Charles Winecoff is a TV writer and journalist whose work has appeared in EW, Vogue, People, and The New Yorker. He is also the author of Anthony Perkins: Split Image, the definitive biography of the “Psycho” star, which is currently being developed for the screen.
Charles Winecoff
Note to Andrew Sullivan: Don’t Blame Breitbart For My Thought Crimes
by Charles WinecoffDear Andrew Sullivan,
Thank you for your Halloween Daily Dish in response to my Big Hollywood blog about the latest LGBT assault on Mormons. We actually met once, briefly, at DC Pride, circa 1990. I had never heard of you or The New Republic. I do remember liking your accent.
More recently, about five years ago, I shot you an email to say thanks for a column you’d written about the threat of Islam to gays. You sent a nice thank you back. I’ve also admired your calling the hate crimes bill “boutique legislation” and urging your readers to stop sending checks to the Human Rights Campaign.
I appreciate the restraint of your posting, “A Gay Voice Against Marriage Equality,” though the title concerns me a little, as the last thing I want is for LGBTers to assume I am some kind of Anita Bryant (she was very active when I was coming out, and we don’t need a repeat of that). Few things are as terrifying as the thought of becoming the object of gay fury (which I understand you’ve had some experience with). It’s a sorry state of affairs when people within the gay community no longer feel they can speak freely without risking ostracism or threats. I sometimes wonder if there should be a hate crimes bill to protect gay people from other gay people.
That said, there are a couple of points in your piece I’d like to address.
First, one does not have to ”search high and low” to find lesbians and gays who are suspicious of the cause formerly known as same-sex marriage. Contrary to popular mythology, not all of us feel a pressing need for “marriage equality,” nor do we derive our self-worth from the state. I know gay Californians who voted for Prop 8 last year because they sincerely believe it is in the best interest of children (some of whom will grow up to be gay), and of society as a whole (which includes gay people), to uphold the ideal of the man-woman nuclear family. (more…)
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Boo-Hoo: Gays’ Lachrymose Last Resort in the War Against Mormons
by Charles WinecoffThere are more histrionics on display in the two-minute trailer (see below)for the pro-gay-marriage ”documentary,” 8: The Mormon Proposition, than in all the episodes of Oprah I can remember seeing.
A blonde woman, tears running down her face, looks into the camera and pleads, “Why did the Mormons do this to us?”
In a crowd of what I presume are gay activists (and not film goers), a young man sobs so hard that he has to be comforted by a female friend.
–
A bulldyke (I’m guessing) stares out at the viewer, her despondent face sopping wet.
And one of the stars of the film, a pretty gay boy (and ex-Mormon) named Tyler Barrick – who seems have been inspired by Barbra Streisand in A Star Is Born – clings to his husband and bawls, “I can’t believe that people could hate us this much!” Really? I can. (more…)
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In Defense of Obama’s Safe School Czar (Sort Of) – or I Was A Teenage ‘Lolito’
by Charles WinecoffWhen I was 17 and desperate to get out of the house (and away from my parents), I wrote a crafty, fawning letter to a teacher whom I had admired from afar (a gay man 20 years my senior, who looked like a teddy bear), then sat back and waited. It didn’t take long to get a response, a phone number, and then a meeting that I managed to turn into a date. He thought I was very “mature” for my age. I thought so too.
As soon as I turned 18, I moved in with him. (Note: he was not my first target; I had a terrible crush on my American History teacher in high school – another gay man – but he was partnered and I scared him off.) Needless to say, we did not live happily ever after.
Married life brought out my true immaturity. He was set in his ways, I had no discipline. He liked dinner parties and lectures, I liked wearing silver lame’ pants to discos. He had plenty of friends, gay and straight, some of whom he’d known since I was an infant. They were very nice to me – but I was jealous of them all. I threw tantrums. “You love them more than you love me!” (more…)
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The NEA: More Than Just A Little ‘Gay’
by Charles WinecoffLast month, National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Rocco Landesman said that, in American politics, ”the arts are a little bit of a target. The subtext is that it is elitist, left wing, maybe even a little gay.”
Well, the NEA has certainly earned that reputation these past few weeks. Just like the LGBT community, the NEA – which purports to help struggling artists of all kinds - is following in lockstep with The One, regardless of whether it’s good for artistic expression, free speech, or real people.
Last fall, I was amazed at how many folks in the gay community let themselves believe that getting Obama elected would be the magical first step towards achieving “equality” – at least in terms of appropriating the word “marriage” - despite the fact that He had already stated clearly that He is against gay marriage.
And no one seemed to care (much less recall) that, in 2007, The One had told CNN that building a consensus for gay marriage would be “difficult and distracting” – you know, like the Iraq war? (Or gnats.) (more…)
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Honoring September 11th: Memories of the WTC — King Kong, Carol Channing, and Ground Zero
by Charles WinecoffI never liked the Twin Towers. As a boy, I watched them go up - slowly, for years – from the terrace outside my parents’ bedroom. My dad, who was an architect, griped about them: they were too big, they lacked style, they were monstrous. They sat vacant for years, a folly of the Port Authority.
And they ruined the skyline.
We all loved the Empire State Building, for decades the tallest building in Manhattan, even the world. The Empire State Building inspired loyalty. It was a marvel of engineering and design. It was a class act. And King Kong had died for love on it.
Of course, we went to see what the WTC was all about. The lobby was tacky, grandiose yet bland, like an airport or a ballroom in a chain hotel. The elevators were fast – a cheap thrill, like a ride at Disneyland – but when you debarked, the mundane, office hallways were an anticlimax. Nothing special. (more…)
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Cultural Kleptos: How the Left Hijacks Art (and Everything Else) for the Good of Mankind
by Charles WinecoffKids love movies about people who tell lies – because they’re such naughty, little fibbers themselves. During my formative years, it seemed like the same two films were on TV everyday when I came home from school – to remind me of the dangers of mendacity. Perhaps it was a portent of things to come.
William Wyler’s “The Children’s Hour” (1961)
One was Weird Woman (1944), a neglected camp classic that was part of Universal’s low-budget Inner Sanctum series - about a scorned librarian (scream queen Evelyn Ankers) who seeks revenge on her ex- (Lon Chaney Jr.) by spreading gossip about his new wife (Anne Gwynne), an all-American voodoo princess he met on a South Seas expedition (don’t ask).
After several people inadvertently die as a result of Ankers’s aspersions, Chaney and gang steal a move straight out of the Democratic playbook - they devise an elaborate, fear-mongering ruse to guilt her into submission (and make her confess). Here’s a clip of Ankers being browbeaten – with prophecies of gloom and doom – by little-known B-actress Elizabeth Russell: (more…)
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A-holes and Insects – or Mother Nature Doesn’t Care If You’re a Good Liberal
by Charles WinecoffDecades before George Clooney began using “Darfur” to swat away the unfashionable nuisance of “Iraq,” the hollow eyes and distended stomachs of starving Biafran children gave America’s impressionable “me generation” a reality check during commercial breaks. Parents shook their heads and wrote checks. “We have so much,” went the refrain. “The world is so unfair.”
My pretty fourth-grade teacher, who taught us everything from math and history to a dash of entomology (study of insects), didn’t think so. One day, unprompted, she told her class of 10-year-olds that she wasn’t really concerned about the Biafran babies because mass starvation was just nature’s way of controlling overpopulation. (My parents were mortified.)
Margaret Sanger
Hard to fathom how, less than three decades after the Holocaust, any educated person could harbor such cold acceptance of the cruel suffering of fellow human beings - much less voice it (and to children, no less). But whoever said the human race is on a one-way path to progress?
It’s widely assumed that, in every moment we’re alive, we’ve reached a new pinnacle – of modernity, experience, knowledge, enlightenment – that we always move forward, never back. But what if we don’t? What if we’re fated to make the same mistakes (disguised with innocuous new names) over and over again? (more…)
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Troopathon 2009: The Only Soldier I Ever Met
by Charles WinecoffI never met a real soldier. My family didn’t know much about the military. We fancied ourselves more artistic and sophisticated than that. As a boy, I lived in terror of the draft, afraid of my 18th birthday, when I would have to register with the Selective Service (or they’d come and get me). And all I ever heard at home was how the Vietnam War was maiming and disfiguring our beautiful young men – all for nothing.
World War II was different. Even my family remembered it almost fondly. Soldiers back then seemed like the real thing, thanks largely to the patriotic black-and-white movies of the 1940s – still played repeatedly on our rabbit ear TV. Hard to believe, but once upon a time, Hollywood actually pitched in to the war effort – stars like Bette Davis, John Garfield, Carole Lombard, Betty Grable, even Marlene Dietrich, all went out of their way to boost the national morale. (more…)
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Britain to America: ‘Don’t Let This Happen to You!’
by Charles WinecoffWhen I was a kid, American Idol wasn’t even a twinkle in Simon Cowell’s eye. No, instead of Adam Lambert’s girly warbling, we listened to wrinkled pacifist Walter Cronkite rattle off the US body count as we ate our TV dinners. (Thank God for I Love Lucy re-runs.)
But Vietnam wasn’t the only war raging. There was a culture clash going on too, right in the privacy of our own home: the ’60s counterculture – seen in everything from Easy Rider to The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour - versus our deeply ingrained Anglophilia. In other words, a tug of war between “social justice” and the Social Register.
Decades before it became cool to diss the Queen with an iPod, the Royals represented everything Americans were not, and never could be: educated, sophisticated, multi-lingual, above carrying cash – and worldly enough to know one doesn’t clean one’s antiques (think no housework). Growing up in our comfy, middle class, anti-war household, I never knew if I was supposed to say “burn, baby, burn!” or “sod off, yank.”
This dichotomy took a psychic toll, which came to a head when I did my part for the revolution by proudly shoplifting a ballpoint pen from our local Lamston’s (”the establishment”). To my amazement, my parents were not pleased. Instead of a gold star, I received a verbal barrage of uncharacteristic cliches (”Do you think we send you to the best schools so you can steal?” ) that left me even more confused. (more…)
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Love, Light, and Lies: Getting in Touch with Your Anti-American Spirituality
by Charles WinecoffHere’s a creepy thought: Dennis Kucinich and I have something in common. We’ve both seen a UFO. I saw mine in New York City in 1989, hovering over a crowded avenue on a warm spring night, as big, bright and still as the full moon. I wasn’t drunk, and I wasn’t alone (there were hundreds of other gawkers). After giving us all a good look, the object glided across town, towards the East River, and disappeared behind some skyscrapers. I’ll never forget it. The end.
The point: I’m a believer. Psychics are in my family too. But that doesn’t prevent me from having a built in bullshit detector – one that’s been working overtime.
Sometime last fall, I began hearing fickle ex-Hillary supporters wax ecstatic about the “paradigm shift” we were all going to experience if Barack Obama came down from heaven and moved into the White House. I wasn’t exactly sure what a “paradigm shift” was (clearly I was supposed to know). But this strange talk reminded me of Michael Tolkin’s apocalyptic movie, “The Rapture” (1991), in which ordinary office drones whisper at the water cooler about “the pearl” (their code word for the second coming).
I later ran across a YouTube clip of Hollywood’s favorite New Age nut, Shirley MacLaine, telling Larry King that we were all suffering from “paradigm blindness.” Assuming she didn’t mean the talent agency, King asked her what “paradigm” was. “Paradigm meaning a whole shift in consciousness,” MacLaine explained. Sort of. (more…)
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DENIED: Bigotry of the Obamatrons
by Charles WinecoffRecently, at the office (a place I sometimes affectionately refer to as Obama Central), I made the mistake of printing out a Washington Post editorial that questioned the foreign policy expertise of our new Commander-in-Chief. By the time I got to the printer to pick it up, someone else had already seen it - and stamped “DENIED” across the top of the page in red ink. Next to that was scrawled, “RIGHT WINGER GO HOME.”
The first thing that went through my mind was: cross burnings. The second was: children are evil (my workplace is overrun by hundreds of twentysomethings).
I tried to be rational. Whoever defaced the page had no way of knowing who had printed it out – just as I had no idea who the defacer was – so it wasn’t personal. Still, it was hurtful.
And it was bigoted. The defacer didn’t know anything about me – my political affilitation, my sex, my race, nothing. Die hard Democrats read mainstream editorials, don’t they? So much for the good will of Dave Matthews’s “American Prayer” starring Idi Amin and Perez Hilton - and Michael Moore’s patronizing, post-Election email exhorting his followers to be kind to their Republican friends (as if they have any). (more…)
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The Streisand Effect – or People Who Don’t Need People
by Charles WinecoffI have a confession to make: when I’m alone in my car – or in iPod isolation – I sometimes listen to Barbra Streisand. And I’m neither a big fan of pop music nor of the current state of liberalism – the cushy, comfy, groupthink kind with which Streisand has become closely linked in recent years. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Whenever I’m feeling a little down, Streisand’s rousing, patriotic rendition of “Before the Parade Passes By” (from the Hello, Dolly! soundtrack) is the next best thing to shooting up a Diet Rockstar. The movie may be deadly, but that track is classic Barbra: starts out quiet, plaintive, then slowly builds to an almost militaristic crescendo of chorus, trumpets, beating drums – and Babs, screaming her head off above it all with a heroic, never-ending high note that sounds like a war cry.
I know - that’s so gay. But for me, the song is musical comfort food – and proof of the power of the human spirit: a rusty Main Street USA antique, shined up and brought back to life by a disadvantaged ugly duckling from Brooklyn, with a voice straight from God, who beat the odds. That’s when Streisand was still one of a kind.
But that was 1969. This is now. Today, “Before the Parade Passes By” would probably be called something like “Whenever the Trans-Cultural Community Gathering Happens to Reconvene.” And it would probably be sung by Sheryl Crow. (more…)
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Play That Funky Gay Card, White Boy
by Charles WinecoffI’ll never forget a dinner party I attended in the early ’80s, where I first heard the term “African-American.” I got a big laugh at the table when I declared, “Oh, that’ll never catch on.” It was way too much of a tongue-twister for everyday use.
Today, “African-American” is as ubiquitous as “the” (and used to describe all US blacks, no matter where they come from).
Flash forward to 2002: Halle Berry pulls out all the stops, dedicating her Oscar win to “every nameless, faceless woman of color that now has a chance” (as the camera cuts to her white mom sitting in the audience). The next morning, I’m in the office of a TV honcho when I overhear a curious voice mail on his speakerphone. (more…)
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Love, War – and Gay Marriage
by Charles WinecoffLate last year, when the gay community was working itself into a frenzy over the passage of Proposition 8 -the measure to amend the California State Constitution to define marriage specifically as a union between one man and one woman – I realized I didn’t trust the community anymore. And I’m gay.
The realization didn’t come overnight; it had been forming for some time. But the Gestapo tactics over Prop 8 – McCarthy-style blacklists, boycotting of otherwise gay-friendly businesses, apologies coerced out of individual supporters who made the “wrong” choice, enforced politically-correct donations to the Human Rights Campaign - clarified it for me.
I hadn’t left the community, it had left me. When did the gays get so mean, anyway?
Well, isn’t it “mean” for California voters to deny us our basic civil rights? I can hear the retort. And I understand the anger, believe me, to a degree. Feelings have been hurt. I also agree that changing any Constitution over this issue is a bad idea. (more…)
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My Real Time with Brigitte Gabriel
by Charles WinecoffIt seems obvious to me that national security is an everybody issue. And apparently, all kinds of people sign up for Act For America’s training seminars – Christians, Jews Hindus Atheists, lesbians, gays, people of all colors and creeds – not just trailer park stereotypes that the ill-informed automatically presume. Brigitte Gabriel is unabashedly gay friendly, feminist friendly, progress friendly, and more socially liberal friendly than her detractors would ever dare to admit – because, as she says herself, “that’s what Western civilization is all about.”
It’s not about calling women second class citizens and feeling supreme above all others. We’ve had enough trouble fighting supremacist movements here in the US already – and now we have a black President to prove the battle is almost over. So why are the Chris Roddas out there trying to malign and marginalize someone who is fighting to prevent another supremacist group – radical Islamists – from asserting their macho supremacy anew? (more…)
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Confessions of a Recovering Anti-Semite
by Charles WinecoffWhenever someone asks me if I’m religious, I always say I’m Jewish by osmosis. Back in Manhattan, my mother was known to order in Chinese food seven nights a week - even for Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner. For an Anglo-centric WASP worshipper who idolized Jackie O, she was very Mama Rose.
But there was always that awkward moment when she had to give the Chinese restaurant our name over the phone: “Winecoff. W-I-N-E-C-O-F-F. And it’s not Jewish.”
Orson Welles “The Stranger”
People usually just assumed we were Jewish. Sometimes they even refused to believe it when we said we weren’t – “Oh, come on. You’re kidding, right?” – which made me mad. But this was New York City, and we were surrounded, outnumbered.
We were supposed to be Episcopalian – or as my mom occasionally put it, Protestant. I had no idea what that meant. We never “protested” anything. We never took communion at the landmark church we went to now and then. My mother, who was really more of a frustrated pagan, thought the symbolic eating the body/drinking the blood of Christ was akin to cannibalism. (more…)
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Whoops! How Hollywood Made Hippie the New Redneck
by Charles WinecoffThe good people of Hollywood often seem compelled to justify their every move - like dinner with a new couple down the street or a weekend out-of-state – with a reassuring “they’re very liberal” or “it’s a very liberal town.” You know, just in case there’s any doubt.
Meanwhile, send them a picture postcard from, say, Texas, and you’ll get a begrudging, very un-liberal, “Better you than me” response. These brave torch-bearers of tolerance rarely hesitate to wish the worst on ”red” states – turning Biblical on a dime with curses of hurricanes, fires, floods - as if real human beings didn’t live anywhere besides Los Angeles and New York. It’s alway payback time.
To understand this dogged, help-we’re-surrounded-by-foes mindset (that only applies to fellow Americans they’ve never met), one needs to look back about 30 years – to that golden age of violence and paranoia: the 1970s. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Straw Dogs, The Wicker Man, Deliverance, and The Hills Have Eyes were just a few of the message movies that taught an entire generation one very important rule: don’t leave the city! (more…)
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Platitudes are not Healthy for Children and Other Living Things
by Charles WinecoffThe other day I was stuck in traffic behind a young woman whose rear bumper sported three popular cries for help: Hope, Free Tibet, and Save the Planet. Her ass was covered.
For some reason, it made me think of my late grandmother, an English rose with a backbone of steel – what us Americans call a “tough cookie.” As a young divorcee, she single-handedly raised my mother, and took care of her own mother, through the Great Depression and beyond.
I used to love asking her about all the events she’d seen take place in her lifetime: the rise of the automobile, the night of Orson Welles’s famous War of the Worlds broadcast, the blackouts during WW2, the “Stars Over America” war bond blitz (which even Hollywood nonconformist Bette Davis threw herself into), the arrival of television, and on and on.
As a boy, it seemed to me my grandmother had lived many lives, and seen more sweeping, historical changes than I could ever dream of. I had missed the boat. (more…)
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What Goes Around…
by Charles WinecoffHere’s what it was like growing up in New York City in the 1960s and ’70s – and keep in mind, I grew up in a penthouse with a fabulous view of downtown Manhattan, the Hudson River, and the Statue of Liberty:
- Under cover of night, all the buildings would incinerate trash, sending enormous clouds of black smoke billowing into the air. Consequently, there was always a layer of soot on anything that didn’t keep moving. Very Dickensian.
- Despite the fact that it rained constantly, and our roof leaked nonstop, there was always a water shortage. If it’s yellow, let it mellow; if it’s brown, flush it down was the unforgettable mantra one fine summer. (more…)
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The Awakening of a Dumb (Gay) American
by Charles WinecoffHaving never been big on the holidays, I decided to do something different this past Christmas. Instead of sending fruit-of-the-month baskets to family and friends, I made gift donations to ActforAmerica.org, the grassroots watchdog group, founded by Lebanese-American Brigitte Gabriel that keeps an eye on the spread of Islamic supremacy and jihad here in the US.
Yes, Virginia, there is a jihad. I was pretty sure all Americans were aware of that.
But I quickly learned that the topic has basically become taboo here in the civilized world – kind of like the way homosexuality used to be before people fought back. Despite the fact that we are currently at war with Islamic extremists who are fervently devoted to annihilating the Great Satan (that’s you and me), I received two reactions for the donations I made.
One was silence. No perfunctory thank yous, just cold-as-a-morgue-slab silence. Apparently, such a gift didn’t deserve an acknowledgment. We don’t talk about those things.
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