Bush Won't Be at the Tonys due to anti-gay campaign theme

[DaveSZ]

FROM ARTS & LEISURE
Mr. Bush Won't Be at the Tony's
By FRANK RICH

The Republicans' gay-aversion therapy this year, once thought of as a slam-dunk political strategy, might not prove so smart in the end.


http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/06/arts/06RICH.html?pagewanted=1


IT'S now official. George W. Bush is not a theater queen.

The word came on May 22, after the president had taken his mountain biking fall on his ranch in Crawford. "You know this president," said Trent Duffy, a White House spokesman, taking pains to explain that his boss had been on a 17-mile marathon, not some limp-kneed girly jaunt. "He likes to go all-out. Suffice it to say he wasn't whistling show tunes."

Let's face it; there had been some nervousness about Mr. Bush's butch bonafides. The president was on record as having loved "Cats." His uncle, Jonathan Bush, a New York song-and-dance man in the 1950's, had appeared as Will Parker in a revival of "Oklahoma!" ("A first-grade hayseed!" raved a critic at The New York Times.) Then there was that lingering question about why a president who had avoided Vietnam was dressing up in Tom Cruise pilot drag and, in Wesley Clark's phrase, "prancing on the deck of an aircraft carrier" in our current war. The scene looked more like a slab of choreography from the World War II movie musical "Anchors Aweigh" than "The Longest Day."

Had Mr. Duffy not intervened, some voters might have feared that the president would be tuning in America's gayest awards show, the Tonys, on CBS tonight. In an election year whose signature culture war has been fought over same-sex marriage, Mr. Bush and his party have made a fetish of distancing themselves from all things gay.

-more

[DaveSZ]

1. Let's send this to Andrew Sullivan

:puke:

[Don_G]

2. He Can Forget

About the Log Cabin Republican vote among others. I wonder if he's counting on Diebold to pull his chestnuts out of the fire in November?

[ablbodyed]

4. Well, I'm afraid that....

there are STILL gays foolish enough to supprot him. The good news is that gays can be as stupid as Whimmies (White Hetero Males)

[Bridget Burke]

3. Too bad, he could have seen what a real man looks like....

Hugh Jackman hosted the show, performed a number from "The Boy from Oz"--and accepted his Tony. Good looks, a great voice & humor--he kicked his heels with the Rockettes during the opening number. Hugh isn't worried that his latest success is playing the part of the very gay Peter Allen.

Let's hope Pickles was able to watch in the other room.

[ablbodyed]

5. She wasn't watching either....

she had a new Barney tape.

[nostamj]

6. he was great

even being propositioned (and kissed) by a gay puppet from Avenue Q!

it takes a real man to wear a leopard-print disco shirt...

[dsc]

7. Getting rid of that horrid show on Fox

was a major victory. When there are so few images of gays on the small screen we can't afford to have one of them be of gays as vile deceptors.