September 13, 2010, - 2:29 pm
Tim Gunn & the Diarrhea of TMI
I used to like fashion/style guru Tim Gunn. A childhood friend of mine directed some of his cable TV makeover shows, and unlike other gay personalities, he seems very professional and not so in your face about gay rights and politics.
But what a disappointment the man turned out to be. This normally classy emir of good taste in savvy dressing has a new book out in which he’s struck by the virus that has sadly infected much of American pop culture: the diarrhea of Too Much Information. In this case, the TMI isn’t even fact. It’s TMS–Too Much wild Speculation . . . meant to sell books.
Gunn’s father was an FBI Special Agent in Washington, DC. And, in “Gunn’s Golden Rules: Life’s Little Lessons for Making It Work
Gunn writes that his father was a special FBI agent based in Washington. He was Hoover’s ghost writer for all of his speeches and books.
“I have no proof and I’m going to say right now, my mother would deny it up and down, and so too would many biographers of Hoover. I’m likely just totally wrong about this. But…The men were incredibly repressed. So even if they were sleeping together you can bet they never would have admitted it, even to themselves. He would have really beaten it back. He certainly wanted to knock it out of me, literally.”
Gunn calls his father possibly a “big closet case” and notes that most of his FBI colleagues committed suicide. His father was the only one of his group who died a natural death. The wives, Gunn says, were “barely functioning alcoholics.”
So, he has no proof. He admits it’s probably wrong. But, hey, put it in the book, anyway, because there’s no revenge like sullying your not-so-dear old dead dad and calling him gay, right? Homo-misery especially loves company.
Hmmm . . . if even a fraction of this much-exaggerated fiction parading as memoir were true, we’d have a good case for repressed, gay, suicidal FBI agents with drunk wives, since in Hoover’s day, FBI agents were at their most professional and accomplished and have since become a group of Islamo-pandering lemmings in the Forever Buttkissing Islam bureaucracy. (As I’ve previously noted, one of the FBI’s most self-cited “accomplishments” in contemporary times is the busting of the Unabomber, but that was done by his brother, not Famous But Incompetent.)
That’s not my point here, however, which is that Gunn’s father is dead. He isn’t around to defend himself. But that’s the way cowards do it these days. And it’s so sad that this style maven who instructs the rest of us to dress in good taste just doesn’t have any good taste himself. And the most expensive haute couture designer cloths won’t change that.
Missing from Tim Gunn’s Golden Rules: Get some class before you tell everyone else to dress with it. Making up extremely hurtful stories about your dead father–with absolutely no evidence, just to sell books–is is far more gauche than sprayed on hot pink leather pants and a sequin tube top on Aretha Franklin or any other fashion faux pas.
Looking forward to the day when tell all shockers accusing your dead dad of having a gay affair with J. Edgar Hoover is out of style. Sadly, telling it all–and making it up if there’s nothing sleazy enough to tell–is all too much the current fad. It’s disgusting, but the death of outrage at everything (except a Florida preacher threatening to burn the Koran) makes it not just acceptable, but all the rage. As I write this, Gunn’s book is #38 on Amazon.com. If Tim Gunn’s father were alive, today, he could sue him for defamation for this utter libel, and he’d probably win.
How sad that so many are stricken with this man’s illness. And it looks like our society is becoming more and more afflicted with the ethos of these sewer-dwellers with fame.
Tim Gunn, you are sadly in need of a makeover. And it’s not the kind you get with nicer clothes and a good haircut.
Tags: affair, book, diarrhea of TMI, father, FBI, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Gay, J. Edgar Hoover, lover, Tim Gun, Tim Gunn, Tim Gunn's Dad, Tim Gunn's Father, Tim Gunn's Golden Rules: Life's Little Lessons for Making It Work, TMI
Totally off-topic:
I am singing Games People Play (an oldie but a goodie) because I just read this article:
http://sfist.com/2010/09/09/iran_to_free_jailed_berkeley_grad_s.php
As goes on September 13, 2010 at 3:02 pm