This little effort has been instructive. After years of feeling like Saturday Night Live had “issues” (which were consequently resulting in gay-themed sketches and characters that weren’t as sharp or funny as the could be, needed to be), I started SNL Homowatch in March. Almost immediately, I noticed a decline in the very sort of misfires and offenses that made me want to start this project in the first place. So: does keeping tabs make me realize that it wasn’t as out-of-hand as I thought? Or has SNL scaled back on the fag jokes? Hmmm. I’ll keep the project going until I decide. Let’s get to it; here’s a breakdown of the last two shows. (Oh, and, if you’re a newcomer to SNL Homowatch and are getting ready to leave a comment asking me to chill out, read this. Other installments are here, and here.)

Air date: 4/24/2010

Host: Gabourey Sidibe

Musical guest: MGMT

This show made me think about how infrequently there’s a black female host, but that’s an issue for someone else’s SNL watch.

Early on, the amazing Kristen Wiig brought back her delish Suze Orman impression for a sketch. It seems as though SNL has pulled back on making fun of gay men in order to fixate on lesbian jokes, notably with a recent spate of “ESPN Classic” sketches which feature masculine female athletes in the 1980s and two inept announcers, Pete Twinkle and Greg Stink (Jason Sudeikis and Will Forte), who break in to tout the sponsor, which is always a feminine hygiene product. SNL has become from fag jokes to vadge jokes. Improvement? Probably not very. Anyway, enjoy some Suze talking about cooze:

I love Wiig as Orman (who is an out lesbian), but I did notice how the lesbo jokes got thicker this time. I think it works here — it’s funny, with mildly ha-ha to sorta-lame references to “my temperature-controlled jacket shed” and “my crazy lesbian cat, kitty lang” and “my miniature horse, Meredith Baxter-Pony.” (”I wasn’t listening. I had a producer in ear yelling the WNBA scores in my ear. The good news is I just won 30 bucks from Cynthia Nixon.”) When she started talking about the women’s health pap-smear cruise, I dunno. Still, I give it a pass.

I don’t always hate SNL’s attempts to do gay. I think Bill Hader’s “Stefon” character, a new addition to “Weekend Update” was pretty close to brilliant:

Yes, it’s a horribly femmy stereotype of a club kid, but there’s something sorta right about it, especially the methy nervousness. It was made all the better by the fact that Hader couldn’t stop laughing, which made Seth Meyers laugh. “New York’s hottest club is Crease! Club promoter Tranny Oakley has gone all out and inside it’s just everything … lights, psychos, Furbies, screaming babies in Mozart wigs. Sunburned drifters in soap-suds beards!” Also loved: “The hot new club is called Wesh! Nine-year-old Tokyo pimp Ichi Yokiguro is back with a new hotspot that answers the question, ‘What?!’” You have to admit “Teddy Graham people” is funny. (”Where are guy has the stumpy arms but with the belly?”) “The things you describe,” Meyer told Stefon, “sound like visions a dying gay man might have under too many blankets.”

I give it a Gay+. I like Stefon almost as much as I liked Angie Ventura, the Bitch Pleazzzze blogger.

***

Air date: 4/17/10

Host: Ryan Phillippe

Musical guest: Ke$ha

Ryan Phillippe? Looking like he was covered in tan makeup, and chosen to host, obviously, because he sacrificed himself to the “MaGruber” movie.

Even less to examine here, Homowatch-wise. The vadge jokes continue apace in another “ESPN Classic” sketch. (Maybe this blog feature should become “SNL Vadge-watch” instead?) Phillippe and Wiig play steroidal female weightlifters (Olivia Newton Cougar Mellencamp vs. Sue Ferrgino) and the event is brought to you by the Today contraceptive sponge (”Put a baby-blocker in your lady locker!”; “Trying to avoid the stork? Well, use this vagina cork!”; “Can’t keep your legs shut? Well, put one of these in your front-butt!”). I only mention these skits because 1., the athletes are always a bit lesbionic and 2., they’re starting to increase the suggestion that there’s something going on between Pete and Greg, the announcers. We’ll keep note.

Other than that (does Ke$ha qualify for SNL Homowatch?), there’s not much to say. “Weekend Update” had one line about Huckabee comparing gay adoptions to picking out puppies, to which Seth Meyers said “Huckabee has no idea how awesomely gay men treat their puppies.” Also, “Weekend Update” had a brief encounter with an unctuous new Will Forte character, “Father Swimcoach Scoutmaster,” which is sort of self-explanatory and not a gay joke, but a pedophile joke. I hope everyone knows the diff.

Last Next-t0-last show of the season: Betty White on May 8. Now how gay is that?

Raving about Kim Severson’s delish new memoir, Spoon Fed, last week, I offered a free copy to a lucky person who would write me an e-mail and explain why they wanted to read it. I got a lot of responses but had to pick one. Couldn’t pick just one, so I’m picking two:

• Alan Zuschlag of Amissville, Virginia (yes, there’s a town called Amissville! Where something always feels a little …?)

and

• M’Lisa Kelley of Berkeley, Calif.

It was totally subjective, the most unfair contest in the world. Thanks to everyone who wrote in. Turns out, Kim needs no help whatsoever promoting Spoon Fed — the book is everywhere and is going to be a big hit. Nevertheless, it’s good to put some book karma out there.

Kim Severson, one of the New York Times’ best feature writers (I hope you’ve been reading all her great stuff, not only in the Dining In/Dining Out section but also on the front page once in a while), has a new food memoir out, called Spoon Fed: How Eight Cooks Saved My Life.

I got to read an advance galley, I got to read an advance galley, neener-neener!

It’s a trip! It’s funny, sad, warm — like a long, great dinner. In it, Kim tells the story of finding her way in the highly competitive snakepit of food writing, in the intense, hyperfoodie era of elevated American eating culture that really started to take hold in the 1990s and 2000s. It’s also about: growing up in a big family, growing up gay, and overcoming alcoholism. It’s told through the stories of eight women who helped Kim see the importance and wonder of good food. These include Marion Cunningham, Alice Waters, Ruth Reichl, Leah Chase, Rachael Ray and others, and especially Kim’s mom. As a bonus, each chapter ends with a thematic recipe.

I loved it because I don’t read a lot of food books — memoirs, recipes, manifestos, whatevs.  Since I haven’t read heaps of material about Alice Waters already, I’m a good target reader for Spoon Fed. I did love Bill Buford’s Heat, but most of the biggie bestseller food books pass me by, until or unless they become movies, like Julie and Julia.

[Tangent: Check out this piece in Newsweek, that posits (half-successfully, I'd say) that the publishing culture has a certain gender bias about food writing: Food books by women must involve emotion, eat-pray-love stuff as a rule. Food books by men, on the other hand, must be balls-to-the-wall, big cock, renegade cooking. Duh, yes, but also: Hmmmm.]

So what’s that you smell wafting from my blog oven? Smells like Hank’s trying to get you to buy one of his friend’s books again, doesn’t it? Well, yes and no. Kim and I are more friendlike, in the modern social-networking style, and we share a brilliant literary agent. Mostly I’m a fanboy.

But way before the Internet introduced everybody to everybody else, in ol’ 1995, Kim and I met at a very weird, sort of awkward National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association sub-committee meeting in Washington, DC.

Basically, the still somewhat nascent NLGJA started to realize that they had failed to recruit many members from the scary hinterlands. All the members were essentially centered in NY, LA, DC — whaaaa? Big shock. So they invited Kim, who worked at the Anchorage Daily News in Alaska (and helped invent this nifty little entertainment guide that was tall and narrow shaped, like half the size of a newspaper page), and me, back when I worked at the Albuquerque Tribune. We were asked to attend a weekend-long workshop session at a Dupont Circle hotel, where we would, in theory, help enlighten the big-city gays with ideas for outreach, recruiting, and meeting the needs of us yokel gays.

Kim and I were asked to give a presentation on “hip” ideas to attract the Gen Xers that the NLGJA so needed. We were a couple of gigglebutts. I’m sure we thought our presentation was hilarious. Now, according to the confessional parts of Spoon Fed, I am presented with the possibility that KIM WAS DRUNK THE WHOLE TIME. So what was my excuse? We bombed (no pun). Our major suggestion, which I still think that useless organization should implement, was to switch the L and the G in the acronym to NGLJA, so that the group could call itself “Negligee.” (Most people wound up calling it that anyhow. Gays are clever.)

I only remember two other things from that weekend, other than it was an utter waste of time: It’s where I met Ron Reason (a big plus); and it’s where Gail Shister hissed and snapped at me in front of everyone for having the gall to read the Post Style section during one of those endless planning meetings.

All of this happened almost exactly 15 years ago, because I was rescued from the whole affair by the Oklahoma City bombing. I left a day early and headed back to New Mexico, so I could then drive to OKC and get busy.

Annnnyhoo, Kim went onto increasingly bigger things — and I think she’s stayed in better graces with the Negligee people than I surely have. I’ve always admired her work on the subject of food, but in Spoon Fed I’ve discovered that I also love reading her on life and family, and especially on journalism and newsrooms and editors and such.

I dug this one part in her book where she writes about her arrival at the New York Times, which resonated strongly with me, because I am fascinated by those precious few people who jump to the Times and manage to carve out a voice and a writing style in a place that, let’s be honest, has an institutional tendency that discourages it.

But David Carr overcame it. Mark Leibovich has more or less done it, too. David Segal totally did it. Kim did it about five years ago, when she left what sounds like an incredible gig at the San Francisco Chronicle’s vaunted food section for a job at the Gray Lady.

I would not be able to do it. (And I’m not saying I was ever offered the chance to work at the Gray Lady, but I’m not NOT saying I was ever offered the chance to work at the Gray Lady — got it? That newsroom scared the bejeebus out of me, if I’m even saying I ever visited it while wearing a Hugo Boss suit. I don’t mean the pretty newsroom in the Renzo Piano building, I mean the old 43rd Street joint, which looked like it had been turned upside down, Poseidon Adventure-like — pipes and duct work and debris and corpses and Shelly Winters swimming by. Not that I was ever in there, because I’m not saying I even was in there in 2003 or whenever. Maybe, maybe not.)

Long story short (er, too late for that), I admire how Kim broke through all that Gray Lady culture and made a big name for herself. But it wasn’t easy, as she writes in Spoon Fed:

When I finally got down to work, the writing didn’t come easily. The breezy, straight-ahead writing style that had worked so well at the Chronicle was considered sloppy and sophomoric at the Times. The funny little asides and goofy structural gimmicks just didn’t fly. In the beginning, even the good stuff got killed. It wasn’t like anyone was ordering any major rewriting. Rather, there were so many editors, each shaving a little here, grinding off a bit there, that it was death by emory board. Explanations were awkwardly thrust into the middle of otherwise perfectly good, short sentences. Contractions were eliminated.

But mostly, I had lost my confidence, and it showed. My editors and friends back in California said I just didn’t sound like myself anymore. I had lost my mojo. …

Oh, reader, you already know how this chapter ends — she perseveres and triumphs, a hundredfold, a basket of perfect peaches, a plate of delectable cheeses, a life as crispy as as a fine plate of pommes fritte.

Ah, food. I loved the book, and I’d love to make some of the recipes in it.

Now let’s involve YOU. For a long time, I’ve always made it a policy to buy two copies of books written by friends — or people I just wish were friends. One copy is for me and one is for someone else. It could be you! Just send me an e-mail by April 25, 2010 to hank [at] hankstuever.com and give me a great reason why you want a copy of Spoon Fed by Kim Severson, and I will mail it to the best entrant, FREE. It’s not signed, but it’s definitely delicious.

Welcome back for another review of Saturday Night Live’s propensity to make jokes about homos. Click here for my reason for doing this and also, please think twice about telling me to lighten up, because I already have.

Anyway, this feature might soon have to snuff itself out. The Tina Fey episode was almost entirely void of gay jokes. There was just one that I caught (but feel free to chime in with others if you saw something I didn’t), and it was barely anything: In the sketch about Tiger Woods and the Masters tournament, Fey was playing a stripper/hooker who joined Jim Nantz for commentary and said “this is gay” about golf. Now, I am one of the few remaining people who actually think calling something “gay” is … sometimes funny, but always allowable. (I’m also still clinging to “retarded” to describe things that I think are … not performing at the corresponding intelligence level. Therefore SNL is often retarded and gay, but literally neither.)

Anyhow, to the show we go:

Air date: 4/10/10

Host: Tina Fey

Musical guest: Justin Bieber.

Okay, I need to blow some hard, here, for just a pause: If adults and adult-oriented late night shows like SNL had paid attention to a 16-year-old pop star when I was a teenager? I would have said it was gay and retarded. As a child, I looked to SNL to transport me away from Shaun Cassidy and the Bay City Rollers and all that childish junk. I wanted to see what grownups (even if they were in their early 20s) were laughing at.

So, Grownups of America: stop putting up with this shit. Stop reading vampire novels meant for middle schoolers. Etc., etc. This kid is DONNY OSMOND and DEBBIE GIBSON rolled into one package. You have been there and you have done this. No one over the age of 19 should be able to even know who Justin Bieber is, and more importantly, people should be embarrassed if they do. Keep this frosting on Nickelodeon where it belongs.

PS, and destroying the premise for my rant: Check out Lesbians Who Look Like Justin Bieber.

Anyway, the show, the show: Enough people have posted Fey’s Sarah Palin Network sketch. Especially here inside the Beltway, where we only laugh at SNL sketches that have something to do with Washington and/or politicians. I’ll skip it and go to something that I was even better: THE BROWNIE HUSBAND. Delve in:

I thought this was one of the better episodes in a long while, thanks to Tina Fey. Her Palin stuff was good, her opening was good, and her “Weekend Update” commentary was better than good.

So …

Looking back since the last Homowatch update, there were reruns with Sigourney Weaver, Jon Hamm, and Jennifer Lopez over the last few weeks. Those too were fairly free of gay jokes. There was this one awful little skit from the Weaver episode that aired in the 12:45 a.m. SNL wasteland, starring Fred Armisen as a nasty gay child who calls everyone “bitch.” Hold your nose and click play:

Where does this come from? What does it mean? Eh, who cares. But I’ll bet they try this character again. If SNL wants to do a funny sketch about a family who gets strange and queeny gay vibes from their child’s new best friend, that could be funny. You just have to try harder.

Next show: Ryan Phillippe. (He’s still around? What’s the movie tie-in? I dunno. If they’re taking requests for gay jokes, how about a make-out scene between him and Jason Sudeikis. Just because?)

The other night I went to the Black Cat to hear John Grant, who was the opening act for Midlake. Grant is a singer-songwriter who used to be in one of my favorite bands, the Czars. (I still recommend the Czars’ The Ugly People vs. the Beautiful People to anyone who ever asks what I like to listen to. It would be among my favorite albums ever, if I could even begin to make a list. It can most definitely be on the playlist while people wait around for my funeral service to begin.)

John Grant has one of the most beautiful singing voices on the planet, I think.

Janet Duckworth and I remember reading somewhere online that he really started singing when he was laid up in a hospital somewhere, in an empty ward, and could hear his voice echo off the tile floors and walls. I gather life hasn’t been easy on him, or else his songs wouldn’t be so awfully sad and broken — and it seems like his career should have gone better, but who’s career doesn’t?

He has a new solo record out, called Queen of Denmark. I bought it at the show. The songs are bolder and more playful than the Czars days. It has this sort of almost-Harry Nilsson quality of larkiness and bluntness to it, not afraid to be goofy or strange.

I don’t write about music for a living, and there’s a reason. I love a song on it called “Silver Platter Club,” which is a bitter apologia from us guys who aren’t very good at pleasing our fathers or anybody else, and we wonder how come we’re the ones who ended up short on confidence and can’t reach that happily oblivious state that blesses so many men who are good at being athletic, oblivious and cool. It starts with something unchangeable (”I wish that I’d been born with skin that turned to golden brown while at the beach relaxing in the summertime,” Grant sings) and then of course, there’s sports (”I wish that that I was good at football, baseball and lacrosse; darts and basketball and poker, golf and chess…”) And there’s this great, sing-along chorus:

I’m sorry that they didn’t hand it to me

On a sliver platter like they did for you.

I’m sorry that I wasn’t able to become

The man you think I should aspire to.

But it goes on. He sings:  “I wish I had the genes of Eduardo Verastegui / That I was effortlessly masculine as well. / I wish that confidence was all you could see in my eyes/ Like those interviews in locker rooms with talented sports guys …

I wish I had no self-awareness like the guys I know

Who float right their lives without a thought

That I didn’t give a shit what anybody thought of me

That I was so relaxed you’d think that I was bored.

This song is worth, like, three-and-a-half therapy co-payments. Happily, it turns out, Grant sings as well onstage as he does in a studio; and it also turns out he’s one of those beautiful people who probably thinks that he’s ugly people.

And it seems like he’s ready to sing lots and lots about his failed relationships with … men. (He has a song on the new album called “Jesus Hates Faggots” that’s pretty wowza; a couple others, such as the title track and “Leopard and Lamb,” feel like they might have been torn from a diary I wasn’t aware I’d kept in a long ago era of bad dating.) This gay angle first dawned on me when the Czars released an album of covers wherein Grant did not change the girl parts to boy parts, such as a ballad version of Abba’s “Angel Eyes” or in Nina Simone’s “Black is Color (of My True Love’s Hair).”

I take it from the seeming lack of gay indie hipsters at the Black Cat on Sunday (and I can always spot them a mile away) that this either hasn’t caught on with that niche crowd, or they’re not into it. I’ll tell you who’s also been overlistening to John Grant all these years, though. Richard McCann, that brazen so-and-so [hee-hee], waiting to talk to Grant after the show and getting him to autograph CDs, and then giving Grant a copy of his very good, very like-a-John-Grant-song novel, Mother of Sorrows. I mean, Marcia, Marcia, Marcia! (Would that I had written a sad novel to give to John Grant. Sigh. Unfortunately, I’m sure he doesn’t need a non-fiction book about suburban Christmas excess — although I will note here that Queen of Denmark was recorded in that curious, indie-rock incubator known as Denton, Texas, which is spittin’-distance from Tammieland! Same county, but utterly different worlds.)

Whatevs. I’m so not a reliable source on anything cool or gay or indie or live-music. The John Grant show and the Soft Pack show last week have been my first bar shows in an age. (Actually, Michael and I saw Dengue Fever at the Mint bar in L.A. on New Year’s Eve, but that was more of a flukey thing.) I would go to more shows, and hope to — at both shows, I couldn’t help recalling how many shows I used to go to, especially in Austin, where it’s what one must do. I feel ready to go back to the clubs and hear music. I forgot how happy it makes me, even when the songs are so sad.

The whole point of this entry? Thank you, John Grant, for years and years of drivin’ and cryin’.