The glass closet seems to make a perfect fit for a lot of celebs today, when gay is inching toward becoming more okay in the entertainment world. In an increasingly gay-tolerant environment, these stars can enjoy actual relationships, they don’t have to constantly dredge up opposite-sex dates (other than their mothers), and after a day of pretending for the cameras they can go back to almost being themselves.
But at the same time, the stars aren’t willing to make the jump to being officially labeled queer and all that it represents in the business. Douglas Carter Beane’s timely play The Little Dog Laughed—which ran earlier this season on Broadway—had a wily lesbian agent, Diane, not only angling to heterosexualize her client’s breakthrough movie role but trying to do the same thing to the client himself. I wasn’t surprised to read at least one review that seemed to think Diane was a winsomely heroic “fairy godmother”!
She was more like a Machiavellian deception queen who’s terrified of shattered glass, though some closet-busting survivors might say she had a point. In his memoir, Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins, Rupert Everett describes losing jobs in About a Boy and Basic Instinct 2 specifically because he’s openly gay. (And no, in the latter case, he probably didn’t dodge a bullet. A quality art-house director was set to helm it at that point.)
What’s more, Everett deserved an Oscar nomination for My Best Friend’s Wedding, but the Academy generally frowns on out gays playing gays—it’s not really acting, after all. Though Sir Ian McKellen broke the curse in 1999 with a Best Actor nomination for Gods and Monsters, actual trophies have been reserved for “courageous” straights playing gay, like William Hurt, Tom Hanks, Hilary Swank, Charlize Theron, and Philip Seymour Hoffman (as if it takes courage to accept career-defining roles most actors would die for). Alas, whenever another X-Men movie rolls around, no one says, “Wow, Sir Ian was so brave to play straight! What a stretch!”
“I think there are four kinds of gays in Hollywood,” explains Howard Bragman, CEO of the PR firm Fifteen Minutes. “There’s the openly gay; the gay and everybody knows it but nobody talks about it; the married, closeted gay who doesn’t talk about it; and the screaming ‘I’ll sue you if you say I’m gay’ person.” In other words, the no closet, the glass closet, the cast iron closet, and the closet you get buried in.
In the case of the Windex people, says Bragman, “A lot of actors are afraid of being defined by their sexuality. In Hollywood they don’t cast by positives, they cast by negatives: ‘This one’s too this or that.’ And actors don’t want to give red flags. They’re actors and want to talk about their mutability, not their personal lives.” (Except for their adorable children, their busy workload that precludes any relationships, and their utter admiration for Kylie Minogue.)
These glass-housed actors, he adds, “are comfortable with their decision because they feel like they’re living honestly.” But if someone who’s struggling with the sexuality issue comes to Bragman, he’ll advise him or her to totally come out. “Their career may be different and less lucrative,” he says, “but everyone I’ve seen come out has been happier as a result of it.” Of course, in Hollywood “less lucrative” and “happier” don’t generally appear in the same sentence.
Bragman handled the coming-out campaign for former NBA star John Amaechi, who Bragman says has lived openly but never came out publicly because it would have thrown the team balance off-kilter in the same way a straight headline-grabber like a divorce does. But the basketball star is now retired and promoting his new book, Man in the Middle, so the glass is no longer required.
In a phone interview the U.K.-raised Amaechi—who played for the Orlando Magic and Utah Jazz and now works as a psychologist—explains to me his longtime lifestyle. “I was a regular at gay places on the road,” he says, “from WeHo to [the New York City bar] Splash. It’s not as if I was hiding.” And he’d bring gay friends—and even a partner once—to the backstage area where his teammates would invite their wives and girlfriends. What’s more, he says, “If someone asked me if I was gay, I’d either joke and say, ‘You’re not pretty enough. You’ve got nothing to worry about,’ or I’d tell the truth. I never lied. I even told a reporter once, but he didn’t report it.” Through much of the ’90s the “Peter Allen free pass” was still in full operation across the boards.
But why stay covered in glass and not come out even more openly back then? “I talked to people about it—my friends, mostly,” Amaechi says. “Some suggested it was a very good idea to not come out. I was worried about my career and what it would be like walking through stadiums. In thirty states I could still have been fired for being gay, without recourse. There’s no protection for discrimination—though that’s going to change with the new Congress.”
A different type of stadium star, singer Clay Aiken, parried a question from Diane Sawyer on “Good Morning America”:
Sawyer: For three years now, everyone has assumed the right to ask if Clay Aiken [is] gay? Everybody assumed that what has really been happening in these last few years with you and what’s probably going to happen right here today, in this next couple of weeks, is that you are ready to come out and say you’re gay.
Aiken: That would not make any sense for me to do that.
Not long afterward, on “Larry King Live,” when the host asked him “hypothetically” if it would affect his career if he were gay, he responded “hypothetically, I don’t think so.”
A longtime target of Web gossip, Aiken has become adept at deflecting questions about his sexuality—often by phrasing his answers as questions. But when a man came forward last year professing to have hooked up with Clay for sex after responding to an ad, the press went wild (“Clay Is Gay,” trilled the National Enquirer). As other celebrities have discovered, in cyberspace no one can hear your denials. Lance Bass and Neil Patrick Harris broke out of glass last year partly because of intensive Web chatter, and neither seems the least bit hurt by his emergence.
But at least—yeah, there’s that phrase again—he hardly denies it anymore. Maybe Clay figures that takes him a step away from his most famous song title, “Invisible.”
Surprisingly enough, the concept of being semi-sort-of-out has even infiltrated the ranks of the Republicans. Pioneer outing journalist Michelangelo Signorile feels that “in the Republican Party now, the glass closet is okay. It’s like ‘just don’t talk about it or announce it.’ It’s progress, but it also still makes being gay something you really shouldn’t talk about.” But things got extra sticky when people started asking questions about then Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman’s sexuality. At first, Mehlman refused to answer any questions, which only fueled the discussion, until he flatly told a New York Daily News reporter, “I’m not gay.” The fact that he parried the question for so long, wrote Washington blogger John Aravosis, was in itself unusual. “I can’t recall many, if any, straight men who refuse to acknowledge that they’re straight—if anything, most are a bit too obvious about it—and that ultimately leads to speculation, caused by Mehlman’s own failure to respond to a direct question posed by a reporter.”
Keeping the glass up is a high-maintenance job, especially since many celebs are left to do it—or, more often, screw it up—alone. Bragman swears there are no meetings between stars and their handlers to strategize whether or not they will stay glassed off. That would explain the various slipups that happen when the luminaries take their own images by the balls. I was wildly amused some years ago when the terminally noncommittal Sean Hayes was asked by a newspaper interviewer what he likes in a partner and he blurted out that he’s “not into that gay ideal of musclemen.” This from the guy who refuses to label his sexuality. Whoopsy! (Though he can always say “Well, I said I’m not into the gay ideal.”) Meanwhile, the more circumspect David Hyde Pierce is quoted on the Internet Movie Database as saying, “My life is an open book, but don’t expect me to read it to you.”
I also loved the blind item in the New York Post a few years ago about ho
w a more calculating star goes into premiere screenings with his female date while his male trainer enters separately and, when the lights go down, switches seats to be next to the star. Good try—but obviously the charade was shabby enough to eventually make it into print.
A popular argument in favor of celebs not going on the record with their gayness is that these people deserve privacy, after all. “It’s nobody’s business but theirs,” onlookers counter—usually while devouring a trashy tabloid.
It’s true that stars are free to put up whatever walls they want in order to maintain boundaries with the public. But even at their most controlling, straight stars never seem to leave out the fact that they’re straight in interviews. Whenever a subject tells me, “I won’t discuss who I’m dating” or “I resent labels,” I generally know not so much that they’re passionate about privacy but that they’re gay, gay, gay.
Are the glassy—or ambiguous—stars tortured? Sometimes. It must be weird to be, say, Wanda Sykes and turn up with gal pals at New York City’s gay lounge Beige and at Fire Island discos while seeming to exude a hope that no one notices enough to ask whether you are or aren’t. But if played right, there are benefits to the high-wire act. As Signorile disdainfully puts it, “Anderson Cooper has finessed it where straight women who have a crush on him think he’s straight and gay men actually think he’s out. [The glass closeters] are able to play to different niche audiences whatever sexual orientation those people want, and they believe it!”
Once again, bravo! (said with rolling eyes). When halfheartedness is used as a career move, there’s little to cheer about, especially when truthin’ could be the road to real relief. As newfound lesbian Cynthia Nixon told New York magazine after coming out, “If someone is chasing you, stop running. And then they’ll stop chasing you.” So come on, people, just say the words. Or just mouth them. At least.
Menstruation: Porn’s Last Taboo
Trixie Fontaine
“Will you pee for me?”
It was one of the first requests I got as a webwhore during a private webcam show, and I was happy to oblige my customer for $2.99 a minute. I grabbed a Tupperware bowl, aimed the cam at my pussy, and pissed until my bladder went dry. Cha-ching! I envisioned logging into the camsite every morning to empty my bladder and line my pockets. Who knew webwhoring could be so simple and the customers so easy to please?
A week later I found out it wasn’t so simple; yellow shows were (and still are) against most camsites’ rules and many camgirls’ accounts had been closed for disobeying by spraying. I was flabbergasted—doesn’t a piss ban on a porn site violate common sense? You can see men eating urine snow cones by going to your neighborhood video store and renting Jackass: The Movie, so what’s wrong with videos of a sterile body fluid being streamed over the Internet to a porn consumer? I grudgingly stopped doing pee shows to avoid being kicked off the camsite, but the rationale of the no-piss rule eluded me.
Even more befuddling than the camsite’s no-piss rule was the no-menstruation rule. What could possibly be wrong with me masturbating my own pussy at the wettest time of the month? Doing period shows seemed a lot more natural, less offensive, and safer than women doing the ever-popular (and camsite acceptable) extreme penetration shows, fucking themselves with baseball bats, footballs, and beer cans.
A year later I opened my own Internet porn site selling monthly memberships to people who wanted to see my spycams, photos, and videos. Owning my own site meant I was out from under the thumb of the big corporate camsites and could set my own rules. I did pee shows and integrated my period into shows like, “Bloody Body Painting” and photo sets like “Blood in the Studio.” I enjoyed showing off my period not because I got any customer requests to see it, but because menstruation is so conspicuously absent from porn. I was determined that my porn site be honest about me, my sexuality, and my body—how could my site be genuine and real if I ignored and hid the fluid coursing through my cunt once a month? I didn’t want my site to portray only the typical skewed porno version of women’s bodies and sexuality; I can think of no greater misrepresentation of premenopausal women’s bodies than having 100 percent of porn pretend that 15–25 percent of our vaginas’ monthly experience just doesn’t exist.
While none of my members requested to see me on the rag, they didn’t complain when I shared my period with them. Some of them chose not to look at it because they couldn’t handle blood, some of them said it didn’t exactly turn them on but it was “interesting,” and some of them just thought it was no big deal. I was happy my fans were tolerant and supportive, but I was still mystified by men’s disproportionate interest in pee versus menstruation. It surprised me that guys were so much more interested in a fluid that comes out of our peeholes than one that comes exclusively out of women’s pussies.
As it turns out, pee is more easily eroticized by men than menstrual fluid because pissing is something they can relate to and urine more closely resembles semen. The only association most men have with blood is pain. Even scat is far more popular and sought after among porn consumers than menstruation. In the world of Internet porn, chances are you’ll run across more enema enthusiasts than menstruation enthusiasts. You will find more guys on the Web talking about how they want to give a chick’s dirty asshole a tongue-bath than you will guys who want to eat bloody pussy. Of course, none of this makes rational sense since menstruation is literally the “sexiest” of these three bodily functions (peeing, pooping, and menstruating), since it’s part of the reproductive process and menstrual fluid exits the body through the vagina.
After a while I found a menstruation fetish site run by Tuna, a man who commissioned period porn from amateurs like me. I was really excited to discover an eager (if small) market for the bloody photos and videos I wanted to make. The webmaster sent me a link to his page for models, describing the types of poses he wanted with sample pictures to illustrate what he was looking for. My excitement waned and transformed into disgust when I saw the emphasis was less on menstruating women and more on waste products: bloody maxi pads, anonymous twats with tampon strings, garbage cans with bloody tampons and panty liners, and a rear-end view of a woman with her panties pulled down to reveal a dripping tampon that had overflowed onto a pad.
My naïve fantasy of presenting menstruation as a natural, healthy and inoffensive occurrence worthy of integrating into sex and porn was overshadowed by images of things that belong in a landfill. I wanted to make period porn so people could start thinking of period sex as good clean fun, not to reinforce old perceptions of menstruation as something dirty and stinky. I wanted to display my period as a fresh, free-flowing, messy puddle of fun, not just something to be stifled and absorbed by a piece of garbage.
In spite of my distaste, I tackled my commissioned photo set with as much enthusiasm and creativity as I could, reminding myself that the webmaster was polite, generous with advertising, and couldn’t be resented for fetishizing the one component of menstruation that’s visible in our society: “feminine hygiene” products. A boy’s first exposure to menstruation isn’t wet red pussy, it’s advertisements for tampons, it’s the package of Kotex his mom keeps under the sink, it’s his sister’s used maxi beckoning mysteriously from the bathroom wastebasket. With most die-hard true “fetishists,” a single thing or one small piece of the whole captures the attention of someone in immaturity and sticks with him as he grows and focuses on the thing, amplifies the thing, and sexualizes the thing. It could be white panties or high heels or armpits or rubber swim caps… or pads and tampons. Because a lot of women don’t want to have sex while they’re on the rag, observing her bulging panties or dangling strings, or inspecting used pads and tampons (and tampon applicators) are the closest their male partners ever get to experiencing the intimate details of menstruation.
Even if I didn’t like the focus on “sanitary” napkins and tampons, I grew to enjoy catering to menstruation fetishists anyway. It didn’t adhere to my ideal vision of period porn, but it di
d appeal to my nonconformist desire to make provocative porn, even if the main reaction I provoked was disgust. I’ve always enjoyed grossing people out and if that meant I could make money in an underserved niche by dripping blood into my mouth from my oversaturated tampons, it was fine with me. I liked confronting people with my body fluids and knew that even if my members didn’t exactly like it, they would remember me for it. There was plenty of other noncontroversial content on my website to entertain them, so I felt that including the unique red content could only help establish my brand and set me apart from other solo girl paysites.
Unfortunately, it could also ruin my business.
Rather than get our own merchant accounts and infrastructure for processing payments online, most independent porn webmasters in the United States process credit card payments through a third party, CCBill. CCBill is now the most popular and trusted third party processor as others turned out to be unreliable and/or folded under new Visa regulations and restrictions deeming porn merchants “high-risk” accounts and requiring substantial registration fees. Not long after I started making period porn, CCBill suspended service on Tuna’s account for violating their acceptable use policy. CCBill also stopped processing payments for the woman owned and operated the site, OnMyPeriod.com. When site owner May Ling Su couldn’t find anything addressing menstruation in CCBill’s posted acceptable use policy (besides restrictions on “extreme violence, incest, snuff, scat, mutilation, or rape”), she called to ask them where menstruation is mentioned in their AUP. May Ling Su says,
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