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Is was Just a Movie, Right?

Out & about, but still some doubt

After years of struggling with sexuality,
ex-Giant tells his story

By MICHAEL O'KEEFFE
DAILY NEWS SPORTS WRITER

Roy Simmons finally got the chance to let some sunshine into a life darkened by drugs and dishonesty. It was 1992 and Simmons, the former offensive lineman for the Giants and Redskins from 1979 to 1984, appeared on national television to tell Phil Donahue - and millions of viewers, including friends, relatives, ex-teammates and former girlfriends - a truth that he had been concealing for decades.

Simmons said he was gay. He said the pressure that came from concealing his sexuality for so long had cost him a promising career. It had prompted him to lie to loved ones, to cheat, to steal. It had turned him into a dope fiend, a thief, a gay prostitute.

But by 1992, Simmons had gone through a rehab stint and found religion, and he felt he was finally ready to tell the world the truth. The revelation didn't make him whole, though. It didn't magically establish a relationship with the daughter he had abandoned years before. It didn't make peace with the loved ones he had conned for so many years. And it sure didn't revive his NFL career.

So just weeks after his "Donahue" appearance, Simmons was back home in California, standing on the Golden Gate Bridge stoned on crack, trying to muster enough courage to throw himself into the San Francisco Bay.

Simmons didn't jump. Instead, he spent the next decade living in anonymity, sometimes binging on drugs, sometimes seeking help for his addictions. But things just seemed to go from bad to worse: In 1997, he learned he was HIV positive.

"My life, man, I wouldn't wish it on anybody," Simmons says.

Now Simmons, 49, wants to share the story of that life with the athletes who are still in the closet. Simmons is one of only three NFL players who have publicly announced their homosexuality - all after retirement (David Kopay came out in 1975 and Esera Tuaolo in 2002). Simmons estimates two or three members of every NFL team are gay, but sports remains America's last bastion of homophobia, and the NFL doesn't appear to be in any rush to make its homosexuals feel welcome.

"In the NFL," Simmons says, "there is nothing worse than being gay. You can beat your wife, but you better not be gay."

That's why so many gay athletes, Simmons says, live on the down low, having anonymous and often unprotected sex with other men. Those secret lives increase the chances they'll become infected with the AIDS virus and pass it on to lovers, male and female. It also makes them more susceptible to alcoholism, drug abuse, anything that might numb their pain.

Simmons says he has contacted the NFL and its union to share his story with the players, but neither has taken him up on his offer. "I know I can help stop someone from going through what I went through," Simmons says. "I've been there. I've had two jobs in my life - football and running. Mostly running."

NFL spokesman Greg Aiello says he isn't aware of any specific offer from Simmons, adding that the league might consider bringing him in for its annual rookie symposium. But Simmons has already found a much broader audience: He's written a book with author Damon DiMarco, "Out of Bounds," that tells the story of his tortured life.

Simmons has been sober and celibate for several years now, he says, and he's healthier than he's been in decades. His longtime friend, Jimmy Hester, introduced him to a naturopathic healer in Martha's Vineyard, where he lives with Hester, who put him on a strict detoxification program and vitamin regimen. But the doctor, Roni DeLuz, says Simmons carries so much pain in his psyche that he'll never be completely right.

"I don't think Roy will ever be okay," she says. "Every day will be a struggle for him. He could relapse into drugs or other self-destructive behavior. But every time he tells his story, it helps him heal. You can't heal yourself until you are honest with yourself."

* * *

To be Roy Simmons is to live in a world of contradictions. Simmons was a fast, strong athlete who played the most macho position in pro sports; he was also a drag queen in size 16 shoes who loved to strut up and down the streets of San Francisco. Simmons was paid big money to play football; he was also a homeless prostitute who earned $15 a trick. Simmons says he accepts that he is gay; he also told televangelist Pat Robertson and his "700 Club" audience just last year that homosexuality is against God's will.

"If you've been through what Roy has been through, you'd be conflicted, too," says Hester, an entertainment publicist who became friends with Simmons when Hester was 13 and working as at a Jersey restaurant popular with the Giants.

Simmons grew up up in Savannah, Ga., raised mostly by his grandmother. His father lived nearby but wasn't a factor in his life. The family was poor so his mother moved to New York to work as a domestic, and although she regularly sent money home, she was absent for large chunks of his life, too.

Simmons was 11 when he says his life began to spin out of control. A neighbor hired him to do some chores around her house, then left him alone with her husband. The husband, "Travis," called Simmons into a bedroom and pulled down his pants. Then he raped the boy.

Simmons says that it was the moment that has defined his life. He writes in his book that he hated Travis, but he says he was also attracted to him. Simmons and his neighbor had other sexual encounters after that rape; years later, after his first season with the Giants, Simmons says he and a buddy ran into Travis at a Savannah gay bar and had "revenge" sex with him.

"Maybe a part of me saw him as the person I'd sensed I was missing all along," Simmons writes.

Simmons spent his teen years having sex with boys even as he cultivated a relationship with the girl who would eventually become the mother of his child. "In my head I had this vision of my girl dressed up all pretty in white on our wedding day," he writes.

But there was one thing Simmons wasn't confused about: football. He was a big, strong all-city football player who worked hard to master the game. His skills attracted recruiters from big-time programs who offered him girls, clothes, cars and envelopes full of $100 bills. In the end, Simmons signed on with Georgia Tech, even though the only thing that school offered was an education and an opportunity to play ball.

At Georgia Tech, Simmons - now nicknamed "Sugar Bear" because of his sweet personality - proved to be an outstanding football player. He joined a fraternity, smoked a lot of pot and fooled around with girls. He also became a regular at a gay bathhouse near campus.

Simmons was drafted by the Giants in the eighth round of the 1979 draft and moved into New York's gay scene, becoming a regular at the city's gay clubs and bathhouses. He'd hire hustlers and take them to hotel rooms; he says he even had a Tanqueray-and-Quaalude-fueled fling with a teammate one night.

Simmons suspects they weren't the only teammates who got together: "I suspected that two of my teammates were fooling around with each other," he writes in his book. "They were way too buddy-buddy with each other for it to be a purely heterosexual friendship."

Drugs, he says, were everywhere. He says he saw one teammate snort coke just before a game; he saw others freebasing at a party. Simmons became a fixture of what he calls the Giants' drug clique and threw wild dope and sex parties. One party drew not just teammates but members of the Jets, Nets and now-defunct New York Cosmos and New Jersey Generals as well. "Cocaine, reefer, uppers, downers, you name it," Simmons writes, "it was on the coffee table, laid out like a buffet."

Simmons was juggling affairs with several women, including one who became pregnant and gave birth to a girl she named Kara. He began a serious relationship with a man he met at a bathhouse. The alcohol and the drugs diminished his performance on the field, and he was demoted from starter to sub. Simmons finally snapped, worn out by the pressure of his hidden sex life and the demands of his family, the drinking and drugging. Just before the 1982 season, he told coach Ray Perkins he wanted to take a year off.

He spent the year as a baggage handler at JFK and tried to come back the following season. But new coach Bill Parcells had no use for Simmons and he was cut. The Redskins picked him up and he went with the team to Super Bowl XVIII in Tampa, where the Skins got waxed by the Los Angeles Raiders.

Simmons was cut by the Redskins in '84 - the freebasing habit he says he picked up in D.C. didn't help his career - and had a brief stint with the USFL's Jacksonville Bulls. The USFL might have been second-tier, but it was big league when it came to drugs and drinking, Simmons says. "On some occasions I was blowing a grand or more a day on drugs," he writes.

But the Bulls folded and Simmons' career was over by the end of the 1985 season. Simmons retired from football with nothing to show for it except a voracious drug habit and a hidden sex life.

* * *

Simmons moved to Newark after his football career ended and although he was still drinking heavily and using drugs, he fell in with a group of professional gay men. It was a community that looked after each other and though Simmons was still in the closet, he felt at peace.

But in 1990, Simmons confided to a cousin that he was gay. The cousin told one of Simmons' former girlfriends. The word spread to other relatives and friends. Simmons, angry and humiliated, withdrew $10,000 from his bank and flew to San Francisco. He became a regular in that city's bathhouses and gay clubs. He even started dressing up in drag - all 290 pounds of him.

Simmons finally bottomed out in California. He blew his money on booze and drugs and went on welfare. He spent five months in prison for shoplifting. He prostituted himself for $15, $20 or a few lines of cocaine.

He became a large, mean drug addict who lashed out at anyone who slighted him. He says he beat and stabbed one guy who ripped him off in a drug deal, leaving his bleeding, wheezing body in a filthy alley. He still doesn't know if the man lived or died.

Simmons finally entered a drug rehab program and started attending a church. Then he appeared on "Donahue," tempted by the prospect of a free trip back East. But Simmons was not prepared for the consequences of his national outing. Friends and relatives who were not aware of his sexuality were shocked. Former teammates asked if he was high. None of them congratulated Simmons; none of them said, "What you did took guts."

A month later, he had traded most of his possessions - and his roommate's - for crack. He drove to the Golden Gate Bridge and prepared to jump. But then he heard his grandmother's voice telling him that people who commit suicide go straight to hell.

He called Jimmy Hester, who arranged for Simmons to return to Long Island, where Simmons' mother and other family members lived, and he entered an intensive drug program. He had relapses and he contracted HIV, but Simmons says he feels better now than he has in decades. The book has been cathartic, he says, and he hopes his message might get through to other struggling athletes. He's even established a relationship with his daughter, Kara, who is now 24 years old and recently graduated from college.

"I feel good," he says. "Not wonderful. I'm working with a therapist. I'm hoping if I can understand what I went through and I can explain it to other guys, maybe those other guys won't have to suffer like I did."

Originally published on January 29, 2006

Secrets and lies

Belinda Oaten has suffered the very public outing of her husband's gay affair. But she is not alone. Diane Taylor talks to the women whose spouses hid their homosexuality

Friday January 27, 2006
The Guardian

The political fallout from revelations that Mark Oaten spent time with a male prostitute was swift and brutal. Even before the News of the World, which exposed him, had hit the streets last Sunday, he resigned as the Liberal Democrats' home affairs spokesman. But the extent of the damage to his 13-year marriage is less clear.

Holed up somewhere snowy in Europe, Oaten's wife, Belinda, 37, is saying little apart from the fact that she is "incredibly angry" and views her husband's behaviour as "the ultimate betrayal". One newspaper report yesterday quoted "a friend of the couple" saying that the marriage is at an end as far as Belinda is concerned.
But what of couples who do not find themselves in the public eye when disclosures about extramarital gay dalliances surface? For a wife who has had no inkling that her spouse was anything other than heterosexual, is it better or worse than finding out that he has been unfaithful with a woman? And is it possible to sustain a marriage after her husband's proclivities are revealed, or is parting inevitable?

There are no statistics on the fate of such marriages in the UK, but according to the Straight Spouse Network, which has its headquarters in the US, where, it estimates, about two million gay men and lesbian women are married to straight partners, roughly a third of couples break up immediately, a third remain together for a year and then split, while the remaining third try to stay together. After three years, half this latter group are still together.

Women who have found themselves in Belinda Oaten's situation say that there can be fleeting relief when they discover that another man is involved if they had suspected their husband was having an affair with a woman, which they would have found more threatening. In the longer term, however, the feeling of being doubly deceived can be overwhelming. Not only have they been fooled about a relationship they thought was monogamous, but they have also been fooled about their partner's sexuality.

Helen, 58, discovered that her husband, Tom, was gay eight years ago. They had been married for 24 years before she found out where his sexual preferences lay. But the problems in her marriage predated that discovery by some time. "The gay partner may blame the straight partner if things aren't going right in the marriage," she says. "The straight partner can be made to feel deficient or unattractive.

"I tried to fix things but floundered because I didn't know what I was supposed to be fixing. It's like asking a doctor to cure a headache when what you've got is a broken leg."

Helen found an amorous email he had written. She assumed it had been written to another woman and, when she confronted him, he allowed her to carry on thinking that. Then she discovered links on the computer to gay chatrooms. Even then, she didn't realise her husband was gay. But during a subsequent row, she shouted: "And you visit gay chatrooms too!"

"At that moment I knew," says Helen. "The colour drained out of his face. 'What do you think?' he said. 'Are you telling me you're gay?' I asked. He nodded and I felt strangely relieved."

In fact, Helen felt they were able to communicate honestly for the first time in years: "He told me that he had known from the age of nine that he was gay but didn't want to be gay."

At the time of Helen's discovery, Tom had never had a relationship with a man. They have since parted amicably and Tom has had a couple of short-lived relationships with men. After some initial distress, their two adult children have accepted the situation.

"Tom said that when he met me, he didn't feel the need to be gay, but he was always very distant. Our sex life was more a celebration of the male body than an expression of emotional closeness between us," says Helen. "I think women who are secretly lesbian in a straight marriage have a harder time having sex with their husbands than gay men in a straight marriage. Men are more able to separate the emotional from the physical and are turned on by the idea of sex even if they're not turned on by the woman's body."

Max, a 30-year-old male prostitute, says that the vast majority of his clients are, like Tom, married with children. "Occasionally, I'll get a call from an openly gay man who wants to meet up for sex, but most of my clients are married with children.

"I had one client who told his mother that he was gay. She was so upset that he got married to keep his mother happy. I think that some of the married men who come to me are not only responding to pressure from society to conform to a straight lifestyle, but are also in denial about their sexuality. With men like me, they can express themselves openly."

Interestingly, Max's secretly gay clients don't only seek him out for sexual release, he says, but also for emotional succour. "I have lost count of the number of married men who have cried when they visit me. I've done a basic skills course in counselling so that I can offer them support," he says. "People are saying that men like Mark Oaten are bastards, but in fact they're victims. They're pressurised by society into conforming to a sexuality they don't want to be a part of. I feel sorry for Mark and his wife, and I condemn the man who went to the News of the World with the story. I would never spill the beans on a client."

Amity Pierce Buxton, who heads the Straight Spouse Network (which has a UK branch), is happily remarried after her first husband came out after 25 years. They remained friends until he died three years ago. "The important thing is to go slowly when these situations arise," she says. "Couples need to communicate with each other honestly so that, even if they separate, they can have a relationship based on truth."

Like Helen and Amity, Pat had no idea that her husband, Mike, was having affairs with both men and women, which began within a year of marriage. Both in their late 50s, they recently separated after 27 years. She began picking up clues six years ago when she caught him downloading gay porn. "He told me he was downloading gay rather than straight porn because it was less likely to have viruses in it. His behaviour is similar to that of an alcoholic who will say and do anything - and then believe it," she says.

The legacy of the revelations about her husband's behaviour, when she accepted the truth after an initial period of denial, has been very difficult. "Apart from the emotional cost, the ramifications are pretty unbelievable," she says. "If a man is unfaithful to his wife with another man, it doesn't count in law as adultery. I had always thought that we would have a certain amount of money for our retirement. But now he's moved out, there are two separate households to run so there's less disposable income."

Worst of all, says Pat, is the awareness of what has gone: "When your husband dies, you lose your future with him. But when something like this comes out, you lose your past because it was all based on lies."

Moving on is often far from straightforward for the woman. While her husband can begin a new life in the gay community, she is faced with whether or not to explain the the real reason for the marital break-up. "As our partners come out of the closet," says Helen, "they slam the door on a new closet inside which we straight spouses find ourselves trapped".

· Some names have been changed. Information from straightspouse.org or contact ever@str8s.org for UK branch details.

Military Officers Discharged under Gay Policy

Hundreds of military officers, health care professionals discharged under gay policy

WASHINGTON -- Hundreds of officers and health care professionals have been discharged in the past 10 years under the Pentagon's policy on gays, a loss that while relatively small in numbers involves troops who are expensive for the military to educate and train.

The 350 or so affected are a tiny fraction of the 1.4 million members of the uniformed services and about 3.5 percent of the more than 10,000 people discharged under the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy since its inception in 1994.

But many were military school graduates or service members who went to medical school at the taxpayers' expense _ troops not as easily replaced by a nation at war that is struggling to fill its enlistment quotas.

"You don't just go out on the street tomorrow and pluck someone from the general population who has an Air Force education, someone trained as a physician, someone who bleeds Air Force blue, who is willing to serve, and that you can put in Iraq tomorrow," said Beth Schissel, who graduated from the Air Force Academy in 1989 and went on to medical school.

Schissel was forced out of the military after she acknowledged that she was gay.

According to figures compiled by the Pentagon and released by the Center for the Study of Sexual Minorities in the Military, Schissel is one of 244 medical and health professionals discharged from 1994 through 2003 under the policy that allows gays and lesbians to serve as long as they abstain from homosexual activity and do not disclose their sexual orientation. Congress approved the policy in 1993.

There were 137 officers discharged during that period. The database compiled by the Pentagon does not include names, but it appears that about 30 of the medical personnel who were discharged may also be included in the list of officers.

The center _ a research unit of the Institute for Social, Behavioral and Economic Research of the University of California _ promotes analysis of the issue of gays in the military.

"These discharges comprise a very small percentage of the total and should be viewed in that context," said Lt. Col. Ellen Krenke, a Pentagon spokeswoman. She added that troops discharged under the law can continue to serve their country by becoming a private military contractor or working for other federal agencies.

Opponents of the policy on gays acknowledge that the number of those discharged is small. But they say the policy exacerbates a shortage of medical specialists in the military when they are needed the most.

Late last year Army officials acknowledged in a congressional hearing that they are seeing shortfalls in key medical specialties.

"What advantage is the military getting by firing brain surgeons at the very time our wounded soldiers aren't receiving the medical care they need?" said Aaron Belkin, associate professor of political science at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

Overall, the number of discharges has gone down in recent years.

"When we're at war, commanders know that gay personnel are just as important as any other personnel," said Nathaniel Frank, senior research fellow at the Center. He said that in some instances commanders knew someone in their unit was gay but ignored it.

The overall discharges peaked in 2000 and 2001, on the heels of the 1999 murder of Pfc. Barry Winchell, who was bludgeoned to death by a fellow soldier at Fort Campbell, Ky., who believed Winchell was gay. About one-sixth of the discharges in 2001 were at that base.

Officials did not provide estimates on the cost of a military education or one for medical personnel. However, according to the private American Medical Student Association, average annual tuition and fees at public and private U.S. medical schools in 2002 were $14,577 and $30,960, respectively.

Early last year the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, estimated it cost the Pentagon nearly $200 million to recruit and train replacements for the nearly 9,500 troops that had to leave the military because of the policy. The losses included hundreds of highly skilled troops, including translators, between 1994 through 2003.

Opponents of the policy are backing legislation in the House sponsored by Rep. Marty Meehan, D-Mass., that would repeal the law. But that bill _ with 107 co-sponsors _ is considered a longshot in the Republican-controlled House.

Copyright 2006 Associated Press.

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Dear Social Grace

JOHN KERRY HAS FALLEN....

JOHN KERRY HAS FALLEN…AND KEEPS GETTING UP
Too bad people in his own party want to put him on ice
By Michael Crowley

"He’s under the illusion that over 50 million Americans voted for him, as opposed to the reality that they voted against George W. Bush.”


In late November, George W. Bush went on the political offensive over the state of the war in Iraq. Determined to get his groove back after weeks of being pummeled by revitalized Democrats, Bush delivered a major speech outlining his “plan for victory.” Democrats, smelling blood, carefully plotted their response. The party’s Senate leadership decided that Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island would deliver their rebuttal. As a former member of the Eighty-second Airborne who had opposed the war from the start, Reed had the perfect credentials to remind Americans about Bush’s mismanagement of the war and of the grim realities the president had refused to acknowledge in his speech. All things considered, it looked like a banner opportunity to inflict more damage on the reeling president.

There was just one problem: John Kerry.

Without checking with his party’s leaders, Kerry scheduled his own response to Bush, which was to take place at 11 A.M., precisely the time that Reed was scheduled to respond. In Senate strategy meetings, mild panic ensued. “It was ‘Oh shit, we can’t have two competing press conferences at the same time,’ ” a senior Senate aide told me recently. “Many calls were made between offices in an effort to make sure we didn’t have two competing events with two messages, because we had ours pretty well fleshed out.” Rather than make way for Reed, though, Kerry agreed to appear with him at a joint press event. Plenty of Democrats predicted what came next: Kerry was “droney and repetitive,” the aide says, but the press nevertheless overlooked Reed and went with the story line of Kerry, yesterday’s Democrat, still taking swings at the guy who beat him. “Jack Reed did a great job, but in the end he was overshadowed by John Kerry,” said the aide. “The story fell into the lazy narrative of John Kerry versus George Bush on Iraq, and that’s not where we wanted to go.”

The bitter clincher came on that night’s Daily Show. After riffing on the Bush speech, Jon Stewart turned his attention to the Democrats. “Naturally, the political opposition would pounce on the president’s vulnerability by choosing as their spokesman an inspiring rhetorical speaker with the proven ability to defeat the president,” Stewart said. Cut to a shot of Kerry stammering, then back to Stewart. “Kerry? You went with Kerry?”

After more footage of Kerry rambling incomprehensibly, Stewart stared at the camera and screamed, “No one understands you!” The next day, a link to the clip bounced among the e-mail accounts of angry Senate Democratic staffers.

So it goes for the man who, a year ago, was 60,000 Ohio votes short of learning the nuclear codes. His party is finally finding its voice and tormenting Republicans on everything from Katrina to Iraq to the seedy corruption revealed in the Tom DeLay/Jack Abramoff/Duke Cunningham scandals. But Kerry—who Democrats almost unanimously say is keenly interested in running for president again in 2008—keeps reminding people of the bad old days, when the country had a choice and chose Bush. “There was so much pent-up anti-Bush anger that has not dissipated,” says Carter Eskew, former chief strategist to Al Gore in 2000. “There was no catharsis, and he’s a reminder of that frustration and anger.”

Don’t think Republicans fail to get this. When Bush delivered an earlier Iraq speech, he took a conspicuous swipe at Kerry, quoting from the senator’s remarks just before he voted to authorize the Iraq war. (Kerry had said that “a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in [Saddam Hussein’s] hands is a real and grave threat to our security.” Not very convenient for Democrats saying the WMD threat was a White House lie.) But Kerry’s office was delighted by the attention. “Republicans are going after him because they are scared of the support he has inside the party,” says Kerry consultant Jenny Backus. But that reaction is like a battered wife who’d rather be abused than ignored. Clearly, even though Kerry came oh so close in the election, Republicans don’t think he stands up well in the public’s memory, and they’re more than happy to address him as the face of the Democratic Party.

Which is why, as another frustrated senior Democratic strategist puts it, “congressional Democrats are spending an awful lot of time trying to figure out how to maneuver around him. They want some new ground. They want the basis for a new conversation. And Kerry’s very much stuck in reverse. It causes a lot of resentment.”

*****

For a brief golden October afternoon in Washington, D.C., precisely fifty-one weeks after the 2004 presidential election, the past was indeed present, at least in the mind of John Kerry. A crowd filled Georgetown University’s Gaston Hall for what had been billed as a “major address” by Kerry on Iraq. There was the battery of TV cameras, the stand of American flags, Teresa in the front row, and Marvin Nicholson Jr., Kerry’s “body man” from the ’04 campaign, adjusting the mike the way he’d done a thousand times before.

In came Kerry, slim and straight as an ironing board, with that rectangular coif of silver hair. But there was something else, too, a subtle sheepishness in the body language, a certain lilt to his grin, something intangible that seemed to say, I’m sorry, folks.

“Whatever else might be said about the campaign,” said the Georgetown professor introducing Kerry, “he certainly fought it hard and honorably.” Whatever else might be said? There’s plenty else that might be said. On that day, in fact, in that very room, people were saying it. “So he’s finally come up with an Iraq policy!” one reporter sitting in the back offered with a grin.

As Kerry took the podium, you couldn’t help but wonder how he’d break the ice and cut through the unavoidable awkwardness. Al Gore was surprisingly expert at this back in 2001, cracking that he used to be the next president of the United States. But Kerry seemed incapable of mustering a good joke. “I had thought about coming back here in a different role,” he said with a wan look on his face. “But I’m honored to be back.” Clang. Maybe the wounds are still too raw for self-effacing humor. Or maybe self-effacing just isn’t his thing.

To be fair, Kerry’s speech wasn’t half bad. “For misleading a nation into war, they will be indicted in the high court of history!” he thundered, and then he referred to Iraq as “one of the greatest foreign-policy misadventures of all time.” It made you wonder where this guy was back in 2004. But then the Georgetown kids lined up to ask questions, and the pain of it all came rushing back. Kerry’s responses were brutally long-winded, as if he were intent on slowly suffocating their earnestness with leaden filibusters. Eyes glazed. Yawns unfolded. Even the kids at the mike shifted their weight impatiently. Afterward, a few dozen students swarmed around Kerry, and he momentarily shifted into high glad-handing mode, soaking up the attention. Alas, the mutual love, such as it was, had to be cut short because of pressing business back in the Senate. “The senator’s only got twenty minutes on the vote!” announced Marvin, the genial body man, as he shooed people away. “He’s gotta go!” A budget amendment to increase spending on home-heating oil awaited him.

In presidential politics, defeat is usually total. Salvaging dignity and honor is no easy task, and by historical standards John Kerry has actually had it pretty good. Better than an instant punch line like Dukakis or Viagra salesman Bob Dole.

But it can’t be fun, either. “He’s gone from being the guy in the bubble entourage of 150 to being one of a hundred senators,” says one former Kerry aide. “That transition is not an easy one, I wouldn’t think.”

A Senate staffer adds, “There is this weird cognitive dissonance. You see Kerry in the Dirksen [Senate Office Building] cafeteria getting a salad, and you think, You were inches from becoming president, and now you’re getting your own salad. And it’s not even a good salad!”

Kerry was never much of a team player in the Senate, and staffers there say that hasn’t changed. When he returned to the Senate after the election, his Democratic colleagues respectfully thanked him, but they didn’t ask him to be their spiritual leader. He was just…back. Since then he’s been reserved in meetings with his fellow Democratic senators, and off the Senate floor reporters generally let him pass unmolested. The smallness of the job must hound him. Back in October, massive flooding that threatened to burst a dam in the industrial Massachusetts town of Taunton forced him to fly up there and help oversee his constituents’ crisis. Kerry’s aides say this is to his credit—it shows he believes in his work. “He didn’t need to come back to the Senate,” says David Wade, Kerry’s press secretary. “He likes his job.”

But never mind the present. Kerry, it seems, is still living in the past. He remembers the 59 million votes he received, more than any other presidential candidate in history—except for the guy who got 62 million that same day. He remembers the hours on election day when exit polls had him winning easily. He remembers his media guy, Bob Shrum, in a regrettably heady early-evening moment, addressing him as “Mr. President.” Mr. President. To hear those words must be something like an acid trip that went too far. You’re just never quite the same again.

Instead, Kerry has become just one of a slew of Democrats cluttering up the party’s message, complicating efforts to present a unified opposition against the president. “Normally, he would be the titular head of the opposition, but he’s not, so we have this kind of ten-headed monster that’s out there,” says Mike McCurry, a former Clinton press secretary and senior adviser to Kerry in the late days of his campaign. McCurry, who remains fond of Kerry, says of him (and of the various other Democrats who seem to be already running for president): “People have to stop freelancing. The reason people think Democrats have nothing to say is that we have fifty people saying fifty different things.” Kerry’s not the only offender, McCurry notes. But plenty of other Democrats say he’s the main one.

Party leaders might be warmer to Kerry if there were much evidence that Democrats still considered him their standard-bearer. But there isn’t. When asked in a November NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey whom they would support in the 2008 primaries, Kerry was Democratic voters’ fourth choice. Hillary Clinton blew everyone away with 41 percent. Kerry’s former running mate, John Edwards, got 14 percent. Even Al Gore, who’s almost surely not running, tallied 12 percent. Kerry? He clocked in at a measly 10 percent—lower even than the number of people who said they definitely would not vote for him again in the next Democratic primary.

Kerry aides consider such polls “utterly meaningless,” insisting he is still loved outside the Beltway. “People in airports walk up to him saying, ‘I should have voted for you’ or ‘I’m so glad you’re still out there,’ ” Backus says.

But it’s in the sanctum of strategists, moneymen, and influential activists who control the party that Kerry fares the worst. These are the people who feel Kerry blew his best chance and that he’s “delusional,” as I repeatedly heard, to think he’s still wanted.

“He thinks it’s about him,” says a former Kerry campaign aide who had significant responsibilities in a key swing state. “He thinks all those people worked so hard and gave so much of their time because of him. And that is a gross misreading of the situation. I think he’s under the illusion that over 50 million Americans voted for him, as opposed to the reality that they voted against George W. Bush.”

Joe Lockhart says, “I don’t think there have been many people in the last year who have been sitting around saying, ‘Now that he has this practice under his belt, boy, in 2008 he’s gonna blow the doors off!’ ”

Another big-name Democrat who is close to party activists and donors, and who worked hard for Kerry in 2004, is even harsher: “Nobody has enthusiasm for him. We should have won that last time. He was running against that idiot.” (“We were running against an incumbent president in wartime,” counters Backus. “It was a challenge for any Democrat.”)

Kerry aides admit their man has never been loved by Washington insiders, but, Wade says, “I think you have to distinguish between inside Washington and outside Washington.” And there are those who insist you can’t underestimate how much he learned from running once. It’s a point Kerry himself makes. “If I get into that race,” he told CNN last November, “having learned what I’ve learned, and the experience I had last year, I think I know how to do what I need to do, and I will run to win.”

Kerry does have a Rolodex thick with the names of rich Democrats. And he’s got an e-mail list of 3 million Democratic activists. “Anybody who writes him off is a fool,” says Jim Jordan.

Several Democrats told me that they worry that Kerry doesn’t have anyone around who is willing to give him a candid assessment of his chances. “I don’t think John Kerry has a lot of really close friends in politics,” says a former adviser to Kerry’s campaign. “I don’t see a lot of people going to him and saying, ‘John, for the sake of your own pride, don’t do this.’ ”

“My guess,” says another veteran Democratic strategist, “is that a bunch of those money guys are telling John that they’re with him—and they’re waiting for Hillary Clinton to call.”

*****

Proof that God is a comedian: In November of last year, Kerry was called for jury duty in Boston’s Suffolk Superior Court. Somehow he actually made it onto the jury, for a case in which two men were suing the city for injuries sustained in an accident involving a school principal. Kerry was even chosen to be jury foreman. Thus were born dozens of snickering headlines noting that, one year after November 2004, John Kerry had finally won an election. Such are the indignities of life for a defeated nominee.

It’s enough to make you feel sorry for the guy. But then you remember the $87 billion quote, and the turgid speeches, and the Swift Boat debacle, and your empathy turns to anger.

Clearly, Kerry’s fellow Democrats aren’t about to forget any of that soon. Even a media strategist who likes and sympathizes with Kerry concedes: “People inside the Beltway want him to, like they say in Harry Potter’s world, disappearate.”

Sometimes they act like he already has. I vividly recall a moment on the Senate floor one afternoon in the spring of 2005. A dramatic showdown was under way over judicial nominations, with Republicans threatening to invoke their dreaded “nuclear option” and change the Senate’s rules so Democrats couldn’t filibuster judges. A large circle of Democrats had formed on the Senate floor, including key party leaders like Harry Reid, Richard Durbin, and Hillary Clinton, and there they held an animated conversation. Kerry ambled up and stood just outside the circle a couple of feet behind Reid, clearly wanting to join in. But like a cocktail-party clique that rejects a dullard, the group didn’t part to welcome him. In fact, no one paid him any attention at all.

Perhaps it was an insignificant moment. Or maybe it symbolized something important: a general sense among Democrats that no one is particularly interested in hearing from John Kerry anymore.

Either way, the circle of senators remained closed, and after a few more moments, John Kerry, the man who for a few hours on November 2, 2004, believed he was president of the United States, looked around awkwardly and tugged at his shirtsleeve. Then, finally, he did the thing that he hasn’t been able to bring himself to do on the larger stage. He put his head down and walked away.

MICHAEL CROWLEY is a senior editor at The New Republic.

White Leather? Gayest....Pope...Ever....

Joey

Do You Know That Girl?

Got Milk?

Julie White, Killer Agent

Julie White, Killer Agent, in 'The Little Dog Laughed'
By ANITA GATES NYTimes January 20, 2006

In a way, Julie White owes it all to a stomach ulcer. It kept her home a lot in the third grade, and acting in the movie musicals she saw on television looked like great fun. But "growing up in Texas," she says, "I didn't realize it was a viable career choice."

It has been viable. Today she is basking in the kinds of reviews most actors only pray for.

From the first minute of Douglas Carter Beane's delicious comedy "The Little Dog Laughed," at Second Stage Theater, Ms. Wilson owns the stage. Her character, Diane, is a brash, fast-talking, infinitely sure-of-herself Hollywood agent determined to save her client, a closeted gay actor, from himself.

"Please, for me, as a favor, butch it up, Mary," she tells that client (Neal Huff) in Act 1. He has decided to come out just as he is about to play a gay character in a film. Bad timing.

Ben Brantley, writing in The New York Times, called Ms. Wilson's work "an irresistible adrenaline rush of a performance." He said of Diane, "When she's hammering out the clauses in a contract (taken to the last delicious degree of absurdity by Mr. Beane), she's Scheherazade."

Over steak frites and iced tea at Le Madeleine, a restaurant down the block from the theater, Ms. White is certainly compelling but much gentler. A dentist's daughter born in a naval hospital in San Diego and brought up in Austin, Tex., she can even be self-deprecating.

"I'm about as deep as a Dixie cup," Ms. Wilson announced during a discussion about acting approaches. When Method actors are backstage connecting with primal memories, she's reading Us magazine, she said.

With four hours between last Saturday's matinee and evening performances, she talked about her life and career so far. She wore a turtleneck and tan cords but Diane's hairstyle; her own is usually curlier and looser.

At 44, she is enviably thin. Good metabolism, she said, but also mentioned "three floors of stairs between the dressing room and the stage." That helps. And she smokes, although it's her New Year's resolution to quit.

Ms. Wilson said she never had a master plan for success. Growing up, she did local shows, driving herself to auditions as a teenager. She acted in "Two Gentlemen of Verona" and "Company" in Austin community theater and attended Southwest Texas State University. (The University of Texas was "too big.")

Joseph Stein and Stephen Schwartz saw her in their musical "The Baker's Wife" and suggested she move to New York. She did, enrolling at Fordham University, but she started getting work and never graduated.

Ms. Wilson made her New York stage debut in 1988 in "Lucky Stiff," an Off Broadway musical. Her subsequent credits include Wendy Wasserstein's "Heidi Chronicles" (a small role) and "Spike Heels" with Kevin Bacon and Tony Goldwyn. She originated the role of Beth in Donald Margulies's "Dinner With Friends." Theresa Rebeck wrote "Bad Dates" for her.

During the 1990's, she also played the wacky neighbor on the sitcom "Grace Under Fire" for four seasons. More recently, she was a memorable funeral home owner in several episodes of "Six Feet Under." She's headed to the West Coast again soon, even though "The Little Dog Laughed" may have a life beyond its current extended closing date, Feb. 26.

She will be going with her husband of four years, Christopher Conner, an actor. Her 19-year-old daughter, Alexandra (from an early marriage to a New York restaurateur), is a freshman at the University of Southern California.

With the flurry of attention being paid to her, Ms. Wilson said she was a little suspicious of real fame because "people become big Macy's balloons of themselves."

There is certainly the danger of becoming typecast as a tough-agent type. She and her current character have some things in common, Mr. Beane said. "Julie is a motormouth," he said. But she didn't fit his original concept of Diane. "I had somebody completely different in mind," he recalled. "But I decided to let go and let Julie."

Shifting Attitude Toward Gays

Advocate.com
January 18, 2006

New military publication signals shifting attitude toward gays

A new four-volume series on the cultural and psychological dimensions of American military life includes, for the first time, a chapter on the service of openly gay troops. The chapter describes social and institutional changes needed to lift the U.S. armed forces' ban on openly gay members.

Experts say the inclusion of the topic in a publication endorsed by major military scholars reflects a shifted landscape on the question of military service by gays. Because a majority of junior enlisted service members now say that gays and lesbians should serve openly, according to an Annenberg poll, and because the vast majority of service members now say that they feel personally comfortable around gays and lesbians, integration is seen as a much less difficult option than would have been the case 12 years ago, when President Clinton tried to lift the gay ban.

Described by scholars as a "path-breaking analysis" of the military experience and a "comprehensive review" of factors influencing military performance, the compilation addresses the emotional impact of combat, methods of coping with war, the role of spirituality in military life, issues affecting family life, cultural diversity within the armed forces, and more. Its authors include military officers, academic experts, health care professionals, and others who have taken part in primary research about the personal and institutional qualities of military life.

"The decision of the editors and publisher to include analysis on how to modify military culture to accommodate this policy change is an important milestone," said Nathaniel Frank, senior research fellow at the Center for the Study of Sexual Minorities in the Military. "It reflects an evolving understanding that the current exclusionary policy on gay troops is harmful and outdated and that change is inevitable."

The chapter authors explain that compliance with new regulations—in this case nondiscrimination toward gays—will be most stable and enduring if strong leaders enforce new expectations by creating high costs for noncompliance. The initial focus of change in this case, they explain, should be the behavior, rather than attitudes, of heterosexuals; but over time, it is reasonable to expect that personnel will conform to new policies because they believe their conduct reflects their identity as members of the institution.

Hollywood Finally Gets It Right

Brokeback Mountain
Hollywood Finally Gets It Right
by Misty S. Irons

Last summer when I got wind of the upcoming gay pride parade in West Hollywood, it crossed my mind to make the 20 minute drive south to see what it was all about. Yet afterward when I heard that they had brought in Paris Hilton as a last minute grand marshall, any traces of regret I might have had for missing it instantly evaporated. Likewise I gave up watching "Will and Grace" about three seasons in when they started parading in a line of guest celebrities on a regular basis. To me it was a sign that from now on the show was going to be more about patronizing gays than clever writing. Apparently Hollywood thinks that associating with gays and lesbians is about image. It's mainly about looking cool and hip. And the gay community, seizing the opportunity for glamorous publicity, can hardly resist entering into a deal with Hollywood where they are ultimately being more used than understood.

But what I find most annoying is this: It has been five years since I started this website, and after a lot of clumsiness on my part and a lot of patience on theirs, currently almost half of my friends are gay. Yet there is nothing about what I've learned over the years about my friends' lives that even remotely relates to why Paris Hilton ought to be grand marshall of a pride parade, or why anyone ought to be enamored with Cher. What, I wonder, does any of this showy ridiculousness have to do with the reality that I see every day in the lives of these people that I care about?

The reality of being gay, I assure you, has nothing to do with a pink feather boa. It has been about seeing courage and quiet suffering, and identifying with faith and struggle and pain that has drawn me into people's lives. And it's not like you can just come roaring up to people in your minivan with your marriage, your three kids, and your Bible and expect them to bare their souls to you. These things are revealed in layers and only over time. You have to hang out, build trust, listen, consider, doubt, put your foot in your mouth, search your own soul, and then maybe, just maybe, your heterosexual brain might establish a fuzzy idea of what it is like to live as a gay person in an ignorant and unforgiving world.

There is so much to be told, and so few words adequate to describe it. It is the kind of thing that I have often wished I had an artistic medium such as literature or film to point my straight friends to whenever they come up to me looking for guidance and an explanation. Something I have been certain Hollywood would fail to provide.

Until now. It took a Taiwan-born director possessing an outsider's keen insight into American culture to finally get it right. Brokeback Mountain is a movie long overdue, because for once it is about the kind of people who more closely resemble the homosexuals I know, and tells the truth about their lives. Guys who act like guys, raised in conservative communities with traditional values, who if you asked them whether they chose to be homosexual would snappishly answer, "Why in the hell would I choose it?" or, "What the hell kind of question is that?"

The story is presented largely from the perspective of Ennis Del Mar, played by Heath Ledger in a performance that will be etched in my memory for quite some time. Gruff, stoic, reticent, he's the last guy on the prairie you'd suspect of being gay. His sudden, passionate response to sheepherding partner Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) as they shared a tent one cold night on Brokeback Mountain seems to come out of nowhere. It may not be the hole in the script that some reviewers think it is. The point is that no one sees it coming, not the audience and least of all Ennis himself. And if passion was strong that night, the ensuing shame that takes hold of Ennis the next morning becomes an equally formidable force.

As if to heap further damnation on their souls, Ennis' and Jack's summer-long affair results in the neglect and loss of some of the sheep and falling into disfavor with their employer. It is as if guilt inevitably intrudes into their secret paradise and finds them out. Then when the summer finally draws to a close and they must leave Brokeback Mountain and each other, you can see Ennis hardening himself for the grim reality of the rest of his life. Whatever feelings he has for Jack he must now bring into subjection with an iron fist. He must steer himself with a steady hand into an emotionally bleak future, and try to forget his soul had ever known the vivid colors of bliss. His plans to marry his fiancée Alma (Michelle Williams) remain as fixed as his jaw and as inevitable as death. He mentions them to Jack with the casual acceptance of talking about the weather. It's coming, it's a fact, and there's not much more to it than that.

Funny how whenever a discussion about homosexuality erupts among evangelical Christians, there's always somebody who wants to put forward the bright idea that the best solution is for a man to get married and keep having sex with his wife until he becomes a true hetero convert. Maybe one reason why I don't see a host of female volunteers lining up to administer "the cure" has to do with the slow pain you see inflicted upon the wives of Ennis and Jack during the years of their respective marriages. Alma looks like she is perpetually cycling through the Five Stages of Grief. Jack's wife Lureen (Anne Hathaway) becomes increasingly shallow, bleached and plastic. Encouraging gay men to "work toward the goal of heterosexual marriage" may sound like harmless, biblical advice when dispensed across the mahogany desk in a pastor's well-vacuumed office, or printed on crisp, white sheets from the "Recommendations of the Committee to Study the Issue of Homosexuality" report handed out by your church denomination. But it is in fact quite disastrous when played out in the real lives of actual human beings.

Yet the beauty of this story is that nobody preaches or bullies Ennis into any of it. What is expected of him as an adult male living in 1963 Wyoming, he expects of himself, and he hardly knows otherwise. Anyone who has been raised with religious or traditional values understands immediately what Ennis is all about. You recognize something of yourself in him. Marriage and family, church and community have always been in the air you breathe, their rhythms and traditions imparting the values and expectations you've known since earliest memory. Ennis would gladly take his place in the current and ride easily along, if it did not set him on a collision course with his own human needs. If there's anyone who might be able to endure the barrenness of a life devoid of any meaningful love and emotional connection, you figure it would be Ennis. The problem is, once he does experience that connection with Jack, it is for him like breathing oxygen for the first time. The agony of having to part from Jack, and his subsequent inability to find satisfaction in his marriage to Alma, however devoted a wife she is, only intensifies his suffocation.

For the most part, were it not for the number of empty beer bottles and cigarette butts littered around him, there would be little indication that Ennis feels anything at all. He seems to have a grip, weathering his life as if he were squinting into a dust storm. He does not invite pity. He does not even seem to pity himself. No wonder then, when Ennis finally has a chance to meet up with Jack again for the first time in four years, you are hardly prepared to witness the desperation that overcomes him. The loss of control. The frantic activity. The impulsive flight from home. Only then does it dawn on you what he is suffering inside, and how much it must be costing him to keep it so thoroughly submerged.

Even a guy like Ennis can't stay submerged forever, so he allows himself to come up for air twice a year. His biannual "fishing trips" with Jack become the routine of his life. But in spite of his determined efforts to hang onto a normal life, while indulging in only the bare minimum of what can sustain him emotionally and sexually on the side, he ends up hurting everyone around him. No one is happy, least of all himself, and things begin to unravel. Caught between his adamant refusal to live openly as "queer" and his fundamental need for Jack, he is never able to give himself fully to anyone. For him there is no peace, no rest, and no safety anywhere. Nor does he believe that there are any answers. Deeply shuttered within himself, he only knows that whatever his rage, whatever his pain and loneliness, he must simply endure. The few times you do see his granite-like exterior crack and anguish and emotion pour out, it is almost too heart-wrenching to watch. You wish there was something that could be done to give him relief from his daily crucible. But in view of his situation and knowing Ennis himself, you come up empty, and all you can do is watch and suffer with him.

Some evangelicals are condemning Brokeback Mountain for "approving" of homosexuality. Strange accusation, since there is no one in the movie who actually does approve of homosexuality. The cast of characters are all traditional, family-values people who are deeply uncomfortable if not outright hostile to the idea of men falling in love with men. And the men who are doing the falling in love are the same guys you are likely to see standing in line in front of you on Election Day to vote Republican, or maybe even to vote in favor of the state measure seeking to ban same-sex marriage from legal recognition. I've known a few of those types myself.

Brokeback Mountain doesn't ask us to approve of homosexuality. But it does ask us to face up to the truth of what homosexuality is and how profoundly it impacts the person who finds him- or herself so afflicted. Most importantly, it raises the question of whether we who don't approve of it as morally right shouldn't feel more compassion toward friends, family members and neighbors who find themselves in that painful dilemma through no fault of their own. After all, the crux of their pain lies in the very fact that they don't approve of it either. And they can appreciate all too well what parents, fellow church members or hunting buddies might think if they were to find out, because it would be the same horrified reaction as their own, and they are quite frankly scared to death.

Such a person would never dream of asking for your "approval." But it would do them a world of good if people were simply to have a heart, invite them for coffee, assure them the door is always open, and give some indication they aren't interested in humiliating them or rounding up their friends to beat the stuffing out of them in a back alley. It is not much to ask, and doesn't cost much to give either.

Posted on January 9, 2006
MusingsOn.com
© 2006 by Misty S. Irons

Homophobic 'humor' is too widespread in kids' media

By Nell Minow
Special to the Tribune
Published January 19, 2006

Several movies released in the last part of 2005 had sensitive, understanding and compassionate portrayals of gay and transgendered characters: "Brokeback Mountain," "Rent," "The Family Stone" and "Breakfast on Pluto."

So why is it that so many films made for children and teens feature casually homophobic humor?

In one of this season's PG family comedies, a princessy teenager played by the wholesome Hilary Duff is annoyed at her pesky younger sister.

In the old days, Big Sis might have called Little Sis a brat. But in "Cheaper by the Dozen 2," the insult of choice is, "Whatever, Butch!" Later in the same movie, two warring fathers are mistaken for a gay couple, a situation viewers are expected to find wildly funny.

It's bad enough that this kind of "humor" is offensive as a matter of taste and tolerance, but what parent wants to explain to an 8-year-old what the "butch" comment means, or why it is supposed to be funny that one man has his arm around another man's shoulders?

This is the place where the ratings board run by the Motion Picture Association of America is at its worst, because it does not take humor seriously. Material that would get a PG-13 or an R in a drama gets a PG or even a G in a comedy.

This means that parents are not adequately warned about material that raises two issues of concern. First, it raises issues of gender and sexuality that many parents would not consider appropriate for children. The light-hearted insults in these films can even make it harder to have a thoughtful conversation with children about those issues because they reinforce a very limited notion of what is "normal."

Second, it suggests that it is permissible to make fun of people who are gay or who do not conform to the most narrow definitions of what it means to be male or female.

In the recent PG "Yours, Mine & Ours," it is supposed to be humorous that one of the young sons of a free-thinking mother is a junior "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy," advising his mother about fabrics and trim on the purses she designs.

At least her view of him is loving and accepting. Later in the film, when the older children want to come up with the prank that would most upset their straight-arrow father, their idea turns out to be dressing up two 4-year-old boys in girls' clothes and having them talk about tea parties.

"Raise your hand if your brother's a homo!" is a frequent punch line in "Just Friends," a current PG-13 release directed at teenagers. This is a high schooler's insult to his twenty-something brother because the elder brother has failed to "boink" the girl he likes.

Even the darling Disney animated "Chicken Little" has "sissy" humor, when the mother of the high-strung and fearful pig character threatens to take away his Barbra Streisand collection as a punishment. More troubling, the outspoken "mean girl" in the movie, an outstanding athlete, is transformed into a sweet, ruffle-wearing stereotypical girly-girl. At the end, we see her happily dancing with the pig.

Other characters in the film make mistakes and find their way toward becoming more grown up, but only she undergoes such a complete (and presumably humorous) transformation. It would be fine to see her learn her lesson and become more considerate, but the implication here is that she has had to relinquish her strength, competence, independent spirit -- and overalls -- in order to do so.

It's unlikely that these themes and portrayals will create any confusion in children or teens about their own sexual orientation.

But they may create other kinds of confusion, for they send troubling messages about gender roles and even more troubling messages about the way we treat those who do not conform to the traditional models.

Movies, television, and popular music help children and teenagers determine the definitions of manhood and womanhood, and all too often they focus on the extremes. They show us men who keep all of their emotions inside, demonstrating manhood through physical courage and power. And they show us women who are softhearted and seldom rely on their wisdom and judgment to solve problems, achieving power through their beauty, vulnerability and sexuality.

These depictions can be especially appealing to children and adolescents who often cling to absolutes for a sense of security as they move toward growing up.

Parents need to make sure that children and teenagers see images of characters who show some emotional vulnerability along with physical and intellectual power. Books of stories like "Tatterhood and Other Tales" (edited by Ethel Johnston Phelps), "The Outspoken Princess and the Gentle Knight" (edited by Jack Zipes); the "Redwall" series of novels by Brian Jacques; and movies "The Court Jester," (1956 comedy starring a wonderful cast including Danny Kaye), "The Great Race," (1965 comedy featuring Jack Lemmon among the Hollywood "names") and the current "Chronicles of Narnia" are the sorts of family fare that show male and female characters who are strong, resourceful, and empathetic.

But for kids, no film or book can top what matters most: the behavior they observe at home. Parents should avoid using words like "sissy" and "tomboy," and they should openly object to jokes that make fun of someone's gender or sexual orientation.

Teenagers today, even those who consider themselves sophisticated supporters of homosexual classmates, often use "gay" as an all-purpose insult. This is an age group that responds better to questions than reprimands, so it may help for parents who hear this kind of language to ask -- sincerely -- why the term is considered appropriate and not bigoted.

Families also can discuss the way that rap music has often included offensive homophobic references as a part of its macho bluster. They certainly should talk about rap superstar Kanye West's challenge to all rap performers to stop mindlessly using anti-gay insults in lyrics.

In an interview on MTV in 2005, West explained that he became homophobic when he was younger because he was called "fag" and "mama's boy" in school, but, in part because he has a gay relative, he realizes how wrong and hurtful those gangsta definitions of masculinity can be.

And since we're not likely to get rid of humor that depends on stereotypes any time soon, the most important defense parents can provide is this: teaching children and teenagers that one core attribute of being a man and a woman is respecting the honor and dignity of others who are different.

----------

Nell Minow reviews movies each week for Yahoo! and for radio stations across the country. She can be reached at moviemom@moviemom.com





Copyright © 2006, Chicago Tribune

Gonna Do This Again Next Summer?

President Bartlett vs Dr. Jacobs

'Brokeback' and Sports

How a Movie Captured the Essence of Being a Closeted Jock

By Jim Buzinski
Outsports.com


“If you can’t fix it, you gotta stand it.”

Those words were spoken by Heath Ledger’s closeted character Ennis Del Mar in “Brokeback Mountain.” They also could be spoken by closeted athletes everywhere.

“Brokeback Mountain,” the movie that it seems everyone is talking about, is first set in 1963 when Ennis meets Jack Twist (played by Jake Gyllenhaal). The two Wyoming cowboys fall in love, but it’s a love that can never be fully realized. It ends in 1983. But as far as sports go, the movie could be set in 2006 and be just as relevant.

When it comes to sports, especially for elite male athletes in bigtime sports who happen to be gay, Brokeback’s themes of yearning, fear and forbidden love resonate strongly. We have come a long way in the acceptance of gays in society, but sports still remain the final closet and the door is still firmly shut.

As I watched “Brokeback Mountain,” much of the time with a lump in my throat, I flashed to contemporary sports and wondered how many closeted jocks were living their own version of Ennis and Jack.

It is still an amazing statistic -- There has never been a male athlete from a major pro team sport (NFL, NBA, NHL or Major League Baseball) who has come out while playing. The same is true of elite jocks at major college programs. We know they’re out there (no one disputes this), but they remain as closeted as Ennis.

'I Cried'

“I am 29 years old and still in the closet and hiding who I truly am,” read one post on the Internet Movie Database, a major resource for film lovers. “I grew up in a small town where I was a star athlete, prom king in high school -- the All-American boy so to speak. I cannot come out to my family or friends for reasons of maybe losing all of them as well as my job.

“I once had a very special love in my life; he is dead now. He took his own life when he was only 23. He could not accept himself or could not trust others to accept who he was. I don't blame him for killing himself, I blame society! I miss him and there is not a day that goes by that I do not think of him. I am trying to hold back the tears as I write this. We met in college and our story is very similar to the one in this movie as well.

“…When this movie finished, I walked to my car, drove down a dark alleyway, locked the doors and did what any other tough young cowboy did -- I cried. Some days I'm just barely hanging on but movies like this want to make me keep fighting. Thank you, “Brokeback Mountain.”

Athletes who have come out after their careers have ended have stories that are universal. The paranoia and fear of being discovered while competing. The ruses to convince teammates, coaches and family that they’re 100% heterosexual. The feeling that their performance on the field suffered because of the great psychic strain of being found out. It’s similar to when Ennis tells Jack a harrowing story of witnessing the aftermath of a gay rancher being killed when he was a young boy.

To Ennis, the stakes are too great to be open about who he is and who he loves, and gay athletes feel those same strains. They may not fear being lynched, but there is still physical fear nonetheless.

The Locker Room

Esera Tuaolo played nine years in the NFL as a defensive tackle, a tough position in a brutal game. He was in the closet the whole time and in his searing and honest upcoming book, “Alone in the Trenches,” (I have read an advance copy) he eloquently describes the trauma he endured trying to keep his secret.

“While I was with the [Minnesota] Vikings,” Tuaolo writes, “a rumor broke out that the Dallas Cowboys’ superstar quarterback Troy Aikman was gay. He’s not, but the rumor spread. The day I heard that, I walked into the locker room, panicked and afraid. I didn’t know what to expect, wasn’t sure what I would have to endure.”

Tuaolo was not out, yet he feared every day that someone might have spotted him in the rare times he frequented a gay bar, implausible as that might seem. He continues:

“Some of the players started saying nasty, graphic things about Troy and his sexual habits. I was going along with it, laughing with the others. The talk turned to speculation about other players. My stomach knotted. I hoped no one would point the finger at me.

“One of the tight ends on our team at the time was a cocky guy that others picked on -- they knew they could get a reaction out of him. [Defensive lineman] John Randle said to him, ‘You must be gay.’ The tight end freaked out. He attacked Randle. A brawl broke out in the locker room.

“These two big guys threw blows at one another. Everybody else tried to break it up, including me. … I felt the adrenaline surge of the fight. I also felt tremendous pain. That could have been me getting teased and in a fight. I was thinking, I am in such a fucked-up nightmare. I wish I could wake up.”

Countering the Rumors

Aikman’s story is illuminating. Rumors that he was gay surfaced in 1990s as he was leading the Dallas Cowboys to three Super Bowl titles. They spread wide, even in the days before the Internet, and one account had his coach Barry Switzer making the allegation.

Aikman denied he was gay, but his PR team at the time went through some elaborate lengths to prove his heterosexual bona fides. It seems that every few months Aikman was linked to some actress or another. And in the strangest story I ever read in Sports Illustrated, the author detailed Aikman’s quest for love and how he just couldn’t find the right woman.

Titled “Mr. Lonelyhearts” (Jan. 15, 1996), the story was a 5,417-word personal ad, with a sub-headline that read: “SWM, TALL, HANDSOME, 29, PROFESSIONAL FOOTBALL PLAYER, SEEKS BEAUTIFUL, INTELLIGENT YOUNG WOMAN TO HELP DESIGN DREAM HOUSE AND CREATE FAMILY EQUIVALENT OF AMERICA'S TEAM. MUST LIKE QUIET EVENINGS AT HOME, EITHER CRUISING AMERICA ONLINE OR ADMIRING TROPICAL FISH TANK. MUST SPEND SUNDAYS IN CROWDED STADIUMS ROOTING FOR DALLAS COWBOYS. DISLIKE OF 49ERS AND REDSKINS A PLUS, BUT NOT REQUIRED.”

Aikman, we were told, would spend hours in AOL chat rooms, though it never specified if they were M for W (which was implied) or M for M (which is what I, and many other guys, hoped).

Aikman went on to a successful career in broadcasting, married and has two children. If there was ever any truth to the rumors, I doubt we’ll ever find out. Similarly, in “Brokeback Mountain,” both Jack and Ennis marry and raise kids, this in a time when two men living together simply was not done, especially in Wyoming. Despite Jack’s pleading, Ennis can’t break the grip of the culture of homophobia in which he was raised.

In sports, being labeled gay is perceived as tantamount to career suicide and athletes have gone out of their way to quash any rumor, as the Aikman case illustrates to the extreme. In 2002, New York Mets catcher Mike Piazza took the unusual step of declaring his heterosexuality after a blind item appeared in a gossip column saying one of the Mets was gay. Piazza then became linked to beautiful women and got married in 2005 to an actress and former Playmate.

In 2004, former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Jeff Garcia announced he was not gay after being fingered as such by then teammate Terrell Owens. Garcia then dated two Playboy playmates back-to-back, further enhancing his straight credentials; the fact that Playmate 1 duked it out with Playmate 2 in a bar only got Garcia more attention to the type of relationship he was having.

Love and Death

In “Brokeback Mountain,” the idea of a savage death for men loving men hovers over the film, including a key scene near the end. The sports world is not immune to similar savagery. In 1962, boxer Emile Griffith beat his opponent Benny Paret to death in the ring in Madison Square Garden before a national TV audience. Paret had taunted Griffith for being a “maricon,” Spanish slang for faggot. "He called me a maricon. I knew maricon meant faggot. I wasn’t nobody’s faggot,” Griffith said. The slurs drove Griffith to a fury in the ring that ended with Paret slumped over the ropes and lapsing into a coma from which he never recovered.

There is no doubt that Griffith is a homosexual, though he steadfastly denied it for years; he developed a reputation as a lady’s man and once briefly married. A documentary last year about the Paret fight brought Griffith some attention and he offered to ride in New York’s gay pride parade. Griffith was in his prime in the same era when Jack and Ennis first meet in the movie, and Paret and Jack are both killed, in a universal sense, by homophobia.

David Kopay is a sports pioneer, the first NFL player to come out, a year after retiring. He saw “Brokeback Mountain” its first weekend in Los Angeles and told me how blown away and emotionally affected he was, and how the story resonated for him. As he watched Jack and Ennis deal with their love for each other on the screen, Kopay said he thought about his relationship with Jerry Smith, with whom he played with on the Washington Redskins in the early 1970s.

Smith died of AIDS in 1987 while never publicly admitting his homosexuality. To honor Smith’s desire for privacy, Kopay never mentioned him by name in his book, though he was a catalyst in Kopay’s coming out. Smith “was my first major [gay] experience and the first person I thought I could love,” Kopay said. Like Ennis and Jack, but for differing reasons, Dave and Jerry’s relationship was stillborn and Kopay sounds wistful when he recalls those days.

At the end of the film, after Jack has died, Ennis is alone with Jack’s shirt and his grief, with no one to share his loss with. It reminded me of a moving passage in Billy Bean’s book “Going the Other Way.”

Bean played Major League Baseball for nine years and came out after retiring in 1999. While in San Diego, Bean was living with another man, in a relationship that was clandestine and which Bean strove mightily to keep that way. His lover became ill and eventually died.

Numb with grief, but still hiding his private life, Bean honored a team commitment on the day of his lover’s death, something inconceivable for a straight athlete who just lost a spouse. “Once in a while, the team issues a statement that a player is excused … to attend to family matters,” Bean recounts in his book. “This had to be one of those situations. There was only one problem: How could I explain that my ‘family matter’ was the AIDS-related death of my male lover with whom I’d been living secretly?”

“If you can’t fix it, you gotta stand it” was Bean’s mantra and Tuaolo’s and that of any closeted athlete. Bean and Tuaolo finally had enough of the hiding and neither has ever regretted coming out. I hope that the movie inspires another mantra for anyone closeted, jock or not. It comes from someone who posted on the official "Brokeback" website: "I have been denying my sexuality for a long time. The movie has inspired me to face my true nature."

A beautiful, doomed dream

By Drew Limsky | December 30, 2005

ARTHUR MILLER'S ''Death of a Salesman" tells of an ordinary family man trying to stay one step ahead of the bill collector. When Willy Loman dies at the end of the play, his long-suffering wife notes that they've finally paid off the house. ''We're free . . . we're free," she sobs as the curtain comes down. It is a devastating ending, and when I observed the audience after the Broadway revival several years ago, few seemed more moved than the 50-ish men who looked too broken to rise from their seats and go home, as if their secret burdens and fears had finally been articulated.

I'm an urban gay man. I don't go camping or ride horses. ''Will & Grace" is a lot closer to my milieu than the pastures and peaks of Wyoming. Still, ''Brokeback Mountain" is my ''Death of a Salesman." Just as the male breadwinners who saw ''Death of a Salesman" didn't need to be in a situation as precarious as Willy's to be struck dumb by his tragedy, gay men don't need to be closeted cowboys to feel that our most essential struggles have finally found expression on the screen.

My identification with Jack Twist was so complete that his heartbreaking optimism and bitter frustration made me almost physically ill, like I couldn't breathe. So strong was the way I homed in on Jake Gyllenhaal's avid portrayal that the first time I saw the movie I barely registered the anguished brilliance of Heath Ledger as Ennis del Mar, or the reason why he's being compared to Brando, James Dean, and Sean Penn (that took a second viewing).

Much has been made about Ennis and Jack's morning-after denial:

Ennis: It's one-shot thing we got going here.
Jack: Nobody's business but ours.
Ennis: You know I ain't queer.
Jack: Me neither.

In the Annie Proulx story, this exchange seems realistically uninflected, with each character trying to outdo the other in manliness. And that's how Ledger plays it. But what Gyllenhaal does is let the tone of his voice go higher ever so slightly -- he gives the line readings a quality of boyish hurt that deftly conveys his sense of being erased. Later on, listen carefully to the unsaid monologue in Gyllenhaal's long pause before he nearly whispers the line: ''The truth is, sometimes I miss you so bad I can barely stand it."

With Jack Twist, the movie places homosexuality within the American Romantic tradition, a tradition of dreaming larger than practicality will abide. Jack flows from a line of doomed, beautiful dreamers that begins with Jay Gatsby, and Jack's ambition -- a life with Ennis -- is as impossible as Gatsby's pursuit of Daisy. Jack's embittered widow isn't far off the mark when she describes Brokeback Mountain as ''some pretend place where the bluebirds sing and there's a whiskey spring."

Gyllenhaal is transparent and charismatic in equal measure: Every emotion not only ''reads," but is elevated, magnified in the tradition of great screen everymen like Henry Fonda. In his final monologue, after all his dashed dreams have come spilling out, watch his dry-eyed resignation as Ennis drives away. In ''The Great Gatsby," we know that Gatsby is through when his lover Daisy makes it clear that she won't dream the same dreams as he does. Like Gatsby's death, Jack's end is pro forma; the spiritual death precedes the physical death.

The praise for Ledger has been so across-the-board, at the expense of Gyllenhaal's equally sensitive performance, that I wonder whether (mostly straight) critics simply are more interested in the character who is perceived as ''straighter."

In an Oprah Winfrey-like lapse, New York Times critic Manohla Dargis claims that every straight woman has had an Ennis in her life, while San Francisco Chronicle film critic Mick LaSalle thinks:''It's possible that if these fellows had never met, one or both would have gone through life straight."

One or both? Probably not the one -- Jack -- who sidles up to Mexican hustlers and rodeo clowns.

One senses straight folks twisting themselves into pretzels trying to make a patently gay story fit their sensibilities: That's what we usually have to do with heterosexual love stories. Their comments are certainly a tribute to the universality of the story, but without understanding the erotic element of romance -- not just in theory, but in practice -- the picture is incomplete. Therefore the experience of ''Brokeback" -- watching the genders on the screen match up to what's in my head -- was a revelation. Suddenly I knew what I'd been missing at the movies all my life.

Drew Limsky teaches English at Pace University and Hunter College.

© Copyright 2005 Globe Newspaper Company.

The Golden Gays

Many have commented on the fact that all the big awards at the 2006 Golden Globes ceremony went to gay characters, but I have't seen anyone notice that the gay characters portrayed are all over the map.

We have Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist in "Brokeback Mountain". As "normal" as gay can get. The epitome of the "straight-acting" gay. Honestly, they weren't "gay" in 1963, and I don't think they're "gay" now. I can't see Ennis listening to "Annie get your Gun" or "Oklahoma". And I can't see Jack wearing Red Prada Slippers. But I would love to hear him tell the Pope "It's Nobody's Business but Ours".

Then we have Truman Capote in "Capote" - the quintessential lisping, limp wristed, self-centered queen that makes guys like Ennis and Jack convince themselves that they can't possibly be gay, even when they are in love.

Finally we have Bree in "Transamerica". The "T" in "GBLT". But of course Bree wouldn't see herself as "gay", but as a "woman". But the "straight" world sees her as "gay" and the "gay" world sees her as "trangendered". As the song goes, "First be a Woman."

What's missing in this map is a good lesbian character. Maybe next year.

Michael Dell Should Eat His Words

Brokeback is Everyone's Mountain

It Ain't Gonna Be Like That

Clip from Brokeback Mountain

Brokeback Mountain Unmixed

Brokeback Mountain Remixed

Here Lies Harry Potter

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