10 GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE

JULY 22, 1994

ON THE AIR OFF THE PRESS

'Bulldog' comes out; on cable they're out all over

by John Graves

One of the regular actors on NBC's sitcom, Frasier has come out of the closet. Dan Butler, who plays womanizing sportscaster "Bulldog" Briscoe, has just opened his oneman, autobiographical play about being gay and coming out of the closet. When shockjock Howard Stern talked about Butler's coming out, he noted that more and more show business people are coming out of the closet with no negative impact on their careers. Butler has just signed a four-year contract with NBC.

Openly lesbian rock star Melissa Etheridge

was chosen to write a new theme song for Ellen Degeneres' sitcom, These Friends of Mine, which will air next season with a new name: Ellen.

The lives of lesbians and gays in the past and present are featured on a segment of Sex in the '90s, now airing on cable's MTV music channel.

In the MTV series Real Life, a group of young people are brought together to live as housemates for several months while their life together is videotaped. The show is notable for inclusion of a lesbian, gay or bisexual person among the residents each season. In the season which began last month,

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Pedro Zamora, a gay cuban ex-patriot living with AIDS, joins the new household.

Comedy Half Hour, HBO's new comedy program, has included back-to-back halfhour performances by lesbian comic Suzanne Westenhoefer and gay comic Bob Smith. Westenhoefer recently won New York's Outstanding Achievement award. Smith is the head writer for the Comedy Central channel's all lesbian and gay comedy special, Out There. Out of the closet Married With Children co-star and director Amanda Bearse will host Out There II, which will premiere on National Coming Out Day, October 11, in 1995.

Motorcycle mechanic and rising fashion model Jenny Shimitzu, who is also an out of the closet lesbian, is featured in an interview and profile airing on cable music channel VH-1's FT (Fashion Television) show.

I recently saw a cable showing of the homophobic 1978 film A Different Story, in which a lesbian and a gay man become roommates, fall in love and supposedly change their sexual orientation. Watch this film to see how we are portrayed if we do not stand up for ourselves. Take a stand. Never again should this lie go unchallenged!

Hope you enjoyed the gay programming WVIZ channel 25 aired in honor of Pride month and the 25th anniversary of the Stonewall rebellion, especially the hour-long special edition of In the Life. The season ended with the June show and WVIZ will have to make a decision about buying In the Life for another year at the end of the summer. Program manager Bob Olive has said before that viewer response and support is a major factor in the station's decision-making process. Positive response during March's membership drive when In the Life aired was reported to be disappointing.

[During June both WVIZ and WEAOWNEO Channels 45-49 also aired One Nation Under God, a film about the various groups which claim to "change" lesbians and gays into heterosexuals. The film strongly questions the motivations-mostly religious that both the "changers" and those seeking their services have for attempting it. In doing so, it sheds light on the basic thinking behind all anti-gay campaigns, and be-

comes one of the best rebuttals to The Gay Agenda and other right-wing propaganda films yet produced. -Eds.]

The new lesbian romance film Go Fish has been getting rave reviews here and around the country. Go Fish is now playing at the Centrum Theater on Coventry in Cleveland Heights. Scene film critic Raj Bahadur gave a positive, but very homophobic and insulting review of the film in the July 6 edition.

Check out Emma Shera's "Lesbofile" column in Deneuve magazine for some of the best celebrity gossip around; lesbian and gay oriented and much more positive and entertaining than the tabloids.

The July 12 edition of the Advocate names tennis star Andre Agassi “Sissy of the Year" in the magazine's annual Sissy Awards to notable homophobes. Agassi won the award for warning fellow player Pete Sampras that he'd made a major error in accepting a bouquet from gay pop star Elton John. Agassi had told Sampras, "You can't go around getting flowers from a fag like that." Others receiving Sissy Awards: Kansas funeral picketer Fred Phelps, Pope John Paul II, anti-gay California Rep. Robert Dornan, televangelist Pat Robertson, aging North Carolina senator Jesse Helms, the Cobb County, Georgia commission who endorsed an anti-gay resolution, and President Clinton for reneging on his promise to end the ban on gays in the military.

Gerald Gunther's new biography, Learned Hand: The Man and the Judge, from Knopf, reveals that Hand's wife, Frances, married him for convenience instead of staying in her "Boston marriage" to her longtime lesbian partner at Bryn Mawr. After her marriage to Hand, she often spent long periods living away from him with her female lovers.

Finally, sad to report the loss of former Bewitched co-star Dick Sargent, who died from prostate cancer diagnosed in 1989. Sargent, who came out of the closet in 1991, became a highly visible supporter of gay rights and called himself a "retroactive role model." When he became ill, Sargent denied rumors he had AIDS, saying, “I do not have AIDS. I am HIV negative. But if I did, I would wear that badge as proudly as everybody else who has it."

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