March 17th: It’s YOUR Birthday, Bitch!
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#QueerQuote: ”In a Room Full of People, Want Yourself First.” – Grace Jones
Grace Jones is one of the most creative and transgressive musicians of the 1980s; She gave voice to the oppressed by offering a bold example of what it means to be free.
As late as the 1970s, it was illegal for two people of the same sex to dance together in many places in the USA. Gay people risked losing their jobs with even the hint of their sexuality being revealed. Before that Internet thing, it was in gay bars, clubs, and discos that the seeds of liberation were sown, and dance music was the soundtrack.
In 1975, Jones appeared on the scene, and when she sang I Need A Man, all lusty and rough, she was not just singing to gay people, but also for them, and as one of them. Jones is about as gay as a straight person can be. Her persona celebrates gayness, blackness and subverted gender norms. She was unlike anyone else in pop music: feminine, supple, seductive, butch and lewd. Ebony Magazine wrote of her:
”Grace Jones is a question mark followed by an exclamation point.”
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#BornThisDay: Actor, Edward Everett Horton
Photo by Wikimedia Commons
March 18, 1886– Edward Everett Horton
From the very start of film as an art form, slightly coded gay characters were used for the easy laugh: Sissies, Gallery Owners, Interior Decorators, Fussy Bachelors, and Prissy Artistic Types. These incidental characters added spice to the urbane sophisticated comedies of the era when film as an art form was in its infancy. The gay hints these minor characters provided were in juxtaposition to the butch, sexier romantic men of the era. Film comedies deftly employed actors like Clifton Webb, Frances Langford, Eric Blore, and Edward Everett Horton, as gay comic relief with stereotypes that didn’t threaten film fans, male or female.
I have always had a special place in my heart for the work of Edward Everett Horton. He was Fred Astaire‘s straight man, and I immediately identify Horton with his work in the Astaire/Ginger Rogers musicals from RKO Studios including the apt named The Gay Divorcee (1934), but he provided many other notable roles onscreen during the 1930s included a deft portrayal of The Mad Hatter in Alice In Wonderland (1933) and the neurotic paleontologist who first appears disguised as a woman, in Frank Capra‘s Lost Horizon (1937).
With Betty Grable in “The Gay Divorcee” (1934), RKO via YouTube
Horton began his career in 1906, singing and dancing and playing small parts in Vaudeville and in Broadway musicals. In 1919, he moved to Hollywood to give film work a try. His first big role was in a comedy, Too Much Business (1922), and he had his first lead, playing an idealistic young classical composer in Beggar On Horseback (1925). In the late 1920s, he starred in two-reelers for Educational Pictures, and made the transition from silent films to talking pictures in 1928. As a trained stage actor, he more easily found work in the talkies than other actors, and he appeared in some of Warner Bros. early sound films, including The Terror (1928) and Sonny Boy (1929)
Beginning in the early 1930s, Horton made at least six films a year for the next quarter of a century, I tried counting but lost track at 120. Reflecting his work earlier on the stage, there were occasional serious variations in his roles. There was Miriam Hopkins‘ humorless boss, Max Plunkett, in Ernst Lubitsch‘s charming pre-code Design For Living (1933) based on the saucy Noël Coward play. He played an unusually forceful role in Douglas Sirk‘s terrific Summer Storm (1944) and he delivered a masterful comedic turn in Busby Berkeley‘s dementedThe Gang’s All Here (1943).
With Fred Astaire in “Top Hat” (1935), RKO via YouTube
Horton developed his own special variation of the time-honored comic double-take. In Horton’s version, it was a triple-take: he would smile ingratiatingly, nod in agreement with what just happened; then, when realization set in, his facial features collapsed entirely into a sober, troubled mask. He was a master at it. His final film role was in the comedy Cold Turkey (1971), where his character had no dialogue and communicated only through facial expressions.
He used his crack-timing to full advantage playing mousy types in Holiday (1938) with Katharine Hepburn, Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941) with Robert Montgomery, Arsenic And Old Lace (1944), It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963) with everyone in Hollywood, and Sex And The Single Girl (1964) with Natalie Wood and Lauren Bacall. Horton worked steadily for more than six decades. Horton:
“I have my own little kingdom. I do the scavenger parts no one else wants and I get well paid for it.”
He may have been a sissy, but he was no dummy. He bought up property in the San Fernando Valley starting in the 1920s. He developed what he named Beleigh Acres, a 23-acre compound where he lived with his longtime partner, handsome, silver-tongued actor Gavin Gordon, and Horton’s mother, who stubbornly hung around until she was 102-years-old. Gordon and Horton met in a stage production of Coward’s Private Lives in 1934. They appeared in only one film together, the sweetly sentimental Pocketful Of Miracles (1961), alongside BetteDavis, Ann-Margret and Glenn Ford. They were together 25 years.
He was busy working in television throughout the 1950s and 1960s: as a guest on series, voice-overs for commercials, and most notably, as host for the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show at Madison Square Garden. Horton was on the silly Western comedy, F Troop, implausibly playing Running Chicken, an Indian tribal medicine man, giving us an entirely new set of offensive stereotypes.
But, his most enduring work in the 1960s was as the narrator of the Fractured Fairy Tales section of the very popular The Adventures Of Rocky And Bullwinkle And Friends (1959-1965) in which he was prominently billed in the opening credits of every episode. This work endeared him to millions of Baby Boomers like me. One of my favorites of his television appearances is an I Love Lucy episode, where he is cast against type as a frisky, amorous suitor.
Edward Everett Horton’s final credits rolled in 1970, taken by that damn cancer at 84-years old. He continued to work up until the week he left this world. He is interred in the Whispering Pines section of Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery, one of my favorite places in Los Angeles (Glendale, for you purists). Gordon joined him in 1983. I have visited them there several times. You can too. Like any reputable homosexual, Horton collected antiques. At the time of his passing, he had a collection worth millions.
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March 18th: It’s YOUR Birthday, Bitch!
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#QueerQuote: “The Queerness Doesn’t Matter, So Long As They’re Friends.” – Dorothy Gale in “The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz”
Photograph from Wikimedia Commons
One of the true classics of American literature, The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz was originally published in 1900. L. Frank Baum crafted a wonderful magical land with a cornfield scarecrow, a mechanical woodman, and a humbug wizard who used old-fashioned hokum to express that universal theme: “There’s no place like home.”
The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz has illustrations by William Wallace Denslow. It was an instant hit. The book can be taken as an allusion to the politics of the USA in the late 1800s. Baum created the Land of Oz as a distinctly American utopia, making it the first truly American fairytale.
Dorothy Gale and her dog, Toto, have their Kansas house swept away by a cyclone and they find themselves in a strange land called Oz. She meets the Munchkins and joins the Scarecrow, Tin Woodman, and the Cowardly Lion on an unforgettable journey to the Emerald City, home of the all-powered Wizard of Oz.
As a young man, Baum was an actor and playwright. He wrote several plays that were successfully produced and in which he acted. The only time that Baum was known to have been in Kansas was when he toured in one of his plays in 1882.
Photograph from Wikimedia Commons
In 1882, Baum married Maud Gage, daughter of the noted feminist and suffragist Matilda Joslyn Gage. His relationship with his mother-in-law and wife, nudged him become a lifelong suffragist and feminist. In fact, most of his books had girls as the heroes.
Baum’s original title for the book was The Emerald City, but his publishers felt that a jewel in a book title was bad luck and asked Baum to change it. Baum got the name for his fairy country off a drawer on a file cabinet that was marked O-Z.
Baum wrote 14 Oz books, with a new book usually coming out in time for Christmas. In his later years, he answered children’s letters on letterhead that proclaimed him as the “Royal Historian of Oz”. He used suggestions from children when creating the Oz books. The series was continued after his death by Ruth Plumly Thompson, who wrote an additional 19 Oz books, and a series of other authors added seven more.
Baum left this world in 1919 after suffering a stroke. Just before he passed, he had some interesting last words. In his books, the land of Oz is cut off from the rest of the world by impassable wastelands, including a desert called the Shifting Sands. As Baum was breathing his last breath, he whispered to his wife: “Now we can cross the Shifting Sands”.
The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz has never been out of print.
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#ArtDept: The Erotic Art of Sadao Hasegawa
Self Portrait 1988
From Japan comes the work of fabulous Sadao Hasegawa (1950 – 1999). Hasegawa’s work really is quite unique, he is a sort of Asian Tom of Finland. His art is both incredibly sexy and an amazing hybrid, influenced by major world cultures.
His work is produced with superb technical skills, using fantastical settings with a nod to William Blake and incorporating Japanese, Indian, South-East Asian and African mythology. Focusing on the muscular male physique, Hasegawa often depicts bondage and SM themes, which, in the context of his stylized fantasy world, have a spiritual, even sacred intensity. I had some difficulty located images I could share here.
Untitled 1990
Sadao Hasegawa was born in the Tōkai area of Japan in 1950. He was self-taught. In 1973, he had his first exhibition Sadao Hasegawa’s Alchemism-Meditation For 1973 in Tokyo, presenting paintings, collages, drawings and sculptures. In 1990, he published a book of his art, Sadao Hasegawa, still in print. Despite the attention to his work around the world, he refused offers to exhibit overseas, not wanting to distribute his works abroad.
He traveled around Asia, especially to India, Bali and Thailand. The Hindu, Balinese and Siamese imagery reflects in his works with some of Indonesian and Thai words are written on to his works.
Untitled, 1982
He took his own life 1999 in Bangkok. In 2000, the Tokyo Naruyama Gallery exhibited his last works from a request of his family who found a will requesting a posthumous exhibition.
A few days before his death, Hasegawa had lunch with his friend American artist John C. Goss. He showed Goss photos of his latest paintings, a series depicting nude, Hindu-inspired male deities. These works were the ones shown at the memorial exhibition, along with a final series of starkly disembodied and erect phalluses unlike anything else Hasegawa ever created.
The only clues left at the scene of his death were a small piece of rope (he had asphyxiated himself using rope tied around a door knob) and a small stone on which he had painted a portrait of Yukio Mishima (1925 – 1970) the famous Japanese author, poet, playwright, actor, model, film director, and Japanese Nationalist. Hasegawa killed himself on the anniversary of Mishima’s own ritual suicide.
Untitled, 1990
Untitled, 1991
Untitled 1988
Untitled 1998
Untitled, 1998
Untitled, 1990
Untitled, 1979
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#Crime: NFL Player Aaron Hernandez May Have Killed to Cover Up His Gayness
Via YouTube
Aaron Hernandez (1989 – 2017) was an American football tight end in the National Football League (NFL). He was a top player during his three seasons with the New England Patriots, but his career ended abruptly when he was arrested for the murder of Odin Lloyd in 2013. His three-year contract with the Patriots was for $19.5 million, and could have paid up to $40 million by 2018.
Convicted of the murder in April 2017, he was found hanging from a bed sheet attached to a window in his cell at Massachusetts’s Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center, serving life without parole.
Hernandez is the subject of a two-part documentry on Oxygen, Aaron Hernandez Uncovered, which looks at the football player’s secret double life. We find out that Hernandez was gay and struggled with his sexuality. In the documentary, lawyer George Leontire, who is openly gay and was a member of Hernandez’s defense team, said Hernandez spoke at length about his sexuality and was conflicted about it. Leontire:
”This man clearly was gay. He acknowledged it. Acknowledged the immense pain that it caused him.”
His college girlfriend, Alyssa Anderson, claims he had a relationship with a man while at the University of Florida. Hernandez denied it when she asked him about it. He later acknowledged her suspicions. Hernandez never spoke about his sexuality publicly. He was engaged to Shayanna Jenkins-Hernandez, with whom he had a daughter. Jenkins was indicted on a perjury charge in connection with Lloyd’s killing.
Photograph by Jeffrey Beall via Wikimedia Commons
Not the first time he was in trouble with the law, in 2012 Hernandez had been investigated in connection with a double murder in Boston’s South End. Two immigrants from the Canary Islands were killed by gunshots fired into their vehicle. In May 2014, Hernandez was indicted on murder charges for the killings, with additional charges of armed assault and attempted murder associated with shots fired at the surviving occupants in the vehicle. The trial began March 1, 2017. Hernandez was acquitted of the murders and most of the other charges but found guilty of illegal possession of a handgun.
According to TMZ, law enforcement officials in Massachusetts believed Hernandez killed Lloyd because he knew about football player’s gayness.
The first part of the Oxygen documentary aired last night, March 17. The second episode is tonight, Sunday, March 18. They will both be streaming on Oxygen later this month.
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#BornThisDay: Comic, “Moms” Mabley
Photograph via YouTube
March 19, 1894– Moms Mabley:
“It’s no disgrace to be old. But damn if it isn’t inconvenient.”
As a kid, I would come home from school, let myself in with the key that hung on a chord around my neck, let the dog out, and practice my piano lessons before settling in to watch The Merv Griffin Show or The Mike Douglas Show where one of my favorite guests was Moms Mabley. More fun was catching one of her appearances on the subversive The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour when that CBS show was the number one television show in the late 1960s. I loved her so much I used to do her routines.
From Detroit Public Library Archives
If you’ve never heard of Mabley, it is easy to understand. There are no DVDs available, and almost no recordings from the first 40 years of her career. Her performing persona was a frumpy, middle-aged woman in a housedress and floppy hat who delivered hilarious, dirty stand-up comedy routines, often with just a pinch wry political commentary.
In the 1960s, when she was approaching her 70s, she began recording comedy LPs, which were a new thing. She recorded 25 by the end of the 1970s.
There’s something almost insane about how far she was ahead of her time. In the 1920s, Mabley was probably the only female standup comic in the world, decades before Joan Rivers and Phyllis Diller began performing, and they are called the pioneers. She was also one of the first openly gay comics anywhere, of course, it was an openness known only by her friends and colleagues. Along with Redd Foxx and Dick Gregory, she was part of the first wave of black standup artists to reach a mainstream audience, and the oldest of them all.
Mabley was so much more than just being brave enough to be the first at things, she is one of the inventors of standup comedy.
Born Loretta Aiken, she was the granddaughter of freed slaves, but she grew up in extreme poverty and segregation. Both her parents were killed in separate accidents while she very young. She was raped twice before she was 15-years old, became pregnant twice, then had to give up both babies for adoption. She was forced to marry an older man that she despised. Mabley:
“Abraham Lincoln, he ain’t freed me; Johnny Kennedy freed me.”
Mabley’s humor came from remembering her grandmother, the dearest figure of her childhood. “Moms”, the character she adopted from the beginning, with her housecoat, toothless gums, and gravelly voice was a tribute to her grandmother.
“Working Blue” is a comedy expression for routines that are risqué, indecent or profane, and largely about sex. Blue comedy was used to shock and offend some audience members, using curse words and discussing things that people do not discuss in “polite society”. Mabley was so lovable onstage that she could get away with working blue when others couldn’t, let alone a woman. Pretending to be old before she was old allowed her to direct righteous ammo at the status quo without ever losing the lightness that made her funny. She spoke from a long stage tradition of old people saying what they damn well like for laughs.
She joked about her hard life, she spoke about race and sex, of how she had no interest in old men, preferring much younger ones:
“Only time you see me with my arms around some old man… “I’m holding him for the police.”
Her act always showed her Vaudeville roots by including a few songs and a bit of soft-shoe here and there. The jokes were old even then, but Mabley had a style and a voice, that could make them seem new:
“Somebody asked me, ‘What is it like being married to an old man?’ I said, ‘Honey. I don’t know what to say. The best I can explain it, it’s just like trying to push a car up a hill with a rope.”
Photo 1933, from the Apollo Theatre Archives
Her early years of performing were at African-American theatres on the Chitlin’ Circuit, culminating with a gig at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, the first woman comic to play the famous venue. Mabley was one of the most successful entertainers of the Chitlin’ Circuit, another name for T.O.B.A.(Theater Owners Booking Association), sometimes called the “Tough On Black Asses Circuit”. Despite Mabley’s popularity, wages for black women in show business were meager. Nonetheless, she persisted for more than six decades. At the apex of her career, she was earning $10,000 a week.
Her appearances in the 1960s on The Ed Sullivan Show brought Mabley fans that were younger and whiter, playing Carnegie Hall in 1962.
Her completely serious and melancholy cover version of Abraham, Martin And John was on the Billboard Hot 100 in summer 1969. At 75 years old, Mabley became the oldest living person ever to have a Top 40 hit.
Offstage she quickly shed her matronly housedress and hat after performances and changed into stylish men’s slacks and shirts.
Mabley is the subject of the Whoopi Goldberg Presents Moms Mabley: I Got Somethin’ To Tell Ya (2013) a documentary film from HBO. The film was nominated for two Emmy Awards. In the film, Norma Miller, a dancer, actor and fellow comic, says:
“I met her at the Apollo Theater, and she and I shared a dressing room for two weeks — she and I and her girlfriend. She was real. I mean she was Moms on stage but when she walked off that stage she was Mr. Moms. There was no question about it. We never called Moms a homosexual. That word never fit her. We never called her gay. We called her Mr. Moms.”
The documentary includes numerous film clips of Mabley performing on the Vaudeville stage and scenes of her signature standup comic routines from the 1960s and 1970s. It also features private photos of Mabley in what appeared to be the 1930s and 1940s in men’s clothes with short hair.
Goldberg:
”See, in that time period it was nobody’s business. And I will assume that when Moms came out of costume, because that’s what the hat and the shoes and the housedress was, and put on that silk shirt with those pants and that fedora and had those women on her arm — I think everybody was like, ‘okay’.”
”And so I think that she was a woman among men and who was equal to those men. And, they treated her like a man. And I think that is what helped give her the longevity.”
When she played Washington D.C.’s Howard Theatre in the 1940s, she would socialize with a circle of lesbian and gay friends in Washington. On one occasion during that period, following her show at the Howard, Mabley organized a gay party at a nearby nightclub that was raided by police.
Mabley bravely came out of the sloset when she was 27-years-old, but after her death in 1975 at 81-years old, Jet Magazine reported Mabley had three daughters and a son (plus the two she gave up to adoption and left an estate worth more than a million dollars. So, maybe she was bisexual, but she is still in the LGBTQ spectrum.
I think that it is amazing that Mabley was able to use what people thought she was from her act to say something strong about the harrowing experiences of African-Amercian citizens and the Civil Rights Movement. Mabley was invited to perform at the White House during the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson administrations in the 1960s.
Goldberg:
”Moms comes along in the late 1920s as a young woman dressed with that hat and the house coat and the big shoes and she takes that persona all the way to 1975. She honed that woman and she grew into that woman at a time when there were no women stand-ups… there were none. There was only Moms Mabley”
She died from heart failure in May,1975.
In 2015, Mabley was named as one of the 31 Icons of the LGBT Historical Month by the Equity Forum. she was featured during the “HerStory” video tribute to notable women on U2’s world tour in 2017. She is a Gay Icon, a Black Icon, and she remains a legend in the History of American Comedy.
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March 19th: It’s YOUR Birthday, Bitch!
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John Oliver Trolls Mike Pence with Competing Bunny Book (& Ru Helps Read the Audio Version!)
Marlon Bundo’s A Day in the Life of the Vice President is a new book about the White House pet rabbit written by Vice President Mike Pence’s daughter Charlotte and illustrated by second lady Karen Pence. The book “gives young readers a bunny’s-eye view of the special duties of the vice president,” says its publisher.
Blah blah blah.
Now, though, John Oliver has put out a competing Marlon Bundo book: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver Presents a Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo (see pic above).
Oliver’s picture book tells the story of a “Very Special boy bunny who falls in love with another boy bunny,” according to the book’s description.
HA! LOVE T!
“You’ll notice right away that our rabbit has a bow tie, so there’s that,” Oliver said on Last Week Tonight las night. “Also, our story is about Marlon Bundo falling in love with another boy rabbit, because our Marlon Bundo is gay, just like the real Marlon Bundo.”
Says Chronicle Books:
“With its message of tolerance and advocacy, this children’s picture book beautifully explores issues of marriage equality and democracy.”
An audio version of A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo features the voice of Jim Parsons as Marlon with special guests Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Jeff Garlin, Ellie Kemper, John Lithgow, Jack McBrayer and… our very own RuPaul!
The Pence’s publisher is NOT amused.
A spokesperson for Regnery Publishing, which issued the Pences’ book, called the parody “unfortunate.”
“It’s unfortunate that anyone would feel the need to ridicule an educational children’s book and turn it into something controversial and partisan. Our and Mrs. and Charlotte Pence’s goal is — and will continue to be — to educate young readers about the important role of the vice president, as well as to highlight the charities to which portions of the book proceeds will be donated,” the spokesperson said in a statement.
The proceeds for Oliver’s book will be donated to The Trevor Project and AIDS United, while the Pences will donate a portion their proceeds to A21, a nonprofit focused on combating human trafficking, and an art therapy program at Riley Hospital for Children.
The parody version of the book was the No.1 bestseller on Amazon.com Monday morning. The Pence version ranked 15th.
(via CNN)
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Polyamorous Lovebirds Nico Totorella & Bethany Meyers Marry! (Five Fabulous Pictures)
Nico Tortorella, the gorgeous and sexually fluid star of Menendez: Blood Brothers, married Bethany Meyers, a fitness and lifestyle entrepreneur, who identifies as a gay woman. The two had been in a polyamorous relationship for 11 years before tying the knot over the weekend.
“Just married. For real,” Tortorella wrote alongside a series of photos of their wedding day (above and below).
Living for their outfits!
Writes Nico & Bethany in Them:
The looks are everything we’ve ever dreamed of. genderbending ensembles designed by our dear friend andrew morrison. timeless androgynous paraphernalia mimicking romanesque sculpture that fluidly blends masculine and feminine. in this relationship, we both wear the pants and the dress. we put on our faces and machinery, finally topping each other off in crowns. duh, we wore crowns. not for the gag of it all, but because it feels like something we’ve done in the past, so we had to keep the tradition alive. in this life’s iteration, this is, in fact, our royal wedding.
And a word to the haters, who don’t understand or approve of their relationship?
Here we are, the day I dreamed of yet not the day I imagined, and I couldn’t be happier. Plenty won’t understand it, something I’m gradually learning to accept. For others, it will help open their eyes to different ways to love. And for some, our story will make them feel less alone. It will give them strength to ask for the things they want and need in a partner. As traditional as we may appear on the outside, we are far from it on the inside.
Fabulous. All the best to the happy couple. We love you guys!
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Snatch Your Tickets to the North American Were The World Tour
Gather your squirrel friends and those dollar bills because the North American leg of the Werq the World Tour is here!!!!
Your favorite RuPaul’s Drag Race queens are back and ready to serve some Drag realness at Werq the World Tour! Pre-sale tickets start TODAY at 12 pm EDT.
Alyssa, Bob, Detox, Kennedy, Kim, Latrice, Peppermint, Shangela, Sharon, Valentina, Violet and of course, Michelle Visage lead the way for a night you won’t want to miss!
Over the top production numbers that will leave fans gaggins! – Brandon Voss
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34+ Pics from Last Week’s “All Stars 3” Finale Viewing Party at the WOW Presents Space
A rollicking good time was had by all last Thursday night at the WOW Presents Space for the All Stars 3 finale viewing party. I spy with my little eye Luis from “Bobbin Around,” the House of Avalon Boys, Jason from the Pit Crew, Love Connie, the co-founder of Equality Vodka Doug Jacobson, Jeffrey Self, Adam Asea, Tyler Hall, Michelle Mills, Kyle Holden, Alicia Gargaro-Magana and more cute boys than you can swing a cat at. Check out just some of the pics (by Glorify Magazine) above and below.
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Cynthia Nixon Runs for New York Governor
Go, Miranda! Former Sex and the City star Cynthia Nixon announced this morning on Twitter she is running for governor in New York.
“I love New York. I’ve never lived anywhere else,” Nixon said in her announcement video. “But something has to change. … We are sick of politicians who care more about headlines and power than they do about us. It can’t just be business as usual anymore.”
Nixon will be challenging Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo in the Democratic primary this September.
via NBC:
Her announcement also called attention to allegations of corruption (one of Cuomo’s former top aides was just convicted on pay-to-play charges last week), neglect of the New York City subway system, which the governor has a big hand in, and shady deals with Republicans in Albany to give them control of the state Senate.
Watch the announcement video below.
(Top photo: Pacific Coast News)
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Having a Better Monday Than You: This Giant Pink Flamingo Floating Down the LA River
A group of three were lounging on a huge pink flamingo raft as they floated down the Los Angeles River.
Law enforcement eventually pulled them over making them pack and leave but I say they are winning this Monday. Don’t we all wish we could be lounging on a pink flamingo!?
See the full story here.
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#BornThisDay: Television’s Mister Rogers
Photograph PBS via YouTube
March 20, 1928 – Frederick McFeely Rogers:
”What if you were offered an hour of live television every day? Can you imagine what it’s like to try to fill that up with something of value? I wanted to give the best I could.”
A few weeks ago, the soon to be defunded PBS aired a primetime special, hosted by actor Michael Keaton, who had been a stagehand on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood before becoming an actor. The show celebrates the 50th anniversary of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, and featured Sara Silverman, Yo-Yo Ma, Tom Hanks, Whoopi Goldberg, Judd Apatow, and John Lithgow.
Although Fred Rogers was a member of SAG/AFTRA (the actors’ unions), he wasn’t an actor; he was a child development specialist who gave children the confidence to talk about their feelings, express themselves through art, and imagine make-believe worlds.
Offscreen, he was very much like his television persona: a reassuring adult who was not only happy to sit and talk, but one who managed to live out his entire life without the slightest whisper of scandal. He wrote the scripts, the music, and dialog, for Mister Roger’s Neighborhood, the longest-running program on PBS.
Won’t You Be My Neighbor, the show’s theme song was a genuine invitation to the viewer. When Mister Rogers arrived onstage in a suit and tie, then changed into both a colorful sweater and loafers, it mirrored what a kid would see as parents leave for work in the morning and come home at night.
The props were mostly simple household objects used to spark a child’s interest in creating something from nothing, and they spoke to viewers from low-income families. He would feed the fish and talk to them, showing kids a sense of how to care and responsibility for others. In each episode he sat down with a red trolley on an electric track which took everyone to the ”Neighborhood of Make-Believe”, populated with puppets operated and voiced by Rogers, along with a cast of zany human characters.
Mister Rogers would feed a reel of 8mm film into ”Picture Picture”, named for the the central viewing rectangle centered inside two gold picture frames. He showed hypnotic, highly enjoyable documentary segments where kids discovered how everyday things such as pretzels, pencil erasers, or plush toys are assembled by scary machines inside factories, packaged and shipped to neighborhood stores.
Rogers earned a degree in Music from Rollins College. He had planned to go into a seminary, but he saw something new at his parents’ house called a ”television”. Rogers thought television was rather dreadful, insipid and poorly executed. He gave up on the seminary idea, and instead went to NBC, where he worked his way up the ladder. He maintained the sets and stages for The Lucky Strike Hit Parade, The Kate Smith Hour, and NBC Opera Theatre. He learned that television could be a very intimate medium, and he had a notion that he could deliver messages to millions of viewers by simply pretending there was only one lonely child out there watching the screen.
In July of 1952, Rogers and his new bride moved to Pittsburgh, where he helped start the USA’s first community-sponsored television station, WQED. There was only a staff of six people trying to get ”educational television” on the air. He created the station’s first original program, The Children’s Corner.
It was a charming program which featured improvised discussions between actor Josie Carey and Rogers’ puppet characters. Rogers worked behind the scenes, giving each puppet a unique voice and personality. The show was live, and Rogers had to run quickly and quietly behind the scenes, back and forth between puppet stages. Before each broadcast he’d take off his shoes and change into sneakers, a habit that became his trademark. The program was popular with local kids and adults.
In the late 1960s, the U.S. Senate was considering cutting half of an important $20 million grant for public broadcasting. Not yet famous with most adults, Rogers was invited to speak and submit a paper at the hearing. He told the Senate how his program was different from cartoons and violent shows offered by the networks. The notoriously impatient Senator John O. Pastore of RI, the first Italian-American elected to the Senate, was chair.
Pastore: All right Rogers, you got the floor.
Rogers: Senator, this is a philosophical statement and would take about ten minutes to read, so I’ll not do that. One of the first things that a child learns in a healthy family is trust, and I trust what you’ve said, that you’ll read this. It’s very important to me, I care deeply about children, my first…
Pastore: Will it make you happy if you read it?
Rogers: I’d just like to talk about it, if it’s all right…
Pastore: Fine.
Rogers: This is what I give. I give an expression of care every day to each child, to help him realize that he is unique. I end the program by saying, ‘you’ve made this day a special day by just your being you. There’s no person in the whole world like you, and I like you just the way you are.’ I feel that if we in public television can only make it clear that feelings are mentionable and manageable, we will have done a great service.
Pastore: I’m supposed to be a pretty tough guy. This is the first time I’ve had goose bumps in days.
Rogers: Well I’m grateful. Not only for your goose bumps, but for your interest in our kind of communication.
Fred spoke for six minutes, taking the time to recite lyrics from one of his songs. Pastore was visibly touched. Roger’s production company received the twenty million dollars.
Pastore died in 1994. The next year, his position on the communication committee was taken by LGBTQ hater Rick Santorum.
The National Educational Television, the precursor to PBS, started broadcasting Roger’s programs nationwide in black and white in February 1968. Eventually the show was broadcast in color, and the sets and furniture were updated, but only bit-by-bit so the kids wouldn’t get confused.
Fred Rogers Archives via YouTube
Rogers chose Johnny Costa, a great Jazz pianist, to be his musical director. Costa had a sophisticated musical style. Costa’s trio performed all the songs and music live in the studio, as each episode of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood was videotaped. Costa wasn’t sure how to write Jazz for kids, but Rogers allowed him to do whatever he wanted. Songs performed by Mister Rogers took on tough topics, such as the fear of going down the bathtub drain or a celebrating everyone’s body as being just fine the way it is.
In March 1998, more than 300 PBS stations aired an episode of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood featuring Koko, the sign-language using gorilla. It was followed by a week-long series addressed the fear young people often experience when confronted with new situations or people who look different from themselves. I tuned in all week because I had a thing for Koko, it was my first exposure to Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. I was enchanted, and I learned a few valuable lessons.
With Koko via YouTube
Through the years, subjects on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood grew increasingly complex. Topics like adoption and divorce were introduced, as well as death. In one program, Mister Rogers shows viewers one of his fishes who has passed away.
The last episode of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood aired Friday, August 31, 2001. Rogers went to the next neighborhood shortly after being diagnosed with cancer in 2003. He was buried in a private ceremony. He had told very few people he was sick.
PBS via YouTube
He was the recipient of two Peabody Awards; four Emmy Awards, plus their Lifetime Achievement Award. In 1999, Rogers was inducted into the Television Hall Of Fame. He received more than 40 honorary degrees from colleges and universities. In 2002, George W. Bush presented him with the Presidential Medal Of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. During the ceremony, Bush kept referring to the program as ”Mister Rogers’s Neighborhood”.
Special visitors to the Neighborhood over the years included: Tony Bennett, Big Bird, Yo-Yo Ma, The Boys Choir of Harlem, Julia Child, pianist Van Cliburn, Arthur Mitchell and Dance Theatre of Harlem, Rita Moreno, football player Lynn Swann, Tommy Tune, and Russian children’s television host Tatiana Vedeneeva.
Bette Midler’s Kiss My Brass tour featured a tender musical tribute to Rogers, joining him in a ”virtual duet” of I Like To Be Told.
One of Roger’s red cardigan sweaters is on display at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. The Smithsonian staff reports that the sweater is the third most-requested item by visitors.
After his death, the asteroid 26858 Misterrogers was named after him by the International Astronomical Union. The Rogers Family Communications, produced a planetarium show for young kids, The Sky Above Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, which still plays at planetariums across the USA.
Won’t You Be My Neighbor, a new documentary by Morgan Nevilles about Rogers, was a hit at Sundance. It opens in theatres in June.
Tom Hanks has signed play Rogers in the upcoming biopic You Are My Friend. The film will focus on Roger’s unlikely friendship with award-winning journalist Tom Junod, who got to know the television personality while writing a 1998 profile for Esquire Magazine.
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March 20: It’s YOUR Birthday, Bitch!
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#TransformationTuesday: QWERRRKOUT feat. Tiggy Thorn
Transformation Tuesday just got a whole lot QTer…New queers featured every week! Tag us, take a pic of us and follow us on Instagram at QWERRRKOUT, and you too could be the next QT! YOU BETTA QWERRRK! (Mx Qwerrrk vid by celebrity photog Santiago Felipe)
Tiggy Thorn
Age: 24
Location: Paris, France
About:
“I’ve always been fascinated and had the most respect for the nightlife scene…so, it was very natural for me to evolve my creativity in this environment. I’m inspired by the first club kid scene, obviously; but also by antique art, masks and sculptures from all over the world, mixed with really pop, bright, cute contemporary kawaii movement. I like to create graphic faces and costumes, and being between creepy and cute.
The biggest project right now is Kindergarten– the brand new queer and club kid party that I’m co-organizing with Marmoset in Paris ! I’m also currently working with different amazing artists to create great visuals…having fun!”
Instagram: tiggythorn
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#Birdwatching: “Exorcist” Star Alfonso Herrera Seems, Um, RATHER EXCITED to Show Us His Crossfit Video
A big, BIG thanx to OMGblog for sharing this treasure. Sense8 and The Exorcist cutie Alfonso Herrera posted a crossfit video in which he shows just how exciting exercise can be. Wait for it… wait for it… POW! There it is! I think I’m going to have to start watching The Exorcist now…
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Episode Four of alter-NATIVE is Out! Watch Now!
Storycast’s Youtube page dropped episode of alter-NATIVE with Bethany Yellowtail today. Director and WOWlebrity, Billy Luther follows a year in the life of Native American fashion designer Bethany Yellowtail as she develops her latest collection inspired by her art, activism, and indigenous women!
Storycast is a free, subscription-based docuseries channel on YouTube born out of a partnership with ITVS, Independent Lens and PBS Digital Studios.
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