March 28, 2003 GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE 11

on the airoff the press

Willow moves to Angel briefly, but could return to stay

by John Graves

Buffy the Vampire Slayer's lesbian witch Willow (Alice Hannigan) made a crossover appearance on the Buffy spinoff Angel at the request of a young witch named Phred to help "re-ensoul" Angel whose soul, sealed in a glass jar, had been stolen.

Phred was overjoyed at getting to work with Willow and, after Angel's soul was restored, intimated that she wanted a more romantic relationship with the lesbian witch. Although Willow gently rebuffed her, saying that she "was already seeing someone," it looks like there's now going to be a lesbian witch on Angel.

A tough slayer by the name of Faith (Eliza Dushku), a reformed ex-con who did time for murder, returned to Sunnyvale with Willow. She may replace Buffy star Sara Michelle Gellar who has announced she is leaving the show she made famous at the end of this

season.

Who knows, perhaps the Willow crossover was to prepare an opening for her to return to Angel permanently if Buffy signs off. If so, it looks like she'll have a readymade love interest.

Virtually normal

Tom Wilkinson portrays Roy Applewood, a married man who tells Irma (Jessica Lange), his wife of 25 years that he can no longer live as a man in the cable film Normal, now playing on the HBO channels.

Written and directed by Jane Anderson, Normal follows Applewood's coming out as transgender, the journey through gender reassignment and how the family, with love and compassion, learns to accept the transformation.

Interviewed by TV Guide's Steve Pond (March 15), Lange said she was attracted to the underlying theme of the story more than the subject matter.

"The story really is a metaphor for any number of things that could happen between two people in a marriage," Lange said. "It's about losing something you've come to take for granted."

New Lifetime film

From the creator of the lesbian comingof-age tale The Truth About Jane comes An Unexpected Love, a new cable film starring Leslie Hope as an unhappily married mother of two who finds herself attracted to her new boss (Wendy Crewson) who is lesbian.

The film began airing on Lifetime March 24.

Like a surgeon

Alberto Garcia stars in Segunda Piel (Second Skin), a Spanish film about a married man who falls in love with a handsome surgeon, now airing on the HBO channels.

Faith in the face of tragedy

Macky Alston, a gay seminary student and filmmaker, interviews everyone from Buddists to born-again Christians to atheists to Orthodox Jews to see if it is possible to find faith in the face of tragedy in the documentary Confessions of a Seminarian which is set to begin airing on HBO in April. Viewers want Bianca with a woman

ABC's All My Children will soon make TV history when Bianca (Eden Riegel) and the mysterious Lena (Olga Sosnovska) have what is described as the "first-ever lesbian love scene on afternoon TV."

Although Bianca and Lena have been dating, Lena has been flirting with Boyd, a hot young male chemist who works at Bianca's mother's firm Enchantment. She has also bedding, and possibly abetting, Michael

Eden Riegel

Pontius, a European business mogul who is plotting to take over Enchantment.

"Is Lena straight, gay or bisexual? That's the question we're putting on the table," ABC Daytime chief

Shister says that Procter & Gamble, Dell Computer Corp., Sharper Image, and three other national companies that sponsored the debut Savage Nation on March 8 have withdrawn from the show.

Statements from the companies, quoted on the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation' web site, www.glaad.org, indicate the advertisers dropped their sponsorship because Savage's rhetoric didn't meet their standards and commitment to diversity.

But MSNBC is "very comfortable" with Savage, spokesperson Jeremy Gaines told Shister, adding, "We expect it to air every Saturday."

Savage's first show drew over 500,000

viewers, twice the network's usual audience for the 5-to-6 pm Saturday time slot.

GLAAD media director Cathy Renna noted the debut show was tamer than Savage's radio show.

"The Michael Savage on the air Saturday is not the real Michael Savage we see in his book or hear on the radio," she said. "In my view, it's clear that he was being pressured to contain the content on the show."

Gaines told Shister however, that, no special restrictions were placed on Savage.

Shister notes that MSNBC chief Erik Sorensen has reportedly said that if Savage used the same pejorative terms on MSNBC that he does on his weekday radio, it would happen only once.

Brian Frons told Gay men's chorus on Six Feet Under

TV Guide. The network has been flooded with letters supporting the Bianca-Maggie pairing but Frons considers the Bianca-Lena pairing "much bolder" TV.

Frons told TV Guide's Michael Logan that ABC polled 1,500 All My Children viewers by telephone last December to see how Bianca's romantic life should proceed.

"To be honest, we were shocked," he said. "That group, by a wide majority, said, 'It's okay for Bianca to be a lesbian, and for AMC to tell a lesbian love story, but we don't want it to be with Maggie."

Frons went on to say, however, "Maybe it will turn out we made a mistake. Maybe it will be decided [as I predicted in my last column] that Maggie has no chemistry with Henry because she is a lesbian and wasn't ready to deal with it. Then again," Frons added, "maybe the audience will see Bianca's chemistry with Lena and say, 'Wow, this is really sexy and hot."

Logan says the history-making scene will most likely air during the May sweeps. MSNBC is sticking with Savage

MSNBC is sticking to its decision to give homophobic radio talk show host Michael Savage his own show on the cable TV network despite the loss of several sponsors, says Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Gail Shister (March 13).

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Members of the Gay Men's Chorus of Los Angeles, some of whom appeared on NBC's Will & Grace last season, will appear as themselves on Six Feet Under this season. The Six Feet Under appearances will re-

volve around a story line following the show's star Michael C. Hall who plays openly gay funeral director David Fisher.

On the show, the role of chorus artistic director Bruce Mayhall will be played by Jason Graae.

Chorus members will appear in four more episodes of Six Feet Under this season. Cole Porter biopic coming

US Weekly (March 24) reports Ashley Judd will star opposite Kevin Kline in DeLovely, a new biopic about gay songwriter Cole Porter that begins filming this summer.

Support queer radio

Finally, WRUW 91.1 FM, home of my Gaywaves radio show, is holding its annual radio telethon Monday to Sunday, April 7 to 13. Proceeds from the telethon will help us buy new music and upgrade our studio facilities to match our new power increase to bring you the very best in diverse radio programming.

Show support for the station that has supported a gay voice on Cleveland's airwaves for over 25 years, and possibly win a valuable premium. Listeners can support Gaywaves specifically by calling in a pledge when the show airs at 7:30 pm on April 11.

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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