Hollywood's "gay mafia" or "velvet mafia" or "lavender mob" has long been the subject of gossip, with occasional blips into the mainstream press.
Terms such as "Gay mafia" refer to a group of powerful homosexuals who exercise extraordinary influence in the entertainment industry.
"Gay mafia" is not a term used publicly or within polite company. It's not something we're supposed to talk about it. To do so, according to conventional wisdom, is to engage in homophobia or paranoia. It is the moral equivalent of anti-Semitism.
The arts community has long had a disproportionate number of homosexuals and Jews. More than half of the leading power brokers in Hollywood are Jewish, and about a third of the powerful are homosexual, including David Geffen, Ray Stark, Calvin Klein, Aaron Spelling, Steve Tisch, Barry Diller and agent Sandy Gallin. This creates an atmosphere conducive to pushing "gay rights" and inimical to "gay bashing."
In his 1999 book "Tabloid Baby," Burt Kearns, former managing editor for such tabloid TV shows as A Current Affair and Hard Copy, writes about the clash between his Australian tabloid buddies and Fox's head at the time, Barry Diller and his "Velvet Mafia."
To Diller, "the Aussies were unwashing homophobic ruffians... Hollywood was a place where untold secrets unfolded in the back of limousines and behind the walls of cloistered mansions, where rubber sheets covered priceless bedspreads...
"The manly men from Down Under had little reverence for the pampered poobahs of screenland and the secrets they held. They laughed at the Diller crowd and their fancy-pants airs. To be blunt, the Aussies regarded Barry Diller and many of his young male executives to be gay, and the Aussies referred to gays as "poofters." Diller... hated A Current Affair ..."
A Current Affair planned to do a story claiming that homosexual Cary Grant was straight. Their ad, written by Greg Snead, read: "Cary Grant: No More Fairy Tales."
Diller phoned: "The...word...fairy...makes...my...BLOOD...BOI L!"
Diller cancelled the entire month of A Current Affair's TV Guide ads and demanded to see copies of every promotional item Greg Snead had written in the past two years. (Tabloid Baby, pg. 46)
Kearns hired homosexual Paul Nichols, to directed a pilot of FUNY, as in F--- You New York. Paul couldn't understand a heterosexual funny bit with a beautiful woman doing a US weather map while wearing a spandex miniskirt.
Gordon Elliott read his script as sportcaster Adrian L. Adrian in a lisping effeminate voice of the stereotypical Aussie "poof." Paul got mad and walked out of the control room. Everything stopped until Elliott agreed to read it "straight." (Tabloid Baby, pg. 112)
Spy magazine published Mark Ebner's controversial essay on the gay mafia in its June 1995 issue. For years afterwards, Ebner was blackballed in Hollywood. It was not until about 1999 that he started selling scripts again.
From Taki's column in the 3/7/00 NYPress.com:
I’m not at all surprised to read that Hollywood is dominated by a Velvet Mafia of rich homosexuals who demand sexual favors in return for work in the movies. In fact I would have been surprised if it were the other way round. Those old Mittel-Europa Jews who ran Tinseltown in its heyday established the casting-couch practice long ago; but, as they say, at least they did it with style and with the opposite sex. ...
But what bothers me is not the bestiality and arrogance of the Velvet Mafiosi. It is the message they send out through their movies. American Beauty, for example, is said to be a well-made film–I haven’t seen it–that will probably win many Oscars, but carries a subliminal message against the family. (Geffen, as rumor has it, is supposed to have been thrilled that in the movie a homophobe father beats up his son when he suspects him to have had a gay affair with Kevin Spacey’s character, and even more thrilled when it is later revealed that the homophobe was actually a repressed gay.) Geffen, of course, denies there is such a thing as a homosexual cabal, and, typically, charges anti-Semitism. ...
Which brings me to the point I wish to make. Political correctness is the best way the left has to stamp out thought it doesn’t agree with. As the Spectator of London wrote recently, "If it’s impossible to say or write certain things, then it becomes impossible to think them and conformity is guaranteed for ever and ever." George Orwell’s 1984 is alive and thriving with p.c., except that this time it’s for real.
What the left and its p.c. adherents have managed to do is to turn everyone who is not mainstream into a persecuted racial minority. As Paul Craig Roberts (the best columnist by far) pointed out in the John Rocker case, "Bud Selig thinks that kids with purple hair, repeat felons, welfare moms and homosexuals with AIDS are ‘ethnicities.’" Selig, in his haste to please the politically correct, misinterpreted Rocker’s remarks. Most kids with purple hair are white, not black, and repeat felons are criminals, not a racial classification. There are many white immigrants who don’t speak English–as in Russians–but try to explain this to p.c. commissars. Geffen and his ilk know all this. Ergo the anti-Semitism defense.
Hollywood has never exactly been a moral place, far from it, but until the 60s and 70s it preached a hell of a moral lesson. God, the family, patriotism, even Mom were sacrosanct. Now it’s the exact opposite. Criminals are sympathetically portrayed, cops always negatively; people who think same-gender sex is wrong are fascists; businessmen are all crooks, while crooks are nice and quaint; drug-takers are cool, drinkers are fascist bullies. Well, you get the point. AIDS ribbons are in, while battle decorations are a real no-no. HIV, like lung cancer, is a lifestyle disease, but HIV carriers are celebrated in the manner winners of the Congressional Medal of Honor used to be.
It is a topsy-turvy world, Hollywood, and I can’t wait to read Tom King’s book. In the meantime, don’t hold your breath before the Geffen spin machine, in cahoots with such Clinton flacks as the grotesque Geraldo Rivera, go to work on the author. After all, if a phony like Jeffrey Toobin can demonize Starr and acquit Bill Clinton, think what his kind can do in defense of the ghastly Geffen. ...
The word "outing" refers to the publicizing of a person's homosexuality. "Outing" as in "out of the closet." "Outing" became widely used during the 1990s.
Michelangelo Signorile, author of "Queer in America: Sex, the Media and the Closets of Power," is one of the leading advocates of "outing." But the outing pioneer is San Francisco Chronicle homosexual columnist Armistead Maupin who "outed" actor Rock Hudson.
"When I came out of the closet (in 1973), I came to the revolutionary conclusion that there was nothing wrong with being gay and that included everyone else as well," Maupin told the LA Times. "It became clear to me that the only way to lift the onus was being as matter of fact about it as I possibly could. I've never accused anyone of being gay because I don't think it's worthy of an accusation."
After Hudson, the next celebrity revealed to be homosexual was publisher Malcolm Forbes. A month after Forbes' death in February, 1990, Signorile wrote a cover story for the now-defunct magazine Outweek, "The Secret Gay Life of Malcolm Forbes."
Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner was written up in early 1995 for taking up with a male companion, following Wenner's divorce. ...
Homosexuality can also be a common bond in an industry where contacts and information are everything. Everyone knows Hollywood is a "boy's club," meaning straight men run it, but even if the straight boys don't accept someone, there are plenty of gays and lesbians to bond with, and there has even arisen, in the media, a phrase, "the gay Mafia." It's a term one reads in the press but one seldom hears it in the business. It's a sneaky, double- edged coinage.
On one level, "gay Mafia" pays homage to the supposed "gay power" in Hollywood, but on the other it makes that power seem sinister. One of the unspoken implications of "gay Mafia" is that gay actors are sleeping their way to the top with gay executives. "I don't know if it's to the top, but there are many who have slept their way to the middle," Leed says.
It's nothing new. Gore Vidal's recently published memoirs report that way back during the making of "Rebel Without a Cause," Sal Mineo was fooling around with the director Nicholas Ray. Ray had been married to Gloria Grahame, an actress who specialized in dangerous allure and played the town tramp in "It's a Wonderful Life." She also turns up in "The Celluloid Closet," getting a massage from a big, mannish masseuse in a scene from "In a Lonely Place," also directed by Ray.
Hollywood's Heterophobia
I found this article by Daniel Jeffreys in the 4/1/00 Daily Mail.
AT THE start of the film American Beauty, Kevin Spacey's character, Lester Burnham, says: 'In a year, I will be dead' - and by the movie's end, he is, killed by his repressed homosexual next-door neighbour. In the meantime, his middle-class life implodes as he falls in love with his teenage daughter's best friend and his wife finds comfort in the arms of a reptilian estate agent. We are left feeling that suburbia is a hellish place where happiness will for ever be absent.
Everyone in the film is explosively dysfunctional, except for the Burnhams' other set of neighbours, an affluent gay couple who float through the mayhem with disarming serenity.
To some, the film is a thought-provoking lesson in the importance of not taking stereotypes at face value and of seeking out the joy and wonder we otherwise take for granted in modern life.
To the more sceptical, its main mesage seems clear: if only we could all be gay and out of the closet, we would be happy. The flip side to that message is that, as heterosexuals, we are doomed to unhappiness and strife. If we are lucky, the best we can achieve is manic depression. At worst, we will be murdered by some causality of heterosexual deviancy.
The film that dominated the Oscars is a triumph of dark cynicism with some wonderful acting and direction, but I believe that it was only made because of what I call its 'heterophobia' - the systematic denigration of heterosexual lifestyles - that has become part of the Hollywood mainstream.
American Beauty is heterophobia's propaganda masterpiece.
Its sweep of the Academy Awards' top categories thrilled Hollywood's gay community, who have been trying to prove for a long time that heterosexuality is a sad form of sexual dysfunction.
American Beauty is now regarded as a classic in the same mould as The Graduate, but far more interesting are the characters behind the movie and the agenda they hope to promote.
In the Seventies, homosexuals had legitimate grievances. They were persecuted for their sexuality and discriminated in ways that were repellent.
THE GAY rights movement that became increasingly vocal in the Eighties won deserved new freedoms for homosexuals.
Nobody should be persecuted for their sexuality, except those who prey on young children.
Yet at some time in the past ten years, a new theory gained currency among gays, especially in the entertainment business. This held that heterosexuality was a curse to be denigrated and mocked wherever possible, and that gays could never win the power they craved in society without undermining heterosexuals whenever possible.
At the same time, gays who held this view began agitating for homosexuality to be accepted as a form of behaviour on a par with heterosexual activity.
This was to be done in two ways.
On the positive front, these radical gays argued that homosexuals should be entitled to get married in the same way as heterosexual couples, and that schools should teach about gay sex as if it were no more normal or abnormal than male-female intercourse.
Academics began writing papers arguing for gay parenting, using statistics to suggest that children of gay couples had no more emotional problems that the average child of a 'straight' family.
On the negative end, gays began countering undesirable images of homosexuality - such as the spread of Aids - with a bleak picture of what they derisively called 'straight sex'. Lesbians began affirming that any woman who had a sexual relationship with a man must, at some point, submit to rape.
Workplace behaviour, such as mild flirting, once regarded as innocent, was lumped together with flagrantly intrusive and unacceptable advances, and all of it labelled 'sexual harassment'.
The point of this exercise was to demonise normal heterosexual behaviour, and to make the ordinary rituals of attraction and relationships seem aberrant, so that gays could advance their own cause by claiming 'straights' led lives that were much worse than theirs.
Along the way, sexual harassment law, and the industry which has developed around it, distorted from a sensible set of safeguards into something which could be used to attack heterosexuality at its roots, effectively conveying the idea that a heterosexual male was inherently dangerous and needed to be constrained by Draconian laws just as bars might hold back a rabid tiger.
Into this picture enter the men responsible for American Beauty, who must be stunned that their insidious attack on heterosexuality has not only become an Oscar-winner but has broken box office records.
The screenwriter, who won an Oscar for Best Screenplay, is Alan Ball. He grew up in the American South, in Georgia. ...
LONG before it became an Oscar hit, Ball's script was picked up by Dan Jinks and Bruce Cohen, who eventually produced the film and were on stage last Sunday to collect the Oscar for Best Picture. ...
Given their Out There affiliation, Jinks and Cohen knew just where to take the American Beauty script to get it made - to fellow Out There sympathizer David Geffen, Steven Spielberg's partner in Dreamworks.
As, The Operator, a new biography of Geffen makes clear, Geffen is a predatory homosexual who has devoted considerable energy to projects that target heterosexuality.
He is allegedly the main force in the Velvet Mafia, a loose association of powerful gay men who use their influence in Hollywood to advance gay issues.
Sources say Geffen has frequently changed scripts if they seem to be too sympathetic towards heterosexual love or if they show any hint of antipathy towards gays.
In 20 years of filmmaking, Geffen has become infamous for making or breaking careers based on whether the people involved are gay and willing to be part of his extremely active sex life.
His summer parties at Fire Island, a gay resort 30 miles outside Manhattan, are legendary as the place the Velvet Mafia meet to indulge in extraordinary bacchanals.
HIS GUEST list begins with designer Calvin Klein and includes other Velvet Mafia members such as Barry Diller (who helped create The Simpsons), George Michael and Sandy Gallin, the super-powerful talent agent who discovered Madonna, Tom Cruise and Julia Roberts.
In recent years, several guests at Geffen's Fire Island house have described weekend-long orgies, fuelled by drugs, at which Geffen and his powerful friends ran a 'meat market', selecting young men for either sex or stardom.
'If you weren't incredibly handsome and well-built, there was no way you would get in,' says a New York movie agent who has been to several Geffen parties. 'Dress was minimal or nonexistent, and Geffen would prowl with his friends, squeezing men like they were cattle.'
When Jinks and Cohen took American Beauty to Geffen, the billionaire producer was ecstatic.
He rushed the script through the approval process - virtually unheard of for a screenplay by a writer with no previous movie hits - and maintained a close personal interest in casting.
Geffen, Jinks, Cohen and Ball all attended half a dozen Oscar parties after the triumph of American Beauty. One producer who is close to Ball said they had good reason to be happy.
After all, he said, they have created a film that is both a masterpiece and the most corrosive satire of heterosexual life that has ever made $100 million from the very people it vilifies.
And that is the hard truth about American Beauty. It exists and triumphed because, for some gays, it is not enough to win civil rights and equality of opportunity.
They want more: a society in which heterosexuality is so condemned that homosexuals can win any increases in power they might choose. ................
Camille Paglia writes 5/26/99 in Salon.com: Would an admission of gayness hurt a young male singer's career? Of course it would: This junior Adonis type requires the electric charge produced by the mass projection of adolescent girls in erotic hysteria. Elton John, after his sham marriage, could afford to be openly gay because he caricatured himself as a sad-sack clown, crying through his sequins. Pretty boys, with their androgynous glow, have a more direct and dangerous sensual appeal. If Ricky Martin turned out to be just another buff gay clone, he'd cut himself off at the knees as an international artist. Current gay male culture is too shallow to provide the kind of psychological development that a performer needs.