I have to disagree with Amanda, Enlish really is one of the easiest languages to learn.
Grammar is really is in contrast to languages say German, French or Spanish.

My first language was English since I went to Kindergarten,
then I had to talk German. In German, French etc you have for example different articles
in contrast to English where there only is “the”.

Great show by the way, I liked the theory about in closet muscians,
Jake Shears is very talented, you are right Fausto. And bands like the Scissor Sisters
do pave the way for gay muscians, I think it would be way harder for someone like “MIKA”
to openly start his career. But those gay artists aren’t as pop music’esque as Real POP stars like Ricky Martin or Justin Timebrlake who mostly attract teenage fans.

I remember when we saw Rufus Wainwright at Ravinia a couple of summers ago, and I was surprised by the kind of crowd he drew. Maybe we were just sitting in the wrong part of the lawn, but we were surrounded by trixies and boorish, loud straight guys (you know, like the crowd at Pride the last couple of years? ouch. only kinda kidding…).

He played “Gay Messiah”, which was not out on CD yet, and these drunk straight guys were booing and sticking their fingers down their throat and making gagging sounds. (Yes, I would like to think that they were demonstrating their fellatio techniques in deference to the subject matter of the lyrics, but I have a feeling that’s not quite what they were going for!)

It made me wonder — Was this a surprise to them, that Rufus Wainwright is gay? Or was it one of those, “not that there’s anything wrong with that… as long as he didn’t sing about giving a guy head” things?

Anyway… thanks, Amanda, for the cover of “I wish I was a lesbian” — I will have to track that down…

Which somehow circles back to the grammar issue. I have to say, I never had any lessons in English grammar in my public school education, a fact which completely astounds my girlfriend. All I know about English grammar, I learned in high school French classes, where I had to diagram sentences for the first time. I’m wondering if I missed out on anything good. Now I’m imagining a classroom of students repeating, “I wish I were a lesbian, you wish you were a lesbian, he wishes he were a lesbian…”

The emoticon didn’t go through because I used angled brackets and the computer thought they were code. wah.

here’s another one: an owl with a John Waters pencil-thin mustache and specs?

[O–O]
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We were at that Ravinia concert. I think all the straights were there for Ben Folds or at
the bequest of theor girlfriends trying to get them some culture.
I think Rufus doesn’t really appear on straight guys radar and then when he starts
singing about a Gay Messiah I bet they freak out.

They say English is difficult to learn properly because there are so many more irregular verbs
than the Romance languages (French, Italian, Spanish, Romanian). We also have many more words
than most other languages. In English, there is a word for everything. In other languages a certain word
may represent several very distinctly differnet things. Words such as “lead” which could have several
different meanings are very few and far between as compared to many differnet languages. English is very precise.

Another thing we do in English, which is difficult for non-English speakers is that we stress certian words to give them importance. It always funny to me when a foriegner speakers try to stress different words when they speaking and they just don’t get it right. They always try to pronounce each and every letter in the word as a way of stressing the importance of the word. For example: I want to give this to you. If I stress it, I say “I want to give this to ‘U’”- just a hard U sound, whereas foriegners pronounce it as a dipthong ” I want to give this to ‘U’ ‘EW’”

Germans and Scandinavians find English to be very easy since it’s grammar structure is Germanic in style-think “I give this to you” rather than in the Romance languages “I this to you give” and many of the words are the same or similar
to Germanic words. Also English is much simpler than German. Germans have al sorts of wierd verb conjugations and declensions(you don’t want to know what these are. Stay blissfully ignorant)
and they just pile words together to make new word and act as if its that’s a totally normal thing to do.Here’s one for your pleasure Donaydampfshiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitaenskajuetenschluesseloch, which of course is “The keyhole of the door of the cabin of the captain of a steamship company operating on the Danube.”

Another thing that is hard is the verb “to be.” We use it insesintly and it’s irregular to boot which adds to the confusion.Add that with our overuse of the word “the” and you have a lot of meaningless extras in our language. In China and in many other languages you just say “I go store,” not “I am going to the store” Look how many useless letters we throw in there(10).

This extra verbage also reminds me of when I worked in Germany and this Greek girl I worked with would hand you something and she would just say “Take.” I knew what she meant, that I should take what she was offering me but its just that we don’t use that verb much without a helper such as “this.” “Take this” is what she should have said, but is just “take” wrong? I don’t know, but I use it all the time now, just to watch people’s reactions.

I still haven’t learned Yup’ik, which is one of my goals in life…
http://members.aol.com/glincoln45/Yugtun.htm

But I DO know “village English” (which is just what people call the way some Native Alaskans, who learned English as their second language, speak English). And it’s funny, they do say “I go store”! In English, I mean. I don’t know how to say that in any Eskimo languages. (Wondering now if Eskimo languages stemmed from Chinese at some point…)

I worked with Native kids for 2 summers as a camp counselor back home; they were all high schoolers, most of them from small villages. And they ALL wanted to go to the mall, since they were in the Big City (population 60,000 — but it was big in comparison). All summer long, “I wanna go store” “I wanna go store.” So it’s funny that you used that as an example, Marc!

Durn, my emoticon didn’t go through… I used pointy brackets and I think the computer interpreted it as code. oops. Back to boring old sideways emoticons…

You know, I may be wrong…could be that the Lesbian song is Loudon Wainwright…sorry for the confusion…

You’re right Amanda…how sad am I? I came online to correct it LOL!!!! Loudon Wainwright wrote I Wish I Was A Lesbian xx

I believe the concept of English being a tough language to master for people who already speak another language is that the English verbatum has soooo many homophones (Not not gay cells, that’s words that sound the same but have different meanings).

You know all this talk about gay musicians and no one’s bothered to mention Will Young? I mean we wouldn’t even have American Idol if we didn’t have the UK’s Pop Idol.. Will came out even before he won the contest and he still manages to get movie roles and hold down number one singles…but then again it’s Britian

I’ll have to go listen to that one. Do you remember the episode?
I’ve been thinking about asking one of the cast members to come on the
show to talk about what to expect from the book. Is there a gay friendly one?

Well I think one of the cast members is gay, but they are all like 17-18 years old and none of them have come out openly. I have no idea which episode it was that they talked about you, I think you were refered to as two guys. And as for having one on the show, unless you or fausto or one of the FOF members have actually read the book it may not be the best thing to talk about, because you will have a guy talking his ass off and you guys just quite in the back ground. However I think it would be funny to hear one of them talk about who they think are gay from the book.

Every boyfriend I have ever had (thats an age bracket of about 17-21) have all been into Harry Potter big time. He is that kind of hero that doesn’t want to be a hero but has to. Like Dorthy in the wizard of OZ, she doesn’t want to kill the witch, she just has to. And every gay boy can identify with a young boy, alway knowing he was a little different but then at 11 finding out what that special secret was and going to a magical land. Every gay boy wants to be harry potter. And if you have ever read harry potter fanfiction you will know how naughty some gay boys can get when it comes to Harry.

best…show…ever…okay…maybe not…but you touched on my favorite topics: language and Rufus! Good work everyone that contributed. LOL.

Marc, your comment about it being in people’s contracts to not come out of the closet is true in Ricky Martin’s case. My best friend’s ex works in the LA music industry, and he at one time worked for Sony and got close to their big name reps. He asked about Ricky Martin and they told him that he’s contractually restricted from coming out of the closet so long as he’s with Sony.

Random correction.

I was listening to a backlog of podcasts and recently came to this one.

That “I wish I were a lesbian” song. Amanda said it was by Rufus Wainwright. It’s actually by Loudon Wainwright III.

I promise I’ll comment on a more recent show soon, hehe.