Playgirl model and father of former Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska's daughter's child, Levi Johnston, definitely created a stir when he let it almost all hang out for the whole world to see. There was truly no time wasted by the press with an incredible media blitz, the likes of which, the once hard copy magazine had never received, but the publishers celebrated all the attention and excitement that the now only online edition, playgirl.com, garnered in a very short period of time and involving almost all of the major outlets, from television to radio to print to online to blogs. Not to mention, all the buzz via social networking that went on and on about the almost hairless body with the decidedly seductive smile of Johnston. There was also a lot of tease and more serious speculation about Johnston's privates, every topic imaginable from the actual size to way beyond the debate about whether he's, in private a boxers-or-briefs kind of guy. The visitors to the web site were more than simply curiosity seekers. Or were they? Johnson was even quickly dubbed a "gay icon." One of the fantasy series, set up by the editors at playgirl.com dressed up Johnston as a fleshy hockey player.  The Huffington Post reported that host/comedian of the Joy Behar Show asked Johnston if "he realized that he was a gay icon." Johnston responded, "I do, yeah."  The ever-inquisitive Behar continued on" "Someone just told me there's a gay porno movie with a look-a-like of you. How do you feel about that?" The cool Johnston said:  "Um. . .let 'em do what they're going to do."  But he implied that "he doesn't want to do anything [that] he would regret," hence his reason for declining to appear in a gay porno film. Despite his "conservative background," Behar observed that Johnston seemed genuinely "comfortable about being a gay icon." "Growing up in Wasilla [Alaska]. . .I've never seen a gay guy in Wasilla, I don't think," Johnston explained, "Once I started doing all these tours and everything. . .I just, you know, they're people, too. It doesn't matter to me, more fans, it's great."

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Queer fashion designer turned filmmaker Tom Ford continues to be the darling of the stylish, the chic, the "in" crowd of the arts and cultural worlds. Formerly an actor before pursuing a career in the fashion industry, Ford choose to adopt for the screen, queer writer Christopher Isherwood's semi-autographical novel, "A Single Man," now playing in theaters across the country, because it spoke to him from the time he had first read it 20 years ago. "What spoke to me . . . then was the character of George, which is so beautifully written . . . that he really seems real. And, of course, he was real, because he was really Christopher Isherwood. . .about five years ago, when I became serious about really making a movie, I was going thought a bit of what could be called a mid-life crisis, after having left Gucci and one career, and actually thinking of that time, that I wouldn't be going back to fashion. I was having a very hard time seeing my future, I knew I wanted to make movies, and I thought, 'Well, this is the prefect time.' One day driving to my office, I realized that I was thinking of this character, George, 'This book has stayed with me for 25 years--I should pick it up and read it again.'."  Ford talking to journalist Gregg Shapiro (OutFrontColorado, December 30, 2009) confessed:  ". . . the book is very, very spiritual. The first line of the book is: 'Waking up begins with saying "am" and "now." And that's also the first line of the film. I just had an intuition and a feeling that the book really spoke to me--and that the themes of the book were universal and timeless, in a sense, and also very timely for the moment we were living through."

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Queer Stanford University profession of literature Terry Castle, author of the well-respected book, "The Literature of Lesbianism," her thick anthology of works by writers, looking at female homosexuality, as diverse as Ernest Hemingway, Ariosto and, yes, even William Shakespeare ("with his cross-dressing women who first and beguile one another") was interviewed by journalist Deborah Solomon (The New York Times Sunday, January 17, 2010) on the eve of her latest book, "The Professor."  Known for her "sparkling and witty prose," her humor, her shunning of the type of "unreadable" writing that has characterized so many "academic" works in the last two decades, Castle is candid, no-nonsense, entertaining and not afraid to take a swipe here and there, where and when and to whom it is due, like, her famous deceased scholarly lesbian giant, friend Susan Sontag who Castle (but still lovingly) describes as a "pompous and self-absorbed aesthete."  Fellow lesbian scholar, Camille Paglia, at Philadelphia's own University of the Arts, thinks that lesbians suffer from a lack of wit due their "resentment or ideology" and that gay men make much "livelier company."  Castle responded:  "Well, those who drank the Kool-Aid in the '70s in the heyday of lesbian separatism--a lot of them have ended up in the academic world as historians or sociologists. And so there is a kind of earnest and stylistically impaired lesbian who is still in existence, like a stegosaurs." Defending her approach to literature from her lesbian vantage point, Castle refutes that it is a "narrow" approach. In fact, she claims that, in great works of literature and down through the ages, that "female characters falling in love with each other is more pervasive than most people realize." "Claims about the dourness of lesbians have been overstated," Castle emphatically states, listing her favorite contemporary funny ladies-Ellen DeGeneres, Wanda Sykes, Lily Tomlin and Rachel Maddow. Historically speaking, she mentioned that "Gertrude Stein was hilariously funny."