You may remember her as the voice of Satan in The Exorcist, but Mercedes McCambridge, whose obit was in the Chicago Trib (3/18), had even scarier moments earlier in her movie career when according to historians she ‘out-butched’ the extremely butch (and bisexual) Joan Crawford in the ’54 flic Johnny Guitar. (A favorite among lesbian ‘camp’ fans.) She, also in her varied roles, made an uncredited drag king appearance in Orson Welle’s A Touch of Evil as a Chicano rapist (of Janet Leigh). She was 87.
Richard Roeper, admitting his own distaste in the matter, (Chicago Sun-Times, 3/15) talks of a list of the greatest movie kisses of all time. The possibilities include female/male, female/female but no male/male. quotes: ‘… there are 20 women-to-woman kissing scenes for every man-on-man scene’; ‘the Will character on Will & Grace is more neutered than a Ken doll’; ‘… [Tom] Hanks did win the Academy Award for playing a gay man dying of AIDS in Philadelphia but we never saw him kiss his loyal boyfriend;’ and ‘We’ll show homosexuals dying, but we won’t show them kissing.’
From a cartoon on the Martha Stewart trial from The Atlantic (4/04): ‘Days of dull testimony followed, as everyone awaited the prosecution’s star witness, Douglas Fanevil. Once he was in court, it was easy to see why he had squealed rather than risk jail. He was very beautiful.’
The New Yorker (3/22) tells the tale of a major female impersonation event, the Miss Max pageant in Omaha. ‘One thing you find out quickly in Omaha is that everyone is a judge. You can never wear a dress twice in this town.’
Short stuff: A new bio, Peninsula of Lies (Edward Ball) about a Charleston matron who used to be a British man. (NY Times 3/15); the cover of the New Yorker (3/15) showing a surprised bride noticing a near-by male bride trying on the same wedding dress; a new production in N.Y. of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with an all-male cast and a Puck who wears suspenders and a tutu (NY Times, 3/18); USA Today (2/24) checks out gay rights in Kansas, close to the geographic center of the country, and finds folks just as pro- or anti-gay rights and marriage as the rest of the country; the NY Times (3/7) has a major article on trans-gender students’ impact on colleges (how many kinds of washrooms do we need?); a new sleazy reality show on Fox pits straight girls against gay guys for lots of money if they can fool each other. (Trib, 3/14).