January 17, 2003 GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE 11

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Three new prime-time series have gay lead characters

by John Graves

The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation received a welcome gift this holiday season, Entertainment Weekly reports. Not one, but three prime-time shows in 2003 featuring gay lead roles.

As reported here earlier, gay actor Nathan Lane will play a gay actor-turned-U.S.representative in the new CBS series Charlie Lawrence. Sometime in March, Fox will introduce Oliver Beene, about an 11-yearold boy who is revealed in flash-forward scenes to be gay, though he doesn't know it yet.

Joining them next fall is Mr. and Mr. Nash, a Hart to Hart-type TV mystery series about a pair of interior decorators who discover and help solve a murder each week.

"We haven't seen two gay leads in a long time," GLAAD entertainment media director Scott Seomin said. "This is a first."

Seomin said he was hoping the Nashes would not be afraid to show a little PDA. "There was a lot of canoodling and innuendo on Hart to Hart which was part of its charm," he said. “We hope to see that in Mr. and Mr. Nash.

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Dad's foot is in his mouth

Lesbian tennis legend Martina Navratilova had a reply for Damir Dokic, father of tennis player Jelena Dokic, who said in December that he would commit suicide if he ever found out his daughter was a lesbian.

"It's a good thing that I am not his daughter, then," Navratilova told reporters at the Australian Hardcourt Championships in Sydney.

"Maybe it's too bad I'm not," she added. Navratilova went on to win the Hardcourt Championships with new doubles partner Svetlana Kuznetsova.

Later, Navratilova told reporters why she was planning to drive all the way from Sydney to Melbourne for the upcoming Australian Open, over ten hours by car.

"Because I have a dog and they don't allow pets in the [airplane] cabin," she said. She added that she was still trying to figure out how to get out of the country without having to put her dog in a cage in the cargo compartment.

"Maybe I'll turn him into a seeing-eye dog," she quipped.

Dinner with Ted Koppel

Nightline host Ted Koppel will be honored by the Human Rights Campaign at its annual Los Angeles gala dinner. Koppel was selected for Nightline's week-long special report on the lives of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people and their families that aired last year.

"The more 'normal' aspect of gay life does not get covered," Koppel told Variety about the report that showed viewers what it means to be gay in America. "Most Americans have a rather distorted view of who their homosexual fellow citizens are."

Former Vermont governor and 2004 presidential candidate Howard Dean will deliver the keynote address at the February 22 din-

ner.

Trying to make it in Hollywood

AMC, cable's American Movie Classics channel, is trying to attract younger viewers by adding more cutting-edge specials and documentaries to it's usual slate of vintage and classic films.

"Now that we've replaced many of our older viewers with younger ones, we're looking to create definitional programming,” Rob Sorcher, AMC's senior VP of programming and production told Variety.

First up in the new AMC lineup include The Wrong Coast, a weekly animated halfhour that will make fun of movies, TV and pop culture, premiering April 2. Another new show, The AMC Project, a monthly documentary series set to premiere in June, will present Gay Hollywood, a two-hour report that will train cameras on five gay men as they go about trying to make it in Hollywood.

De Rossi in Camelot

Ally McBeal costar Portia de Rossi, who recently purchased a $2 million home in Los Angeles with longtime partner Francesca Gregorini,

un-

has an canny resemblance to the late Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, who was killed in an airplane crash along with her husband

Portia de Rossi

John F. Kennedy Jr. a few years ago.

De Rossi, who plays Carolyn Kennedy in the new cable film America's Prince: The John F. Kennedy Jr. Story, told USA Today that Carolyn Kennedy noted the resemblance the first time she met the actress at a White House social function.

"At the White House correspondents' dinner," de Rossi recalled, "she (Kennedy) tugged my ponytail. When I turned around, she was grinning and said, ‘Are you trying to look like me?' It was prophetic."

Although de Rossi has not talked directly about her relationship with Gregorini, the stepdaughter of Ringo Starr to whom she is reportedly engaged, Us Weekly spotted the two "kissing and holding hands at Fiamma, a trendy bistro in New York City's SoHo district on New Year's Eve."

Satellite radio channel coming

Sirius Satellite Radio was expected to announce at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week that it is developing a 24-hour gay radio channel that will feature news and talk shows. The yet-to-be-named channel should be available to listeners of the direct-satellite service within the next few months, writes Backstage.com's Paul Bond.

The first host to be signed is John McMullen, a founder of the now-defunct GayBC Internet radio network. He will move from his current post as a left-wing political talk show host for Sirius to the new all-gay channel.

"This is a big idea. Nobody has done this," said Sirius vice president of programming and marketing Larry Rebich. "It's estimated that there's 20 million gay people in the United States, and they're not served well on radio."

Rebich, who claimed that famous gays and lesbians from film, TV and music are

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expected to participate, said, "We'll be talking to a broad range of celebrities. Those who don't end up as hosts, I'm sure will be guests." Small theater is big winner

Dobama Theatre, which specializes in bringing cutting-edge plays to Cleveland audiences, was honored by the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the west suburban Times newspapers for its work in 2002.

Dobama has brought LGBT-themed plays like Angels in America, The Laramie Project and Shopping and Fucking to the stage at their Coventry Road theater.

Three in the Back. Two in the Head and The Old Neighborhood were two of the top twelve local productions last year, according to Plain Dealer theater critic Tony Brown, while the Times papers' Roy Berko gave the theater 13 awards, including actors Nan Wray and Jean Zarzour for Homebody/Kabul by Tony Kushner.

Dobama's current production is The Tale of the Allergist's Wife by openly gay writer and actor Charles Busch.

Bayard Rustin bio to air on PBS

On January 20, PBS stations across the nation will air Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin, a new P.O.V. documentary about the gay black civil rights leader.

For a half-century, Rustin was a relentless soldier in the civil rights movement, although much of his work was conducted behind the scenes out of fear that the public wouldn't accept an openly gay activist.

In 1955, he was one of Rev. Martin Luther King's key aides during the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott that became a landmark civil rights victory. He was the lead organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, at which King gave his "I Have a Dream" speech, considered by many historians to be the pivotal moment in the civil rights struggle. Rustin died in 1987.

Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin is a co-presentation of the Independent Television Service and the National Black Programming Consortium. 'Gay Hitler' book comes to TV

HBO is developing a documentary based on The Hidden Hitler, a controversial book by German history professor Lothar Machtan that claims Adolf Hitler was gay.

The documentary, scheduled to air next year on either HBO or Cinemax, will be produced by the Los Angeles film studio World of Wonder, whose credits include Monica in Black and White for HBO and the upcoming theatrical release Party Monster.

Although Machtan's book came under fire from historians who questioned its authenticity when it was published in 2001, World of Wonder co-founders Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, who directed the cable documentary defended it.

"The thrust of the documentary looks at the body of evidence that in his early life, Hitler was, in all possibility, gay," they told the Hollywood Reporter.

An abridged 49-minute version of the documentary aired on the United Kingdom's Channel 5 in November as Is Hitler Gay?

Chronic

The full 75-minute version is expected to air on HBO with either the original British title or as The Pink Führer.

The book and documentary recounts testimony describing Hitler's sexual activity during and after World War I. It features interviews with Machtan and other historians and visits European cities where Hitler spent his early years, including his hometown of Linz, Austria.

The book also suggests that Hitler murdered a high-ranking Nazi who attempted to blackmail him with a threat of outing, and persecuted hundreds of thousands of other gays and lesbians to "disguise his own true colors."

When NBC's Today anchor Matt Lauer interviewed Machtan about the book in October 2001, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation blasted the program for failing to grill the author on the validity of his claims. GLAAD news media director Cathy Renna noted that they expect better of the documentary.

"We would welcome a rigorous and fair examination of the book from all different sides, which it didn't get from the mainstream media when it first came out," said Renna.

Bailey, defending his company's decision to explore Hitler's alleged homosexuality, told the Reporter, “It's an absolutely uncomfortable subject, but you're in graver danger if you refuse to explore an idea in fear that someone might misinterpret it."

World of Wonder has another gay-themed documentary coming to cable in the spring as part of MTV's True Life series. Homo High will examine the lives of a group of students attending a private gay high school in Dallas. NBC picks up Ellen's new talk show

NBC announced on January 7 that it has picked up Ellen DeGeneres's new hour-long syndicated talk show. It will air five days a week on all 14 NBC-owned stations, including WCMH Channel 4 in Columbus.

On her new show, DeGeneres will use her unique brand of humor to interview celebrities and pop culture newsmakers. As

"What's great about Ellen hosting is that she's being Ellen DeGeneres," GLAAD's Scott Seomin told Gay.com. "She's not a character like Ellen Morgan (on Ellen), which frankly is going to lead to a big success. She's best in front of a microphone being Ellen and giving her skewed rambling observations on life and relationships."

Premiering this autumn, the show will air in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Miami. No word yet as to whether or not the show will be carried by NBC outlets in other Ohio cities.

John Graves is the producer and host of Gaywaves, a lesbian, gay bisexual and transgender public affairs show on Cleveland's WRUW 91.1 FM Fridays at 7:30 pm, and at www.wruw.org. See what's coming on TV in the Couch Potato Report, under "Entertainment" at www.lgcsc.org. Dave Haskell, Jim McGrattan and Kim Jones also contribute to this column.

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