JUNE 19, 1998 GAY PEOPle's ChronICLE 17

ON THE AIR OFF THE PRESS

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TV seems to have noticed: June is Gay Pride month

by John Graves

You may have noticed, especially if you have full-service cable, that there is an extraordinary number of programs and films with lesbigay, AIDS and transgender themes on television this month. It looks like the television industry, especially cable TV, is really becoming aware of how important Pride month is to millions of lesbigay and transgender Americans.

Filmmaker Arthur Dong's award-winning film Licensed to Kill makes its première on cable's P.O.V. network on June 23. The riveting film offers viewers a first-hand look into people who have murdered gays, and examines the motives behind the crimes.

Dong himself was the victim of an antigay hate crime in 1977, which served as the impetus for the film.

"For the past two decades, I've tried to understand these acts of violence," Dong said. "I decided... to actually meet the men whose contempt for homosexuals led them to kill people like me. I wanted to confront these murderers face to face, to sit with them and see who they were, and ask them directly, 'Why did you do it?' '

Check out this disturbing, but remarkable film.

Be sure to also see Montana, a direct-tocable, woman-centered crime thriller much like the lesbian crime-romance Bound but with an implied rather than explicit lesbian storyline.

Culture Club is back

Gay pop icon Boy George and his group Culture Club have just reunited after a 13year separation for a U.S. concert tour later

Arthur Dong

this summer. The band warmed up for the summer tour and talked about the reunion during a concert taped in New York this past May for a VH-1 Storytellers music special as well as a report on the reunion. Boy George and Culture Club are also being featured on VH-1's Pop-Up Video and Behind the Music programs.

Heche to star in Psycho

Anne Heche was recently featured in People magazine's special, “50 Most Beautiful People in the World” edition along with Foxfire and Gia star Angelina Jolie. According to the article, Jolie, who got married just before she realized she was bisexual during

The boy with the thorn in his side

Continued from page 12

really angsty, full of man's inhumanity to man. Charlie Brown is a very tormented character. The artwork is deceptively simple, it's beautiful. The man can really draw.

When you draw your strip, do you usually start with a sketch first, or a story?

The story. Right now the strip is very character driven. Nathan and Drew are in my head all the time. I'm thinking about what they are going through.

I need to get back to Nathan because he's gotten into a band, and he's finally found a creative outlet, something in his life to latch onto. He's been aimless for too long and he's at that age now that it's starting to get to him. He's got to do something with himself. What age is that?

I think for me it was when I was about 26 or 27 and I was getting kind of scared. I still hadn't found my niche. And this is where I come in. I'm writing from experience with Nathan. He didn't really know what to do with himself. He had creative drives but he was blocked. And Drew has been really good for him, he's been encouraging Nathan.

I really loved your story in Strange Looking Exile [a 'zine Kirby published from 1991 to 1994] about your love affair with Morrissey, and how R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe steals him away from you. It's just too damn funny.

To this day I still love Morrissey, though I never buy his new records any more. Well, they suck, they're bad.

Oh yeah but I still play all the old Smiths records. People ask me about that strip all the time.

Would you like Morrissey or Michael Stipe to see that strip?

No! As much as I love Morrissey, I do not like Michael Stipe. He bums me out. I just think he's a real poser and he was so nambypamby about his sexuality. He had to be dragged out and he was offended that people wanted to know if he was gay.

Why did you stop doing Strange Looking Exile?

My strip was syndicated and I wanted to do something different. And I was tired of doing 'zines, or so I thought. So I stopped.

But a few months after I quit, I started thinking I still wanted to gather cartoonists together, but I wanted to find more boys. All during Strange Looking Exile, I was one of the only boys that were ever in there.

Michael Fahy had sent me some stuff too late for SLE; I had already published the last one but I held onto his work because I really wanted to publish it. I decided to do a 'zine called Boy Trouble. Cartoonist David Kelly is now publishing it. It's gotten good reviews. There should be a new one out this year.

Do you ever have any starry-eyed fans come up to you?

I've met some people through the strip. I think I'm a "big star" to maybe 200 people. I've met fans and kind of dated a couple of them when Tony and I were broken up.

I think of my readers as being very Drewlike. The boys, and even the girls. I think of them as being kind of shy and smart. Square pegs in a round hole. They look at this gay

culture that surrounds us and they try to make sense of it. They don't really feel part of it. Maybe somewhat a part but not wholly committed by any means. And they know how to laugh at the more absurd aspects of it.

I think the overriding theme of all my comic strips has been alienation. Trying to find a place for yourself in this society. My strip's characters search for that.

Do you ever feel like a radical?

I don't think of myself as this deeply radical underground person. I am just a jumble of a whole lot of different things. Again I feel somewhat alienated from any group or crowd.

But you're sort of quietly subversive"subversion with a smile."

Oh yeah, the worst thing you can do is take yourself too seriously. You've got to have a sense a humor no matter what-about your alienation too! ✓

To order Kirby's new book, Send $10 check, money order to: Robert Kirby/Hobnob Press P.O. Box 2368, Times Sq. Station New York, NY 10108. Checks payable to Robert Kirby. For information on Boy Trouble write to David Kelly, 1122 East Pike Street, Suite 992, Seattle, WA 98122

the filming of Foxfire, has apparently just divorced her new husband. Wonder who she'll start dating now!

Heche will take Janet Leigh's role in gay film director Gus Van Sant's remake of the Hitchcock thriller Psycho. She was also the subject of feature cover articles in the latest issues of Details, Out and Girlfriends magazines.

Waiting 10 years to play lesbian

Out magazine also featured an interview with Ally Sheedy and Patricia Clarkson, who plays Sheedy's love interest in the new film High Art.

When the interviewer asked Sheedy if she had ever had "any real-life experience with girls," Sheedy replied, "Yeah, I checked it out. You thought I'd say no, right? At the moment I'm monogamous with my husband of five years, but one of the things he loves about me is that I find a lot of women really attractive. And I don't find as many men attractive."

When asked if High Art was another example of "lesbian chic," Sheedy responded, "My mother is gay, and she's been living with a woman for a long, long time. So when somebody says 'lesbian chic' to me, it's like, when did it become chic? I was growing up with it all the time." On playing a lesbian,

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Sheedy said, "I've been waiting for a part like this for probably ten years. It's the closest thing to me that ever came along."

Louganis, Kmetko are an item

Olympic diving champion Greg Louganis recently confirmed that E! News' Steve Kmetko is his significant other during an appearance on a Boston radio station. Sondheim makes it official

Although the theater world has known it for years, composer Stephen Sondheim has come out to the rest of the world in his recently published biography by Meryle Secrest.

"I was never easy with being a homosexual, which complicates things..." Sondheim says in the book. "I don't think I knew more than maybe four homosexuals in the '50s and '60s who were openly gay... Everybody knew the theater was full of homosexuals, but nobody admitted to being so."

This time, Bond gets the guy

Openly gay actor Rupert Everett said on a recent Barbara Walters special that he is writing a film script in which he plays a gay James Bond. Everett said he would like to cast cross-dressing Chicago Bulls basketball star Dennis Rodman to be his "Bond girl." Although the movie would be full of women supermodels, Everett said, "I end up with Dennis Rodman.”

We are Borg. Gay is irrelevant

Actress Jeri Ryan, who plays the former Borg drone Seven of Nine on Star Trek: Voyager, went online recently to talk about reports her character would come out as lesbian.

Ryan, speaking on TheGlobe.com said, "This is an enormous, enormous rumor on the Internet, and it's not true. Somebody had posted supposedly official press releases from the producer's office saying that Seven would be a lesbian, and it's not true. Now."

John Graves is the producer and host of Gaywaves, a lesbian-gay public affairs show on Cleveland's WRUW 91.1 FM Fridays at 7 pm. Dave Haskell, Jim McGrattan and Kim Jones also contributed to this column.

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