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Barbara Rosenblat's storied career includes time served on Broadway (pioneering the role of Mrs. Medlock in the Tony-winning The Secret Garden, among multiple others), more film and television roles than you could throw a pie at (Law and Order: SVU, Veep, Girls), and a nun-scattering behemoth of an audiobook career: she's narrated nearly 500 titles and even has an e-book on the subject.

But you probably know her best as Orange is the New Black's Miss Rosa, the husky-voiced, curmudgeonly, terminal cancer patient who comes up for air just long enough to pluck a "tit hair" or knock off a bank. This week, I spent an hour chatting with Rosenblat about everything from Miss Rosa's future to her poignant fan letters and from Jodie Foster's interest in aforementioned tit hair to what piece of the set currently resides in her freezer. It was quite a chat.  

Reader beware, spoilers follow.  

TCM: Going back to the beginning, how did you originate the character of Miss Rosa Cisneros? How was she presented, and how did you proceed?

BR: After my general audition, they called and said: "We'd like to offer you the part of Miss Rosa."
And I said, "Great! Who is she?!"
"She's a prisoner."
"Oh, does she have a last name?"
"No idea."
"Where's she from?"
"Don't know."
"Um, what's she done?"
"Not a clue."
"OK! [beat] Alrighty then."
"And she has cancer."
"Really, what kind?"
"We don't know. Oh, and by the way she's bald. Will you shave your head?"



I wasn't even sure she was Hispanic, and yet in the first large scene that I had, I'm in bed in my cell; I was discussing how things are in prison with Piper (Taylor Schilling), and Nicky (Natasha Lyonne), and Anita (Lin Tucci), and at one point one of the lines said, "I could have been la jefa" which in Spanish means "chief."

So, I thought, "OK, so she's Spanish. Alright. Good!" Being a dialectician by trade and an actor by trade ... I created a bio for [Miss Rosa] internally.

When my agent called me up and said "We're going to do her backstory," I thought, "Oh my goodness! I'm going to matter! I'm going to find out where she's from."

Turns out she's Cuban, but I didn't know that until season two.


TCM: So you probably contributed a lot to the development of her character?

BR: Yeah, I guess so! The producers eventually brought in Josh Turi, an "astonishingly brilliant special effects makeup guy," as Rosenblat calls him, to save her hair through the rigorous application of a bald prosthetic piece, so realistic it fooled actors working closely with her on the set. Beth Fowler (Sister Jane Ingalls), once even congratulated her on having a perfectly-shaped head.

BR: It took three hours every time to apply. I think we eventually got it down to two and half, which was a lot of fun at half-past dark in the morning.

They have to paste my hair down so that it looks like it's just painted brown as opposed to having any hair on it. So it's flat, flat, flat, flat, flat before you can begin the process of putting on this very sheer bald cap and beginning the process of fitting it to the face and fitting it to the other piece that attaches to the rest of my neck, and start all that airbrush work with a million colors. He covered my eyebrows and put fake eyebrows on, put little veins and beauty marks. It looked utterly authentic!

I worked when it was very cold; I also worked when it was very hot. It was such a delicate operation; in the warm weather I was followed around by PAs with umbrellas so I would keep my head away from the sun. Otherwise I would get little breaches like behind the ear or whatever, and he would constantly be coming around to patch me up. Because it's a delicate thing!

But you can't be the slave of the silicone, it has to serve you as an actor. I remember various occasions during the hot summer months when we were shooting up at Rockland doing some exteriors. I sweated so much underneath my bald cap at the best of times, even though I look dry and bald, underneath it's Niagara Falls! Every now and then he would have to mend a breach - but before he did that, he would take his fingers and milk my head! Other actors would be standing by while you see this [makes whooshing sound] of shit coming out of my head, and they would go, "Ew!" That was horrible, [she laughs] the things we do for our art!

It takes another hour to get out of the thing because it takes about three or four different solvents to remove all of that from my hair. And that's a process in and of itself. And then I have to go back to the makeup area where they would wash that cement out of my hair and blow dry my hair!

It wasn't very pretty, but everybody respected the work so much.

TCM: Let's talk about the episode "Lesbian Request Denied." Jodie Foster directed that; what kind of direction did she give you specifically ...

BR: She's up for an Emmy for that very episode ("Lesbian Request Denied")! I remember there was a scene where I'm plucking tit hair in the cell, and it's kind of disgusting; this is how we have to look out for ourselves in prison.

There's none on my head but I'm plucking it from my tits. OK? Fine. That's what I read in the script. So, I get into makeup, another three hour process on a cold morning, then I get a message from one of the PAs (production assistants) that Miss Foster would like to meet me and have a chat.

I said, "Uh oh. What did I do?"

So, I go to a private room and there's Jodie Foster. "Hi, I'm Jodie. OK, I'd like to talk about that cell scene where you're plucking ... tit hair. I just want to see where we're gonna go with this. Where I'm gonna have the camera, how revealing it's going to be and what not."

And then she starts to remove her sweater, and she's showing me ... you know ... her rack ... up to a point, and she's saying, "Well you know, I'm thinking, this would be appropri ... because if I have the camera over here, then we'll shoot it from this way. And then we'll see this much, and then you can ..."



And I went, "Great, terrific! Whatever brings the viewers in, I'm happy to do it. Whatever you want to do is fine by me." And I'm thinking to myself, I'm standing here, looking like a terminal cancer bald patient in prison garb and I'm talking to Jodie Foster who is taking her sweater off. This is amazing.

We did the scene; she shot it; she was terrific; it all went well apparently. I finished kind of early because I wasn't involved in the stuff they shot the rest of the day and so I went back into makeup, Josh spent 40 minutes getting the appliance off my head. Makeup and hair washed the rest off my head. Blow dried my hair. Put on some lipstick. Put on my glasses. Put on my earrings. And I walked back to video village, where the director sits watching the scene, and in a little break in the proceedings, I tapped on her the shoulder and said, "Thank you, it was a pleasure working with you." She turned around and went "Bahh! Who is this?! Oh my god, Barbara!" And I realized, she'd never really met me ... She gave me a big hug and that was that.

TCM: Fast forwarding to the end of the second season, how did you find out you would have the last word literally and metaphorically (you potato with eyes):

BR: When I found out about it, I ran into the bathroom, shut the door, and screamed for five seconds. "ME?! Are you kidding!? ME!? Oh my god!"


I had a sense that I would be more pivotal this season after I found out they were doing my backstory. But I didn't know where they were taking it. And I recall a couple of very uncomfortable encounters with Vee (Lorraine Toussaint). They were just a couple of short days; I still spent three hours getting that bald cap on my head, but you know they were these not-very-nice moments. There were a couple of them, like when I told her, "You are a very rude woman," and I thought to myself: This can't end well. [she laughs] But that's all I knew!


[she just remembers] I did get a phone call from the production office a few weeks before we shot it asking if I knew how to drive a van ... And I said, "Uh, yes. And?"

"No, that's all. Thanks. Great."

This response made me laugh so uncontrollably, I asked Rosenblat all about the van scene so I could take the time to compose myself.

BR: It was shot in a couple places. Some of it outside Kaufman Astoria [Studios] in four degree weather, which was SO cold. You know those little pad things they give you, you rub them together and they get warm? I think I went through forty of them in four hours. I was sticking them on my tits and the back of my neck, everywhere to keep me warm while we were shooting both the interiors and the exteriors.

You know that moment at the end where I morph into my younger self? The director had me behind the wheel. And then I would jump out of the van so that she could jump in and try to get the exact same position as me. We did this back and forth and back and forth. And they had a fan blowing on her (it was four degrees!) and me, I don't need a fan because nothing blows through anything on my head. And the poor thing was freezing to death!



But it was terrific - so brilliantly done.

While OITNB has received numerous accolades for its representations of women, women of color, and a rainbow of queer identities, few articles have covered the complexity of Miss Rosa's identity as a cancer patient. Indeed, there really isn't a lot of dimension to most televisual representations of people living with cancer. Mostly, characters with cancer wander onto and off of sets of various shows flattened out as either tragic victims or heroic overcomers without much characterization. Both are really two lazy sides of the same generic coin. Don't be fooled: Their only goals are to emotionally manipulate the audience and make the lead characters feel equal parts shitty and inspired. They are rarely characters unto themselves.

With one of Miss Rosa's first lines, "Thank god I got cancer. No one fucks with cancer," it was clear early on that Miss Rosa was going to be an exception. (One person, Andrew Cray, Tweeted: "hilarious b/c I was the only 1 'allowed' to laugh (I have/had cancer)!"



TCM: There's a lot of complexity and texture added in the second season that fills Miss Rosa into a more fully-developed, humanized character not limited to or defined by her body. Do you ever hear from people who have somehow connected with your character in that regard?

BR: I was astonished at the number of people who wrote to me precisely in that regard. I was very touched and moved.

Here's one: "Hello Barbara Rosenblat ... I'm 16 years old and live in Ohio. I have never wrote an email to any actor, actress, friend, or close relative, but I feel I needed to send my first email because of such a touching acting role you were a part of in Orange is the New Black. I have never in my life have been so impressed with acting that I was moved to write this to you.

"Firstly, I would like to say the makeup and design of your character was flawless. I really thought the background of it was so interesting. Miss Rosa had a background of crime and love and then leads up to how the character had gotten caught and sent to prison. I have thought about this in detail and cannot figure out why, but, your character really made me think about my grandma. Or as I called her, my nonna, Italian for grandma.

"My nonna pased away [last July] and it was the saddest day of my life because I had lived with her and had been very close to her my whole life. She died of B-cell lymphoma cancer. I had begun to realize episode to episode how negative your character took having cancer. And how it psychologically got to her until she drove out of the prison. This made me realize that when my nonna had cancer, she was very positive and hopeful that she would be alright. I never really appreciated how much strength it must have taken for her to be hopeful at such a sad time for her.

"I wrote this to tell you what an amazing job you've been doing. And I'm very excited to see you next season. But most importantly, playing such a powerful role that showed me such a huge show of strength my nonna had that I overlooked in her last few months of fighting. If this role would have been played by anybody else, I might not have made the connection with my nonna. Now that I watched the show and made the connection, wow was my nonna in a similar spot to that lady! And then thinking, "I don't remember my own nonna ever saying negative things like that" was a huge eye opener for me, and I'm very grateful. Again, thank you very much for showing this crucial detail to me from my nonna's fight. And again, excited to see you next season again."

TCM: Wow. That must mean so much to you.

BR: You have no idea. No idea. [she takes a moment] And various people have written similar things. But this one really got to me because he's 16, you know? And she meant a lot to him. And I seem to have helped him understand a part of his relationship with his grandma that wasn't quite clear for him. And that touches me.

TCM: I know another big moment for you was the New York City Pride Parade, of which the OITNB float was the most popular.

BR: Oh my god, I felt like the fricken' pope! It was divine! There were six of us, they had cars for us all. I had a wardrobe nightmare. I said to my driver, "Can we stop at Macy's because I forgot to put earrings on, and I don't go out of the house without earrings."

I got my little clip-ons, jumped back in the car, and we went to the staging area. And there was this float and it looked like prison laundry! [she laughs] It was so great to see everyone because we all get along so well. It's so lovely, there's so much love in this company it's astonishing.

All these people were coming by and saying, "Oh my god, Miss Rosa, Miss Rosa! Can we take a picture!?" And they all knew it was me! I knew my dimples would give me away and they have.

I've gone to the gay pride parade over the years because it's the best parade in the world! It's so crazy and fun, and this is where it all began all those years ago at Stonewall. And so it was quite an honor to be asked.

It was sensational. There were these screaming hordes, all these fans, they were flinging roses at me! It was incredible. The noise, the yelling, the love! We're bouncing up and down and screaming and posing and waving. It was such a thrill, I was just ... I'm lost ... I don't know what to say to you. It was the biggest thrill of my life!

I love the appeal of this show across so many demographics. I think that Jenji Kohan pushes more envelopes than Staples!

TCM: Even if you don't return (though I hope you will), what endures for you from the show so far? What will you take with you from your experience?

BR: I think the thing that was most heartening for me is, after we finished season one, and they called me back for season two, and you see those guys behind the camera, those directors who know your work, your fellow actors who trust you, people you've grown with in this production. And they look at you and they hand you stuff because they think you have what it takes to deliver for them. And that level of trust to show me as an actor is probably one of the greatest gifts you could ever give me.


TCM: I teach classes on television at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and my students are all very interested in the Netflix model, releasing entire seasons at once. Do you have any thoughts on that?

BR: You know everyone binge watches OITNB (she was at Disneyworld when season two dropped). I can't imagine what bleary-eyed faces were showing up to work on Monday morning. It all comes out and you watch as much or as little as you want. And I liken that to ... Can you imagine handing a child a recently-released Harry Potter book and saying, "Merry Christmas! And by the way, you can read three chapters tonight. And then you have to put the book down. And then pick it up next week and you can read three chapters and then put the book down." And so on. He would look at you like you're crazy!

Binge watching is not unlike taking a book that you love and staying up 'til dawn with it.

I've been recording audio books for a long, long, long, long time. When you think that you can take me on long journeys or for a stay at a hospital or while you're working, nobody is going to stop you from listening to as much as you want to listen to when you have that thing in your possession. And this has finally translated into television. It's astonishing.

Jenji has made something so incredible and delicious, it's like Lay's potato chips, you can't just watch one episode. It's mind-bogglingly addictive. And it's exciting for me to a part of something that means so much to so many people around the world. It's not like regular TV. It has an extra-special meaning for me because it's such pioneering television.


TCM: Did you keep anything from the set?

On that last day of shooting, I had to get into my Miss Rosa garb and bald cap like every other day, but at the end of the day ... I went back to makeup and I said to Josh, "Josh, just carefully remove this bald cap, just very carefully, because I'm taking it home." And he said, "Are you kidding?" because normally, it just looks like a piece of evidence, you know?

You just want to throw it away. It's either that or have a piece of roast pork since that's what it looks like at the end of the day. But I said, "Well, cut it off, carefully. And I'm going to put it in a little baggy and stick it in my freezer." I don't know why. I thought maybe one day may I could sell it for charity or something, I don't know. But I thought I just want to have a little chunk of it as a reminder of Miss Rosa.

TCM: Wow! [I laugh] So you've got Miss Rosa's head in your freezer?!

BR: [concedes] I have Miss Rosa's head in my freezer.

[she's embarrassed] I don't know what it sounds like; it probably sounds really macabre?

TCM: It's one part macabre, two parts sentimental and sweet. It's hysterical that you have Miss Rosa's head in your freezer.

BR: Well, it's not her head. It's her scalp. [she laughs] I just wanted to have it. I just hope I don't mistake it for giblets when I'm making soup.

I look at it every now and again and I think, "Really? Really, Rosenblat? This is what they're gonna find when you're dead? Is this weird thing in the back of your freezer?!" Oh, god.

TCM: Barbara, will we see Miss Rosa next season?

BR: Hand on heart, I have no idea. Because no one's told me.







Special thanks to Connie Soendker Anderson and Wendy Morris.
Visit BarbaraRosenblat.com.

Originally published by The Huffington Post, 11 September 2013.


Jeanne Robertson is contagious-contagiously funny! When this 6-foot-2-inch-former Miss North Carolina (50 years ago!) was told she'd gone viral (on YouTube), she joked, "I don't think so, I've had all my shots?!" But the metaphor is fitting, y'all: I spoke with a long Southern drawl for a good two weeks after our first encounter, which raised more than a few eyebrows in my state of Wisconsin.

On a rare visit north of the Mason Dixon line, Jeanne performed her one-woman show at the beautiful old Orpheum Theatre in the tiny town of Galesburg, Illinois. I, of course, arrived late for our meeting-constantly braking for Illinois' endless supply of cleverly-hidden patrol people. I raced into the lobby of her Holiday-Inn Express frantically searching for a quiet place I could find to interview her on camera. Although the sitting room promised aesthetics, country music blared from a speaker behind the front desk, and so I reluctantly moved on to the breakfast nook, dragging studio equipment behind me like an overwrought caddie and struggling to fit through doors.

The breakfast nook was quiet and dark but windows promised natural lighting behind their heavy blinds. It was empty except for a single hotel housekeeper who stood two inches from the television with her arms crossed. She was tapping her foot with annoyance as it failed to spring to life and side-eyed me as I shuffled in. "Are you going to be using this room?" I asked, gingerly, hoping somehow she'd learn of my interview and beg to assist on production. "I'm on my break. When this TV works I'm going to watch television," she informed me, and, turning away she added, "and it's going to be loud."

Witnessing as she haphazardly stabbed at buttons on the "clicker," I felt some confidence she wouldn't have success, and so I began re-arranging tables with one hand as I dialed Jeanne's phone number with the other. The hotel had reeked of drabness-the 50 shades of brown that was the carpet matched the bored personalities of much of the staff. They moved through the motions lifelessly without an abundance of crises to excite their attention in the tiny town, and so this made the television incident all the more poignant because things weren't supposed to go wrong.

I-myself-was already annoyed at the hidden patrol people, my tardiness, and this "over-it" housekeeper. I was edging toward fury as I dragged tables from here to there across the carpeted floor of the nook, until something stopped me: My arm muscles relaxed, my knees weakened, and my stomach pushed up a giggle as the booming Southern voice reached around the corner and tickled my ear. "Ohhh ma goodness will ya have a look at that un-yoo-zhall little puppy! What's his name?!"

When I peeked around the corner, it was as if everything had changed. As when Dorothy opened the door on Oz, the sepia tonality had readjusted into vivid color and something in the air made everything feel lighter. Jeanne stood smiling at a new family of guests as front-desk employees gathered around to join in her warmth. The once-annoyed housekeeper looked downright bashful as Jeanne sashayed by, greeting her with a smile and a simple, "Hey 'thare'!"

Somewhere between quizzically furrowing my eyebrows at the housekeeper and Jeanne striding confidently toward me with an outstretched hand, I "got it." So many of the most famous quotations are about this moment. Jeanne's own, "Smile; have a sense of humor, and accept the things you cannot change," paired beautifully with Toni Morrison's " Does your face light up when [people] come into the room?" to create for me a new realization: Do I bring my humor and colorfulness into the room to "infect" others with joy, or do I bring my burdens into the room to bear upon the people already there?

Although we don't say so, in my experience smiles and laughter are even more contagious than yawns, and so the metaphor of "virality," when it comes to viral videos like Jeanne's, falls short of illustrating the power of joy and happiness. We have so many words to articulate the sickness and negativity one body can infect upon another, yet so few for such a welcome contagion as Jeanne brings-as I will strive to learn to bring myself. She didn't enter the room with a sense of entitlement, expecting to be received in any particular "positive" way. She instead brought it with her, sprinkling little pieces of sunshine into the lives of people she passed along the way.

This lesson I gleaned was strengthened later that evening as I watched Jeanne greet guests both before and after her show. The hundreds of patrons were drawn to her, many sharing stories of their own left-brained family members or rehashing some of their favorites of her own. Words failed others who stumbled through stories to illustrate how her humor helped them struggle through some of their darkest hours. She hugged those people and assured them she was just as grateful for them as they for her.

Although Jeanne is hysterical and a magnificent speaker, she assures audiences that her life isn't much different than theirs. Humor is all around, and if you look for it, you'll realize that so much of the funny we miss is shrouded in expectation. Had I been pulled over by one of those patrol people or had that housekeeper's television set suddenly switched on, I would have expected everything to fall apart. But at the end of the day, everything would still have been okay. So, a little while later, when her vacuum did whirr to life, I couldn't help but smile and think how funny life can really be. She really was contagious, and I can verily say, I caught a "Jeanne" and laughed.

-- Limited tickets are still available for Jeanne's one-woman show at the Alabama Theater in Birmingham and the Cobb Energy Center in Atlanta, celebrating her 70th birthday. And her "Jubilee Year" of winning Miss North Carolina.

"People say, 'Jeanne, what do you want for your birthday?' And I say, 'If you're 70, you don't want anything. You want to get rid of stuff!'" So Jeanne and her crew are asking instead, for guests to bring a new, unwrapped toy for Toys for Tots.

Jeanne has many other public appearances coming up-and-she is available for private speaking engagements, so hire her. Really. Here are a couple long clips from my interview with Jeanne, the first, our general overview with "unusual questions" and in the second, Jeanne accepts the Regional Dialect Challenge. Keep smiling!

Originally published in Antenna from the University of Wisconsin – Madison, 5 July 2012.

Anderson Cooper's "outing" this week beautifully illustrates something I have been writing about for a while: the imperative of coming out. The paradox of homosexuality is and has been that one must at once not be gay while at the same time publicly (confessing/admitting/declaring) that (s)he is. But what does that mean, exactly? If the presumption is that we are straight until we say otherwise, then why are the most common reactions to Anderson's outing, "We already knew!" or "It’s about time!" Hollywood legend might describe the alleged homosexuality of figures like Agnes Moorehead or James Dean as an "open secret"--something about which to argue at pretentious dinner parties. But I bracket "outing" with quotations marks because if everybody already knew Anderson was gay, why was he constantly hounded to declare it? And why aren't people satisfied with his declaration?

I'll admit some guilt here; as an Oprah scholar, I've long thought Anderson’s semi-successful talk show suffered by his Donahue-esque journalistic fourth wall, something Oprah deflated by making herself always already one of her own guests. I draw this parallel because soon after his "outing," Star Jones quite ickily suggested on The Today Show that Anderson outed himself to boost his ratings just like when Oprah admitted she used crack, got pregnant as a teenager, and considered suicide.

"I’m a little bit of a cynic; you know I've been in daytime television a long time.... There are times that you generate information for ratings." Shame on you, Star Jones.

But why didn't Anderson come out on his talk show, instead choosing to write a letter to Daily Beast? Will that letter be good enough, or will he be expected now to discuss it on television? And, indeed, can he discuss it without the kind of appalling accusations constantly volleyed in the news? That afternoon, Anderson, his syndicated talk show, was a rerun (it's on hiatus) and he was absent from his late night news program, Anderson 360. If he came out to help his ratings, he sure has bad timing.

Anderson in a 2008 issue of The Advocate that I also contributed to.

Our media culture often portrays coming out as this great moment of personal achievement--a bourgeoisie notion of psychological wholeness or self-actualization after which (and only after which) we can become our true, complete selves. This trope is then used to justify our demand that celebrities (and by extension our culture of celebrity mimics) come out of the closet "for their own good." Just look at Ellen DeGeneres, people (like Oprah) often say, ignoring the six or so years after her outing that she was out of work and out of money. We can throw all kinds of Foucault at this: although he never specifically addressed coming out as we understand it today, confession for Foucault functions not only as a mechanism of articulating but also making truth as well as establishing one’s own credibility and authenticity. In other words, the lie we tell ourselves now is that we come out for ourselves, when in reality, we’re mostly supplying the demand.

The coming out imperative comes from an old association between gayness and deception, dating back at least as far as McCarthy and the 1950s (the Lavender Scare) when homosexuals were indicted as deceptive individuals prone to blackmail. After gay activists in the '60s and '70s made the coming out process (as a political tool to combat invisibility) relatively commonplace, talk shows began quietly suggesting openness which ultimately became a demand when AIDS and HIV made homosexuality a "dangerous deception" for unsuspecting heterosexuals (see Gamson, Freaks Talk Back). We might say we're coming out to our friends and family just for ourselves, but if that were the case, I might ask why the repeating line "they deserved to know the truth" is such a staple in coming out stories.

In her remarkably articulate response to Anderson's outing, "fruit fly" Kathy Griffin deftly discusses the continuing dangers of outness: "[D]espite the very real, the very necessary, and the very life-changing progress we have made in this country ... America--the world--is not fully represented by Chelsea in New York City ... [it] is, in larger part, small towns like ... Wichita, Kan., where I was [asked], 'Kathy, how do you deal with so many goddamned fags?'" Foucault writes that our society believes confession "exonerates, redeems, and purifies ... unburdens [us] of [our] wrongs, liberates [us], and promises [us] salvation." But none of those attributes are particularly true of many coming out narratives in certain areas of the country (or the world) where outness can and does lead to greater isolation, bullying, suicide, or homicide.

Anderson's sensible closet (photo parody).

In his letter, Anderson writes: “It’s become clear to me that by remaining silent on certain aspects of my personal life for so long, I have given some the mistaken impression that I am trying to hide something -- something that makes me uncomfortable, ashamed, or even afraid. This is distressing because it is simply not true.... The fact is, I’m gay, always have been, always will be, and I couldn’t be any more happy, comfortable with myself, and proud.”

Anderson is an astute television personality--he could have exploited his outing for ratings, and who knows, maybe he will discuss it openly when his show re-premieres in Nate Berkus' former studio this fall. But instead of folding to and perpetuating the cultural myth that public confession psychologically liberates us, Anderson decided to address his sexuality in a well-crafted letter that demonstrates a new, old reason for coming out: to break down invisibility. I applaud him for it.

As a culture we must be more sensitive of our demands and our expectations (of both our celebrities as well as our friends), for the realities of queer individuals all across the world are different--and just because someone isn't out to you or your family, doesn't mean they are living their life in a closet.

Notes:
1. Originally published in Antenna from the University of Wisconsin – Madison, 5 July 2012.