. Lalla) and Jewel (Kim Villagante) and their business manager, Chase (Jordan Waunch), bickering and angry at the police.  

Newton was inspired by the death of Fredy Villanueva, an 18-year-old shot and killed by an officer in an altercation in Montreal North in 2008. In the play, the police shooting of Sammy gives Newton the opportunity to explore the machismo and homophobia of the hip hop world, especially when (SPOILER WARNING) sammy’s friends discover via a First Nations transvestite and hooker (Billy Merasty) that Sammy was gay.
 
The video design by Candelario Andrade is  beautifully staged, the cast is excellent, and actors Tristan D. Lalla and Kim Villagante can rap with the best of them.
When the script focuses on Sammy’s sexual orientation and homophobia in the hip hop community, the play is absolutely riveting.
It reminds me of Terrance Dean, a former MTV executive who lost a lot of friends when he decided to publicly come out as a gay man and write all about it in his terrific 2008 bestselling blind-item filled book Hiding in Hip Hop.

“I wanted to write the book because there is a huge subculture that exists in the entertainment industry and the world is unsuspecting,” Dean tolkd me. “So many of my friends are part of that subculture and are afraid to come out and jeopardize their careers. Homophobia is [also] so ingrained in the black community and within the black church. It’s all about black masculinity. Hip hop is all high testosterone machismo and bravado. In the black community, you cannot be hip hop and be gay. I think the white community is more tolerant of gay people.”
Dean added, “You cannot come into this business openly gay – the business won’t support you. So it will have to be somebody established and well-known. People will be shocked. I think if Queen Latifah came out, it will create a whole new precedent. She’s on the verge.”
Queen Latifah, the Oscar-nominated actress and recording star, told 100,000 people attending her May 2012 concert at the Long Beach Lesbian & Gay Pride Festival in Southern California, that she was happy to be in the presence of “her people” although technically she didn’t actually come out.
The hip-hop closet is explored in Sal Capone: The Lamentable Tragedy Of. While the play doesn’t offer any answers, it asks all the right questions.
Sal Capone: The Lamentable Tragedy Of by Black Theatre Workshop runs at the MAI Theatre until Nov. 10. Click here for more info and tickets.
Sal Capone: The Lamentable Tragedy Of opens at the Vancouver Roundhouse Community Arts & Recreation Centre in May 2014. Click here for more details.
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REMEMBERING OSCAR WILDE

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Oscar Wilde died on Nov 30, 1900, at the age of 46 (Photo by Napoleon Sarony, circa 1883)


Over a century after the American Revolutionary army made the Château Ramezay in Old Montreal its Canadian headquarters in 1775 – Benjamin Franklin himself would later overnight there in his quest to persuade Canadians to join the American Revolution – the Château’s gardens (then already a fraction of the size they used to be) would be visited by none other than Oscar Wilde during Wilde’s lecture tour of Canadain 1882.
Don Anderson resurrects Wilde

In Wilde’s children’s story The Selfish Giant, originally published in the collection The Happy Prince and Other Tales in 1888, kids play in an orchard very much like the gardens of Château Ramezay, which was built by Claude de Ramezay, the military commander appointed Governor of Montreal in 1704.

Château Ramezay was dubbed "the most beautiful house in Canada," and its gardens and orchard – only 750 square metres remain today – sloped down to the St-LawrenceRiver.

When I first visited the garden a few year ago I could not help but think of Oscar and The Selfish Giant, a story that can still bring me to tears today.

The Selfish Giant is the story I listened to most when I was a child and when I read it today I can hear my father’s voice,” says Montreal actor Don Anderson, who memorably portrayed Oscar in the Montreal New Classical Theatre Festival production of critically-hailed American playwright Moises Kaufman’s Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde, back in November 2006.

“It’s a powerful story,"Anderson continues. "Like so many of Oscar’s stories, there is a moral underpinning. All of what he wrote had a moral underpinning.”

Wilde, of course, really was the world’s first gay icon, and later a gay martyr when he was tried and convicted of sodomy in 1895, even though Oscar would never know what he would become, much less recognize the word “gay.”


 “Gay did not exist [back then],” explains the equally gracious Anderson, who is himself gay and has played Oscar in two other plays. “There was no rainbow flag, no pink triangle. There was no [gay civil rights] fight to be had at that time. He was simply fighting against the brutal, prudish world that was Victorian morality. During this whole period, during the rise of the Raj in India– the claiming of a whole subcontinent – the British subjected people to horrible crimes in the name of Empire. For somebody to stand up against that world, where do you go to fight this fight? That’s why I am loath to call Oscar a gay icon. He would not know what that would have meant.”

Kaufman’s Gross Indecency gives us ringside seats to Wilde’s dramatic trial based on actual court transcripts. In the Montrealproduction, Wilde’s lover, the insufferable Lord Alfred Douglas, or “Bosie,” was played by actor BJ Erdmann (“Who is stunning and tragically straight,” Anderson quips).

“You gotta understand that Oscar was the rock star of his age,” Andersonsays. “He was Liberace and Bono rolled into one. Given the chance to escape to the continent, he refused, and the townspeople then chased him to the mountaintop with pitchforks and torches.”

While Wilde was imprisoned and then after his death, his truest friend, Robbie Ross, desperately protected Wilde’s literary legacy. Ross – whose father, the Honourable John Ross, was Attorney General of Canada – seduced Wilde, then 32, in London in 1886 when he was just 17.

“Robbie was Oscar’s first love,” Anderson says. “But nobody could have Oscar and Ross was the first to realize that.”

Still, it is fitting that in the monument Ross had built to mark Wilde’s final resting place in Père-LachaiseCemetery in Paris, Ross’s ashes were placed in a secret compartment on the 50th anniversary of Wilde’s death. And so they lie together still.

“It is absolutely appropriate,” Anderson says. “A poetic reality.”

Wilde’s life can also be seen through the now stereotypical gay-male prism of delayed adolescence, in which so many older gay men obsess over youth because the closet denied them their own adolescence.

“Like Oscar, I hang out with people 5 to 10 years younger than myself," says Anderson, 43. "I have older friends, but the vast majority are younger. And so many gay men today [still] fall for younger guys. That is what happened to Oscar. There is a deep emotional love between young and older men, when the younger has a sense of joy and wonder in the world. Young people can learn much, and there is much they can give as well. But one must learn not to give their soul. You can give your heart. But don’t give your soul. You will end up a tragic figure. Like Oscar, it will kill you.”


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MARIELA CASTRO ON LGBT RIGHTS IN CUBA AND GROWING UP CASTRO

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Mariela Castro received the international Grand Prix award at the Gala Arc-en-Ciel in Montreal (photo by Andre Querry)

Bugs' sit-down one-on-one interview with Mariela Castro originally ran in Daily Xtra

Mariela Castro, the daughter of Cuban President Raul Castro and the niece of former president Fidel Castro, was in Montreal recently to accept an award for her work promoting the civil rights of LGBT people in Cuba.



Mariela Castro (Photo courtesy

Conseil Québécois LGBT)
Castro received a warm standing ovation at Montreal’s sold-out Corona Theatre at the 10th annual Gala Arc-en-Ciel, the awards ceremony honouring LGBT activists and presented by the Conseil Québécois LGBT each October. Previous winners of the gala’s international Grand Prix award include Svend Robinson, Louise Arbour and South African Supreme Court Justice Edwin Cameron.

“I am honoured to receive this award, which I dedicate to my mother, feminist and revolutionary Vilma Espín, who, since the first years of the Cuban Revolution, defended the rights of historically marginalized social groups in colonial and neo-colonial-dominated Cuba,” Castro told Xtra. “I also accept this prize as recognition of the work of those working with me, who have greatly contributed to our work at the Cuban National Center for Sex Education (CENESEX).”

Castro is a sexologist and the director of CENESEX. Since 2004 she has been the driving force lobbying for healthcare for transsexuals in Cuba and in 2008 won approval from the public health ministry to offer free sex-reassignment operations to Cubans. Castro is also president of the Cuban Multidisciplinary Centre for the Study of Sexuality, president of the National Commission for Treatment of Disturbances of Gender Identity, member of the Direct Action Group for Preventing, Confronting and Combating AIDS, and an executive member of the World Association for Sexual Health.

Along the way she has publicly advocated for same-sex unions in Cuba, and her organization CENESEX has given sensitivity training to Cuban police and continues to campaign for effective HIV/AIDS prevention.

“Just because someone is not heterosexual does not make them any less human,” she says.

“They have all the same rights that I do, and I will continue to fight for their right to get married. The problem in Cuba is the same problem you have in other countries, and that is religion. And in Cuba, that is mainly Catholicism.”

But Castro points to a transgender politician who was elected this past February as a deputy in Cuba's parliament, the National Assembly of People's Power.

“Her name is Adele, and she had widespread support,” she says. “That is a sign that things are improving in Cuba.”

This past May, Castro also received an award from the Equality Forum, an international LGBT think-tank based in Philadelphia. The US State Department initially refused to grant Castro clearance to travel from New York, where she was visiting the United Nations. But the decision was reversed at the last minute, and Castro travelled to Philadelphia to receive her award.

Unlike in Montreal, whose citizens have travelled to and vacationed in Cuba for decades, controversy followed Castro to Philadelphia. In a 2013 report, Human Rights Watch states that Cuba "remains the only country in Latin America that represses virtually all forms of political dissent" and in 2012 "continued to enforce political conformity using short-term detentions, beatings, public acts of repudiation, travel restrictions, and forced exile."

While Castro’s language echoes anti-colonial rhetoric, not even her cousin Alina Fernandez — the daughter of Fidel Castro who escaped Cuba in 1993 with false papers and is currently a popular radio talk-show host in Miami — doubts Mariela’s sincerity and good intentions.

"She’s sensitive and courageous, helping those who have historically been persecuted in Cuba,” Fernandez told this reporter a couple of years ago. “At the beginning of the revolution, many writers and artists were accused of being homosexuals and were sent to UMAP camps [Unidades Militares de Ayuda a la Producción, or Military Units to Aid Production, established in 1965 to eliminate alleged "bourgeois" and "counterrevolutionary" values in Cuba]. I respect Mariela because she could have done anything else."

When I repeat Alina’s quote to Mariela — as well as Alina’s assertion that Mariela’s father, Raul Castro, “was always good to [Alina’s] family, whereas Fidel was indifferent” — she asks to clarify what happened in Cuba’s old UMAP camps.

There were no discussions of homosexuality at that time, when we were under threat from American state terrorism,” Castro says. “So Cuba had a statewide crackdown, and some homosexual people were also [arrested]. But after three years, we stopped arresting homosexuals because of the homophobic attitudes and reactions [of other prisoners] in the units.”

That surely is of little consolation to LGBT victims of past state persecution in Cuba, but Castro is clearly unafraid to challenge the establishment. So I ask her if the establishment is afraid of challenging  the daughter of Raul Castro? What was it like growing up as a Castro?

Castro pauses for a moment, then says, “To have parents as well-known as mine, sometimes it bothered me because it caused some problems. But otherwise my childhood was normal. Growing up is difficult for everybody.”

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2013 HEROES AND ZEROS OF THE YEAR

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Vienna’s Leopold Museum courted controversy with its Nude Men from 1800 to Todayexhibition


Here is the expanded version of my 18th annual column of the past year’s heroes and zeros which originally ran in Fugues magazine.

Zero Lebanese security forces, for using discredited “anal probe” exams to test for proof of men being gay. The doctor checks for traces of sperm, and takes a picture to ‘study’ the shape of the hole – the larger the width the more ‘likely’ the person is gay. Human Rights Watch says the tests amount to humiliation and torture.

Beth Ditto married her longtime partner

Kristin Ogata in April

Zeros The Gulf states of Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, who are developing a medical test to “detect” homosexuals. Yousouf Mindkar, director of public health at the Kuwaiti Health Ministry, told the Kuwait newspaper Al Rai in October, “Health centres conduct the routine medical check to assess the health of the expatriates when they come into the Gulf Cooperation Countries. However, we will take stricter measures that will help us detect gays who will be then barred from entering Kuwait or any of the GCC member states.”

Zero Greece, for reinstating laws to arrest anyone suspected of having HIV. The law also allows authorities to publicize the names of HIV-positive people, and have them evicted from their homes.

Zeros The 1,000 people who protested same-sex marriage in Haiti (which currently bans SSM). Days later, across the Caribbean nation, Haitian gangs beat 47 gay men with machetes, sticks and iron bars, then looted and burned down many of their victims’ homes.

Zeros The 1,500 extremists who firebombed police protecting 150 LGBT activists taking part in an Oct 20 Gay Pride march in Podgorica, the capital of Montenegro. 

Zero India'’s Supreme Court which on Dec 11 reinstated a ban on gay sex, reversing a landmark 2009 Delhi High Court order which had decriminalised homosexual acts. According to Section 377, a 153-year-old colonial-era law, a same-sex relationship is an “unnatural offence” and still punishable by a 10-year jail term.

Heroes The 3.5 million people who attended the largest Gay Pride parade in the world, in Sao Paulo, Brazil, on June 2.

Zeros The Ugandan Parliament, for passing that country’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill on Dec 20. The bill, which must be signed by President Yoweri Museveni to become law, calls for life imprisonment for “aggravated homosexuality” and jail for all citizens who do not report homosexuals to the authorities.

Heroes The 100 people who marched in Uganda’s second annual Gay Pride parade, on Aug 3 in Entebbe. Police did not break up this year’s march.

Hero France, which legalized same-sex marriage on May 18

Zeroes French far-right militants who attacked journalists at protests against gay marriage in Paris on May 27. Some 350 people were arrested.

Zero The Canadian International Development Agency, which paid $544,813 to Crossroads Christian Communications, an Ontario-based evangelical group that helped dig wells and build latrines in Uganda. However, Crossroads describes homosexuality as a “perversion” and a “sin.” After news of the funding broke in February, Canada’s International Cooperation Minister Julian Fantino tweeted, “I have asked officials to review this organization before further payments are made.”

Heroes The participants in the October 2013 Miss Jacaranda Drag Queen pageant in Zimbabwe, where sodomy is a crime and president Robert Mugabe says gays should be castrated. The winner was a 17-year-old whose stage name is Ezmerald Kim Kardashian. The event was the grand finale of ZimPride week, held discreetly in an isolated farmhouse on the outskirts of Harare.

Heroes The highly-strategized grassroots campaign and its supporters around the world who helped free filmmaker John Greyson and Toronto doctor Tarek Loubani from jail in Cairo.

Zero Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente, who outed John Greyson in a nasty Oct 8 column, before Greyson and Loubani even left Egypt. The rest of the media kept mainly quiet about Greyson and Loubani’s sexual orientation – even though Greyson was very publicly gay (I interviewed him for an HOUR magazine cover story as far back as 1997). 

Zero The Israeli cabinet, which on Dec. 8 voted down two bills that would have expanded LGBT rights in the workplace and housing. The defeat came just days after the Knesset failed to pass a measure that would have granted gay parents the same tax breaks as heterosexual parents.

Zero Pakistan, for blocking that country’s first gay website, Queerpk, deeming it “against Islam.” Homosexuality is illegal in Pakistan.

Zero Tumblr, which in July banned the tags “gay,” “lesbian” and “bisexual” on mobile apps.

Hero McGill University’s Dr. Nitika Pant Pai and her team, who in October received a $30,000 award from the Accelerating Science Award Program in Washington, for creating a mobile app called HIVSmart to assist people as they take a home HIV test. Users are guided through a confidential process of self-testing, which contains information, instructional videos, a 24-hour help line and confidential linkages to care and counselling. 

Hero Vancouver’s Dr. Julio Montaner, a global leader in the fight against HIV and AIDS, who on Aug 21 was presented with the prestigious 2013 Frederic Newton Gisborne Starr Award by the Canadian Medical Association.

Zero Pope Benedict XVI, whose virulently anti-gay papacy ended on Feb 28. The former pope’s staff declined to confirm or deny La Repubblica claims that Benedict’s resignation was over the discovery of a network of gay prelates in the Vatican, some of whom – the report said – were being blackmailed by outsiders.

Zero Pope Francis, “Person of the Year’ for both Time and The Advocatemagazines and whom I originally ranked as a “hero” for stating in July, “If a person is gay and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge him?” But one line does not make a man, nor does it reverse the Roman Catholic Church’s still-operational anti-gay policies.

Zero Pasta-maker Barilla CEO Guido Barilla, who said LGBT people had no place in his company’s TV commercials, and added “they can go and eat another brand.”

Zero The U.S. Boy Scouts, which while lifting the ban on gay youth members, will maintain its ban on gay adult leaders when its new resolution takes effect on Jan. 1, 2014.
Hero Kathleen Wynne, who became Canada’s first out LGBT premier when she became the premier of Ontario on January 26.

Zero Polish democracy icon Lech Walesa, who provoked outrage in March when he said gays should sit at the rear of parliament or “behind a wall.” Walesa added gays have little significance as a minority and must “adjust to smaller things.”

Hero Convicted Wikileaks leaker Bradley Manning, who announced he would undergo hormone therapy and live as a woman: “I am Chelsea Manning, I am a woman.” 

Zeros The mob who attacked 17-year-old cross-dressing Dwayne Jones in St. James, Jamaica, on July 22. Jones was “chopped and stabbed” to death, the rest of his body dumped in the bushes. 

Zero Jodie Foster, for finally coming out, but in a passive-aggressive speech at the 2013 Golden Globes, in which she also defended noted homophobe Mel Gibson, rumou-red to be the biological father of her two sons.

Zero Alternative singer-songwriter Michelle Shocked, who lived up to her name when in March she said onstage in San Francisco, that same-sex marriage will be the “downfall of civilization.”

Hero Vienna’s Leopold Museum, which presented its hugely successful Nude Men from 1800 to Today exhibition, despite a massive public outcry over its Vive La France promotional poster by French artists Pierre & Gilles which depicts three footballers wearing nothing but blue, white and red socks and soccer shoes. So posters of the three men were covered with lines of red tape to hide their crown jewels.
Billie Jean King is going to Russia

Zero Charles Lapointe, former head of Tourism Montreal who was heavily criticized in a Quebec auditor-general’s report for lavish spending at the taxpayers’ expense. Then in November, Lapointe – who helped put Montreal on the international gay map and received the Hanns Ebensten Hall of Fame Award from the International Gay and Lesbian Travel Association in May – heeded calls for his resignation as president of Montreal’s arts council.

Zero Russian President Vladimir Putin for signing and enacting anti-gay laws in Russia on the eve of the 2013 Sochi Winter Olympic Games. Calls for protests and boycotts have fallen on deaf ears in the head offices of Sochi’s corporate sponsors and TV broadcasters, as neo-Nazis continue to bash, torture and kill LGBT people across Russia with impunity. 

Hero Billie Jean King, appointed by President Barack Obama as the LGBT spiritual leader of the American delegation to the Sochi Olympics. Obama himself will not attend the Sochi Winter Olympics. The presidents of France and Germany, as well as the prime ministers of Belgium and Canada have also declined to attend the Sochi games.

Heroes Lady Gaga, Madonna and especially Elton John (watch the clipof Elton below) for speaking out in support of LGBT rights while performing in Russia. Meanwhile, a Russian court fined the promoter of a Lady Gaga concert for “propaganda of alcohol consumption and homosexuality.”
 
Hero The U.S. Supreme court, for striking down both California’S Proposition 8 and the anti-gay federal Defense of Marriage Act, on June 26. The New Yorker magazine celebrated the double-victory by publishing artist Jack Hunter’s “Moment of Joy” painting – which features Sesame Street duo Ernie and Bert –on the cover. 

Rod Stewart looks up at my "Dear Rod" open letter

on the big screen, just before singing "Sailing" at

his Dec. 14 concert at Montreal's Bell Centre
Heroes Hollywood actor Jim Nabors, Doctor Who star John Barrowman, Puerto Rican boxer Orlando Cruz, LGBT activist and gay icon Larry Kramer, and Gossip lead singer Beth Ditto all married their same-sex partners in 2013.

Hero WNBA basketball superstar Brittney Griner and NBA centre Jason Collins (on the cover of Sports Illustrated); MLS Los Angeles Galaxy soccer player Robbie Rogers; famed record executive Clive Davis; and actors Victor Garber, Raven Simoné of The Cosby Show, Maria Bello, Maulik Pancholy, Andrew Scott and Wentworth Miller all publicly came out in 2013. Not surprisingly, in related news, a January 2013 Université de Montréal study reported that gay men who come out of the closet are less stressed and depressed than heterosexual men.

Zero The Village Voice, for laying off my friend and colleague, famed gossip columnist and NYC icon Michael Musto, who bounced back with new columns for both Out.com and Gawker.com. Michael is living proof you can't keep a good bitch down.

Hero Netflix, for launching its critically-hailed original series Orange is the New Black which features the transgender character Sophia Burset.

Hero Cher, for her latest comeback which she appropriately launched by performing at the NYC Pride Pier Dance on June 30. 

Hero Rod Stewart, for singing The Killing of Georgie (Pts. 1 & 2) at his Dec 14  concert in Montreal, after I wrote him an open letter in The Montreal Gazette:  “I just want to say that if ever a straight boy deserved to be called an Honorary Gay, it’s our boy Rod, who holds a special place in rock’n’roll queerdom: His 1977 hit song The Killing of Georgie (Pts. 1 & 2)– an elegy for a murdered gay friend – was the first-ever Billboard Top 40 song about gay characters."Before he sang Georgie, Rod dedicated the song to “my friend, Richard Burnett.” He also dedicated the song Sailing to me. Read all about it in my follow-up story in The Gazette, as well as in Ultimate Classic Rock. 

Heroes Toronto’s Fab magazine (which ran many of my Three Dollar Billcolumns over the years) folded; and National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association president Michael Triplett, revered Montreal actor and author Greg Kramer, closeted NYC mayor Ed Koch, legendary Las Vegas female impersonator Kenny Kerr, and Bernard Gadua (who published Montreal’s now-defunct LGBT publication Orientations) all passed away in 2013. RIP.

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LILY TOMLIN MARRIES PARTNER JANE WAGNER - AND OFFERS SOME "COMING OUT" ADVICE

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Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner get hitched

Emmy-winning couple Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner got married on New Year's Eve. Tomlin, 75, and Wagner, 78, have been together for 42 years.

The wedding, reported by columnist Liz Smith, does not come as a complete surprise: Just before the US Supreme Court struck down California’s marriage ban last June, Tomlin said she and Wagner – author of The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, The Incredible Shrinking Woman and other Tomlin vehicles – might get married.

A few years ago, I asked Tomlin– who had spent much of her career publicly closeted – what she would tell  gay actor or performer seeking advice about coming out.

 “I wouldn’t know what to say, other than it would be wonderful if it didn’t mean anything,” Tomlin told me. “But if they’re completely gay-identified in their performance, or speaking to issues of sexual identity, I suppose it would be fine. I would want them to be out so they could be themselves but it depends on how ambitious they are. My story is relative to the times. Jane and I were out, but we never called a press conference. In those days the press also didn’t write about [our personal lives]. And truthfully from my heart, I didn’t encourage them. It was the ’70s. But I don’t know what would have come of it if I had. It could have been great. I mean, Time magazine offered me the cover in 1975 if I came out and Ellen [DeGeneres] came out on the cover 20 years later. She was the right person at the right time.”

Congratulations to Lily and Jane for tieing the knot!

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THE NIGHT CONRAD BLACK VISITED MONTREAL GAY LEATHER BAR TRUXX

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Le Journal de Montreal's front-page coverage of the police raid on Truxx and Le Mystique


The historic Montreal police raid on gay leather bar Truxx in the wee morning hours of October 22, 1977, was the largest mass arrest in Canada since the War Measures Act. Police charged 146 men with being found-ins in a common bawdyhouse. Police also simultaneously raid the neighbouring gay bar le Mystique.

“More than 50 uniformed and plainclothes police from the divisional morality, mobile and technical squads carried off the raid” in the early morning hours of Oct 22, The Body Politic reported. “The heavily armed members of the technical squad entered with bullet-proof vests and at least two machine guns.”

The 146 men arrested were held for up to 15 hours at police headquarters “while ‘compulsory’ VD tests were administered.”
Andy Warhol's portrait of Conrad Black

The next night over 2,000 LGBT people blocked the corner of Ste-Catherine and Stanley in protest, and a few weeks later, on December 15, 1977, Quebec’s National Assembly passed Bill 88, banning discrimination based on sexual orientation in Quebec's Charterof HumanRights and Freedoms. The law also made Quebec the second jurisdiction in the world (after Denmark) to forbid discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation

Truxx was also the site where my first mentor, the late Nick Auf der Maur— famed Montreal boulvardier, former Montreal city councillor, columnist for the Montreal Gazette and the father of Melissa Auf der Maur(rock star with Hole and Smashing Pumpkins) — brought his old friend Conrad Black, the conservative Canadian-born former newspaper publisher, historian, author, columnist and convicted felon (in the United States, for fraud).

Nick gleefully recounted to me for my Three Dollar Bill column the time he bumped into Black in downtown Montreal one day in 1978, not long after the Truxx police raid.

“Let’s go for a drink,” Black suggested.



January 22, 2014: The façade of the historic Stanley

Street building that used to house Le Mystique,

Truxx and the Stanley Pub, has been torn up.

Inside the building has been gutted.

(Photo by Richard Burnett)
“I know just the place,” Nick replied., then mischievously led his old friend to the Truxx leather cruising bar above the Stanley Tavern when Montreal’s gay district was still downtown.

“Are you taking me to Sodom and Gomorrah?” Black snapped. “Let’s go to the Ritz!”

Just then a bouncer slid open the peephole and eyed Black in his pinstriped suit. “You can’t come in here,” the bouncer spat.

Nick laughed. “Then Conrad slipped into civil libertarian mode and said, ‘What do you mean I can’t come in here!’ So I pulled out my city councillor’s card and got us in,” Nick told me. “After a drink I offered to go to the Ritz, but Conrad said, ‘No! Let’s have another drink here!’

“He hates it when I tell that story,” Nick added.

Which is why it is worth repeating again and again.

Click here for CBC TV video footage of the Truxx raid and aftermath.

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SILENCE=DEATH CO-FOUNDER ON HOW ONE POSTER CHANGED THE AIDS MOVEMENT

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Brooklyn artist, writer and activist Avram Finkelstein co-founded both the Silence=Death and Gran Fury collectives (Photo courtesy of Avram Finkelstein)
Bugs' interview with Avram originally ran in Daily Xtra

Brooklyn artist, writer and activist Avram Finkelstein is a legend in the AIDS movement, for co-founding both the Silence=Death and Gran Fury collectives that changed the way the world looks at AIDS.

And while the simple catch phrase “Silence=Death” and the accompanying poster have become ubiquitous— a global anthem for AIDS activists — today Finkelstein reveals his Silence=Death collective had no idea its slogan would catch on like it did and come to symbolize a movement.

“Silence=Death was designed by a collective I formed with five other friends a year before ACT UP New York even formed,” Finkelstein says. “Our poster is closely associated with the movement, but we did not know we were surrounded by this community.”

The original catalyst for Finkelstein was the death from AIDS of his boyfriend Don Yowell in late 1984. “I come from a leftist background and politicized family, so I suggested we do a poster, and we ended up with Silence=Death,” he says. “We worked for six months on that poster. It is highly massaged. At the time, William F Buckley was calling for the tattooing of HIV-positive people, and we were outraged by that. By trying to picture what a tattoo would look like [on a poster], we decided we needed an abstract image, and that’s how we ended up with the pink triangle. Once people embraced [the poster], we referred to it — with gallows humour — as ‘the happy face of the ’80s.’”


Finkelstein recently lectured about the Silence=Death Project (which also created the ghoulish “AIDSgate” poster in 1987), as well as Gran Fury, another art collective closely identified with the AIDS movement, at Montreal’s Concordia University.

“We live in an image culture, so it’s interesting to watch the permutations of images and what they mean to different people,” Finkelstein says. “I don’t think [our] symbol is sacred. I mean, we copyrighted it so we could give it away. If we hadn’t, somebody else could have and then prevented us or ACT UP from using it. So I copyrighted it. It always was and still is meant to be a consciousness-raising project. For example, I was thrilled when the poster/VIRUS project did Silence=Sex [in 2012].”

Avram Finkelstein (centre) and the Silence=Death

collective, during one of their meetings in 1987.

(Photo courtesy of Avram Finkelstein)
“We are not making money from the Silence=Death image,” he says, “though I stopped counting at $1 million [fundraised for] ACT UP. Silence=Death has been very helpful to them.”

Finkelstein also co-founded Gran Fury, whose memorable “Read My Lips” poster was also used in the movie Dallas Buyers Club. “The film’s art department contacted me for posters of mine they could use in the shoot,” he says.

The 1988 formation of Gran Fury — named for the Plymouth sedan used by the New York Police Department — underscored how images could both fuel AIDS activism and scare others away.
When one of the sailors in Gran Fury’s famous “Read My Lips” poster called Finkelstein one day, Finkelstein says, “I thought, okay, this is it, this is the lawsuit. I was terrified. But the sailor told me, ‘I’m so thrilled to see that image is helping people in the way it was intended.’”

While his newer work has been exhibited everywhere from New York’s Whitney Museum to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, he says he never tires of talking about the work Silence=Death and Gran Fury did during the 1980s.


The 1984 death from AIDS of Avram Finkelstein’s

boyfriend Don Yowell (pictured here, circa 1980)

inspired Finkelstein to co-found the Silence=Death

Project. (Photo by Avram Finkelstein)

“I believe politicization is an important process. If it means talking about the past — or tweaking it — so be it,” says Finkelstein, who helped students create their own collectives during workshops at Concordia. Because as Finkelstein, now 61, well knows, all it takes is one person to change a life — and a movement. For Finkelstein, that person was Don Yowell, his musician boyfriend who died of AIDS in 1984.

“You might be making me cry,” Finkelstein says quietly, then adds, “I come from a family of activists — I am a lifelong political activist — but this was a politicizing moment for me. However, I was surrounded by people who were [also] struggling. So I purposely did not talk about Don a lot because I did not want his death introduced in my work with these people who were struggling to live. Truth is I buried Don, but my close friends know I have never recovered. It’s only now with the landscape changed that I feel free to talk about him. His death changed my life.”

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PETER RAUHOFER's FINAL TDB INTERVIEW, ON DIVAS, DRUGS AND GAY LIFE

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Peter Rauhofer in 1994 (Photo via Peter Rauhofer's official Facebook page)

Pioneering DJ, producer and remixer Peter Rauhofer died on May 7 after a long battle with brain cancer. The iconic blond was arguably best known for his very gay Star 69 record label, and his remix work for Depeche Mode, Eurythmics, Madonna, Mariah  Carey, Whitney Houston, Pet Shop Boys and even Yoko Ono. He also won (under the name Club 69) the Grammy Award for Remixer of the Year in 2000 for his reworking of Cher's Believe.

"It makes me sad, not only that I have lost a friend, but that the world has lost an amazing talent and that future generations will never get to understand the magic that Peter created night after night all over the world," Rauhofer's friend and manager Angelo Russo posted on Rauhofer's Facebook page. He added, "I ask that his true fans keep his legacy alive by sharing his music with anyone who may not have had the opportunity to experience it for themselves."

I interviewed Rauhofer just once, when he headlined Divers/Cité’s official closing party in Montreal back in 2005. He was pretty frank and honest, and told me that - unlike many other cities - he still loved spinning in Montreal.


Bugs: Why did you leave your hometown of Vienna in 1995? 

Peter Rauhofer: You can leave Austria for 10 years and it’s like you left yesterday. I wanted to go to the source where everything happens. Everybody in Europe dreams of going to America and NYC is the place to go.

You have a taste for female vocalists with big personas and big voices. So do most gay men. Why do you think that is? 

Because gay people admire powerful women. If a gay man could choose to be a woman, he would choose to be a powerful woman.

Are you still working on a project with Grace Jones? 

No. It was too complicated. She just wants to sing on a DJ track if she shows up at all…
Do you often re-record vocals in your remixes? 

It’s very rare [today] that a singer wants to re-sing [a remix]. Most of the times I have to work with what I get. Artists are not involved in remixes unless they’re Mariah Carey or Madonna.

You say circuit parties are on their last legs. Why? 

Circuit parties are not what they were when they started. And they always left a bad taste. It’s not about dancing. It’s a pickup fest. Circuit parties were never stylish or exclusive enough. Every party has the same DJs and same décor. They’ve become commercialized. Promoters don’t care because they want to make big bucks.

Do you think drugs have also ruined that experience forever? 

Drugs have ruined the experience. I’ve travelled to a lot of cities and NYC is the most extreme. People don’t go out for the DJ anymore. They don’t care about the DJ. And it’s not just the gay world. It’s also the straight world. Everybody gets drunk as hell, they’re trashed and there’s no vibe. They try to hook up and that’s it. But I must say it’s not like that in Montreal yet – it’s still a music-oriented city.

Peter Rauhofer died on May 7. He was 48. RIP.

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FROM THE TDB ARCHIVES: "BAD BOY" AUTHOR RM VAUGHAN 100% UNCENSORED

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Author RM Vaughan is the "bad boy of Canadian Literature" (Photo courtesy RM Vaughan)
This interview with Canadian author, playwright and poet RM Vaughan originally ran in Three Dollar Bill on August 21, 2008. RM Vaughan will read from his new book Compared To Hitler: Selected Essays at Montreal's Concordia Community Solidarity Co-Op Bookstore (2150 Bishop Street) on February 12 at 7 p.m.


I absolutely adore Dick. Heck, life just wouldn’t be the same without Richards. Fabulous Dicks like Burton, Gere, Branson and the Queen of Rock’n'Roll, Richard Wayne Penniman (a.k.a. Little Richard).

In fact, I love Dick so much I once flew to B.C. just to have a drink at Vancouver’s fabulous live music emporium Richard’s on Richard Street.

"Where did he go?" Dad asked Mom incredulously. (My folks, by the by, named me after that other fabulous homosexual, Richard the Lionheart.)

"Richard went to Richard’s on Richard," Mom replied.

Another night, dressed in drag at Montreal’s Jello Bar (I looked absolutely stunning in my brand new blond Beyoncé ‘fro), three men stood before me arms crossed as I exited the men’s room.

"Ain’t you Richard Simmons?" one himbo snarled.

"No!" I snapped, hands on my hips (thumbs forward, of course). "I’m Richard Burnett!"

Suitably chastened, they stepped aside as I sashayed past.

The best nightclub story of all, though, was told to me this week by yet another fabulous Richard, acclaimed author and Globe and Mail columnist (for now, though, until his bosses read this anecdote) RM Vaughan, who found himself in a, uh, novel position in France a few years ago.

"I went to this bar in Paris – a sex club bar, and I had a few too many and I realized at one point I was on the bar on all fours getting it from both ends," Richard shares. "I thought I came to Paris to have an Edith Piaf experience. Instead, I had a Jean Genet experience."

Apparently I’m not the only one who worships dick.

As Wikipedia describes Vaughan, "He is openly gay."

Oh yeah: Vaughan is also one of this country’s finest and most prolific writers. He’s a novelist, poet, playwright and filmmaker. He’s off to see the German translation of his play The Monster Trilogy in Vienna this autumn, then becomes writer-in-residence at some artist compound in Reykjavik, Iceland, in October.
Still, he’s no millionaire and, if he had to do it again, he’d stay in the closet until he crossed over to a wider audience.

That’s the very advice he recently gave a roomful of aspiring writers.

"They were aghast," Richard says. "I said, ‘Talk to me in 10 years.’"

Vaughan knows of what he speaks.

"Once, when I was shopping one of my books around, [one publisher] said they already had a gay writer. It’s like that old porn adage about blacks: ‘One’s exotic, two’s a ghetto.’ It’s an eternal battle. There is a lavender ceiling. I’ve hit it enough times to know. Newspapers expect us [gay writers] to write about art and culture. ‘Why do you want to write about the Iraq war? That’s for straight people.’"

Now Vaughan’s on a roll.

"Whatever integrity I had I’ve blown writing a celebrity column for the Globe," he continues. "It ain’t art. When I started the column – and before that I was an art critic – it was refreshing because it wasn’t about art. These folks are all about the money."

Truth be told, so are most artists. This past February, when I hung out with Andy Warhol muse, the Factory’s first superstar, literary legend and William S. Burroughs’ best friend, NYC poet John Giorno, I asked him, "Why wasn’t Warhol more openly gay in his work?"

"Because being gay was the kiss of death, like it still is today, sort of," John replied. "Gay people were not considered fully human. We know that [artists] Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell and the others thought it was not possible for gay men to be as good as themselves. Warhol didn’t want the liability of being a fag attached to his work. It’s all about economic values."

Giorno is one helluva poet.

And so is Vaughan.

Just read his new poetic memoir Troubled (Coach House Books) about his clandestine sexual misadventure with his therapist. It ended badly, with lawyers and the suspension of the doctor’s licence. "I went to university, I write for a living, I’m kind of smart. How did I do something so stupid?" Richard, now 43, asks.

Then we’re back to our favourite topic: Dick.

Did Richard – who hails from Saint Martins, New Brunswick – ever meet that other fabulous homosexual, the late NB premier Richard Hatfield?

"I met him in a pub in Fredericton after he retired," Richard says. "He went [there] the same night every week and hung out with the law students and cruised the boys… It was funny growing up with [Hatfield as premier] because his sexuality was an open secret. No one talked about it. But the man had a doll collection, for God’s sake!"

Did Hatfield ever cruise Vaughan?

"God no! I was not in his league!" Richard says. "He liked the preppy, clean-cut lads. I was fat and studious!"

Say what he will, RM Vaughan still cuts a dashing figure and – like Burton, Branson, Gere and Little Richard – Vaughan truly is a fabulous Dick.

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UNSEAMLY: JONATHAN SILVER PORTRAYS SLEAZY FASHION TITAN

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Montreal actor Jonathan Silver portrays Ira Slatsky in Oren Safdie’s new play Unseamly (All photos by Jeremy Bobrow, courtesy www.jtsilver.com)


“You’re like this beautiful sexy chick that has every guy in your class whacking off to you! ” says the fictional character Ira Slatsky in Oren Safdie’s new play Unseamly, currently playing at Le Bain St. Michel in Montreal.

You are forgiven if Slatsky reminds you of Safdie’s cousin, Dov Charney, the notorious CEO of American Apparel who has been the target of several lawsuits involving employees, most of which have been quietly settled or dismissed. In Unseamly, Slatsky heads a clothing company known for its risqué billboards, and is charged by a former employee of sexual harassment.

Silver portrays Slatsky
Safdie is one of Montréal’s best known playwrights across North America, son of famed architect Moshe Safdie, and he divides his time between his residences in Los Angeles and Westmount where he recently told the Westmount Examiner, “There really is a sense of coming home. Despite having all my plays done in New York, it was somewhat of an obsession to be produced here. In fact, in the early days of my career, I used to bring the actors from my shows up to Montreal and put up the plays in back basement bars – places like Le Bijou in Old Montreal or DeSalvio's Club on St. Laurent Boulevard - just to get the theatre community to see my work.”

I have long thought the way women are portrayed in fashion is the same way men are objectified in gay culture, which embraces sex and also puts a premium on youthful beauty. 

As American rock star Beth Ditto notoriously complained to London’s NME magazine back in 2007, “If there’s anyone to blame for size zero, it’s not women. Blame gay men who work in the fashion industry and want these women as dolls. Men don’t know what it feels like to be a woman and be expected to look a particular way.”

Except gay men do.

“Fashion is one of the few professions where gay men and women hold the reins of power,” Ditto told me. “It’s a shame we can’t be more empowering.”

For openly-gay actor Jonathan Silver – who lives, acts and teaches acting in Montreal – playing the role of Ira Slatsky has been enlightening.

“I think the biggest trap with this kind of character is to get drawn into our preconceived notions of what a sexual predator looks like and sounds like,” says Silver. “I think that playing him as overtly threatening or clearly predatory actually does a disservice to his victims, as it paints them as unintelligent or easily taken in. The truth is that this kind of sexual predator is able to get away with his actions because he is actually more charming, more innately likeable than average. This charm, when combined with power is a truly dangerous proposition. This to me is what makes the character so terrifying.”

Silver adds, “As a gay man, this supposedly uber-straight character actually isn’t that far of a stretch. He is a sexual being through and through whose energy can definitely be described as pushing the boundaries of hetero-normativity.  I would even say there are hints of pansexuality to him. The world is a canvas for his sexual energy which he expresses through his clothing, his photographs and his company’s values. He certainly fixates on women in this play, but in a very different way than what you might consider an ‘average’ heterosexual response. Women are his clay, his playthings, his mannequins. He is in many ways attracted to women as an idea more so than women themselves.”



Infinithéâtre presents Unseamly at Montreal's Bain St. Michel (5300, Rue St-Dominique, corner Maguire) until March 9. Tuesday to Saturday at 8:00 pm, Sunday matinee at 2:00pm. Click herefor more info and tickets. Tickets: Regular: $25, Students/Seniors: $20. Ticket sales at the door are CASH ONLY.



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WILL OSCARS PROVE HOLLYWOOD IS STILL A FOUR-LETTER TOWN?

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No Oscars for Michael Douglas and Matt Damon in Behind The Candalabra

Bugs' op-ed on the 2014 Academy Awards originally ran in the February 2014 issue of Fugues magazine.

I don’t know how much more I can take of straight film critics and audiences fawning over how brave Jared Leto and Michael Douglas are as straight men for playing, respectively, a transgender woman in the film Dallas Buyers Club and a gay man in the TV movie Behind the Candelabra.

Don’t get me wrong: Both actors played their roles to the hilt onscreen. It’s just the way they’ve acknowledged the accolades offscreen that’s really rubbing me the wrong way. 

Will Leto and McConaughey clean up at the Oscars?
Lets start with Dallas Buyers Club. Leto’s portrayal of transgender woman Rayon was transcendent, and Matthew McConaughey’s outsized performance as the real-life Texan homophobe Ron Woodroof who loves rodeo, drugs, booze and loose women – and whose chance discovery in 1985 that he has HIV and a T-cell count of 9 – is also worthy of an Oscar.


“What is largely missing is the sense that Ron’s efforts are part of a larger movement,” the New York Timesreview of Dallas Buyers Club pointed out, while Variety swooned over McConaughey as “a redneck bigot who becomes the unlikely savior to a generation of gay men frightened by a disease they don't yet understand.”

Really? That’s not how I remember it. 

Au contraire, it was the LGBT community that saved everybody else’s ass.

But that is also my point: Dallas Buyers Club is a movie that should have been made 25 years ago – and with a gay hero as the main character – but that this film could only be made today with a straight hero tells you everything you need to know about commercial filmmaking in Hollywood.

Like I have long said, Hollywood is a four-letter town.

Steven Soderbergh faced the same hurdles in Tinseltown when he made Behind The Candelabra, the award-winning docudrama about Liberace.

It was in Montreal, of course, back in 1944 that a publicist at the old Mount Royal Hotel changed the name of Walter Liberace (pronounced Lib-ber-ayse) to the more showbiz Liberace with a hard-c Italian pronunciation. At the time Liberace was being paid $350 a week to play at the Mount Royal Hotel’s famed Normandie Roof  ballroom. He left Montreal a star and would go on to reign over Las Vegas for the next four decades like the fabulous queen he was. 

“Lee loved hanging out with the chorus kids,” says my friend Michael Doughman, who got his start in Vegas in 1970 dancing one season for Ann-Margret before moving on to the Folies Bergeres for the next seven years. “I never went to his house, but I did meet [his lover] Scott [Thorson] who I really think was fond of Lee.”

A quarter-century after Liberace died of an of AIDS-related illness in 1987, Soderbergh directed Behind The Candelabrawhich also stars Matt Damon as Scott Thorson. Liberace and Thorson embarked on a secretive love affair in the summer of 1977, and the film takes a behind-the-scenes look at their tempestuous relationship, from their first meeting backstage at the Las Vegas Hilton to their bitter and public break-up.

The film turned out to be a huge success – it premiered at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival and went into wide release in the U.K. when I was in London last June – except when Soderbergh originally shopped the film around in Hollywood, not one studio was interested.

Like Soderbergh said at a press junket press roundtable to promote the film last year, Nobody would make it. We went to everybody in town. They all said it was too gay. And this is after Brokeback Mountain, by the way, which is not as funny as this movie. I was stunned: It made no sense to any of us. This movie is a magnet for attention. The whole package looked [to HBO] like a slam dunk, [but] the studios didn’t know how to sell it. They were scared.”

Which is why Behind The Candelabra– which won 11 Emmy Awards, including Outstanding Miniseries or Made-For-Television Movie, Outstanding Directing in a Miniseries or Made-For-Television Movie (for Soderbergh), and Outstanding Lead Actor in a Miniseries or Made-For-Television Movie (for Michael Douglas). – is not nominated for one Oscar.

When Douglas stepped onstage to accept his Best Actor Emmy, he memorably said to his co-star Matt Damon, “This is a two-hander and Matt, you’re only as good as your other hand. You’re magnificent and the only reason I’m standing here is because of you. You really deserve half of this. So do you want the bottom or the top?” 

I actually thought Douglas’s Emmy acceptance speech was humourous, but when he won a Best Actor award at the 2014 Golden Globes, I cringed. In his Golden Globes acceptance speech he recalled his reaction when Soderbergh first approached him on the set of Traffic, to play the role of Liberace. “Being the paranoid actor that I was, I thought maybe I was mincing a little bit in the part that I was doing,” Douglas said.

Yup, you heard right: “Mincing.”

Now, it’s true that Liberace did, in fact, mince, and acknowledging that is not a crime. But Douglas sounded more worried about what others thought about his own acting and body language.

Fortunately we won’t have to listen to more of this crap from Douglas at the Oscars. However, we will likely have to deal with Jared Leto and Matthew McConaughey, who are, respectively, nominated for Best Supporting Actor and Best Actor for their roles in Dallas Buyers Club. 

When Leto and McConaughey accepted their 2014 Golden Globes best acting awards, they were roundly criticized by LGBT activists and pundits for their insensitive and self-congratulatory acceptance speeches that – unbelievably – not once mentioned the word AIDS.

Leto bragged that his “tiny little Brazilian bubble butt was all mine” – which is fine, because we all love a fabulous ass.

But Leto totally blew it when he said, “It was a very transformative role. I had to do a lot of things to prepare. One of the things I did was wax my entire body, including my eyebrows. I’m just fortunate it wasn’t a period piece so I didn’t have to do full Brazilian.”

Then as an afterthought Leto thanked “the Rayons of the world.”

While we cannot expect actors like Leto and McConaughey to transform into activists offscreen, I also think after portraying these transformative roles in Dallas Buyers Club that Leto and McConaughey should at least prepare a sensitive acceptance speech. After all, when the Oscars will be presented in Hollywood on March 2, over 1 billion people worldwide will be watching the ceremony and Leto and McConaughey will have a unique opportunity to remind everyone that HIV and AIDS is still a reality for tens of millions of people around the world today.

It’s true that homophobia in Hollywood is alive and well. But for one night, Leto and McConaughey may have the chance to step up to the plate and prove that Hollywood isn’t just a four-letter town. 

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JOAN RIVERS STILL RUFFLING FEATHERS 50 YEARS ON

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Joan Rivers returns to Montreal to headline Just For Laughs Festival (Photos by Charles William Bush)

 Bugs' new interview with Joan Rivers originally ran in Daily Xtra on July 19

Hollywood myth has it that former Tonight Show host Johnny Carson was betrayed by his public heir-apparent, stand-up comic Joan Rivers, when she signed with FOX in 1986 for her own late-night TV talk show.

Can we talk?
Except the little-known truth is it was NBC and Carson who betrayed Rivers: there was an internal NBC memo with a Top 10 list of candidates to replace Carson, and her name was not on the list.

“A friend of mine, [then] NBC vice-president Jame Michaels got the internal memo and sent it to me,” Rivers says today. “And he wrote on it, ‘Darling there is no place for you here.’ That’s why I walked away. And Carson never spoke to me again.”

But don’t fret for Joan: “I say what I think and I move on and I don’t hold grudges,” she says. “That’s why I don’t have an ulcer.”

In fact, the octogenarian comedian (she turned 80 on June 8) is in great health, and will host the July 27 Gala at Montreal’s Just For Laughs comedy festival.

Though Rivers is still kicking, many of the gay men in her life have died of AIDS. And while Elizabeth Taylor is widely hailed as the first Hollywood star to host an AIDS benefit, it was really Rivers who hosted the first-ever Hollywood AIDS benefit — except no Hollywood star at the time would be caught dead at the Rivers fundraiser.

“I was not only the first, but AIDS was still called gay pneumonia it was so early on and nobody wanted to come on the show with me. I got three drag queens from San Francisco to fly down to Los Angeles and we got so many death threats that we had many men on stage – literally guards – scanning the audience while I performed. Elizabeth Taylor did a lot but she got on [the bandwagon] when it was good to get on board. I continue to do AIDS benefits today to shake up the younger generation, to say, ‘Don’t be such smartasses. AIDS and HIV are still part of our culture.’”

Rivers’ Hollywood connections run deep: Legendary gay actor Roddy McDowall was her daughter Melissa’s godfather and McDowall used to host star-studded salons at his home. “The only negative was he went to his grave with a lot of secrets. That would have made a great book. At his salons you’d sit at his [dining room] table and there’d be Ava Gardner on your right and Bette Davis on your left. His table held 10 or 12, depending how tight they wanted to make it, and he’d never tell you who was coming. You’d end up having dinner with Laurence Olivier and John Gilbert. It was unbelievable.”

Like a recent dinner Rivers had with two other gay icons, Cher and Kathy Griffin. “We talk shorthand because we all know what we’re talking about. We compared plastic surgeons, who’s nice, who’s a bitch, who did you wrong, who did you right. Everything.”

Just don’t get Rivers started on the demonization of Paula Deen. “I don’t get it – she said ‘nigger’ and her life is over. Mel Gibson said ‘kike’ and he went to the Golden Globes. Again, give me the rules. As Lenny Bruce said, ‘You’re a kike, you’re a nigger, you’re a wop, you’re a chink, you’re a wetback. Everybody’s something, so relax.’”

On Rivers’ Internet TV series In Bed with Joan, RuPaul recently discussed being slammed by the transgendered community for using the word ‘tranny.’

“The trannies should know that a nigger said it to a kike,” says Rivers. “Here we go again. Calm down, for chrissakes! Everybody take a deep breath.”

To this day, Rivers is grateful for her diehard gay fans. “Gay men love me because I love them so much. I was one of the early ones,” Rivers says, citing her very first album,  Joan Rivers Presents Mr. Phyllis and Other Funny Stories, from 1965 and named for her gay hairdresser. “I was one of the first to come out and say gay men are fabulous. And it’s true. They gave me a career.”

Joan Rivers hosts the July 27 Gala at Montreal's Just For Laughs Festival at Salle Wilfred Pelletier at Place des Arts

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