I know that making broad generalizations about any culture, let alone contemporary upper-middle-class American Left Coast gay culture is an exercise in rope pushing, but that's never stopped me before. Besides, what are you going to do about it? I blame my culture.
So for some reason, after rereading Bill Whittle's TRIBES again, I decided to look up a list of who is actually gay in Hollywood, dialing a bead on the Pink Tribe. And like I never knew with Freddie Mercury, I never knew with George Clooney. No wonder the commies think they're so smart. And really, after all this time, I thought that Tom Hanks was gay. Maybe that was just Peter Scolari. Oh well. Part of Hollywood's job in spreading a thin veneer of impenetrable unobtruthium over all of their products is to protect the audience from their own stereotypical biases, or common sense, however you choose to call it. And of course with your willingess to suspend disbelief, you become complicit in the tissue of lies and harden it to bone and sinew of lies. But let me not use my own words when I have the horses' mouth:
It used to be a Hollywood sin, especially if you were an A-list male celebrity, to be gay, to come out of the closet. Girls, the majority of them straight, paid big money to see male movie stars, such as the late James Dean and Rock Hudson, Montgomery Clift, all confirmed gays, kiss their on-screen (female) counterparts. Not each other. (That was left for the wrap parties).
Today, things have changed. A little. Girls, who spend billions of dollars each year, worldwide, on movie tickets and Blu-Rays and DVDS, still expect to see Taylor Lautner, (a confirmed gay, from numerous Hollywood insiders), kiss a girl - and like it, but if he were to kiss a boy in his own house, behind closed doors, perhaps they wouldn't really care? Or would they?
However, if you're Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Cruise, John Travolta or George Clooney, and 60% of your movie's revenue comes from overseas, where in some countries being gay is cause for being stoned to death, your studio, publicist, manager and hangers-on don't want you to admit to your sexual proclivities.
Why? Because the bottom line is if people in China and other parts of Asia, as well as the Middle East, who make up a significant amount of a movie's box office gross, know you're gay they most likely won't go to see your movies, which, in turn, would put a huge dent in the overall gross of said movie.
Simple.
Now you cannot expect anything civilizationally principled to come from that sort of defense, then again we weren't asking or looking for any such thing. Hollywood sells sex, so what else is new? Well, what else is new is that it only sells the hottest kind of sex it can figure up. Not just hokey pokey, but smokey pokey. That's what it's all about. Consider the following list of who the fuck cares...
And the WHO CARES list of confirmed living and dead homosexuals!
Adam Shankman
Alvin Ailey (late)
Andy Dick
Barney Frank
Billie Jean King
Bret Easton Ellis
Bryan Singer
Charles Nelson Reilly (late)
Christopher Rice
Clay Aiken
Danny Pintauro
David Bowie
David Brudnoy (late)
David Sedaris
Denholm Elliott (late)
Edward Albee (late)
Elton John (she is grandma to all the gays)
George Takei
Greta Garbo (late)
Guillermo Diaz
Herb Ritts (late)
J. Edgar Hoover (late)
Jane Lynch
Jann Wenner
Joel Grey
John Cameron Mitchell
John Waters
Johnny Mathis
Kathy Najimy
Lee Daniels
Leonard Bernstein (late)
Lily Tomlin
Linda Hunt
Liza Minnelli
Malcolm Forbes (late)
Marc Cherry
Mark O'Donnell (late)
Matt Drudge
Melissa Etheridge
Meredith Baxter-Birney
Nancy Kulp
Paul Bowles (late)
Pete Postlethwaite (late)
Peter Allen (who was married to lez, Liza Minnelli) (late)
Rachel Maddow
Ralph Waldo Emerson (late)
Rip Taylor
Rupert Everett
Ryan Murphy
Sam Champion
Simon Callow
Tab Hunter
Tim Gunn
Tim Nasson
TR Knight
Trevor Moretz (Born in 1986, he is the 6' 3" older brother of Chloe Moretz)
Wanda Sykes
Wilson Cruz
Let's not forget Paul Linde with Charles Nelson Reilly, because those dudes were pioneers. Which now that I think about it, I've got to wonder about Nipsey Russell. I mean he never did anything any black people I knew cared about, so how did he get on game shows in the 70s? At least Johnny Mathis could sing, but for some reason I'm drawing a blank about what he actually did sing. I keep getting Smokey Robinson songs in my head. LL Cool J, yeah we know. So freakin' what is true in all cases, not just the above list.
I would say for the record that I recognize about a steady (ok let me calculate it...) 20% of all the nuts, and of those whose names I recognize, the surprise comes about a third of the time? I don't know. It's silly to even dignify the facts with statistics for anything but curiosity. But I think there are a couple of surprises. Oh yeah Kevin Spacey and Daniel Radcliffe for about 20 seconds each, and George Clooney for a full minute. Gasp! But I'd do Clooney. On the other hand, I get the feeling I'd want him to shut up. Lord only knows what comes out of his mouth if he's not scripted. He impresses me as a superlative actor and a cool guy - our contemporary Cary Grant, unless there's something Hollywood wants to tell me about him and Grace Kelly too. Spacey is an admirable dude and I think I'd dig his gay vibe, I get the feeling he's got the juice to be the reincarnation of Noel Coward, and I'm quite frankly rather ashamed that he won't say jack about it, unless he's some kind of preternatural queer. I mean if anyone at all in Hollywood could swing it with style it would be Kevin Spacey, but clearly we're going to have to give the award to David Hyde Pierce. BAM. That's my man.
Then again, I'm just saying what kind of entertainment homo I find particularly respectable / desireable, your mileage may vary. The whole subject brings up an interesting host of questions about the sexual ethics of Hollywood, if such a concept actually exists with any discipline worthy of examination. I suspect they do not and the whole don't-tell-just-sell cries out for some Wikileakage, but I can't say that I care enough. Nor is observing the state of decay at all compelling. Still, the fact that some homos are interesting to Hollywood and others are not must be an indication of something, not the least of which must be the secret joy and pride Hollywood must take in its selling of fiction of the lowbrow variety to the unsuspecting masses. Not a particularly ethical kind of business at all. Hmm.
I am apt to conclude that, in the vein of the feminization of the American male, this misdirection close to the center mass of Hollywood's entire business model is apt to succeed in peacetime. So it comes as no surprise that Vince Vaughn's "Delivery Man" got greenlighted and the whole perceptibly Jewish and Gay Mafia influences in the mainstream give dudes like me headaches and sighs. And I'm only saying the Jewish thing because David Mamet says so. Every business is predominantly something, or overly influenced by something even if that is a modicum of respect to its tradition. I mean what's meritocracy when it comes to reading envelopes at award shows? Speaking of which, I ought to lay the following on you, from Bill Whittle, whom I've been recalling all weekend:
What kind of money could Barbra and Martin and Tim and Susan and Gwenneth and George and Steven and Viggo and Linda and Harvey and Brad and Angelina and Ben and all the rest how much could they really put together, if they actually believed what they say not to mention the cash available to the Malodorous Michigan Manatee of Mendacity? What kind of check could they write? $500 million would be less than 10% of every outspoken celebrities' combined wealth. That money could take every poor person in LA county and put them into much nicer apartments than the one I live in. They could, at a stroke, shame the President, the Congress, and the evil NeoCon warmongers by putting every displaced person in New Orleans in a Marriott for a year. They claim this is the kind of better human they have evolved into.
Why don't they do it?
They don't do it because that Tribe worships the golden statue of themselves, that's why. A church-going pharmacist in Des Moines would be ashamed of herself for giving only 10% of her modest salary. But Sean Penn can take himself, an entourage and a personal photographer that's three or four people in a four-person boat and show us all how incredibly big and down-home he is by sailing off a few feet to rescue people, before the boat sinks from the incompetence of failing to put in the drainage plug. He wore a very nice white flak vest, instead of the pass orange life preserver, because getting shot at is a lot more macho looking, if a million or so times less likely, than drowning because you went out into the water with a lead vest rather than a life vest. It's a scene in the trailer that runs incessantly in their heads: In a world run by evil corporations, a rebel who plays by his own rules starts a deadly game of cat and mouse with an all-powerful conspiracy in this searing portrait of extraordinary courage in a life under siege, starring: me!
Now I'm willing to bet that some thoughtful people who happen to dig their own parts on other people are put off by the pinche vendidas of Hollywood as much as I am. So understand that I am not suggesting that the character flaws of Hollywood are naturally attrative to Jews and/or gays. I'm not even saying, althought I might in the future, that there is in Hollywood a sort of consistent perversity that offers a unique haven for such scapegoats when the country goes bonkers. I am saying that if you are a weirdo, you can sell your weirdohood to Hollywood. Hollywood aggregates the long tail of weirdness of all sorts. And I am saying that merely being homo is not sufficient for Hollywood to love your homosexuality. You have got to be... whatever it is that you've got to be. Don't ask me. But the Hollywood gay is not gay and is extra gay at the same time. Just like Ice Cube, a Hollywood black is not gangsta and extra gangsta at the same time. This is what we call semiotics, and Hollywood is the deepest, dankest semiotic swamp since the court of Louis XIV.
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