How many times do we have to read that Rupert Everett blames his lackluster career on coming out as gay, when all evidence is that it’s because he’s a jerk?

As Neil Patrick Harris’s openly-gay star only seems to be on the rise to eclipse his Doogie Howser fame; as Cheyenne Jackson joins the cast of 30 Rock; as Ellen DeGeneres becomes a Cover Girl; and as Rosie O’Donnell shows no sign of gay celebrity fatigue, it seems lost on Rupert Everett that people don’t particularly care for him and the reasons have little to do with his sexuality.

Never mind that he upset a lot of people by writing a tell-all Hollywood book that was unflattering to those who considered him a friend.  Never mind that his plastic surgery foray was another example of botched movie star vanity.  And never mind that Everett never seems to get his story right.

For instance, after he tossed off his friend Madonna in the aforementioned gossip book, she wanted nothing to do with him.  What if your friend wrote these things about you:

His observation that she smells “vaguely of sweat”, to take one example. Or that, like all Hollywood’s alpha females, she’s something of a “she-man”. Or just possibly it was this bit that she didn’t care much for: “Just like America, everything about Madonna had changed. And what had happened had been carefully wrapped in psychological clingfilm and locked inside an interior fridge. Sometimes, in moments of stress, Madonna had power cuts and the old whiny barmaid came screaming out of the defrosting cold room.”

He wrote about how Guy Ritchie doesn’t like gays (not true), and that Madonna ditched her gay brother and gay friends to be with him.  He wrote about her celebrity spats.

And Rupert was shocked that she was upset.

Yet in February 2009, he told the New York Times magazine that he and Madonna were friends again.  Then just days ago he contradicts himself with The Guardian:

So has she forgiven you for that now?

“No.”

Really?

“Elephants don’t forget.”

Has she not forgiven you in a jokey way, or has she really not forgiven you?

“She doesn’t trust me any more.”

Oh dear! Although she’s probably not the only one. Everett’s memoir is entirely unlike the usual Hollywood memoir: he tells stories that aren’t always entirely flattering, about himself, about other people, about the way the star system works, which is fabulous for the reader, but perhaps less so for his subjects.

And Madonna read that and likely said, “There you go again, why don’t you just learn ‘no comment’ you twat?”  It’s not just his friendship with Madonna; Everett has stepped on pretty much everyone he has come in contact with:

Julia Roberts is “beautiful and tinged with madness”. When she gives him a lift on the Sony jet from Chicago, where they’re filming, to New York, he writes, “I witnessed the whole machine grind into action, the grandeur of Hollywood in transporting its livestock from A to B.” Sharon Stone he describes as a goddess, but it’s only when he starts rehearsals that “I realised something that had hitherto escaped me. She was utterly unhinged.”

In July 2009, Everett was fired from plum Vanity Fair after he called his boss Graydon Carter–whom I adore–fat and weird:

Who does one have to fuck to get OFF that masthead? He’s such a weird character, that [Vanity Fair Editor in Chief] Graydon [Carter]. He’s certainly not the buffoon he looks like. This is the most amazing thing I found out about him. I was once staying at a hotel and I was in the room directly under his. He is an amazing fuck. And you can quote me on this. The screams coming from the woman were some of the purest sounds of pleasure I’d ever heard. And there I was sitting alone in my room unfucked. Suddenly it all made sense. That messy hair of his that I always thought was buffoon hair was buffoon hair hiding a monster cock. The next day I went down to breakfast and Graydon came in and I thought to myself, well, now I understand why you are always acting so entitled and walking on air even though you’re rather fat. It’s because grazing the grass between your legs is this appendage of yours. I did rather politely tell him that morning that I thought he was a very good fuck.

So, Rupert, that is how you get the F-off the Vanity Fair masthead, and his friends said he needed the money.

Through all of this,  Rupert seems blissfully unaware that the problem is that he is an asshole and if you work with him, he’s going to slam and spill the beans about you.

In 1998, Everett was cited as an example of how being gay doesn’t prevent your star from rising.  After that was written, he starred in An Ideal Husband (for which he garnered multiple award nominations); Inspector Gadget; The Next Best Thing; Shreks II and III; The Chronicles of Narnia; and the St. Trinian´s films.

But if you ask Everett, he’ll tell you he’s being held back because he’s gay.:

“The fact is that you could not be, and still cannot be, a 25-year-old homosexual trying to make it in the British film business or the American film business or even the Italian film business,” Everett, 50, says. “It just doesn’t work and you’re going to hit a brick wall at some point. You’re going to manage to make it roll for a certain amount of time, but at the first sign of failure they’ll cut you right off.  Honestly, I would not advise any actor necessarily, if he was really thinking of his career, to come out”

In April 2009 he told the Daily Beast pretty much the opposite thing:

But the reason my career is so up and down is that I get very little opportunity. There is just very little opportunity for a fag. That’s the reality. There isn’t. But I have no regrets for being out. None. It’s not like I’m missing out on that much.

Actually, it’s a surprise Everett made it as far as he did; after all, his ‘story’ is hardly the stuff leading men are made of:

Rupert did not last even two years at London’s Central School for Speech and Drama in his mid teens, being expelled for “insubordination” (an early sign of his fiery, independent spirit). As soon as he moved to London he began exploring his sexuality. At seventeen he joined the flamboyantly campy and avant garde Glasgow Citizens’ Company. Over the next few years (in the late 70s and early 80s) he worked in theater and modelling.

It was during this period that the boy born with the silver spoon started working as a prostitute, or “rent boy.”

What about developing a gay fan base?  Everett is a fail there, too.  Gays who want the same rights as everyone else are pathetic just because he wants to live a life “outside the mainstream” as he says:

“I mean, if you are meant to have babies then great. But this whole idea of two gay guys filling a cocktail shaker with their sperm and impregnating some grim lesbian and then it gets cut out is just really weird….  It has to change. These awful middle-class queens – which is what the gay movement has become – are so tiresome. It’s all Abercrombie & Fitch and strollers. Everybody has the right to do what they want to do, but still…”

So because Everett wants to be a freak, all gay people should want that, too.  In the same article, he insults the entire London theatre-going audience, which is essentially his own:

In London, the audience is like a bunch of old sluts who have had too much sex and can never cum. They’re mean and they dare you to entertain them.

Rupert, the problem is you have been so taken with your fame, and your fame-chasing; you are so taken with your rise that you’ve forgotten an element to being a successful actor is an air of mystery.  If you want to be a leading man, it’s one thing for you to be gay, but it’s another thing for you to continually talk about all the celebrities you are around, spilling their secrets and your private thoughts, telling the world about your prostitute days, tossing off your audience and gays who want families, and then expect men and women in an audience to suspend reality for two hours and picture you as the perfect leading man that they might like to see more of.

It doesn’t work that way.  Just don’t blame your crap career on anything other than your flawless ability to demonstrate to everyone that you’re a jerk who few people want to watch or get to know, Rupert.

This blog has taken part in outing two gay celebrities.  I was not the first, but  the second person to out Fox News anchor Shepard Smith; shortly thereafter, Academy Award-nominated director Kirby Dick became the third.  Dick’s explanation as to why he focused on Smith in his 2009 documentary Outrage! mirrors my own reasoning:

The film does report on one journalist, Shepard Smith, who was first reported on by Kevin Naff of the Washington Blade. Shepard Smith works for Fox News, which has been a major factor in the rise of anti-gay hysteria in this country over the past two decades. As one of the most prominent people in Fox News—according to the New York Times, Smith makes 7 to 8 million dollars per year—his complicity with the network’s homophobic agenda rises to a level of hypocrisy that I felt was worthy of reporting.

Although my stomach turns every time I see a FreeRepublic.com or eNationalist.com referral hit my Shepard Smith post, I still believe in the merits of outing him.

I know of many gay celebrities who are in the closet that I would not out because they are living their lives, harming nobody in the LGBT community.   Longtime blog readers may remember that I had a chance to out Clay Aiken, but refused despite “Claymates” demanding I reveal the gender of a “friend” I mentioned who was dating him about a year ago.

The same can’t be said for Smith, or Florida Governor Charlie Crist.

Word to the conservative closeted gays who make decisions that work against their own people: the LGBT community has no more patience for Roy Cohns.

The problem with my Smith post is that I wrote it out of anger over Fox News and their destructive, debased “news” that seemingly intelligent people actually believe is fair and balanced.  Writing in anger is cathartic, but it detracts from the message.  I was in Tel Aviv photographing for the Creative Commons, and my hotel only carried Fox News (“We see them as the most pro-Israel,” my guide told me).  Every day for a week I had to watch them to find out what was happening in the U.S.

Forced to watch Fox, outing Shep to the legions of fans of their slanted reporting was the only thing I could think to do.  They are being fed their news by a gay guy.  And there are a lot of gays who work at News Corp.

In October 2007, I interviewed one of the most impassioned defenders of outing celebrities, Michael Musto, who writes a popular column for the Village Voice.  In the 1990′s, Musto outed two of the most famous openly-gay celebrities today: Rosie O’Donnell and Ellen DeGeneres.  Here was our exchange over the subject:

DS: What stands out as a story that you did where you were bowled over by the reaction to it.

MM: In the 1990s I was one of the few people outing celebrities—

DS: —You outed Rosie O’Donnell and Ellen Degeneres—

MM: —I outed Rosie and Ellen, and it’s hard to even imagine now that they ever were in the closet. You have to educate the new people and say, ‘Guess what, they were in the closet at one point.’ It’s hard to believe that Rosie was doing this delicate dance on her talk show where she was the ‘Queen of Nice’ and the single mother who had a crush on Tom Cruise and I was pointing out the absurdity of it. I was even more angry at the media than people like Rosie, because the media would play along with it. They would do huge profiles of her without even addressing the fact that she was obviously a lesbian. I just spoke at Yale a couple of weeks ago and talked about outing, and nobody argued. I was like, ‘Come on! Somebody argue!’ I used to get so many arguments over this that I used to have a list printed out with an answer to each argument.

DS: Do you have a theory or philosophy you follow about outing?

MM: My theory is just that public figures sign an implicit deal with the media that their private lives are to be covered, and to leave out gayness because it is distasteful or there might be homophobes out there is homophobic in itself. It’s hypocritical and it makes ‘gay’ the last taboo. But I don’t get arguments anymore. I’m like, ‘Come on people! Yell at me!’

DS: What about the argument that it is more appropriate for people who are working against the gay community, a Larry Craig, if you will?

MM: People like Michaelangelo Signorile started by outing Malcolm Forbes, not anybody anti-gay. He was just saying ‘He’s dead, he’s gay, let’s say so in the obituary.’ I don’t believe in outing only the hypocrites and anti-gay people because then the only people the public is going to know are gay are horrible, hateful people.

DS: There are a lot of gay people who aren’t talked about in Hollywood now. Merv Griffin was an example. Do you not feel the need to spell it out for some people who lead very openly gay lives but that nobody talks about?

MM: Yeah, that was a big uproar after Merv died. Merv almost came out himself; was it Vanity Fair where he said ‘I’m quarter sexual, I’ll sleep with anybody for a quarter?’ or something? 99% of the obits didn’t even address it the fact that even Merv had almost coyly come out. So yeah, I wrote something to try and rectify that.

DS: But why not write something before he died?

MM: Please! I totally did. In the 90′s there was a group that put up those ‘Absolutely Queer: Jodi Foster’ and Merv Griffin posters? I ran the Jodi and Merv posters in my column. It was huge. I was really going places nobody was going; nobody was running pictures of those posters because everybody was so terrified of lawsuits.

DS: Did you ever come under editorial pressure over those?

MM: No, and the Voice staff at the time was very anti-outing, but nobody told me not to go there, and I’ve never been sued in my life and I’ve been here for 22 years.

Jean Coaxum, one of the staff members of Exodus Transitional Community, stands outside the Church of Living Hope in East Harlem with Jim McGreevey.

Former New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey, who riveted the nation when he came out as a gay American in 2004, is now the symbol of fallen Governors.  When Eliot Spitzer stepped down from the New York governorship in the midst of his own sex scandal, Spitzer and his wife were even charged with copying the McGreeveys’ fashion (it is uncanny).

The comparisons between Spitzer and McGreevey were apt, since they were both active Democratic politicians in neighboring states around the same time, both were frequently mentioned as strong Presidential contenders, and both of their sex scandals were seen as hubris personified.

With South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, whose Argentinian affair is not only hubris but also hypocrisy personified, McGreevey emerged again to offer advice that he should proceed with humility.

“I’m filled with a sense of pain and anguish for him and for his family,” McGreevey said in an interview. “I think it was a very human moment.”

Sanford is only one in a recent list of “Love Govs” who have admitted to affairs.  They include the aforementioned McGreevey and Spitzer; Jim Gibbons of Nevada; and David Paterson of New York.

I have known Jim McGreevey since 2007, when I photographed him as part of my public art project that Wikipedia hosts.  At the time I was attending Saint Bartholomew’s in Manhattan on one of my many failed quests to find spirituality.  St. Bart’s also happened to be where McGreevey, his partner Mark O’Donnell and his daughter Jacqueline attended service.  One day I approached him to ask if I could do his portrait.  He still possessed the boyish good looks and charm that were evident even at the height of his scandal.

However, he possessed more than that: he also displayed humility and an inner peace.  He is in a healthy, happy relationship with Mark as he studies to become an Episcopal priest.  He is giving back to others who have made mistakes, often because they were caught up in the circumstances of their lives.

Jim McGreevey and black Jesus at the Church of Living Hope in East Harlem. Click on the image to see more.

Gay people mostly forgave McGreevey for his affair when it came to light five years ago.  We are well aware of the many ludicrous situations that occur because men, particularly in McGreevey’s generation, have been forced to live their lives in the closet.  That he is living such an honorable and giving life freed from the shame of the closet is testament to the real Jim McGreevey.

McGreevey volunteers at Exodus MinistriesTransitional Community at the Church of Living Hope in East Harlem, New  York, which tries to help newly-released prisoners learn life skills and handle the significant challenges that ex-convicts face.   It’s not just job-hunting.  One of the photographs below shows Jim helping one young man figure out how to set up a free e-mail account on Yahoo.  With limited access to computers, the guy had no idea how to do this.  This is not atypical.  We take this kind of knowledge for granted, assuming everyone knows how to set up free e-mail.  They don’t.

The gifts that McGreevey brings to these formerly-incarcerated men and women are vast.  He still retains many of the contacts and friendships in government that he had when he was Governor, which has been a Godsend to a program that needs state assistance to function.   McGreevey knows  how the system works; he knows resources that are available to these people; and he is gifted with an ability to teach and reach them.

Many of these men and women don’t know who McGreevey is; they were not exactly following politics before their imprisonment.  Nevertheless, it was obvious that they sensed in Jim that he knows tremendous mistakes, and he knows how to overcome them.

Of course, the tabloids, the Mark Sanfords and the Larry Craigs of the world will probably never forgive him.  But who cares.  Certainly not the men in these photos below, who see the same McGreevey that I see, and not the caricature who exists in the pages of the press.

UPDATE:  The correct name is Exodus Transitional Community.  There is a Dallas-based group named Exodus Ministries that does prisoner rehabilitation as well (You may remember Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers served on the Dallas group’s board, which was mistakenly thought to be the ex-gay group Exodus International).  I was told they are affiliated with Dallas, but then later told that they are not.

Alvin Williams, one of Exodus’ intake counselors, talks to newly-released men about readjusting to life outside of prison, and the services that Exodus has to offer them.

McGreevey talks to the young men about life skills and how to re-engage society.

McGreevey and an Exodus counselor help a young man set up a free e-mail account.  Many of these people have challenges, such as lack of access to computers, that many of us can not fathom.

McGreevey stands in front of James de la Vega‘s East Harlem mural of legendary Nuyorican poet Pedro Pietri.

These images are licensed Creative Commons and are part of a public art project.  Click here to learn more.

In 2002 I was at a bar called Hell in the Meatpacking District of New York City, which is where I met Shepard Smith.  At the time, Shep was just coming to terms with his sexuality, and we spent a good deal of time talking about what it means for him to be a gay man.  I’m not the first to report this.

Shep showed some interest in me–we were introduced via a mutual friend, an actor named Mark–but all we had was conversation.  I thought he was a nice guy.  I snapped photos of him and his female friend with the handkerchief on her head, whose name I have long forgotten.  I sent him those photos.

But as I watch Fox News, and the diatribes they air and the complete reaming of reality that they undertake daily that only serves to incite the worst in Americans, I wonder:  Shep – do you ever feel like you are selling yourself out completely just for your career?  When you said “it gets frightening sometimes” did you really mean it?  Your career is so developed that you could now hop to another network.  Why don’t you?  Why do you stay at a network that appeals to the worst in American society, and practices one of the most debased forms of infotainment?

At the time you and I met you at Hell, Shep, I was seeing someone and made that clear in our conversation; I would never have cheated.  But through the years, as I watch what Fox News does, I wonder if you and I had started to date–do you date, or do you just have one-night stands?–whether I would be okay with who you work for and what you do every night.  I don’t have an answer.

I imagine, Shep, that your career is fulfilling, but I also suspect that you go home every night and wonder what you are doing, and whether getting your face plastered all over the Rockefeller Center subway station and across America is worth it that you have found nobody with whom to build a life.  You are alone, and you are probably frustrated that your personal life is in the crapper because you have sold yourself out.

You’ve already made your name, Shep.  You just haven’t done anything with it beyond what every talking head does.  You could start by coming out, and exploring a side of who you are more openly so that you are no longer terrified that it will endanger your working life.  It won’t, and you’ve already banked your financial security.

Update: Why did I write this post?