Do I Sound Gay?

WELL — DO I?

This four-minute trailer is funny — if gay stuff doesn’t make you nervous.  With 39 hours to go as I type, they’ve raised $97,466 toward their $115,000 Kickstarter goal to complete “Do I Sound Gay?” Here is the director’s two-minute rationale for making the film, complete with his cat.  Not least because a (straight) friend is one of the producers, I happily kicked in.

AND SPEAKING OF GAY

Here‘s the much-watched Anderson Cooper segment on the Michael-Sam-kiss-on-ESPN controversy.

MEANWHILE . . .

Have you seen HBO’s new film, The Normal Heart?  It scored 95% among Rotten Tomatoes’ “top critics” — a film about lust and love, ignorance and fear, oppression, indifference, denial, injustice — heroism — and a plague that’s killed 36 million men, women, and children.

I know/knew almost all the characters portrayed in the film, from New York’s closeted mayor and his closeted right-hand man (who made us dinner once) . . . to the central character, Larry Kramer . . . to bronze star recipient and Gay Men’s Health Crisis co-founder Paul Popham.  I even once briefly met Dr. Linda Laubenstein — “Dr. Buzz-Buzz,” as my friends called her for the sound her electric wheel chair made as she maneuvered the hospital, a phenomenally brave, heroic woman played by Julia Roberts in the film.

I never knew Harvey Milk, assassinated in 1978 by one of his fellow San Francisco city supervisors — that movie scored 96% among the Rotten Tomatoes top critics — but I was moved to see him honored last week with this first-class “forever” stamp.

One day, I’d like to see a stamp honoring Larry Kramer and Linda Laubenstein, together.  If you find time to watch, you’ll see why.