Since coming out in February 2014, Ellen Page has taken her place as a major spokesperson for LGBT people. She recently played a lesbian in Freeheld, and she has a couple more projects in the pipeline where she’s playing gay. However, some have wondered whether that’s by necessity as by choice.
Talking to Elle she addresses the issue, saying, “Zachary Quinto is out, and he stars in one of the biggest blockbuster franchises. I have four projects coming up – all gay roles. People ask if I’m concerned about getting pigeonholed. No one asks: ‘Ellen, you’ve done seven straight roles in a row – shouldn’t you shake it up and do something queer? There’s still that double standard. I look at all the things I’ve done in movies: I’ve drugged a guy, tortured someone, become a roller-derby star overnight. But now I’m gay, I can’t play a straight person?”
She’s also been talking to The Guardian about why she felt compelled to come out, saying, “I felt, let’s just please be done with this chapter of discomfort and sadness and anxiety, and hurting my relationships, and all those things that come with it. I felt guilty for not being a visible person for the community, and for having the privilege that I had and not using it. I had got to the point where I was telling myself, you know, you should feel guilty about this. I was an active participant in an element of Hollywood that is gross. I would never judge somebody else for not coming out, but for me, personally, it did start to feel like a moral imperative.”
However she hopes that, “It’ll be amazing, the day when it’s not a thing, when an actress doesn’t feel like she needs to make a speech. That’s obviously the goal.”
Over the past few months stories and video of actress Ellen Page has been doing the rounds, showing her confronting notorious homophobes such as GOP presidential hopeful Ted Cruz. It’s all been as part of her new docu-series project, Gaycation, which sees her travelling to different parts of the world alongside best friend, Ian Daniel, to see LGBT life in numerous different countries and explore how those people are treated and the struggles many of them face.
In the last couple of weeks there’s unsurprisingly been a lot of anger and frustration at the fact that out of 20 acting nominees in this year’s Oscar, no people of color are represented (mirroring what happened last year), and the likes of Straight Outta Compton and other films concentrating on non-white characters were completely shut out. However, Ian McKellen has stepped forward to suggest that the problems with diversity at the Oscars don’t just extend to people of color, but also affect women and gay people too.
Writer/director Kait Ziegler is busy working on her new short film, Before Night, but to get it finished, she needs some help, as she’s launched an 
Xenia is apparently the Greek custom of offering strangers hospitality, but with this film it gets a new spin, as two Albanian brothers look for the Greek father who abandoned them, in the hope of managing to get Greek nationality. As the trailer and clips reveal, it is a bit of a crazy journey and sometimes a rather camp and surreal one.
Howard Brookner is one of those people who definitely left us too soon. In the late-70s and 80s he had his pulse on the point where the avant garde met the mainstream, essentially becoming William Burrough’s official biopgrapher/videographer, and hanging around everyone from Andy Warhol to Madonna. He was in post-production on his first feature when he died of AIDS in the late 1980s.