Not since Liberace have we seen such unabashed queer showmanship!

At 7-feet or thereabouts, Leonid the Magnificent, formerly of Russia, currently of Brooklyn, brought down the house on America Has Talent – a sort of Gong Show crossed with Cirque du Soleil — that presents a summer-long American Idol-style competition, but with jugglers, bird-callers and at least one stocky man who got himself inside a big pink balloon (you had to be there).

Leonid is a sword balancer — sort of. He’s really Cher, with a Russian accent. He comes on stage near nude, with the sort of golden Adonis body reminiscent of pulpy gay-trade paperbacks of the Sixties — and, oh yeah, fucking angel wings!

We loved the way his act began as he walked toward the camera with hard, purposeful steps, crossing one leg over the other in the manner of a showgirl — to the string accompaniment of Feelings.

No, we haven’t been this catapulted out into the queer stratosphere since… well, since Siegfried and Roy raced the snow tiger around the stage in their sequined hot pants.

See the Magnificent Leonid for yourself: (more…)

There’s more than Voodoo down here on the Bayou.

One year ago, in June of 2005, the residents of Tangipahoa Parish were locked in a heated debate about whether the local school board was unleashing Armageddon on the world.

It was big news here in Louisiana. At issue was a fancy-schmancy biometric fingerprint system that would scan students’ index fingers in the school cafeteria, thereby debiting money from their lunch accounts.

More than a few concerned citizens argued that the system was placing the mark of the beast on their little darlings, even though in reality it was more like that palm-scan thing in Logan’s Run — with tater tots instead of death by laser beam. (more…)

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…)

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…)

The odds on Vito Spatafore surviving are running 6 to 1 — against. That’s the buzz over at the Pinaccle Sports website, where bets are placed each week on which Sopranos character will be whacked next

Ever since the tubby Mafioso was discovered at a gay bar in leather regalia and ass-out chaps by two thugs, who happed to be there to pick up a kickback, the death clock has started ticking on the Sopranos hitman.

That was a month ago. Since then Vito has disappeared himself to New Hampshire and — straining belief as Vito is weighing in there at a waddling 260 pounds — snagged himself a humpy bi-curious volunteer fireman (below). And this fireman is a piece of work, in the Hells Angels Daddy-o mode, complete with Harley and zippery leather jacket. (UPDATE: But see the discussion of chubbies and chubby chasers in the comment area, below) (more…)

Ah, to be a pole dancer in a strip club! (like Elizabeth Berkley in the fabled pussy extravaganza Showgirls, at right)

That is the simple wish of so many of us! — including a chubby young lady who comes on stage in Jerry Springer — The Opera and tells Jerry that all she ever wanted to be was a whorey stripper swirling around a pole in a glitter G-string.

“I don’t give a fuck no more,” she tells the onstage Springer audience, who are trying to shout her down with chants of “Loser! Loser!” “I’m tired of laughing and I’m tired of crying. I’m tired of feeling and I’m tired of always trying. I want to do some living because I’ve done enough of dying. I just want to dance, I just want to …fucking dance!”

The longing that Alison Jiear expresses in the song is quite touching and one of the opera’s suite of showstoppers (which also includes “Chick with a Dick” and a wife-stealing tranny shaking her stuff in wifey’s face as she brings down the house with “Talk to the Hand, Bitch.”)

Jerry Springer — The Opera comes from — where else, other than Japan, would they get this loopy over American junk TV? — England, home of Masterpiece Theater! The opus is set to land on our Puritan shores any minute now, but if you can’t wait and don’t want to shell out the big bucks for an import CD, staring David Soul (from Starsky and Hutch, yet!) as a very convincing Jerry, then… (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…)

He didn’t mention gay marriage. But comedian Stephen Colbert confronted George W. Bush with nearly every twist of public lying, pious hypocrisy and war ineptitude in his calamitous presidency. Not all of it was funny, but all of it was true.

It happened over the weekend at the White House Correspondents Dinner, usually a genial event where the President pokes gentle fun at himself, and even gentler fun at the press, who sit in their tuxedos and gowns happily liquored up.

Comics are invited to take the President on from the podium — easy going punsters not known for social commentary, like Ray Romano or Drew Carey — and everyone leaves with the sense that the President is a swell guy, after all.

As an example of what usually passes for humor, last year Cedric the Entertainer — who? — was so lame he was overshadowed by the mock-critique First Lady Laura Bush gave her husband from the stage. Typical of the sugar-coated zingers deemed quotable the next day by a sobered press: (more…)