Celebrity Gossip / By Liz Smith
Let Lindsay be happy
“I SLINDSAY GAY?” That’s what the weekly gossip mags are asking — in giant World War III typeface — as Lindsay Lohan continues her openly affectionate friendship with DJ Samantha Ronson.
Who knows? (And don’t say, “Who cares?” because lots of people do.) Miss Lohan, who recently celebrated her 22nd birthday with Ronson by her side and a blazing cake with Marilyn Monroe icing, hasn’t seemed so pulled-together in, well — several years.
What we do know is that girl-on- girl romantic action doesn’t freak people out the way male homosexuality does. Every few years, lesbians actually become “chic” — remember the Gina Gershon/Jennifer Tilly movie, “Bound”? That sparked a wave of trendy gal-pal commentary, photo shoots and generally benign discussion. Of course it helped that Gershon and Tilly are hot, and fulfilled straight male fantasies.
Far from destroying Lindsay’s career, this “is she or isn’t she?” gossip has put a sexy new gloss to her battered image. So, yes — maybe it’s clever public relations, and soon Lindsay will be back in the arms of some young man, with a twisty little edge to her red-carpet image. (The boyfriend she met while in rehab, Riley Giles, accepted big bucks from a British newspaper, and offered the opinion that Lohan was “a nymphomaniac.” You can see why she might want to go another way!)
For now, whatever the truth of the relationship, Lindsay looks happy. And I know none of you out there are so mean-spirited as to deny this girl— who has had so many troubles — some happy time?
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When the glossies are not speculating on Miss Lohan’s love life, they are pathologically monitoring the “bumps” of female celebrities, trying to figure out who’s pregnant.
Of the many new and unbearable media inventions/obsessions this one I find perhaps the worst. The phrase alone, “baby bump” makes my skin crawl. Do the men (and women!) who edit and publish and caption these photos have no idea what a woman’s body really looks like? The feminine ideal, based on the continuous “bump patrol” requires women to be literally concave and sport zero body fat. It would also help never to wear a shiny fabric, or indeed never move. The slightest shadow is a “bump” and by implication, if they are not pregnant, then they’re fat!
And while it is something of a myth that women were allowed to be much plumper back in the show-biz world of the mid-20th century, there was wiggle room; certainly not every star with a few extra (or normal) curves was immediately thought to be pregnant!
