What's a Gay to Do
When There's No Gay?

Remember when we used to have fictional shows that were all about homosexuals? Will & Grace, Queer as Folk, The L Word, Sex and the City. All of them gone. And who knows when we'll get more of them? It could be a while. It could be forever.

Maybe you didn't watch any of the above. I know I only ever paid attention to The L Word, to be completely honest. Maybe Project Runway was all you needed. And that's fine. But right now we don't even have that. And RuPaul's Drag Race has wrapped its first season. It's going to be at least nine months until Dante's Cove comes back. There's Lambert still hanging in there, but you know about him already. The Whites are kicked off The Amazing Race. I have no idea what's up with that Survivor gay. He may have been eaten by a shark by now. But I guess we'd have heard about that if it had happened, so he's probably fine.

What I'm trying to say here is that there's not a heck of a lot out there that's aimed right at us lately unless you're watching all the talking-head pundits wonder aloud about when the rest of the gay marriage dominoes are going to fall. So here's what I'm looking at in the meantime when I need a little fix:

*If you can find it on your cable system, there's a show on now that looks like it cost about 35 cents to produce called Living It Up With Patti LaBelle. Patti runs around the country going to African-American vintage doll museums and the Motown studios and hair salons where they make giant sculptures on the tops of women's heads. Patti travels wearing a gigantic black sun hat and carrying like a hundred pieces of Louis Vuitton luggage with her wherever she goes. In one scene she says, "I made macaroni salad for the trip." Then she holds up an LV bag and says, "It's in here on an ice pack."

But the best part of the show is the theme song. She sings it. And the words go, "Make the most of every day! We're living it up! With Patti LaBelle! That's my name!" For me, the show could end right there and that would be all I needed.

*I didn't think I could be captivated by two women more astounding than Kim and NeNe from The Real Housewives of Atlanta, but The Real Housewives of New Jersey are already talking about kidnapping, Colombian cartels, blow jobs, and skinning one another alive. And all that's aired so far is the 30-minute preview show. At the end of the episode someone upends a dinner table.

So yeah. I'll be watching that.

Now, female readers, please don't misunderstand. If the L Word lesbians were still on TV -- and yeah, the video interrogations on the Showtime site are fine and all, but they're going to be over soon and those bastards at Showtime aren't picking up the show with Leisha Hailey on lockdown -- then I wouldn't need what is clearly a somewhat-less-than-feminist-yet-still-somehow-reasonably-equivalent display of lady lunacy and super-entitlement. But it's not. And I do. Anderson Cooper gets what I mean.

*Bill O'Reilly sure is hilarious. He serves up his gay titillation with a side of implied naughty that rivals the recent Amazon.com "glitch" PR shitstorm. He comes on all bewildered by what is this thing called American Idol and shows half-blacked-out pictures of Adam "The High-Pitched One" Lambert making out with guys (so as not to offend anyone with an extreme sensitivity to the sight of male lips touching other male lips, as if seeing that sort of thing might make your own lips just fall right off your head). Then he engages two women in a mini-non-debate on whether or not blatant homosexuality will impede someone winning it all on Idol. Then he sort of wishes Lambert the best of luck and the segment is over.

Later, when he's called on his exploitation-y blowhardiness, O'Reilly claims not to know why anyone would be annoyed by his presentation of the subject matter --because, you know, bars across faces aren't reminiscent of anything related to shame at all -- and then repeats the part of the segment where he's seen being a well-wisher. He wins! Good one, man. That dude is total entertainment. You should really be checking him out once in a while.

And another thing: After they rescued the captain of that ship from the pirates, O'Reilly brought on a smoking-hot former Navy SEAL sniper guy to talk about it. I like to think it was a bonus treat for people like me who fast-forward the TiVo through his bits about how Obama is wrong, wrong, wrong about everything. I don't remember the former SEAL's name, but it was something like Bruiser McThickenson.

*And then there's whatever the hell this is :

My husband is pretty fluent in the kind of from-Spain Spanish these guys are speaking and even he can't figure out what's going on. But it's got Hugh Jackman asking a man in a shiny gold leotard where he got it. I'm going to assert that this is meaningful. Argue with me if you like.