(UPDATED) Weekend (q.v.) star Tom Cullen:

I’ve played very masculine high-status guys. In my career, I want to always be pushing myself. And Russell was somebody who’s so honest, so damaged in many ways, and very lost. Very low-status. And that’s somebody who I wanted to get myself around. I’m guarded and it was a challenge to strip that away.

Chris New (also in Bent) is certainly gay; I rather expect Tom Cullen is, given his dodging of a dusty question dragged out of a closet:

Was this the first time you played a gay person?

It’s never really crossed my mind because, for me, sexuality doesn’t mean anything…. This is a love story. A story about two people who connect and something that happens between them. We’ve all felt it – gay, straight, bisexual, curious, questioning, or whatever these silly names we give to this.

Yes, and straight guys have all those “silly names” readily rolling off the tongue in press interviews.

After the screening at Inside Out, director Andrew Haigh was asked if the actors were gay or straight. In a dodge right out of Hays Code Hollywood, Haigh told the audience to ask them ourselves. There’s more than enough evidence for any seasoned Kremlinologist without going to that kind of trouble.

Update

(2011.08.24) Tom Cullen is billed as straight in Out (unreadable original; Readability version). That’s one theory.

(Q.v.; q.q.v.)

Another month, another round of refutations of factually unfounded claims that gays are rich.

• Seattle’s “LGBT community has more disposable income than the general population” (nope).

• A Christopher St. bar owner – no, that’s actually the Christopher Street Bar in St. Petersburg, Florida – “note[d] that companies are embracing the gay community’s higher-than-average disposable income. Coca Cola, JetBlue Airways, Macy’s and Wells Fargo are just some of the big names sponsoring the event.” It’s fine they’re advertising, but is there a real reason why?

• Jeffrey Goldberg in the Atlantic listed several “advantages to the gay-male lifestyle [sic], such as: disposable income, sex with a lot of different people, and more disposable income.” I asked, but he didn’t explain why he got two of those three “advantages” wrong.

• Now, here’s a tricky case. For one thing, it involves statements from a mayor – Kathy DeRosa, mayor of Cathedral City, California, in bustling metropolitan Palm Springs.

  DeRosa said one potential benefit of the high concentration of same-sex couples is that because many of them aren’t raising children, they have more disposable income to spend in the city.

  According to the Census data, 79% of same-sex couples living together in California are not raising children.

  The problem here is that Palm Springs definitely will not hew to the California average in this regard. It will surely be home to a higher number of middle-aged-or-older gay couples, particularly males, who in turn will be even less likely to have children.

  I wrote DeRosa a message stating that her city probably does have a higher-income gay population than is typical, mostly due to the self-selection process by which relatively affluent gay couples choose idyllic Palm Springs as a retirement location. (She didn’t respond.)

  In fact, now that I think of it, Palm Springs and Fort Lauderdale are almost certainly two of, say, the top five U.S. cities in terms of proportion of high-income gay couples. But I mean gay, not lesbian, and they’ll almost all be older.

  By the way, Durango, Texas is also trying to attract the gay tourist dollar. I suppose some gays might vaguely want to visit small-town Texas, yes, but it won’t be because “they tend to comprise a higher percentage of DINKs – dual income, no kids – and have a lot more disposable income,” as tourism head John Cohen stated. (I asked, but he didn’t elucidate.)

• Fagonomics, schmagonomics: “In Tel Aviv, gay pride pays off”: “All studies conducted in recent years prove that the gay tourist brings in
  the biggest proceeds, with a higher disposable income.” I asked them to prove it and they didn’t bother.

• What about the phenomenon Americans insist on calling “gay marriage”? Isn’t that a cash bonanza? Actually, yes, according to M.V. Lee Badgett et al.’s research. But it won’t be because gays are rich; it will be due to enlargement of the pool of consumers choosing to marry.

  • “New York gay-marriage bill: Event industry expects ‘enormous impact’ ”: “The gay community typically has a higher rate of disposable income and the
    innate ability to entertain [continues in this vein]”

  • “Billion-dollar gay-wedding boost”:

    The same number of people have been getting married every year for the last 20 years,” says Carley Roney, cofounder and editor in chief of the Knot, a wedding-planning site. “Gay marriage is literally the only thing that has the potential to change the size of the wedding industry.”

    Correct, if exaggerated. But this isn’t correct (and is also exaggerated): “[S]ame-sex households tend to have more disposable income and a higher median income.”

    I wondered where their figures came from. I asked the publicist for the holding company that owns the Knot (note how far away we already are from the actual article), Jacalyn Lee. “The stats in the article came from the U.S. Census Bureau,” she replied, pointing to Williams Institute research (PDF) as the reporter of the data.

    A reasonable place to look, except for the fact that U.S. census aggregate data does not control for millionaires, the presence of only a few of which can deform the statistics for a relatively small group like this one.

    It just isn’t reliable to state that higher incomes (inflated by a few extreme values mixed in) result in “more disposable income.” (The underlying claim about higher incomes is also unreliable.)

• Did you know that diversity equals dollars – and love? So claims a Gazette blog by Jillian Page. She and I had a perfectly reasonable (if, on her part, top-posted) E-mail discussion about the underlying facts. Ultimately she agreed the statement in her piece –

  I was reading an article from 2009 [not cited!] about disposable income in the U.S. gay community. We’re talking hundreds of billions of dollars (I don’t have a precise figure, though I have seen $700 billion quoted in several articles).

  – can’t really be backed up by the evidence.

Will this be going on forever, I wonder?

Kenneth Grange, industrial designer:

Apple is enjoying a reputation as the maker of the sleekest things. But… [t]heir things are overdesigned. I’ve got a Mac Mini upstairs and every morning I try and fail to find the button on the back.

Power switches are a design issue horrendously more complex than their size and the simplicity of their function. Ask Don Norman, or try to start a car with keyless ignition. But:

• The power button is on the right-hand side as viewed from the front, as it must be to suit most people.

  

• You can just turn the product around if it’s giving you that much trouble.

• You aren’t supposed to turn a Macintosh off every day – an ancient DOS/Windows concept that hasn’t been applicable to Macs in a decade. Just put the machine to sleep via any of several methods (including walking away from it or tapping the power button).

At any rate, does a single problem a single designer has with a single product, even if it happens every day due to his own misunderstanding, prove that Apple designers are, as he put it in the interview, “up their own arse, to be honest”? Isn’t this anecdotalism at its worst?

To get ahead in business, some foreign nationals – and Quebeckers – are taking accent-reduction courses. The article makes it clear that the goal is to be understood, not to erase your heritage.

And along comes a vizmin academic to, in essence, dispute the premise.

Roland Sintos Coloma, a professor at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Integrative Anti-Racism Studies, finds the concept of reducing accents disturbing.

“This speaks to a certain kind of linguistic racism,” Prof. Coloma said, adding that the idea of “making North American customers comfortable is silly, especially when you consider that there isn’t even a standard Canadian English accent. A person who lives in the Atlantic provinces will not sound the same as someone from the Prairies or Ontario,” he noted.

The easy answer to that is “Yes, they will.” You could barely make the case that Newfoundland or Ottawa Valley accents are sometimes distinguishable, but Canadian English is unusual in its uniformity and its paucity of variations. As such, our dialect yet again differs from British, American, or even Australian.

I asked Coloma on what objective basis he made that statement and got no reply. As such I was not able to ask a follow-up question about whether or not he was making a statement about how the Canadian accent is somehow white hence racist, despite the fact that accent and race are causally unrelated.

Mike Ananny commits two sins in his endless opinion piece on why Grindr gets lumped in with sex-offender apps on Android (where open is always better!).

1. He recapitulates the lie oft repeated by Grindr’s inventor, Joel Simkhai, that the app is really just about getting to know people. (Ananny: “Grindr describes itself as a ‘simple, fast, fun and free way to find and meet gay, bi, and curious guys for dating, socializing and friendship.’ It’s… targeted at gay men looking to socialize, where ‘socialize’ can mean a wide variety of things, including chatting, hooking up to have sex, or developing a friendship.”) Grindr’s sole purpose is to find nearby guys to fuck.

2. Ananny complains about the Android Marketplace’s and even Apple’s categorization of Grindr and sex-offender apps, and especially about Android’s presenting both categories together. But he did not contact either firm for a comment. (I asked him why not and he didn’t respond.) It must be stated that Apple responds to almost no press inquiries, and my own meta-inquiry to Google Press – “Who handles media inquiries for the Android Marketplace?” – was ignored.

   The point here is that, even in an opinion piece, factual statements have to be verified, and named parties you accuse of something have to be given a chance to respond.

Canadian daytime running lights – absence of which makes foreign roads feel foreign – never look stranger than at the Tighty Whitey Car Wash, held in the laneway ass-cheek-by-jowl by the Steamworks.

Not shown: Dwayne Minard in his underwear.

Wait.