As so often happens, our thoughts turn once again to the liner notes on Barbra Streisand’s What About Today album:

“This album is dedicated to the young people,” wrote the singer with all the grave authority that came with being 27-years-old — in other words, a kid herself. Up until then, Barbra had been knocking them dead with old-style nightclub standards and off-beat showtunes. She had concocted a show business personality that was part clutsy Jerry Lewis, part Queen of England. Now she was declaring herself at one with her generation. (more…)

On June 10, just in time for her birthday, Judy Garland will appear on a U.S. stamp.

I always think of Judy at this time of year, as the rainbow flags unfurl and the floats come down the street with their glamor-girl boys and near-nude leathermen. Hyper-real spectaculars that would not be out of place in the Emerald City — or Munchkinland!

“Are you a friend of Dorothy?” soldiers would ask each other during World War II, using this code phrase to signal that they were gay. It was only a matter of time before the brass caught wind of it, without quite understanding its significance. In a dither that Reds and homos were sneaking into their ranks, the military spent $250,000 to find out who this diabolic den-mother of the GI homos was. Yet even the nelliest civilian could have told them (in exchange, we hope, for a little buzz-cut face action).

She was, of course, our Judy. The gal who fell from a star called Kansas. So tenderly young in The Wizard of Oz, yet already empowered by that penetrating cry in her voice. (more…)

In The Passion of the Crawford, now playing the Empire Plush Room in San Francisco, Lypsinka (actually, John Epperson) recreates an interview Joan Crawford gave right in her last Mommie Darkest days.

It was a one-time only appearance at Town Hall in Manhattan, a few years before her death in 1977, and I, in fact, was in the audience.

I remember how Joan kept pouring dark whiskey-colored liquid from a Pepsi can and rattling the ice cubes in her tall glass as she steadily became bombed out of her mind while the interview, conducted by an old friend and flatterer, John Springer, went on and on. (more…)

Why has Madonna lasted so long? Even now, in her decline, she is more interesting than the various young blonde updates that were supposed to replace her.

Yvan, a French Canadian writer, looks into his crystal ball at Madonna’s past and discovers her magic charm. Madonna, you see, is an Artist, with a capital A.

Trained and molded by the New York art scene during her scruffy bar-band days, Madonna made herself into an art object, a fiction, a canny, post-Warhol Marilyn Monroe.

“Britney Spears,” lamented Interview magazine editor Ingrid Sischy, “looks like a mall rat when she’s not doing one of her videos.” This prompted culture gadfly Camille Paglia to observe: “It shows the gigantic gap between Britney and Madonna, who has always had a superb instinct for the still photograph. Madonna’s career is much more than dance music and sensational videos. It’s also a phenomenal series of still images.”

Such as the one at left, from Sex, Madonna’s first and mercifully not-for-children foray into publishing. The ass, so the legend goes, belonged to none other than Joey Stefano, whom Nightcharm calls the greatest bottom that ever lived. (UPDATE: Our readers contend the lovely bubble butt belongs to Tony Ward, a Madonna boytoy who appeared in her videos. See comments below.) (more…)

Nancy Grace hasn’t been this cheesed off since Michael Jackson beat the rap last year for child molestation.

When the lab report came back with no DNA matches for the Duke University lacrosse players, accused of raping a woman during a party, steam began pouring out of Nancy’s ears.

All week long, she had been worrying the case from every angle. There was the race aspect: “I understand they specifically asked for a black stripper!” she said, eyes narrowing with the sort of flinty indignation that would send a young boy’s ball-sack right back into his pelvis.

There was the white privilege slant: Southern college, lacrosse as an expensive sport peopled by privileged white jocks from leafy suburbs. Most of all, there was the WOMAN RAPED hysteria, which dovetailed neatly with Nancy’s recounting of slavery days when master imposed himself on hapless black servant girls, a scenario that borrowed heavily from the blackspoitation tradition of Mandingo. (more…)

If you scan this picture of Whitney Houston you can see that only a smudge of a person occupies those fluffy designer furs. Yes, drugs have left her skeletal and recessed into her white costume, and a lengthy absence from the stage gives her expression during last week’s performance in Turin a frightened and confused patina. But to anyone familiar with drug abuse or drug abusers it’s her absence of soul, her brittle zombiness, that defines the photo.

In 2001, when she failed to appear at the second of Michael Jackson’s 30th anniversary celebrations, her record label was forced to issue a formal statement denying that Houston was dead. That was true — corporeally. (more…)

Swans never fly very high either. What is it about Michelle Kwan, American’s most mythic ice skater, sent home from the Olympics this week with a groin injury, her gold medal hopes now finally dashed?

At 25, Kwan has aged out of a sport that requires the twisting, leaping hard-impact landings that damage tendons and jar spines. It’s not enough to be ballerina perfect, a figure skater must be a toughened athlete.

A winner of five world titles and an astonishing nine national championships, Michelle Kwan was that — and more. Lithe of form, powerful of limb, beautiful of face — she had a huge gay fanbase. A huge world fanbase, to be precise. Turino will be her last Olympics.

“Kwan cried when she won silver in Nagano,” recalled the Associated Press this week — one of many media postmortems on the skater’s career. “Wept after having to settle for bronze in Salt Lake City. She skated through her adolescence and into adulthood chasing a gold medal that always seemed so tantalizing close yet was always so far away.” (more…)

Judy Garland came back to life again last night. Judy Davis channeled the slurring, unsteady-in-heels Judy she had created in the Garland biop, Me and My Shadows, and made her slush around again in an outrageous Mommie Dearest style performance.

At times screaming and breaking the furniture, at others all stricken tones and fake sincerity, Davis played real-life con-artist Sante Kimes who, with her son, exploded all over the tabloids in the late 90’s when she was convicted of strangling her socialite landlady.

The Lifetime-channel film, A Little Thing Called Murder, details the life and crimes (including three if not more murders) of Kimes and her youngest son, the two of then entangled in a sort of mental incest which the murders weirdly consummated. If the son had been gay, all this could have been worked out with a career in fashion design or runway modeling. Unfortunately, Kenny Kimes was straight, so it was guns, knives and snapped necks. By all accounts, the son was a charmer; and the mother, a busty, bubbly woman who turned heads in her plunging, cleavage-proud dresses. Both sit in prison now with no possibility of parole. (more…)