Dinner! and also gay/lesbian actors

As you may know, we bought a side of grass-fed beef from Vermont Natural Beef this year.  We ordered it in early summer and picked it up in November.  No, we didn't get a whole, unbutchered side of cow. Instead we got 3 boxes full of more than 200 pounds of frozen beef, butchered to our specifications. A good portion of this was ground hamburger, just because that's what you get from a side of beef even when you get lots of steaks and roasts.  You can only make so many meat loaves, pots of chili and hamburgers, so I'm experimenting with other recipes using ground beef that I might not have otherwise made.  Tonight we had a quite delicious shepherd's pie.

But what I am really excited about it making all the variations of these homemade hamburger helper recipes I found.

But enough about food. My brother was visiting recently and casually mentioned that he was at a vaguely popular actor's house for a party and how Neil Patrick Harris and his husband were there with their twins and how cute the vaguely popular actor and his husband and their kids are.  And I sat up and said, "Wait what? Vaguely Popular Actor is gay?" I may not be the most in-the-know person in the world. I don't read Perez Hilton or gay gossip stuff. But I do read the Advocate on occasion and do enjoy the entertainment news.  I didn't recall having seen Vaguely Popular Actor in there as an out actor.  I confirmed on the Advocate that anytime Vaguely Popular Actor is mentioned, it was just as "Name."  The Advocate always prefaces the name of a gay/lesbian actor as "out actor Name."  But apparently it's a known thing in Hollywood that Vaguely Popular Actor is gay.  And I even found some unconfirmed instances of this on some gay gossip blogs.

So what's the big deal?  I understand that people want to keep their personal lives private.  I get it. I do. And I understand that gay/lesbian actors fear being stereotyped and not having the opportunity to do as many roles.  But don't straight actors play gay all the time? They're not stereotyped as only playing straight characters. The more mainstream gay/lesbian actors that come out, the less of a big deal it would be.

I'm not saying they have to welcome cameras into their homes 24/7 and tell me about their 2-year old's cute habits and the way they don't always agree with their same-gender spouse.  Some heterosexual celebrities seem to like that type of thing but there are plenty of heterosexual actors about whose families I know very little.  Why can't a random news article say "Vaguely Popular Actor and his husband so-and-so went to such-and-such event tonight"? Or whatever. The same way it would say the same about Jessica Alba and Cash Warren.

When I was just figuring out my own sexual orientation I was very interested in knowing which actors were gay or lesbian.  Especially the female actors on whom I had crushes, of course. :) Funny enough, many of them did turn out to be gay.  It was a way to see that it was a "normal" thing and that I wan't the only one (well, I knew I wasn't the only one, I went to Vassar, but still). It could be that seeing more actors out in Hollywood might make things a little easier for teenagers who are trying to figure things out when they feel like they're the only gay person in their school/town/wherever.  That's exactly why Zachary Quinto came out. And I was really excited about that. He's an actor who has played very non-gay roles.  Well, I guess it depends what type of a Star Trek fan you are ....

It kinda goes back to that whole thing I wrote about before about how gay/lesbian people should just be a non-issue.  I have challenged my brother to make a children's show some day where one of the characters just happens to have two moms or two dads and IT'S NOT TALKED ABOUT.  It doesn't have to all have an agenda! I don't care if Vaguely Popular Actor never marches in a gay pride parade. I don't need him to be preaching about how being gay is normal or whatever. I just want to know that he's in a committed same-sex relationship, raising children together. Grr.