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Isn't Carson Kressley so, like, out there? Last night in New York, the former "Queer Eye" gadfly hosted an event for the 2009 Felipa de Souza Award, which the International Gay & Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC) this year gave to the five-year-old Lebanese group Helem (it means dream in Arabic). Helem is the only gay-rights group in the Middle East outside of Israel, and also does a lot of HIV/AIDS work in Lebanon, a country that's kind of to the Middle East what Florida is to the American South -- liberal, given the region. Anyway, after Georges Azzi, Helem's good-looking young national coordinator, accepted the award, Krazy Kressley gets up there and says, "I will personally do whatever it takes to expand homosexuality in the Middle East. Hands on, in the trenches -- and I'll start with you,Georges." Carson!
Then he kept deliberately mangling the pronunciation of IGLHRC, saying, "That sounds so espionage-y." Carson, this is a serious human-rights event! Then, after the multicultural Lavender Light lesbian and gay gospel choir performed, Kressley commented on the "tight butt" of the conductor -- which, in Kressley's defense, was right in his face, and hard not to notice -- and said the group should be called "Lavender Tight." Carson! This is an LGBT gospel choir singing about global gay liberation!
After the award ceremony, when we talked to Carson, he was not any more appropriate. We asked him how he felt Season Two of his Lifetime makeover show How to Look Good Naked was going, and he said that women were harder to work with than the men he would style up on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. "Straight guys are like puppies," he said. "You show them how to do it, give them a treat and they're fine. And unfortunately in our society, women are bombarded with images from Madison Avenue and from their childhood and their peers that say you've got to look a certain way to be beautiful." Oh, nice try, Kressley, trying to sound all P.C. and sociocultural but really just saying that broads are difficult.
Then, in the U.N.-type spirit of the evening (oh, yeah, he mocked the U.N. earlier, too), we asked him what was the craziest gay international experience he'd ever had. "Oh, these five guys from Senegal..." he started. Carson! You are totally mocking the fact that IGLHRC's new head, Cary Johnson, just told us all a horrible story about a group of Senegalese gay guys who just went to jail for having a safe-sex information party. Not cool! So instead he says, "I'll go to a place I expect to be homophobic like Egypt and some guy will be like" -- in a pidgin-y accent -- 'I love you on "Queer Eye.' In Malaysia, the show was called 'The Pink Savior,' which sounds a little evangelical for my taste." Yeah, Carson, but your weirdest experience ever? "I guess being chased through a mall in the Philippines. You know that song, 'I'm big in Japan?' Well, I'm huge in the Philippines."
Oh, Carson. And we had another bone to pick with him: We'd heard from at least one reliable source (a magazine editor, of course!) that, in his rare private, unobserved moments, he was actually fairly butch -- that his whole queeny, loud affect was a put-on crafted to catapult him to international fame and obnoxiousness. "Oh my God, you read my Manhunt profile?" he gasped. "'Butch fisting top seeks' -- oh my God, don't print that." Then he got, well, marginally serious: "I'm just me. On TV, I'm very proud of being as flaming and queer and gay out there as I can be. I think that's important because a lot of gay people, even, are homophobic about flaming queers. That's part of who I am. But like all gay people, I have different sides. My dad's a car dealer, so I know everything about cars, and that's not something that you would expect. Or that I have a tractor because I have a farm and I have horses."
Eh. We felt like telling Kressley that it was a little late in the evening for him to be going all I'm-a-complex-and-nuanced-individual-deserving-of-human-rights on us. But we didn't. We just asked if he was comfortable having it on the public record that he was a closet butch. He pondered that for a moment -- he was distracted when the choir conductor with the tight butt passed by -- then said, "Yeah. People have often mistaken me for a lesbian." Carson!
-- TIM MURPHY
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