Foo Fighters

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A religious group known for picketing U.S. soldiers’ funerals got a taste of its own medicine on Friday afternoon. The Foo Fighters stood atop a flatbed before their Kansas City show that night and sardonically treated the protesters from Westboro Baptist Church to a live performance, in a counter-protest of the Topeka, KS-based church’s anti-gay views. (via NBC Action News)
Dressed in trucker costumes from their recent “Hot Buns” video, the band members hit back at the protesters with a message of tolerance and American pride. “Land of the free, home of the brave,” frontman Dave Grohl declared at the end of the song, in an exaggerated drawl. “I don’t care if you’re black or white or purple or green, whether you’re Pennsylvanian or Transylvanian, Lady Gaga or Lady Antebellum. It takes all kinds.”
The Foo Fighters posted additional video of the counter-protest on their website, receiving more than 400,000 views over the weekend. The band kicked off a 27-date North American tour earlier last week in St. Paul, MN, in support of latest studio album Wasting Light. The “Hot Buns” song itself is a twangy country spoof with goofy lyrics about “hot man muffins,” in the grand faux-trucker tradition of mid-1990s Blur B-side “Rednecks.”
In addition to military funerals, the Westboro church has also picketed funerals of well-known figures, such as that of Elizabeth Edwards, the late wife of former presidential candidate John Edwards. Missouri and other states have passed laws trying to limit the church’s protests, but have been repeatedly overruled by the Supreme Court on free-speech grounds.
from Spin
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After 19 years hiding her relationship with an active-duty Army captain, Cathy Cooper is getting ready to exhale. On Tuesday, the policy known as “don’t ask, don’t tell” will expire. And Cooper will dare speak her love’s name in public.
“This is life-changing,” said Cooper, choking up. “I just want to be able to breathe – knowing I can call my partner at work and have a conversation without it having to be in code.”
Much has been reported about the burdens that “don’t ask” placed on gay and lesbian service members who risked discharge under the 1993 policy if their sexual orientation became known in the ranks. There’s been less attention focused on their civilian partners, who faced distinctive, often relentless stresses of their own.
In interviews with The Associated Press, five partners recalled past challenges trying to conceal their love affairs, spoke of the joy and relief accompanying repeal, and wondered about the extent that they would be welcomed into the broader military family in the future.
Even with repeal imminent, the partners – long accustomed to secrecy – did not want to reveal the full identity of their active-duty loved ones before Tuesday.
Cooper, who works for a large private company, moved from the Midwest to northern Virginia to be near her partner’s current Army post, yet couldn’t fully explain to friends and colleagues why she moved. “It’s been really difficult – it’s really isolated us,” she said. “I became much more introverted, more evasive.”
Cooper said her partner’s Army career is thriving, though she’s had to hide a major component of her personal life.
“I don’t know any of her co-workers,” Cooper said. “She says, `You’re the best part of me and I have to pretend you don’t exist.’”
Looking ahead, Cooper is unsure how same-sex partners will be welcomed by the military establishment.
“Will it be, `Hey, come join all the family support programs’?” she wondered. “I’m not going to be so naive as to think that … I’m just hoping the door is open.”
During the long, arduous campaign to repeal “don’t ask, don’t tell,” activists and advocacy groups tended to downplay issues related to post-repeal benefits for civilian partners. “It’s not something we’ve been pushing very hard for yet, but it’s obviously going to be the next front in the ongoing battle for equality,” said Alex Nicholson, executive director of Servicemembers United.
Nicholson’s organization, which advocates on behalf of gay and lesbian military personnel, conducted a survey of same-sex partners last year to gauge their concerns. One widespread hope, he said, was the military might issue ID cards to same-sex civilian partners so they could gain access to bases, commissaries and support services on their own.
In general, same-sex partners will not get the same benefits that the Pentagon grants to heterosexual married couples to ease the costs of medical care, travel, housing and other living expenses. The Pentagon says the 1996 federal Defense of Marriage Act – which defines marriage as a legal union between a man and woman – precludes extending those benefits to gay couples, even if they are married legally in certain states.
(more…)

Julie Bowen & Ty Burrell / Modern Family

‘Modern Family’ might already be walking away as the big winner at this year’s Primetime Emmy Awards, but as far as series stars Ty Burell and Julie Bowen are concerned, one of the greater rewards of working on the lauded series is turning the societal tide when it comes to attitudes about homosexuality.
Asked how they felt on being on a show with multiple gay characters, Burrell — who won the Emmy this year for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series — told reporters, “Definitely, it feels very very good to be on a show that seems to be changing a lot of minds … it’s a great thing to peripherally go to events and talk to family and have people talk about the characters the same way they talk about other characters.”
Also read: “Justified”‘s Margo Martindale Nabs Best Supporting Actress Emmy
Added Bowen, who took home Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series, “As a straight woman in a straight couple, I feel marginalized.”
Bowen was kidding, of course; the actress quickly added, “To me, it’s absurd that it is an issue, but in that it is an issue, I’m glad that we’re helping to change minds.”
As for who Bowen was rooting for outside of her own show (which managed to take home the first four statuettes of the night), Bowen put her support behind “Hot in Cleveland” star Betty White, who was up against her in the category.
“If I didn’t have a dog in this fight — and I had two — I would have voted for Betty White,” Bowen noted.
from Reuters

Jane Lynch, right, with wife Lara, left, and Haden

Way back in the mists of time, when Lea Michele was a name known only to theater geeks and “Don’t Stop Believin’” still belonged to “The Sopranos,” the thing that excited most critics, and many fans, about this new show “Glee” was not so much jazz hands as Jane. Jane Lynch, the inevitably hilarious performer whose appearances on shows as diverse as “Two and a Half Men” and “The L Word,” in the films of Christopher Guest and Judd Apatow, were always stellar if all too brief. Finally, she had landed a steady gig on a big show — the whole musical thing might not work, the young unknowns might turn out to be duds, but at least this crazy new show had Jane Lynch.
“Glee,” of course, went on to redefine “hit” and Lynch, finally, got her due: Not only did she win an Emmy last year, she’s nominated again, and hosting Sunday night’s ceremony.
But in the show’s down months, while everyone else took to the road with live shows, Lynch apparently stayed home and wrote her memoir, “Happy Accidents,” proving, once again, that there’s no predicting things in Hollywood.
Those expecting something like the breezy wit and easily excerpted essays that marked Tina Fey’s “Bossypants” or the bipolar fearlessness of Lynch’s own comedy will be disappointed. There’s plenty of fearlessness in “Happy Accidents” but it is of a much more straightforward variety. What Lynch has written, in simple declarative English, is a no-frills, plain-spoken memoir in which the “juicy” stuff — her struggles withalcoholism and her sexuality, the emotional and financial turmoil of a performer’s life — is related in the same calm, clear-eyed tone as the “boring” stuff — her loving family, her supportive friends, her happy marriage.
Tossing brand to the wind, Lynch is, for once, not going for laughs; she’s going for something remarkably close to wisdom.
A child of the American heartland (Dolton, Ill., a suburb of Chicago) circa the late ’60s, early ’70s, Lynch’s life has echoes of quintessential Boomerdom. Her father worked in a bank, her mother was a homemaker and as much as she loved and admired her, young Jane had no interest in such a life. She knew early on that she was different — for one thing she wanted to perform; for another, she liked girls. This sense of otherness was thrilling and terrifying, amping up the normal roller coaster of adolescence so that Lynch found herself embracing “the melodramatic potential of it all” and soothing herself with a lot of alcohol.
Beginning with a transformative experience in a high school production of “Godspell” followed by a theatrical arts degree at Illinois State University, an MFA from Cornell and a brief unhappy stint in New York, Lynch returned to Chicago. There, after landing a role in a local production of Shakespeare’s “The Comedy of Errors” that she quickly sabotaged — “The combination of being in a Shakespeare company and having an MFA from Cornell turned me into an even bigger more impossible pain in the ass than I’d been before,” Lynch discovered Second City and her calling in life — improvisational comedy.
“Happy Accidents” is, on one level, a straightforward, well-observed chronicle of Lynch’s life. She leaves Second City and gets a break playing Carol in the play “The Real Live Brady Bunch,” which becomes a huge hit. She drinks so much she finally decides to stop (replacing booze with NyQuil.) The show moves Lynch to New York, where she blows her sobriety and then ditches the NyQuil and joins AA, becomes obsessed with the Indigo Girls and yoga, and discovers the gay and lesbian community center. She moves to L.A., finds a good therapist and decides to come out to her parents who are, not surprisingly, not surprised. She gets a role in “The Fugitive,” does a one-woman show, meets Christopher Guest and is cast in “Best in Show.” Then comes “A Mighty Wind” and “The L Word,” a role as Meryl Streep’s sister in “Julie & Julia” and though she’s working all the time, she can’t seem to get one steady job until, of course, “Glee.” She finally really truly falls in love, wins an Emmy and gets to work with Carol Burnett, who wrote the foreword to the memoir.
There is name-dropping, but not a lot; praise for other performers but not a sickening amount. There is frustration over the difficulties of being a female performer who doesn’t fit the beauty ideal, of being praised but not hired, of being hired but not put on contract, but Lynch is not big on pointing the finger except at herself. Or at least at past versions of herself, when she isolated herself and then shivered in loneliness, pushed people away and then moaned about not being loved.
The only problem with “Happy Accidents” is the title — there’s nothing accidental about Lynch’s success as a performer and nothing accidental about her ability to tell this complex story with such refreshing simplicity. Just as she continued to put one foot in front of the other as a performer, she also did the necessary work to become the sort of person able to look back over a life that would drive many memoirists to hyperbole if not histrionics with astonishing perspective.
There is nothing salacious about “Happy Endings,” nothing incendiary or shocking, no moments of high drama or soul-rattling revelation. But it doesn’t need any of that because, of course, it has Jane Lynch.
from The Los Angeles Times