Glee Star Curt Colfer has paid his dues

Curt Colfer plays Kurt on Fox TV's Glee.

Sometimes when an actor plays a role, it is all made up from scratch. But for Glee star Curt Colfer who plays Kurt, his high school days were not one of bliss. Like so many teens, the combination of what he calls his "VonTrapp voice" and highly theatrical behavior did not always get a warm welcome in his conservative home town. “I actually was Kurt in ‘The Sound of Music’ a long time ago,” he pointed out.

Growing up in Indianapolis, Murphy sang in his church choir and immersed himself in musicals in high school and college. His mother was a beauty queen; his father was a semi-pro hockey player who was baffled by a son who requested a “Vogue” subscription when he was 5 years old, started ironing his own clothes at 7, and performed in his bedroom, holding a hairbrush for a microphone in front of a mirror.

“My dad would look at me and go, ‘What the hell? I don’t know who you are. How did you come out of me?’ He would say things like that,” Murphy said. He may not have understood his son, but he accepted him, even when Murphy revealed to him that he is gay when he was 15 years old.

In this short video, we see his interview with the Viewsters, and then there is an amazing clip of him singing "Roses Turn" from Gypsy.

Update on Glee and "Sneaky Gays"

The character Kurt (Chris Colfer) may find a romantic interest this Spring on Glee.
I've written a lot about Glee which has some great new episodes coming up, and here's a delightful promotional video to help get the next installments off to a rousing start. It has Sue Sylvester complaining how difficult it is to fit people in boxes these days.

Glee has one gay character the fourteen-year-old Kurt, played by Chris Colfer. Originally written so as to imply his being gay without actually saying the word, you can tell, just the way you can tell that Vin ("I come from the Harrison Ford, Marlon Brando, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino code of silence") Diesel is most likely straight.

Word has it that the new Glee episodes will find Kurt being more specifically gay as he enters into a relationship.



Meantime all is not a bowl of cherries as far as gay characters on tv. As few and far between as they are, they could get rarer still as the whacko right continues to punish equal treatment through whatever means they can. In Florida there is an effort to remove tax credits from films and tv productions in that state that feature homosexual characters. Half the world away, Malaysia is finally allowing the depiction of gays in films as long as they go straight before the film ends.

So it goes. The battle for equality is far from won.

Will "Glee" Attract the GLBTQ Audience?

It is always fascinating to see what programming attracts us to watch. The new series titled Glee on Fox seems to have done just that. My sense is that a show about our high school years, one that makes winners out of losers, strikes a chord with most of us. After all, high school is a lot like the bar scene, one in which only a select few achieve high popularity and real success.

Cory
Chris
Amber
The creators of Glee know what they are doing. Here's how they describe its creation: "From Ryan Murphy, the creator of "Nip/Tuck" and "Popular," comes Glee, a one-hour musical comedy (um, guys that is more like 43 minutes, with 17 minutes of commercials!) that follows an optimistic high school teacher as he tries to transform the Glee Club and inspire a group of ragtag performers to make it to the biggest competition of all: Nationals. Will Schuester, a young optimistic teacher, has offered to take on the Herculean task of restoring McKinley's Glee Club to its former glory. Everyone around him thinks he's nuts. He's out to prove them all wrong." Bla bla bla.

Jenna
Jayma
Dianna

You can see the pilot episode over at the Fox website and right now it is at the top of their offerings. I can hardly wait for Fall to see if the series holds our interest week after week. The kids are cute and lovable, the music is upbeat and the characters are all too familiar. Who knows, it might be a winner.

Kevin
Jessalyn
Mark

Oh, and one more thing. It is on one of the Fox channels, and if you are like me, you may block them from your cable or satellite selections along with the homophobic religious broadcasters in order not to be dissed constantly. I have to manually program this back in to see it.

Yeah, I am touchy about that stuff.