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      in Music

      Gossip Dance Back Into Action After a 12-Year Pause

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      The trio fronted by Beth Ditto wasn’t sure it would return after scattering in different directions. But music united them for a new LP, “Real Power.”It’s possible that there are better people to dig you out of an ice storm than the frontwoman of a dance-punk act, but few would do it as resourcefully or cheerfully as Beth Ditto. Since her band Gossip started 25 years ago, its scrappy, D.I.Y. roots have always run strong.Early this year, when Portland, Ore., Ditto’s adopted home of two decades, was overtaken by a deep freeze, my windshield was a sheet of ice, and there was no scraper in sight (do better, Portland rental car agencies). Over my protestations, Ditto fished out her old ID, hopped out of the slowly warming sedan in her black beret and Chuck Taylors, and shaved the ice off herself. She has never been fazed, she said, by the unexpected.Though Gossip has been a major label act since 2009, when it made the leap from the storied indie Kill Rock Stars to Columbia Records and the megaproducer Rick Rubin, the trio has carved out a very unconventional path.“We’re renegades,” said Ditto, who founded the group with her childhood friend Nathan Howdeshell on guitar and bass, chatting with her bandmates in the drummer Hannah Blilie’s minimalist, midcentury living room, cozy against the wintry mix outside. They had gathered to talk about “Real Power,” their first album together in 12 years. Due Friday, its arrival was not preordained, or even serendipitous — it was more instinctual, a product of punk energy, somehow sustained across time, space and adulthood.“We don’t plan,” said Howdeshell, who grew up with Ditto in small-town Arkansas. “Me and Beth just sit down and made up stuff.” They don’t talk about it, either. That might ruin it, make it feel contrived, Ditto said.“That’s the magic of our band, I think,” Blilie added. “It just kind of falls into place.”That is, until it didn’t.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      Missing the Gay Best Friend

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      In film and on TV, he was a sign of cultural progress. Then he was a tired stereotype. Then he disappeared. So why do we want him back?SOMETIMES, YOU DON’T know how much you’ve been missing something, or even that you’ve been missing it, until you have it back. That may explain the unexpected nostalgic pang I felt while watching Nathan Lane connive and conspire with an array of imperiously behatted women on the second season of Max’s real housewives of New York costume drama “The Gilded Age.” Or the similar pang I felt while watching Mario Cantone reprise his role as the embittered confidant Anthony Marentino on the second season of Max’s other real housewives of New York costume drama “And Just Like That …” In both instances, it seemed suddenly clear that, for a long time now, popular culture has been moving forward without a once-essential style accessory: the Gay Best Friend. We’re not supposed to mourn his absence; we’re not supposed to want him back. But I kind of do.Listen to this article, read by Ron ButlerOpen this article in the New York Times Audio app on iOS.Sardonic and supportive, caustic and self-deprecating, alternately the angel and the devil on the shoulders of countless heroines, the Gay Best Friend — always free, always available, there when he’s needed and invisible the minute he isn’t — had been a staple of women-driven, gay-friendly movies and television shows since I was a teenager in the early 1980s, at the dawn of the representation-matters era. As our designated representative, the homosexual confidant wasn’t ideal, but he was better than nothing. He could serve as a pet, a provocateur or a sob sister; a servile, wince-inducing stereotype or a sly underminer of various heterosexual norms. For gay audiences, his existence, rarely in the thick of the action but rather just next door to it, offered, at its best, a brief glimpse into a universe of possibilities — a universe that mainstream culture was still unwilling to enter more immersively. Over the next couple of decades, the Gay Best Friend’s development could be traced alongside the overall arc of gay culture as it bent toward justice.And then, seemingly without anybody noticing, he ghosted, disappearing from the scene with barely an acknowledgment that he’d been there at all. (The momentary appearance of Earring Magic Ken in 2023’s biggest film hit, “Barbie,” is the last known sighting.) Was the cultural demise of the Gay Best Friend a defeat, or was it a sign of progress? And either way, whatever happened to that guy? He was fun to have around and, all in all, good company.IT MAKES SENSE that, in the 2020s, the Gay Best Friend is not only virtually extinct but even frowned upon as démodé, a quaint form of minstrelsy. In an era in which everybody is determined to live life as the star of their own show, the G.B.F., a member of a sexual minority who accepts that his destiny is to serve as a tangential character rather than a central figure, feels self-abnegating in a way that renders him politically suspect. Why would any self-respecting gay man choose to define himself primarily as a woman’s ornamentation? The trope is by now so familiar that it can be spoofed: A 2023 “Saturday Night Live” sketch, “Straight Male Friend,” shrewdly posits that being the Gay Best Friend (as embodied by Bowen Yang) is essentially uncompensated emotional labor, and that after a long day (or at least a long brunch) of listening and supporting and encouraging, what gay men really need is a dude-bro buddy with virtually no emotional intelligence who just wants to hang.Has the character simply outlived its questionable-in-the-first-place value? The inverse of the Gay Best Friend is the Fag Hag, and the minefields of that particular stereotype announce themselves right in the label (twice in just six letters). Forever bemoaning her rejection by the straight world, often the first to announce that she considers herself overweight or unattractive and viewed by her gay friends as a kind of rescue case, the Fag Hag character can be predicated on affection, condescension or both, but the general sense is that her time has passed. The character has also come under fire for reasons that lie outside of popular culture, as frustration has increased over the minimization of the role of women, both straight and lesbian, in the struggles and movements that have defined the past 60 years of gay history.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares189 Views

      in Television

      Book Review: ‘The House of Hidden Meanings,’ by RuPaul

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      Chronicling the high-heeled path to drag-queen superstardom, the new memoir also reveals a celebrity infatuated with his sense of a special destiny.THE HOUSE OF HIDDEN MEANINGS: A Memoir, by RuPaulAs “The House of Hidden Meanings” is RuPaul’s fourth book and his first straightforward memoir, it’s understandably being marketed as an opportunity to see the pop culture icon in a new light. The striking, almost intimidating, black-and-white cover photograph notably subverts the expectation of seeing Ru in glamorous technicolor drag. All the artifice has been stripped away, we’re being told: This is RuPaul stripped bare.But the meanings laid bare in the text contradict RuPaul’s narration again and again. What’s revealed is a striver high on his own supply who tries to spin his story as empathetic wisdom draped in Instagram-ready captions.About 70 pages in, RuPaul — at the time, a Black high school dropout driving luxury cars across the country to help a relative flip them for profit — declares without irony, “Americans have always been frontiersmen, people who are open to a new adventure, and I felt this as I drove cars alone, back and forth, across the United States.”I wearily recalled an earlier section of the book. Explaining the conservative environment of his childhood in San Diego, RuPaul summarizes the Great Migration in a paragraph that would be considered too concise even for a Wikipedia entry, then declares, “All the Black people in our neighborhood were transplants from the South, and so they had inherited a kind of slave mentality, which was based on fear.”Aside from breathtaking dismissiveness of the decades of racial violence that made the migration necessary, it’s chilling to see a public figure known as a champion of the marginalized so easily dismiss survivors of Jim Crow-era terror as people who “hold onto their victim mentality so fiercely; it becomes a defining feature of their identity.”The way we tell our stories has a way of telling on us. The memoir reveals an author who thinks he understands outsiders when, really, all he understands is that he wanted to become famous and eventually became famous. And given RuPaul Charles’s truly extraordinary talent, that would be fine if the book (and his brand) weren’t so invested in trying to convince the rest of us that he has unique insight into the joke called life.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares179 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Wham!’ Documentary Had an Unusual Choice for a Director

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      The director Chris Smith was not a fan of the ’80s pop band when he decided to take on the project about George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley.Two young Londoners — one of Greek Cypriot origin, the other of Egyptian descent — set up a pop band in the 1980s that goes on to sell more than 30 million records. They break up several years later, at the pinnacle of their fame, when the two hit the ripe old age of 23.That, in a nutshell, is the story of Wham!, the British pop duo, and its two stars, George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley. It’s a story that the director Chris Smith tells in a Netflix documentary, which is nominated in Sunday’s EE British Academy Film Awards, known as the BAFTAs.Other contenders in the documentary category include “Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie,” about the actor’s battle with Parkinson’s disease; and “American Symphony,” a year in the life of the musician Jon Batiste.Smith previously directed the Emmy-nominated 2019 documentary “Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened,” about a fraudulent music festival that landed its organizer in jail.Two years earlier, he directed “Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond,” on the making of the 1999 movie “Man on the Moon,” in which Jim Carrey played the entertainer Andy Kaufman.Smith said that he was approached to shoot “Wham!” by its producers. There is no narrator: The tale is told using documentary footage of the duo during their career, paired with audio excerpts from interviews with the two pop stars themselves, which are voiced over — Michael died in 2016 at 53.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      A Radio Station’s Call Letters Announce Its Purpose: KGAY

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      KGAY in Palm Springs is geared toward Gen X and older gay men who enjoy Rihanna but still worship Donna Summer.Fog clouded the San Jacinto Mountains recently as Brad Fuhr approached the headquarters of KGAY, a radio station in an undistinguished Palm Springs, California, strip mall. Fuhr, the station’s chief executive, was tuned to KGAY in his all-electric Volvo, and the morning’s soundtrack included “Bad of the Heart,” George Lamond’s 1990 freestyle cri de coeur about getting dumped, and “Lucky Star,” Madonna’s 1983 dance hit of bouncy adoration.KGAY’s call letters aren’t a fluke but a savvy marketing tool. While there are streaming stations devoted to gay audiences (like iHeart’s Pride Radio and Gaydio out of Britain) and gay-themed talk shows and dance formats have thrived on commercial and nonprofit radio for decades, KGAY is still one of a kind. It’s the only terrestrial radio station in America geared toward L.G.B.T.Q. listeners and their allies, where gay personalities broadcast in person, “WKRP in Cincinnati”-style, at least part time. (There’s WGAY, a “party station” in the Florida Keys, but it doesn’t market itself as gay.)KGAY covers the Coachella Valley with its FM signal at 106.5 and is simulcast with KGAY AM 1270; it can be streamed globally at KGAYPalmSprings.com. Its two full-time D.J.s are Chris Shebel, the old-school, no-nonsense program director and weekday afternoon personality, and the wisecracking John Taylor, who covers mornings. Three other D.J.s — Eric Ornelas, Galaxy and ModGirl — provide the station with homemade mix shows that play around the clock.Born on Dec. 25, 2018, KGAY replaced KVGH, an oldies station, with a playlist that rotates over 900 pop songs, disco anthems and dance remixes from the ’70s through the latest releases.“It’s an entertaining, mass-appeal radio station first,” said Fuhr, 65.Shebel at work as a D.J. at KGAY.Michelle Groskopf for The New York TimesKGAY serves primarily the clubby slice of the queer music pie. There’s no Barbra or Bikini Kill, no American songbook showstoppers or lesbian breakup ballads. There’s no rap or country, although it does play Lil Nas X and dance versions of songs by Dolly Parton, Tammy Wynette and other country divas.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Theater

      The Musical Force Behind the Communal, Queer ‘Bark of Millions’

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      Matt Ray is a prolific songwriter and the musical nexus of New York’s alt-cabaret scene. His next project: Taylor Mac’s latest marathon performance.“It’s the last hour, and I’m feeling the energy draining,” Taylor Mac, the performing arts polymath, announced near the end of a recent rehearsal at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.If the artists — an ensemble of a dozen singers, as well as several instrumentalists — were exhausted, it was because of the sheer scale of what they were working on: “Bark of Millions,” a show by Mac and the musician Matt Ray, which has its American premiere on Monday at BAM’s Harvey Theater. Essential to that scale is Ray’s score of 55 original songs that add up to four hours of performance.That would be enough to fill several albums by any recording artist, and yet it’s business as usual for Ray. He has been not only the musical core of Mac’s recent shows — the daylong marathon “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music,” for which he arranged over 240 songs with the purpose of queering the American canon, and “The Hang,” for which he wrote 26 — but he has also been the force behind much of New York’s alt-cabaret scene, with collaborators including Justin Vivian Bond, Joey Arias and Bridget Everett.“This is a community of risk-takers and rule-breakers,” Everett said in an interview. “It’s a really exciting, vital scene. And there’s one person who’s the musical nexus of that. It’s Matt. His heart is beating at the center of all of it.”The performer Justin Vivian Bond called Ray “such a sensitive artist,” and said, “for being a consummate Leo, he’s just great at letting other people shine.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesRAY, 51, has had expansive taste in music since his childhood growing up on the East Coast. Whether as a player — he started learning the piano when he was 2 years old — or as a listener, he never limited himself to any one genre. “I really admire monochromatic types of work,” he said, “but I just don’t work that way.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Theater

      The Queer Kids Are All Right. And Now They’re Making Me Better.

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      Here’s a list of every openly queer person I knew when I was 15:That’s it. None. Not even myself.Oh sure, Paul Lynde and Liberace were flouncing on television; closer to home, a boy I kept my distance from decoupaged his notebooks. But even if they really were what people whispered or snarled about them, it was not then an identity they would dare to acknowledge.Nor would I. Unable to see through their closet doors to the truth of what their lives might be, I did not have the benefit of their stories, which meant not having the benefit of my own.Cut to today, 50 years later. Another 15-year-old boy — like me intense, unathletic and bullied — is the lead character on “Heartstopper,” a hit teen romance. But this boy, Charlie, knows all about queerness. He is, after all, growing up in the 2020s and, more to the point, in 2020s pop culture. In that magical land, also known as Netflix, adolescence for people like him is not only survivable but often a lovefest, all closet doors blown off their hinges.And I do mean all. Charlie (adorkable Joe Locke) is happy to be gay, and why not: When he crushes on a dreamy and apparently straight rugby player, the rugby player promptly comes out as bisexual. Their romance is supported by a cute teenage lesbian couple they hang out with. Also in the group is a bookish nerd who realizes he’s asexual — or “ace,” as he explains, pinning a fun new name on that identity. Even the straight boy, vastly outnumbered, gets a queer love story when he falls for his best friend, a beautiful trans girl.Welcome to the classic lifeboat plot, checking boxes on a diversity agenda. But this time it’s mostly calm seas and clear sailing.Do I sound envious? I am. Also slightly embarrassed.Don’t get me wrong: My husband and I devoured the first two seasons. (The third is expected in the fall.) I’ve also been watching, with or without him — for these are guilty pleasures — a slew of other queer youth stories, all the while trying to sort out my feelings.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      in Movies

      How ‘All of Us Strangers’ Hit Close to Home for Its Director

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      Andrew Haigh wanted to infuse “All of Us Strangers” with elements from his own life, which included shooting it in his childhood residence.“I got called a gay elder the other day,” Andrew Haigh said. This title, bestowed by a group of younger gay men, initially rankled him. It’s true that Haigh — the director of acclaimed films like “45 Years” and “Weekend” — had recently turned 50, but he still found that landmark age hard to believe.“I’m looking older,” he told me, “but it’s a strange thing to think that I’m not young anymore.”That uncanny feeling is a key theme in Haigh’s latest film, “All of Us Strangers,” which he adapted from the 1987 novel “Strangers” by Taichi Yamada. Andrew Scott stars in the film as Adam, a screenwriter in his late 40s with a whole lot on his mind: As he entertains a tentative romance with his neighbor Harry (Paul Mescal), he returns to his childhood home and finds it somehow inhabited by the parents (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell) who died when he was young. Though this reunion summons Adam’s inner child to the fore — a transformation Scott sells with heartbreaking subtlety, even when dressed in Christmas pajamas — there are still tricky adult conversations to be had with his parents about his sexuality and lonely middle age.“I knew that for this film to work, I had to throw myself into it on a very personal level,” Haigh said. “So much of the things they’re talking about and the memories that Adam has of being a kid are my memories.”That commitment even extended to filming much of the movie in the house where Haigh grew up, a notion that astounded many of his actors.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More