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Ryan Murphy
September 10, 2012
FILM & TELEVISION, KILLOUGH CHRONICLES

REVIEW: ‘The New Normal’ Revives the Tired Old Ghey

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.

Naked Twink

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.

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By James Killough
2
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July 5, 2011
KILLOUGH CHRONICLES

The Slow, Inexorable Demise of the Gay Bar (And Not a Moment Too Soon)

THE KILLOUGH CHRONICLES

by James Killough

I’ve done something highly unusual for me the past two weekends: I’ve been gaybarhopping twice with friends.  What makes it extremely the more unusual is I’ve been stone-cold sober; I’m currently in one of my Puritan phases.  Most guys need to drink heavily when they’re in a gay bar, which is why liquor companies love us so much.  We singlehandedly built the Absolut brand without help from an Ikea instruction manual.  We own the Country of Sweden’s economy.  Says so right on the bottle.

The super awesome Johnny Knoxville screening "Jackass 3D" at The Eagle in LA just to show how grateful he is that we Gheys appreciate how willfully homo-erotic the Jackass franchise is.

The reason one tends to get hammered in a gay environment is that this is no ordinary social gathering.  You are shopping and being shopped for: the desire for sex is the mixer in your drink; the potential for sex could be standing next to you at the urinal.  So you need to relax, and that’s what booze is for, as well as a few Vicodin, and maybe a bump of… etcetera.

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By Pure Film Creative
3
0
March 19, 2011
KILLOUGH CHRONICLES

Does This Corset Make My Ass Look Queer?

Ask any red-blooded baboon: as repressed as the Victorians were, the bustle was a flagrant invitation to do nasty things from behind.

I miss the Victorian Era.  It’s not just that I miss the high-waisted trousers and the frock coats, and the prospect of reading Dickens serialized in the paper every week.  I am probably one of the few men in the modern era who can say he had two frock coats hanging in his closet at one point, made for me by my tailor in Delhi to my amateur designer’s specifications, based on yet another Yohji Yamamoto frock coat I brought in for him to copy.  It’s not that thinking about the Victorian Era makes me miss when I had hair, either, which I usually wore long and curly on top and shortish on the sides, with my sideburns always down to my jawline.  No, the real reason I miss the Victorian Era most is because had I lived then I would have been straight.

As every gay man knows, while inwardly guffawing at those misguided conservative poodles who incessantly yip that ours is a “lifestyle choice,” only an extreme masochist with a major reactionary streak would ever choose to be gay over being straight.  Most of us believe we would make great straight men.  We’d be wonderful fathers, we would seriously pay attention to our woman’s appearance, we’d never even tire of clothes shopping with her.

The reason a Ghey like me would have been straight back then is I would likely have gotten married, had kids, and nobody would have been the wiser.  My wife would have been so repressed and confined by the rigid corset of social mores that she wouldn’t have admitted even to herself that I wasn’t banging her, much less to anyone else.  She would have ignored the stable full of handsome young stable hands, who would have walked funny after I’d spent an afternoon “grooming my horse.”  In the unlikely event of a complaint from her, I would have just yanked a lace in the back of her dress like a yo-yo string and she would have passed right out on the parlor floor like a rag doll, after being cut off from what little air she was getting to begin with.

The Victorian Era was basically when Western culture turned Japanese for a hundred years.  It was graceful, fraught with fascinating social intricacies and niceties, but was, all kidding aside, clearly a real pain in the ass.

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By James Killough
8
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March 17, 2011
KILLOUGH CHRONICLES

So It's Really A Fag Hag Thing

We’ve gotten to the bottom of Gwyneth Paltrow’s recent appearances on Glee.  I draw your attention to this little item in Nikki Finke’s Deadline.com, in which show creator Ryan Murphy outs Gwyneth for who she truly is to him.  For those too lazy to click, I refer you to the following quotation:

“Gwyneth is sort of the muse of the show,” Murphy said. “She’s somebody who I write on the weekends and say, ‘What do you think about this for an episode even if you’re not in it?’ She has opinions. She’s great.”

Like in "Avatar," "How to Train Your Dragon," and "Eragon," where the dragon chooses the rider who will fly her, a Fag Hag chooses her Ghey and they bond for life.

Murphy is hiding behind subtleties that many creative Gheys might not see themselves, which is why Dr. Killough is here to explain.  He uses the word “muse.”  But a muse is distant, an inspiration, someone the artist aspires to commune with, a siren who unblocks the creative flow just by being there.  Gwyneth is the muse transformed, the mermaid wrenched willingly from the sea and forced to walk on land.  She has become Murphy’s Fag Hag.

Apparently she has been this since they worked together on Running With Scissors, Murphy’s decidedly unfunny adaptation of Augusten Burrough’s exceedingly funny memoir.  He should have gone with archly flip for RWS’s tone, not with sincerity and contrition.  I’m sure he knows that now with the tone he established in Glee, which would have served RWS better.

A true muse is someone like my creative partner, Rain Li, who basically ignores you, making you desire his or her company and the inspiration that it gives you all the more.  Rain and I hardly ever speak on the phone; I’m lucky to get a text-based Skype session once a quarter, during which she types one line every ten minutes until I just give up at 2 a.m.  I won’t hear from her for months, but then a single “You aw-right, dahling?” in that mockney Beijing accent and my entire career path becomes clear to me.  That’s a muse.

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By James Killough
5
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