10
GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE August 17, 2001
on the airoff the press
Antonio Banderas to be in Pedro Almodovar's next film
by John Graves
Antonio Banderas is set to star in gay Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar's next film, tentatively titled Tarantula.
In the film, which Entertainment Weekly says makes Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down look like The Little Mermaid, Banderas plays a plastic surgeon who seeks vengeance on a man who raped his teenage daughter.
The surgeon hunts the rapist down, holds him captive in his basement, surgically turns the man into a woman and then falls in love with her.
Although Banderas admits the film is kinky, the actor told Entertainment Weekly that Tarantula, scheduled to be filmed next summer, is "unbelievably beautiful.”
His argument's too dumb
Atlanta Contitution editorial page editor Cynthia Tucker took the Rev. Walter Fauntroy to task for supporting the "Federal Marriage Amendment," a proposed amendment to the constitution that would state that marriage would "consist only of the union of a man and a woman.
According to Tucker's column, which appeared in the August 2 Call and Post, Fauntroy, a Baptist minister and long-time civil rights activist who worked with Dr. Martin Luther King, based his support for the homophobic amendment on the rising number of African-American children being raised in fatherless homes.
Although Tucker agrees the problem of fatherless families is an issue that needs to be addressed by leaders in the African-American community, she found Fauntroy's rationale to be "a non-sequiter."
4.
"What is the connection between fatherless children and gay marriage?" wrote Tucker. "There is none. Is Fauntroy suggest ing that more 15-year-old black girls living in poor neighborhoods in Atlanta will bear children outside of wedlock if, across town in upscale Buckhead, two responsible, hardworking gay men marry each other? Does he really believe that even more black professional athletes will father children in countless casual affairs if singer Melissa Etheridge were allowed to legally marry? That's absurd."
"No," Tucker concluded, "Fauntroy has come up with a half-baked rationale to support his homophobia. Sorry, reverend, your argument is too dumb to conceal your hate."
'Straight-up bisexual'
There's a bisexual character in Leap Years, a new Showtime drama series that looks at three different years in the lives of five charac-
ters.
Gabrielle Winkel and Deanna Barnett write in the August 14 issue of Soap Opera Weekly that one of the stories is about a woman named Althena who falls in love in 1993 with a man named Gregory only to have him come out as bisexual in 2001.
"
falls in love with souls. He doesn't seem to place a sex on them, which I find one of his redeeming qualities. He can see people's hearts."
Actress Michelle Hurd said that her character Althena is a struggling, and ambitious, New York actress who, in 2001, "becomes a Diva star-capital letters--and has everything."
Gregory was her first love in 1993," Hurd went on. "She absolutely, always maintains a love for him. In 2001, he has explored his sexuality and is coming out of the closet.
What's great," Hurd added, "is that because Althena's a diva, she doesn't really hear it. It's not necessary for her to hear that. She's like, 'Oh, it's cute that you like men. Whatever. Still, pick me up at 8.' Then in 2008, you get an ex-diva, and there is no such thing as ex-diva! We are divas from the beginning to end." Lane to leave 'Producers' for TV
Gay actor Nathan Lane, now starring in the hit Broadway play The Producers, has signed with CBS to do an as-yet-unnamed project that may air on the network by the fall of 2002, reports USA Today columnist Peter Johnson.
"That is the most fun thing. I'm playing him Jay and Silent Bob straight-up bisexual, which a lot of people don't believe in, which is good,” actor Garret Dillahunt, who plays Gregory, told Winkel and Barnett.
Gregory is conflicted, Dillahunt explained, "It's not so fun to be the hero, the guy who's always right, who always wins and is the best athlete. It's great to be the fool and the loser. That stuff is really appealing to me. He can't decide what he wants. He loves Althena. He
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GLAAD, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, is objecting to jokes about gay men in Kevin Smith's new movie, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.
"I know Kevin Smith is not a homophobe," GLAAD's entertainment media director Scott Seomin told E! Online, "but we feel the movie he wrote and directed is overwhelmingly homophobic, and there's a huge potential for a negative impact on gay people, particularly gay youth."
In a letter to Smith, GLAAD complained that the movie "reinforces [gay men] as objects of acceptable ridicule and dehumanization," and, criticized Jay's constant use of the word gay as a synonym for stupid.
"Neither Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back nor myself are homophobic" Smith_responded. "If anything, we're overtly gayfriendly. I swear, I caught it from the right wing on Dogma, and now I'm catching it from the left wing on this flick Which am I, people, a bleeding heart liberal or Biblethumping conservative?”
Smith described his film, a story of two guys who go to Hollywood to sabotage a movie version of their life, as “a satire on young male stupidity." The title characters are a pair of not-too-bright slackers in the vein of Beavis and Butthead or Cheech and Chong, which have appeared in earlier Smith films.
"When you have two main characters who've both at one point or another-hinted at or flat-out copped to homoerotic escapades, how on earth can that be considered 'gay bashing"?" Smith asked MSNBC. "It's more than you get in most 'buddy' flicks. Did Murtaugh and Riggs [of Lethal Weapon] ever cop to getting dreamy over the male anatomy? I think not."
GLAAD suggested that Smith make a donation to the Matthew Shepard Foundation. Smith agreed and donated $10,000, but insisted his donation should not be mistaken for an apology saying, "I'm not sorry--because I didn't make the jokes at the expense of the gay community. I made jokes at the expense of two characters who neither I nor the audience have ever held up to be paragons of intellect. They're idiots."
Seomin, however, told MSNBC, “GLAAD is steadfast in its belief that this film is dangerous, and Kevin is steadfast in believing it's a satire. The audience is not going to be separating satire from acceptable behavior when they're bombarded with constant *fag jokes'." Pitt to wife: 'No more gay roles'
Actor Brad Pitt wants his wife Jennifer Aniston to stop taking gay roles, said the New York Post in its July 30 issue.
Aniston, who shares what Post correspondent Bill Hoffman describes as “a sizzling kiss with beautiful brunette Dagmara Dominczyk" in her upcoming new movie Rock Star, shared a similar scene with actress Winona Ryder on an episode of Friends this past season.
Aniston also has a sexy dance scene with Melissa Etheridge's girlfriend Tammy Lynn Michaels in Etheridge's new video of her song "I Want to Be in Love."
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, and at http://radio.cwru.edu. Dave Haskell, Jim McGrattan and Kim Jones also contributed to this column.
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