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.
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.