May the foreskin be with you!

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

The Food Bank and the rest of my week

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

Happy Burns Day!!

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!.

Thanks to whoever put this up on youtube.  I am so happy to be able to spread the message of Kelvinside to a whole new generation...

Happy MLK day

Last week I was one of the hosts of a party to welcome the delightful and crazy talented Darren Criss to Broadway, where he is performing a short season in How To Succeed In Business Without Realy Trying.  It was a total hoot and Darren performed a few numbers himself, starting with my favourtie song ever sung by a mermaid, Part Of Your World. This is a funny picture: Parker Posey - another host of the evening and my current ex-wife in The Good Wife, Darren, Grant my husband, and moi.

I am the new Ambassador for the Paul Taylor Dance Company. I am so excited to be connected with someone who is such a legend, and soon I will be posting a report from my most recent visit to the studio where I sat with Mr Taylor as he talked me through his latest creation that will have its world premiere during the company's debut season at Lincoln Center in March.  Meanwhile here I am busting some classic Taylor moves with Michael Trusnovec...


I was thinking the other day about all these GOP Presidential candidates frantically trying to outdo each other in ways to attract the evangelical vote in the primary states.  It is really fascinating to me how religion plays such a huge role in American politics and yet America prides itself on its constitutional edict about the separation of church and state. Uh, hello, it ain't happening babies!!  American society and politics is wracked with religion, it reeks of it.  And it goes to the very top and to the very left too. Can you imagine the uproar if President Obama did not finish a speech with the phrase 'God Bless America'?  Well, I can tell you that if a politician in Britian or most of the countries in Europe EVER mentioned God at the end of a speech there would be just as huge an uproar, but for the very reason that the American political system is supposedly designed to avoid!  Let's get God, or the Gods, out of politics and talk about the real issues.  I can't believe the candiates are actively wearing their piousness on their sleeves and yet again bringing up their aversion to abortion and gay rights as a way to show themselves capable Presidents. It's disgusting. Disgusting that the candidates pander to these people and disgusting that these people use religion as their only political compass.

I am going to be on Live with Kelly next Thursday January 25th.  The totally darling Kristin Chenoweth will be co-hsoting. We will be able to reminisce about dancing down the streets of the backlot at Paramount singing Easy Street in Annie, and also the other guest is Emmy Rossum who I bitch slapped big time in the movie Dare.  Can't wait!

Also, I am going to be playing Macbeth later this year for the National Theatre of Scotland. Well, not just Macbeth, all the parts actually. I have very strong connections to the play. It was the first play I was ever in as a professional actor, I was born very near Birnam Wood and my father's family were for generations workers on Cawdor estate. That is why this picture of the first Earl of Cawdor that hangs in the Drawing Room of Cawdor Castle fascinates me.  Doesn't it look very like the person whose blog you are reading right now?  Do you think there could have been a little dalliance with the help sometime in the last few centuries?! Maybe I am real Scottish royalty after all!!


And finally, here's to Martin Luther King Junior! This is a great quote by him, and rather apposite in terms of what I was saying about the GOP Presidential race:

Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man's sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true


I just got back to New York City from Scotland and I feel very very thankful for the weekend I have had. I am not though a great fan of the origins of the Turkey day celebrations of last Thursday.  See below from New York magazine

The reason I went to Scotland was to take part in a Staging the Nation event for the National Theatre of Scotland about the traditions of Panto and Variety and how they have influenced both the performance style and also the material of contemporary Scottish theatre. The event was on Saturday lunch time in the Kings Theatre in Glasgow and was a total hoot. I was joined by some of Scotland's most amazing actors: Dave Anderson, Greg Hemphill, John Ramage, Johnny Beattie (legend!!), Juliet Cadzow, Maureen Beattie and Paul Riley. The show was a total example of what we were setting out to demonstrate: the way that Scottish theatre rarely has a fourth wall and the elements of language and song and dark humour and locality and above all warmth and heart are integral to the special relationship Scottish performers and audiences have. I am so thankful to have been there, andto experience that warmth and to realise I am steeeped in a tradition that allows me to be so open with an audience. And for just being Scottish actually.  Look at me getting all sentimental, and it's no even Hogmanay! 


I also did a press conference at which my one-man Macbeth was annouced. I will be playing all the parts in macbeth for the NTS next year, in Glasgow and then New York. Yes, all the parts. John Tiffany and Andy Goldberg are directing, mad fools that they are. I am very excited...

Here I am blabbing on about it on Scottish Television and also on the BBC

If you had told me when I was a little boy...

If you had told me when I was a little boy that I would be sitting in a room in New York City having an on-camera therapy session with Pamela Stephenson I would have thought you were nuts.  First of all, Pamela Stephenson was then part of the cast of Not The Nine O'Clock News, a hilarious and, without sounding too fluidy, seminal comedy show of the early eighties. Now she is a pyschologist and this morning I shot an interview with her that was basically a therapy session about being famous.  The thing about being famous is that you don't really talk about the real experience of it very often.  To do so with non-famous people is awkward and there is a lot of 'you should be so lucky, mate'  and with other famous people you sort of can but actually you don't really because it is so nice to know that someone just gets it and that you don't need to talk about it. Obviously being famous and what that means as you go about your business in the world is something I have a lot to say about but mostly I say to only my husband, very close friends, my own therapist and now, the lovely Pamela Stephenson.  I had a great time. I hope it turns out ok.

I have been having a lot of 'if you had told me whe I was a lttle boy/getting up this morning/etc' moments recently.  Partly I think it's due to Halloween and the flurry of extraordinary experiences I have been having.  I attended Bette Midler's Hulaween bash that benefits her amazing New York Restoration Project and I went as a monkey. Not a mouse as some of the tabloids supposed! A great time was had by all and a lot of cash was raised. Stevie Wonder performed, Bette wandered around being charming and hilarious.

Then on Saturday I had my own second annulal (I hope) Halloween extravagnaza at the the Soho Grand Hotel. It was another smashing evening. DJ Michael Cavadias had a lot to do with how incredible a night it was, but also my amazing friends and their genius costumes.  I went as a Victorian boxer. Natch.  We partied till the cows came home.

Then on Sunday and Monday I performed in Sleep No More, the amazing Punch Drunk, site-specific show at the McKitrick Hotel on West 27th st, NYC.  I have been to the show several times and am a big fan, and when they asked me to be a part of their special Halloween celebrations I was honored, and when they came to me and asked if I would like to be IN the performance and play a doctor and do 1 on 1s with audience members (behind a locked door I did a short wordless piece in the near dark in which I tucked them into a bed and eventually coughed up a piece of hardware!!), well, I was over the moon.  The show is incredible and I cannot exhort you enough to see it if you are in NYC.  I just loved being around the dancers and performers who I had seen from the other side as an audience member.  I have said many times that if I have a regret it is that I am not a dancer and that was only reinforced after spending time with these brilliant people.

Now I am back at work on The Good Wife. In this past weekend's episode I said a line which involved the words 'semen' and 'Bin Laden'.  Again, if you told me.....I can't believe it got past the censors. But the fact that I get to say things like that and work with the people I do is what makes this such an incredible show to work on. Today I am shooting my first ever major scenes with my colleague Josh Charles.  We have only said hello to each other over the last couple of years. Funny old world.

On Friday I will be in San Francisco singing for an Amfar event and on the weekend of the 12th I will be at the Denver Starz Film Festival receiving an Excellence in Acting award.

If you had told me when I was a little boy...