Oh, Ricky

I'm sure you've all heard the news by now that Ricky Martin has finally come out of the closet as, in his words, "a fortunate homosexual man."

It's always great when someone has the courage to come out of the closet, whether it's to their family or to the public in general. Everyone pretty much knew Ricky was gay anyway, what with his years of non-denials, but having another out and proud LGBT celebrity is certainly a good thing.

All day long, I've been remembering a heated conversation I had with a friend back around the year 2000 or so. We were trying to study, but the conversation drifted to guys, as it usually did. I told her that Ricky Martin was gay and she absolutely refused to believe it. Of course, any time I pointed out a guy I thought was gay, she'd scoff.

Looking back, I realize that if someone wasn't overtly effeminate or hadn't directly told her that they were gay, she was firmly convinced that they were straight and nothing would budge her from that view. One of our biggest arguments was over whether or not there was such a thing as 'gaydar'! To be fair, it probably didn't help that she and I tended to be interested in the same guys!

I told her back then that Ricky would come out one day and that I'd be waiting with a big fat "I told you so!" when he did. I haven't really spoken to her in a long while, though, so I'll just use the old blog for a sort of cosmic "I told you so!" in her general direction.

Congratulations to Ricky. It would have been nice if he'd come out back in the Livin' La Vida Loca days, but maybe having the courage to be open about who he is will revitalize his career in the United States?

Out of the Closet and into the Glee Club

So, last week I read an interview on We Love the Soaps with Jonathan Groff, an actor who'd been nominated for a Tony for playing the lead in Spring Awakening. The interview was about his stint on One Life to Live a few years back.

I remember hearing about his story on the soap (which featured him as a school shooter and which was rewritten after it had been filmed, due to the events at Virginia Tech right around the same time it would have aired), but it was before I'd started watching OLTL.

Reading the brief interview, I thought Jonathan came across well and that he looked really cute in the picture. I regretted a bit that I'd missed his time on the show, but I didn't give it much more thought than that.

Now, just a few days later, Jonathan Groff is suddenly very much on my radar. First came the announcement that Jonathan would be joining Glee for a five episode run as the male lead in rival glee club Vocal Adrenaline, reuniting with his Spring Awakening co-star Lea Michele, who of course plays Rachel on Glee.

As exciting as that bit of news is, things get even better: I just read on AfterElton that Jonathan was at the National Equality March last week, and that the cutie took that opportunity to publicly come out of the closet as gay!

By the way, the article in which Broadway.com casually mentions Groff's coming out also highlights the many Broadway connections to the National Equality March.

An openly gay Tony nominee with a past connection to One Life to Live doing a multiple episode story arc on Glee? The fates couldn't have designed a person for me to be more interested in if they'd tried!

The only thing I'd like better is if his character was a new love interest for Kurt, rather than Rachel. But, hey, you can't have everything!

In the meantime, I'll settle for this picture from the Equality March, borrowed from AfterElton, of Jonathan with another Broadway favorite of mine, Gavin Creel.

"I'm proud of my sexuality."

"I'm proud of my sexuality. I embrace it. It's just another part of me."

That's part of what Adam Lambert has to say in the next issue of Rolling Stone, where he confirms the fact that he is gay. He also adds:

"I don't think it should be a surprise for anyone to hear I'm gay. I've been living in Los Angeles for eight years as a gay man."

The issue hasn't hit the stands yet, but Adam has been quoted from it in several other places and I pretty much find myself thinking he's even more awesome than I already did! He's completely upfront and holds nothing back.

What he says about his finding his sense of self worth really moved me, especially because it fits in so perfectly with the Adam who seemed so fearless while performing and so humble as soon as the song was done :

“I finally checked into my self-worth for the first time in my life, and the fact that it coincided with Idol is so sweet. I mean, I still have moments where I think, ‘Oh, my skin is terrible, and I’m a little fat — I should really go to the gym more.’ But for the most part, when I look in the mirror now, I finally see somebody who can do something cool"

I also enjoyed what he said about rooming with Kris Allen during the show:

"Oh, s--t, they put me with the cute guy. Distracting! He's the one guy I found attractive in the whole group on the show: nice, nonchalant, pretty and totally my type — except that he has a wife. I mean he's open-minded and liberal, but he's definitely 100% straight."

All during Idol, I thought that Adam had an incredibly cool family, and what he says about how his parents dealt with him being gay confirms it:

Speaking openly about this subject matter hasn't always come easy for Lambert. He says that during school, he was "so scared" of his sexuality. He never even confirmed the news to his parents, who found out in shocking fashion.

Adam's father Eber caught his 13-year-old son looking at gay pornography on the family computer, and turned to his wife and said 'It's official.'

Later, Lambert's mother asked if he had a girlfriend. He said no. She asked if he had a boyfriend. He said no. Then she asked if he wanted a boyfriend, to which Lambert replied "Yes, that would be nice."

"Suddenly, it was like a wall dropped, and we started gabbing like crazy," Lambert says.

The issue will be out this Friday. I can't wait to read the full article, but that hot cover alone would make me buy it! (The image above is from Just Jared)

Wesley Eure Comes Out

This week, AfterElton had an exclusive coming out interview with 70's TV heartthrob Wesley Eure, who was on Days of Our Lives from 1974-1981 playing Mike Horton. He was also on the classic 70's Saturday morning show Land of the Lost.

Eure's run on Days was before my time (the first Mike Horton I remember was played by Michael T. Weiss in the late 80's) but I've heard much about him from fans of the show who are a bit older than me and still remember loving him in the role.

Wesley has a lot of interesting things to say in the Q&A, but this part especially interested me:

AE: Do you think being gay hurt your career?
WE: Absolutely. It was a horrible time in Hollywood, being gay. It was horrible. I was on the cover of Tiger Beat and all those a lot, and they'd do those "Win A Date With Wesley" and "Who's Wesley Dating?" It was so disingenuous. I had a full life. I've had a lot of friends and some pretty high profile partners, and it was an odd thing. I got fired from Days of Our Lives for being gay.

AE: Is that right?
WE: That's what I was told. I mean, they told me a lot of different reasons. After nine years, my contract was up, but I was hosting the number one show for Nickelodeon, Finders Keepers. It was on cable, but this was before everybody had Nickelodeon. Mark Summers was doing Double Dare. I was getting bigger ratings than Mark. I became the number one host for kids for two seasons, and then we heard the show was being sold to Fox. Everybody else was celebrating and I went, "Oh, no. I'm out of a job." Sure enough. I waited, I kept calling, "Am I hosting the show?" They wouldn't answer the question, and then I got the call they went with somebody younger.

I knew Fox and NBC were run by gay men at the time, but what was odd about the industry at the time, it was amazing how the gay men were perpetuating the damage. I remember Earl Greenburg — who was a big philanthropist here in Palm Springs, and had the Desert AIDS Project, he did some wonderful work, he's passed away now this last year — but the first time I saw him in Palm Springs, he said, "Didn't I fire you?" He was head of NBC Daytime at the time.

AE: And what did you say when he said that?
WE: [laughs] I said, "You're an ass."

I've written before about how mandatory the closet that LGBT soap stars find themselves living in is, even now, so I have no trouble believing that Days of Our Lives fired Eure 28 years ago for being too open about his sexuality.

The saddest part, though, is that Eure wasn't very out at all. Reading the interview, it's obvious that he while was very out in his personal life, including with the cast and crew of Days, he was very closeted publicly (a situation that most LGBT soap stars today would find very familiar).

Nearly thirty years after Eure was let go from the show, there is an all time high of out LGBT actors & actresses working in daytime: a grand total of three. Sad as that number is, just a few months ago, there was only one. Clementine Ford & Thom Bierdz on The Young and the Restless and Scott Evans on One Life to Live are the only three out daytime stars, though they're far from being the only LGBT onscreen talent working in the medium.

Ford & Bierdz will be involved in major storylines this summer on Y&R and Evans seems to be showing up more and more often in his recurring role as Oliver Fish on OLTL. Hopefully, the ability of these three actors to be out and still maintain a career in daytime will encourage others to follow their example and help push the door to the daytime closet open a bit further.

It would be wonderful if a young actor (or actress) like Eure was could come out at the height of his career (or be out from the very start, for that matter) without having to worry about losing everything. There has been a lot of progress in thirty years, but clearly there is still a long way to go.

Come Out From Where?

It has been a few weeks since American Idol's finale and in that time period, many reporters have danced around the subject of Adam Lambert's sexuality without actually directly asking him if he's gay. Adam remains playfully coy when the subject comes up, but has also made cracks about the elephant in the room being pink and has joked that he 'likes the top' when asked about bunk beds on the idol tour bus.

The latter comment immediately had Adam and Idol winner Kris Allen dissolving in laughter as Adam added "That was inappropriate", making it clear that this was indeed a joke about being a top, sexually speaking.

So, it's not like Adam is pretending for a second that he's straight, but even so some bloggers have been upset with Lambert for not coming out immediately after American Idol wrapped up. I wonder, though, if someone who was never in the closet to begin with really needs to actually say "Yes, I'm gay."

It's true that during the show, I wanted him to be more out than he seemed able to be. For instance, I would have loved to see his boyfriend identified as such in the audience instead of just as a friend. I was looking forward to the show ending so that he could say the words, but in the weeks since, I've realized that the words are unneccesary when someone has never tried to hide to begin with.

Don't get me wrong, we do need more people in public life to officially come out, whether it's in the entertainment industry or in politics. People who have been hiding their sexual orientation from the public, that is. Adam never did that. Before the show began, he could easily have deleted the pictures of him and his ex boyfriend Brad kissing from his social networking accounts, but he didn't. When they surfaced, he never attempted for a second to deny his sexuality, he just said that he was who he was.

Why, then, do we need to hear the words? As long as Adam keeps living his life openly, why are so many people obsessed with verbal confirmation?

Last night, Adam went to a club in West Hollywood with Drake LaBry, a man who was frequently seen in the audience with Adam's family during his Idol performances and whom some bloggers have recently identified as his boyfriend. The two men openly held hands as they departed the club, looking very much a couple.
Clearly, Adam is living his life as an openly gay man. There isn't a closet in sight, so why all the fuss about getting him to say what has always been clear? If he were going out on the town with women and trying to pretend to be straight, I'd be the first to be outraged.

I'd also be upset if he was saying nothing one way or another while keeping his relationships under wrap. That's called the glass closet and is almost as bad as actually pretending to be straight at a time when we need all the out and proud people we can get in public life.

Adam is not in the closet, glass or otherwise, though. He's making jokes and openly dating another man right in public view, all with a sexy smile on his face. I don't need him to say the words, and no one else should either.

It's refreshing, really. Adam is one of the first major American celebrities to be so out and open right from the beginning of his career. Why treat him the same way that those trying to live in glass closets have been treated? If other celebrities or politicians would just follow Adam's example and live their lives openly, no one would ever need to come out officially. They'd just be out and it would be taken in stride. Hopefully, in that sense, Adam is a harbinger of a new sort of gay celebrity.

At any rate, the rumor is that Adam will finally put all the media speculation to rest in an upcoming Rolling Stone cover story. I think that's great, but I don't think it should be treated as a Coming Out story, like that of Lance Bass or Clay Aiken, for example, since Adam was never in the closet to begin with. The media and a few obsessive bloggers seemed to need this more than anyone else did.

Personally, I'm just looking forward to Adam's first album (and hopefully to the tour that will come along with it!) and to seeing him continue to be the incredibly talented, honest, and open guy he's been since day one.

A Variety of Topics

Just a few random things that I wanted to write about.

First off, I just saw the news that U.S. Supreme Court Justice David Souter is planning to retire from the Court in June, which will give President Obama his first chance to appoint someone to the Court. I'm a total geek about things like this, I have to confess now, so I'll probably write about this more as time goes on.

Whoever the President appoints, it isn't very likely to change the ideological make up of the court since Souter is one of the more liberal Justices. What I've always loved about Souter is that he was appointed by the first President Bush and was expected to be a more conservative vote than he turned out to be. This turnabout is second in my view only to Nixon appointee Harry Blackmun ending up the author of Roe v. Wade and a champion for abortion rights.

Anyway, it will be very interesting to see who President Obama chooses. I'm hoping that it will be a woman, since it is completely ridiculous that there have only ever been two women on the court in its history. The number of women currently serving dropped by 50% when Sandra Day O'Connor was replaced with Samuel Alito, which I think was an unacceptable step backwards.

Maybe the President could appoint the first ever openly LGBT Justice? Given that the never married Souter has always had rumors out there about his own sexuality, that could be an especially notable changing of the guard, as it were.

Another thing I wanted to note: I read on Towleroad that former NYC Mayor Ed Koch is all up in arms about the new documentary Outrage, which is an expose on closeted politicians who work against gay rights. Koch is apparently furious that the film depicts his record as being nonexistent when it comes to helping with gay rights issues and during the AIDS crisis.

Having just read And The Band Played On last month, I can say that Koch did fuck all (excuse the language but it's warranted) to help stop the spread of AIDS in his city (which was the hardest hit city in the world at that point) or to help those who were living with it get the support they needed, all because he was afraid of being identified as gay himself.

We all rightly lay blame at the feet of the Reagan administration for their complete failure to act on AIDS, but they are far from being the only politicians who have blood on their hands from that era. If indeed Koch is a gay man himself, he should be doubly ashamed. I have to wonder how the hell he lives with himself. Someone like Reagan obviously just didn't give a damn and had his bigoted ideology to wrap himself up in at night, but I hope Koch lays awake every night in torment thinking of all the lost lives he could have done so much to help save.

To end on a much lighter note, actress Kelly McGillis of Top Gun fame (wait, there was a woman in Top Gun? I'm drawing a blank...) has come out of the closet as a lesbian. Way to go, Kelly!

Hollywood's Closet

My day at work today was a lot less exhausting than yesterday, probably because I went in more mentally prepared. I didn't have any really cranky customers, either, though I did have several of a type that we only ever see during the holidays. I'm talking about the people who come in with a list of five to seven items (sometimes more) and want you to basically be their personal shopper and take them from place to place all around the store, putting each item in their hand.

These customers, more often than not, are friendly and grateful for the help, but they're also incredibly time consuming while six other customers wait for assistance and people are calling for back up at the registers.

We were busier today, which is good. Yesterday we didn't even make half of our sales plan for the day, which is pretty awful for the Saturday of Thanksgiving weekend.

But, enough about work.

Larry Gross has a really interesting article at Truthdig about the continuing existence of the Hollywood Closet for gay & lesbian actors and how the whole Hollywood system is basically structured around keeping onscreen talent closeted. It's definitely worth reading the whole thing, but here's a little something from it:

In a recent interview, after he came out publicly, Neil Patrick Harris spoke of the impact on him of seeing Danny Roberts, the gay cast member of “The Real World-New Orleans,” which aired in 2000 (Harris was 27 at the time!): “Danny Roberts was on a reality show, so I was watching him exist in his world and … what was empowering was to see him interacting socially and admiring the way he behaved in any given situation.”

In fact, for younger audiences, the presence of gay people is part of the recipe for establishing the verisimilitude of reality TV. This is important for the growing stream of cable-based reality shows, many highly successful, like “Project Runway” and “America’s Next Top Model,” which are almost as gay as the trend-setting “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.” The king of this reality mountain, “American Idol,” has not exactly been welcoming to the possibility of openly gay stars, as Clay Aiken well knew, and as this year’s quickly dropped openly gay contestant, Danny Noriega, discovered.

But reality programming is not the basis for big-budget movie making. Would the coveted young audiences flock to the opening weekend of the next installment of blockbuster franchises like “Mission Impossible,” the “Bourne” series, Spiderman, James Bond or Batman if they knew the lead actor was gay? Would teenage girls still make “High School Musical” a megahit if they knew the romance between Zac Efron and Vanessa Hudgens was limited to the screen? There’s no way to tell for sure, as no one is about to put the question to the test, but it seems safe to assume that the studios are not being paranoid here.

After all, think about this: If two straight young men go to the movies together, how do they sit? Time’s up. The answer is that they will almost always, if possible, leave an empty seat between them.

Ultimately, what it will take to cut through this Gordian knot is for someone credible for A-list roles breaking the rules and coming out – and succeeding. A Jackie Robinson moment – in part because this will also require a Branch Rickey in order to make it happen. There are a number of potential players who might be cast in this epochal role, some of whom have already begun to climb the ladder while remaining in their glass closets.

The article really highlights for me just how brave those who have come out truly are. Each person in Hollywood who has the courage to be who they are makes it that much easier for the next and eventually the structures in place to keep people in the closet will crumble. It does seem like there's such a long way to go, though.

By the way, I had to include the part with Neil Patrick Harris' comments on Danny Roberts, because I felt the same way about Danny when Real World New Orleans aired! His presence on the show meant so much to me and I still love the guy, even though I haven't seen him since the MTV News special that finally revealed his boyfriend Paul's face.

It was just so amazing to have this gay man who wasn't flamboyant or stereotypical (not that there's anything wrong with that, but up until Danny, that's the only sort of gay man reality TV ever included) on TV.

Standing Up for Equality

I hope everyone has had a great weekend. Hopefully many of you got the chance to stand up for equal rights for gays & lesbians in the United States by joining one of the many simultaneous protests of Prop 8 across the country yesterday.

I live in a smallish city with a large University and our group wasn't huge but a fair number of people did turn out. Many people had gone to one of the two or three larger protests in cities nearby, I think, but it was still an amazing event. There were a few non-supportive passers by who felt the need to voice their narrow minded bigotry, shouted oh so bravely from car windows as they sped past, but the overall response from people was incredibly supportive.

I don't think it's a day that any of us will forget any time soon, and that goes for the thousands who turned out all over the country in various cities and towns. It's amazing how we can come together through adversity and turn ourselves into a force for real change. So many people were hurt and angry a few weeks ago when Prop 8 (and the other anti-gay measures in Florida, Arizona, and Arkansas) passed, but we're already turning those feelings into something positive that is going to make marriage equality a reality in this country.

On a related note, one of my favorite comedians, Wanda Sykes, joined the protest in Las Vegas and officially came out as a lesbian while doing so!

'Sykes... said the passage of California's Proposition 8 made her feel like she was "attacked."

"Now, I gotta get in their face," she said. "I'm proud to be a woman. I'm proud to be a black woman, and I'm proud to be gay." '

Congratulations, Wanda! I love that the visibility of gays and lesbians in the public arena is growing all the time.