When Anne Hathaway, whose funbag-flashing moment in the back of a car provided Brokeback Mountain audience members a brief respite from the steady onslaught of Heath-on-Jake action, recently attempted to toast the holidays at the Gramercy Park hotel, a doorman failed to recognize the star. (We imagine he has since been chained to a rolling AV cart in the hotel's boiler room with multiple copies of The Princess Diaries and Devil Wears Prada.) Luckily, the NY Daily News reports, she was traveling with her husky, hairy guardian angels in tow:

The Best Week Ever blog continues their "10 Best 10 Best Lists of 2006" with #3, The 10 Gayest Moments of 2006. It reads as a pretty hysterical stroll down this year's yellow-bricked memory lane, including such highlights as #9 ("The 6-foot Long Hoagie That is the Jake/Lance/McConaughey Sandwich"), #7's Ryan Seacrest/Teri Hatcher photo-op smooching session ("'Anus-Mouth' has never made more sense in our eyes,") and this write-up of the one movie sure to represent the Rainbow Rebellion at this year's Oscars, Dreamgirls:

Iconic former gay porn star Jeff Stryker (nee Chuck Peyton) and his North Hollywood neighbor Paul Kulak, described as a "juvenile delinquent-turned-javelin champion," have found themselves embroiled in an ongoing bitter feud over "the Woodshed," which from best as we can surmise is some kind of open mic night for local, folk-music-loving weirdos. Peyton hates the noise and crowds; Kulak just wants to feel the music, dude. It's the quintessential, porn star vs. hippie L.A. story, and according to the Daily News, things have gotten ugly. Disco dancing ugly:

AfterElton.com explores the fascinating case of the character of Zach from NBC's hit drama, Heroes: The best friend and confidante to the series' pivotal cheerleader character Claire, Zach (actor Thomas Dekker) was conceived by the show's creators to be a gay teenager. And while Zach never once uttered the words "I'm gay," up until the "Homecoming" episode that aired Nov. 20, all signs still pointed to Queer. (The episode features the cheerleader punching out another girl who called Zach a "gay boy," and later features a scene in which Zach refuses to accompany Claire to the homecoming "for a million different reasons," then seguing into a maddeningly vague speech about embracing one's otherness.) AfterElton reports the official Heroes website even summarized the exchange by saying "Zach stammers with his reply, admitting that he's gay," words which then went mysteriously missing from the online recap. His MySpace page, meanwhile, lists his orientation as "Not Sure," and his favorite movies as a lavender laundry list of the usual suspects (Rocky Horror, Priscilla Queen of the Desert, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Velvet Goldmine, etc.). So why, then, with Dekker about to leave the show to star in a Terminator TV series, are NBC and the actor's reps now insisting the character was straight all along?

Before a flawlessly put-together mob of angry Gays storms the courtyard of the 8000 Sunset shopping complex to topple the 68-foot statue of Jennifer Hudson they have erected in her honor, the star of Dreamgirls has released several statements intended to counter remarks attributed to her yesterday in a Dallas gay newspaper in which she allegedly called homosexuality "a sin." Her MySpace blog entry puts her current mood at "depressed," and goes on to say that "some paper is saying that I have a problem with gay people. Its just mean and wrong... Anybody that knows me, knows that just ain't true." A second statement, sent to The Advocate (whose current cover features Hudson) and forwarded to us, had this to say:

There exists in all of Gaydom perhaps no greater paradox than the one represented by the inner struggle of the Bible-thumping diva, who would have no career if not for the Gays who idolize them, but whose strict religious upbringing teaches them that God looks unkindly on the shirtless, sodomizing hordes gazing worshipfully up at them from the dancefloors below. No, not even Jennifer Hudson, recently anointed Gay Man's Messiah for her up-from-the-American-Idol-ashes, Beyoncé-upstaging turn as Effie in Dreamgirls, is immune from the fanbase-alienating phenomenon. The Dallas Voice recently interviewed Hudson—who until now has expressed a very pro-Gay attitude in the media—and found the Next Big Thing still carries with her some old-fashioned attitudes:

The endless entertainment that comes out of humiliating lonely women who choose to take their search for love to national television is the basic working premise of GayDAR, a new dating show currently casting Gays able to resist their temptation to gush about Jennifer Hudson's performance in Dreamgirls long enough to convince their dates they actually have some legitimate interest in vagina:

A tipster reports:

Kristanna Loken, who hit the public's radar somewhere around the time Arnold Schwarzenegger slammed her T-X deathbot's head into a toilet bowl in Terminator 3, was asked recently by The Advocate about rumors that she and BloodRayne co-star Michelle Rodriguez's mutual, vampiric bloodlust had spilled off the set and into their personal lives:

The studios are jamming 65 releases down audiences' throats between Nov. 17th and the New Year, hoping to establish favorable awards season position and reap quick profits from a barrage of holiday-themed movies. [Variety]
For those who think Neil Patrick Harris and T.R. Knight's coming out announcements were progress, the THR cautions to wait and see what happens when a Rock Hudson-type steps out of the closet, instead of Doogie and a guy who's "practically one of the girls on Grey's." [THR]
Fox is shy about using the word "canceled" to describe Justice, instead preferring the gentler "pulled from the schedule, never to be seen again, except for possibly on tiny TV sets on budget-fare Eastern European airlines." Meanwhile, ABC gives What About Brian a full season pick-up. [Variety]
Heads have finally started to roll for NBCUni's "Layoffs 2.0" initiative, with about 15 Dateline NBC staffers sacrificing their paychecks to the company's bottom line. [THR]
Two best friends go batshit insane when they pick the same wedding date, starring Kate Hudson. That's pretty much all you need to know. [Variety]

Reichen Lehmkuhl, the Amazing Race winner and aspiring actor who managed to hush all the naysayers with his laudable, recent turn on Days of Our Lives as a bartending amateur detective hot on the trail of a missing cellphone, is once again making self-induced headlines with comments he made regarding the recent coming out of How I Met Your Mother's Neil Patrick Harris—coining a new word in the process:

With Neil Patrick Harris' recent, matter-of-fact declaration of his own gayhood, and the similar celebrity announcements that preceded it, we could very well be entering a Golden Age of Hollywood Gays, where Best Actor winners won't think twice before gushingly thanking their partners at the podium, as opposed to surreptitiously squeezing their names between a rattled off list of agents and managers. In honor of this new time of openness, exciting to just about everyone save for the legions of publicists who have devoted the better parts of their careers to honing perfectly crafted deflections of the painfully obvious, WCBSTV.com (the people who previously gave Scientologists the same flipbook treatment) has amassed every remotely famous out person in history into one exhaustive slideshow entitled, "It's In To Be Out: Openly Gay Celebrities." It's a handy reference to bookmark, useful for everyone from fledgling anti-gay militias looking to debrief new recruits, to fans of Frasier who just needed a quick memory jog to help them recall which cast member actually came out of the closet.

With our minds already wrapped around the sweet, salty release of half-price Cadillac margaritas, we very nearly let this little tidbit get by us: Like the fat girl in high school you could always confide in, People magazine is once again the go-to source for young Hollywood actors looking to come out of the closet:

A press release in our inbox alerting us to the upcoming nomination announcements for the 33rd Annual People's Choice Awards isn't typically the sort of thing we would bother mentioning, regardless of how thrilled we may be at the prospect of George Lopez getting the popular recognition he so richly deserves as one of America's Favorite Television Actors. But something about the lineup chosen to read this year's nominees struck us as noteworthy:

Towleroad notes the alleged "inning" of Neil Patrick Harris by his publicist, an incident which began with an item on Canada.com that claimed the actor had pulled strings to get "longtime sweetheart" David Burtka a role on How I Met Your Mother, then was followed by a report on ContactMusic.com ("A grain of salt free with every suspiciously underattributed celebrity news item!" ) which stated that the actor's "publicist, Craig Snyder" (actual name: Craig Schneider, according to StudioSystem) had countered the story by saying, "He's not of that persuasion." Now that the statement's out there, it shouldn't be long before we get a more definitive proclamation on the matter from the flack, who can always distance himself from his remark on the original Canada.com item by clarifying that the words "not of that persuasion," were referring to Harris being Canadian, not gay—a subtle but crucial difference.

Not everyone was caught by surprise when Grey's Anatomy star T.R. Knight slipped in a subtle, "So I'm gay, no big whoop, could you pass the yams?" Thanksgiving-style outing last Thursday—at least not according to the pinging of our commenters' highly attuned gaydar, not to mention the counsel of a highly-placed Defamer operative who quietly confided to us, "I suspected something was up when he showed up to the Tony Awards with blue hair." Count CBSNews.com's Rob Todd among those in the know as well, as has been on to Knight's not-so-interesting non-secret for at least a month now. He explains:

If there is a Desperate Housewives fanatic in your life, may we suggest gifting them with this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to dine and mingle with the show's cast at the home of series creator, Marc Cherry, as part of a GLAAD fundraising event:

The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation's annual Counting of the Gays tallies the exact number of "homosexual" recurring roles you can expect to see on a weekly basis in the upcoming TV season. (Or at least until three episodes in, when, after some focus-group assisted "retooling," the gay character is killed off and replaced with a wacky, straight uncle who refuses to grow up.) According to this year's tally, gay characters have slipped a notch, dropping from last year's ten to a meager nine, a number that has concerned GLAAD representatives resetting their color-coded Homosexual Visibility Advisory to lilac, for "guarded."

The Gays, if not the fundamental fabric of show business, are at the very least its highly ornamental stitching. So it should come as no surprise that Entourage, Hollywood's weekly, 30-minute glance at its own magnificent reflection, gets a great deal of mileage out of the constant, uncomfortable rubbing up of straight and gay cultures throughout the industry. Usually, that comes in one of two ways: 1) watching resident Gay eunuch Lloyd absorb yet another round of shells fired from Ari Gold's semi-automatic mouth, or 2) scenarios, such as last week's plot in which Johnny Drama showed way too much interest in his favorite masseur, which explore the comic possibilities that emerge when a rigidly hetero male is mistaken for/unwittingly acts like—mercy—a Gay. But PlanetOut.com's Personality Machine thinks we may not be giving the show's writers enough credit, and that the signs have been staring us in the face all along:

Great piece in the Post today on interns, many of whom suffer terrible indignities for little or no pay. I know, can you believe it? The story, written by Veronica Thew and Christopher Cassuto (we want to know which one came up with the line, "The devil, it seems, doesn't always wear Prada;" it's both humorous and timely!) is full of anecdotes from actual interns about the actual abuse they've endured. This one caught our eye: