Gawker - Queer Eye for the Secret Baby

Like all game shows, 'Queer Eye' elevates people onto the stage, flatters them, and leaves them with a bevy of prizes.

It is easy to forget that, once upon a time, before the current content glut, before Queer Eye and RuPaul’s Drag Race and even before that one time on Thirtysomething when two guys had their shirts off in bed, there were approximately two gay men who regularly appeared on American television, and the joke was that they were never allowed to tell us. Charles Nelson Reilly and Paul Lynde sat at the top right and center of two popular game shows, pitching swishy one-liners and innuendos across the bow of a venerable format. They were, with rare exception, the most engaging raconteurs on their respective programs, Match Game and Hollywood Squares.

Today, we might call this “queering” — the application of a certain outré sensibility to an object or experience that is premised in some measure on the exclusion of that sensibility. In Gerald Ford’s America, however, queer was only an adjective, or when sneered, a noun, one that meant a person who was unwelcome. Particularly unwelcome on 1970s television were homosexuality and wit — Three’s Company’s conceit was that Jack was not, in fact, gay, and farce did not, in fact, need to be clever — and yet Reilly and Lynde proved to be two of the busiest actors on the small screen. Set against the vapidity of network programming, their unabashed nancing sparkled like water in the desert:

Brett Somers, the middle-aged woman who was Reilly’s usual seatmate on Match Game, wearing a dowdy velvet dress and gasping in mock disdain at his leisure wear: “Charles isn’t wearing any socks!”

Charles, looking directly into the camera: “Oh, we want to thank Shirley Temple for the use of her dress from Fairy Tale Stories.”

The thrill was partly aesthetic — Reilly typically sported an ascot, a sailor’s hat, and oversized glasses — but it derived also from the tension homosexuality elicited. Many of Lynde’s jokes depended on the implicit association of his manner with the fact that he fucked men and, moreover, the notion that fucking men was dangerous and exciting:

Peter Marshall, the host of Hollywood Squares: “According to The World Book, what’s the main thing we get from Honduras?”

Lynde: “You got it too?”

Just outside the frame of the television, simultaneously invited in and kept at bay by the bitterness that attended both men, was a lively nighttime world of furtive passes, cigarette holders, gossip, banter, gin, flirting, hangovers, excess. In a word, queerness.

"I don't know what I was thinking"

Grimes, although talented at many things — making music, posing for photos, and posting through it — is not very good at keeping a secret. The “Kill v. Maim” singer, who is on the cover of Vanity Fair this month, invited reporter Devin Gordon to her home in Austin to talk about her new album, Book 1. Things went off the rails almost immediately, when Gordon heard a crying baby upstairs. This was not the nearly 2-year-old X Æ A-12, Grimes’s known child with Elon Musk. It was Y, a baby girl that Grimes and Musk welcomed via surrogate in December.

In what is the most exciting moment in a celebrity profile in years, Gordon hears “what sounds vaguely like a lone cry from an infant upstairs.” When Gordon asks Grimes if there is a new baby in her life, the singer says, “I’m not at liberty to speak on these things.” Here is what happens next, according to Gordon, who deserves all the credit for this major scoop:

I suggest we pause for a moment to discuss the surreal professional ethics at play, which are that I can’t pretend I don’t know she’s got a secret baby with the world’s wealthiest man hiding upstairs. Especially when she invited me here. It’s a calming period that breaks with a sitcom punch line: full-blown infant screams upstairs, followed by the voice of a woman pleading SHH.

I’m sure you have questions (I know I do). I will now try to answer those questions to the best of my ability.

The much-lauded novelist returns to the topic of daughterhood

In Sheila Heti’s 2018 novel Motherhood, the narrator, as she wavers back and forth between her desire to procreate and her wish to stay as she is, remembers a scene from childhood, “sitting at the kitchen table with my entire family, and suddenly knowing that I would never be a mother, for I was a daughter — existentially — and I always would be.” She comes, in this sense, from a whole line of daughters; her own mother stayed “turned towards her mother,” and not toward her child. That our narrator is not a “mother” in the literal sense is not the only reason she is not a mother; even if she had a child, she would always be a daughter.

With her new novel Pure Colour, which focuses on its protagonist Mira’s relationship with her father, Heti has written another work concerned with daughterhood — existentially, to use her qualification. “To be a daughter is to be leaning, half,” Mira thinks to herself after her father dies. “To no longer be a daughter is to be a whole thing, an orb.” Yet Mira’s father’s death does not make her as whole as perhaps she thinks; without anybody left to pull away from, she’s not so much an orb as tipping over. In her grief, she retreats first into the pleasures of mindlessly playing games on her phone and then into a leaf.

Pure Colour is a book that’s in one sense very strange and in another not strange at all. It is a story about placelessness and grief and looming apocalypse told through mythical conceits. Human beings have three natures: bird, fish, and bear. Birds are lovers of art and beauty; fish prize the good of all; bears love only individuals. If you are a bird, you cannot make yourself comprehensible to a fish or a bear, who will view your retreat from public duty and personal intimacy as frivolous and hurtful, respectively. Poor Mira is a bird, her father is a bear, and Annie, a friend to whom Mira experiences a deep attraction, is a fish. The three of them live out their lives in God’s first draft of the world — the same draft in which we, too, live. One day a great disaster will end this draft and usher in the new one.

She’s obsessed

Queen consort Camilla Parker Bowles invited a British rowing team that crossed the Atlantic in record time to have a tipple with her and Prince Charles at their home on International Women’s Day. But could there be another famous thaw at work? According to Page Six, a photo of Charles’ estranged son Harry Markle and his wife Meghan, who left Britain to escape a toxic family situation (Harry’s family), is featured prominently in the home.

Can you find it?

I’ll help you.