By Gary Barlow

Brokeback forgotten
So we all know how Hollywood liberals have poisoned our children’s minds and ruined America by, among other things, pushing “the gay agenda” at every opportunity, right?
Well, next time some homophobe brings up that tired old charge, just say two words: “Brokeback Mountain.”
As Adam Vary pointed out in an excellent essay in Entertainment Weekly last week, Hollywood has yet to even attempt to repeat the success of “Brokeback.” Since that groundbreaking film—which cost just $14 million to produce and grossed $178 million—not a single major Hollywood studio has made a movie with a gay theme.
This, mind you, is from an industry that’s so uninhibited about mimicking its successes that we’ve had about a dozen Freddys and watched Sylvester Stallone practically come out of the nursing home to get back in the ring.
Oh, well, there is a glimmer of hope—apparently gay director Gus Van Sant is set to start production of a film on gay icon Harvey Milk in January, with Sean Penn starring as the late gay San Francisco political icon. That could have 2009 Oscar all over it…and maybe send conservative Hollywood moguls yet another wakeup call.

The Dali’s ass movie
One small-budget production with a controversial gay theme has tongues wagging in Europe. Set to hit the screens soon, “Little Ashes” is about the widely rumored love affair between surrealist master Salvador Dali and dramatist/poet Federico Garcia Lorca.
Britain’s Sunday Observer detailed British screenwriter Philippa Goslett’s telling of the story, which posits that a sexually repressed Dali arranged to watch Lorca have sex with a female friend as a substitute of sorts for the sex he wanted to have—but couldn’t—with Lorca.
That interpretation is already causing controversy. Dali talked at length with numerous interviewers about his relationship with Lorca, who was killed in the Spanish Civil War at age 38. But Dali always claimed it was Lorca who came on to him and that he rejected the advances.
“He tried to screw me twice,” Dali told Alain Bosquet in 1969. “I was extremely annoyed, because I wasn’t homosexual, and I wasn’t interested in giving in. Besides, it hurts. So nothing came of it. But I felt awfully flattered vis-à-vis the prestige. Deep down I felt that he was a great poet and that I owe him a tiny bit of the divine Dali’s asshole.”
Uh-huh. Anyway, Goslett said she did a “huge amount of research” to get at the truth and called Dali “the real tragedy.”
“He was really haunted by Lorca for the rest of his life,” she said.

Fundamentalist leanings
The Catholic archbishop of Winnipeg was criticized by a former Iraq War hostage after his invitation to speak at a Catholic social justice conference was rescinded because he’s gay.
James Loney, who was kidnapped by Iraqi terrorists in Baghdad in November 2005, then rescued by the military four months later, has talked at length about how fearful he was that his captors would discover that he was gay.
“When I was in captivity I had to keep my sexual identity a secret,” Loney said, saying he was sure they would have killed him had they known he was gay.
Apparently, talking about that publicly has gotten him labeled as an “unrepentant, active homosexual” by a radical Catholic anti-gay, anti-abortion group, so Winnipeg Archbishop James Weisgerber told Loney over the phone last week that he was no longer welcome to speak at the conference.
“I felt that at the root it’s because I’m gay,” Loney told the Winnipeg Sun.
Loney added that being encouraged by the church, in essence, to go back in the closet reminds of him of how guarded he had to be about being gay while being held captive. I guess a fundamentalist is a fundamentalist is a fundamentalist, huh?

Creepy science
Finally, researchers at the University of Utah announced that they’ve figured out how to turn nematodes—tiny worms that live in the soil—gay.
The species has two sexes—male and hermaphrodite. The researchers switched a gene in the hermaphrodite worms’ nervous systems and made them behave like males.
“They look like girls but they act like boys,” the study’s lead author said in a statement.
And so mad science marches on. But don’t worry—as all the sex researchers have assured us, they’d never, ever, ever want to play around with people’s sexual orientation genes. It stops with the worms…really…trust them…