Cleaning Out the Closet

1. Roy Ashburn, the notoriously anti-gay senator who came out of the closet and announced his homosexuality after he was arrested on a DUI after leaving a gay nightclub. A website called RightPundits.com posted an article by Suzanne Venker titled “Roy Ashburn, Anti Gay-Rights CA State Senator, Is Gay: Does It Matter?” in which Venker states “Not all gay people want to be married, and not all gay people think gay marriage should be legal. What does this make them? A traitor to their cause?… You can absolutely be gay and not support gay rights.” This is a perfectly defensible position and Venker makes a very valid point that just because Ashburn was a closeted homosexual doesn’t necessarily mean that he was selling out his personal ideology by voting a straight anti-gay rights agenda – an agenda that I don’t agree with, but I am open to the concept that does have some plausible rationale behind it. But the fact of the matter is that while Ashburn lied to his wife and possibly himself in his rise to power, he also lied to his anti-gay constituents by pretending to be a heterosexual family man when he was really anything but. Would the people who supported his political career as a standard bearer for anti-gay rights have done so if they had known the truth about him? I am inclined to think that in Ashburn’s case, where his lack of support for the gay agenda was a major area of his personal political manifesto, it does matter and that he should resign for selling the voters a false bill of goods. And that’s a damned shame, because someone coming out of the closet of anything should be a cause for celebration. But when you lie about what you are as a means of getting ahead, there should be repercussions for it.

2. Dan E. Campbell who objected to being sent a letter alerting him to fill out the census form that he’ll be receiving next week, writing “Did the Census REALLY need to send me a letter today telling me that in a week they’d send me my census form? Like I am THAT excited to get it?? How many millions of dollars that could have gone to support the arts did THAT waste?” Personally, I thought it was a great use of tax dollars, as the government needs to have a hyper-accurate count of how many Dan E. Campbells there are in the country and their exact whereabouts. In the 2000 census, there was a shocking total of one Dan E. Campbell living in the USA, and experts fear that the number has remained stable over the decade despite the government’s best efforts to eradicate the menace. We won’t know the precise number of Dan E. Campbells there are currently living amongst us until the census in completed, but not until the count is at zero can we rest easy.

3. Bro Joe, who returned from his jaunt in Puerto Vallarta yesterday evening and called me as he was waiting for our mutual friend Ken to pick him up at the flyaway bus from the airport (Joe did not ask me to perform this service because he didn’t want to ride in the sidecar of my 1941 Harley Davidson). Since most people who know me are aware that I would rather have five pounds of ammonia-soaked cotton stuck up my nose than talk on the phone, Joe kept the conversation mercifully brief while still managing to annoy me with teases of his miraculous journey when I spent the week shuffling back and forth between a gray cubicle on Wilshire Blvd. and my lonely bed in Van Nuys. But after we terminated the chat, Joe proceeded to “butt dial” me a total of three times on his ride home, including once when I finally turned off the phone only to later discover that his butt had left me a voice mail. I have decided that the only thing worse than having a conversation with Joe is having a conversation with Joe’s ass, and if it ever calls me again I am going to reverse the charges so that it receives an enema from Ma Bell that it won’t soon forget.

4. James Cleveland, who was my Facebook-assigned Best Friend of the Day (BFD) yesterday. I met James when we were both attending Cal State Northridge during the Bronze Age when I achieved my degree in bronze mongering which has proved completely useless in the ensuing ages. What I remember most about James (aside from the fact that he was eight feet tall at the time, less than half his current height) was his love for music. He was always tinkering on the piano, guitar, or (if neither of those were available), fingering his crotch as though he was giving a performance at Carnegie Hall. He finally settled on the violin as his instrument of choice, or the “fiddle” as he unpretentiously refers to it. Since I am the most pretentious man imaginable, I have always been careful to regard Jim’s mastery of the fiddle with the greatest degree of patronizing mockery I can muster up, resulting in his hating my guts and dreading any social occasion that he would be forced to encounter me at with a degree of foreboding usually felt by a man with severe diabetes who has to have his foot removed the next morning. Of course, if Jim were to have a foot removed, it would limit the amount of stompin’ and hollarin’ he could perform while he was fiddling at the hoe-down, which might limit his tour de force performance of Devil in the House of the Rising Sun, so we’ll leave such unpleasant similes for a time when we’re not discussing an art form that is invariably performed on a floor covered with straw.

5. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, who booted it by neglecting to include Farrah Fawcett (who appeared in the Oscar-winning Logan’s Run and the Oscar-nominated The Apostle) and Beatrice Arthur (who was in the Oscar-nominated Lovers and Other Strangers) in their In Memoriam segment. But even more offensive to me was the fact that they produced a lengthy tribute to John Hughes, who directed a total of eight movies, while relegating Karl Malden to a ten second film clip. I’ve got nothing against Hughes, who I realize had a lot of fans (although I was never one of them), but Malden had a career that spanned over 70 years that saw him appear in two Oscar-winning Best Pictures (On the Waterfront and Patton) and won the Best Supporting Actor award for A Streetcar Named Desire. He was also President of the Academy from 1988 to 1993, and perhaps most impressively was married to the same woman for 71 years from 1938 to his death last July. I guess that last part doesn’t matter in terms of a tribute to his career in Hollywood, but it is the mark of a good man who contributed a great deal to the industry and community that made him an unlikely star, and it was a shame that he didn’t get a better tribute from an organization that he did so much for.