March 17
on the airoff the press
Restroom cop's suit against George Michael dismissed
by John Graves
A Los Angeles court has dismissed a suit by undercover police officer Marcelo Rodriguez against gay pop star George Michael.
Rodriguez, who arrested Michael in a public restroom for lewd behavior in April 1998, had sued the British singer for $10 million on the grounds of emotional distress.
The dispute was over a video released by Michael shortly after his arrest. The video, shot partly in a restroom and mocking the gay singer's arrest in a Beverly Hills park, featured men dancing in tight black leather uniforms and scenes of two policemen kissing.
Rodriguez claimed emotional and mental distress and slander from the video and interviews where Michael claimed he had been set up by what appeared to be a good-looking gay man.
The judge dismissed the case saying that Rodriguez was a public official and could not, under law, recover damages for alleged emotional distress.
Last September, Michael called the Rodriguez suit "a classic case of American law at its craziest."
Melissa Etheridge, with a man
Melissa Etheridge will be one of the first guests on VH-1's new chat show Daily One, says USA Today's Jennifer Merin.
Etheridge appears on the show to promote her new video, "Enough of Me." In the video, directed by her partner Julie Cypher, Etheridge appears in love scenes with a man.
When host Rebecca Rankin asked, "What's with the guy?" Etheridge replied, "Julie and I wanted to do something different. A lot of straights play gays these days, so we figured a gay could play straight." Garbo's love letters to be shown
Next month, the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia will display, for the first time in the U.S., the secret love letters screen goddess Greta Garbo wrote to her lover Mercedes de Acosta in the 1930s.
Described by the Swedish daily Aftonbladet as an eccentric poet and playwright, Mercedes de Acosta donated 55 intimate letters she received from Garbo to the museum on condition that no one read them until ten years after the death of both women.
Garbo, a Swedish screen icon who was known for her compelling screen presence and enigmatic beauty, rose from poverty to stardom in the 1920s and died in America in 1990. De Acosta died in 1968.
No one at the museum has read the letters yet, but they hope to make them available to the public soon after April 15.
Garbo's niece and heir, Gray Reisfield, is not happy about the publication of the letters
and said that, although the museum owns the letters, she owns the content of them and that no one can quote the letters without her
consent.
Rumors that the pair had engaged in a love affair began after it was revealed that Mercedes de Acosta wrote in her memoirs how she and Garbo used to bathe naked.
De Acosta also was reported to have had a love affair with screen star Marlene Dietrich and boasted that she could get any woman from any man.
Alice B. Toklas, a companion of de Acosta, said, "You can't dismiss Mercedes lightly. She has had two of the most important women in the United States: Garbo and Dietrich."
'Hate and Violence' series set
On March 20, cable's Discovery channel will begin a year-long Hate and Violence program. The series will feature specials and town hall meetings hosted by former ABC news correspondent Forrest Sawyer. Ellen was reluctant to do love scene
If These Walls Could Talk 2, an HBO film about three generations of lesbians, garnered the highest rating for an HBO movie in three years, according to the New York Times. With each rating point representing 260,000 homes, Walls got an 11.5 rating-even against ABC's Who Wants To Be a Millionaire.
Times correspondent Bill Carter interviewed Ellen DeGeneres and her wife Anne Heche, who directed DeGeneres in a story she wrote for the film.
DeGeneres told Carter that, at first, she was very reluctant to do the love scene with Sharon Stone in the movie.
"I fought Anne for months, saying I wouldn't do the love scene. She was like, 'It's Sharon Stone.' I said, I won't do the scene. I'm not getting naked. I'm not going to kiss somebody else. To me, it's a very private thing that I don't think you show the world, and yet it was important to show that part of the relationship."
According to Carter, Heche quipped, "What other lesbian on the planet would say, I won't do a love scene with Sharon Stone?" DeGeneres told Carter she would play lesbian roles again as long as she felt they were different from what she had done before.
"I have no problem playing a lesbian in something like this because I think it's an important thing to do, and I am a lesbian. You don't say to Gwyneth Paltrow: You're going to play straight again? Haven't you done that before?"
Bashing video yanked
MTV yanked a video by the U.K. rock group Bloodhound Gang that featured a scene of gay-bashing, after receiving a complaint
A Garage full of memories
Columbus-March going out like a lion this past weekend did not
stop legions of pa-
trons from giving their final farewell to a mainstay in the queer community, the Garage and Tabu. The club's co-owners, Kelly Coate and Harely Greene, “had an offer they couldn't refuse," according to Coate, and officially closed up shop on Monday, March 13. “Sometimes you have to let things go,” said · Coate. "It served the community well."
The clubs have been
open for 22 years.
The final night hosted guest DJ from Fire Island Steven Oliveri and
fifteen male strippers.
-Michelle Tomko
from GLAAD, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation.
According to columnist Michael Starr, the "Bad Touch" video shows the group walking around Paris when they see two men dressed as sailors, feeding each other French fries with their arms intertwined. The "sailors," obviously gay, are then attacked by the group and beaten up.
GLAAD officials lodged a protest with MTV after the video aired once on February 7 to hype the band's new album Hooray For Boobies.
"We realize that the 'Bad Touch' video is a satire, but there's nothing satiric about a gay-bashing in any form, so we asked MTV to pull the video,” said GLAAD spokesman Scott Seomin.
Starr added that MTV has promised to reedit the video before airing it again. Finding love at a computer class
Bisexual rocker Courtney Love, who recently told Jane magazine that she likes "really trashy porno girls," will play the love interest of actress Lilli Taylor in the upcoming film Julie Johnson.
In the low-budget movie, being shot in New Jersey this month, Taylor plays a cop's wife who falls for Love's character at a computer class.
"She's so sexy--I'm so into her," Love said to Entertainment Weekly about her costar Taylor.
Elton slept 'with all the boy bands'
Elton John joked at the Grammy Awards that he'd slept with the Backstreet Boys. John, who had just received the Grammy Legend Award, made the quip onstage during a tribute to the Florida boy band.
The gay superstar told fans he had sex with the Backstreet Boys and all their pop rivals, saying, "I've slept with all the boy bands. I know them all."
"TLC, the Dixie Chicks, now I don't know about them," John added about the girl bands. Earlier, Billy Joel presented Sir Elton with the Legend award, saying, “He might be a knight in the U.K., but here in the good old USA his friends can still call him Sharon." This is the nickname Rod Stewart called John when they became friends in the 1970s. After boasting of his boy-band conquests, John then knocked the Grammys themselves. According to the Scottish Daily Record and Sunday Mail, Grammy organizers were so upset they refused to print his attack on their web site, which presents the award ceremony nearly word for word.
John Graves is the producer and host of Gaywaves, an LGBT public affairs show on Cleveland's WRUW 91.1 FM Fridays at 7 pm, and at http://radio.cwru.edu. Dave Haskell, Jim McGrattan and Kim Jones also contribute to this column.
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