Boy Culture Links: Harry Styles Does Disco, Freddie Mercury's Secret Daughter Dies, Gay TV History + More
JANUARY 16, 2026
PITCHFORK: Harry Styles will release his first studio album in four years on March 6. Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally. — with all that punctuation — offers a dozen new songs.
INSTAGRAM: Tish Hyman, who is apparently a singer — and who is a proud lesbian — has one, and only one, issue that bothers her in 2026, and that is: she hates trans people, and does not believe they exist. Being as butch as she is, it’s odd she fails to see the irony there — the people she plays to mostly hate butch women, too, almost as much as trans women. (Nobody ever talks about trans men.) Anyway, this dumb-ass is now running for mayor of L.A. Great! A MAGA lesbian who hates trans people and loves RFK Jr. I’m sure she’ll really make a dent.
PEOPLE: Are you ready for Jude Law and Andrew Garfield as Siegfried & Roy?
INSTAGRAM: A gay kiss cam inspired by Heated Rivalry! Continues to remind me of what it was like when suddenly everyone was seeing Brokeback Mountain, except gone feral!
JUST JARED: Heated Rivalry co-stars François Arnaud and Connor Storrie left NYC together after a busy round of promo, fanning flames of rumors that they are a real-life couple. (And of course I saw comments exclaiming “ew!” over the prospect of their 15-year age gap. Like, don’t worry about it.)
TWITTER: Insanely, Machado handed her Nobel Peace Prize to Trump, blatantly trying to curry favor. And Trump — OF COURSE — proudly accepted it. It’s nontransferable, but so what? He will die saying he won it.
COOK POLITICAL REPORT: The Dems are taking back the House in November. Book it.
US WEEKLY: Freddie Mercury fathered a secret daughter during a 1976 affair, a fact only revealed last year in the biography Love, Freddie. Now, his previously anonymous daughter’s name — Bibi — is revealed only because she has, sadly, died of cancer at 48. The Queen songs “Bijou” and “Don’t Try So Hard” are said to be about her.
KQED: How San Francisco-area gay bars became a lab for the propulsion of LGBTQ+ rights in the 1950s.
SOCIALITE LIFE: Ariana Grande and Jonathan Bailey will star in a new production of the Stephen Sondheim classic Sunday in the Park with George.
THEM: First I’ve ever heard that Matt Damon considered filming the great gay read The Dreyfus Affair, a gay baseball drama. I remember all the rumors about The Front Runner being a possibly movie by/starring Paul Newman, too. I hope both finally get their adaptations.
PLAYBILL: Playwright Matthew Lombardo, who endured Faye Dunaway in Tea at Five (in which she played Katharine Hepburn), has written about that experience, fictionalizing it in When Playwrights Kill. His new comic piece plays in Boston April 3-18, with Beth Leavel as a suspiciously familiar testy diva.
VARIETY: I’m sorry, but Teyana Taylor sucked in the overrated One Battle After Another, and you can tell Jesus for me. But the film and her performance seem to be broadly appreciated. She is probably, duking it out with Amy Madigan, favored to win an Oscar for it, which is ludicrous. Now comes word that she is standing up for her pal Kanye West, arguing that we can just agree to disagree on … Nazism.
PEOPLE: Mary Tyler Moore introduced America to a gay man who was accepted by his peers 53 years ago, via a part played by Robert Moore, whose character was not Rhoda’s type because while “attractive, witty, single,” he is [said in Rhoda], “Gay.”
YOUTUBE: This … exhaustive … research on the relatively recent birth of the phrase “reheating nachos” to connote copying or just returning to one’s own creation again is truly engrossing to me:
I remember how hard it was for me to research just when “gaslighting” as a verb came into being after seeing Being the Ricardos, in which it is anachronistically used. So many old people claiming it was always used since, like, immediately after the movie came out (not true). Looks like Snopes did a definitive dive, noting that Lucille Ball talked about giving someone “the gaslight treatment” in 1967, but left out a 1965 episode of Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. in which Ronnie Schell (alive today at 94) became arguably the first person in history to use “gaslight” as a verb on TV or in the movies.
Here is that Gomer Pyle episode he says it around 13:01), for kicks:
That episode is also noteworthy for Ted Bessell revealing his gifts in gray sweats:
