This week's Recommended Reading links take a broad look at queer media culture, continuing the conversation about whether LGBT actors can play straight, looking at teen sex comedies, a new gay character on Glee, and thoughts on gay cinema from John Cameron Mitchell:
'Glee's' Jane Lynch: Gay Actors Might Never Land Lead Roles in Hollywood (The Hollywood Reporter)
"'I don't know when or if that will ever happen,' the 50-year-old openly lesbian actress said in an interview with AfterElton.com. '...This is a business of projection and desiring people from afar ... so there has got to be some truth to it, in terms of, 'I could see myself with that person.' Because the leading man and lady are the person we want them to fall in love with, and most of the audience is straight. So for right now, we can only use straight actors.'"
When it Comes to Gays, Teen Sex Comedies Are Growing Up (AfterElton)
"There’s a theory that you can tell more about a society from its “low-brow” pop culture than you can from its high art. If that’s true, there’s not too much that’s more low-brow than the teen sex comedy, movies which are usually celebrations of male promiscuity and debauchery – often with a vague or bittersweet moral tacked on at the end. What are teen sex comedies saying about gay people?"
Confirmed: Anne Hathaway Heading To ‘Glee’ To Play Kurt’s Lesbian Aunt (Access Hollywood)
“'In my head, I’ve written a part for myself on ‘Glee.’… In my head I’ve cast myself on ‘Glee’ and I know what song I’d sing,” she told Jimmy “I would wanna play Kurt’s long-lost aunt, his mother’s sister who is also gay, who comes back to help him deal with his sexuality, and I would sing, ‘You Are Not Alone’ from Stephen Sondheim’s epic show ‘Into the Woods.’'”
Helping Gay Actors Find Themselves Onstage (NY Times)
"Mr. Calcaterra said he started Act Out because he was tired of seeing so many of his gay students undergo what he called a 'contraction, not an expansion' of their talents as they dealt with years of shame, guilt and other byproducts of life as a sexual minority. Many students felt a fear, unconscious or not, he explained, that if their real selves were exposed in the audition room or onstage, they would be rejected, as they had been by family or friends in their personal lives."
John the Divine (The Advocate)
John Cameron Mitchell: “I used to think that someone being gay was enough to be cool... So I get a little homophobic lately when I meet young people who just assume that this [obsessed with Lady Gaga] is what you’re supposed to be because you’re gay. It makes me feel like I’m in some sort of frat society where you’ve got to do this, you’ve got to listen to that, you’ve got to wear these clothes. Ageism is stronger. There’s more sort of an anorexic point of view about body issues.” And don’t get him started on gay cinema: “’Gay film’ means ‘stupid kind of lamebrained date film with pecs.'”
Looking critically at queer film (Bay Area Reporter)
"The Queer Film Classics series is an ambitious project by Arsenal Pulp Press from Vancouver, BC, to critically explore 21 films that have been important in LGBT film history."
MoMA Takes On “A Fire in My Belly” (IndieWire)
"The Museum of Modern Art has acquired both the full cut and a seven-minute excerpt of David Wojnarowicz’s 'A Fire in My Belly,' following its controversial removal from the Smithsonian Institution last December. Made during the AIDS crisis in the late 80s, the short film came under attack last year by Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League and several members of Congress."
Jane Lynch via Access Hollywood, Michael Caulfield/Getty Images for PCA