September 12, 2003

GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE

on the airoff the press

Autumn brings a new batch of gay films to theaters

by John Graves

A number of films of interest to the LGBT community are coming to theaters this fall.

Emile Gaudreault's Mambo Italiano tells the story of the family uproar that ensues when the only son of conservative Italian parents.comes out of the closet. Two male Israeli officers fall in love in the fact-based film Yossi & Jagger. An all-male cast portrays three "bitchy" actresses looking for work, mates, and trying to make babies in Girls Will be Girls, a film comedy written and directed by Richard Day (The Larry Sanders Show).

Charles Busch, who played a police detective in drag in Psycho Beach Party, plays Angela, an aging movie queen who may have done in her husband to be with a young gigolo played by Jason Priestly in Die, Mommie, Die. The film, which won the Special Jury Prize at Sundance, opens fittingly (in some locations) on Halloween.

Two hustlers search for cash that belonged to a recently deceased gay man in the English comedy 9 Dead Gay Guys, which debuted in Ohio at the Cleveland International Film Festival last March, while Fairy Tales: Straight Men & The Men Who Love Them offers up a number of short films with gay themes.

Entertainment Weekly says gay filmmaker John Waters is enamored of Porn Theater, a French film about the regulars at a X-rated movie palace, due out in October. Coming up in November, two gay lovers who lost their lives in the Holocaust are reincarnated and reunited in The Singing Forest, while a young man begins to realize his true sexual orientation when he meets an Italian boy in Rome in Love Forbidden.

Finally, gay British actor Ian McKellen reprises his role as Gandalf the Wizard in director Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, the third film based on J.R.R. Tolkien's classic trilogy, opening December 17.

Also in December, actor Thomas Jane plays a bisexual hustler who struggles to survive on the streets with the help of his drug-dealing best friend and his sister who works as a prostitute in the film Junked.

Bye bye, M. Butterfly

Gay actor B.D. Wong and his longtime partner Richie Jackson have broken up. Wong, who wrote about the couple's struggle to save their newborn son's life in his recently released book Following Foo, is sharing custody of the child with Jackson.

Romance in a vodka ad

Author E. Lynn Harris describes a very gay romantic encounter in a full page ad for Absolut vodka in the August 22-29 issue of Entertainment Weekly.

Harris also writes about growing up poor, gay and black in Arkansas in his recently released memoir, What Became of the Brokenhearted.

The return of Ellen

Ellen DeGeneres, who will co-host the Emmy Awards show with 21 other comics, talked to TV Guide's Lisa Bernhard about her breakup with Anne Heche, her new girlfriend Alexandra Hedison and her new talk show, which debuted on NBC September 8. Asked what was special about The Ellen DeGeneres Show, she told Bernhard, "I hope people laugh hard and are inspired to know that you can accomplish anything you want to. And I think I stand for that without even saying that."

"I feel that I have been led to this place in such an organic way," DeGeneres said, explaining about why she decided to give talk shows a try, "and it's a time in my life where I needed to digest everything that happened to me after I came out."

"I'm gonna continue to be honest," she added, "but at the same time there are certain things that I'm just not gonna engage in on the show. I'm not gonna engage in politics, I'm not gonna start talking about religion. It's an entertainment show. It's not my passion to change the world."

DeGeneres said that her breakup with Heche was so painful that she burned the documentary of their last road tour

"I watched it until I couldn't watch it

anymore," she said. The film, never aired,

led to their breakup when Heche became involved with cameraman Corey Laffoon, whom she later married.

She didn't want to watch Barbara Walters' interview with Heche either, but "It was the only way I was getting information. You think you all were shocked. I mean it was horrible. It was hurtful on levels that just kind of... kept unfolding. So I watched out of curiosity, because you just wonder, 'What is it in me that I didn't have some kind of indication of something?'

Asked about what made her trust enough to hook up with Hedison after the breakup with Heche, DeGeneres told Bernhard, "I had a really hard time. But she's an amazing person and she's really grounded, just a very healthy... you know I had her tested. I had a lot of psychological tests, and Rorschach and Mensa, a lot of tests. And then I had a lot of my friends meet and evaluate her, and she passed. I was very scared of entering another relationship, so it took us a long time. But as Cher says, 'I believe in love after love.' Or 'Life after love.' Whatever Cher says, I believe in it."

Welcome to the midseaton, Mc Noch

ABC has given the green light to the new show about a pair of gay, interior designers who moonlight as private eyes, a sort of gay version of Hart to Hart. The network is, however, considering a new name for the show, originally called Mr. and Mr. Nash.

Whatever the name, the new show, produced by comedian Steve Martin for openly gay Broadway star Alan Cumming, will air sometime this winter.

Amexing go7:

Reichen Lehmkuhl and Chip Amdt, the gay married couple who won Amazing Race 4 a few weeks ago, were interviewed www.tvguide.com.

All through the competition, the two men, who told their fellow contestants and the television audience that they were gay and have been married for five years, got along much better than any of the other romantically involved couples on the show and won handily, finishing a full eight minutes ahead of runners-up Jon and Kelly and hours ahead of third-place team David and Jeff.

The outcome was not all that clear to the pair at the time, however.

"Honestly, I didn't know that we'd won until we ran up to the podium, and I didn't see David and Jeff anywhere," Reichen said. “We figured the whole time that they had found some sneaky way to get ahead and that they were just going to be there waiting. I really thought we were going to be second."

Asked if they thought their portrayal as gay men and as a gay couple on Amazing Race was fair, he said, "I think the editing was fair, although they really nailed it to Chip when he got frustrated and freaked out in the car in Korea telling the guy to speak English. It was kind of taken out of context. Other than that slam, I think we got really fair editing. A lot of people have asked us if there was some sort of restriction on how much PDA we could show. Chip and I are just not very demonstrative in public about affection. I think it really was true to life, and I think as far as portraying us as a gay couple it came out exactly like I wanted it to."

Reichen pointed out, "Chip and I laid a big kiss on each other at the very end of the race that will never be shown to family television audiences." "People actually stopped clapping, I think," Chip added. "They were all like. 'Whoa, how do we respond to this one?'

What's next for the duo?

"I just agreed to be the spokesperson for the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network," Reichen said.

He's a graduate of the Air Force Academy and a former Air Force officer who will appear in an upcoming documentary that looks at the military's ten-year-old "don't ask, don't tell" policy.

In an SLDN press release, Reichen said, "If the same thing were happening in corporate America, most citizens would be rightfully outraged. The

fact that our nation's largest employer discriminates against gay Americans under the sanction of federal law is equally appalling."

Boy meets military brick wall

Reichen's decision to work with SLDN came just as the Navy discharged Michael Tiner, saying his appearance on Bravo's gay dating reality show Boy Meets Boy violated "don't ask, don't tell."

"I was ready for it," Tiner told the Atlanta LGBT weekly Southern Voice, adding, "I was comfortable enough with who I am and with my sexuality that I was ready to face the consequences."

Tiner, a Navy combat systems instructor, went by his middle name Jason on the show. Although he could have pretended to be one of the straight men hidden among the show's suitors, Tiner's orientation was revealed after he was rejected by James, the main character.

Tiner had told his commanding officer by the time the show first aired on July 29, and the Navy immediately began discharge proceedings. Tiner was given an honorable discharge effective August 19.

No harm, no

1:|:ཀྱི ཀྱང དུ ད 1:| ས པ ས 1

Despite earlier reports in the New York media to the contrary, Port Authority Officer John Verdi is not in trouble for appearing on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.

"Our police superintendent watched the show and enjoyed it thoroughly," said Pasquale DiFulco, a spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

The New York Daily News had reported that Verdi, who let Queer Eye's Thom Filicia and Carson Kressley try on his uniform shirt during the show, upset Port Authority officials because he didn't get clearance to say he was a police

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officer on television and he allowed a civilian to wear his uniform.

But, DiFulco said, "The officer did this on his own time. We have no issue with this."

Port Authority Police Benevolent Association president Gus Danese backed that up when he told the Daily News, "What he did, he did on his own time. He didn't portray the Port Authority in a bad light. It was harmless."

Beene's back

Oliver Beene, last year's sitcom about an 11-year-old boy and his still unrealized gay best friend Michael, is returning this fall. The prize went up

Also this fall comes Bachelorette, a dating show in which a straight woman chooses a date from a group of eligible men.

The show has a reverse of the Boy Meets Boy twist: one of the men is gay. If the contestant chooses a straight man she wins $1 million. If she chooses the gay man, he wins the cool million.

On Boy Meets Boy, the prize was "only" $25,000 and a trip to New Zealand.

Arhange

Finally, please note that my Gaywaves radio show is shifting a half hour back this fall. After August 31, the show will air Saturday from 9 to 9:30 am rather than 9:30 to 10 am.

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 Saturdays at 9 am, and at www.wruw.org. Dave Haskell, Jim McGrattan and Kim Jones also contribute to this column.

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