Ah, the salad days of the ’80s Afterschool Special, an earnest epoch that provided us with such cautionary tales as The Boy Who Drank Too Much, Stoned, My Dad Lives In A Downtown Hotel, Which Mother Is Mine?, and Andrea’s Story: A Hitchhiking Tragedy. Sure, they were meant to divert us away from the horrors of Teenage Apocalypse, but these overwrought PSAs only drove us that much closer to becoming schoolyard boozebags, nihilistic headcases from broken homes, and mid-priced teenage whores because they made it all seem so fucking awesome. Few of these entries ever managed to scale to the delirious heights that 1982′s Desperate Lives did — a full-tilt freak-out featuring bathroom bitches giving lip to Mommy Dearest’s Christina, two angelically blond siblings drawn into the horrors of drugs, impaired driving that wouldn’t be out of place in Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, and Helen Hunt just daring the Oscar gods to commit her to Lifetime Movie Hell for all eternity.

Gay spectatorship: it used to be all about deciphering.

Before True Blood, Glee, Ugly Betty, and Modern Family, gay characters in television tended to be canny in-jokes among writers; the game was to see how far gay signifiers and innuendo could be pushed so as to register with one smaller audience while completely going over the head of another broader one. It’s a certain campy, broad, conspicuous, idiosyncratic, or “colorful” quality that marks these characters as somehow “other.” This is what accounts for the are-they-or-aren’t-they? inscrutability of Crypto-Gay characters — they have to be discerned by those in-the-know, and their natures are channeled through the eye of the beholder.

Mainstays like Dr. Smith from Lost In Space, Batman and Robin, half the cast of Bewitched, hothouse flower Monroe from Too Close For Comfort, and even more contemporary figures like Joey and Chandler from Friends, the Crane Brothers from Frasier, and ball-breaking Xena are likely to come to mind first, but I’ve assembled a gathering of ten characters who’ve hit home with me through the years and remained favorites who’ve largely managed to slip under the gaydar: (read the full article)

History isn’t only about the winners: it’s about the big moments. Personal plights and small-scale victories can often be lost like individual grains of sand through the hourglass. Gay Liberation focuses on the game-changing plays: the battle between the gays and the Smoke Monster during the Stonewall Riots, Anita Bryant getting her head lopped off by sword-wielding Steve Reeves after he blinded her with the haze off his pecs, the American Psychiatric Association classifying Christianity as a morbid but curable form of sexual arousal toward ghosts and zombies, and the Daughters of Bilitis raiding Los Angeles to rescue Barbara Walters from Roy Cohn. And that was just the 19th Century! (read the full article)

“Itâ’s like I’m having the most beautiful dream and the most terrible nightmare all at once…”

It’s the gorgeous, mooningly Lynchian line delivered by a good girl in love in a bad way that’s always epitomized the eternal appeal of Twin Peaks for me, arguably the cult show that turned everything that came before it on its head while setting the new standard for everything that came after.

I can vividly remember watching the criminally brilliant pilot movie that chronicled an F.B.I. agent’s arrival in a small Pacific Northwest town to investigate the grisly slaying of the high school homecoming queen. The images I encountered therein remained with me all through school the next day and beyond: the best friend of the murdered Everygirl Laura Palmer looking to her empty desk and tearfully inferring that she would never return; a horrific crime scene in a derelict train car whose centerpiece was an altar-like mound of dirt venerating a half-heart necklace and the cryptic message Fire Walk With Me scrawled in blood; a brutalized girl wandering down from the mountain and into town, half-dead with her wrists bound; and a gloved hand retrieving the second half of the Laura’s necklace from under a rock under cover of night.

Peaks was my first formative experience in which TV shaped the entertainment I would later seek — a midnight movie magically broadcast right into my living room. What remains salient now as the series reaches its twenty-year anniversary is not just how it united an assemblage of character actors who you’d never expect to see all together in one night, but how the male cast in particular undercut expected soap stud clichés and offered up a unique palette of offbeat man candy you’re not likely to ever see again in primetime. (read the full article)

Presenting an assembly-line floorfiller from the early ’90s heyday of Bitch-Can’t-Sing Italo House that became a dance chart Number 1 smash and a gay club staple thanks to its perfectly-balanced piecemeal design: typically ace production by super producer Gianfranco Bortolotti, some seriously ballsy sampling, a pulsating bass line worthy of Bomb The Bass, hilariously inept lip-synching, then-innovative video effects, and an unintelligible chorus ranking up there with Manfred Mann‘s “Blinded By The Light” — interpreted as anything and everything from “Peter Pan had a plan!” to “Take a perv at my pants!”

At this time of year, when the moon turns orange and the witches fly, we think back on Rosemary Woodhouse, the unwitting mother of Satan’s son from Rosemary’s Baby, and Marguerite Perrin, the batshit-crazy “God Warrior” from Trading Spouses.

One is fictional, one is very literally in the flesh, but both are sisters under the skin.

Rosemary and Marguerite have each, in their different ways, decided that the world is full of witches — and not the Molly Weasley cook up some dinner with a spin of the wand kind, but malevolent, soul-sapping hags — give or take a Ruth Gordon chatterbox with a Noo Yawk accent and a brash way of barging into your apartment to quiz you on the price of the drapes.

At first Rosemary — sweet, hip, Mia Farrow-esque Rosemary, so proud of her edgy Vidal Sassoon boy bob — laughs at the idea ("in this day and age!") Then a good friend hands her the book All of Them Witches, which holds a clue to the true nature of her neighbors, the baby she is carrying, and the strange dream she had at the time of conception that involved a wolf-like beast with claws and slit pupils. (read the full article)

We’re living in a world of stars and dust.

Between heaven –
and all that surrounds us.

We’re travelers here –
spirits passing through.

And the love we give is all that will endure…

Tears will leave no stain,
Time will ease the pain.

For every light that fades
Something beautiful remains.

Words are here, finally, superfluous. Let’s us listen then. Let us remember Pavarotti, both the Sacred and the Profane. (read the full article)

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