cookiegirl

I return from the abyss! The internet has finally come back to me after 4 days of separation. It's one thing not to have it if I'm away on holiday, but when I'm at home and have nothing to distract me, it's the only thing that keeps me sane some days, so I'm so relieved to be reunited. 

It did come at the price of a fairly hefty call-out fee for an engineer from the service provider, which we were instructed was the next move after buying new filters etc which didn't make any difference. However, considering all we needed was a different type of modem - which is apparently by far the most common problem, and was the first thing the engineer tried during his approximately 2-minute sojourn in our flat - I'm not sure why they couldn't have sent one out by post like I've just heard my mum's service provider did for her when she was having issues. I could - and probably will - ring up or email and try to get the call-out fee waived, but it's a lot of hassle and it might not work. AND I JUST WANT TO GO ON THE INTERNET FIRST.

*clings to laptop*
*hugs f-list tightly*
*gazes hopefully at the suspicious-looking site that's currently slowly loading up White Collar, fingers crossed*

I'll be catching up on your entries and some fics I've been meaning to read, so prepare to be commented upon! 

Oh, and I've just got myself a hc_bingo postage stamp for the amnesty challenge that's currently going on. Two of the prompts are ones I'd probably avoid on a bigger card, but I hope I can think of something to write anyway. Buffy would be a good fit, probably, though I don't really feel like writing anything except Peter and Neal at the minute! We will see :)

WILD CARD	apocalypse
loss of limb / limb function	taking care of somebody

Today has been a day filled with frustration, and disbelief that this is 2012 and we are still having to deal with this insanity.

This afternoon I read leonie_alastair's post alerting me to Bret Easton Ellis' Twitter tirade on why Matt Bomer is too gay to be cast in Fifty Shades of Grey. You can read his tweets on his Twitter page, or read the reports on the controversy at Huffington Post, The Hollywood Gossip or BuzzFocus (warnings for homophobia or references to homophobia on all the above).

Now, whilst I personally think Fifty Shades is an appallingly written book, I do think the film may turn out to be quite good in the right hands, and I think Matt would make an amazing Christian. Is that the point? No. The point is that no actor should be discriminated against based on their private life. If we allow actors' romantic lives to determine what roles they can and can't play, we are sentencing actors and actresses who are concerned about their careers to a lifetime in the closet.

There's also a serious double standard going on here. Nobody raises an eyebrow when a straight man is cast in a gay role. Nobody said that Heath Ledger was unrealistic in Brokeback Mountain because in real life he didn't really sleep with men. Sean Penn played a gay man in Milk, won an Oscar, and was praised for his daring, despite having had two high-profile marriages to women. And yet today Ellis stated that Matt playing Christian would be 'ludicrous', that the resulting press tour would be 'an embarrassing fiasco' and that what was needed was 'an intensely straight actor wanting absolutely to screw Ana Steele'. This makes so little sense that my mind boggles. How do we know any actor is 'intensely straight'? How do we know, even if the chosen actor is straight, that he will be attracted to the actress playing Ana, or that he will enjoy the BDSM lifestyle? We don't. We don't need to. That's why it's called acting. Christian, not the actor playing him, is the one that needs to want to 'screw Ana'.

I knew better than to hope that this opinion was limited to Ellis - I had already seen glimpses of it in Youtube comments - but I was pretty appalled to see that it was also relatively prevalent in the comments on the articles which report Ellis' tweets. People commenting they would be unable to believe him in the role because they know he's sleeping with a man, people commenting that he would be unable to construct any onscreen chemistry with a woman... it's enough to make me despair. 

Matt is an excellent actor who plays a convincing straight man on White Collar and has led millions of women to fall for Neal Caffrey. If he wants the role, he deserves the chance to be considered, just like any other actor. We should not be pigeonholing actors as only able to play gay or straight roles, any more than we should stop married actors from playing single roles. 

I realise that on Livejournal, I'm almost certainly preaching to the choir, but I felt the need to get this out anyway.