False Scandals, News Shame and Defaming

If you are giving a massage to a movie star and that person sexually assaults you, call the police and report it. Go ahead and file charges. Though it should be confidential, there is a danger someone will leak the police report, but at least you are taking it serious and doing what arguably must be done. If you have witnesses, be sure to take their names and contact information and have the police canvass them to back you up and there you have it - justice served. But that is not what we end up hearing about. Suppose there is a movie star whose work I enjoy and whom I respect who might belong to a church I consider flaky. This person is already a target. People want to ruin his career with a scandal either because he belongs to a church or because he is married to a woman and has an image and past history of dating women and denies assertions that he is gay. I personally don't care whether this individual or other celebrities may have a personal life outside the bounds of his marriage or fails to tour the country in a bus to lecture at high schools about how cool it is to be homosexual. There are actual, certified gays and lesbians or transsexuals doing that. Tom Hardy and David Bowie have talked about their respective bi backgrounds, and few straight guys can claim to be more cool or manly. (One small aside, though: It is for attributes OTHER THAN their gay activities that make such people cool; being gay itself is not quite the accomplishment as being a genius musician or a skilled and committed actor.) If a performer cultivates an image or self-identifies as straight, whether that person is 15 years old or 51, they should have their privacy and identity respected. Arguably the only person who has a say and a right to be outraged is the spouse. Certain bottom-feeding scandal-based publications or websites are leading the legitimate press by the nose into printing some of the most inflammatory garbage I've seen. Of course the headline and the lead paragraph is all about whatever accusations, and one has to read on to the end to find out how insubstantial it all is. Insubstantial enough that the vetted accusation is not worth spreading the article in the first place. You have an accuser who claims a sort of sexual assault occurred. That makes it a police matter. Instead, they went through the lawyer of the accused actor but didn't get the results they wanted. Is there any way to interpret that other than extortion or blackmail being attempted? And then the lawsuit apparently exposes the accusations to the press. Well, at this point the battle cannot end with any sort of settlement or placation of the accuser. Now possible damage is done to the image of the celebrity. It may be shrugged off and business as usual may proceed as it has in the past, or maybe tens of millions of dollars in earnings will be nixed or maybe a film already made will get a smaller release if the "cool" of the star is tarnished. These are issues the actor has to take into consideration anyway. The accuser should be treated as the extortionist he is, and legally obliterated. But what is worse is the air time and print space given to these stories by the so-called legitimate press who should know better. A site like Defamer is at least what it claims to be, in the business of defamation. That's not for me. The imdb.com is more of a go-to source for information that might be of interest to those who LIKE certain movie stars and who like movies, TV and music or other art forms. It seems clear that RadarOnline and TMZ for example do not appeal to people who like anything but merely those with chips on their shoulders and an ax to grind; they appeal to losers who want to reinforce the idea that even the winners are losers so it excuses their own failure. At least GLAAD has the constructive side that gives awards for positive people or works; this almost makes up for the aspect of their work that seems to personify the D in their name, Defamation. Should someone (however obscure or outside of hip culture) say anything less than presidential about gays or using the word for a British cigarette or saying gay to mean anything other than happy or homosexual in a positive way, this gets reported to GLAAD who function as a bullhorn to the media who fall over themselves ready for marching orders that smack of scandal. This has the result of the average person leaving comments under such an article that are full of hostility toward gays. Or at least toward their presumptuous media representatives. A movie star punching out bad guys is not responsible for gay teens who commit suicide. The culture that worships gossip and allows anonymous accusations to be pushed through to the public and which recklessly endanger an actor don't promote the idea of equality or that the gay teens of the US are okay. It is a form of bullying whether it comes from Defamer or its peer sites, leaving off the names of the accusers and their lawyers and easily slinging unchecked slander and libel upon the public figure and his/her lawyers as the only persons named. What that says is that it is not enough to tolerate gossip and move on with your life because it will hound you. Perhaps a movie star could afford to have an accuser/ extortionist shot. I am sure there are some fans who could be trusted with such a contract. Travolta and Cruise for example have both played hit men to great effect, in Pulp Fiction and Collateral respectively, so the issue is not entirely alien to them. Legally, I can't say whether I would condone that way of resolving a problem, but I would understand the imperative of it more than the need of certain groups to push, push, push celebrities into ending nosy speculation by "admitting" to whatever extent they would be rated on the Alfred Kinsey scale of gayness, a situation that would not be any sort of example to inspire anybody. It is just media and scum enabling another with hunt. Sickening. There is a disproportionate focus on Tom Cruise and John Travolta because they happen to promote Scientology and Scientology has an official stance on homosexuals that is very similar to the official stance of the Vatican or Islam on the topic; as two grown adults wit decades of work in the entertainment field, there is no reason to believe either one harbors hatred toward gays. They might be a little tired of their persecutors. And you can blame the persecutors when Travolta claims he said no to an appearance on Glee because he wouldn't have enough time to rehearse dancing (he has danced spontaneously on Inside the Actor's Studio and almost every talk show he has been on). He has played a gay vampire on SNL and he dressed in drag for Hairspray, so he doesn't seem handicapped by any attitude or phobia. Maybe he just thinks Glee is lame. And by that I don't mean to offend lame people who can't walk.

gay teen suicides and movie star pests

I'm not saying "We" humanity are in our nature mean-spirited, but just as an individual psyche might me a microcosm of society and the zeitgeist of any group there are individuals who are abhorant. The sort of bully who focuses on outing and humiliating the schoolyard gay kid or tomenting others who seem "different" or vulnerable I have not seen grow up and change with new information. I know too many Bullies who have at best grown old and less able to bully, but they channel it different ways. I'm not sure they reform. Campaigns to "educate" either preach to the converted or to the culprits who will laugh it off and mock it and continue in one form or another. I think with this the focus has to be more about how students and even teachers, parents and finally employers are equipped to deal with bullies in general. Even with strict regulations it took our construction site at MLG months to get rid of a toxic foreman, a racist, even after he assaulted another boss.

I'll be honest that I roll my eyes when for example GLAAD scolds Jerry Lewis for using the word fag and doing a swishy physical thing about tennis or something. As if his core Rat Pack fans care. On the other side of the fence I laughed out loud in shock when I was watching a Kevin Pollack Chat Show episode on youtube and he opened with an obligatory "Happy Gay Pride" reference and them stared in silence at the camera with a bored smack. I had been pretty sure that kind of thing was just not allowed to be done anymore - somebody pointing out his own insincerety with something obligatory.
I like Ellen DeGeneres and I believe her heartache over a gay teen suicide - even though her heartfelt address to camera about the dog that was re-gifted to the wrong owner got a little more air time. And my reaction to her interview with TR Knight was that he was a crybaby and the much-publicized Issiah Washington deal left people asking why newspapers refer to faggot as the "f-word" when we already have a perfectly good "f-word." And when "The Hanging Garden" was making waves in Canadian film (among critics anyway) I thought it was absurd. This guy was afraid of (I think) his father knowing he was gay so he tried to hang himself as a teen?

I think the hype of this may pathologize gay teens even more. Like, "I suppose I'd better speak to you in a gentle tone so you don't kill yourself" which would be a new style of bullying. ALSO, frankly, why can't the "closet" be seen as a valid phase for them? There are a number of people I went to High School with who are now gay or lesbian. Most teens don't really know what they want to do for a living and only some idea WHO they want to do. There seems to be a myth that people should self-actualize even when they are dependant.

Possibly exploiting the tragedy of suicide either due to simply being gay or also having a psychological disorder - is less effective than the example given by Sir Ian McKellen, Neil Patrick Harris, Jane Lynch (the only Glee cast member who doesn't belong on DeGrassi or some Afterschool special) and Tom Hardy who has taken over the role of Mad Max. But even then (getting back to that closet idea) how firmly established are some of these brave people before they are out? Either for being gay or for having done tabu things. Would they have been better off being in-your-face in high school? Growing up is fine, but I think inadvertently there is a form of bullying coming at TEEN gays from their own circle of support.

As far fetched as THAT might seem, look at the inherent cruelty of groups that make it their mission to "out" movie stars who are ostensibly straight. That is high-end bullying. The conceit is "be a role model - the gay poster child - or else." Jodie Foster was badgered for years, and tured in some good performances she might not have gotten had a lesbian identity coopted her PR exposure. When Anne Heche was cast in Six Days, Seven Nights, and the Ellen relationship story broke the studio was determined to recast since the film had a rom-com element. If Harrison Ford hadn't put his foot down on principle, she would have been recast. (would be a great story if the movie was any good) Tom Cruise or Keanu Reeves - I don't pretend to know anything about them personally and I don't care what they may or may not have done. It should be their own business. There are plenty of successful bi people like David Bowie that could be held up instead of potentially damaging someone's action hero career.

That's an example of what may be called "liberal Hypocrisy." There are some people who may be well-meaning in defending a teen who has been outed and goes to commit suicide, yet many of that same core group has a sense of entitlement to force actors and celebrities to be "honest" about their personal life and questions that they have no business asking.

Most of this blog is re-used and recycled from a reply to a friend who is an activist for gay issues. I tend to take the Devil's Advocate stance on a lot of issues, and either that points to leaks in the proverbial boat or it's a mean slap in the face my me depending on your estimate of my nature. I'm in favor of gay marriage and gay adoption, but I'm against hyper-sensitive media run by fear of lobby groups. It's like the difference between 60's Star Trek and Next Generation - it was brave to have a multi-racial cast in the original. But even as PC as Star Trek generally is, the aggressive Klingons are usually played by black actors and the money-grubbing Ferengi are usually played by a Jewish-sounding actor. Some might complain that (apart from an episode of the on-line fan-made version) they haven't directly dealt with a gay character. Trills are paracites that can take over either a male or female host, but I'm not sure that would be held up as an example. This reminds me of the 60's writer whose body of work was very socially conscious and yet he never took on a black character. His reason when asked was that he didn't want to be "forced to write Sidney Poitier." No slight against the great actor, but it is true that once you HAVE TO write a character a certain way to appease an interest group then there's no point.