I am always amazed when I read stories like this one from Idolator where a celebrity comes out and admits something so inherently, ridiculously obvious that its almost a non-story. Was I shocked when George Michael admitted to being gay? Okay, that one blew my mind. Neil Patrick Harris? I *really* wasn’t expecting that one.

Clay Aiken, though?

The cover story from people might as well have had a picture of Chris Rock holding a baby and said “YES, I’M BLACK.”

Anyways, I’m glad he figured it out. I guess.

Clay Aiken Comes Out Of The Closet: Nation’s Craft Stores Prepare For Lower Aiken-Related Revenues.

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The Associated Press is reporting that actor Heath Ledger was found dead today in his SoHo apartment by a housekeeper. The 28-year-old actor was believed to have died as a result of a possible drugs overdose. Reports from Manhattan indicate that Ledger was scheduled for an in-house massage. When he failed to respond in a timely fashion, a housekeeper entered the apartment. Ledger was found, according to MSNBC, “surrounded by pills” (which we have since learned are over-the-counter sleeping pills, non-prescription) at around 3:35pm EST.

UPDATE: The New York Times City Room blog has provided the following additional details –

At 3:31 p.m., a masseuse arrived at Apartment 5A in the building, at 421 Broome Street in SoHo, for an appointment with Mr. Ledger, the police said. The masseuse was let in to the home by a housekeeper, who then knocked on the door of Mr. Ledger’s bedroom. When no one answered, the housekeeper and the masseuse opened the bedroom and found Mr. Ledger naked and unconscious on a bed, with pills scattered around his body. They shook him, but he did not respond. They immediately called the authorities

UPDATE 5:50pm EST: The New York Times is now reporting that the possibility exists that this was a suicide, though the M.E. has made no official ruling as to the cause of death. Foul play, however, is in no way suspected. CNN is now reporting that the drugs in question are over-the-counter sleeping pills.

UPDATE 6:08pm EST: The New York Times has retracted their earlier statements regarding ownership of the apartment by Mary-Kate Olsen.

More details as they become available.

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Well Merry Christmas everyone. You probably thought you’d never hear from me again, but I just didn’t have anything worth saying for a while. I’ve been busy, you have too. Time for me to talk about this Will Smith debacle that when I read about it made me say, “Oy vey!”

As you probably have heard if you’re reading this, Will Smith was quoted in Saturday’s Daily Record as having said the following:

“Even Hitler didn’t wake up going, ‘let me do the most evil thing I can do today’,” said Smith. “I think he woke up in the morning and using a twisted, backwards logic, he set out to do what he thought was ‘good’.Stuff like that just needs reprogramming.”

When I read this quote, I didn’t think to myself, “Hey! Will Smith is an anti-semite! You evil horrible bastard, you who have been graced with the gifts bestowed on you by the entertainment industry, an industry replete with Jewish people who will be offended!”

But apparently, I was alone in this way of thinking for a day or two, particularly when said newspaper ran the headline SMITH: ‘HITLER WAS A GOOD PERSON’.

Within minutes, Will Smith was slandered and libeled in a potentially irreparable way by any number of major news sources, the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai Brith (who called for a boycott of his movie I Am Legend, a film which should be boycotted not for this reason but because it’s horrible), and even Page Six took a swipe at him, saying:

“Will, you’ve broken our hearts. It’s you that needs reprogramming.”

Now, I don’t know about you folks, but I have a brain and I have a heart. Sometimes, I think with my brain and other times I get emotional and try to think with my heart. When heart dominates over brain, I occasionally fall short of my marks on things. All of these people got so emotional, so over-the-top about this headline that they didn’t read the fine print and use the logical mechanisms they’ve been entrusted with to figure things out.

This is Will Smith we’re talking about. The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, people. He gets jiggy wid’it. He’s not Mel Gibson who, by all published accounts, actually did launch an anti-semitic tirade and will now spend the rest of his life trying to recover from it.

If you’re still confused, well you’re not alone. Will Smith issued a statement through his publicist which read:

“It is an awful and disgusting lie…It speaks to the dangerous power of an ignorant person with a pen. I am incensed and infuriated to have to respond to such ludicrous misinterpretation.”

“Adolf Hitler was a vile, heinous vicious killer responsible for one of the greatest acts of evil committed on this planet.”

And there, of course, is the loving father and husband that we have all come to know and respect. So if you’re still thinking that he said something anti-semitic, let me ’splain for you what he was talking about, k?

When I was in acting school, we had an entire acting class dedicated to talking about Adolf Hitler and about how we would seek to portray the character of Adolf Hitler in a play or movie should such a challenge ever arise. Adolf Hitler, we all knew, was an evil and horrible man, a man whose atrocities were too numerous and horrific for the mind to contain them. But the challenge was in getting that message across to an audience in a performance. It didn’t matter how we individually or collectively felt about Hitler; for this acting lesson, we would have to play Hitler. To become him, what tools would we use? How could we deliver the message of who he was in a performance?

And the turning point came when our teacher said, “Now, consider this. Which one is more frightening: to think of Adolf Hitler as the horrible, evil dictator that we know him to be, or is it more frightening to think of him as a person who believed that what he was doing was right?”

A collective sigh went through the classroom as the reality sunk in: it’s far more frightening and disgusting to consider that Hitler believed what he was doing was “good”.

As someone who has considered this logic many times over the years, I couldn’t begin to fault Will Smith for having the same conversation that I’ve had hundreds of times with countless friends. As for the shame and guilt associated with the comments, cut The Fresh Prince a break. If anyone should be ashamed, it should be The Daily Record. Whoever chose to run with that headline ought to be hitting the bricks.

But, oh, wait — headlines like that sell papers. Well played, assholes.

(sources: CNN.com, TMZ.com)

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I finally had a chance to sit down and really watch last Friday’s Oprah Winfrey Show, a show I traditionally avoid. But Dave Chappelle, being one of the few entertainers for whom I have a deep and long-standing admiration, appeared on the show to discuss why he walked away from his $50M Comedy Central deal and television show. I read all of the things in the news about how he was crazy, he had gone to Africa to a mental hospital, and any number of other things that were mentioned when he walked off the set of his show. At first, I took all of it to heart and, like many fans and friends, became very concerned about his well-being. Here, after all, was a man whose body of work, work ethic, down-to-earth-guy-I’d-run-into-on-street persona, and intuitive comedic knowledge I related to on a number of levels.

But after reading all of these things, I realized a point which Dave voiced on Oprah’s show on Friday. He talked about his distaste of “negotiating with people in the press,” which is part and parcel of the era in which we live. At the time when all of this happened, I reasoned that the people around him were trying to find a way to get his attention, to put pressure on him to complete his work, and to do so even at cost to his own state of well-being.

What I got an earful of on Friday was a man who refuses to let his egotism, his celebrity, or the agendas of the people around him become his undoing. I listened as he talked openly about a situation involving a whte crew member whose laughter during the filming of a sketch involving some really heavy racial humor made him seriously uncomfortable. Dave told Oprah that he felt like “I know the difference between people laughing with me and people laughing at me, and it was the first time I’d ever gotten a laugh that I was uncomfortable with.” This event signaled a turning point for Dave who began to see how socially irresponsible his humor was.

“There’s a lot of people who will understand exactly what I’m doing,” Dave told the audience. “Then, there’s another group of people…the people, the kind of people who scream ‘I’m Rick James, B—” at my concerts, that they’re just along for a different kind of celebrity worship ride. They’re gonna get something…completely different. That concerned me.”

In recognizing the difference between those who would seize on Dave’s language as a catchphrase and those who understood the painful, racially divisive roots from which his comedy stems, he became disillusioned with the way his work was being interpreted. “I mean, I don’t want…black people to be disappointed in me…for putting that out there,” he told Oprah, to which Oprah replied, “You don’t want to be disappointed in yourself.” In classic Chappelle style, he grinned and said, “You know what Oprah? You’re right.”

The show evolved into a discussion about the difference between whether it is socially responsible to use celebrity to put culturally insensitive ideas into the minds of millions of viewers. Oprah recounted a story about a show she had done on Klu Klux Klan members and skinheads which led her to question whether or not she was exposing them or empowering them by giving them a voice. “My idea was that I was exposing some of their atrocities,” she told listeners, “and during a commercial break I saw one of them from the stage raise a fist and give a look to another one of them in the audience. And I knew that what I was trying to do was being interpreted by some people the wrong way. And I realized in that moment that I was doing more to empower them than I was to expose them.”

Some of you may wonder why I would choose this as something to write about on my personal blog, but it got me to thinking about the issues I’ve been writing about the past year and the impact that writing about those issues, namely Love In Action, has had.

I have the same fear, the same concerns, the same deeply-rooted worry about my social responsibility in discussing or publicizing what I’ve learned about Love In Action and its former clients. I’m not a celebrity, by any stretch of the imagination. I don’t intentionally reach millions of readers, and the people who know me well are my friends. So am I, by renting space in your head with my blog, sending a socially irresponsible message by discussing things that alarm and disturb me? Is the work that I’m doing more to expose these people or to empower them? By talking with the media, am I trying to negotiate the end of this unlicensed reparative therapy center?

I know it sounds strange to you, but I think about it every day. I’ve considered it many times but I’ve never been able to have quite the breakthrough that I had after listening to that Oprah show. I’m sure that throws up a series of labels I’m not entirely ready to accept, but denying the subconscious and conscious impact it had on me today would be false.

Then there’s Dave Chappelle whom I admire more with every word I write here. It would be worth your while to hunt down a video capture or recording of Friday’s show, particularly if you’re one of the people asking yourself which kind of fan you are after what you’ve read here today.

I hope Dave goes back to Comedy Central and finishes his season. He brought a lot of joy to a lot of people who did understand what he was going for, who do respect him for his willingness to push the envelope, and now respect him for having the courage and sense enough to walk away when he could sense that the pressure might destroy his ability to do what he loved to do.

STOP THE PRESSES. Thanks to Rachel for this fascinating counterpoint to the media spin. If this were true, and I reiterate “if”, it would be one of the most disturbing cover-ups in entertainment history. But, like everything else, it’s only a theory.

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First of all, I’m late to the game on this but condolences go out to the friends and family of Chris Penn. He was a very talented actor and, as Winona Ryder said at Sundance, “He was much more than Sean’s little brother.” His work speaks for itself, and I was saddened to hear of his passing today.

Secondly, I got a piece of celebrity gossip in my Inbox from a friend seeking validation of its truth. I read the item, and sat there shaking my head thinking, “Who in the hell dreams up this crap and why?” All in a day’s work, or lack thereof, I’m sure. But to the nincompoop who dreamed up this piece of ridiculous misinformation, what was your purpose?

TIMBERLAKE RESPONSIBLE FOR RICCI AND GOLDBERG SPLIT?

Actress CHRISTINA RICCI split with boyfriend ADAM GOLDBERG after filming
with JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE made her realise she wants a boyfriend who is as
successful as the singer.

The MONSTER actress filmed BLACK SNAKE MOAN with Timberlake in his hometown
of Memphis, Tennessee, and the two became close friends.

A set source tells US Weekly magazine, “She saw Justin doing all that he is
doing and started to really like him. When she came back from filming she
broke up with Adam and said she wanted more. Adam is furious about it.”

The co-stars didn’t become romantically involved, but the friendship caused
Ricci to re-evaluate her three-year relationship with the SAVING PRIVATE
RYAN actor.

The actress has put the Los Angeles home they shared on the market for
$3.1 million (GBP1.72 million).

For sure it’s none of my business, but I can report with certainty it’s a bunch of total malarkey. Maybe I’m naive, but I couldn’t think of one “set source” who would waste their time coming up with this nonsense. If you hear anyone repeating it elsewhere, tell them it’s bullshit and then give them a list of better things to do than talk about Christina Ricci.

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The Smoking Gun yesterday blew the lid off another literary scandal. Apparently fictionalizing your entire life story into something worse than what it is has become the new chic, completely unbeknownst to me. James Frey, author of A Million Little Pieces is, according to TSG, fabricating or wildly overstating large portions of his life story. The book has sold over 3.5 million copies since Oprah Winfrey included it as an official selection of “Oprah’s Book Club”. Hell, even my roommate Jen told me just the other day what an incredible book it was, and that story can be repeated by almost everyone reading this I’d imagine.

Police reports, court records, interviews with law enforcement personnel, and other sources have put the lie to many key sections of Frey’s book. The 36-year-old author, these documents and interviews show, wholly fabricated or wildly embellished details of his purported criminal career, jail terms, and status as an outlaw “wanted in three states.”

In additon to these rap sheet creations, Frey also invented a role for himself in a deadly train accident that cost the lives of two female high school students. In what may be his book’s most crass flight from reality, Frey remarkably appropriates and manipulates details of the incident so he can falsely portray himself as the tragedy’s third victim. It’s a cynical and offensive ploy that has left one of the victims’ parents bewildered. “As far as I know, he had nothing to do with the accident,” said the mother of one of the dead girls. “I figured he was taking license…he’s a writer, you know, they don’t tell everything that’s factual and true.”

I think we can safely say how that last bit is true about nearly everyone we know. The problem for people like me, who have unfortunately actually lived out some sembleance of the horrific tales told by Mr. Frey, is that it makes us look bad when he starts telling our stories. It’s almost as if he overheard me talking to a friend in a diner somewhere ten years ago or happened to sneak into one of those anonymous 12-step meetings. I feel fairly violated all around right now. Best you should go read The Smoking Gun’s six-week investigation report and expose. I gotta go to work.

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For many years, I was understandably allured by the, by all accounts, fictional and mystical novel Sarah, a story about a boy who grows up living the life of a “lot lizard” working the truck stops of West Virginia. I was equally disturbed and touched by The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, a story of an abusive relationship between mother and child that goes beyond explanation here. There was the Yahoo! group called Terminator2 which I joined in hopes to learn more about the author. There were two films, one of which was finished and one of which was not. Thousands of people came into contact with JT Leroy, and I have to wonder how many of them actually knew JT so well. Tonight, I sit here horrified as I read the tale of the real JT Leroy. As with JT’s stories, the tale of JT himself does not end well.

JT Leroy, former prostitute, H.I.V. victim, literary author and recluse has become even more astonishing. Why? It turns out that JT Leroy is none of these things at all. JT Leroy isn’t even a man. JT Leroy does not exist and, I hate to say it, is one of the most clever hoaxes ever laid on the literary world. JT Leroy is the fictional, completely fictional, creation of a woman named Savannah Knoop who, according to several people close to the story, played the part so accurately and completely that nobody knew.

But the young man in the wig and sunglasses, it turns out, is not a man at all. The public role of JT Leroy is played by Savannah Knoop, Geoffrey Knoop’s half sister, who is in her mid-20’s.

A photograph of Ms. Knoop at a 2003 opening for a clothing store in San Francisco was discovered online. Five intimates of Mr. Leroy’s, including his literary agent, his business manager and the producer of a forthcoming movie based on one of his books, were shown the photograph and identified Ms. Knoop as the person they have known as JT Leroy.

“That’s JT Leroy,” said Ira Silverberg, Mr. Leroy’s literary agent, upon seeing the photograph. Mr. Silverberg said he had met Mr. Leroy a number of times in person. Lilly Bright, a producer of “The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things,” a 2004 film based on Mr. Leroy’s 2001 collection of stories, was no less certain. “It’s JT Leroy,” she said, adding that she had worked with Mr. Leroy extensively on the production.

The article closes with the most telling of quotes, and I think this might explain how I’m feeling right now.

But perhaps those most affected by the revelation that Ms. Knoop has been playing the public role of JT Leroy are those who went out of their way to help someone they thought was a troubled young man.

“To present yourself as a person who is dying of AIDS in a culture which has lost so many writers and voices of great meaning, to take advantage of that sympathy and empathy, is the most unfortunate part of all of this,” Mr. Silverberg said. “A lot of people believed they were supporting not only a good and innovative and adventurous voice, but that we were supporting a person.”

Take a few minutes to peruse this article. I want to make note that I am ashamed to have ever been duped by this hoax, that the numerous secretive moves and inconsistent public appearances of JT Leroy should have tipped me off. I will have more when I cool down. For now, go steam and tell me what you think.

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