Word: thingness
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...Sunday night's show, Gervais alluded to the Heidi Fleiss-like relationship of the HFPA to Hollywood. After asking viewers to buy the DVD of his own movie, The Invention of Lying, he lurched into an introduction of the HFPA President: "One thing that can't be bought is a Golden Globe. Officially," he added, wagging his hand, and making the aside, "I'm not gonna do this again anyway." He continued: "But if you were to buy one, the man to see would be Philip Berk...
...irreverence; on last year's show, as a presenter, he heard a wince from the audience as he remarked, apropos The Reader, that "The trouble is, with holocaust films there's never any gag reel on the DVDs." Since the HFPA invited him back to preside over the whole thing - indeed, Gervais was the first host since 1995 - he took that as a license to kill, with his trademark acid wit, the stars he was introducing - especially if they'd been known to take a tipple. Making a solemn declaration against "prejudice and stereotype," he then said, "One stereotype...
...when Tony Blair's Labour government came to power, the ground was shifting. Chris Smith, the only out MP for 14 years, was named Minister of Culture. "The really astonishing thing was that no one pointed out a gay man had been appointed to the Cabinet," he says from Britain's Environment Agency, which he now runs. The same year in Exeter, a constituency in southwestern England, Conservative party candidate Adrian Rogers attacked his openly gay opponent Ben Bradshaw by describing homosexuality as "a sterile, disease-ridden and godforsaken occupation." Voters awarded Bradshaw the seat, in one of the biggest...
Wowereit, Berlin's mayor, is all of those things: he regularly appears with his neurosurgeon boyfriend at public events and ran for office with the slogan "I'm gay and that's a good thing." But even he doesn't believe a level playing field exists yet. "As long as the sexual orientation of a candidate is publicly discussed at all," he says, "one has to assume that it's still not normal for a gay person to aim for such a position...
...they were going to have that day," he says. Back in Canada, he collects and refurbishes laptops for donation and recently helped raise $7,500 for a Ghanaian orphanage. "I learned you don't need to save the whole world," he says. "You just need to do one little thing...