Hasta La Gadget!

“Orphan Black” star Jordan Gavaris came out of the closet as gay in an interview published on Vulture on Wednesday.

The 27-year-old star, who plays the “exuberantly gay” Felix Dawkins on the hit show, seemed a bit surprised to be questioned about his sexual orientation. “Nobody ever asks me,” he said after revealing he identifies as gay. “I’ve never been asked. Like, the whole course of the series.”

Gavaris, who said he came out to his family at 19, told the publication he ultimately believes that his sexuality shouldn’t matter. “I hope that one day, the world gets to a place where you don’t need to politicize your sexuality any more than someone needs to politicize their race — that we can just act and we can exist in this Zeitgeist, telling stories about one another… And that no one’s afraid, maybe, to come out,” he said.

Gavaris also shared how he feels about being openly gay in Hollywood and the effect coming out could have on his career.

“This is a tricky thing to say and I’ve never actually said it out loud before, but I do believe that jobs will be lost and I do believe jobs will be gained,” he said, adding, “Maybe not even for the right reasons.”

“Orphan Black” has regularly been heralded for its portrayal of rich LGBTQ characters and its stars have never shied away from talking about ― and supporting ― queerness in whatever forms it might take on the show.

“The reaction to Felix was brilliant,” Gavaris told an audience at a Comic Con panel in 2013 (see the video below). “I did receive a couple of little things from the straight community where they felt he was a bit of an ugly stereotype… a cliche, over the top, blah blah blah, and my response to that is this: you cannot collectively as a society decide that you are only going to represent one part of a minority.” He added, “I don’t know when in society and film that it became ok to only represent gay people in like the traditional sense where they have a great job and well-adjusted parents and maybe a surrogate or adopted child — when was [it decided that was] the only way you could represent gay people?”

Tatiana Maslnay, the show’s lead who plays almost a dozen different characters on the show, has also been outspoken in her views on sexuality. 

“I’m honored in any way to speak to that community and to be playing a role,” she told Entertainment Weekly in 2014. “We sort of embrace the idea of every human having the potential to be anything, and I think that opens the door for all kinds of dialogue about sexuality and about gender. And it’s exciting material that is not always on screen in a respectful way… and I don’t mean respectful in the sense of martyrdom, I mean respectful in the sense of flawed, complex performance and characters.”

Speaking to GLAAD in 2015, Maslnay got emotional talking about her love for the LGBTQ community and her show’s place in it.

“[The characters are] not sexualized [for the male gaze], but they are sexual with each other and they’re intimate,” she said. “Whether Delphine identifies as bisexual or however she identifies herself, she’s open to loving Cosima and there’s no question. It’s about the love between them; it’s not about the fact that they are two women.”

Watch the season 5 premiere of “Orphan Black” here.

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A man who appears to be of a certain age seems to have found the formula for driving bliss: Metallica pumping out of the speakers, his head bobbing to and fro and the belief that his spirit — and heavy metal — will never die. 

H/T Digg

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When photos of Bella Thorne and Scott Disick cuddling poolside during the Cannes Film Festival made the internet rounds, the world promptly responded with a collective cannes we absolutely not. 

Their May-December “romance” (and Disick’s latest attempt to make ex-girlfriend Kourtney Kardashian jealous) fizzled days later, leaving the rest of us to wonder what exactly torpedoed the most inappropriate KarJenner love story to date. For once, Kyga, we’re not talking about you. 

The 19-year-old star recently opened up to Complex about how she even crossed paths with Disick, who’s 15 years her senior, and why she took a hard left when things got too hardcore. 

“I throw a lot of house parties, and that’s how I meet these people. They come to my house party and they’re like, ‘Yo, I heard you’re having a party,’” Thorne explained. “I’m just like, ‘OK, French Montana. Hi, French.’ That’s how I met Scott — he came to a house party of mine [with French] and I was like, ‘Hi.’”

So began a series of increasingly concerning photo ops that reached its OMG WHY? tipping point when Disick seemingly got handsy with Thorne for the cameras. 

“Honestly, my nipple came out of my bikini and he tried to fix it for me and it looks like he’s grabbing my boob,” Thorne said. “That’s very nice of you to actually not sit there and stare at my nipple because my boobs are big — they come out of my shirt all the time! You can’t keep those suckers down.”

But, in the end, it wasn’t the age difference or the looming threat of the Kardashians that caused Thorne to call it off. 

No, apparently it was Disick’s hard-partying ways that drove Thorne away. The father of three has struggled with sobriety over the years, most recently seeking treatment for drug and alcohol abuse in 2015. 

 “Scott is really nice, sweet, charming. I don’t drink, and he really drinks a lot. And it just ended up … I just wasn’t down. I was like, ‘I gotta leave,’” the former Disney Channel star explained.

 “We were [at Cannes] a day and a half before I was like I’m booking my flight and leaving,” she continued. “I love to go out and have fun, I love to f**king dance, but I just don’t party hardcore like that and it was way too much for me. I was like, ‘Whoa, this is not the way I live my life, bruh.’”

So much for famous in love, bruh. 

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There have been a lot of truly dumb and audaciously dishonest things said about the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, over the years.

Think death panels and microchips embedded under the skin.

But what might be one of the most boldly absurd things Republicans have said about the law is that it failed because there are still people who have no health insurance.

Sure, an estimated 20 million people have health coverage because of the law, and the national uninsured rate is the lowest it’s ever been. But some people remain uninsured. Train wreck!

“Obamacare itself has woefully fallen short of its goal to cover the American people,” Vice President Mike Pence said during an remarks to Department of Health and Human Services employees Tuesday.

And here’s Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price ― who absolutely knows better ― lamenting this state of affairs on Twitter Tuesday, using a chart Pence displayed on stage at HHS headquarters.

First, that “only 10 million enrolled” refers solely to the Affordable Care Act’s health insurance exchange marketplaces, and completely ignores the law’s Medicaid expansion, which has provided coverage to more people than the exchanges in 31 states and the District of Columbia, which adopted the expansion.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) has been trotting out this bogus argument for years, most recently on Twitter a few weeks ago. (It’s hard to say whether Cornyn knows better.)

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) surely must find this yearning for universal coverage from his Republican colleagues to be utterly heartwarming. He’s got a plan for that!

But about that 28 million. That’s how many people the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say lacked health coverage last year, and it amounts to 9 percent of the population, down from 14.4 percent in 2013, the year before the Affordable Care Act’s coverage expansion began. (The Congressional Budget Office pegs this year’s number at 26 million.)

Those are big numbers, and no one who believes in universal coverage is satisfied that the Affordable Care Act left so many people without help.

Let’s be clear, though: Mike Pence, Tom Price and John Cornyn don’t belong to the group of Americans that believes in universal coverage.

Nor do President Donald Trump, House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), or Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). And neither does any member of Congress who voted for the GOP’s American Health Care Act.

How do we know? Because that bill would make the number of uninsured much, much bigger. This, presumably, is why Trump reportedly told Republican senators that the House bill is “mean.”

Under the legislation the House passed last month ― which the Senate is using as the basis for its legislation ― there would be 51 million uninsured people in the United States by 2026, compared with the 28 million under current law (Obamacare), according to the Congressional Budget Office.

By comparison, when the CBO assessed the Affordable Care Act in 2010, it projected the law would shrink the number of Americans without health coverage from 51 million to 23 million in 2019. After the Supreme Court ruled in 2012 that states could refuse the law’s Medicaid expansion, the CBO revised its prediction, saying 29 million would be uninsured in 2019, and 30 million by 2022.

So why does a law designed to help people get health coverage leave so many people uninsured?

It’s partly by design, because undocumented immigrants deliberately are excluded from the Affordable Care Act’s benefits. It’s partly because there are a lot of people who are eligible for Medicaid coverage or subsidized private health insurance who haven’t signed up. And it’s partly because there are many people who can’t afford or don’t want health insurance, either offered by an employer or via the exchanges, and so they don’t buy it.

The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation created this chart breaking that down, using data from the U.S. Census Bureau: 

The largest group is undocumented immigrants, legally barred from even using their own money to buy health insurance from the exchanges and from enrolling in Medicaid.

If Mike Pence wants to change that, he’d find a lot of Democrats willing to have that conversation.

More than four in 10 of the uninsured are eligible for assistance, but, for whatever reason, aren’t getting it. For some portion of those individuals, it’s because even with financial assistance, they still find the insurance too expensive. Others probably don’t even know that help is available. 

If Tom Price wants to increase aid for poor and middle-income households to buy coverage, and to devote more resources to getting the word out about programs that can help, Democrats would be more than happy to work out a deal.

There are more than 2 million people who’d be eligible for Medicaid if they lived in states that took up the Affordable Care Act’s expansion.

Democrats would welcome it if John Cornyn pressured his home-state officials in Texas ― which has the highest uninsured rate in the country ― to expand Medicaid.

And then there are the 7.5 million people who either earn too much to qualify for the Affordable Care Act’s tax credits, or can’t get those subsidies because their employers offered them health benefits and they turned them down. It stands to reason that cost is a big reason why these folks are uninsured. So, again, if Pence, Price and Cornyn are so concerned about the plight of these people, they could promote policies that address it.

Instead, the Republican Party is putting all its weight behind legislation that would help far fewer people. Don’t expect Mike Pence to stand in front of a bar graph showing the number of uninsured going up and up and up under the legislation his boss is in such a hurry to sign.

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