6/17/2014 | Jezebel
VIDEO
From “Your son is going to end up in New Orleans wearing a dress if we don’t get him into therapy right away” to kicking ass on Orange Is the New Black, Laverne Cox talks about the long road from growing up trans in the South to making Mrs. Ridgeway’s prediction come true by lecturing at Tulane University on LGBT rights.
http://jezebel.com/watch-laverne-cox-talk-about-how-it-got-better-1592107984
6/18/2014 | The Huffington Post
“The Biggest Loser” trainer Jillian Michaels has spent her life whipping people into shape, and now she’s taking it all off for the pages of Shape magazine, revealing her own fantastically fit form.
Posing nude can be daunting — even for someone who spends as much time toning her body as Michaels — but the 40-year-old reveals that she finally feels like she’s come into her own.
“When I think back on my 20s and 30s, I look better now than I ever have. Yes, I’m older but I’m also wiser and that’s a more intrinsic type of beauty,” Michaels told the magazine.
Michaels, a mother of two children under the age of five, regularly works out, and tells the magazine that a fit body is about more than just looking a certain way.
“It’s important for women to have overall strength, because when you feel physically powerful, it transcends into every facet of your life,” she said. “My best reason for having strong arms is because I love to pick up my kids.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/18/jillian-michaels-nude_n_5507164.html?utm_hp_ref=email_share
6/13/2014 | The New York Times
George Takei sat in a V.I.P. room at the Waldorf-Astoria as a young makeup artist named Eryk Datura dabbed foundation on his brow.
“Are you a native of this city?” the 77-year-old actor asked him, in the booming basso profundo that helped make him famous, beginning with his role as the galactic helmsman Hikaru Sulu on “Star Trek.”
“I’m from Nashville,” Mr. Datura said.
Mr. Takei perked up. “Do you know the state senator from eastern Tennessee named Stacey Campfield?” he asked. “He tried to get a law passed forbidding teachers from using the word ‘gay’ in schools.”
He cracked a satisfied grin and continued: “On YouTube I said, ‘Well, if it’s going to be illegal to use the word “gay,” then you can simply substitute it with the word “Takei,” which rhymes with “gay.” And you can march in a Takei Pride Parade.’ ”
That brand of winking online activism is why Mr. Takei was honored last month by Glaad, the gay rights advocacy group. Since coming out as gay in 2005 at the age of 68, Mr. Takei has used his bawdy social-media persona to build a following far beyond Trekkies. To his seven million Facebook fans and million or so Twitter followers, he supplies an endless stream of viral diversions (like a photo of a road sign saying “Elevated Man Holes”), often accompanied by his pseudoscandalized catchphrase, “Oh myyy.”
Like Betty White, Mr. Takei has used naughty-oldster humor to fuel a late-career surge. But his ribaldry is often in the service of social causes, whether gay rights or Japanese-American visibility. In 2007, after the former basketball player Tim Hardaway said, “I hate gay people,” Mr. Takei responded with a mock public service announcement on “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” telling Mr. Hardaway, “Let it be known: One day, when you least expect it, I will have sex with you.”
He concluded, with a cackle, “I love sweaty basketball players.”
This month, Mr. Takei is to appear in gay pride parades in Seattle and Columbus, Ohio.
“The moment he came out, it was all engines go,” said Wilson Cruz, an actor who appeared on “My So-Called Life” and is a Glaad national spokesman. “He was on the ground, making his opinion known.”
His rebooted fame is likely to grow. A documentary about his life, “To Be Takei” by Jennifer M. Kroot, showed at the Sundance Film Festival in January and is to open in theaters in August. And he is looking for a Broadway home for “Allegiance,” a musical inspired by his childhood experiences in Japanese-American internment camps during World War II.
At the Glaad awards, he was accompanied by his husband, Brad Takei (né Altman), a tightly wound 60-year-old who serves as Mr. Takei’s manager. A self-described “control freak,” Brad is a bustling presence in “To Be Takei,” playfully bickering with his husband and acting as a Klingon when fans get aggressive.
As they walked into the hotel ballroom, he eyed Mr. Takei’s cocktail glass and warned, “George, you have to give an acceptance speech.”
“This is juice!” his husband protested.
The couple, wearing matching tuxedos, took their seats. Moments later, Boy George wandered over in a bright red fedora. He slung his arm around Mr. Takei and posed for a photo, saying, “It should be ‘Live long and saunter.’ ”
When it came time to receive the group’s Vito Russo Award for promoting gay equality (past winners include Ricky Martin and Anderson Cooper), Mr. Takei gave a speech mixing gravitas and gags. He ended with a call for equality “for all people, and especially young straight couples, because they are going to be making the gay babies of tomorrow.”
Given Mr. Takei’s cheeky advocacy, it is hard to believe that he came out publicly just nine years ago. For that, his admirers can thank Arnold Schwarzenegger, who, when he was governor of California, vetoed a marriage-equality bill. Watching the news on TV at home, Mr. Takei felt his blood boil.
“We agreed that I had to speak out, which meant my voice had to be authentic,” he said in an interview with his husband in their Midtown Manhattan apartment. (They also have a home in Los Angeles: “We are bi … coastal!”)
Brad added, “The fiction that I was only George’s business manager, that was getting kind of stale for us.”
The couple met in 1984, in the gay running club Los Angeles Frontrunners. Brad, who was working as a journalist for a trade publishing company, caught George’s eye during a jog around the Silver Lake Reservoir.
“For you, it was lust at first sight,” Brad recalled.
Mr. Takei clutched his hand: “You were my first hunk.”
By 2005, their friends knew they were a couple, but the decision to go public had unexpected perks. Mr. Takei got a call from Howard Stern’s SiriusXM radio show asking him to be a regular announcer. It was Mr. Stern who popularized Mr. Takei as a gay pundit and comic gold mine. On one show, he put Mr. Takei on the phone with Mr. Schwarzenegger to debate same-sex marriage, only to reveal afterward that it was not the governor, but an impersonator.
From there, Mr. Takei’s comeback snowballed. He played himself on sitcoms like “Will & Grace” and “The Big Bang Theory,” and he and Brad became the first gay couple on “The Newlywed Game.” That was soon after their wedding in 2008 at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles; Mr. Takei is a trustee. His “Star Trek” co-stars Walter Koenig and Nichelle Nichols served as best man and best lady.
Mr. Takei’s gay rights advocacy came after years of outspokenness on other fronts. By the time he revealed his sexuality, he had already dabbled in politics. He narrowly lost a race for Los Angeles City Council in 1973, and later served on the board of the Southern California Rapid Transit District. In 1981, he testified in a Congressional hearing, calling for redress for Japanese-Americans who had been in the internment camps.
Mr. Takei had made his way in Hollywood at a time when Asian actors were mostly relegated to playing servants or ninjas. His earliest film work was dubbing English dialogue for the Japanese monster movies “Godzilla Raids Again” and “Rodan.” Later on, he appeared in a pair of Jerry Lewis comedies, playing characters he knew were racial caricatures.
“Those were stereotypes, and I terribly regret them,” he says now, adding that his agent at the time (also of Japanese descent) urged him to take the parts.
But “Star Trek,” which had its premiere in 1966, offered something different: a chance to work with a multiethnic ensemble on a show that obliquely tackled hot-button issues like the Vietnam War and civil rights.
Sulu, Mr. Takei said, “was a groundbreaking character. I mean, there he was as part of the leadership team of the Enterprise, smart as a whip. In fact, he was the best helmsman in Starfleet, and he was an Asian driver!”
Throughout the series, Mr. Takei was careful not to indulge stereotypes. When a script called for Sulu to wield a samurai sword, he suggested a fencing foil instead.
But another part of his identity remained hidden. At night, he went to gay bars around Los Angeles, always terrified of a police raid.
“I immediately looked around at the exits where I could slip out and flee,” he said. “I couldn’t afford to be fingerprinted and photographed.”
Most of his “Star Trek” co-stars knew he was gay, but they were savvy enough not to say anything. He recalled Mr. Koenig nudging him on the set one day when a “drop-dead gorgeous” male extra in a skintight Starfleet suit was standing nearby.
“They knew,” Mr. Takei said. “Except for one. It went right over his head.”
The original “Star Trek” series was canceled in 1969, the same year as the Stonewall riots. Mr. Takei was aware that he was missing out on a movement, but as a newly unemployed actor, he couldn’t take the risk. When he went to parties where there were reporters, he brought “girlfriends.”
Nowadays, Mr. Takei’s life is less compartmentalized. Far from separating his ethnic history from his sexuality, or his humanitarian concerns from cat-video humor, he cross-pollinates them.
Three days after the Glaad awards, he and Brad took the train to Washington for another gala. It was an awards dinner for the Asian Pacific American Institute for Congressional Studies, and Mr. Takei was to give the keynote address.
This was far more sedate than the Glaad affair, which had culminated with Kylie Minogue singing on a table. Lisa Ling introduced Mr. Takei, who gave a joke-free speech about his internment experience.
By now, he is used to telling the story. One morning when he was 5, two men with bayonet-tipped rifles banged on his family’s front door in Los Angeles. The Takeis were taken to a racetrack and spent several months living in the stables.
“I remember thinking, ‘We get to sleep where the horses sleep,’ ” he said later.
From there, they were taken by train to a “relocation center” in the swamps of Arkansas. He ate in a noisy mess hall and bathed with his father in a communal shower. After a year, his parents were given a questionnaire asking if they forswore their loyalty to the Japanese emperor. It was a trick question, akin to “When did you stop beating your wife?” His father answered no, proclaiming: “They took our business, they took our home, they took our freedom. The one thing I’m not going to give them is my dignity.”
For that, the Takeis were labeled “disloyals” and moved to a high-security camp in Northern California.
“We started every school day with the Pledge of Allegiance,” Mr. Takei recalled. “I can see the barbed-wire fence and the sentry tower right outside my schoolhouse window as I recited the words ‘with liberty and justice for all,’ each word stinging with irony. But I was just a kid who mouthed those words.”
It was not until they were freed that he realized anything was wrong. Back in Los Angeles, the Takei family moved to Skid Row, and his father, who had gone to business college, took a job washing dishes. In school, one of George’s teachers called him “Jap Boy” (George was born in Los Angeles) and refused to call on him in class. He learned to bury his feelings of ostracism, making it easier to hide his sexuality once he realized he was “more interested in Bobby than in Jane.”
As a teenager in the ’50s, he began looking back on internment and grew angry, directing his rage at his father over the dinner table. He had been attending civil rights rallies, and told his father that he would have protested rather than go to the camps.
“My father said: ‘If I were alone, maybe I would have done that. But I had you, your brother, your sister and your mother to worry about,’ ” he recalled.
Decades later, George and Brad Takei were attending an Off Broadway show and sat behind a young musical-theater team, Jay Kuo and Lorenzo Thione. The resulting collaboration, “Allegiance,” is in part Mr. Takei’s way of making peace with his father, Takekuma, who died in 1979.
The musical is also why Mr. Takei took up social media. He registered his Facebook account as a promotional tool, but it quickly became a comedic outlet.
“I discovered that funny animal pictures — memes — would get a lot of likes and shares,” he said. (A small staff, called Team Takei, helps run his online presence.)
Now, his younger fans are as likely to know him from Facebook as from the Enterprise. At the dinner in Washington, Mr. Takei gamely endured a long line of photo seekers, some of whom splayed their fingers in the Vulcan salute. Brad looked on, uncertain when to enter the frame.
Mark L. Keam, a member of the Virginia House of Delegates, leaned in for a photograph, then asked Mr. Takei if he would come to Virginia to help campaign against its same-sex marriage ban.
“I would be happy to,” he said tentatively, unsure of his schedule.
Between courses, Mr. Keam checked his Facebook page. His selfie with George Takei already had 44 likes.
Laverne Cox has wanted to perform for as long as she can remember.
“Before I knew I was trans, I knew I was a performer,” said the actress, now winning raves for her role in “Orange Is the New Black,” the Netflix critical smash currently in its second season. She explained that while growing up in Alabama she would make speeches — winning a countywide competition in the 8th grade — performed in talent shows, and even choreographed dance routines. But when Cox came to realize she’s transgender, she also realized her route to an acting career would follow a specific path, working in nightclubs, even up until a year ago.
“The gender stuff really started to come up strong for me,”she said, in an interview with me on SiriusXM Progress. “I thought, okay, I can perform in nightclubs. That was never really my milieu, never really something that took off for me. I did work at a place called Lucky Cheng’s [in Manhattan] till about a year ago. I hated it. I never talked about it. I didn’t want anyone to know I worked there. It’s a drag restaurant. I’m not a drag queen. But a lot of trans women who perform find work within the context of drag because we love performing. And there’s not spaces for us elsewhere to perform. Historically, trans women and drag queens co-mingled a lot. And they still do in many spaces. And I love my drag sisters. So, that’s part of my history that is important for me to own. The moments when I was onstage and I was making people laugh and I had everyone’s attention —I loved that. I wanted to act. And I wanted to do more serious work. And I think I grew as a performer working there.”
Laverne Cox Discusses Working As A Performer In Nightclubs In The Past by SiriusXM News & Issues
Cox is undoubtedly that rare person in the acting profession who rode the wave of success while simultaneously being outspoken as an activist as well. For several years she’s been passionate as a transgender activist and blogger, pointing to the violence and societal indifference trans people experience. All the while, she pursued an acting career that took her from appearances in” Law and Order” and “Law and Order: Special Victims Unit,” to her own VH1 makeover series “TRANSform Me,” to “Orange is the New Black,” in which she plays Sophia Burset, a transgender inmate at a women’s correctional facility. Cox is also producing a documentary, “Free CeCe,” about CeCe McDonald, a transgender woman who spent 19 months in a men’s prison, convicted of manslaughter after she defended herself during an anti-trans attack. And last week Cox graced the cover of Time magazine, speaking as an advocate on behalf of transgender rights. She said she chooses the issues carefully about which she speaks out.
Laverne Cox Talks About Her Success And Orange Is the New Black by SiriusXM News & Issues
“I do make choices because I’m an actor first,” she said. “I make choices to speak in certain ways about certain issues. It means that I’m more measured and much more deliberate — that I make sure that I speak out about things that I’m really passionate about. That I’m going to embrace an issue, that it means a lot to me. I’ve had a lot to say about a lot of things. I don’t stop being who I am because I’m an actor. I have thoughts and opinions. And I do believe that trans people need to have spaces where we are treated in just ways. That our lives are in danger because of who we are. That we shouldn’t be fired from our jobs because of who we are, denied health care, bullied in schools because of who we are. And I think we need to figure out ways to talk about that.”
Laverne Cox Discusses Speaking Out On Transgender Issues by SiriusXM News & Issues
Cox’s advocacy for transgender people obviously gains a bigger platform as she becomes more successful. And while magazine covers were certainly something she dreamed about, her main goal and passion, she said, has been to act.
“I dreamed about it,” she says of this kind of attention in a series. “And I manifested it but I didn’t know that ‘Orange’ would be the vehicle. When ‘TRANSform Me’ happened, I was starring in that show and I was hosting it and I was co-producing it. And I honestly thought, I’m going to be a huge star, which I feel kind of embarrassed about saying now in public. And then it was huge flop. No one really tuned in. A second season wasn’t ordered. So I had to have a ‘come to Jesus’ moment and I reevaluated a lot of things in my life. I remember saying to my agent, ‘I want to act. No more reality. I don’t want to be a celebrity. I just want to act.’ And I found a new acting coach and I recommitted to that process and it really just became about the work. So I was hoping I would just work. I’ve dreamed about being on the cover of magazines, but my goal was to be a working actor.”
Laverne Cox On Her Role As ‘Sophia’ In Orange Is the New Black by SiriusXM News & Issues
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/12/laverne-cox-drag-nightclubs_n_5484874.html?&ncid=tweetlnkushpmg00000054
LGBT people in Japan need to fight for their own rights and they need to be a bit angry, George Takei said during his visit to Japan this week.
The California-born actor, who is of Japanese ancestry, recounted his own experiences as having felt both courage and anger when he publicly came out as gay and joined the equal rights movement for sexual minorities in the US.
Best known for his role as Lieutenant Hikaru Sulu in the television series ‘Star Trek,’ the 77-year-old is also a prominent gay and civil rights activist.
On a speaking tour to Japan and Korea organized by the US Department of State this week, Takei said he has noticed a growing LGBT movement in Japan and that LGBT people in Japan need to be a bit angry to fight for their own rights and make their society more equal, the Associated Press reported.
Takei was the guest of honor at a reception hosted by US Ambassador Caroline Kennedy and was attended by about 160 people, including Japan’s first lady, Akie Abe, who wore a rainbow LGBT pride pin. Abe became the first Japanese first lady this year to participate in a LGBT march.
He said that he was silent for decades due to fear of hurting his acting career which began in Hollywood in the late 1950s, at a time when Asians were rarely cast in American television shows and movies.
At the reception, Takei compared future society with a miniature Starship Enterprise given to him by Kennedy. He said that it is the perfect description to the occasion they were celebrating, ‘That is our Utopian future. This Enterprise is a metaphor of Starship Earth with all of its diversity – not only diversity of race and culture and history but also the unseen diversity of orientation, all coming together working in concert for a better future. And that is what we are doing here tonight.’
In an interview with The Korea Times this week, Takei shared that he has been politically active, having marched with Martin Luther King Jr during the civil rights movement in the 1960s and had also protested against the Vietnam War.
The actor however remained tight-lipped about his sexuality although he was out to his closest friends.
‘The irony is, at the same time I have been an activist in the political arena… I was silent on the issue that was closest to me,’ Takei told the Times.
It was only when then-California Gov Arnold Schwarzenegger rejected a bill legalizing same-sex marriage in 2005 that propelled Takei to speak up.
‘My blood was boiling but I was still silent,’ Takei said.
‘That night, [my husband] Brad and I were watching the late evening news and we saw young people pouring out on to Santa Monica Boulevard venting their anger and rage… I felt I needed to participate in that. To do that, my voice had to be authentic. So I spoke to the press for the first time and I blasted Schwarzenegger’s veto.’
Takei and his husband Brad Altman, who accompanied him on the trip, were among California’s first gay couples to obtain a marriage license when California legalized same-sex marriage in 2008.
George Takei: LGBTIs need to be a bit angry to come out and change things
5/14/2014 | OUT
Photo: Getty
In addition to reuniting on HBO’s The Comeback, Dan Bucatinsky and Lisa Kudrow have teamed up for a new inspiring web series, It Got Better, which will look at the other side of Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” viral campaign.
In parternship with Savage and L/Studio, the series will run for six episodes and feature a diverse group of LGBT celebrities, including Jason Collins, Tim Gunn, Tegan & Sara, and recent GLAAD Media Awards honorees George Takei and Laverne Cox.
“The series is a real passion project for me and Kudrow and Dan Savage,” Bucatinsky says of the series, which will run for the next six weeks.
The first episode stars Glee‘s Jane Lynch, who talks about overcoming her “affliction” and how New York’s piano-bar scene changed her life.
“My desire to play is stronger than my fear of rejection,” says Lynch. “Dealing with my sexuality as a young person started that balling rolling.”
Watch it now on L/Studio.com.
http://www.out.com/entertainment/popnography/2014/05/14/dan-bucatinsky-and-lisa-kudrow-launch-online-docuseries-it-got
5/14/2014 | Huffington Post
(Video)
An incredible new docuseries has hit the web that interviews out lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) celebrities as they share their journey to living freely and authentically as a reminder to the rest of us that it really does get better.
Launched by Lexus in collaboration with the It Gets Better Project, the “It Got Better” docuseries is a collaborative effort between actress Lisa Kudrow and actor and HuffPost Blogger Dan Bucatinsky with celebrities such as Tim Gunn, Tegan & Sara, George Takei, Laverne Cox and Jason Collins. This first episode in the six-part series features actress Jane Lynch and is hosted through the broadband channel L/Studio.
“I believe people come into our life — we draw our people to us,” Lynch shares in the above video. “Always keep your mind open, your heart open for those like-minded, like-hearted others. It doesn’t even have to be somebody else who is gay going through this, just somebody who is sympathetic. And they will come your way — you will find your people. And now I live in a world where I don’t give a shit if you have a problem with who I am.”
Check out the first episode in this incredible series above or head here to visit the L/Studio broadband channel.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/14/jane-lynch-is-gets-better_n_5325725.html
5/19/2014 | People
Jane Lynch plays strong and confident Sue Sylvester on Glee, but she wasn’t always as self-assured as the cheerleading coach she portrays on TV.
“For me, to be ostracized would have been the worst thing,” Lynch says in the new webseries It Got Better of struggling to accept her sexual orientation as a teen. “To be thought of as different and not accepted was a fate worse than death.”
Lynch admits that she felt different long before she realized she was a lesbian.
“I enjoyed doing boys things. The boys stopped wanting to play with me when I got to be about 10 and I had to fight to play baseball,” she says of growing up in a suburb just south of Chicago. “Every day, I didn’t know how I was going to be received because I would just hang out until I got to play. Deep down inside I knew that something else was going on.”
Eventually, when Lynch was 14, she learned the term “gay” and says she realized, “I’m the female version of that.” But she still struggled to come to terms with what she was feeling.
“It was almost like I had a disease I had been diagnosed. I had a journal and … I remember I wrote, ‘I am gay. No one can ever know this.’ And I went four blocks away and threw it out in somebody else’s garbage,” she says. “It led to a life of secrecy that I had to unravel.”
Now 53, Lynch looks back on her conflictions as a teen and uses her hard times to fuel her passions today.
“That persistence that kept me on the baseball field even when the boys didn’t want to let me play has served me,” she says in the webseries, which will also feature the stories of Tim Gunn, Orange Is the New Black‘s Laverne Cox, Tegan & Sara, George Takei and basketballer Jason Collins.
And Lynch hopes others can learn from her journey to self-acceptance.
“You are going to find something in you that is going to help you move on and make you a more extraordinary person,” she says. “And you’ll use that all through your life.”
http://www.people.com/article/jane-lynch-glee-gay-coming-out-lesbian-it-got-better
5/20/2014 | MediaBistro
Team One and Lexus have launched a new series on Lexus’ broadband channel L/Studio, entitled “It Got Better.”
“It Got Better” is a six-episode docuseries telling “the inspiring personal stories of a diverse group of LGBT actors, athletes and musicians including Jason Collins, Jane Lynch, Tim Gunn, Tegan & Sara, George Takei and Laverne Cox.” A collaboration between Team One, executive producers Lisa Kudrow and Dan Bucatinsky, and the It Gets Better Project (executive producers Dan Savage and Brian Pines), the docuseries just launched with its first episode, featuring Jane Lynch, star of Glee and, more importantly, Party Down. Lynch tells her story of growing up identifying more with boys, discovering her sexuality and treating it as something she was afraid her peers would discover, to finally embracing and accepting it and finding a supporting community. It makes for compelling viewing, well worth the time if you have six minutes or so to spare (yes, this runs a bit long), and a promising start to the “It Got Better” series, which has the potential to do a lot of good for struggling teens. We look forward to upcoming installments (especially from George Takei).
Credits and video after the jump.
(Video)
5/19/2014 | Jazebel
In a new web series, It Got Better, Jane Lynch described her personal journey from closeted gay kid to highly visible gay celebrity. It wasn’t easy.
Lynch grew up in Dolton, Ill., a suburb of Chicago, and says she was considered different from a very young age.
“It was almost like I had a disease I had been diagnosed. I had a journal and … I remember I wrote, ‘I am gay. No one can ever know this.’ And I went four blocks away and threw it out in somebody else’s garbage,” she says. “It led to a life of secrecy that I had to unravel,” the actress and comedienne admits.
“I identified more with boy things. I enjoyed dressing like a boy,” she says. “The boys stopped wanting to play with me when I got to be about 10 and I had to fight to play baseball.”
Is Jane Lynch the greatest creature living or dead e’er to walk the earth INCLUDING JOHN GOODMAN? It’s possible. It certainly seems possible. And I do not joke about John Goodman.
http://jezebel.com/jane-lynch-on-being-a-gay-kid-it-was-almost-like-i-had-1578768530