Do you ever think about how the scene where Arthur catches Merlin with a dress in S2Ep9, and the scenes where Arthur is like "girl??????" in S5Ep8

that it's like just a lil bit suggested that Arthur thinks Merlin is both into men and crossdresses (which does that suggest some kind of queer culture in Camelot where gay men are known to do drag?? who knows) and not only thinks that, but accepts it too.

Like Arthur who is presented with the fact that Merlin might wear dresses in his spare times just shrugs and says what a man does in his spare time is up to him, and that the colour suits him.

He literally could have made any joke about Merlin being a girl like he often does when he teases Merlin about being a coward (which we know is just teasing) but instead he just accepts it, and still calls Merlin a man.

Meanwhile in The Hollow Queen, well, I'll let the lines speak for themselves:

GUINEVERE: He’s not in danger. He’s seeing a girl.

ARTHUR: Merlin?

GUINEVERE: Gaius, I’m sorry, but there is no reason to worry.

ARTHUR: Except for the poor girl.

---

ARTHUR: Oh, so you can go and visit that girl again.

MERLIN: What?

ARTHUR: Girl.

MERLIN: Don't have one.

ARTHUR: That's not what Guinevere tells me. So, why don't you tell us all about her?

MERLIN: Right.

ARTHUR: And why you're walking with a limp.

---

The first lines could be interpreted that Arthur doesn't think Merlin is good with women, but paired with the lines from the 2nd scene where Arthur asks him about it.... it definitely feels like Arthur is saying to worry for the girl because he thinks Merlin isn't attracted to women.

I mean the sheer disbelief alone when he says "Merlin?" like it's so out of realm of possibility. (I mean it could also be suggested that Arthur doesn't think anyone would be attracted to Merlin, but with the 2nd scene it definitely doesn't seem so.)

Especially the way he says "girl" with sarcasm dropping from his tone, like literally "girrrl" is how he says it. Like he's basically calling out Merlin, or saying that he knows that the girl Gwen told him about is actually a man.

Which I believe is why the "and why you're walking with a limp" has Arthur so, well,

like this. I think he truly believes that Merlin is lying sjhdfghsdfg Like he's thinking in that little brain of his that Merlin got pegged by a man and just isn't admitting to it.

And he's definitely accusing Merlin of sneaking away to have sex, you know, during an important time and all.

Basically, with these like 3 scenes in the show, I'd say it really comes off as Arthur accepting Merlin as gay and just waiting for the day where Merlin tells him the truth.

And that's really funny to me.

October 26, 2019 at 07:00AM

On September 30, 1970, a reporter asked Janis Joplin to explain her fearless sexuality. “It seems to bother a lot of women’s lib people that you’re kind of so upfront sexually,” Village Voice writer Howard Smith told her. Joplin, by then accustomed to such criticism, responded: “I’m representing everything they said they want.… It’s sort of like: you are what you settle for.… You’re only as much as you settle for. If you don’t settle for that and you keep fighting it, you know, you’ll end up anything you want to be… I’m just doing what I wanted to and what feels right and not settling for bullshit and it worked. How can they be mad at that?”

Janis made it sound as if fighting the urge to settle was the most natural thing to her. But deep down inside there had always been the yearning for doing exactly that: getting the house, the white picket fence and the husband. They had been the middle-class hopes of her mother, Dorothy, who herself had fought hard for a life of stability in 1950s Port Arthur, Texas. Janis, her mother’s daughter, was often tormented about leaving that white picket fence behind. “I keep pushing so hard the dream/I keep tryin’ to make it right/Through another lonely day,” she sang in “Kozmic Blues.”

She was born a misfit—a tomboy, a painter, a girl who didn’t accept arbitrary boundaries, a girl with a big voice—but she never stopped wanting to belong. That’s why, years later at the age of 25, it had been so daring of her to leave behind the band that had launched her, Big Brother and the Holding Company. She had joined the group in San Francisco in June 1966 and two months later they were bunking communally in Marin County. Despite technical shortcomings as musicians, they were a dynamic live band with a solid following, and they correctly saw in Janis the element that would elevate them to status similar to their Haight-Ashbury scene-mates Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead. Sure enough, Big Brother and the Holding Company broke big in June 1967 at the Monterey Pop Festival, signing with Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman, who secured a lucrative deal for them with Columbia Records.

But Joplin was beginning to feel again that part of her that would not settle. Her ambition ratcheted up. She looked more to her heroes Nina Simone and Etta James. Rather than shriek over Big Brother’s blaring psychedelic “freak rock,” Joplin longed to work her voice with more nuance, and explore soul and other musical genres; she envisioned keyboards, a horn section, more sophisticated tunes. In remarkable letters she wrote her parents, she explained, “I have to find the best musicians in the world & get together & work. There’ll be a whole lot of pressure because of the ‘vibes’ created by my leaving Big Brother & also by just how big I am now. So we’ve got to be just super when we start playing—but we will be.” To New York Times reporter Michael Lydon, she admitted: “I’m scared. I think, ‘It’s so close. Can I make it?’ If I fail, I’ll fail in front of the whole world. If I miss, I’ll never have a second chance on nothing. But I gotta risk it. I never hold back…” Anyone who really knew her would not have been surprised by her leap of faith. As a roughhousing tomboy in Port Arthur, she’d exhibited a fierce will not unlike that of her father, Seth, who led a double life as a Texaco engineer by day, and a cerebral bookworm and atheist by night. He and Dorothy adored their daughter, but their showdowns were legend—Janis refusing to do what she was told, damn the consequences. With adolescence came compulsive risk-taking; she was the female “mascot” among a group of outlier intellectual boys, a role that helped set a bold Joplin in motion.

Unlike her father, Joplin would not hide her defiance. She vocally opposed segregation in her high school, which made her a target of bullies and racists. She sought out the hard-to-find music of Lead Belly and Bessie Smith, sneaking out to juke joints with boys, and was accused of sleeping with her male companions. At 17, after a midnight ramble in New Orleans, she crashed her father’s car. She would soothe the shame with alcohol, the first drug on which she became dependent. And then she’d do it all again.

Joplin found temporary solace in traveling, which she’d been introduced to by Kerouac’s On the Road, a game-changer for her. Her first taste of freedom came at 19, when she briefly lived like a beatnik in Venice Beach, California, then hitchhiked alone to San Francisco, before hightailing it back to Texas. She soon cultivated an ardent following of fellow college students in Austin, who clamored to hear her sing blues, country, and folk with her first group, the Waller Creek Boys.

Forever restless, Joplin hitchhiked for the second time to San Francisco the day after her 20th birthday in 1963. Already writing songs and accompanying herself on an autoharp, she floored audiences in the Bay Area, gaining confidence and vocal skill, gig by gig. But after spending the summer of ’64 in New York’s Lower East Side, where she learned to play 12-string guitar, Joplin became addicted to methamphetamines. She returned to Port Arthur yet again, sobered up at the Joplin homestead, and attempted to renounce her life as an artist. But she could not resist opportunities to perform in Houston and Austin clubs, where her voice manifested ever more powerfully, an uncorked siren calling her away from the life of dutiful commuter student and sociology major at Beaumont’s Lamar Tech. At age 23, after sharing a bill in Austin with the 13th Floor Elevators, she split town for Haight-Ashbury yet again. When she wrote her parents to give them her whereabouts, she promised to stay clean.

In just over a year, she achieved much of what she thought she wanted, but chafed at the constraints of Big Brother. As she turned to heroin to soften anxiety and fears of rejection, her urge to rebel—even within the parameters of the counterculture—could not be reined in. “I’ve been doing it for 26 years,” she told the New York Times in 1969, conflating her age and her lifelong iconoclasm, “and all the people who were trying to compromise me are now coming to me, man. You better not compromise yourself, it’s all you got.… I’m a goddamn living example of that…. People aren’t supposed to be like me, sing like me, make out like me, drink like me, live like me, but now they’re paying me $50,000 a year for me to be like me. That’s what I hope I mean to those kids out there… that they can be themselves and win. You just have to start thinking that way, being that righteous with yourself, and you’ve won already.”

Joplin’s great champion Ellen Willis, a rare female rock critic of the era, worried for post-Big Brother Janis in the pages of The New Yorker. “Did Big Brother perhaps give her more than we realized?” she wrote. As often happens with performers, Joplin had to learn in public, so the initial answer to this question was a resounding maybe. Only three months after assembling her back-up players, Joplin was still finding her way, which showed in her two-night stand at New York’s Fillmore East. Joplin didn’t fall back on her usual over-the-top performance techniques, but modulated herself, doing the “kind of things that milk you rather than hammer you,” she said. Willis was one of the few critics who seemed to get it.

Rolling Stone’s Paul Nelson resolutely panned the shows, describing Joplin as “The Judy Garland of Rock” who “strangled the songs to death.” Six weeks later, when she performed back in San Francisco at Bill Graham’s Winterland, her “people” did not call for an encore—a first on her own turf. Afterwards in the dressing room, journalist John Bowers noted, “She is pale, as if in shock, saying, ‘San Francisco’s changed, man. Where are my people? They used to be so wild. I know I sang well! I know I did!’” One of her earliest fans, esteemed jazz critic Ralph J. Gleason, advised her in his San Francisco Chronicle column to “scrap this band and go right back to being a member of Big Brother if they’ll have her.”

Hurt but undaunted, Joplin continued to pursue her musical vision. She recorded her debut solo album, I Got Dem Ol’ Kozmic Blues Again Mama!, its title alluding to a persistent existential dread her father had called “the Saturday night swindle.” She’d written new songs including “One Good Man,” a Bessie Smith blues update. Other material ranged from her adaptation of the Chantels’ “Maybe,” a favorite from her teen years, and Rodgers and Hart’s “Little Girl Blue,” inspired by the 1959 Nina Simone recording of the song. (Simone would later applaud Joplin’s version.)

The album debuted on Billboard on October 11, 1969, remained there for 28 weeks and gradually moved up to #5. Joplin’s aching original “Kozmic Blues” just missed the Top 40, hitting #41. Reviews were lukewarm, with Joplin, again, being taken to task—by male critics—for being “bent on becoming Aretha Franklin” and dumping Big Brother. An exception was an insightful Village Voice piece by Johanna Schier (later Johanna Hall, coauthor of the Pearl track, “Half Moon”), who wrote that Joplin “was singing stronger and better… The top of her range is more solid and her vocal control is maturing… She breaks through into greatness by anyone’s standards.” Backed by her Kozmic Blues Band, she would play the biggest venues of her career to date, including a sold-out concert on December 19 at Madison Square Garden.

Bettmann ArchiveJanis Joplin and her final group, the Full Tilt Boogie Band, perform at the Festival for Peace at Shea Stadium in August 1970.

The first year of her brief solo flight, Joplin headlined Woodstock, performing an hour-long set in the middle of the night, singing until her voice gave out. She made her debut on The Ed Sullivan Show and The Dick Cavett Show, appeared on the cover of Newsweek (the cover line: “The Rebirth of the Blues”), and toured Europe for the first time, a series of concerts garnering rapturous responses. At London’s Royal Albert Hall, she’d even managed to roust a sold-out, normally staid audience from their seats.

Joplin remained peripatetic, musically speaking, and driven. She’d learned to play and sing Kris Kristofferson’s “Me and Bobby McGee,” and the song opened new doors. Joplin sought a smaller, rootsier-sounding unit to bring it, and other material, to life. She would christen this group Full Tilt Boogie. With them, she would mature as a bandleader and co-producer of her recorded output, all gloriously evident on her final album, Pearl, and in footage of Joplin and Full Tilt Boogie’s live performances. Following her death during the Pearl sessions, on October 4, 1970, “Me and Bobby McGee” topped the charts for two weeks, and Pearl became the most commercially successful album of her career. Despite her kozmic blues and the critics’ initial discouragement, Joplin, of course, had refused to settle for anything less than traveling the road her music took her.

Actors recall living in fear of Jerome Robbins — yet dying to work with him

It’s a legend that even now, 20 years after Jerome Robbins’ dying, threatens to outline him: Whereas berating his actors, he stepped farther and farther again on stage till he toppled into the orchestra pit. And nobody stated a phrase to cease him. Some say the present was “Name Me Madam,” “Excessive Button Sneakers” or “Billion Greenback Child.” (An eyewitness tells The Put up it was, in reality, “West Facet Story.”) However the underlying message is similar: The choreographer and director was a terror to work with. Final month, after a “Chicago” actor killed himself following what was reportedly a brutish rehearsal, many recalled Robbins and his penchant for pushing dancers and actors to the breaking level. Nonetheless, it’s exhausting to think about Broadway or the ballet with out him. Which is why Robbins — who was born 100 years in the past and died at 79 on July 29, 1998 — is as revered as he’s reviled. His centennial 12 months is being celebrated throughout the nation and in Germany, France and the Netherlands. On Aug. 9, there might be a tribute aboard the Intrepid in Manhattan, with performances and panels moderated by Robbins biographer Amanda Vaill. In ballets and such musicals as “West Facet Story,” “Peter Pan,” “The King and I” and “Fiddler on the Roof,” Robbins introduced a naturalism to dance and motion that was revolutionary — motive sufficient why those that survived each him and his wrath have a tendency to recall the grasp, not the monster. Jerome Robbins throughout a 1974 rehearsal Getty Photographs Getty Photographs Getty Photographs Getty Photographs 4 View Slideshow “Stephen Sondheim stated that Robbins was the one genius he’s ever recognized,” stated Vaill, who had entry to the director’s diaries and papers whereas writing 2006’s “Someplace: The Life of Jerome Robbins.” And he was, she factors out, self-taught: Unable to afford greater than a 12 months at NYU, younger Jerome Rabinowitz dropped out and ferried between Weehawken, NJ — the place his father urged him to be part of the household corset enterprise — and New York, the place he kick-started his dance profession. Alongside the way in which, he developed what Vaill calls “a form of tunnel imaginative and prescient — as soon as he’d seen what he needed, nothing else was necessary.” Within the identify of artwork, he’d make actors and dancers undergo their paces repeatedly, typically screaming at them and hurling insults. “Jerry not solely attacked you, he attacked your loved ones, your background, the place you lived, the way you lived, who you studied with,” Tony Mordente, a “West Facet Story” forged member, advised biographer Greg Lawrence. Yet Mordente and plenty of different stars say they owe their careers to him. “The acute battle between his admirers and disparagers made my e book an emotional ordeal to write,” Lawrence advised The Put up of his 2001 biography, “Dance with Demons: The Life of Jerome Robbins.” A perfectionist, Robbins was even exhausting on his collaborators, together with “West Facet Story” composer Leonard Bernstein. “My father had to battle with so many points of Jerry’s difficult character,” Bernstein’s daughter, Jamie, advised The Put up. “He was impolite and imperious and harsh and terrible to artists . . . and yet my father managed to set it apart and go on working with Jerry.” Jerome Robbins circa 1950Getty Photographs However others by no means forgave him — if not for his cruelty, than for naming names earlier than the Home Un-American Actions Committee (HUAC) in the 1950s. As his biographers found, Robbins dropped the dime on his colleagues much less from fear of being blacklisted than that of being outed. A bisexual whose best love, many consider, was for a ballerina — Tanaquil LeClerc, the spouse of his idol, George Balanchine — Robbins additionally had affairs with males, Montgomery Clift amongst them. Not solely did he fear his household’s wrath, however homosexuality was then punishable by jail. Like many artists, he’d flirted with communism and the post-World Struggle II concept of Soviet-American friendship. All of the whereas, the FBI was watching him. So was Ed Sullivan. A decade earlier than he launched the Beatles, Sullivan was placing fear into the hearts of leftists by vetting them for his TV present, typically writing damning objects about them in his newspaper column. In 1950, Sullivan pressed Robbins to reveal his actions and that of his fellow Soviet sympathizers, one of them Robbins’ sister. When Robbins refused, Sullivan canceled his look. However three years later, subpoenaed as a “pleasant witness,” Robbins caved. He gave HUAC the names of eight celebration members, seven of whom, Vaill stated, had been already recognized. Robbins later advised “West Facet Story” author Arthur Laurents that he wouldn’t know “for years” whether or not he’d finished the best factor. “Oh, I can let you know now,” Laurents replied. “You had been a s–t.” Zero Mostel overtly disdained Robbins. Blacklisted himself, although not by means of Robbins’ doing, the burly actor noticed his movie profession wither and die. Nonetheless, he knew a genius when he noticed one, and went on to star in 1964’s “Fiddler on the Roof,” which Robbins choreographed and directed. Sheldon Harnick, the present’s lyricist, remembers that first fraught day of rehearsal, and the way he and the forged awaited Robbins’ arrival. When he lastly got here in, Harnick stated, “He and Mostel checked out one another. Then Zero stated, ‘Hello, there, blabbermouth!’ and everybody broke up.” Even so, there was all the time stress between the forged and their director, who by no means left a single second of a present to probability — and did no matter he had to do to make his imaginative and prescient actual. “Perhaps I’ve tried to blot it out from my reminiscence,” Harnick, now 94, advised The Put up, “however Jerry could possibly be merciless, particularly to some of the ladies. If he had a criticism, he would specific it in a very chilly and merciless manner.” Austin Pendleton, who performed the present’s timid Motel the tailor, remembers one lacerating encounter so private, he advised Robbins’ assistant not to let the director discuss to him once more for every week. And Robbins obeyed: “He’d say, ‘Inform Austin to cross left,’ after which, every week to the day, he was supportive once more, and my efficiency had actually pulled collectively.” Jerome Robbins circa 1965Getty Photographs Now a director himself, Pendleton stated, “He was more durable on himself than anybody else.” Had Robbins not been a director, he might need been a puppeteer. Or so he advised Carol Lawrence, who performed Maria in 1957’s “West Facet Story,” when he confirmed her his puppet assortment. It was metaphor for a way he noticed the world. “He needed full management,” she advised The Put up. “You had been below his fingertips.” A agency believer in the strategy faculty of appearing, Robbins inspired off-stage enmity between his actors, typically with violent outcomes. Underneath Robbins’ course, Larry Kert — the Tony to Lawrence’s Maria — received a nightly pummeling. “Hit him more durable!” Robbins urged her as they rehearsed the scene in which Maria assaults the person who killed her brother. Someday, she recalled, Kert walked into her dressing room, his chest bandaged, and so in ache he may barely communicate. “The physician stated you’re loosening my lungs from my rib cage,” he whispered. “However I can’t inform Jerry.” As a substitute, Lawrence advised him. “And with no second’s pause, Jerry stated, ‘So hit him in the top, you received’t damage something there.’” Jerome Robbins throughout a rehearsal in 1965Getty Photographs Even Bernstein, who wrote the music for that present, got here in for a pounding, at the least psychologically, when Robbins crossed out some of his orchestrations. Years later, at Bernstein’s memorial service, Laurents stated his “West Facet Story” collaborator was afraid of solely two issues: “God and Jerry Robbins.” Many years earlier than Martin Charnin wrote and directed “Annie,” he performed a Jet in “West Facet Story.” He was, he advised The Put up proudly, the primary individual to sing “Gee, Officer Krupke, Krup you!” on a Broadway stage. Now 83, he remembers watching Robbins fall into the pit. He stated it occurred throughout a rehearsal in Philadelphia. “We needed to see how far he would go and he ended up going one step too far,” Charnin stated of himself and fellow Jets. Had the bass drum not damaged his fall, Robbins would have been badly damage. Why didn’t anybody cease him? “I actually don’t know,” Charnin stated. “Perhaps there was a collective second of tit for tat . . . I’d like to consider that it was only a mistake, and we had been terrified — we didn’t need him to get damage. “For all of how robust Jerry was, he additionally had one thing inside of him that was actually good,” he continued, “and that goodness manifested itself in the work. He knew what he needed, and what I realized and used in my profession actually got here from a fountain known as Jerome Robbins.” Jerome Robbins in 1988Getty Photographs Chita Rivera, whose multi-Tony-winning profession took off after her function in “West Facet Story,” goes additional. “All I do know is that I used to be in love with Jerry,” she advised The Put up. “I bear in mind feeling euphoric once I noticed him work — it was simply so stunning, and so proper and on the nostril . “He taught us how to be. Once I was operating by means of the door to the window after [the song] ‘A Boy Like That,’ he stated, ‘Don’t dance to the window. May you simply return and stroll to the window?’ “He taught us how to dance as individuals, not as dancers.” It was dancers with whom Robbins selected to spend his final twenty years. After “Fiddler,” he and his “West Facet Story” group tried and failed to get one other exhibit the bottom. Disenchanted with Broadway, Robbins returned to the place he began, making the ballets which might be nonetheless being danced in the present day. “I believe with the ballet dancers, he had a barely gentler edge, although he may nonetheless rip and destroy somebody,” stated Christine Redpath, who teaches the Robbins repertoire at New York Metropolis Ballet. “He had just a few individuals right here and there he’d beat into. I bear in mind one man being utterly devastated, in tears . . . however he survived.” It helped that Robbins beloved canine, his personal and everybody else’s. One of Redpath’s golden retrievers got here in useful throughout the making of at the least one ballet. “When he was choreographing ‘Brandenburg’ in the early ’90s, the rehearsal pianist stated, ‘I’ll offer you cash if you happen to carry Emma into the room!’ ” Redpath advised The Put up. “So I did and he or she’d lie below Jerry’s seat. When he received tense, he’d look down at her and he or she’d have a look at him and he’d smile and the temper would change.” Others observed it, too. As “West Facet Story” dancer Grover Dale advised biographer Greg Lawrence a 12 months after Robbins’ dying, “I typically puzzled what the work would have been like had he been as candy to his dancers as he had been to his canine. “Maybe ‘contentment’ and ‘being a genius’ don’t combine very effectively,” Dale stated. 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