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February 17th: It’s YOUR Birthday, Bitch!

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#BornThisDay: Actor, Alan Bates

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In Butley (1971)

February 17, 1934Alan Bates:

“I think actors are privileged. Acting feeds you.”

My little 15-year-old brain simply fried after seeing Ken Russell’s adaptation of D. H. Lawrence’s 1920 novel, Women In Love (1969). I had caught it at a movie theatre in Spokane, along with my high school theatre nerd friend, Richard, and on the trip home we couldn’t speak. Back at his place, alone together in his room, we discussed how the film had changed our minds about so many things, and we swore in that moment that we would adopt the clothing and affectations of the British Edwardians, and that we would each find a way to somehow wrestle naked with a beautiful hairy man by firelight.

Women In Love explores the hearts and minds, personalities and philosophies, of four intelligent, educated young people at the beginning of 20th century, and their romantic relationships, heterosexual and homosexual, plus themes of friendship, love and desire. I experienced the film several times in the theatre. I played a certain scene over and over in my head, and I could never quite erase the images. Oliver Reed and Bates seemed like excellent choices for a new hobby, Nude Wrestling With British Film Stars.

Women In Love is a powerful film with very strong homoerotic undertones. It was also one of the first films to boldly show full frontal male nudity. The plot subtly hints at a strong “special” relationship between the two leading male characters, Gerald and Rupert. That very physical wrestling scene continues for almost full five minutes with both men wearing absolutely nothing! I will always be grateful to Russell, Bates and Reed for that. At 15-years-old, this was quite interesting and definitely strange to me, but certainly memorable, an added twist to an already curiously beguiling film. In an interesting tid-bit, the Academy Award nominated screenplay was written by Gay Hero, Larry Kramer, author of The Normal Heart and one of my favorite human beings.

Soon after graduating from the Royal Academy Of Dramatic Arts (RADA) in 1956, Bates made his stage debut in the West End production of John Osborne’s Look Back In Anger, a role which made him a star. Four years later, he had his first film role in The Entertainer opposite no less than Laurence Olivier. He soon starred in films like Whistle Down The Wind (1961), King Of Hearts (1966), and The Fixer (1968), which brought him an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor.

Look Back In Anger (1956)

Yesterday’s #BornThisDay Honoree, John Schlesinger, directed Bates in some great performances: A Kind Of Loving (1962), Far From The Madding Crowd (1967), and An Englishman Abroad (1983), a rather perfect television film in which Bates portrays real life English spy, Guy Burgess.  Bates worked in many genres: Comedies, Dramas, Rom-Coms, Musicals, Period Pieces, and starred in such disparate fare as: Georgy Girl (1966), Zorba The Greek (1964), The Go-Between (1970), An Unmarried Woman (1977), and he was crazy good opposite Bette Midler in her screen debut, The Rose (1977).

Bates worked on stage, screen, and television in a career that lasted 45 years. I saw him on stage in the Broadway production of Simon Gray’s rather dark comedy Butley (1971) opposite Jessica Tandy, where he is astonishing as a gay English professor who finds his life crumbling around him. The script contained a favorite line:

“I’m a one-woman man, and I’ve had mine, thank God”.

Bates had a long working relationship with the plays of Gray, appearing in the author’s productions of Otherwise Engaged (1975), Stage Struck (1979), and Life Support (1997), plus the film version of Butley (1974) directed by Harold Pinter. Bates was also a frequent collaborator and premier interpreter of the works of Pinter, including the original casts of The Caretaker (1960), The Collection (1962), and One for The Road (1985).

Besides Butley, he played gay characters in 1983 revival of Osborne’s A Patriot For Me, and on screen as Mr. Jennings in Robert Altman’s Gosford Park (2001), Sergei Diaghilev in  Nijinsky (1980), and as writer J.R. Ackerley in We Think The World Of You (1988)

Bates was married to fellow actor Victoria Ward from 1970 until her death in 1992. They had twin sons born in 1971: Benedick, an actor, and Tristan. Tristan died from a heroin overdose in 1990 when he was just 19-years-old while in Tokyo on a modeling job. Bates blamed his son’s addiction and death on his absences while filming, and he grieved terribly, never quite recovering.

Bates had numerous, often tortured, relationships with other men during his life, including a long affair with Olympic skater, John Curry. Curry died in Bates’ arms, gone from HIV in 1994. Bates rigorously avoided questions about his personal life in interviews. He worked hard at his image as a ladies’ man, but in fact he had sexual relationships with many of the male actors that he worked with.

Tellingly, his sexual liaisons began around the time that he rolled around in front of that roaring fire with Oliver Reed. The first was with 25-year-old actor Nickolas Grace, an affair which began in 1971 when Bates was 37-years-old and they appeared together in a production of Shakespeare’s The Taming Of The Shrew at the Royal Shakespeare Company. Grace wrote:

“We were very close and very loving in an intense affair that was one of the most important relationships of my life.”

So close, that Grace even became a good friend to Bate’s wife and the children. Their affair lasted a decade.

In 1982, Bates had been introduced at a party to a 22-year-old artist, Gerard Hastings. Their attraction was immediate. At first, they met only occasion, enjoying their assignations in a rented room near Bates’s London home. Bates was never able to tell his sons the truth about their relationship, even though Hastings helped the twins with their homework and played games with them. His intense romance with their father lasted for five years. Hastings:

“He appreciated women for companionship and men for sexual fulfillment. His erotic fantasies mainly involved men. He called attractive young men ‘haunches of venison’, for example. Yet sometimes, oddly, he seemed to feel very uncomfortable about his sexuality, and felt it necessary to reaffirm his masculinity, or his idea of masculinity. He actually turned to me one day and said, ‘Of course, you know I’m not gay’. By this, I don’t think he meant that he was bisexual, but that he did not consider his homosexual tendencies as homosexual per se, just as sexual escapades. He hated being categorized. As a result, Alan could be very hypocritical about his sexuality, and eventually this didn’t help us.”

In 2003, Bates took his final curtain call, gone from that fucking cancer at 69-years-old; the same age that cancer took David Bowie and Alan Rickman last year.

I have always been a fan of Bates’ rumpled, malleable features, and his explosive versatility. Bates was an impossibly beautiful and talented man. Ten of my favorites of his performances on film:

The Caretaker (1963)

The Three Sisters (1969)

Separate Tables (1982)

We Think The World Of You (1988)

The Cherry Orchard (1999)

Duet For One (1986)

Hard Times (1994)

Zorba The Greek (1964)

King Of Hearts (1966)

Gosford Park (2001)

For more information try: Otherwise Engaged: The Life Of Alan Bates (2007) by Donald Spoto.

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Hillary Clinton And Kate McKinnon Had Dinner Together And It Looked Glorious

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The people’s president aka the majority vote Hillary Clinton AND our lord and savior Kate McKinnon had dinner the other night in the theater district of New York and it looks as pleasant as one would imagine. Did they go catch a Broadway play together? Were they drunk dialing the oval office? Did they go out for some saucy dirty martinis afterwards?

Check it out:

https://twitter.com/jeneps/status/832432478413606913/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

While President Donald Trump has bashed Alec Baldwin for playing him on “Saturday Night Live,” Hillary Clinton seems to be a big fan of her comedy double, Kate McKinnon.

Before seeing Glenn Close in “Sunset Boulevard” on Wednesday, Clinton was at dinner with McKinnon at Orso restaurant.

One onlooker said, “They seemed very nice and friendly and had a quiet dinner. Somebody else in the restaurant came over and gave Hillary a hand-written letter.”

One rowdy diner began chanting “Lock him up!” as a riff on the anti-Clinton cheer.

We’d pay good money to see Sean “You are a cheap Page Six reporter” Spicer and Melissa McCarthy break bread — and then possibly each other.

On Thursday, Clinton made jabs at Trump while honoring Oscar de la Renta as the US Postal Service unveiled new stamps featuring the late designer.

“Oscar de la Renta was an immigrant,” Clinton said at Grand Central Terminal.

“What a fitting person to be chosen by our Postal Service, mentioned, by the way, in the Constitution, something we should all read and reread in today’s times … Let there be many, many more immigrants with the love of America that [he] exemplified every single day.”

Read more here.

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#You’veBeenConwayed: Kellyanne’s Secret Interview Tricks, Explained

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Is there anything on earth more frustrating (and fascinating) than watching Kellyanne Conway work her dark magic on hapless interviewers? The lightning quick way she bobs and weaves, pivots and deflects – truly she is the Muhammed Ali of doublespeak. In the video below, VOX has brought debate coach Seth Gannon on to explain what the hell she’s doing and how she’s doing it. It basically boils down to a trick: She hears a key word that she can use, she then repeats it over and over, while going off on a tangent. By using the key word it SOUNDS like she’s staying on topic, when really she’s just using a series of non sequiturs to trip up the host. “It’s like watching bad improv” he says. Also: “Like watching someone try to nail Jello to a wall.”

Watch that trick and others, below.

Via VOX:

Kellyanne Conway has a supernatural ability to derail any interview that paints Donald Trump in a negative light. How does she do it?

Watching Conway do backflips to avoid answering simple questions is fascinating and occasionally entertaining, but it doesn’t provide viewers with useful information about what the Trump administration is doing or intends to do. And it should raise questions about what the purpose of interviewing an administration official actually is.

For fun, watch a supercut of Kellyanne doing her thing below.

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Beware of Alt-Right Agitators Posing as Trump Protestors in Melbourne, Florida, Tomorrow

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Screen Shot 2017-01-12 at 12.36.14 PM

Donald Trump is headed to Melbourne, Florida, this weekend for a campaign-style rally he hopes will “provide him with a chance to speak to a big, friendly crowd reminiscent of his Thank You tour during the transition.”

Things have changed since then, though, and a large crowd of protestors will likely be there as well.

Trumpsters on Twitter have begun ominously warning “libtards” not to try anything, or there will be trouble.

If there is violence, prepare for the Right to blame the Left. They’ve been trying to paint us as thuggish, hate-filled wackadoodles for some time. (Can you say “PROJECTING”?)

BuzzFeed has a fascinating exclusive about a group of alt-right agitators who have started a disinformation campaign intended to paint anti-Trump rallies as violent and out of control. To that end, they have started infiltrating anti-Trump events carrying hateful signs that say things like “Rape Melania!” and getting the crowd to chant “Assassinate Trump!” in hopes that the videos and images will go viral. It’s happened a number of times already, with media outlets (including – not surprisingly – Russia Today) and Republicans/Trump supporters delivering swift rebukes on Twitter of how bitter and evil Democrats have become in the wake of Trump’s ascendency.

“The current surge in the left’s propensity toward violence and mayhem should surprise no one,” wrote one InfoWars commenter.

The perpetrator?

BuzzFeed News has learned (the campaign) was the brainchild of a group of Trump supporters led by Jack Posobiec, one of the organizers of the controversial DeploraBall inauguration party and a prominent figure in the pro-Trump internet.

Posobiec, who is the special projects director of a grassroots organization called Citizens for Trump, has been at the center of several flareups of the new right media in recent weeks. In November, Posobiec was thrown out of Comet Ping Pong, the Washington, DC, pizza parlor made infamous by #pizzagate, for filming a children’s birthday party. And in December, Posobiec started the viral #DumpStarWars hashtag after claiming that Rogue One contained anti-Trump scenes.

Read the whole story here, it’s absolutely appalling. And terrifying. And a terrifying glimpse into the mindset of our enemies.

The lesson: Don’t fall for it.

Indeed, the time to “go high when they go low” maybe long past, but Democrats should never and will never sink THAT low.

sub-buzz-19155-1484081123-2sub-buzz-10502-1484087947-1

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BRO’LASKA: Alaska & Cory Talk Pumping Iron

Radical Hippie Fashion Is Dusted Off For an Upcoming Exhibition at New York’s Museum of Arts and Design

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Fashion designer Michael Cepress has spent the last 20 years crawling around the attics of 60’s-era San Franciscans, collecting handmade artifacts of hippie counterculture.

“It came together in a very 60s kind of way,” says curator Michael Cepress of the upcoming show Counter-Couture: Handmade Fashion in an American Counterculture at New York’s Museum of Arts and Design. “Someone would say, ‘Oh, you have to go to Petaluma and talk to Sunshine, she used to live in the canyon and embroider shirts.’ It was nearly all word of mouth.”

What he found was lovingly flower-stitched dresses, tie-dyed tunics, beaded jewelry, patchwork blankets, and every kind of embroidered denim you could imagine.

“It made me realize that clothing is more than a commodity, it’s a tool for showing who you are on the inside,” he says (he now designs his own line in Seattle and teaches fashion at the University of Washington). “For the last 10 or 20 years, I’ve been trying to find all the people who made this happen 40 or so years ago — literally crawling into people’s attics,” he says. “This history is all around us. It’s just somebody’s job to find it and pull it out — my job!”

The MAD show, which opens on March 2, brings together an unprecedented collection of clothing, costumes, textiles, and ephemera from the hippie era.

There’s a floor-sweeping crochet gown made by designer Birgitta Bjerke (aka 100% Birgitta) for the wife of Grateful Dead guitarist Bob Weir. There are vividly patterned hand-stitched leather boots sewn by the Mickey McGowan, the owner of Marin County’s legendary Unknown Museum, who back then went by the name “the Apple Cobbler.” And there are scores of touchingly personal garments created by unknown young people from across the States during the height of Flower Power.

All of which is politically important and strangely relevant again.

“The Vietnam War is a massive backdrop to this story,” he says. “In part, I think these colorful expressions were acts of resistance to war. To sit down and lovingly embroider flowers on the garment of someone you care about — what could be more peaceful?”

He also sees the return to traditional handcrafts like weaving, embroidery, and hand dyeing as an anti-capitalist gesture. “I think there was a realization by young people that capitalism was failing them, that there was a lack of meaning and richness in this push to buy, buy, buy.” It was a time when self-sufficiency and self-expression became acts of resistance. The idea, says Cepress, was to “take what you had, and let it out, literally wear it on your sleeve. There is only one you so why not celebrate that in whatever colorful, weird, and wonderful, way?”

“Counter-Couture: Handmade Fashion in an American Counterculture” is on view at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York from March 2 to August 20. (via i-D/VICE)

Top photo: “The Cockettes in a Field of Lavender,” 1970. Courtesy of Fayette Hauser and Museum of Arts and Design

Above: Scrumbly of The Cockettes, from the book Native Funk & Flash, 1974.

100% Birgitta (Bjerke), Ibiza, 1969. Photo by Karl Ferris.

Kaisik Wong. Photo by Jerry Wainwright, 1974.

Cockette Daniel, 1970. Courtesy of Fayette Hauserand Museum of Arts and Design.

Sweet Pam, Cockette House, 1971.

Lee Brooks and Alejandro “Alex” Mate of Alex and Lee Jewelry, 1974.

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Adore Delano & Nikita Dragun Star In Jeffree Star Cosmetics New “Androgyny” Campaign

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THIS JUST IN: Adore Delano and Nikita Dragun star as the new faces of Jeffree Star’s new #Androgyny campaign. Just announced on their official instagram, the first image has surfaced and all three beauties look beat to the goddesses in different contours/lips to match/enhance each fashionista’s look.

Check it out:

Instagram Photo

Delano shared the love as well:

Instagram Photo

The new palette will launch on March 4th so we won’t be able to get our make-up obsessed hands over them til later! Go to Jeffree’s store to get any of her other products.

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February 18th: It’s YOUR Birthday, Bitch!

#BornThisDay: Photographer, Duane Michals

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February 18, 1932Duane Michals:

“Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be.”

One of my very favorite photographers, Duane Michals is totally self-taught. He began his successful career with his work for Esquire, Mademoiselle, Vogue and photographing the 1968 Summer Olympics for the Mexican Government.

His photography often looks at gay themes. He is especially noted for two innovations in photography that he developed in the 1960s and 1970s: He uses a series of photographs to tell a story, and he uses hand-written text above or below his photographs, giving information that the image alone cannot convey.

His work has been shown in major galleries and museums around our pretty planet and is considered highly collectible. Sir Elton John owns one the largest collections of Michals’ photographs.

Michals grew up near Pittsburgh, part of a Slovakian immigrant family. He didn’t want to work in the steel mills like his father and he left home when he was 17-years-old to study Graphic Arts at the University Of Denver and then served two years in the Army, driving tanks in Germany.

His own photographs are highly manipulated, moody and philosophical. The photographic establishment were shocked when Michals began writing directly onto his prints in his signature scrawl.

By using sequences instead of capturing a single moment, and juxtaposing the images with his text, Michals really changed modern photography. His relentless work ethic, owing to his blue-collar roots, is evident in his prolific output. He explores themes ranging from gender identity to his childhood in Pittsburgh, reinventing himself again and again. He uses allegories to show subjects that are quaint or humorous, but hidden behind them is something sharp.

Grandpa Goes To Heaven

Michals is a fan and friend of late, great gay children’s book writer/artist Maurice Sendak. They used to take long dog walks together. They collaborated on a whimsical kid’s book, Upside Down, Inside Out, And Backwards (1993). Many of his photographic sequences are about children or life from a child’s point of view. Michals:

“I am a big kid. Grownups don’t do what I do. They leave all this stuff behind. They get rid of it. Everyone wants to be a grownup. Where does that get you? You cannot do anything in my racket, make art, without being a kid.”

Growing up, Michals knew he didn’t want to work in the steel mills like his father and his uncles, and he  took Saturday art classes at Carnegie Museum Of Art as a teenager. He saw art as a way out of Pittsburg. He loved going to the library and hanging out with friends. He dated girls and never gave much thought to his sexual orientation. He writes:

 “We had sissies in 1949. We hadn’t invented gay people yet.”

While in the Army, he wrote to his girlfriend back home, but also wrote to a male buddy, a turning point in his sexual awakening. His letters are published in a beautiful book, The Lieutenant Who Loved His Platoon: A Military Memoir (2011). While in Germany with the Army, he would read and reread a well-worn copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves Of Grass. Whitman’s poetry about his feelings for another man helped Michals deal with his own gayness, and Whitman’s philosophy became an example for Michals’ life.

He was also influenced by the surrealist painters René Magritte, Balthus, and Giorgio de Chirico. He admired the work of photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson who could capture an instant in time, a flash of reality. But, those definitive moments were too constraining for Michals. He wanted to capture the moment before and the moment after. He began staging stories that looked for a deeper emotional truth.

After the Army, in 1956, Michals studied at Parsons School Of Design, but he left after the first year to become the Assistant Art Director at Dance Magazine and in 1958 he became a designer for Time. He lived a quiet life, immersing himself in books of photographic history. His first commission as a photographer was doing the lobby and program shots of the cast for the Off-Broadway production of The Fantasticks, which thanks to a decades long run and many cast changes, gave me steady work.

His first group show was at the tiny Image gallery in 1959. In 1963, Michals had his first show at the Underground Gallery in Greenwich Village. The photographs were shockingly different for the gallery goers because they included sequences of images. People walked out, Critics declared: “This isn’t photography!” The fake news producing New York Times refused to review the show. People had trouble accepting his kind of boundary-breaking work. They had only just begun to accept single black-and-white photographic rectangles as art.

Michals:

“I was surprised by the people with knives. But it didn’t stop me.”

He wasn’t trying to be a provocateur. He didn’t do it to be cool. Michals was simply frustrated with the limitations of the single print. He is more cerebral than visual in his approach.

Michals:

“Though some photographs, such as the Hindenburg catching fire, may be worth a thousand words, many others are deceptive. I could show you a picture of my parents smiling next to each other. They didn’t like each other. They hadn’t kissed in 40 years. Photographs lie all the time.”

His career finally took off after a 1970 solo show at the Museum Of Modern Art. One his pieces from the show was a sequence, Chance Meeting, which shows two men walking toward each other in an alley. One looks back to see if he notices the other. The second man looks back after the first has turned away. It’s depicts what we used to call back in those zany 1970s, “cruising”.

Michals was ahead of his time in exploring Gay Rights and the struggles of being in the closet. In The Unfortunate Man (1976), a naked man arches in anguish. Shoes cover his extended hands, a metaphor for being closeted. The hand-written text on the photograph reads:

 “The unfortunate man could not touch the one he loved. It was declared illegal by the law. Slowly his fingers became his toes and his hands gradually became feet. He wore shoes on his hands to disguise his pain. It never occurs to him to break the law.”

Like Andy Warhol, Michals escaped blue-collar Pittsburgh to live in NYC. Unlike Warhol, he adores his hometown, returning for high school reunions, to visit Carnegie Museum Of Art, and to photograph the city that still defines him.

“I still have this umbilical cord to western Pennsylvania. Most people are so anxious to leave home. I have run away many times, but I have never left. It’s my spiritual home.”

His photographs of his hometown are an honest kind of photographic memoir. The House I Once Called Home (1986) shows the abandoned three-story brick house where Michals was born. That bleak image is juxtaposed with scenes from his childhood, when the place was filled with the energy of his family. Another Pittsburg sequence, Old Money (1992), shows the graves of the industrialists Henry Clay Frick, Willard Rockwell, and members of the Mellon Family at Homewood Cemetery. Michals:

“This is where everyone ends up. Even the Mellons die. Ultimately, this is the trip we take, rich or poor.”

Like Warhol, Michals began to make real money from doing portraits on commission. He dubbed them “prose portraits”. Michals:

“You can’t capture someone, per se. How could you? The subject probably doesn’t even know who the photographer is. So, for me, a prose portrait is about a person, rather than of a person.”

He has shot a variety of subjects, many well-known, including Meryl Streep, Sting, Willem de Kooning. He did a portrait of Magritte in the manner of Magritte. But, he also shoots strangers, acquaintances and friends, all of them in his trademark natural light.

Always reinventing himself, in 2012 Michals began hand painting on found tintypes, an oversized, unique kind of photograph created on a thin sheet of iron, a popular portrait format in the second half of the 19th century. In Rigamarole, he painted an ornate crest with the name Fred on a 19th-century tintype. It is a tribute to Fred Gorrée, his partner of 59 years. The pair married in 2011, just nine days after Marriage Equality came to New York. They live in the Gramercy Park neighborhood of NYC.

“Fred has been diagnosed with Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, and has started saying the most wonderfully strange things. Recently, he said: ‘I saw you eating a banana. What was the meaning of that?’ The other day, he quipped: ‘I wonder what Marco Polo’s doing?’ and, ‘On holidays, everybody likes lemons’. There are so many of them and they’re so sweet.”

“We’ve been together for a long time, and I’ve known him over many incarnations. There’s the infatuation Fred, there’s the long-term Fred, and this is the last of the Freds. But, of all of the Freds that I’ve known, this is maybe the best one. There’s no subterfuge. He says exactly what he feels. I asked Fred, ‘Why do you think we’re here?’ And he replied, ‘To take care of each other’. I thought that was brilliant. That’s the only meaning! Asked and answered.”

 

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February 19th: It’s YOUR Birthday, Bitch!

#BornThisDay: Actor, Merle Oberon

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February 19, 1911Merle Oberon:

“Without security, it is difficult for a woman to look or feel beautiful.”

Estelle Merle O’Brien Thompson was probably born in Bombay 106 years ago. It might seem improbable, but our lives intersected once. I have always been interested in the idea that her origins are so nebulous and rather queer: Who was her mother? Was it the woman who she thought was her sister?  Was Oberon mixed-race, Ceylonese, Indian, or Irish? Was she Tasmanian born?

Los Angeles, 1974, I was 20 years old, fearless and not always engaged in reality. I had decided to crash the premier of the film That’s Entertainment and post-show gala MGM 50th Anniversary Ball.

I borrowed a tuxedo from my university, Loyola Marymount’s Theatre Department costume shop, I drove my cool black 1959 T-Bird from my apartment in Playa Del Rey to Hollywood, and indeed, managed to sneak into the event, having secured a room at the venue, The Beverly Wilshire Hotel, and then moving through the kitchen and server areas. When confronted by security, I explained that I was a guest that had become a bit drunk and was lost. That acting training came in handy.

I sat at Merle Oberon’s table and enjoyed a bit of conversation with the still ravishingly beautiful, Golden Age movie star. Oberon was quite gracious to me. She even accepted my offer of a dance. Later, I swiped her place card and event invitation.

Oberon’s film career began in Britain. Her first major role was as Anne Boleyn in The Private Life Of Henry VIII (1933) opposite Charles Laughton. After finishing the filming of The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934), she was signed by Samuel Goldwyn and she made the move to Hollywood. She was nominated for an Academy Award only once, as Best Actress for her performance in the appropriately titled romantic drama The Dark Angel (1935) opposite Fredric March.

An automobile accident in 1937 caused injuries to her gorgeous, exotic face that should have ended her career, but she bounced back with her most famous performance, this one in Wuthering Heights (1939) opposite young, handsome Laurence Olivier.

With Olivier in Wuthering Heights (1939)

She suffered from allergies to theatrical make-up and suffered from problems to her complexion, but when I encountered Oberon, then her early 60s, she looked tan, rested and radiant. Outside of Elizabeth Taylor, Oberon was probably the most alluring, elegant female I had ever met.

Oberon worked steadily in films into the early 1970s, always doing strong work as a leading lady. She married four times, and always married well, her first husband was director/producer Alexander Korda. She was lucky enough to have had affairs with several of her leading men.

Oberon was one of the biggest film stars of the 1930s and 1940s. MGM’s publicists insisted that she was born, like her freind Errol Flynn, into a wealthy family in Tasmania, the Australian island state.

Her studio invented life story read like a film script. They said that after her father’s death Oberon traveled to India to be with her aristocratic godparents. But, rumors were swirling that the exotic almond-eyed Oberon was concealing her true past. The gossip rags claimed that she was actually “Oriental,” maybe Anglo-Indian, and she was born in Calcutta. In Tasmania, people were convinced she was their island’s most famous person, born not to wealthy parents, but to a Chinese hotel maid and the married hotel owner.

In Hollywood at that time, an actor of mixed race would not have been accepted. The racism of her era made it quite clear: Oberon’s Indian heritage would be a major obstacle to her becoming a star. Tasmania was chosen as her new birthplace because it was so incredably far from the USA and was generally considered by the dim Amercians to be “British”. So, Estelle Thompson from Bombay became glamarous Merle Oberon, a white upper-class girl who moved to India from Tasmania after becoming an orphan.

There were also fantastic tales of Indian silk merchants stealing Oberon when she was a baby, or a troupe of travelling actors called The O’Briens taking her to India. Tasmania embraced her as one of their own, but there is no official record of anyone who could remotely be Oberon in the official Tasmanian Archives or birth records. But, there is no record of her birth in India either.

Canadian Harry Selby long claimed that his mother, born in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), had given birth to Oberon in Bombay when she was just 15-years-old, and that his grandmother had taken the baby and had raised her as her own. Selby said that he was shocked to discover that the woman he thought might be his aunt was really his sister. Oberon never directly acknowledged the Selby family, but she did send them money throughout her lifetime. When Harry Selby attempted to visit Oberon while he was in Los Angeles, she refused to see him.

1974

Oberon successfully kept her secret until her final credits rolled in 1979, when she was taken by a stroke. No one really knows her true story.

I find Oberon to have been an actor of limited range, but unlimited appeal. Her exotic beauty was jaw-dropping. Oddly, one of my favorite of Oberon’s roles was in the rather trashy The Oscar (1966), in which she convincingly plays Merle Oberon.

I can only say my youthful impression her Oberon was correct. She possessed a subtly peculiar beauty that no other star has surpassed. She may not have been Hollywood’s greatest actor, but, hell, anyone can act. Right?

A decade ago, while in preparation for our annual yard sale, The Husband came upon a cigar box filled with nostalgic ephemera: Bits and tiny pieces from my past, including concert ticket stubs, Joel Grey’s autograph, a very significant special Valentine, a hand-canceled letter from Rutledge, Georgia (circa 1986) from my father, photos of past affairs, a love note (circa 1981) from the man that would eventually become my husband, and Merle Oberon’s invitation to the That’s Entertainment premier and MGM 50th Anniversary Gala Ball.

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February 20th: It’s YOUR Birthday, Bitch!

#BornThisDay: Kurt Cobain

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Kurt Cobain of Nirvana Photograph by Frank Micelotta

February 20, 1967Kurt Cobain:

“I’d rather be hated for who I am, than loved for who I am not.”

I was living in Seattle when Grunge happened. Young people around the globe embraced the “Seattle Sound” of fat sludgy guitar riffs, fuzz and feedback. I became aware that the city was becoming a center of American culture. The look of angst and the raw sound jumped to the fashion world and a lifestyle of thrift shop flannel went international with the huge success of Nirvana’s album Nevermind.  Amazing, this was a quarter century ago.

Cobain’s music reflects his fractured childhood and his disconnection from the world. Cobain befriended a gay student at Aberdeen High School that suffered bullying from the straight students. His classmates concluded that Cobain must be gay also. Cobain claimed that he liked being identified as gay because he didn’t like people and when they thought he was a queer, people left him alone.

Cobain:

“I started being really proud of the fact that I was gay even though I wasn’t.”

Cobain claimed that he was “gay in spirit”.  He also stated that he used to like to spray paint “God Is Gay” on pickup trucks around Aberdeen, Washington. Cobain:

“I am not gay, although I wish I were, just to piss off the homophobes. I used to pretend I was gay just to fuck with people. I’ve had the reputation of being a homosexual ever since I was 14. It was really cool, because I found a couple of gay friends in Aberdeen, which is almost impossible. How I could ever come across a gay person in Aberdeen is amazing! But I had some really good friends that way. I got beat up a lot, of course, because of my association with them.”

“People just thought I was weird at first, just some fucked-up kid. But once I got the gay tag, it gave me the freedom to be able to be a freak and let people know that they should just stay away from me. Instead of having to explain to someone that they should just stay the fuck away from me. I’m gay, so I can’t even be touched. It made for quite a few scary experiences in alleys walking home from school, though…”

The Husband and I used to pass through Aberdeen, two hours from Seattle, each time we went to our favorite spot on Washington’s Pacific Beaches. Aberdeen should be, at a first easy glance, a tourist town and arts center, with an abundance of quality Victorian houses, cheap boarded-up storefronts, and unoccupied loft spaces. But the town, named for the dreary city in Scotland, has a perpetual grey misty cloud of sadness hanging overhead. In 2005, a sign went up at the city limits, paid for by the Kurt Cobain Memorial. It reads:

Welcome To Aberdeen – Come As You Are

For people in their 30s and 40s, the albums by Nirvana were the first music that they ever purchased. The album Nevermind contributed to an era in music that for a certain person of a certain age has come to have lasting significance because of what was happening in Seattle in the 1990s.

When Kurt Cobain’s body was discovered on April 5, 1994, the world was shocked but not surprised. I had a friend who bought a commemorative shirt with a huge photo on it of the man who said:

“If my eyes could show my soul, everyone would cry when they saw me smile.”

Cobain was found dead at his home on Lake Washington on that spring day, just a few blocks away from The Husband’s restaurant, Plenty (yes, The Husband was once a restaurateur). I was working at his place that day and we heard the sirens and the whirl of helicopters all day long. The staff were arriving in tears, some unable to work.

Yesterday, I watched the absorbing documentary film Soaked In Bleach (2015). The film gathers together the pile of anecdotal evidence that has long made some fans and friends suspect that Cobain’s death was no suicide, but possibly a murder plot cooked up by his wife Courtney Love. If you think it might be easy to dismiss this supposition as crazy conspiracy theorizing, the doc produces testimonies from various experts, certain that the Seattle Police Department bungled their investigation. The recollections, many captured on audio tapes, from the private investigator that Love hired when it appeared that Cobain had just gone missing, are compelling and chilling. Soaked In Bleach contends that Cobain evidently shot himself to death after injecting himself with three times the lethal dosage of heroin. This leaves the private eye, Tom Grant, and the filmmaker, Benjamin Statler, to wonder whether that was even possible. Wouldn’t Cobain have instantly passed out from the drug? But oddly, the police pronounced it a suicide with questionable haste, allowing evidence to be destroyed or go unexamined. Inexplicably, photos of the death scene weren’t developed for 20 years.

Another documentary about Cobain was released in 2015, Montage Of Heck, a so called “official film” about the life of Cobain. This one was made with the co-operation of his family. His daughter, Frances Bean Cobain, served as executive producer. His parents, sister, first girlfriend and Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic all allowed themselves to be interviewed. Strange, but Cobain’s closest friend, Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl is not included.

Cobain has no grave. His ashes are scattered in the Wishkah River. His fans visit Viretta Park which borders the house in Seattle where he lived with Love.

This world was just too much for poor Kurt Cobain. He would have been  50-years-old today.

“If any of you don’t like gays or women or blacks, please leave me the fuck alone.”

I love this song so much. I would like to cover it. I believe it would translate well into a heartfelt saloon song:

 What else should I be?

All apologies.

What else could I say?

Everyone is gay

What else could I write?

I don’t have the right

What else should I be?

All Apologies

 

In the sun

In the sun I feel as one

In the sun

In the sun

Married!

Buried!

 

I wish I was like you

Easily amused

Find my nest of salt

Everything is my fault

I’ll take all the blame

I’ll proceed from shame

Sunburn with freezer burn

Choking on the ashes of her enemy

 

In the sun

In the sun I feel as one

In the sun

In the sun

Married, Married, Married!

Buried!

 

All in all is all we are…

Cobain, 1990

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BREAKING: Simon & Schuster CANCEL Publication of Milo’s Book

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Variety is reporting that Simon & Schuster is reporting that racist homotroll Milo Yiannopoulos has just had his book deal CANCELLED in the wake of his pro-child sex comments.

On Monday, Simon & Schuster’s Adam Rothberg announced that the company and its Threshold Editions division would be canceling its publication of Yiannopoulos’ book, “Dangerous.” It was due for release on June 13.

Of course, this now makes him a martyr for the cause of Free Speech, and he’ll get much more press than he ever would have had it been published… but yay Simon & Schuster. It took a bit longer than we would have hoped (and that line that he finally crossed was much farther than we expected), but they did the right thing in the end.

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OMG: You Must Grab This Queer Gear From Wildfang

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Online boutique Wildfang, or what I like to call the soft butch lesbian’s dream, just dropped an awe-inspiring collection that’s made for the rebel queers in your life. The line which is a collaboration with Draught Dry Goods is called “The Outsider Misfit Crew” and it’s to honor, “those who choose to stand up and stand out”.

We are the Rebel Rousers, the Black Sheep, and the Queer Outsiders. We are the weirdos, the nonconformists, and the oddballs. We are the misunderstood and the underestimated. And we’re putting our collective middle fingers up and saying f*ck your racism. F*ck your sexism. F*ck your homophobia and transphobia and xenophobia and whatever phobia you haven’t even thought to be scared of yet.  We are your neighbor, your cousin, your best friend. We are you. (via WildFang)

Such an awesome message, so you should definitely peep some of the dope queer finds below!

Oh and did we mention 10% of the proceeds from Wildfang are donated to Planned Parenthood and ACLU! So grab your wallet and spend money where it matters, yay capitalism!

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‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’ Top 10 Reads EVER with Latrice Royale

Women Caught Smuggling 13 Pounds of Horse Genitals (in Juice Boxes!) Through US Border

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Two women traveling from Mongolia were stopped at Washington Dulles International Airport during a routine agriculture inspection and were found to be smuggling 13 lbs of horse genitals into the country.

That was in addition to the 42 pounds of OTHER kinds of horse meat they had, as well as 2 litres of Yak milk.

Horse meat, of course, is prohibited from entering the United States unless accompanied by an official government certification from the country or government where it originated. Otherwise, it’s considered “unknown ruminant meat” and seized to prevent the spread of foot and mouth disease.

“Customs and Border Protection takes no pleasure in seizing and destroying travelers’ food products,” Wayne Biondi, CBP port director for the Area Port of Washington Dulles, said in the release. “We’re in the business of protecting America’s agriculture industries, like the livestock industry, from the potential introduction of animal diseases posed by these unpermitted food products.”

The women claimed the genitals were for medicinal purposes, and would cure the H1N1 (swine) virus.

They were not arrested, but the products were incinerated. (via HuffPo)

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Emma Sings! The First 50 Seconds of “Belle” from Beauty & the Beast Will Make You Quiver with Anticipation

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SO GOOD! We finally hear Emma Watson sing in the new clip from the upcoming Beauty & the Beast, and she is obviously up for the task. In fact, she SOARS. The song is “Belle” – in which we first meet our young heroine and see the town she lives in.

Via SlashFilm:

As you can see above, the song and staging is a pretty faithful adaptation to the Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise-directed animated film version. I’m not even a huge fan of the original movie, and yet this clip brings a big smile to my face. I think this clip will reassure fans who maybe weren’t sure that Bill Condon’s staging would be faithful to the classic movie. Star Emma Watson seamlessly falls into this famous role.

The song “Belle” was written by composer Alan Menken and lyricist Howard Ashman for Walt Disney Pictures’ 30th animated feature film, which hit theaters in 1991. The original number was recorded by Paige O’Hara and Richard White.

Compare and contrast with the animated original, below.

The film stars: Emma Watson as Belle; Dan Stevens as the Beast; Luke Evans as Gaston; Oscar® winner Kevin Kline as Maurice; Josh Gad as Lefou; Ewan McGregor as Lumiere; Oscar nominee Stanley Tucci as Maestro Cadenza; Oscar nominee Ian McKellen as Cogsworth; and two-time Academy Award® winner Emma Thompson as the teapot, Mrs. Potts.

Beauty & the Beast will be in theaters March 17th/

The post Emma Sings! The First 50 Seconds of “Belle” from Beauty & the Beast Will Make You Quiver with Anticipation appeared first on The WOW Report.

John Waters SLAYS His Acceptance Speech at the Writer’s Guild Awards

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About a month ago it was announced that John Waters was to be honored at the 2017 Writer’s Guild Awards, receiving the Ian McLellan Hunter Award for his written body of work. Well he accepted his award last night and gave the most John Waters speech ever.

Waters got two standing ovations for his legacy in battling film censors and going it alone as an independent filmmaker out of Baltimore in the 1970s. Waters reveled in the applause and the appreciation, telling the crowd at the Edison Ballroom that he has always thought of himself, first and foremost, as a writer.

“Every single weekday I get up at 6 a.m. and go into my writing room and think up something f—– up,” Waters said. “In the afternoon I go try and sell it. Isn’t that what all writers do?”

Preaching to the choir, Waters added: “Writing is the only part of filmmaking I really love.”

Waters couldn’t resist the platform to remind the room of some of the memorable lines from his body of work that earned him the guild’s Ian McLellan Hunter career achievement award.

  • “I wouldn’t suck your lousy dick if I was suffocating and there was oxygen in your lousy balls.”
  • “I’m glad I got an abortion.”
  • “Make a list of all the people you f—– and then apologize to their parents.”

Waters admitted that for a long time he was afraid of the guild. He figured one day he would be dragged off of one of his set and “taken off to some writers jail in a place like Burbank.” But now he considers himself a “militant member.” And as such he had some suggestions for the WGA to demand in its upcoming contract negotiations with the major studios.

For one, “Let’s stop these movie stars from ad-libbing. You know who they are. I say, say your f—— lines as written or join the Writers Guild.”

For another, “Let’s attach some of the editor’s salary when they cut out some of the best lines without WGA permission.” And the suggestion that got the biggest rise from the room: financial penalties to marketing executives who insist on voice-over narration being added to a movie after bad test screenings. He also advocated that writers “go to their homes in the middle of the night and shout out these offensive lines over and over so they too can’t sleep.”

Another proud son of Baltimore, “The Wire” creator David Simon, presented the kudo to Waters (he joked that Barry Levinson must’ve turned down the gig). Simon noted that he and Waters have shared many crew members over the years. But their connection goes even deeper, as Waters was the one who performed his marriage ceremony to novelist Laura Lippman.

Simon hailed Waters as a hero who went toe-to-toe with the state censor of Maryland on his early films such as “Pink Flamingos,” “Female Trouble” and “Polyester.” (Mink Stole, legendary actress in those films, was in the crowd at the Edison to honor Waters.)

“You’d be hard-pressed to find a greater and more influential enemy of ‘normal’ than John Waters,” Simon said. (via Variety)

We salute you Camp King and hope you keep writing campy narratives that we can devour!

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