The emotional videos feature lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) celebrities sharing their journeys of accepting their sexual orientation to let others know it does get better.
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.”
She knew something was going on. But it wasn’t until she was 14 that she realized she was a lesbian.
After high school and college, she moved to New York to attend grad school at Cornell University, and started to be more open about her sexuality.
Now 53, the Glee star hopes her journey can inspire others to accept themselves.
For decades, LGBT youth have faced hardship and today is no different: Thousands of children and adolescents in the United States are struggling with their sexual orientation and/or gender identity/expression.
In an ongoing effort to address this societal concern, the It Gets Better Project, as established by columnist and author Dan Savage, strives to inspire young people facing harassment and intimidation. The staggering number of bullied, LGBT young people inspires the It Gets Better Project to create a personal way for supporters everywhere to tell LGBT youth that despite the current adversity in their lives, it does indeed get better.
Recently, Lexus launched “It Got Better,” the newest series on broadband channel L/Studio. With this new docuseries L/Studio once again has the opportunity to back another passion project from the creative team of Lisa Kudrow and Dan Bucatinsky, who produced the channel’s popular and award-winning “Web Therapy.” Currently in its sixth year, L/Studio hosts an eclectic collection of original films, live-action shows, documentaries and comedy programs designed to engage a discerning, inquisitive audience—outside of the traditional automotive encounter. The Lexus-owned broadband channel also includes original work from the worlds of art, culture, design, science, entertainment, architecture and beyond.
The six-episode docuseries is a collaboration between Kudrow and Bucatinsky and the It Gets Better Project (Dan Savage and Brian Pines). It tells the inspiring personal stories of a diverse group of LGBT actors, athletes and musicians including Jane Lynch, Jason Collins, Tim Gunn, Tegan & Sara, George Takei and Laverne Cox.
“It Got Better” establishes a pithy, yet truly heartfelt connection between LGBT celebrities and the video’s audience. Insightful personal accounts from the most recognizable faces in the LGBT community provide a way for young people and adults alike to experience the unparalleled victory that is self-acceptance.
Growing up as a LGBT person is all too often a bleak existence. So many young/queer people, dissatisfied with their current situations, can only hope for the day when life gives them a break. Happiness becomes a rare commodity only accessible through coping mechanisms, and visions of a utopian future consume most other thoughts.
“It Got Better” is so necessary and innovative in that it validates there is indeed a light at the end of the tunnel. The messages expressed through each video are just as inspiring as the individuals being interviewed and the perspectives gained are both unique and remarkable.
The first “It Got Better” episode features “Glee” star Jane Lynch and can be viewed here.
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.
TIME magazine unveiled its 11th annual “Time 100 Most Influential People in the World” issue on Thursday, with major — and controversial — figures from music, movies and the political world filling up a large portion of the list.
Superstar Beyonce Knowles-Carter is on the cover of the popular issue, and subsequent inside covers feature actor Robert Redford, Jason Collins, the NBA’s first openly gay athlete, and General Motors CEO Mary Barra.
TIME
Other honorees include actress Amy Adams, Amazon founder and The Washington Post’s newest owner Jeff Bezos, Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Pope Francis, actress Christy Turlington Burns, potential presidential candidate and grandmother-to-be Hillary Clinton, Secretary of State John Kerry, Late Night host Seth Meyers, country singer Carrie Underwood, “Happy” singer Pharrell Williams, Russian President Vladimir Putin and singer Miley Cyrus, making it possibly the first time Putin and Cyrus have had something in common.
TIME
The “TIME 100” list is intended as a roundup of those who have inspired others in one way or another over the past year, regardless of their moral standing.
Each honoree is profiled in a piece authored by figures as notable as those being featured.
TIME
In this year’s issue, Malala Yousafzai wrote about Hillary Clinton, Amy Poehler took on Seth Meyers, Gov. Chris Christie authored politican Scott Walker’s profile, and Dolly Parton wrote about Miley Cyrus.
The TIME 100 issues goes on sale Friday, April 25.
EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. — The genesis of this Nets team can be traced to last May. Forty-nine regular-season victories were quickly rendered meaningless by an inglorious first-round playoff elimination.
After the Chicago Bulls, depleted by illness and injury, bullied the Nets in Game 7 at Barclays Center, General Manager Billy King lamented that his team lacked a hard edge, a willingness to hit back when struck. It was not a unique assessment.
Jason Kidd, the new coach, watched every Nets game from last season, and he noted during his introductory news conference that the team’s identity was “just vanilla.”
To those who experienced it, the Nets’ short playoff run left a bad taste that required compelling changes.
“The guys that were here last year that were a part of that loss, that Game 7 loss, still feel that, still remember that,” Deron Williams said. “We don’t want to have that feeling again. We feel like when we made the moves we made this summer, that we had a chance to win the championship, and we still feel like that’s attainable.”
The Nets’ off-season personnel decisions — a trade to get Kevin Garnettand Paul Pierce and free-agent signings like Andrei Kirilenko and Shaun Livingston — were unequivocal responses to that postseason collapse.
The Nets were chasing talent, of course, but on top of that a certain pedigree and attitude. The time has come to put their makeover to the test.
As they approached their playoff opener on Saturday afternoon against the young and talented Toronto Raptors at Air Canada Centre, the Nets were touting their own experience, their maturity and mental fortitude, and their résumés.
“Youthfulness is a funny thing,” Garnett said. “When you’re playing off energy and momentum, adrenaline, when all that wears down or when all that goes out the window, now it’s time for you to start using what you know. And if you’ve never experienced that, then you’re just playing basic basketball. It’s a different level of intensity, a different level of concentration.”
Garnett added: “Some can withstand it for 48 minutes. Some can’t.”
No player in the Raptors’ expected starting lineup — Kyle Lowry, DeMar DeRozan, Terrence Ross, Amir Johnson and Jonas Valanciunas — has started a postseason game. The Nets’ projected starters, on the other hand, will enter the series having accumulated 381 postseason starts.
For a week or more, there will be a compelling dichotomy on the court. The Raptors are saying they can use their speed and young, fresh legs to undo the Nets’ defense. The Nets think they have more experience weathering stressful situations.
“We brought in guys who have won championships, so they know what it’s like to be in this type of situation and doing these battles night in and night out,” Williams said.
The Nets have struggled at times playing the second of back-to-back games. The teams split the season series, 2-2, and both Nets losses were in such situations. Johnson and other Nets players noted that there were no back-to-back games during the postseason, meaning it would be easier to keep legs fresh.
Few teams were as openly dismissive of the 82-game regular-season slog as the Nets. From the preseason, the talk was of a trophy. When they struggled early, they said the first half of the season did not matter. They rested players in bunches over this last week, not worrying about momentum.
As a group, they were conceived for this moment.
“We have had our ups and downs, our trials and tribulations,” Pierce said. “We’re ready.”
Furler, who refused to pose for a photograph for this article, recently appeared on the cover of Billboard with a bag over her head.CreditIllustration by Jenny Morgan, based on a photograph by Cindy Ord/Getty Images.
Sia Furler walked into the Silver Lake studio 10 minutes late, ignoring the 22 keyboards and six guitars and giant speakers on her way to the blue velour sofa in the back. There she pulled a MacBook Air from her white Goyard bag and called up “Living Out Loud,” a song she had just started writing. As the music played, Furler began scat-singing: “Ha-ha-ha-ha!”
And: “Oooooo!”
Then: “Hooooh!”
Before, finally: “Haaaaaaaaaaa!”
It was a sunny Los Angeles morning in early March, and Furler, who is 38, was dressed in a white tank top and capri pants with a blue, long-sleeved shirt tied around her waist. Furler usually wears her lightning blond hair in a bob that’s somewhere between Anna Wintour and Deborah Harry, but this morning it was tied in a loose braid. And though she is slight and barely 5-foot-5, her ability to sing in an eerie high register, like Merry Clayton on the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter,” makes her seem much taller. She and Greg Kurstin, a producer and writer, quickly settled into a familiar routine in which she sang and gave short instructions — “that’s nice”; “that’s emo” — and he followed with big, ringing, gospel-sounding chords on his Steinway. Within minutes, they coalesced in the form of a pop song.
“Is that a chorus?” Furler asked. “That feels like a chorus.”
“Yeah,” Kurstin replied.
She scat-sang more gibberish: “Mananananan-m-dah! M-dah!”
“Now we’ll do a harmony on top.”
“I need to write,” Furler said. She hunched over her laptop and started typing, turning her gibberish into real words, which she simultaneously sang over the piano.
Pop hits these days usually have at least two or three writers, and the choruses are generally celebratory — “victim to victory,” as Furler put it. For some, this process can still be soul-wrenching and endless, but Furler has no patience for that. In recent years, she has become a one-woman hit factory, working with Kurstin and others to write songs for artists like Christina Aguilera and Beyoncé. And her hits — including Flo Rida’s “Wild Ones” and Eminem’s “Beautiful Pain” — seem to roll off something of a pop-music assembly line. Furler wrote Rihanna’s “Diamonds” in 14 minutes. After the D.J. David Guetta invited her to write the melody and lyrics for one of his songs, she futzed around on the Internet and pumped out “Titanium” in 40 minutes. (It has since been downloaded more than 3.7 million times.) After 45 minutes in the Silver Lake studio, Furler finished “Living Out Loud” and declared it perfect for Brooke Candy, a new singer-slash-rapper she described as a “feminista glam alien.”
Furler’s instinctive style can seem a little hasty. When she looked up from her laptop, she told me she wanted to crank out another single, which she hoped to record before Kurstin’s 1 p.m. commitment. Her inspiration, she said, was a word that popped into her head a few days earlier — “polygraph” — and soon enough she was two-finger speed-typing lyrics on her MacBook Air as Kurstin worked on a bass line, adding percussion and effects, all recorded via multicolored horizontal bars of Logic software on his desktop iMac. Within minutes, she had taken a stab at the chorus. (“If you love me/I gotta ask you/would you take a polygraph?”)
At first, Furler, who has a loud Australian accent, sounded sort of like Adele. But as she filled in the alto vocals, the song resembled something by a soul-pop girl group, like Destiny’s Child, the old Beyoncé vehicle. Finally, as she bent her knees and rose up for the high notes, free-throw style, the song became anthemic — full of love and loss and all that other stuff in the big, overly simple way that sounds great on the radio. “Oh, this is so good,” Furler said. “Rihanna’s gonna do this. I can feel it.”
Many hired-gun songwriters enter the business as failed pop stars. Linda Perry, whose band 4 Non Blondes had one big single in the ‘90s, has made a fortune writing pop hits like Aguilera’s “Beautiful.” Max Martin, a Swedish studio whiz, left his metal band, It’s Alive, after it failed to take off. Furler, however, had the chance to be a rich and famous star herself. In 2005, when she was known simply as Sia, her tense-but-evocative piano ballad “Breathe Me” appeared in the final scene of “Six Feet Under,” the HBO series, as each of its lead characters aged and died on-screen. “Breathe Me” became an instant viral sensation — U.S. sales of the single reached 1.2 million — and her manager, David Enthoven, tried to leverage the song’s success in conventional music-business fashion, starting with a tour.
Furler, however, was uncomfortable with the prospect of becoming famous. “It’s horrible,” she told me over tuna salad and coffee at a cafe after the studio session. “I just wanted to have a private life. Once, as my friend was telling me they had cancer, someone came up and asked, in the middle of the conversation, if they could take a photograph with me. You get me? That’s enough, right?” She also became increasingly dependent on alcohol and drugs, and soon enough, effectively sabotaged Enthoven’s plans: Furler demanded to bring her two tiny mutts on tour, which would require renting an extra bus; she also refused to do “promo,” an obligation nearly every performer must endure, like showing up for on-air glad-handing at radio stations and submitting to numbing shifts of 15-minute phone interviews. As her addictions deepened, her behavior became increasingly dark. She eventually dressed herself and her band in masks and black costumes so crowds couldn’t see their faces onstage. In May 2010, Furler contacted a drug dealer and ordered “two of everything,” she says, except meth and heroin. She held on to her stash and contemplated taking everything at once. Months later, she was writing a suicide note.
‘It’s easy to get away with getting high, because everybody’s drinking on the road.’
Fortunately, a friend inadvertently called in time to intercept her plan, and Furler began a 12-step program. Around the same time, she also made an important creative choice. She replaced Enthoven with Jonathan Daniel, who suggested Furler try writing songs for other singers. At first, the idea was a bit desperate. “I didn’t know she could write pop songs,” he says, “because she’s kind of a quirky artist.” But Daniel explained to Furler that she didn’t have to put herself out there as personally as she did on “Breathe Me.” He described what he called “high concept” songs — the industry trick of coming up with a word or phrase that works as a simple, poignant, bankable metaphor, like the Katy Perry song “Firework.”
Spotting a piggy bank on a table, Furler asked him: “So I could write, ‘I’m not your piggy bank’?”
“Exactly,” Daniel said.
Writing for others allowed Furler to hide in plain sight for years. Her songs have sold more than 25 million copies, but in June, she will release her first solo album since 2010, “1000 Forms of Fear.” The first single, “Chandelier,” which came out last month, is starting to appear on Top 40 playlists. For Furler, who refuses to appear on the cover or in her video, the album presents another chance at making it on her own. The question is whether she can be a pop star without suffering for it.
Pop music has always relied on behind-the-scenes songwriters — like Jimmy Webb and the team of Gerry Goffin and Carole King — but technology and social media have amplified their power. In an era when the major labels want to prevent leaking and piracy, there is a market for speed and volume, and plenty of well-paid opportunities for writers who can pump out a hit in 14 minutes. In only a few years, in fact, Furler has reached the highest echelon of contemporary songwriters, up there with Dr. Luke (Kelly Clarkson’s “Since U Been Gone”; Taio Cruz’s “Dynamite”), Martin (the mastermind behind many of the Backstreet Boys-‘NSync-Britney hits of the late ‘90s) and Bonnie McKee (Britney, Katy, Ke$ha, etc). Despite being uneasy with fame, Furler has turned out to be deeply comfortable with her world-famous stars. She has also embraced the lifestyle, going to meditation workshops at Demi Moore’s house and making international travel plans via text with Katy Perry. As we left Kurstin’s studio, she climbed into her black Lexus 450 hybrid and declared, half-sarcastically, “I’ve only recently become a baller.”
Photo
Some of the artists for whom Furler has written songs. Clockwise from top left: Beyoncé, “Pretty Hurts”; Britney Spears, “Perfume”; David Guetta, “Titanium”; Rihanna, “Diamonds”; Ne-Yo, “Let Me Love You (Until You Learn to Love Yourself)”; Flo Rida, “Wild Ones.”CreditTop, left to right: Frazer Harrison; Mark Davis; D Dipasupil. Bottom, left to right: Frederick M. Brown; Angela Weiss, all for Getty Images. Rihanna: Francois Guillot/AFP/Getty Images.
Furler lives in Echo Park, a trendy neighborhood north of downtown L.A., with a rear living-room window overlooking Hollywood. (She’s building an addition in back that will soon be larger than the house itself.) The place is modern and modular, with white walls and white trim, and when I say I like her retro Northstar refrigerator, she says, “This is the refrigerator that David Guetta built.” She gestures toward the large pictures in her den, including a charcoal portrait of herself titled, “Sia in the Morning,” and a bizarrely funny self-portrait of Lee Materazzi, the photographer, wrapped in a rug underneath a piano bench. “This is the artwork that Flo Rida built,” she says.
Furler prefers to be detached and cheeky about how she earned it all. Several times during our interview, she repeated the phrase “I can’t believe I got away with it,” referring to what Alex Macpherson, the pop-music critic, calls “these vague, inspirational, cliché ballads.” This type of music would have seemed deeply out of place on one of Furler’s five hyperpersonal, bohemian and soulful albums. And she certainly never aimed to write these “victim to victory” ballads when she was starting out. After all, Furler was born to an artist and teacher, Loene Furler, and Phil B. Colson, a blues guitarist known as Philby, in Adelaide, Australia. According to him, their family life was a creative idyll, filled with hippies and feminist musicians, living in “connubial bliss,” at least until the unmarried couple split and he moved to Sydney when Furler was 10.
Furler didn’t have much of a relationship with her father after he left, but she had a natural gift — that voice — and wanted to follow him into the business. In 1993, when she was 17, Furler was working at an Adelaide cafe when she happened upon Crisp, a local hip-hop/soul band along the lines of the Roots. “I’ll be your singer then,” she told a guy she knew in the band. When she showed up at rehearsal, Jesse Flavell, Crisp’s founder and former guitarist, recalls, “she opened her voice and we all kind of stopped in our tracks. And we all felt, O.K., this is going to work.” It was also clear, however, that Furler did not have the extroverted persona of a natural performer. She relied on booze to help get her through live shows, and her alcoholism eventually intensified, years later, after she left the band, when her boyfriend was run over and killed by a taxi in London. (Furler’s mother broke the news the day before she was to fly and visit him.) Almost nobody knew about these personal demons when Furler later hooked up with Zero 7, a British trip-hop duo who developed a dedicated following in the late ‘90s but lacked a lead singer. Furler sang memorably on a few of their albums and caught the attention of a couple of Hollywood music supervisors who would later pitch “Breathe Me” to the producers of “Six Feet Under.”
Trying to become a pop star is not for healthy people, or sick people who want to be healthy. The hours are irregular, the sleep is intermittent and the drugs and alcohol are plentiful. Furler began to realize she had an addictive personality. Whenever she quit drinking, she would invariably become hooked on raw food or Nutella. And after she was given a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, she took antidepressants and painkillers, including Xanax and OxyContin, and eventually became addicted to those too. “I was in the back lounge, high on Xanax and alcohol, watching every episode of ‘E.R.’ from the beginning,” she said of her years on the road. “When you’re in a different place every day, there’s this kind of madness that sets in. It’s easy to get away with getting high, because everybody’s drinking on the road. None of my friends thought I was an alcoholic, and neither did I.”
When she eventually sobered up, after her suicide attempt, Furler found that her struggles were oddly valuable in her second career. She excelled at one of a pop songwriter’s main jobs: connecting with impossibly famous, needy people. She was a natural at listening to stars talk about their own insecurities and quickly turning those feelings into catchy hits. Furler and Aguilera, a fan of Zero 7, clicked in the studio after she helped the singer write four songs, including “All I Need,” about her son, Max. “She’d sit and have a mini-therapy session with Christina,” says Sam Dixon, who co-wrote and produced the songs. “I would leave the room. That was secret ladies’ business.” Britney Spears, who worked with Furler on “Perfume,” among other songs, also felt a close connection with her. “I fell in love with the way she looks at life,” she says. “There is a bit of darkness somewhere in there, but it doesn’t come across in a frightening way.”
Last August, Lea Michele, a star of Fox’s “Glee,” requested that Furler help her record songs for her debut album. Michele wanted to write one personal song about her co-star and boyfriend, Cory Monteith, who died the previous month of a toxic combination of alcohol and heroin. During the two hours they spent together over coffee at a Los Angeles studio, she spilled out the story to Furler, who took notes, then played Michele a work-in-progress song on her iPhone. Michele began to sob on the sofa, and Furler eventually wrote “If You Say So,” based on the young star’s feelings. “Maybe it was because I have a dead boyfriend, too,” Furler said later, offhand, while recounting the moment. Then she paused, no longer cheeky. “Maybe I have some shame around it,” she said. “Maybe I’m embarrassed because I’m writing something so cheesy. Then something like that experience will happen, and I’ll realize maybe I’m not as stupid as I thought — and maybe people aren’t as stupid as I think. It occurs to me that there is value to what I do.”
When we first met, Furler immediately blurted out that she had scheduled one of our interviews during a pizza party she was planning for her friends in order to “avoid intimacy” with me. I knew that she was freaked out by the idea of talking to a reporter, but Furler’s defensiveness or anti-fameness, however omnipresent, belies the fact that she is reflexively intimate. As we prepared for the pizza party, she started talking, casually, about her failed suicide attempt. She was sitting in her New York apartment on a September day, she recalled, watching “Real Housewives” on Bravo, when she thought she needed something “to relax.” Furler had been sober for a few years then, but she decided it was time to take the drugs she bought months earlier. Her plan was to check into a fleabag hotel around the corner and ingest every pill she had. She wrote a vague note to her dog walker, she said, and another note to a hotel manager requesting an ambulance: “I’ve killed myself and I don’t want you to have to suffer seeing my dead body.” When her friend called, though, she thought better of it.
Despite her success, despite her new famous collaborators and friends, despite the fridge that David Guetta built, Furler still isn’t comfortable with fame. She refused to pose for a photograph for this article and recently appeared on the cover of Billboard with a bag over her head. But the 12-step program encourages people to “share,” she says, and she now tries to be more open about herself. As I dusted mushrooms and Furler washed kale in the sink, she said she spent five years not talking to her dad, who she believed was jealous of her career. At one particular point, she says, she offered to sing backup on the album he had been working on for more than a decade, and he snapped, “It’s my record, and you’re not on it.” (Colson denies this.) A few years later, Furler wrote him a series of resentful letters, including one asking why he moved away when she was 10.
Eventually, though, Colson came around to admitting to his daughter that he was not proud of his behavior. “I wasn’t really a rock ‘n’ roll drug addict or anything, but I would go out and do gigs and stay later and have some bourbon and Cokes, or maybe smoke a hash joint or something,” he told me. “And the next day you have to come down off that — I might be a bit dark and sullen.” Over the last two years, father and daughter have reunited and now speak frequently. “In my sobriety,” she said, “I have discovered that the people I love, and who hurt me, were sick like me.”
The pizza party was low-key — 20 of her friends, including Patty Schemel, the former drummer for Courtney Love’s band, Hole, showed up. No wine was served. But at some point Furler mentioned that her style of high-speed songwriting had replaced her other addictions — drugs, alcohol, Nutella, etc. “Focus,” she said. “Workaholism. That’s my new jam.” It came out in a half-serious way, but she seemed to mean it; writing songs, even in 14- or 40-minute bursts, was a serious attempt to open up, to “share.”
The new album, “1000 Forms of Fear,” undeniably reflects an older vintage of Sia, with sadder, brutal lyrics that are far too violent and introspective for Top 40 radio — a result, perhaps, of her own internal “secret ladies’ business.” But it also displays elements of Furler the pop-anthem writer, and many of the songs, like “Eye of the Needle,” are built on a simple metaphor. Furler’s gigantic voice, full of emotion and empathy, makes every sentiment sound, well, like going from victim to victory. Furler might have invariably called these kinds of songs “cheesy,” but I could tell she wasn’t ashamed of them anymore. Now it seemed as if she truly knew their value.
“You don’t really need to get married, but marriage is awfully nice,” the 73-year-old said. “Everybody I know who got married, they say it really makes a difference. They feel very very happy about it.”
“With the concept of marriage, I’ve been a little too flippant and I’ve said things like, ‘I was hoping the gay community would come up with a better idea than imitating heterosexual marriage,'” she told Between the Lines last September.
“But no, I know plenty of people who married and who are pleased about it and are happy,” she continued. “I guess if we had any kids, it would mean something more. Neither of us is religious, so that means nothing to us. I’m proud and happy for it, for people who want to be married. I suppose symbolically it would’ve been nice if we had gotten married for anybody who’s interested.”
The “Malibu Country” actress’ sexuality is not something she has ever chosen to publicly broadcast. In 1975, Time magazine offered Tomlin a cover if she was willing to come out in the issue. Even though some fans wanted her to do it at the time, she explained to the Advocate in 2009 that she wasn’t “interested in being typed as the gay celebrity.”
President Obama gives his next State of the Union address on Tuesday.
1/27/2014 | Advocate.com
After a joint fundraiser for the Democratic Party last year, it was already clear that Michelle Obama had hit it off with Jason Collins. Now Collins will be among the first lady’s special guests during the State of the Union address this week.
The White House this morning announced Collins will be among those seated in the box with the first lady and Dr. Jill Biden — a spot often used to honor Americans whose example the president wants to highlight. A news release touted Collins as the first man to come out in major pro team sport and recalled President Obama saying he “couldn’t be prouder” of Collins.
For her part, Michelle Obama tweeted congratulations when Collins’ news first broke. (“We’ve got your back!” she wrote.) And the first lady unloaded praise for Collins when both appeared at the Democratic National Committee’s LGBT Leadership gala in New York’s Upper East Side held in May.
“Jason, we are so proud of you,” she said during the event. “We are proud of your talent, your character, your courage, and we are so proud. He has just made the difference in the lives of so many of our young people. So let’s give one more round of applause to our friend, Jason Collins. We love you so much, Jason.”
Collins was equally as complimentary, according to an ABC News report. He said the first lady is “a steadfast champion for LGBT families” and that she and President Obama send the message that “the most important thing that defines a family is love.”
April Bloomfield (born 1974), is a British chef best known for holding a Michelin star at two restaurants, The Spotted Pig and The Breslin. She had previously worked at a number of restaurants in the United Kingdom, including The River Café and Bibendum.
A native of Birmingham, England, April began her culinary studies at Birmingham College. From there, she went on to hone her craft through cook positions in various kitchens throughout London and Northern Ireland, including Kensington Place and Bibendum. It was under the guidance of Ruth Rogers and Rose Gray at The River Café where she learned to appreciate the beauty and simplicity of food.
Before moving to New York, April spent the summer of 2003 in Berkeley, California at the legendary Chez Panisse. In February 2004, April and restaurateur Ken Friedman opened New York City’s first gastropub, The Spotted Pig. Under April’s direction, The Spotted Pig has earned one star from the Michelin Guide for seven consecutive years, and since 2010, April & Ken’s The Breslin Bar & Dining Room also earned one star two years in a row in the esteemed guidebook. As Food & Wine Magazine’s ”Best New Chef,” April continues to receive widespread attention for her food. In fall 2010, she and Ken opened The John Dory Oyster Bar, which joined The Breslin at New York’s Ace Hotel and earned a glowing, two-star review from the New York Times. April’s first cookbook, A Girl and Her Pig, was published by Ecco in April 2012.
Chef Bloomfield is also noted for achieving the highest score of any single challenger in Iron Chef America history, accomplishing the feat during her 56–53 victory over Michael Symon in 2008.
A Day in the Life of Chef April Bloomfield
Famous for her New York gastropubs, the English chef is going global with a San Francisco eatery, a PBS series and a forthcoming cookbook devoted to vegetables
10/10/2013 | The Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304213904579093573862146500
CHEF APRIL BLOOMFIELD’S New York City gastropub the Spotted Pig is known for its famous investors, Jay Z and Bono among them.
So it should come as no surprise that Bloomfield and her business partner, Ken Friedman, acquired their newest restaurant in San Francisco with some celebrity help: When Sean Penn discovered that one of his favorite watering holes, Tosca Cafe, was closing its doors, he rang up his pal Friedman, who immediately began hatching plans to take over. After a summer-long kitchen renovation, Tosca reopens this month. With it, Bloomfield, 39, returns to her Italian cooking roots—a style that most Americans, blinded by the beauty of the burgers she serves at Michelin-starred the Spotted Pig and the Breslin Bar & Dining Room, likely aren’t aware she has.
Bloomfield’s rise to fame began at age 16, when she missed her deadline to apply to the police academy and opted to enter cooking school in her native Birmingham, England. By her late twenties she was crafting risottos and raviolis at the renowned River Cafe in London, where fellow Brit Jamie Oliver also cut his teeth. There, Friedman and Mario Batali discovered Bloomfield while searching for a chef for the Spotted Pig. She apprenticed at Alice Waters’s Chez Panisse in 2003 before making history the following year by introducing New Yorkers to their first gastropub: “the Pig,” as it’s known. Bloomfield now presides over four of the city’s most popular kitchens, having opened the Ace Hotel’s John Dory Oyster Bar in 2010 and Salvation Taco earlier this year.
As if all that weren’t enough, this month Bloomfield will also be featured on the PBS travel-cooking series The Mind of a Chef, which took her from New York City to Sarasota, Florida, and back home to England. On October 26, she’ll participate with 40-plus chefs from around the world in Cook It Raw, a chef’s summit in Charleston, South Carolina. And next summer, she’s set to publish her second cookbook, A Girl and Her Greens, the vegetable-heavy antidote to her glowingly reviewed A Girl and Her Pig.
While Bloomfield was working to get Tosca off the ground, she lived out of her suitcase at Hotel Zetta, eating poached-egg breakfasts and morning buns at her favorite local eateries and rolling up her sleeves to do everything from inspect her new restaurant’s custom-made white-enamel Viking stove to befriending the town’s top butchers.
Ted Allen (born May 20, 1965) is an American writer, cookbook author, and television personality. He was the food and wine connoisseur on the American Bravo network’s television program Queer Eye and has been the host of the TV cooking competition series Chopped since its launch in 2009. He regularly appears on the Food Network’s show The Best Thing I Ever Ate and other television cooking shows. He also will host another Food Network show, “America’s Best Cook,” debuting on April 13, 2014. He is a longtime contributing writer to Esquire magazine, the author of two cookbooks,
He is author of The Food You Want to Eat: 100 Smart, Simple Recipes (Clarkson Potter) — a collection of vibrant, all-natural dishes — and recently released In My Kitchen: 100 Recipes and Discoveries for Passionate Cooks. He also co-wrote the New York Times best-seller Queer Eye for the Straight Guy: The Fab Five’s Guide to Looking Better, Cooking Better, Dressing Better, Behaving Better, and Living Better.
Since 1997, Ted has been a contributing editor to Esquire magazine, where he writes about food, wine, style and everything else the American man needs to know. He was a finalist for a National Magazine Award for his Esquire feature on the little-known phenomenon of male breast cancer. Ted also writes for such publications as Bon Appétit and Food Network Magazine. Before joining Esquire, Ted was a senior editor and restaurant critic at Chicago magazine.
Ted volunteers his time to several national and local charities. The year 2011 marks his fourth year as spokesperson for Dining Out For Life, an annual fundraiser held on the last Thursday in April in which more than 3,000 restaurants donate a portion of the day’s proceeds to local AIDS service organizations. In 2010, Dining Out for Life raised more than $4 million in 50 cities in the United States and Canada. Ted also serves on the Culinary Council of the Food Bank for New York City and emcees GMHC’s annual Savor fundraiser.
Allen is openly gay and lives in New York City with his partner of 20 years, Barry Rice. On June 26, 2013, he announced that he was engaged to Rice. On July 30, 2013, the two were married in New York City.
Education:
-Purdue University
B.A. in Psychology (1987)
-New York University
Science and Environmental Reporting Program
M.A. in Journalism
In the Media:
Ted Allen, Chopped Host, Gets Engaged to Longtime Partner After DOMA Decision
7/27/2013 | US Weekly
