Tim Teeman

If you love The Daily Beast’s royal coverage, then we hope you’ll enjoy The Royalist, a members-only series for Beast Inside. Become a member to get it in your inbox on Sunday. Harry and Charles’ secret talks” to heal rift Prince Harry and Prince Charles are reportedly holding “secret talks”—now not-so-secret—in a bid to heal their fractured relationship ahead of the queen’s Platinum Jubilee. Source link

This story contains references to suicide. If you or someone you know is thinking of suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255, or text TALK to the Crisis Text Line at 741741. Also: Trans Lifeline is at 1-877-565-8860. The last time David Feldmann saw his daughter Haley alive, she surprised him by asking for a hug. He was up late watching some films, and Haley joined him. “We watched three movies together,” he recalled to The Daily Beast. “Then I realized it was about 2 in the morning. I said, ‘Oh I better go to bed.’ She was like, […]

Flying Over Sunset is, appropriately for its subject material, a strange trip of a musical—delightful in places, disconnected in others, and mainly a bore and downer. The real draw is that this Lincoln Center musical (to Feb 6, 2022) has Tony Yazbeck as Cary Grant dancing and tap-dancing alongside Atticus Ware as Cary Grant’s younger self. This is dancing, choreographed by Michelle Dorrance, as pure artistry. The musical, directed by James Lapine, follows an imagined meeting in the late 1950’s between Cary Grant (Yazbeck), Aldous Huxley (Harry Hadden-Paton), and Clare Boothe Luce (Carmen Cusack), all tripping off their faces on LSD […]

On the basis that Christmas is near, presents must be considered, joy should be taken wherever it can be found in this fraught world, and direct guidance is often the most welcome, here it is: book ticket or tickets for Company on Broadway (booking to June 26, 2022) right now. Stop what you are doing. Right now. Stephen Sondheim’s musical, with a book by George Furth, opens tonight at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, and is the best tribute imaginable to Sondheim himself (along with the near-perfect Spielberg adaptation of West Side Story). Two and a half hours of sublime entertainment […]

Any dedicated, line-repeating Sex and the City fan knows there are at least two Sex and the City’s; the first seasons in which Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha exist in a fairly un-glossy New York, which have an echo of the pop-friskiness of Desperately Seeking Susan. Bathed in global popularity, the show thereafter transformed into a high-gloss, serious-fashion fairytale of princesses rejecting frogs and finding princes. Sex and the City was always a pleasure to watch, but its later seasons were a striking departure from its initial sharp celebration and interrogation of sexual freedom and being single, emphasis on the “being.” […]

All the benefits of film, and all the limitations of theater when it lazily follows in a film’s footsteps, are starkly evident in the numbing, dull, and astonishingly flat Mrs. Doubtfire, which opens Sunday night on Broadway. Most infuriating: It’s showing at the Stephen Sondheim Theatre, which seems an especially egregious blasphemy. The still-popular 1993 movie starred Robin Williams as Daniel Hillard, a man-child divorced from his wife who then drags up as an older Scottish female nanny to parent his own children and to earn money he needs to prove to the courts that he can be a responsible person. […]

It will be hard, Deirdre O’Connell says, to say goodbye—for now at least—to Dana H. at the end of this week. The off-Broadway play, which transferred to a reopened Broadway alongside Is This A Room? to create a repertory double hit at the Lyceum Theatre, will close on Nov. 28. O’Connell is preparing for a degree of separation anxiety from her alter ego, Dana Higginbotham, the playwright Lucas Hnath’s mother whose experience of kidnapping and violence at the hands of a deranged psychopath O’Connell brings to unique life on stage in Hnath’s play. We hear Higginbotham’s voice recite her own searing, […]

The best heckle so far of the post-pandemic Broadway era happened last Friday night, when Prince Charles (Roe Hartrampf) snarled at Princess Diana (Jeanna de Waal), “I made you what you are” during the shamelessly bonkers, terrible, and mesmerizing Diana: The Musical (Longacre Theatre, booking to November 2022). The silence and a few shocked sighs that followed were broken by a lone male voice from the orchestra. “Fuck off!” this voice from the dark said straight at Prince Charles, earning a smattering of applause and laughs. And who can blame that heckler? It’s odd that the royal family has gotten so […]

Royal sources have indicated there is concern at the palace that the full scale of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry’s involvement in a sympathetic biography written about them may yet be revealed in court. “A lot more” could emerge on “what was briefed for the book” if the case she has brought against Associated Newspapers over publication of material from a letter written to her father proceeds, a source told the U.K. Sunday Times. This week, Meghan apologized for “misleading” a British court, saying she had forgotten that she had briefed her then-press secretary Jason Knauf on material to be passed […]

In some ways it feels odd as an adult to watch the musical Trevor: the Musical, which opened tonight in New York (booking to April 17, 2022 at Stage 42). It seems tonally like it’s really aimed at children or teenagers, whose world it centers. The parents and adults loom large as cartoon cutouts, and the action takes place mostly in school halls and kids’ bedrooms. For a musical about a 13-year-old gay kid simultaneously determinedly being himself and suffering soul-destroying homophobia, it also has a hard time actually saying both these things out loud. It edges around all the issues […]

Everything junior Missouri Senator Josh Hawley does, day in day out, is an exercise in sneering opportunism. Maybe he loves playing the right-wing bad boy, gobbling up airtime, stoking cultural outrage, alongside the relentless smirking he does into the black hole of whatever he imagines his future consists of. We know, he knows, that the most resonant image of him is from Jan. 6, his fist aloft supporting those who led the violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. He shouldn’t hold a position of any power. In May, the Washington Post traced his political path up to that moment, and to […]

You can see why the venerable and much-missed Public Theater was determined to stick by its grand musical hope, The Visitor. This world premiere was long-delayed by the pandemic, and had such drama offstage that its lead, the Tony-winning Ariel Sta’chel, left the show just before its opening. But the Public was set on seeing it through, and using The Visitor to herald its own post-pandemic return. Its makers proudly vouch for the politics of the show, which in earnest, emphatic terms illustrates the appalling way undocumented immigrants are treated in America. This is a musical—music by Tom Kitt, lyrics by […]

One thought kept occurring to this critic throughout Caroline, Or Change, and a long time after: “No one is OK here.” Throughout you wonder what happy ending can possibly be achieved—and to the musical-meets-opera’s great credit, it isn’t. This spiky-shouldered show resists an easy reading almost as much as its lead character rebuffs kindness. Tony Kushner’s 2003 musical (he wrote the book and lyrics, Jeanine Tesori the music) consistently cuts against expectations of all kinds—just as you might imagine by the playwright behind Angels in America—another unique, absolutely-of-its-own canvas. Caroline, Or Change looks and sounds beautiful, but it’s also a defiant, […]

If you love The Daily Beast’s royal coverage, then we hope you’ll enjoy The Royalist, a members-only series for Beast Inside. Become a member to get it in your inbox on Sunday. How to parcel up the world, House of Windsor style. After Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s explosive Oprah Winfrey interview—and many words, upset, allegations, and denials since—it seemed to be that the two had their American constituency of fans. The rest of the royals—Prince William and Kate Middleton included—could keep Britain, thanks very much. The popularity of Harry and Meghan in the U.S. is far greater than in the […]

Dana H., along with Is This A Room, were the best pieces of off-Broadway theater just before the pandemic hit. Now, karma doing its best kind of thing, the two Vineyard Theatre plays are playing at the same Broadway theater. Both are rooted in two very different traumatic real-life events, and both use words that were really said in the reciting of those real events. While Is This A Room focuses on intelligence contractor Reality Winner’s FBI interrogation (using the transcript of that day), Dana H. reveals to the audience what happened in 1997 when Dana Higginbotham, mother of playwright Lucas […]

Two and a half years ago, The Lehman Trilogy played in New York City’s cavernous Park Avenue Armory—and from where this critic was sitting it was lost, airless, and pretty unintelligible. Somewhere, over on my left, a stage consisting of a fancy glass cube fashioned into a variously partitioned office revolved in jerky fashion, as the story of the evolution of the famous banking family unfolded. Necks were craned, hopes the stage would draw closer were dashed. And this went on for over three and a half hours. Now The Lehman Trilogy has opened on a conventional Broadway stage—praise be, no […]

Sometimes plays reach to be something else. At their most urgent they can be manifestos, like Keenan Scott II’s Thoughts of a Colored Man, which opens tonight on Broadway in the same week that Jon Gruden resigned as the coach of the Las Vegas Raiders after various racist, sexist, homophobic, and transphobic comments he had made in the past were exposed. It opens as America and American theater’s reckoning with race and racism, brought into sharp focus by the murder of George Floyd, is ongoing. It opens as Black people’s voting rights are being brazenly curtailed. It opens as the Texas […]

Is This A Room is a gripping, highly recommended piece of theater, and also an unexpectedly intricate ballet. The 70-minute, deservedly multi-award winning play, which opens on Broadway tonight at the Lyceum Theatre, is an enactment of the transcript of what was said when the FBI first came to the Augusta, Georgia, home of former Air Force linguist and intelligence contractor Reality Winner on June 3, 2017. Winner, then 25, went on to be formally accused of leaking evidence about Russian interference in the 2016 election to The Intercept. In 2018, Winner was sentenced to five years and three months in […]

It is time for the Mabry family to go to church, and they are taking us with them. Douglas Lyons’ comedy is directed by Zhailon Levingston, who is not only making his Broadway debut with this play but at 27 is the youngest Black director in Broadway history. Levingston is also director of industry initiatives for the Broadway Advocacy Coalition, which is leading Broadway’s ongoing reckoning with race, racism, and representation. The occasion for the family gathering in Chicken & Biscuits, which opens tonight at Circle in the Square, is the funeral of Bernard, the father of sisters Baneatta (Cleo King) […]

Ruben Santiago-Hudson is one person, but in Lackawanna Blues—the show the Tony Award-winning performer has written, performs and directs, opening tonight at Broadway’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre—he becomes a voice of many. And, thanks to Santiago-Hudson’s dexterity of interpretation, the many characters he embodies immediately become familiar and intriguing to us. The key relationship in this 90-minute, Obie and Helen Hayes-award winning show—originally staged in 2001 by the Public Theater, and which Santiago-Hudson adapted for HBO four years later—is between him and his surrogate family, Ms. Rachel Crosby (“Nanny”). She had a soft voice and a bearing that was kind, understanding, […]

Tonight—hopefully, every single finger crossed (obviously including Anne Boleyn’s alleged sixth fingernail)—will mark one of the sweetest (in a karmic way) Broadway opening nights since shows restarted. On the night of March 12, 2020, Six, which sees the six wives of Henry VIII loudly and emphatically reclaim their own histories, was due to open. But that afternoon, Broadway’s pandemic shutdown was announced, and Six never had its opening night—until Sunday night, when the original Broadway cast returned to finally, officially open the show at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre. Of course it’s worth the wait. Of course anyone planning their own return […]

There were three major messages transmitted from Sunday night’s much-delayed Tony Awards. First: “Hello, the rest of America and international tourists, come to New York, and buy Broadway tickets because the hometown population cannot keep The Lion King and Wicked going. Sitting in a theater wearing masks is meh. But, right now at least, there’s hardly any coughing, and mercifully less mastication of crunchy foods.” Second: the Tonys believes in diversity. There must be more of it, on stage and off. This discussion and activism—ongoing since the murder of George Floyd—were referenced in speeches and performances. But if the proof of […]

When Kelli O’Hara returned to Broadway, it was quietly—not on stage as the Tony Award-winning star that she is in a reopening or new production or revival, but as an audience member at Pass Over, Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu’s acclaimed play about two Black men under various kinds of siege. Now living in Connecticut, O’Hara had returned to Manhattan to sing—“You’ll Never Walk Alone,” beautifully—at the event marking the 20th anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks the next day. “It was very surreal. I walked into the theater, which feels like home to me, sat among a very eager audience,” O’Hara […]

It seems strange to Jim Giaccone that he is 60 this year. He was 40 when his 43-year-old brother Joe, who worked for Cantor Fitzgerald on the 103rd floor of the World Trade Center’s north tower, died on 9/11. “I’m 17 years older than he was when he was killed. The math just freaked me out,” Jim told The Daily Beast. “When I was 40 and he was 43, he was my older brother. Now he’s stuck at 43. I’m 60. It freaks me out he was so young.” The Giaccone family has to date received no remains of Joe. Not […]

Max Giaccone remembers the night before 9/11 vividly. His father Joe was with him at home, quoting from Pink Panther movies. “A lot of my memories are jumbled of my dad. Prior to that night, unfortunately I remember not a whole lot,” Giaccone told The Daily Beast. “I’m not sure if my mind is blocking it out. I remember good things. I remember my dad being there for every baseball game I had after school. I remember my dad tapping along to music as we drove to and from my baseball games. I remember him having a glass of wine on […]

A trans friend from Kabul recently told Ahmad Qais Munhazim, “There is hope in waking up tomorrow, but I am afraid I would be killed tonight.” “Being in love is the most beautiful feeling in this ugly war. Qais, I have fallen in love with someone,” a queer friend from Kabul recently texted Munhazim. “It is nice to wake up not thinking about the war but waiting for his text. I fear what if Taliban kill my lover. What would I wake for?” The perilous situation facing LGBTQ Afghans now living under Taliban rule didn’t simply emerge in recent days, Munhazim, […]

The standing ovation, the whooping and cheering happened before a word was spoken. Pass Over opened tonight, August 22 (until Oct 10 at the August Wilson Theatre), the first release on a pent-up Broadway itching to make up for a lost year. Here we all were in what looked like a full house, and it felt momentous and strange. It had been so long, and it was so good to be back, but the pandemic is ongoing. Whether theatre can fully return in the social and scientific hinterland we find ourselves is still an open question, and one that will be […]

The young Bree Fram was obsessed with dinosaurs—the stegosaurus, to be exact—and becoming a paleontologist. (Her elder daughter Kathryn, 12, has inherited this fascination.) Then, when Bree was about 9 or 10, a friend of Fram’s dragged her “kicking and screaming” to watch an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. “And suddenly I wanted to be Geordi La Forge and make the warp drives go,” Fram tells The Daily Beast, laughing. Now Lieutenant Colonel Bree Fram is an active duty astronautical engineer in the U.S. Space Force, currently assigned to the Pentagon to lead space policy integration for the Department […]

Murray Bartlett and I spoke moments after I saw him take surely the most beatific crap ever taken on television. In both blatancy and lyricism it sets a new on-screen turd standard. Moments later, his White Lotus character, the highly strung hotel manager Armond, apparently died in a bathtub after being stabbed by rich-boy guest Shane (Jake Lacy), into whose suitcase Armond had squatted down in a gleeful act of righteous vengeance against the kind of obnoxious white privilege that Mike White’s comedy drama has been skewering and satirizing these last six weeks. “Are you traumatized?” Bartlett asks, roaring with laughter. […]

Somewhere in Cindy Adams’ Park Avenue penthouse, there is an intercom. Today it does not appear to be working, so the queen of New York gossip must ask her housekeeper Nazalene to bring us two glasses of chilled white wine. She asks me not to say what specific furnishings the penthouse contains for fear of attracting thieves, so I will simply note that I sit next to a jug of pink feathers. There are swagged drapes, intricately carved cabinets, fine art, sculptures, and plush, overstuffed sofas. This penthouse was once Doris Duke’s; Adams bought it in 1997 from Duke’s lawyer, “all […]

A few months into the pandemic, the reopening of theater a depressingly far-off and uncertain prospect, this reporter asked producers what they thought theater would look like when it returned. One common theme emerged: At least in the short term, some said, one should expect productions to make audiences happy. That wouldn’t mean dramas without drama, or relentless cheer, but after everything people had been through, the thinking was there had to be some emphatic on-stage uplift when seats were occupied again. Merry Wives (to Sept. 18), the first Public Theater “Free Shakespeare in the Park” production to play in two […]

If you love The Daily Beast’s royal coverage, then we hope you’ll enjoy The Royalist, a members-only series for Beast Inside. Become a member to get it in your inbox on Sunday. Is Virginia Roberts Giuffre about to sue Prince Andrew? Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who accuses Prince Andrew of having sex with her on three occasions when she was 17 years old while being trafficked by Jeffrey Epstein, may be about to sue the British royal in a New York court, according to the Mail on Sunday. Source link

The strange thing was the politesse in the articles that followed. “The f-word” or “the f-slur,” over and over again. It was only recently, we read in an interview in the U.K. Sunday Times, that Matt Damon realized “the f-slur”—ah, how gentle and unassuming it sounds—was wrong and bad. And this was thanks to his daughter who had to write a “treatise” on it to show him that “faggot” was bad. In 2021. To a Hollywood actor, who must work around LGBTQ people, who really can’t have been living under a social evolutionary rock all this time. Well, apparently Damon has […]

If you love The Daily Beast’s royal coverage, then we hope you’ll enjoy The Royalist, a members-only series for Beast Inside. Become a member to get it in your inbox on Sunday. Prince Charles in ‘access capitalism’ controversy Ben Elliot, nephew of Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall and the chairman of the Tory party in the U.K., has been accused of running an “access capitalism” service, allegedly trading off his connection to his aunt’s husband, Prince Charles. Source link

If you love The Daily Beast’s royal coverage, then we hope you’ll enjoy The Royalist, a members-only series for Beast Inside. Become a member to get it in your inbox on Sunday. Everyone has a view on what will be in Harry’s memoir How many books is Prince Harry writing? Just one, he insists, contrary to the Daily Mail reporting Saturday it was four—including, the Mail claimed ominously, one to the published after the queen’s death. Source link

At the cavernous Park Avenue Armory’s Drill Hall, Ann Dowd has not entirely given up elements of the spirit of Aunt Lydia—as any Handmaid’s Tale fan, as one of my theater buddies was, will soon realize. Dowd is the only person on stage in a commandingly performed but puzzlingly composed and paced remolding of Henrik Ibsen’s Enemy of the People by Robert Icke (to Aug. 8). Here, Icke has updated to the piece to the present day, its setting the small American town of Weston Falls dependent on the tourist income generated by its spa, and whose water supply may be […]

At one time, New York City’s Meatpacking District was all the things our Seven Deadly Sins guide excitedly told us it was: industrial, edgy, sexually transgressive, with the indisputably brilliant Florent feeding every demographic that passed its portal. Oddly, the façade of Florent is one of the few visible ghosts of those times in the cleaned-up, moneyed, boozy foody streets of now, and even more oddly our guide couldn’t have been close to being born when the area he was so enamored with was as steamy as he was eulogizing. On a recent evening, watching this inventive piece of storytelling and […]

Three days after its members were involved in a tragic accident at a Florida Pride event, the Fort Lauderdale Gay Men’s Chorus remains “in shock,” its president Justin Knight has told The Daily Beast. On Saturday, members of the chorus were preparing to march in the Stonewall Pride Parade in Wilton Manors, FL. One of their number, Fred Johnson Jr. who had ailments preventing him from marching, was set to drive in the parade in a white pickup truck. But Johnson, 77, seemingly lost control of the vehicle, striking fellow chorus members James “Jim” Fahy, 75, Gerry Vroegh, 67, and chorus […]

Warning: contains descriptions of events some readers may find upsetting. As you read this, Brandon Wolf might be eating ice cream for breakfast. Every June 12th for the last five years, he carves out time in the morning to “recharge” before preparing to attend the memorial events marking the 2016 massacre at Orlando’s LGBTQ Pulse nightclub, where 49 people were killed, two of them close friends, and where Wolf himself was present and escaped death. (Three days ago, the Senate passed a bill designating Pulse as a national memorial site.) Since the massacre—at the time, pre-Las Vegas in 2017, the deadliest […]

Here’s one thing you can do, indeed should do, to cast a real downer over brunch or sunbathing this weekend. When someone brightly greets you with a “Happy Pride!,” answer, as witheringly as your inner Dame Maggie Smith will allow, “Is it?” What else can one say after this first-week-of-Pride-month, featuring social media feeds dripping with rainbow emojis, individual and corporate smug self-congratulation, emails advertising every product under the sun made rainbow-colored, and pat messages of empowerment? Yet what is the point—apart from self-interest, self-promotion, and the easiest kind of cheerleading—of this orgy of pathetic virtue signaling when LGBTQ rights, and […]

Keith McNally, the famed 69-year-old restaurateur of such hotspots as Balthazar, Pastis, the Minetta Tavern, and Café Luxembourg, is planning his return to New York City next month, having recovered from a life-imperiling battle with COVID in his native England. In a candid interview with The Daily Beast, he says that the pandemic almost broke his restaurant empire, but that plans are advancing to build branches of the Minetta Tavern in Washington, D.C., and Pastis in Miami. “After divorce, a stroke, and COVID destroying 75 percent of the finances of my restaurants, it’s crucial I make money,” McNally told The Daily […]

The ACLU has so far filed two lawsuits against a panoply of anti-trans, anti-LGBTQ bills passed in Republican-controlled state legislatures. On Tuesday, it filed a lawsuit on behalf of four transgender youth and their families as well as two doctors, challenging a law passed in April that meant Arkansas became the first American state to ban the provision of gender-affirming treatments and surgery for transgender youth, despite every major medical association speaking out in support of the treatments. In April, as reported by The Daily Beast, Arkansas’ legislature voted to override Governor Asa Hutchinson’s veto of House Bill 1570, which bans […]

Adam is 14. This August he will begin public high school in Tennessee, and he is already “really stressed” about which bathroom he will be allowed to use. Last Friday, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee signed HB 1233 into law, which denies transgender students like Adam access to the school bathroom and locker rooms consistent with their gender identity. The new law also means a student, parent or employee could sue a Tennessee school “for all psychological, emotional, and physical harm suffered” if they share space with a trans person in a restroom or locker room. The student bathroom bill was one […]

If you love The Daily Beast’s royal coverage, then we hope you’ll enjoy The Royalist, a members-only series for Beast Inside. Become a member to get it in your inbox on Sunday. At the beginning of a ballroom scene in Pose, indeed in the brief opening titles and its exploding pink graphic, the call goes up: “The category is…” The phrase recurred to me this week thinking about the various grooves the royal family, and its talkative Californian dissidents Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, inhabit. In olden times, we called them “interests,” and the royals pursued them dutifully, cutting ribbons, opening […]

If you love The Daily Beast’s royal coverage, then we hope you’ll enjoy The Royalist, a members-only series for Beast Inside. Become a member to get it in your inbox on Sunday. Queen’s first cousin reportedly boasts about closeness with Putin—and a sweet deal Prince Michael of Kent reportedly has been trading on both his royal status and his access to Russian President Vladimir Putin. In an investigation published today by the U.K. Sunday Times, Prince Michael and his adviser boasted to undercover reporters of his connections to Putin and the “Putinistas” around him at the Kremlin. Source link

If you love The Daily Beast’s royal coverage, then we hope you’ll enjoy The Royalist, a members-only series for Beast Inside. Become a member to get it in your inbox on Sunday. If you keep a royal scorecard—and really, everyone needs a hobby—a shocking thing has taken place in recent days. Prince William and Kate Middleton have seemed, for the first time ever, more interesting than Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. Whether this is a blip, and the glamorous California controversy-magnets are planning a front-page coup de théâtre, remains to be seen. The Oprah interview, its fallout, and the various dramas […]

The Biden administration is preparing to directly confront the rash of anti-LGBT, and specifically anti-trans bills proliferating in state legislatures, according to the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the country’s leading LGBTQ advocacy organization. Separately, the Department of Justice has told The Daily Beast it will “fully enforce our civil rights statutes to protect transgender individuals,” giving hope to campaigners that the DOJ is preparing to challenge in the courts the legality of bills that have been introduced—and some passed—in a number of states, outlawing transgender youth’s access to health care and sports. The White House’s move and DOJ declaration follow President […]

If you love The Daily Beast’s royal coverage, then we hope you’ll enjoy The Royalist, a members-only series for Beast Inside. Become a member to get it in your inbox on Sunday. Harry and Meghan bio ‘Finding Freedom’ returns for dishy second edition Prepare for yet more internecine royal warfare in a matter of months. But really, when does it ever end? Source link

Willow Breshears says she has been contacted by several young transgender people in Arkansas over the last few days. “One of them said he was going to kill himself if the bill passed,” Breshears, an 18-year-old community organizer for the Center for Artistic Revolution and a founder of the Young Transwomen’s Project, told The Daily Beast of the now-notorious House Bill 1570. “That has weighed heavily on me. I was at a loss for words when he said it. It really showed me how important gender-affirming care is.” In early April, Arkansas became the first state in America to ban the […]

Prince Andrew spoke publicly for the first time since stepping back from his role as a senior royal, revealing that the queen had told him that the death of Prince Philip had left “a huge void” in her life. Andrew stepped back from public life in 2019, and has not performed any official royal duties in the wake of criticism over his friendship with late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, a candid interview he gave the BBC on the subject, and his lack of co-operation with American authorities. On Sunday, where he and Prince Edward thanked members of royal estate staff after a […]

Mayor Bill de Blasio—so tall, really a human redwood—was there, speaking about the moment being a new dawn for theater in New York City. Indeed, theater was “back,” he told the cameras. The line of people he came to greet waiting to see the first performance of Blindness at the Daryl Roth Theatre off Union Square was collectively, properly masked, but still a line, still packed closely together, reminding this critic that whatever measures being taken inside theaters, the line outside a theater right now remains just as it always was—an expectant, kettled huddle. “At some point, you just make a […]

Asa Hutchinson, Arkansas’ Republican governor, has vetoed a bill that would have criminalized affirming health care for trans youth, calling it an example of “vast government overreach.” The majority Republican Senate had voted in favor of HB 1570 last week, 28 votes to 7—making it the first bill to pass in America outlawing health care access and treatment for trans teenagers. The Arkansas General Assembly can vote to overturn Hutchinson’s veto. If passed, the bill would prevent young trans people from accessing health care and insurance coverage for gender-affirming care, and would have outlawed gender-confirming hormone treatment or surgery to trans […]

A college friend once jokingly asked Paul Schindler, “Were you reading Time magazine when you were in first grade?” Schindler chuckled recalling this benign jibe about his lifelong love of inked news on paper. He has just retired after 25 years working as the editor in chief of New York City’s LGBTQ newspaper, Gay City News (previously known as LGNY). Schindler is not completely leaving his keyboard to mothballs. He is still reporting for the paper and has written around half a dozen pieces since retiring on Dec. 31, most recently about Roberta Degnore, close friend of Sam Wagstaff, art curator […]

Imagine Dallas’ J.R. Ewing—that cackling, whisky tumbler-holding pinnacle of television villainy—not being played by Larry Hagman. It almost happened. Before Hagman’s successful audition, the actor Robert Foxworth was offered the part of J.R., Dallas creator David Jacobs recently recalled during an interview with The Daily Beast. It wasn’t J.R. that had percolated in Jacobs’ mind first when he created the CBS saga, which ran from 1978 to 1991. It was the character of Pam, later played by Victoria Principal—and the show’s original Romeo and Juliet storyline between her and Bobby (Patrick Duffy). “Pam wanted the house with the white picket fence. […]

If you love The Daily Beast’s royal coverage, then we hope you’ll enjoy The Royalist, a members-only series for Beast Inside. Become a member to get it in your inbox on Sunday. Royal family appoints “diversity czar” The royal family is to appoint a “diversity czar,” the Mail on Sunday reports. This Huh!-only-now-you-think-this-might-be-a-good idea? appointment is being made with a view to “modernizing the monarchy,” the Mail on Sunday said, adding that it was an acknowledgment that “more needs to be done to champion minorities’ rights.” Source link

Senator John Kennedy (R-LA) has a thing about genitalia. Around the time of Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court confirmation process, he told Fox News, “If my Democratic friends want to turn it into an intergalactic freak show and bring back the protesters with the genitalia-shaped headgear, I can’t stop ’em. I just hope they won’t.” On Wednesday, what lies between our legs was on his mind again, as he tried to clarify his disgust with the Equality Act—the proposed bill that would protect LGBTQ Americans from discrimination under federal law. If 70% of Americans, including 50% of Republicans, really do support […]

The contemplation of suicide, blatant racism, and a family of “trapped,” emotionally stunted snobs: nobody expected Meghan Markle and Prince Harry’s interview with Oprah Winfrey to be as dramatic as it was, or as grim. It was less a night for popcorn and low-stakes royal dish, and more one for stricken looks of surprise. One bombshell and within-palace-walls horror story followed another, one numbing thud after another. The opening revelation that Kate Middleton had made Meghan cry, not the other way round—as had been previously reported—was a relatively innocent aperitif. This grand guignol was just getting started. Harry and Meghan told […]

Patrick J. Adams, Meghan Markle’s co-star in the TV show Suits, has condemned the royal family as “obscene,” and the “racist, slanderous vitriol” of the media in a powerful series of tweets. Adams’ passionate defense of Meghan came after it was announced that Buckingham Palace had begun an investigation into bullying allegations made against the Duchess by former Palace staff, just days before the broadcast of Meghan’s much-hyped interview with Oprah Winfrey on CBS this Sunday night. In a statement, Meghan said the allegations were part of a “calculated smear campaign.” Adams said that it was “OBSCENE that the Royal Family, […]

I have played this 9-second video 16 times, and I think yes, Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff is absolutely, rightly telling me to wear a mask to do my part in closing down the coronavirus pandemic. It’s a sadly necessary message: Check out NBC reporter Sam Brock’s video of the maskless shoppers and staff he found in a Naples, Florida supermarket. And then, hmmm, there’s Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff’s uncompromising yet gentle eye contact, his genially butch monotone, and the way he just snaps that sleek black mask on at the end—well, it’s like Alan Ladd has just ridden into town as […]

If you love The Daily Beast’s royal coverage, then we hope you’ll enjoy The Royalist, a members-only series for Beast Inside. Become a member to get it in your inbox on Sunday. Joe Biden’s royal appointment Joe Biden will meet the queen and other royals this summer, and we’re betting they’re looking forward to it way, way more than when the bombastic House of Trump descended on Buckingham Palace in June 2019. Source link

For someone who is allegedly “muzzled,” Sen. Josh Hawley sure talks a lot. In relentlessly whiny media appearances, he keeps telling us how censored he is from saying anything, as he keeps saying exactly that on mass media platforms. Just last night, he was wailing away on The Ingraham Angle. The most definitely not-muzzled Hawley wants you to know he is a victim of “wokeness” and “cancel culture,” because people have asked him lots of very, very, very mean questions about his role in inciting the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, his fist raised to the Trump-supporting mob. Here is what […]

The joy was audible in Paulo Batista’s voice. The 36-year-old from San Diego, California, wants to join the Navy. The significant obstacle that was former president Donald Trump’s ban on trans service people was now gone, revoked by an executive order issued by Joe Biden’s administration. “I’m just ecstatic today. I feel like I am walking on clouds,” Batista told The Daily Beast. “It’s a new…” He started laughing again, saying he had been with his “ecstatic, very supportive” colleagues at the property management company where he works when he heard the news. “I’m just speechless. Before, having the ban meant […]

Montana legislators are preparing to decide whether the state should discriminate against its young trans population. If passed into law, HB 112 would prevent interscholastic athletes from participating in athletic activities consistent with their gender identity, while HB 113 would enshrine an effective ban on physical and mental health care for trans youth, including banning the use of puberty blockers, while punishing and fining doctors who treat young trans people. Both bills were introduced by Rep. John Fuller, who has not returned The Daily Beast’s requests for comment. “Fuller says he finds it wrong for young people to go through these […]

If you love The Daily Beast’s royal coverage, then we hope you’ll enjoy The Royalist, a members-only series for Beast Inside. Become a member to get it in your inbox on Sunday. Harry and Meghan quit Twitter and Facebook President Trump has been ejected from multiple online platforms after inciting the Capitol MAGA riot, resulting in the deaths of five people. Source link

It was a familiar swing-set of an LGBTQ year: high highs, low lows, and the ever-present animus of the Trump administration, a bigotry which Trump and his gaslighting lackeys, like Richard Grenell, insisted was not bigotry. On one side of history was Pete Buttigieg, the first out LGBTQ candidate to garner delegates in his impressive bid to become the Democrats’ presidential nominee. Now Biden’s pick to be transportation secretary, Buttigieg has made history again, as the first out gay man to be nominated to a Cabinet role. One bum note: Chasten Buttigieg will not be First Gentleman. Yet. Then there was […]

Had I heard of the alleged gay sex party “full of Broadway stars that you love and adore.” This reporter had not. “They get together and have sex with newcomers,” Mark Peikert said. “This is second-hand information, I have not been invited myself. At the end of the night, there are party gifts. So, one bottom [a sex partner who prefers getting penetrated] reaches into the bowl of gifts and plucks out his prize. ‘King Lear tickets!’ he shouted.” Peikert laughed—a hearty roar, really. “Imagine that. You’re a bottom and you’ve gotten fucked at a group sex party. And now you […]

The staff at Blackstones salon in New York City’s East Village watched in fascinated horror Thursday afternoon as the slick brown trickles of maybe hair dye, maybe makeup, maybe fake tan trickled from Rudy Giuliani’s sideburns. “We saw it,” Blackstones colorist and educator Patti O’Gara told The Daily Beast. “It was a collective ‘Ewwww.’ We were like, ‘It’s just so gross and it won’t stop dripping.’” Giuliani was holding forth at his latest low-on-legal-evidence, high-on-decibels election rigging press conference for President Trump—this one at the headquarters of the Republican National Committee in Washington, D.C.—but his huffing, puffing, and democracy-imperiling lies were […]

Prince William secretly battled coronavirus, even struggling to breathe—but kept his April ordeal a secret because he didn’t wish to alarm the public. The Sun reported Sunday that William, 38—who is second in line to the British throne—contracted the virus after his father Prince Charles and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson both fell ill with coronavirus. Johnson became so sick he was placed in the intensive care unit of a London hospital. A source told The Sun, “William was hit pretty hard by the virus—it really knocked him for six. At one stage he was struggling to breathe, so obviously everyone […]

If you love The Daily Beast’s royal coverage, then we hope you’ll enjoy The Royalist, a members-only series for Beast Inside. Become a member to get it in your inbox on Sunday. Thomas Markle: “I could die tomorrow” Meghan Markle’s father Thomas Markle says he wants her court case against Associated Newspapers—over the Mail on Sunday publishing details of a private letter she sent to him—to happen “as quickly as possible.” Markle wrote in a statement related to his daughter’s case: “I am a realist and I could die tomorrow. The sooner this case takes place the better… I have had […]

Who would you expect to drive policy and public opinion when it comes to child hunger and poverty? A government, whose job it is to protect and care for its citizens, or a professional football player, whose job is it to score goals? In Britain, the answer is the professional footballer. “Marcus: The Pride of Britain” the Mirror’s front page read Monday, revealing the footballer Marcus Rashford had been given one of their “Pride of Britain” awards. Rashford, a forward for Premier League club Manchester United and the England national team, has led a hugely successful campaign, starting last spring, to […]

Betty Buckley was out walking her dog one evening a few weeks ago—near her ranch, west of Fort Worth in her native Texas—when she saw a neighbor’s Trump/Pence sign. “In a fit of pique, I ripped it off the fence and kept walking,” the Tony Award-winning Broadway star told The Daily Beast. Buckley then called her longtime assistant and close friend, Cathy Brighenti, who told her that she shouldn’t have done what she did, and that the homeowner would likely know she was the perpetrator. “So, on the way home I picked up the sign, and put it back.” Buckley laughed. […]

There is no need, if you are a Trump supporter, to respond to this. Jog on. Your gaslighting and lies are better spread elsewhere. Whatever you claim about a day of clouds and rain (“It’s so sunny”) is usually the opposite of truth; whatever insult you level, baselessly, about a political opponent is only ever true of President Donald Trump or his allies. Up is down, round is square, and the most homophobic and transphobic president of modern times is really a gay savior. His daughter Tiffany Trump addressed a “TrumpPride” event (this one over the weekend in Florida), claiming this […]