Logo Brings Back The A-List; Gay Rights and Perceptions Set Back 1,000 Years: The Clyde Fitch Report

February 1, 2011

tags: Clyde Fitch Report, Logo, The A-List

The Brown Tweed Society is pleased to welcome new contributing partner Leonard Jacobs, Editor of The Clyde Fitch Report, who will routinely weigh in with news from the New York theater scene and ongoing arts issues.

I’m afraid this is going to be snarky.

Logo, according to the headline of a press release I received last week, “Greenlights More Drama with a Second Season of Hit Docu-Reality Series The A-List: New York.”

Ugh.

My powers of articulation are good, but I’m bereft of words to describe how much I detest quite a number of these cruel, loathsome, ultra-narcissistic boy-children who comprise the so-called “cast” of this so-called “show.”

If you haven’t yet been exposed to this TV virus, it’s meant as a kind of Real Housewives, maybe Homotopia, for the under-30 gay set. They’re rich and gaymous, as one piece I read put it.

They’re also some of the most hot-mess queens on earth.

One exception: Rodiney Santiago. In addition to being easy on the eyes, he seems like a decent person and I don’t get the sense, watching him, that he French kisses himself in the mirror each morning, and he’s the one guy on the show good looking enough to justify it. Would that his boyfriend, Reichen Lehmkuhl, who won the fourth season of The Amazing Race with an ex-boyfriend, who dated Lance Bass for 10 minutes and whose name makes me identify with the plight of Anne Frank, could disentangle himself from his vanity long enough to treat Rodiney like a human being.

The rest? Proof that some species evolve backward. They range from simpering, whimpering, catty, batty and awful to simpering, whimpering, catty, batty and awful — not to mention shallow, superficial and self-adoring to a point of total vomit from viewers with any stake at all in wanting to ensure positive role models for gay men. (Yes, Virginia, this is one of those posts.) For I don’t believe these guys represent much in the way of positive role models for anyone in the LGBT community. Sheboyan or Dubuque or Pacoima see them and all their stereotypes about the gays, even in 2011 — maybe because we’re in 2011 — are inflated up yet again like hot pink air balloons, as if these guys represent reality. As opposed to, say, reality TV.