Thursday 10 May 12
This is a picture of me as Macbeth, drawn by my husband Grant Shaffer, for the New Yorker magazine. I am currently in Glasgow reharsing for this National Theatre of Scotland production which opens at the Tramway in Glasgow on June 13th, then in NYC at the Lincoln Center festival for a two week run from July 5th.
A great thing happened yesterday when President Obama came out and supported gay marriage. 
And finally, a blast from the past, Victor and Barry and their Glasgow anthem with the closing helicopter shot to end all closing helicopter shots...
Tuesday 1 May 12
Last night I was honoured with the Star Award from Live out Loud. It was a very inspiring evening. Check out Live out Loud if you haven't already as they are doing great work in encouraging young people to be strong and happy and proud. A pretty good thing to do, huh? The lovely Sandra Bernhard presented me with the award and I am so grateful to her and all my friends who came along or supported me by making contributions to the evening.
Tonight is the NYC launch of my photo exhibit Alan Cumming Snaps! Yikes! And then tomorrow morning I am off at the crack back to the UK to continue filming the documentary series City Secrets. Look out Liverpool and Newcastle! I'm coming to probe your depths!
Next Tuesday I start rehearsals in Glasgow for Macbeth with the National Theatre of Scotland. Also yikes. So happy to report that my friend John Tiffany (one of the directors of Macbeth) and Stephen Hoggett were nominated for Tonys today for their work on the musical Once! It is a beautiful piece of work and I am totally kvelling right now.
Yesterday I was in Dublin. I can't quite believe that I am actually standing, let alone partying up a storm by attending the launch of my photo show or throwing surprise birthday parties then getting up and going to the gym! You see, last Saturday I was in Singapore. Since then I have been in Kuala Lumpur, Abu Dhabi, London, Bristol, NYC and then Dublin. I also managed to shoot two episodes of City Secrets, the travel documentary series I am doing for Sky Atlantic, went to the opening of my husband's painting show and did a press day and attended the Tribeca Film Festival world premiere for Any Day Now, the movie I shot last summer in LA. See below for the premiere pics with my co-stars Garret Dillahunt and Isaac Leyva. I am wearing a natty outfit by Lucio Castro
Oh, I also was the guest of honour at an event in aid of the Robert Giard Foundation, which aims to continue the photographer's work of cataloguing the LGBT exeprience by giving scolarships to young visual artists. Check them out.
Below are some pics from the premiere of Any Day Now are a couple of TV interviews about the movie
Tuesday 28 Feb 12
Here is a piece that the Wall Street Journal commissioned me to write about circumcision. Sadly they eventually felt it was 'too raw' for their readers - a rather unfortunate phrase considering the subject matter don't you think?!! Anyway, here it is for you to peruse. Please feel free to blast it into the blogosphere....
No man will deny that it feels pretty great to have someone gasp at your penis.
Well, that’s what happened to me when I first moved to America and started to show people the contents of my underpants. But their gasping was not due to my gargantuan girth, (though no complaints so far, thank you very much!) but more to the fact that I, unlike the vast majority of American males, have not been genitally mutilated. I have a foreskin. I am intact.
The gasping was due to the fact that most people had never seen a real, unadulterated, uncircumcised penis before, and some of the people who were seeing mine had, to be frank, been round the block a few times so their reaction was all the more surprising and on refection, upsetting.
For not only did they have no idea of what a foreskin looked like, they also had no idea how to deal with it when we got down to business. I had to give quite a few seminars on how it worked. Can you imagine being in your thirties and suddenly having to explain to lovers how your genitals functioned, or having them gush that they’d never seen one like yours before, or, worse, recoil in disdain and say ‘what do you even do with that?’
It made me feel that I was the weird one, I was deformed, I was not normal, when of course it was they who had had a piece of the most sensitive part of their bodies removed. I was the intact one. I was complete, I told myself. They were the ones who were lacking, literally, and who needed to be counseled and awakened to these facts.
We have a foreskin for a reason. Mine protects the most sensitive part of my body. Of course when I say this in the now many conversations I have had on this topic, there is always some guy who scoffs and says he couldn’t possibly be any more sensitive down there, if he were it might be some sort of problem. To him, and to you now, dear reader, I offer this little parable:
Say I am having a shower and as I am toweling myself off my foreskin gets pulled back, revealing the head of my penis. When I begin to dress, if the head is still out and it touches the fabric of my underwear, it is so uncomfortable and sensitive that I have to pull my foreskin back down immediately before I can finish dressing. That’s how sensitive it is. And that’s also how much sensitivity you lose when you are circumcised.
Of course no man wants to hear that he is missing out on sexual pleasure by something that happened when he was a few days old and is therefore irreversible as well as impossible for him to even conceive of the difference. That’s why I think a lot of men who are circumcised are initially defensive and protective of the procedure, and see any opposition to it by people like me as hysterical and cranky. I get it. Maybe I would be like that too if I wasn’t intact, and if I spent most of my life never encountering anyone who was.
But this defensiveness can turn rather aggressive when a discussion, um, extends into anything more than a passing comment and I am always amazed by people’s reasoning for why this really distressing thing was done to them and in turn why they intend to continue the tradition on their own male offspring. We are all so rightly horrified by the genital mutilation of girls in some parts of the world, I say, why don’t we have the same abhorrence about it happening to little boys here?
The phrase ‘Religious reasons’ will be quoted though most are vague on what these actually are when pressed. Occasionally the ‘covenant with God’ angle will rear its head, though when I say that we have stopped most of the other barbaric practices described in the Bible so why are we so keen to continue this one, nobody really wants to listen. Then, prospective fathers who are defending future circumcision on their boys will say things like ‘He’ll be teased in the locker rooms’. Why? For having all his body parts intact? Or, my personal favorite: ‘I want him to look like me!’ Is this a part of American culture I have not been enlightened about yet? Do you all go home at Thanksgiving and get your wangs out in front of your fathers and compare notes? I mean, really.
So I have decided to get together a book, a sort of circumcision 101. In it you will find everything you ever wanted to know (and some stuff I daresay you didn’t) about circumcision. Why it’s done, how it’s done, the religious reasons, the social reasons, the myths, the facts, testimonials from those who’ve had it done, those who haven’t and also, how it can go wrong, horribly, horribly wrong. It’s the perfect read for anyone with a penis and those who love them, which covers the whole population of the planet so fingers crossed that this will be a cash cow for Intact America and Norm-UK, two organizations I am affiliated with and who are doing sterling work in educating and advising on this matter, and who, like me, really want above all to make parents question if they really want their infant son to be subjected to such a traumatic, irreversible and potentially dangerous medical procedure. Let’s get the conversation started, I say.
I have been trying to do that for years, ever since that first gasp as I dropped my drawers. Once, when I was working on Broadway in Cabaret, the girl who did my make-up confessed she had never seen an uncircumcised penis. I thought this was shocking and decided tonight was the night. She was understandably a little freaked out, but we had known each other for over a year and she painted a swastika on my right butt cheek nearly every night of that year so we were pretty close. And as I said, I was doing her a favour. Knowledge is power and all that.
She stepped out into the hall. I pulled down my dance belt and presented the Cumming manhood. We had agreed I would call her in, she would take a quick look then go back out of the room again so I could rearrange myself, then call her back in and she’d get back to work. I shouted I was ready and the door opened slowly and I saw her little face full of trepidation. But only for a second!
‘Oh, I see’, she exclaimed, bounding towards me, all nerves gone, now caught up in a physiological field trip. ‘It’s not at all how I thought it would be!’
‘What did you think it would be like?’ I asked, feeling slightly objectified but also in the same moment acknowledging I had totally invited it.
‘Well’, she said, her eyes still fixed on my pudendum. ‘I thought it would be more like a flip-top bin!’
‘What, like you’d stand on my foot and my foreskin would pull back?’ I guffawed.
‘Something like that!’ she shrieked, and soon the two of us were bent double with the silliness of it all.
At that moment, a vision was hatched. I chose to accept a mission to lift the lid as it were, to educate and enlighten what a penis is supposed to look like, without having to actually get mine out every time to do so!
May The Foreskin Be With You will be published later this year by Magnus Books
Friday 17 Feb 12
This week I did some pretty amazing things and went to some amazing places, but the most amazing was The Food Bank for New York City.
I went to their branch in Harlem, where they have a soup kitchen and a pantry and where they also give people advice about food stamps and tax returns as well as nutrition. It blew me away. It blew me away for many reasons: the passion and kindness of the people who work there, but mostly the sheer size of the problem they are dealing with.
Hunger is everywhere. It is not just a problem of the homeless. I was horrified to learn that only about ten per cent of the people who come for help to the Food Bank are homeless. Actually 1 in every 5 New Yorkers needs their help to get by. 1 in every 6 seniors. 3.3 million people in NYC are having trouble affording food and are turning to the Food Bank for help. Their traffic has increased by 30 per cent in the last year. It's huge. It's everywhere. It's people with jobs, maybe more than one job. It's people you are passing every day in the street, respectable, presentable, hard-working people who just don't have enough to eat.
There are many ways to help. One of the ways the people I met seemed to favour was doing a virtual food drive because they are able to get much more bang for their buck this way as they can buy in bulk and help more people.
Please go to the website and have a read. It is galling problem that needs to be discussed and helped immediately.
What else I did this week:
Monday: LA, worked with my business partner Joe on my upcoming photo show and website AlanCumming Photography.com. Then went to see the cast and crew screening of the movie I shot last summer, Any Day Now. I love it and very excited for it to be seen by the world. Just remember to bring your hankies. Then I went to LAX and got the redeye back to NYC. Bad idea.
Tuesday: I visited the Food Bank then gave a violin lesson to Paul Festa. Yes, that's right. But it's part of his film project Tie It Into My Hand. Later in the evening I hosted the 5th anniversary party of The Box, one of my favourite places in the city. I sang Tainted Love as a clergyman in a rubber kilt . Later I introduced two girls who peed onstage. Yes, showbiz. Here I am below singing the end of my number amd dealing with a punter trying to look up my kilt.
Wednesday: I went to Boston and recorded the role of a poodle in an episode of the animated kids' show Arthur.
Thursday: I returned to WGBH in Boston to do my annual duties as host of PBS' Masterpiece Mystery series. Then I got the train back to NYC
Friday: I am back on the set of The Good Wife, where I invented a new sport: Yogolda
It's the birthday of Robert Burns, Scotland's national poet, and here in honour of all things Scottish, is a blast from my past : Victor and Barry's album from 1988 Hear Victor and Barry and Faint!.