The Advocate October / November 2014

THE BACKLASH IS A TRIED-AND-TRUE trope in American culture. Actors Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem, and One Direction boy-bander Zayn Malik (the cute one), all experienced a backlash for their expressed views on the crisis in Gaza. There are the “coal rollers” who enact their backlash to the green movement (and Prius owners and Obama, generally) by outfitting mini-monster trucks with extra gas-guzzling chimneys to belch out clouds of inky smoke. Someone more invested than I in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles universe could explain the potential effects of a Michael Bay backlash on the film’s blockbuster prospects. Democrats hope to fill campaign coffers in a backlash to the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision. And Susan Boyle, Lana Del Rey, and Vampire Weekend are all musical acts that have experienced…

Joe Pompeo is a senior reporter at Capital, a New York-based magazine and website where he covers the media industry. He was previously a reporter at Yahoo News, Business Insider, and The New York Observer. While conducting interviews for “The Disrupters” (p. 62) he observed that “hearing these sources talk about why gay people seem to thrive in digital media, it was almost like they were completing one another’s sentences.” Kerry Eleveld, a Berkeley-based freelance writer and politics columnist for The Advocate (“Clinton’s New Challenge,” p. 17) is completing work on a book about how the LGBT rights movement produced a political tipping point during the presidency of Barack Obama. “I’m amazed at how different the landscape of LGBT issues is from 2008 to 2016. It’s a whole new world…

Laverne Cox arrived at our meeting point, a hotel restaurant in midtown Manhattan, a few minutes behind schedule. She was rolling a small suitcase behind her. Her next appointment, where she’d go directly from our meeting, was for her Time magazine cover shoot, though she couldn’t say as much at the time. She sat down in the booth and explained that she prefers to bring a few items of her own clothing to photo shoots. Just in case. She’s busy and in demand, and being prepared is a running theme in her life. She’s tall and attractive and that day was dressed in a short, fitted green dress. Cox’s voice is distinct, with a wide range, and as actors do she commands it consciously, but in regular conversation it conveys…

If there’s one thing no one expected, it’s that Hillary Clinton would make one of her first campaign missteps over the gays. But there it is. Clinton went after NPR’s Fresh Air interviewer Terry Gross in June during a seven-minute exchange about same-sex marriage, DOMA, and whether Clinton had an actual change of heart on marriage equality or simply changed her political calculation as voter attitudes shifted. Not all seven minutes were a disaster. Clinton lost her cool only in the last minute and a half. It’s also not clear that her main offense was substance so much as it was tone, though some publications, such as The Atlantic, argued otherwise. But after Gross tried several times to nail down Clinton’s true motivations for changing her marriage position, Clinton’s patience…

Disco is dead. Long live Sylvester! The trailblazing queer pioneer—who rocketed up the charts in the ’70s and ’80s with hits like “Do Ya Wanna Funk”—is now receiving an exuberant musical retelling of his life, Mighty Real: A Fabulous Sylvester Musical, off-Broadway this fall. It’s all thanks to Anthony Wayne, a Broadway actor in his early 30s who only recently discovered the music. “I saw a TV show about his life story in 2010,” says Wayne, who is taking a leave of absence from his ensemble role in Broadway’s Pippin to perform as Sylvester. “I was inspired by his drive to be who he was regardless of what he went through.” Although he’s singing the hits—such as “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” and “Dance (Disco Heat)”—it’s not simply an…

It’s no secret the superhero genre is practically overflowing with queer metaphors. Characters struggle with secret identities; mutants are despised by society because they are born different. However, viewers of Gotham—the new TV series from Fox based on the world of Batman long before he donned the cape and cowl—won’t need the detective skills of the Dark Knight to find LGBT visibility or racial diversity. In this reimagining, women of color are depicted in positions of power on both sides of the law, and strong LGBT characters are an essential part of the story from the first episode. Though Gotham centers on James Gordon (played by Ben McKenzie) during his early days as a rookie detective in the Gotham City Police Department, it’s the rich cast of characters that breathes…