October 24, 2013

How ubiquitous are crypto-homos among pop culture stars these days?

I've had a major change of view regarding how prevalent homosexuals have been in the pop culture of the past 20 years. Before, I thought, "Gee, there used to be quite a few gay singers in the '80s, yet you don't really see too many at the top of the charts these days." My interpretation was that after the Great Big Coming Out of the '90s, gays felt less motivation to earn the public's attention, now that they were getting it lavished on them for free (since being stingy with attention for faggots = bigotry).

But just to be sure, I figured it was finally worth checking up on any gay rumors. Before I was looking at lists of "out" gay singers, actors, etc. -- letting others do the work for me, since I don't really know who more than a handful of today's mopey singers and mumbling actors are.

So after some trial-and-error, I found "the #1 blind item site in the world" -- blindgossip.com. "Blind item" meaning a piece of gossip with the names removed. As far as I could tell, they had a good track record. Then, whoever their users agreed were gay, I'd investigate on Google Images. And holy shit, those "lists of LGBT actors," singers, etc., are way under-counting them. They only include the person on the list if they are confirmed "out."

It's bizarre how the Wikipedia nerds set such a high bar of evidence for claims about, say, Enrique Iglesias being gay. They don't hesitate to mention that he is male, that he is of part Andalusian ancestry, and so on, without sending a blood sample off to the lab to confirm that he actually has one X and one Y chromosome, that his genetic profile fits best with a Spanish origin, etc. But to mention that Enrique Iglesias is gay, there must be a public gay sex tape, or a self-issued declaration of his bent for getting boffed by boys -- something irrefutable.

Discussing his facial expressions, mannerisms, speech, and other behavior is considered beyond the pale -- dealing in stereotypes. Yet homosexuality is a full-blown syndrome with myriad symptoms, only one of which is wanting to commit unnatural acts with other men. Hence the gays' own open use of the concept "gaydar." It's only when normal people apply their experience-derived intuition toward detecting whether some dude is gay, straight, or in the closet, that the informed hunch becomes homophobic.

Even the gossip hounds seem to restrict their vision to sightings of X and Y caught kissing, with only a few venturing to explain what easily observable features ping their gaydar about the pair. But just as you don't have to see a person walk into a gynecologist's office to conclude she's female, you don't need to catch two men in bed to tell they're queers.

Perhaps sometime soon I'll go over some specific cases of how you can tell that some celebrity is gay just by using Google Images to check the consensus of a gay-related thread at Blind Gossip. Real quick, though, I was able to easily confirm the hunches about the gayness of Enrique Iglesias, Ryan Seacrest, Bradley Cooper, Chace Crawford, and Kevin Jonas (among many others); to strongly suspect George Clooney and Will Smith; and to reject claims about Hugh Jackman and Tom Cruise (as in, no way, no day).

But consider one final example that I would not have thought of before reading Blind Gossip -- Gavin Rossdale, current husband of Gwen Stefani and former MTV staple with Bush during the alterna heyday of the mid-1990s. Before stardom, in his late teens he was a cross-dresser and in a relationship with another high-profile cross-dresser: see pictures here, here, and here. You can tell by the sincere look on his face that he wasn't just doing it as a joke.

When that news broke, he waved it away as confused youthful experimentation. However, a blind item from June 2013 reads:

This music veteran is pregnant and ecstatic. On the other hand, her husband is wondering if he is the father. You see, lately he has preferred the company of other men to her.

There were many guesses that it was Gwen Stefani and Gavin Rossdale, although she was not known to be pregnant at the time. Well, just this week she announced her pregnancy by showing a baby bump for cameras, and you can tell that it's been growing for some months. This implicates her in the blind item, and means that Rossdale hasn't given up on guys after all.

Why do any of these examples matter? Cumulatively, they show how widespread the crypto-homo influence has been in the pop culture of the past 20 years. No wonder it's been so damn lame, emo, campy, and spazzy. There were a handful of queers active in '80s pop culture, but nowhere near this many. The even more disturbing conclusion is that mainstream audiences have grown gayer and gayer in their tastes over that time. It's not as though preferences stayed the same, only now with more gays supplying the demand. Rather gays, whose defining trait is Peter Pan-ishness, have thrived as audience tastes have grown more and more infantilized.

25 comments:

  1. I'm proud to say I couldn't stand George Clooney (Intolerable Cruelty), and I loved Tom Cruise.

    On the other hand, I thought Bradley Cooper was attractive (Wedding Crashers) and in my childhood, Rock Hudson too.

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  2. Perhaps sometime soon I'll go over some specific cases of how you can tell that some celebrity is gay just by using Google Images to check the consensus...

    I really hope you do!

    Gays seem to have a hard time looking serious. When they try to look serious, they crinkle their foreheads, and it looks fake and masklike.

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  3. Don't talk like a glibertarian fag-defender, it's degrading.

    Queers are the big new social-political issue these days, in case you aren't tuned in. Because homophile policies and attitudes are not 100% fait accompli, that's where we ought to devote a lot of our effort to preserve what's still left of our decent society. Affirmative action or female suffrage would be harder policies to undo, since they're already done.

    Enrique Iglesias is the subject of this blind item:

    http://blindgossip.com/?p=57440

    It's clear he prefers men over women, and lusts after porn dudes with big dicks. Doesn't get any gayer than that. Then you check his pictures, and he has numerous gay giveaways, not to mention lots of shots of him serenading and kissing a lucky fat fag hag fan on stage at his concerts.

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  4. "Gays seem to have a hard time looking serious."

    Right, they have difficult with adult expressions. They come off as kiddie caricatures, aping what they've seen from actual grown-ups.

    Serious, pensive, reflective, all give them trouble. And expressions related to dominance, like glaring. Even smiling is tough. It usually looks like a little kid whose being told "Give us a smile and say cheese..." The lips are pulled more sideways than up-at-the-corners. See Ryan Seacrest.

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  5. If the celebrities you list are actually gay, this raises two interesting questions:

    First, are gay men more likely to be on the "down-low" than is popularly believed? I remember Sailer remarked in his gay vs. lesbian article that lesbians were more likely to have experience with the opposite sex than gays, but this could be wrong.

    Secondly, why is being a "beard" so popular? I'm not a woman or anything but it doesn't sound like much fun to me.

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  6. Lesbians have more experience with the opposite sex, but gays who want to become celebrities have to maintain appearances. From what I gather they're pretty asexual around their beards, too.

    I think beards either have a low libido or distrust of men, something where they wouldn't mind getting out of the dating / marriage pool, while maintaining a respectable and perhaps glamorous public image -- not the unnoticed spinster, but the gf/wife of Mr. Fabulous.

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  7. With someone like George Clooney, I just thought he was a bad actor. Ricky Martin? I just thought he was a fake manufactured pop star.

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  8. On the internet, there was this girl named Jacqueline Passey. I used to read people who read her, so I heard about her story.

    Jackie was a libertarian and ran for office as a libertarian. I think she was going to move to a sparsely populated state so that the libertarian party could take over. She majored in economics. She played poker professionally for a bit. She had an Asian boyfriend who was a professional poker player.

    Her brother was gay. She was married to a homosexual man. She said that she liked being married to him except for the fact that he stopped being sexual with her. That's what lead to them getting divorced.

    He doesn't seem to have had a proper job because he continued to live with her, and she paid him to do her housework. She mentioned that she once came home and found him in bed (their previous marriage) with another man.

    She was pretty blase about all of this.

    She ended up an accountant and married an accountant and video game player.

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  9. I'm not sure about beards to celebrity in gays.

    In real life, I think women who are beards are nerdy and don't really pick up on gay weirdness.

    If you don't have much experience with men, you might not know how a real man would act.

    I've heard two cases in which a woman had an arranged marriage to a homosexual man. In both cases, the marriage ended within one or two months.

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  10. as, you're describing a situation very similar to one of the ones I'm going to focus on. Only instead of being an internet person, she's an A-list actress. Strangely, she's not a beard -- the gay man is a complete unknown, not just in entertainment, but in any industry including his own.

    I'm not sure whether she is too naive not to have noticed that he's obviously queer, or whether she did and just wanted out of the dating / marriage pool.

    If the latter, I suspect it'll end like your story did -- she thought she'd be OK with his gayness, then grows resentful that he's out partying with boy toys, or even bringing them home, while she gets little or no attention.

    She may have a good girl personality, but if she walks in on him and some random dude... well, you know what they say: hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.

    That should be enough of a tease for now...

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  11. I wonder about Christina Hendricks of Mad Men.

    She is very pretty, so why did she get breast implants, especially such huge breast implants? Maybe it has something to do with her being a model in her youth? "I was a model for years, and even when I was 19 years old and 115 pounds [and 5´8˝], my agency said, ‘Your ankles are a little large. If you could lose 10 pounds, that would be really great’."

    I've looked up Christina, and she and her husband make an odd couple.

    Even in real life, she carries herself in a self conscious way which involves thrusting her chest out. She has this artificial manner. The dynamic between her and her husband is also odd.

    Then there's this line: "My boyfriend is half Pakistani, and he has these gorgeous curls that drive me crazy. He's like, 'My curls to you are like your boobs to me.'"

    But her breasts aren't real.





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  12. Christina Hendricks is a blonde who dyes her hair red, and I wonder if that is significant.

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  13. How do you tell the difference between a homosexual and a hetero who is slightly effeminate? I fell into the latter category in my teens but I am 100% hetero.

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  14. Christina Hendricks also only hit it big with "Mad Men" in her early 30s, which is pretty late I'm guessing for an actress.

    Geoffrey Arend is just not cute or charming at all.

    I don't get it.

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  15. "How do you tell the difference between a homosexual and a hetero who is slightly effeminate?"

    Homos are infantilized more than effeminate, so I'd guess a straight effeminate man wouldn't appear quite so Peter Pan-ish.

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  16. Homos are supposed to be super promiscuous, right? But they always have an asexual vibe in real life. They are never sexy. I think that's what makes it so off-putting to see them in the role of romantic leading man. It just seems wrong somehow. You can't think of them in that way.

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  17. I don't know how chicks respond to closeted gay male actors, but for a dude the reaction is like "...So *this* is the guy I'm supposed to be like in order to be cool? That's who I'm expected to hang out? No thanks."

    They don't seem like fun-loving, let-it-all-hang-out, rowdy or rambunctious guys. They're too prim and proper, fastidious, and almost weepily woman-worshiping. It's humiliating to look at, and we'd get contaminated with his limp-wristedness by associating with him.

    And I don't mean the guy has to be some caricature of rugged machismo. The guys from Duran Duran would be fun to hang out and have a rollicking good time with. They're pretty boys, but they have the normal mature red-blooded male nature.

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  18. I think the reason that asexual, no-chemistry, zero-charisma males are so popular in movies, TV, and music these days is that the mainstream female audience is creeped out by red-blooded male libido. We're still living in a world of date rape hysteria, where every normal male is a crypto-rapist.

    So they need someone who looks good enough to grab their visual attention, but who's unassertive and uninterested in giving it to her, to make her feel like he's safe to get close to.

    Then these women wonder why they're alone or unsatisfied in real life -- because there are no highly attractive gay men who would rather spend time with a plain or even attractive woman, when they could be out sucking as much cock as they feel like.

    The mainstream female audience member these days is a fag hag and doesn't know it.

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  19. http://us.cdn282.fansshare.com/photos/bradleycooper/bradley-cooper-blue-wallpaper-1921076436.jpg

    Bradley Cooper looks off-putting to me in this picture, but not in many of his others.

    The cases for which you have a strong reaction seem to be different from mine.

    It is easy for me to believe that Will Smith is gay. He was supposed to be some ghetto kid in Fresh Prince, and he was so goofy, unlikeable, and unfunny.

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  20. As a small geeky unathletic aspie in my early teens I was called "faggot" constantly. And while it took me awhile to learn how to be with women, I've never been anything but 100% hetero.

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  21. It looks like you (and BG) were right about Gavin: Gwen and he are divorcing, and the shit's flying that he cheated on her with another man:

    http://blindgossip.com/?p=72884

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  22. @ agnostic

    " The guys from Duran Duran would be fun to hang out and have a rollicking good time with. They're pretty boys, but they have the normal mature red-blooded male nature."

    Except that at least 3 of them had stong gay rumours back in the 80's: Lebon, j.Taylor and Rhodes.
    They used to "hang" around a lot with openly gay director Russell mulcahy and his boyfriend Gerry Laffy (they even named their company lebad film after lebon).

    The 80's popstars were a lot gayer than you suspect.

    British men are very good at sporting a serious face, who would have thought that red blooded patrick stewart is a closeted gay in real life for instance?

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  23. "The 80's popstars were a lot gayer than you suspect."

    It's hardly shocking that pop would attract gays since pop stars tend to share typical homo traits. Like being:

    -loquacious (or at least extroverted)

    - having a non-threatening affect so as to not alienate young girls

    -an attention whoring/ego driven personality to a large extent; how else are you going to stay in the spotlight? Though during the late 70'- mid 80's peak in creativity, artists who couldn't produce catchy songs usually faded fast. Lost in the hatred towards MTV is the fact that Madonna, Culture Club, Prince, Duran Duran etc. made fun music. Now that creativity is non-existant, we've gone back to the mid century norm of pop artists basing their careers on expert PR management rather than actually making interesting music.

    One thing that might've been an advantage to gays in 80's pop is that physical attractiveness wasn't as important as it is now. Gay males, on average, are significantly less attractive. Mid century stars were usually attractive, as are modern pop stars whose careers were established since the mid 90's

    Was a balding/middle aged Phil Collins, weirdo short dude Prince, A Flock of Seagulls, or The Tears for Fears guys pin-up material for horny girls? What about the homos? Boy George? Freddy Mercury? Don't think so either. As for the women, Madonna was nearly 30 in the mid 80's when she hit her career prime and probably was nothing to write home about even when younger. Joan Jett? No. The Heart Sisters? Aging and fatter. The Go-Gos? Not really, more good personality than looks.

    Perhaps when the focus is on creativity rather than God given looks, gays do better. After all, creative types are more prone to "experimenting" and being nuts. As are gays. And gays are more prone to being hideous, to boot.

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  24. They used to "hang" around a lot with openly gay director Russell mulcahy and "his boyfriend Gerry Laffy (they even named their company lebad film after lebon)"

    Stallone hired Mulcahy for Rambo 3. Mulcahy got fired for casting a bunch of pretty boys for Rambo 3. Stallone said Mulcahy got petulant after being confronted about his choices. Typical homo. Per Stallone:

    "He went to Israel two weeks before me with the task of casting two dozen vicious looking Russian troops. These men were suppose to make your blood run cold. When I arrived on the set, what I saw was two dozen blond, blue-eyed pretty boys that resembled rejects from a surfing contest. Needless to say Rambo is not afraid of a little competition but being attacked by third rate male models could be an enemy that could overwhelm him. I explained my disappointment to Russell and he totally disagreed, so I asked him and his chiffon army to move on.[6]"

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  25. Gays are not more creative, actually most creative talents, who are behind the scene, are either straight men or bisexual women.

    But gays make good puppets (they are very docile), and they provide the kind of sexual favors that gay producers, mostly from the tribe really crave for.

    Speaking of Mulcahy, I find incredible that he is still a working director with all the box office bombs he directed after highlander (written by a straight guy, that's why it turned out decent), when so many talented film directors never make it past 1st film. Speaks volume of the hollywood gay mafia. It's a bad place for real women and straight men.

    The same with Bonnie Tyler and the music video for "total eclipse of the heart", she called him a pervert because of the shirtless young boys and he got mad and vowed to never work for her again.

    Typical homo behaviour.

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