Christie Keith's blog

The lag between the Academy Awards and Pride could be a drag on the gay social calendar. Fortunately, GLAAD's been around for the last couple of decades making sure that doesn't happen. They've also been making sure the media doesn't get away with ignoring, misrepresenting, insulting or just plain forgetting our community, of course. Those huge, glamorous awards banquets in three of the gayest and most fabulous cities in America? That's just what the gays do when we give out awards. It's in our DNA.

So America's gay celebs and our allies put on their tuxes and evening gowns and walk down the Red Carpet in support of equality for all. And this year, at least at last weekend's GLAAD Media Awards in San Francisco, that means marriage equality, the subject on almost everyone's mind and lips.

What does a classic gay novel like James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room have to do with gay porn?

You'd think the answer would be pretty much "nothing." But if that's true, why would Amazon.com strip the sales ranks of it as well as almost all gay and lesbian books on their site — including Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain, Edmund White's A Boy's Own Story and 20s lesbian classic The Well of Loneliness — at the same time it's removing the sales rankings for adult novels?

Queer punk pioneers Pansy Division in 2003 and now

Once upon a time, lesbians listened to earnest folk music and gay men listened to sounds anywhere on the spectrum from opera to show tunes to Judy to Barbra to disco, with a possible dash of glam rock for the truly adventurous.

And then along came Pansy Division, who decided they'd take a crack at redefining queer music for all time.  They erupted on the post-AIDS, post-punk San Francisco music scene with their own thrashing, funny, sexually explicit brand of punk.

That was back in 1991. The years that followed saw them brush the edges of fame with a tour opening for label-mates Green Day, and then fade into something that might have become obscurity but morphed into legendary status instead.

When the music documentary Scott Walker: 30 Century Man made its North American premiere in Austin in 2007, I interviewed its out filmmaker Stephen Kijak (Cinemania). As a full-fledged proselytizing Scott Walker freak, I would have liked the fact that Stephen has the gay to be enough to get our readers to give it a click, but let's get real. The audience for documentary films about obscure ex-pat musical geniuses is neither large nor disproportionately well-represented on our site.

I found a way to get around that little problem when the publicist for the film sent out a note that one of its associate producers was also available for press events in Austin: actor and AfterElton.com hot 100 listee Gale Harold (Queer as Folk, Desperate Housewives). I interviewed him; the article did well, so my editor was happy; I got to write about one of my musical obsessions, so I was, too.

Filmmaker Stephen Kijack and Gale Harold in 2007

Fast forward to last Friday night, when I went to see the San Francisco premiere of the film. Or rather, I wish I really could have fast forwarded through those two years, and not just because the recent election season nearly killed me with stress.

Apparently I haven't done a good enough job sharing the wonder and glory that is Rachel Maddow with the guys at AfterElton.com, as she did not win — despite my passionate campaigning on her behalf — as the site's favorite lesbian.

I admit I love her for her butchy adorableness and world-class mind, but her politics aren't bad, either. Take, for instance, Friday's episode of her show over on MSNBC, where she sliced, diced, skewered, and eviscerated the choice of celebrity anti-gay preacher Rick Warren to pray at Barack Obama's inauguration next month.

Details and the video clip, after the jump.

When it comes to his favorite roles, does Gale Harold prefer Liberty Avenue or Wisteria Lane? Neither, he told AfterElton.com. It turns out he's more of a Christmas Town kind of guy.

We talked to Gale after he joined the cast of Desperate Housewives earlier this year. But when a serious motorcycle accident put him in the hospital with a brain injury and fractured shoulder in October, we put the piece on hold until we knew if he'd be all right, and whether or not he'd be able to return to the series.

Because AfterElton.com editor Michael Jensen made the mistake of letting our readers know we'd done the interview, he started getting a steady stream of emails from Gale's fans wondering if and when it would see the light of day. We're still holding back on the Desperate Housewives parts – and some QAF comments, too – for a future article, but that's not all Gale talked about. And since a lot of what he did say was downright Christmas-y, we decided to take advantage of the holidays and share it with you.

Find out what role Gale would love to find in his stocking, after the jump!

I don't think Harvey would approve: the CEO of one of the film chains that will be showing Milk this fall was a major donor to the Yes on Prop 8 campaign.

Alan Stock, CEO of the Cinemark chain of theaters, donated $9,999 to strip California's lesbian and gay citizens of our right to marry. So it's a bit hard to swallow that Cinemark will also be showing Gus Van Sant's epic biography of Harvey Milk, due for release Thanksgiving weekend in some cities, and December 5 nationwide.

Cinemark owns the “Century”, “CinéArts”, and “Tinseltown” theaters nationwide. You can plug in your town and state on this website to find out which theaters near you are part of the chain, and make sure they don't get your gay pennies. And then go join the Facebook group for the organizers of the Cinemark boycott. 

More details on the boycott and other Prop 8 news, after the jump...

 
Gus Van Sant and the cast of Milk

In case you were wondering what San Francisco, and the struggle for gay rights, would have looked like if Harvey Milk had lived, you should have been on Castro Street Tuesday night for the premiere of Gus Van Sant's Milk.

Yes, it was glitzy and glamorous. Yes, the stars turned out in their fancy clothes, and the press was there in force. But the night belonged to the hundreds of chanting, sign-waving, fist-pumping demonstrators across the street, telling the world to vote "No on Prop 8!"

Sean Penn and Diego Luna at the Milk premiere

On the eve of Tuesday night's premiere of Milk, the long-awaited biopic of Harvey Milk, Mexico's Diego Luna (Y tu mama tambien, Havana Nights) sat down at a press roundtable to discuss his role as Milk's young lover, Jack Lira. AfterElton.com was there to hear what he had to say.

Luna was soft-spoken but intense, sometimes pausing to find the English word for what he wanted to say. He said seeing the documentary The Times of Harvey Milk, which won an Academy Award for its director Rob Epstein in 1984, convinced him that a larger audience, including young people who might not even have heard of Harvey Milk, needed to know his story.

"I believe the story of Harvey Milk is a story that needs to be told," he said. "My generation and the generation that is behind me need to know that there was someone like him. Harvey was very important, and we should remind people that there are a few stories like Harvey's," he said.

"We cannot forget."

Earlier this year, when AfterElton.com editor Michael Jensen and I asked an assortment of pundits and political analysts to gaze into their crystal balls and predict how this issue would play out for our "Gay-Baiting '08" article, most of them believed it would be a non-issue nationally, but potentially useful for the right in local races and in the battle over marriage equality in California. And they pretty much got it right.

Carpetbaggers including the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in Utah, Colorado's Focus on the Family, and the Traditional Values Coalition in Arizona are flooding California with millions of dollars to produce and air blisteringly deceitful anti-gay ads concerning Proposition 8, the amendment to our state constitution to take away our right to marry legally — a right we have today. This would be the first time the state constitution has ever been amended to strip people of rights they already have.