Kristin Chenoweth did not write a letter to NEWSWEEK as AP's Sandy Cohen reported. In fact, the letter was never published in Newsweek! The AP reported a lie.

it is true that after Newsweek's controversial article written by openly gay Ramin Setoodeh, that stated that in his opinion as a gay man that gay actors can't pull off playing heterosexual, actress Kristin Chenoweth wrote these comments, but they were never published as a letter to the editor of NEWSWEEK, much too long for that. So the AP's Sandy Cohen misreproted that Chenoweth wrote a letter to Newsweek, implying that it had appeared in the magazine's print edition. It never did.

What Chenoweth did write was this, but it was NOT a letter to the editor of NEWSWEEK. It was more of a long note she sent off to Newsweek but it was not a letter to the editor.

She wrote:

Dear Newsweek,

As a longtime fan of Newsweek and as the actress currently starring opposite the incredibly talented (and sexy!) Sean Hayes in the Broadway revival of Promises, Promises, I was shocked on many levels to see Newsweek publishing Ramin Setoodeh’s horrendously homophobic 'Straight Jacket,' which argues that gay actors are simply unfit to play straight. From where I stand, on stage, with Hayes, every night — I’ve observed nothing 'wooden' or 'weird' in his performance, nor have I noticed the seemingly unwieldy presence of a 'pink elephant' in the Broadway Theater. (The Drama League, Outer Critics Circle, and Tony members must have also missed that large animal when nominating Hayes’ performance for its highest honors this year.)

I’d normally keep silent on such matters and write such small-minded viewpoints off as perhaps a blip in common sense. But the offense I take to this article, and your decision to publish it, is not really even related to my profession or my work with Hayes or Jonathan Groff (also singled out in the article as too 'queeny' to play 'straight.')

This article offends me because I am a human being, a woman and a Christian. For example, there was a time when Jewish actors had to change their names because anti-Semites thought no Jew could convincingly play Gentile. Setoodeh even goes so far as to justify his knee-jerk homophobic reaction to gay actors by accepting and endorsing that 'as viewers, we are molded by a society obsessed with dissecting sexuality, starting with the locker room torture in junior high school.' Really? We want to maintain and proliferate the same kind of bullying that makes children cry and in some recent cases have even taken their own lives? That’s so sad, Newsweek! The examples he provides (what scientists call 'selection bias') to prove his 'gays can’t play straight' hypothesis are sloppy in my opinion. Come on now!

Openly gay Groff is too 'queeny' to play Lea Michelle’s boyfriend in GLEE, but is a 'heartthrob' when he does it in Spring Awakening? Cynthia Nixon only 'got away with it' ’cause she peaked before coming out? I don’t know if you’ve missed the giant Sex and the City movie posters, but it seems most of America is 'buying it.' I could go on, but I assume these will be taken care of in your 'Corrections' this week.

Similarly, thousands of people have traveled from all over the world to enjoy Hayes’ performance and don’t seem to have one single issue with his sexuality! They have no problem buying him as a love-torn heterosexual man. Audiences aren’t giving a darn about who a person is sleeping with or his personal life. Give me a break! We’re actors first, whether we’re playing prostitutes, baseball players, or the Lion King. Audiences come to theater to go on a journey. It’s a character and it’s called acting, and I’d put Hayes and his brilliance up there with some of the greatest actors period.

Lastly, as someone who’s been proudly advocating for equal rights and supporting GLBT causes for as long as I can remember, I know how much it means to young people struggling with their sexuality to see out & proud actors like Sean Hayes, Jonathan Groff, Neil Patrick Harris and Cynthia Nixon succeeding in their work without having to keep their sexuality a secret. No one needs to see a bigoted, factually inaccurate article that tells people who deviate from heterosexual norms that they can’t be open about who they are and still achieve their dreams. I am told on good authority that Mr. Setoodeh is a gay man himself and I would hope, as the author of this article, he would at least understand that. I encourage Newsweek to embrace stories which promote acceptance, love, unity and singing and dancing for all!

Sincerely,

Kristin Chenoweth.


THAT ABOVE IS NOT A LETTER TO THE EDITOR OF NEWSWEEK. SORRY SANDY COHEN.

Straight Jacket
Heterosexual actors play gay all the time. Why doesn't it ever work in reverse?

By Ramin Setoodeh | Newsweek Web Exclusive
Apr 26, 2010
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The reviews for the Broadway revival of Promises, Promises were negative enough, even though most of the critics ignored the real problem—the big pink elephant in the room. The leading man of this musical-romantic comedy is supposed to be a single advertising peon named Chuck who is madly in love with a co-worker (Kristin Chenoweth). When the play opened on Broadway in 1968, Jerry Orbach, an actor with enough macho swagger to later fuel years and years of Law and Order, was the star. The revival hands the lead over to Sean Hayes, best known as the queeny Jack on Will & Grace. Hayes is among Hollywood's best verbal slapstickers, but his sexual orientation is part of who he is, and also part of his charm. (The fact that he only came out of the closet just before Promises was another one of those Ricky Martin-duh moments.) But frankly, it's weird seeing Hayes play straight. He comes off as wooden and insincere, like he's trying to hide something, which of course he is. Even the play's most hilarious scene, when Chuck tries to pick up a drunk woman at a bar, devolves into unintentional camp. Is it funny because of all the '60s-era one-liners, or because the woman is so drunk (and clueless) that she agrees to go home with a guy we all know is gay? (Click here to read Newsweek's response to Kristin Chenoweth)

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This is no laughing matter, however. For decades, Hollywood has kept gay actors—Tab Hunter, Van Johnson, Anthony Perkins, Rock Hudson, etc.—in the closet, to their own personal detriment. The fear was, if people knew your sexual orientation, you could never work again. Thankfully, this seems ridiculous in the era of Portia de Rossi and Neil Patrick Harris. But the truth is, openly gay actors still have reason to be scared. While it's OK for straight actors to play gay (as Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger did in Brokeback Mountain), it's rare for someone to pull off the trick in reverse. De Rossi and Harris do that on TV, but they also inhabit broad caricatures, not realistic characters likes the ones in Up in the Air or even The Proposal. Last year, Rupert Everett caused a ruckus when he told the Guardian that gay actors should stay in the closet. "The fact is," he said, "that you could not be, and still cannot be, a 25-year-old homosexual trying to make it in the ... film business." Is he just bitter or honest? Maybe both.

Most actors would tell you that the biographical details of their lives are beside the point. Except when they're not. As viewers, we are molded by a society obsessed with dissecting sexuality, starting with the locker-room torture in junior high school. Which is why it's a little hard to know what to make of the latest fabulous player to join Glee: Jonathan Groff, the openly gay Broadway star. In Spring Awakening, he showed us that he was a knockout singer and a heartthrob. But on TV, as the shifty glee captain from another school who steals Rachel's heart, there's something about his performance that feels off. In half his scenes, he scowls—is that a substitute for being straight? When he smiles or giggles, he seems more like your average theater queen, a better romantic match for Kurt than Rachel. It doesn't help that he tried to bed his girlfriend while singing (and writhing to) Madonna's Like a Virgin. He is so distracting, I'm starting to wonder if Groff's character on the show is supposed to be secretly gay.

This is admittedly a complicated issue for the gay community, though it is not, in fact, a uniquely gay problem. In the 1950s, the idea of "color-blind casting" became a reality, and the result is that today there's nothing to stop Denzel Washington from playing the Walter Matthau role in the remake of The Taking of the Pelham 1-2-3. Jack Nicholson, by the force of his charm, makes you forget how he's entirely too old to win Helen Hunt's heart in As Good As It Gets. For gay actors, why should sexual orientation limit a gay actor's choice of roles? The fact is, an actor's background does affect how we see his or her performance—which is why the Tom Hankses and Denzels of the world guard their privacy carefully.



It's not just a problem for someone like Hayes, who even tips off your grandmother's gaydar. For all the beefy bravado that Rock Hudson projects on-screen, Pillow Talk dissolves into a farce when you know the likes of his true bedmates. (Just rewatch the scene where he's wading around in a bubble bath by himself.) Lesbian actresses might have it easier—since straight men think it's OK for them to kiss a girl and like it—but how many of them can you name? Cynthia Nixon was married to a man when she originated Miranda on Sex and the City. Kelly McGillis was straight when she steamed up Top Gun's sheets, and Anne Heche went back to dating men (including her Men in Trees costar). If an actor of the stature of George Clooney came out of the closet tomorrow, would we still accept him as a heterosexual leading man? It's hard to say. Or maybe not. Doesn't it mean something that no openly gay actor like that exists?

TAKE THE COAL AND OIL OUT OF THE PICTURE NOW, OR THERE WON'T BE A PICTURE IN THE FUTURE AT ALL.

** If you care about a future sustainable Earth, go to http://pcillu1010.blogspot.com and do what you can to head off climate chaos in the coming centuries.

TAKE THE COAL AND OIL OUT OF THE PICTURE NOW, OR THERE WON'T BE A PICTURE IN THE FUTURE AT ALL.

** If you care about a future sustainable Earth, go to http://pcillu1010.blogspot.com and do what you can to

head off climate chaos in the coming centuries.





-----------

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL
May 13, 2010
''While the Senate Fiddles''


You don’t have to look far for proof that the USA must cut its dependence on fossil fuels and develop cleaner sources of energy.
It can be found in the oil-slicked Gulf of Mexico. It can be found in China’s aggressive efforts to win the global competition for green technologies and green jobs. And, most urgently, it can be found in the inexorable math of accumulating greenhouse gas emissions.
And where is the Senate? After a year of talking, utterly nowhere. Paralyzed by partisanship, hobbled by indifferent leadership, it is unable to muster a majority (much less a filibuster-proof 60 votes) for even a modest energy and climate bill.
Senators John Kerry and Joseph Lieberman presented a good but far from perfect bill on Wednesday that would at least point the country in the right direction. For the first time, it would set a price on carbon emissions that are now dumped without penalty into the atmosphere. A price signal is an essential prerequisite for reducing emissions and for shifting American industry to cleaner, less polluting sources of energy.
The measure would also invest widely in low-carbon technologies, renewable fuels, more efficient transit.
The two senators (originally three, until Lindsey Graham jumped ship) have worked hard to fashion a worthy companion to a similar measure passed by the House in June of last year. They deserve thanks. Yet the bill has no chance unless President Obama steps up.
Mr. Obama pledged to “engage” with the Senate to pass a comprehensive energy and climate bill “this year.” This was one of those ticket-punching statements that isn’t going to change any minds. What he should have said is that he is going to hammer on the Senate until it does what this country needs.
Mr. Kerry and Mr. Lieberman doled out all sorts of rewards to various industries to bring them aboard, and the bill has been endorsed by several big power producers, including Duke Energy. But Republicans remain unanimously opposed and Democrats from industrial states are not enthusiastic.
Getting the Senate to act is not just a matter of leadership for Mr. Obama. It is also a matter of honor and sound science. At the Copenhagen climate conference in December, the president — who did much to rescue that meeting from failure — committed this country to a 17 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020.
That is the target in the Senate bill and the bare minimum that scientists believe is necessary to get the United States on track toward reducing its emissions by 80 percent by midcentury — which it must do to help the world avoid the worst impacts of a warming planet.
Despite industry pressure, the bill preserves much of the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulatory authority to reduce emissions from power plants. And on Thursday, the agency issued a rule saying that it planned to address only the biggest emitters. But while the E.P.A.’s authority is important, Congress must still act. A broad market-based scheme would be much more effective than a patchwork of regulations.
The United States is the world’s second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases after China. Until America moves seriously to control emissions, the big developing countries will not do so. As Mr. Obama knows well, all senators like to imagine themselves as world leaders. Well, here’s his chance, and their chance, to lead.

Dear Editor, TIME magazine: re your recent faux obit of Leslie Buck, alleged designer of the Anthora (sic) Coffee Cup

Dear Editor, TIME magazine

Re: "Leslie Buck" (May 17): There is no documented proof that the late Leslie Buck actually designed the Anthora (sic) coffee cup, as your obit writer Alexandra Silver writes, cribbing her "facts" verbatim and directly from Margalit Fox's New York Times obit a week earlier. In addition, while TIME says the name came from the way Buck mis-pronounced the word Amthora, a type of Greek vase, other published accounts online for anyone to see -- if they had properly researched their article before publishing it -- say the word was a typo in a 1963 magazine article about Greek vases that Buck's paper cup firm copied without fact-checking. Maybe TIME should have done some fact-checking, too.

-- Signed
Tempest in A Coffee Cup
NEW YORK CITY
via email

Is Alexandra Silver the pen name or nom de blume of Margalit Fox, or it this another Leslie Buck faux obit?

Leslie Buck

By Alexandra Silver
TIME MAGAZINE OBITS WRITER, aka ''Margalit Fox'' - apparently, [same person?

May 17 issue


Even those whose caffeine loyalties lie firmly with Starbucks are probably familiar with New York City's iconic blue, white and gold Grecian-style coffee cup. It's as much a symbol of New York as the Empire State Building, and no doubt the city's landscape would have been less colorful if it hadn't been for Leslie Buck, the man behind the Anthora. He had no formal artistic training, but Buck, who died April 26 at 87, designed the "We are happy to serve you" cardboard cup in the 1960s. Born Laszlo Büch in what was then Czechoslovakia, he survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald before moving to the U.S., where he eventually worked for the Sherri Cup Company. Buck's creation--inspired by the city's many Greek-owned diners and whose name reflects Buck's pronunciation of amphora, a type of ancient Greek vase--became ubiquitous. Today, however, the true Anthora is made only by request. The many knockoffs produced over the years serve as a testament to the original's appeal.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1987595,00.html#ixzz0nu8tUwFV
===================================


Tempest in a coffee cup?

Dear Editor, TIME magazine

Re: "Leslie Buck" (May 17): There is no documented proof that the late Leslie Buck actually designed the Anthora (sic) coffee cup. In addition, while TIME says the name came from the way Buck mis-pronounced the word Amthora, a type of Greek vase, other accounts say the word was a typo in a 1963 magazine article about Greek vases that Buck's paper cup firm copied without fact-checking. Maybe TIME should have done some fact-checking, too.

-- Dan Bloom

ANTHORA COFFEE CUP FOLLOW UP: A top newspaper columnist in the USA writes: "I have recently been in correspondence with a muckraker bottom of the coffee cup troublemaker

ANTHORA COFFEE CUP FOLLOW UP: A top newspaper columnist in the USA writes: "I have recently been in correspondence with a muckraker bottom of the coffee cup troublemaker who has presented a significant amount of information which suggests that the late Leslie Buck may, in fact, not have been the alleged creator of the legendary Anthora (sic) design.
... I attempted to secure the services of Maury Povich for a "You Are Not the Father" segment, however that effort was fruitless and may result in the issuance of a restraining order. So, in the interest of fairness, please make a mental not to insert the words "reputed and disputed" prior to any reference to Buck as the "creator" of the Anthora (sic)."

Lovelock Tells BBC That Mankind Cannot Save Gaia - But Notes That Polar Cities Might Serve as Climate Arks to Save Humankind from Complete Extinction (Survivors of climate chaos in 2500 AD or sooner can serve as breeding pairs in the Arctic, according to Lovelock (1919 - 2015) and climate visionary Danny Bloom (1949 - 2032)

Christine Lepisto, in Berlin, notes:

James Lovelock, the scientist who put forth the Gaia Theory, has told the BBC it is too late for us to save the planet. According to Gaia Theory, the entire Eaarth is a single organism, connected and interactive. Only just over a month ago, Lovelock called for authoritarian intervention while questioning whether humans are clever enough to respond correctly to the complexities of global warming.

In this newest interview, the perpetual pessimist seems to have made his peace with the inevitable, perhaps even with the end of mankind (though not the planet). With typical intellectual acuteness, Lovelock delivers some thought provoking observations on the evolution of science, on climate modeling and on human responsibility in the face of a warming planet. We may not embrace what he says, but we must understand it.

Lovelock's opinions over several decades have often challenged the status quo and frequently angered or annoyed both friends and foes. But quite often, his predictions have proven accurate. The messenger merits attention...but is this the right messsage?

Lovelock reviews the earth's history of maintaining homeostasis even as temperatures jolted through various peaks and troughs:


We are forcing it to move to one of the bit more stable states, which is a hot state. And once it starts moving, it takes charge and things will start to happen. It will put gases in the air, like methane and carbon dioxide, in huge quantities...far larger than we put in. And when that takes place, then it warms up.

Lovelock exculpates mankind, noting that we did not know what we were doing. But we have "pulled the trigger," and the implications of what has been done are only now becoming clear to us.

Lovelock may not be right about the door to action slamming closed. But his observations on two other points hit center target. First, he notes the history of global temperatures is not a smooth curve. The predictions of climate models naturally rely on statistical projections that can only foresee relatively smooth curves. One thing is certain: the planet will not warm in the ways our models predict.

This observation does not make the models worthless. They are one important tool in our attempts to understand our environment. But they are crude and simple tools, nothing compared to the complexity of the real Gaia system. We must not let hubris blind us to the potential failings of our simple science.

On the topic of science, Lovelock spells out one of the greatest tragedies for anyone enamored of the objective search for truth:


It used to be a vocation... You did it almost as a calling. You had your own discipline and rules of behavior. When I started science, most scientists would consider it a sin against the Holy Ghost to fudge data. But the moment that it became a career job, which it did during the last century, then... if you are under pressure, and your job depended on your producing the right results, you tended to adjust the data...to fit what your bosses wanted.

If democracy fails to address the challenges facing mankind, it will be because the public cannot trust the evidence and admonitions of those with proof. The loss of science's reputation may be a small tragedy in the face of the potential devastation of civilization as we know it, but it is the seed of downfall. Even when he drives us crazy, Lovelock gets it right. Again.




Comments (6)




Lovelock may not be right about the door to action slamming closed


Oh I think he is. At least when it comes to preventing the climate from changing.

Why? Because a system as large and complex as the earths climate will have such a huge inertia that by the time you see it move it's already too late.

We may be able to mitigate how far it pushes and maybe even deal with the worst of the fallout if we start now but we should give up on the illusion that we can still fix what we have broken.
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stueysplace 2 days ago

You say: "In this newest interview, the perpetual pessimist seems to have made his peace with the inevitable, perhaps even with the end of mankind (though not the planet)."
I think the word pessimist may be a bad choice. If getting rid of the humans will help the planet survive and possibly make way for a new species then perhaps we should call him an optimist, or at very least a pragmatist.
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stueysplace 2 days ago

Anyone who has been paying attention to the details of climate change will know that Lovelock is right on the money.
The only difference between he and I is that he leaves room for the slim possibility that a few of us will survive. I don't. The Inhofes of the world will make sure of that. (I like to think of a denier or skeptic as a Senator Inhofe.)