Newsbites, 4/9/13

• Both mourned and reviled by her compatriots even in death, Britain's Iron Lady, Baroness Thatcher, is dead at 87:

• America's Sweetheart and and favorite Mouseketeer, Annette Funicello, also died yesterday at age 70:

• Detroit's Catholic archbishop orders gay-marriage supporters among his flock to abstain from communion or risk further penalties for disrepecting the teachings of the Church - which, as he puts it, amounts to a kind of criminal perjury.

• Westboro Baptist announces they will picket the funeral of "fag enabler" Roger Ebert. Your Head Trucker thinks they should be barred from appearing at anybody's funeral, period, and given very hefty fines and jail terms if they don't mind their own fucking business. But you know, it's practically gotten to the point that now, you're nobody if Westboro doesn't picket your funeral.

• Matt Baume of the American Foundation for Equal Rights brings us up to date on developments in marriage equality this week:

• Gay activist and Democratic political strategist Richard Socarides talks about coming out to his psychiatrist father, who founded the so-called reparative therapy movement to convert homosexuals into heterosexuals:

• The trailer for Behind the Candelabra, set to premiere on HBO in May, starring Michael Douglas, Matt Damon, Dan Ackroyd, and Debbie Reynolds (as Mama Liberace) is here:

Your Head Trucker saw Liberace in concert back in the 80's and can attest that the man was indeed "Mr. Showmanship" - I took my mom, thinking it might be a bit of a bore, but to my amazement, he kept everyone on the edge of their seats the whole time with a dazzling display of sequined costumes and two hours of non-stop excitement. Quite a memory.

Sometime in the next decade, I happened to see in the paper that Scott Thorson, Liberace's ex-lover and adopted son, was going to be speaking about his life with Liberace at the biggest Baptist church in town - the kind built like an auditorium, with vast tiers of rocking, thickly-padded, movie-theater chairs instead of pews. And he stood up there, golden-haired and movie-star handsome, in the midst of all those tut-tutting Baptists and told a long, rambling tale of how he was "molested by my own father" - weeping on cue while doing so. Then after milking that angle for all it was worth, carried on with some sordid, convoluted story of being taken into FBI custody and hidden for months in a windowless skyscraper room for his own protection as a witness against some drug dealers or something like that. Not to mention all his personal failings with drugs, booze, sex, and you-name-it.  The Baptists, rocking contentedly and purring like old cats, ate up every word.

I thought there was something fishy about all this at the time - and I'm sure the rich Baptists paid him very nicely to come warn them of the wages of sin - but we didn't have the Internet back then to double-check with, so I just filed it away under Suspicious Stories in my mind. And wondered how many of those hatchet-faced old blue-haired ladies had flocked to hear the great entertainer - that awful sinner, you know - back when he had filled the civic center.