My latest random connection is wacky, but it appears from a viral test currently making the rounds of Facebook that I’m almost entirely right-brained. I’m now allowed to be random and wacky with impunity. According to Sommer-Sommer.com I am congenitally creative, chaotic, intuitive, imaginative, curious, and fantastical. I would add tangential to that list of adjectives.
Where was I? Oh, right…
I don’t know why I’m going to relate this anecdote because it’s not a particularly good one, and it’s too gossipy and tawdry even for someone as louche as I. But I suppose, on reflection, the whole reason it was told to me in the first place, back when I was a young entertainment hack journalist,
I am absolutely the wrongest person in Homolandia to review the new Ryan Murphy show on NBC. This isn’t made with me in mind, meaning you can be sure the show’s creators don’t give a Chihuahua’s sneeze about my opinion, which is based solely on the pre-premiere show that aired on August 30. (I had no idea there was such a thing as a pre-premiere show, but the mysteries of network television are revealing themselves to me gradually, like secrets to an initiate in a Freemason’s lodge.) New episodes kick off tomorrow, September 11, but I won’t be watching any more—what I have seen will have to do for this piece.
Picture, if you will, Homolandia as a quaint county on the borders of the mighty Empire of Normalcy, a pastoral landscape quilted with neatly tended fields, speckled with dozens of tight-knit communities of people with vastly different behaviors and preferences. Over there, farthest away from the border with Normalcy, you have Trannytown, a garish, hissing locale that comes alive mainly at night, a place noted for its high suicide-attempt rate. Very close to that is Twinksburg, which is packed with Peter Pan-like effete younger men, most of them thin, many of them preyed on at night by men from St. Mary Muscleton or Bearsville down the road, where a number of the residents of Twinksburg move after they have become fat, bald and old, and can no longer stand the “ewwws” that lick at them when they walk by. The Lesbotrons live as far away as possible on the other end of the county, and only communicate with the gay communities when its time to band together for protection against the relentless onslaught of the barbarian bigots.
The first image to come up on Google when I searched “twink.”
Guys like me live in a remote, rural area outside of AlternaQueer City, and we often live alone, occasionally socializing with the denizens of the various gay communities, but more often we venture out beyond the foggy marshes that obscure Homolandia from Normalcy so we can fraternize with the Str8s, with whom we share more in common socially that those with whom we share a preference sexually.
All the more reason why I’m so wrong to review this show: The New Normal is my true American horror story.
BAKER STREET
by Eric J Baker
So how about Zachary Quinto playing Chad, the flaming bottom-bitch ghost on American Horror Story, in the same week he decided to publicly out himself? I think Quinto has an intense, camera-friendly face and is a pleasure to watch, so let’s hope his career is not damaged by the recent bombshell (it figures, though, that the guy who got to make out with Zoë Saldana in Star Trek is the one guy who wouldn’t want to in real life). Oh yeah, American Horror Story…
For those wondering if Spock and Kirk were lovers, you're halfway there.
Regular Sunday readers know I’ve been covering FX’s lurid new haunted house series for the past month, and the show continues to push basic cable boundaries. Before this week’s opening credits ran, Quinto’s on-screen lover (Teddy Sears) boasted about cheating on him with a “power bottom” at the gym… then both of them were killed by the vinyl-suited fetish phantom that looks like a shiny version of The Gimp from Pulp Fiction. The two dead men returned to haunt the house’s current occupant, Dylan McDermott, throughout the episode, including a sequence in which Sears grabbed McDermott’s crotch and offered him head (Spoiler Alert: He declined).
BAKER STREET
by Eric J Baker
I’ve seen the future of horror, and its name is Television.
I’m paraphrasing Stephen King, who once said that about author Clive Barker (and was wrong). Consider the recent slate of theatrical horrors: Colin Farrell couldn’t get people to shell out 10 bucks for the tepid Fright Night remake. Daniel Craig scared up even fewer ticket sales for Dream House, and Sarah Jessica Parker, though terrifying to look at, did not draw a crowd for I Don’t Know How She Does It. I mean, why go to the movies for horror when you can see more intense stuff in The Walking Dead and American Horror Story right from your couch?
Elisabeth Harnois, whose connection to this story is tenuous at best. The impossibly adorable “CSI” star is 32, despite looking 16, which makes my attraction to her a lot less creepy. Maybe.
I’m not sure when it became acceptable to show disembowelment, beheadings, and flesh eating on primetime television, which are acts that would earn most theatrical movies an NC-17 rating. Perhaps the immense popularity of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation is the culprit. Cop shows – the only network shows where weekly killings have long been tolerated and expected – used to depict the vic crumpled in a corner with maybe a red spot for a gunshot wound. Then CSI came along with its slow-mo, 360-degree sequences of bullets exploding inside people’s brains and child autopsies and time-lapse decompositions and – voilá! – cannibalism is now kosher for TV. I never actually watched CSI until this season, and that’s only because they just cast Elisabeth Harnois, above.* Don’t tell my wife. She thinks I’ve taken a sudden interest in law enforcement and test tubes.