it's also how we got the episodes of Jerry Springer and Jenny Jones when they would bring the KKK guys on... Those were some good episodes

for a minute there, I read "Jerry Jones"

He's a straight up neo-Nazi who wore a suit and cleaned up his rhetoric just enough to be allowed on the news and for a hot minute in 2016-2017 mainstream news would have him on to talk about Trump and the alt right. Then the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally happened (where he was a headlining speaker) and he became persona non grata.





And here's the money shot.



But yeah what was being served by having this dude on the news? Everyone predisposed to not liking him wouldn't like him, but every idiot worried about immigrants or white people being marginalized would get someone put in front of them to potentially push them even further towards fascism. Which was exactly his plan.

Before he got deplatformed on YouTube and social media he had 1.4 million visitors to his Info Wars site every month. Afterward it dropped by half to 700,000. And that's not counting all the views he lost on all those social media sites.

Sure the "respectable" people were laughing but how many chuds started watching him? And Trump himself was always a laughing stock to many people but he still got elected and all the laughing changed nothing. If it hadn't been for covid Donald Trump would still be president. All the public scrutiny and fact checking never deflated his rise to power because he could just bull**** his way out of his problems, which is how the far right operates in general.

Thinking of these people as a joke and not an existential threat in need of removing like a cancer is precisely why far right figures are allowed to succeed despite their reputation. People thought Mussolini and Hitler were jokes. No matter how absurd they might seem and be they are a deadly serious threat who should be treated as such.

I'm glad you're so confident. We were confident with Trump in 2016. I wonder how many people were confident in Brazil or France?

Well, the Dallas Cowboys are known for their soap operas :D

True, but Jerry Springer, Jerry Jones, and the KKK sounds more like a sketch comedy.

Josh O’Connor, Paul Mescal Unite for Gay Romance ‘History of Sound’ From Oliver Hermanus

I'm a little ambivalent about straight actors who keep getting cast in gay roles. Mostly because I always feel they are not entirely convincing (probably the major reason why I wasn't completely sold on God's own country). I feel like casting maybe somewhat less talented gay actors in gay roles achieves more in terms of authenticity of feeling.

Although then there's the whole should we pigeonhole actors according to their sexuality argument.

The counter-argument to that is that gay actors have played straight roles in movies since time immemorial - not to mention in real life - so why not the reverse? Besides which, I think some straight actors have stated that playing a gay role has made them see the gay perspective more clearly. That can't be a bad thing.

An actor, after all, is someone who makes a profession out of pretending to be something they are not.

Sure, but it also may be that it's easier to play straight than to play gay. Maybe. Sometimes not very skilled straight actors might push the role into stereotypical camp which some people might find offensive, like with James Corden in The prom.

I certainly wouldn't make a big deal out of those kinds of things, it's just a preference.

I thought it was fantastic they cast an all gay cast in the recent film version of Boys in the band. I don't think it would have been the same experience had it been a straight cast.

There is a whole history of straights depicting gays in the movies. For a long time when it was taboo to come out of the closet, a gay person would be depicted as someone who was living a sinister type of lifestyle. I remember a movie, Advise and Consent, from 1962, where a senator (from Utah of all states), was threatened with a disclosure of his past. He confronted a person he supposedly had an affair with during the war in the seediest place you could imagine with something that sounded like Sinatra in the background. Long story short, the Senator was so worried that his wicked past would come out that he committed suicide. And this was a sympathetic figure; imagine all the characters that weren't played so sympathetically.


Later, when gay characters became more sympathetic in movies, straight people would still play them despite many of them being afraid their careers would be harmed by playing a gay person. Gay actors, of course, couldn't come out of the closet for the same reason. I think it began to change in the eighties a bit. Longtime Companion dealt with a group of gay men affected by the AIDS crisis. Most, if not all, of the main players were, in reality, straight, but they played the gay characters very well and with much dignity. I even became something of a Bruce Davidson fan from this movie (I especially liked his character). Of course, you could say Tom Hanks brought gay characters into the mainstream with Philadelphia, and I don't think people even think twice now when it comes to gay actors or characters (at least I hope so anyway).

I'm convinced "straight" people take gay roles to live out some sort of fantasy.