Following on the post about trusting our guts about gaydar and celebrities...
I've batted nearly .1000 when it comes to predicting a celebrity's sexual orientation just from media clues. I think partly it's because I don't make the "guess" that often: Only a few celebrities really ring the clue phone (yeah, lack of representation sucks), but I also think the other reason is because LGBTQIA folks don't get it wrong very often.
I mean, it's pretty important that our instincts are right, after all. We could truly be risking our lives on a wrong guess in real life. We have to be incredibly careful AND pretty darned good.
So, I was trying to think of someone who pinged my spidey senses that I was COMPLETELY wrong about... and I came up with only one example:
Despite driving the daydreams of legions of 1970s lesbians (Rosie O'Donnell, I'm looking at you), Kate remains firmly heterosexual, in spite of the lesbian catnip she oozes from every pore.
Just look at her as Mary Ryan in her soap opera debut:
She went on to do movies and the stage for a number of years, but she was hard to cast because she didn't fit the cookie cutter parts available at the time. She had a brief doctor series and some guest star spots, most notably on Dallas and Cheers.
But when they cast her as Captain Janeway? Come on!!
Every woman loving woman in all the quadrants wanted to be her coffee cup!!
But the man boys at Paramount decided the show needed some spank appeal for the 14-24 male demographic, so they brought out their Space Barbie, Seven of Nine, to introduce some gratuitous sex and nudity.
"Only one problem, boys," said Mulgrew with a smirk....
Voyager now had a willful, headstrong, wildly intelligent "alien" snatched from her natural environment and penned up in a rigid, paramilitary system that she had to learn to navigate, understand, and ultimately be tamed by... and it was headed by another willful, headstrong, wildly intelligent human, who happened to be female, too.
The producers and writers claimed Janeway was Seven's mentor, a "mother figure" to the poor little space orphan.
As the J/7 fandom put it: Mother, my ass.
The subtext-- and soon the fan fiction-- wrote itself: Seven gets kidnapped back to the Borg? Janeway takes on a Borg cube with a ship a tenth its size. Failing Borg technology threatens Seven's life? Janeway goes "cortical node" hunting, even if it means killing a live (enslaved, sentient) drone to get one. Greater good? Screw that, Janeway's girlfriend is in danger.
Star Trek: Voyager went toe-to-toe with Xena, Warrior Princess as lesbian show of the decade.
And it wasn't just the show that made us all sure about Kate. The woman has the voice of a lesbian sex goddess and she's not afraid to use it. She flirts shamelessly with all interviewers and creates sexual tension with stage furnishings. She swaggers. She slouches. She has the greatest hand game in lesbian history!!
But through it all, Kate Mulgrew maintained (and still maintains) her heterosexuality.
And I still hope...nay, LONG!, to have my gaydar proven right...
janainaart
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