Celebrity Friday: British Olympian Swimmer Tom Daley Comes Out As Gay

As many people predicted when Tom Daley came out as bisexual last year, the 19-year-old British Olympian swimmer has recently revealed that he is actually gay.

Pink News reports:

Five months after claiming he still fancied girls, Tom Daley says he’s a gay man now. 

Speaking on ITV2′s Celebrity Juice the 19-year-old Olympic medalist also said his relationship with Oscar winning screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, 39, is “all good”.

This is not to say that there are not people who are actually bisexual, because I am convinced such people exist. Sexual orientation is a fluid phenomenon that exists on a spectrum. This does NOT mean that it a malleable aspect of one's identity or that being gay is  "choice." The only choice is whether people will acknowledge (to themselves, and to others) that they are gay.

Gaytterdämmerung: Prop 8 is Dead! Marriage Equality Returns To California

With a short 1 sentence order published at 3:21pm PDT, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals lifted the stay of their 2012 decision in Hollingsworth v. Perry, eschewing the typical 25-day wait for the United States Supreme Court ruling to be officially communicated to them, putting the district court ruling of Perry v Brown back into effect, returning marriage equality to California and its nearly 40 million residents.

The order was simple but its effect was not: "The stay in the above matter is dissolved effective immediately."

American Foundation for Equal Rights sent out the information 12 minutes later by tweet:

BREAKING: The stay has been lifted. Gay&lesbian couples can now get married in California.  

Details> http://t.co/mV8ERz1s5H #Time4Marriage
— AmericanEqualRights (@AFER) June 28, 2013

The above picture is of the Northern California plaintiffs, Kris Perry and Sandy Stier, getting their marriage license in San Francisco City Hall. with Bruce Cohen, Dustin Lance Black, Chad Griffin in the background behind them.

Woo hoo!!

MOVIE REVIEW: J. Edgar

After a long break, I finally went and saw a movie. A group of co-workers planned an outing to see J. Edgar, the new movie directed and produced by Oscar-winner Clint Eastwood (Unforgiven, Million Dollar Baby, Mystic River) starring Leonardo Dicaprio, Naomi Watts, Judi Dench and Armie Hammer. The film is a biography about the life of J. Edgar Hoover, the longtime director of the Federal Bureau of Investigations, and was written by openly gay Oscar-winner Dustin Lance Black (Milk).
The movie has had a mixed reception by critics (rated 40% on rottentomatoes.com) and has been excoriated by some LGBT reviewers. I don't disagree with the disappointed reviews but I do disagree with the intensity of the vitriol that is being heaped on the film.
At its core, J. Edgar is a film about the 50-year-old relationship between two men, J. Edgar Hoover (played by Dicaprio) and Clyde Tolson (played by Hammer), one of whom happened to be the most powerful man in the United States. Black's screenplay jumps haphazardly between different decades, covering the major events in Hoover's (and thus the FBI's) career. The primary event in Hoover's career was his investigation of the so-called Crime of the Century, the kidnapping (and murder) of Charles Lindbergh's infant son. Hoover was obsessed with solving the crime and the movie does a good job of depicting his support and encouragement of forensic science.


Hoover also had some curious relationships with the two most important women in his life, his mother, Anne Marie Hoover (played with brio by Dame Judi Dench), and his longtime secretary and personal assistant Helen Gandy (a thankless role played by Oscar nominee Naomi Watts). There's an incredibly chilling scene where Judi Dench makes it crystal clear that she has no interest in seeing her longtime bachelor of a son ever come out of the closet. Another enlightening scene is between a very young Hoover and Gandy have just began dating and Hoover asks her to marry him. She must realize that Hoover really has no interest in a conjugal relationship with a woman and instead she is interested in having a more enduring (professional) relationship, as his executive secretary.


The performances are the best part of the film, Dench is particularly good, as is Dicaprio. Hammer is easy on the eyes and the depiction of these two single men spending decades together at the #1 and #2 positions at the internal national police force despite a parade of more than half a dozen Presidents is quite compelling.


However, there are some bad characteristic of the film and these flaws most definitely outweigh its strong points. The first that comes to mind is the make-up. Dicaprio looks quite amazing physically as Hoover, but as the film jumps decades into the future they are forced to slather huge amounts of make-up on Hammer and Dicaprio, making Hammer particularly look like some kind of zombie. It doesn't help matters when Tolson has a stroke and spends the last half-hour of the film shaking a leaf. Hammer does a decent portrayal of the physical effects and Hoover's self-centeredness and paranoia are revealed when he starts to turn on the man who has shared his life with him. Even though the relationship lasts 50 years it is completely chaste since neither party really ever acknowledges the love they have for each other, except for one badly written and overly histrionic scene in which the two get physical (violently and romantically). I can understand that some reviewers felt these aspects of the film make it a disappointing exercise, but I would argue that it is still worth seeing, but go in knowing that it is not a masterpiece, but simply an affecting film.


Title: J. Edgar.
Director: Clint Eastwood.
Running Time: 2 hours, 17 minutes.
MPAA Rating: Rated R for brief strong language.
Release Date: November 11, 2011.
Viewing Date: November 15, 2011.


Plot: B+.
Acting: B+.
Visuals: B-.
Impact: B+.


Overall Grade: (3.167/4.0).

Outed Former RNC Chair Ken Mehlman Comes Out

Ken Mehlman, 44, a longtime Republican political operative, protege of the truly odious Lee Atwater and former chair of the Republican National Committee, Political Director in the George W. Bush White House and campaign manager of the 2004 Bush-Cheney re-election effort has finally acknowledged his homosexuality publicly, after being outed by Mike Rogers years ago and in his excellent Outrage (2009) documentary, which just happens to be up for an Emmy award this weekend September 19th.

The impetus for Melhman's revelation (by Marc Ambinder in The Atlantic) was his decision to become involved in a huge fundraiser for the American Foundation for Equal Rights, the sponsors of the Olson-Boies federal lawsuit against Proposition 8.

The reactions to Mehlman's announcement, especially from the LGBT community have generally been vitriolic, with Joe.My.God titling his post "Repulsive Anti-Gay Quisling Homophobic Scumbag Asshat Closeted Former RNC Chair Ken Mehlman Has Come Out" while Dustin Lance Black posted to facebook that it was "an incredible coup for AFER."

I find my thoughts closer to Joe's than Dustin's, which is why I have created the tag "quislings" especially for this occasion. I think Equality California's executive director Geoff Kors gets pretty close to the right response with:

"One of the things I sincerely hope Ken Mehlman has done or will do is to explain to George W. Bush how denying LGBT people equality causes real harm and how the GOP's anti-equality platform and campaigns lead to teen suicides and hate crimes. I hope he explains how bigotry impacted him and that he has asked George W Bush to join his wife Laura in supporting marriage equality. If he can convince Bush to publicly change his position that would be powerful. And I hope he shares with the public how the GOP used animus towards gay people to pass anti-marriage state constitutional amendments, as that will bolster the federal Prop 8 case. What he does to undo the damage he caused can be a part of his legacy and working with AFER to help overturn Prop 8 is a good start. We all have to hope he goes all out and proves he is a talented political strategist -- this time on the side of equality."

What do you think?

Celebrity Friday: Dustin Lance Black Speech at Oscars

Dustin Lance Black, the openly gay (34-year-old) screenwriter of Milk, made a strong statement for equal rights for gay people and for the esteem of LGBT youth in his acceptance speech for Best Original Screenplay on Sunday. Since any references to homosexuality were apparently censored to the Oscar ceremony broadcast to hundreds of millions of people around the world, I am posting it here:




And back stage talking to the media, he continued:



Justin Cole posted the transcript of Black's speech on the GLAAD blog.

'Milk' Starts To Pick Up Steam in Awards Season

Milk is starting to appear on several year-end Best Of lists, with Sean Penn's performance receiving universal accolades. Kris Tapley over at In Contention has compiled the Best Picture winners of the various critics associations:

African American Film Critics Association — “The Dark Knight”
Alliance of Women Film Journalists — “Slumdog Millionaire”
Austin Film Critics Association — “The Dark Knight”
Boston Society of Film Critics (IC coverage) — “Slumdog Millionaire,” “WALL-E”
Broadcast Film Critics Association (IC coverage) — winners announced Jan. 8
Chicago Film Critics Association (nominees, winners) — “WALL-E”
Dallas-Fort Worth Film Critics Association — “Slumdog Millionaire”
Detroit Film Critics Society (IC coverage: nominees, winners) — “Slumdog Millionaire”
Florida Film Critics Circle — “Slumdog Millionaire”
Houston Film Critics Society — “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”
Hollywood Foreign Press Association (IC coverage) — winners announced Jan. 11
International Press Academy (IC coverage: nominees, winners) — “Slumdog Millionaire,” “Happy-Go-Lucky”
Las Vegas Film Critics Society — “Frost/Nixon”
London Film Critics Circle (IC coverage) — winners announced Feb. 4
Los Angeles Film Critics Association (IC coverage) — “WALL-E”
New York Film Critics Circle (IC coverage) — “Milk”
New York Film Critics Online — “Slumdog Millionaire”
Phoenix Film Critics Society — “Slumdog Millionaire”
San Diego Film Critics Society (IC coverage) — “Slumdog Millionaire”
San Francisco Film Critics Circle (IC coverage) — “Milk”
Southeastern Film Critics Association — “Milk”
St. Louis Gateway Film Critics Association — “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”
Toronto Film Critics Association (IC coverage) — “Wendy and Lucy”
Utah Film Critics Association — “The Dark Knight”
Washington, D.C. Area Film Critics Association — “Slumdog Millionaire”

Clearly, Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire is the front runner but most Oscar watches expect Milk to be on the Best Picture list announced on January 22, along with The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Frost/Nixon.