Express has less imagination than John Key: does anybody these days turn gay?

asked by Express mag the Rove question, JK answered that he would for Brad Pitt – adding some strange comments about Pitt’s current age, perhaps to preempt debate that JK’s into much younger men – but that he thought when the question was popped about Tom Cruise. However, Cruise, his sidebar comment ran, looks too young for his age.

Who would I go gay for? … Brad Pitt,” he told Express. “Now he’s a bit older, he’s a bit of a looker. I was going to say Tom Cruise, but someone of his age shouldn’t look that young.
– John Key, Herald

Too young for you? Unhealthily young? Or the more familiar, creepily young?

So in choosing Brad over Tom – while not suggesting Brad should be over Tom – JK is opting for the more credible of the two, the sensible shoe.

Why then think of Tom? Should we infer from this triviality that JK was playing to his audience? Choosing Brad, perhaps he thought, would make him look more hetero. It would be to give the generic reply.

Choosing Tom would have stuck out a bit. A lot.

JK’s reasoning is interesting in this regard. He didn’t choose Tom because Tom looks youthful. A straight man with some odd speech defects going for a Peter Pan who shares his first name with the famous Finn (see image below) and who’s second name is Cruise might lead us to entertain, if only for an instant, the notion that JK has an inch or an ounce of sincerity or a genuine bone on his body.

– image by Tom of Finland (1920-1991)

I don’t believe JK has come across Tom of Finland. (The artist’s biography is here.) To say, I’d turn gay for a big blond Scandinavian hunk and I wouldn’t even need to know his name, would possibly have been harder to self-correct.

As soon as I read this, thoughtfully placed on the front page of Herald, I wondered if Express would or could ask Helen Clark the same question. Apparently not, read on, dear reader…

What if she’d taken a career on Broadway? In which play would she perform?
“I think 12 Angry Men – that wonderful play about the jury, where the sole person who objects to the verdict talks through it; certainly not a Shakespearian tragedy.”
– Hannah JV, Express