So here is raised again the question about why there’s no gay sex in the movies, the main answer being “haha studios, obviously, they’re total wusses.” But the call is also coming from inside the big, dumb, gay house: in particular, the big dumb gay house named Dustin Lance Black, who is the writer, most recently, of the abominable and terribly, ridiculously bad J. Edgar.

Black, who won an Oscar for his Milk screenplay, says that a love scene would have been too revisionist historically. “I certainly didn’t want to see J. Edgar doing it,” says Black, who is gay. “In the 1930s, oftentimes, a loving relationship with gay men was never consummated.”

It… I’m sorry? Say what? I think I’m trying to understand his point but all I can hear is every gay studies professor crapping his pants with laughter. Yes but wait, etc., there’s more.

“Here’s my thing with gay sex,” Dustin Lance Black says. “In terms of sex, we get plenty of that every day in our own lives and thrown on the Internet. I feel like what I’m really interested in is gay romance.”

So at least we know who the dumbest Oscar winner since Charlton Heston is. We hereby sentence old DLB to read Love Stories: Sex Between Men Before Homosexuality, for starters.

I have an odd fascination with the Prime Ministers of Australia. From Gough Whitlam, the only officeholder to be dismissed by the representative of the British (and, I suppose, Australian) crown, to Paul Keating, who proved that being super foulmouthed is not enough to guarantee your reelection on Prison Island, there are any number of fairly interesting stories. But it’s tough to top that of Harold Holt, the man who went for a swim and never came back.

Just once, gentlest of readers, I would like to crack open a YA novel and see our heroine getting ready for a party. I would like to see her getting HERSELF ready for a party, and then I would like her to look in the mirror and say “damn, I look fiiiiine, as per usual.”

But no. Always, it’s “the girl in the mirror looked back at her.” The girl in the mirror being herself, just the surprisingly beautiful version of herself that her friends and/or Alice Cullen have helped pull together with flat-irons and body-conscious dresses and liquid eyeliner — or, as it happens in our selection here, The Secret Circle, random magical herbs. Drives me batty. What kind of weird destruction of the self is represented by this use of “the girl in the mirror”? What would Derrida say? And then, right, she’s always obviously bangin’ anyway. It’s the Anne Shirley thing, you know? Pale! Thin! Red-haired! Too tall! You know who that also describes? Nicole Kidman. And she’s not exactly wearing a bag over her head. Well, actually, if you’ve ever seen Nicole Kidman in the wild, she does actually wear a bag over her head, and a rash guard, and an umbrella, so as to remain extremely pale.

But, whatever, your heroine probably has “a dusting of freckles” or “slightly too-elfin ears.” “Too-elfin,” for Christ’s sake. Elves ≠ trolls, you know? I’d be happy to see it go two ways.

Way The First: “(Heroine) is a conventionally attractive teenage girl, which is why all the male characters in the book are drawn to her over and over again.”
Way The Second: “(Heroine) is pretty cute, but she’s got weird cystic acne on her forehead and her armpit fat makes her look weird in strapless dresses, which is why she’s slightly awkward and shy.”

What I’m saying is, Cassie Blake, our girl, is a fine-looking girl, despite having brown hair. Let’s get down to business.

I don’t know about your New Year’s resolutions, but I always like to have Official Resolutions and one or two that are too embarrassing to share, except for with you. In this case, I realized I can go WEEKS without reading anything besides my Google Reader feeds, and it’s time to get real. Real with The Secret Circle. I mean, I have a whole year to actually read that David Grann piece on Guatemala that I’m always recommending to others, right? Better to ramp back up with teen witches in ZOMG LOVE.

Generally, I have found that books with ‘secret’ in the title are less shitty than one would expect. I mean, who didn’t cringe when they first picked up that Donna Tartt book, and then completely adore it for the first… two hundred pages? One-fifty? And just as the subtext of The Secret History was “college is kind of awful and full of juiceboxes who are secretly looking to kill people for kicks,” the subtext of L.J. Smith’s The Secret Circle is “high school is kind of awful and full of juiceboxes who are secretly looking to kill people for kicks.”

Oh, and how awful this high school is. And how familiar! Apparently The Secret Circle is a new show on the CW, which I found amusing, as Cassie’s newfound witch-y/bitch-y sisterhood is clear spiritual kin to that one episode of “Gilmore Girls” where Rory gets almost-initiated into the Puffs at her weird WASP-y prep school. Minus the magic, but with just as many candles. (And of course, the CW is plundering another series of L.J. Smith books for “The Vampire Diaries.”) The Secret Circle should also be familiar to anyone who read That Other Series of Very Popular Teen Vampire Books, The One That Rhymes With “Highlight,” as said series kinda rips off The Secret Circle in numerous places. There’s this completely obvious part where Cassie has figured out that this smoking-hot gang of ladies is clearly a coven of witches, and they’re all “what do you think we are?” and she’s all “you use herbs for things other than salads! you cast spells! you probably have pointy hats!” which is an exact parallel for Bella Swan being all “your skin is icy cold! your eyes change color! you suck blood from mammals! you may or may not live on Sesame Street and enjoy counting things!”

Like many such books, of course, the paranormal aspects are really an afterthought. The important thing is that the secret-circle-of-witches is super popular and clique-y and have their very own cordoned-off portion of the school cafeteria (I am not joking) which boasts a microwave and a juice machine and a TV. Which is when you go online to figure out when this book was written (ooh, a microwave!), only to discover that the cover of the version you’re holding is a total reboot for the Twilight generation, and the original was published in 1992 and looks — see above — like a Christopher Pike novel. Which is probably why I didn’t read it originally, as Christopher Pike novels terrified me too much to even have on my bookcase and were generally read one chapter at a time and then thrown into the closet.

The more obviously retro-y part of The Secret Circle, at least this first book, is that it makes the non-existent sexual content of the first Twilight installment look like Kathryn Harrison’s The Kiss. The closest we get is a “silver cord” between Cassie and Adam, which draws them spiritually closer to each other. It’s a total cock-tease. I mean, there was more overt eroticism in The Mill on the Floss (red mist, anyone?)

Books about teen witches, of course, are like catnip for the youngs. Always have been, always will be. Who wouldn’t want that? It’s mystifying, really, that Actual Wiccans (love you, actual Wiccans!) are so hardcore about WE DON’T CAST SPELLS, OKAY, WE JUST WORSHIP NATURE AND THE GODDESS, because that’s the exact opposite of good PR. If I controlled the international society of Wiccans (I know there is no such thing, and that is great), I would run it like Scientology, and would totally keep my members thinking that the ability to cast spells was just a level or two (or about forty thousand dollars in Wicca-classes) away, and then, much like the volcano-thetans, the truth would only be revealed to them when they reached Wicca Clear, at which point they’d be too into it to throw in the towel. Keep them wanting more, I say.

NOW TALK. I HAVE MISSED YOU.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
• No, seriously, what would Derrida say? I have absolutely no idea what Derrida says about anything.

• What books and movies and TV shows and longform New Yorker articles do you pretend to have consumed? My parents never let me watch “My So-Called Life,” so I’ve only ever read a bad novelization while sitting in a bookstore when I was sixteen. True story.

• The story opens in Cape Cod, where Cassie is having a shitty time. The worst time I ever spent on Cape Cod involved a B&B; constructed entirely from wicker. Why are B&Bs; the worst? It’s like paying to have sex on a cot next to your grandparents, and then pretending their coffee is decent the next morning.

• It’s not just the Anne Shirley thing, right, it’s the Jo March thing. You can run your mouth about her “one beauty” all you want, but does anyone think that Laurie was falling in love with an uggo? He was hot, loaded and charismatic. He would totally have had a motorcycle if such a thing existed.

• Do you have cats? If so, what do you call that weird kneading-thing they do? I’m interested to see if it has a regional basis. My friend from Florida says her cat ‘makes muffins.’ I say my cat ‘makes biscuits.’

• Christopher Pike novels, right?

• If you are a Wiccan who actually does cast spells, and are currently feeling like Willow in “Buffy” when she met with the non-spell-casting college group of Wiccans, please tell us about it.

And for next time, we’ll read Clan of the Cave Bear — and, speaking of classic, you can CliffsNotes it with Lizzie Skurnick’s tribute to same here or here.

Nicole Cliffe is the proprietress of Lazy Self-Indulgent Book Reviews.

Yes, “Bark Mitzvahs.” You can insert your own “German Shepherds deeply conflicted” joke here. Or you can just shake your head sadly, like I’m doing right now.

“He knows that she’s been in the freezer — he likes to say she has been in the freezer with the chips and the chicken — so he is sort of aware that she is his twin, but obviously he doesn’t really understand how it’s all worked.”
 — Twins! Born five years apart!

Please make a note about the supplanting of cupcakes with marshmallows, as decreed by T. Still, I think that’s REALLY unfortunate, because I wanted profiteroles to be the new cupcakes, and you just know petits fours are going to be the new marshmallows in a couple months. 2012 SUCKS.

One of the few bright spots of any new year, apart from the holidays finally being over, is the London Review of Books’ presentation of Alan Bennett’s diary. The 2011 volume is only available to subscribers, but you can listen to some extracts here and then go buy yourself a copy of the issue. Or better yet, subscribe.

The Only Way Is Amy

by Emma Garman

A series dedicated to explaining Britain’s manufactured celebrities to an American audience.

Far be it from me to inject a note of alarmism into this barely launched year, but have you noticed that absolutely nothing is real anymore? Bikini models are actual hungry teenagers only from the chin up, marriages arranged in good faith by Ryan Seacrest Enterprises are not, it turns out, sacred and everlasting unions, and each day that passes sees Photoshop and plastic surgery opponent Kate Winslet looking more like a cyborg who’d like to offer you a Lancôme gift bag with a $35-or-more purchase. We do, it is some consolation, still live in a world where ensnaring innocent animals in our Baudrillardian web is deemed to cross the line: last month, when a BBC nature show used fake snow and interspliced shots of the Arctic to pass off captive newborn polar bear cubs as having been filmed in the wild, there was a national outcry and a stern official reprimand issued. Idiot homo sapiens can be manipulated and placed in faked-for-TV situations and no one really cares — well, a few journalists are pretending to care that “The X Factor” might be fixed, probably because Simon Cowell told them to — but we will not stand for our baby bear reality shows to be corrupted in this way.

Which brings us, conveniently enough, to the case of a young TV star so cherubic, so snub-nosed and fluffy and altogether adorable, so incapable of forming anything resembling regular adult speech, so helpless and irresistibly doe-eyed, that she has transcended the derided category of docusoap performer to occupy the same place in Britain’s creaky old heart as those tiny endangered species. Amy Childs, a 21-year-old Jessica Rabbit lookalike, shimmied into the UK’s collective consciousness in late 2010 as a cast member of “The Only Way Is Essex” (“TOWIE” in its affectionate acronym), and then appeared alongside friend to this column Kerry Katona on last summer’s “Celebrity Big Brother,” expanding her fan base far and wide. The usually acerbic writer Giles Coren, for instance, drooled in the pages of Vogue that Amy is as “exotic and unattainable as a princess,” which is certainly one way of putting it.

Nevertheless, after Amy’s moonlight stint on “CBB,” the “TOWIE” string-pullers ruthlessly exiled her from subsequent seasons of their human puppet show. “Apparently,” relayed the Daily Mail-anointed Best Loved Essex Girl, “they said that my life wasn’t real anymore.” Somewhere, in whatever simulated celestial order he has ascended to, Professor Baudrillard is smiling wryly at this very 21st-century perplexity, and at Amy’s brave attempt to prove her own existence — or, in paradoxical truth, further erode her realness with more fame — via a new show. “It’s All About Amy” debuted on December 1st and is depicting “the real Amy Childs,” as opposed to the wantonly distorted version seen on “TOWIE.” “People will see the real me in my new show,” she has poignantly vowed, “whereas in ‘TOWIE’ I was edited to look stupid.”

One can sympathize with Amy’s desire to set the record straight, looking stupid on “TOWIE” being the converse equivalent of looking clever while debating string theory with Stephen Hawking and Brian Greene. Of course, intellectual stimulation is (stratospherically) far from the point of this highly rated “structured reality” show, whose characters, catchphrases, customs and landmarks are now so tightly woven into the fabric of British society, it’s almost impossible to believe that it only hit screens a little over a year ago.

The London-adjacent county of Essex has always been notorious for the status symbol-laden style and cheerfully brash behavior of its denizens — the image of New Jersey, including the relationship it shares with its more sophisticated neighboring metropolis, is remarkably analogous — and now, with “TOWIE,” Essex Boys and Essex Girls are finally enjoying the kind of adulation they know they deserve. Even the poshos of “Downton Abbey” couldn’t compete with Essex at the 2011 BAFTA Awards — “TOWIE” beat “Downton” and other shows including “Sherlock” and “The Killing” to carry away the YouTube Audience Award, voted for by the public. (Lady Mary, aka Michelle Dockery, is herself a proud Essex Girl so she probably didn’t mind too much.) In further confirmation, Claire Danes, whose stunning performance on 2011’s best US show — as well as her marriage to a Brit — imbues her with the greatest authority, recently came out as a “TOWIE” aficionado: “They’re definitely tacky and a little, I don’t know, maybe morally questionable,” she opined of the cast, “but they all have a kind of charm, too, and a sense of humor that I just really appreciate. They’re very amusing people.”

Perhaps I should defer to the show’s opening disclaimer to evoke the universally spellbinding “TOWIE” quintessence: “This programme contains flash cars, big watches and false boobs,” viewers are warned/promised. “The tans you see might be fake but the people are all real — although some of what they do has been set up purely for your entertainment.” Focusing on the romantic travails of a group of oddly weathered early twenty-somethings as they exchange inconsequential confidences in wine bars, have pseudo-dramatic confrontations in glitzy nightclubs, and fret about whether or not their tans need topping up, the phenomenal success of “TOWIE” has proven to television networks once and for all that paying for scriptwriters, set designers, wardrobe stylists, and trained actors is utterly unnecessary — just find some suitable members of the public, pour the drinks, tell one of them that her frenemy has totes just walked in the bar with her ex who, as it goes, babes, is well narked off about what she’s been going round saying, and yell “Action.”

To give credit where credit’s due, the “TOWIE” cinematic method is not entirely freeform, existing as it does in a tradition originating way back in 2004 with Lauren Conrad’s media debut, the MTV game-changer “Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County.” The Guardian’s Stuart Heritage beautifully summed up the formal markers of such shows thusly: “All the conversations on ‘The Only Way Is Essex’ are full of weird little pauses, as if they’re all communicating via a faulty 1970s satellite link-up. It’s like watching an old Open University programme on Advanced Pointlessness.” Quite so: those weird little pauses, typically accompanied by a glassy-eyed stare, are to this genre as existential angst is to French New Wave, or irritating hipsters are to Mumblecore. And while the characters on “Laguna Beach” and “The Hills” baffled viewers born before 1980 with their stupefying sub-Bret Easton Ellis inarticulacy and murder-inducing repetition of “like” every other word, “TOWIE” also fascinates and appalls with its lexicon (“nicking a bird”=wooing a young woman; “well jel!”=very envious; “well reem!”=absolutely excellent; “you going to Marbs, then?”=might you be vacationing at our favorite Spanish resort? “slated!”=humiliated) and glottal-stop accents (“Slay-id!” “Shuu-up!), which would likely necessitate subtitles in the US.

Endearingly, Amy gives the impression of being entirely unaware that her way of speaking is, shall we say, distinctive: when she was mimicked by a fellow contestant on a quiz show, she set everyone straight by divulging that at school, she “come top of elocution.” And when her friend apprised her of the disparaging definition of “Essex Girl” in the dictionary, she airily dismissed the insult to her tribe with her now famous retort, “The person that, obviously, done the dictionary, is he from Essex, or is he from wherever?” Just as some people are lucky enough to be born with a gift for music, or science, or athletics, God blessed Amy with the talent that Britain expects — nay, demands — from its young reality stars: an effortless knack for Olympic-level ditziness.

Nor is Amy’s casual relationship with the English language any impediment to her extra-TV careers. In “TOWIE” we saw her working as a beautician and glamour model, and her new show is following the realization of a lifelong dream: her own beauty salon, where as well as the usual spray-tanning, waxing and facials, she’ll be offering the treatment which, thanks to her, is le dernier cri in Essex: vajazzling. She’s also the face (breasts?) of a lingerie line, and sells Amy Childs-branded clothes, tanning products and a “fantastically diverse” — the mind boggles — range of false eyelashes. Her fitness DVD, as it completely goes without saying, is coming soon. The combined profit of all this entrepreneurial zeal will exceed £10 million, reckons a coyly anonymous “showbiz insider” quoted by that august journal of fiscal forecasting and boobies, the Sun.

One quick glance at Amy is all it takes to understand that in the role of beauty salon proprietress, she has found her divine calling. Always resplendent with mahogany tan, acres of shiny hair extensions, false lashes so thick and sweeping she seems to have trouble keeping her eyes fully open, and enough make-up to fuel a small non-hybrid vehicle, she’s a walking, breathing advertisement for her business, even if she appears to some people — those who don’t obviously know nuffing about being proper glamorous — to be getting way too high on her own supply. She does, however, take an admirably restrained view of plastic surgery, notwithstanding her own generous breast enhancement. “You can get addicted to surgery,” she sensibly averred, before adding, entirely without irony, “but I prefer the more natural look.”

Amy’s thoroughly wholesome look is much appreciated by her discerning male fans, for whom 2012 heralded welcome news: no longer must they gloomily struggle along without an Official Amy Childs Calendar featuring “a sexy and sunkissed Amy Childs in exotic locations such as Europe and the Far East.” Readers of a prudish disposition — and I know there are many of you — will be relieved to hear that in each month’s portrait, Amy’s modesty is fully maintained with bits of lace or fabric; as she often mentions, elegance and refinement are her bywords. “I didn’t do it because I wanted to get them out all the time,” she has said of her decision to acquire silicone implants, “I just thought it would be nice to show a little bit of cleavage…I love modeling underwear and bikinis but the classy side.” (Whether posing for a tabloid newspaper with nothing but crystals between oneself and a chilly draft quite qualifies as classy is a gray area into which your columnist demurs to wade, especially since the malevolent octogenarian Countesses who ran her Swiss finishing school neglected to cover The Etiquette of Vajazzle Display.)

Despite the wealth of romantic possibilities conferred by her newfound sex bomb status, Amy is currently single and still lives with her doting parents. Commendably, the media is taking very seriously its responsibility to document her every brush with the opposite sex, so we know she’s been flirting on Twitter with rapper Professor Green, is maybe linked again to “TOWIE” castmate and former fling Kirk, spent New Year in Dubai with a group including her management stablemate (and Jordan’s ex-husband) Peter Andre, and is contemplating getting back together with her ex-boyfriend, a banker named Joe who, with a mystifying lack of ambition, declined to take part in “TOWIE.” (Although he did find time to pose with Amy for a tasteful photoshoot reprising the iconic Calvin Klein ads featuring Kate Moss draped over Marky Mark.) But all this conjecture, albeit scintillating, is basically moot, because Amy has consented to star in the new British iteration of “The Bachelorette,” where she’ll get to choose from twenty-five hopeful suitors, only a handful of whom will be transparently gay if the US version is anything to go by.

Still, if Amy’s got any sense (bear with me, it’s just a turn of phrase) she won’t stay with the lucky recipient of her final rose a second longer than is contractually mandated, because bigger and better opportunities are bound to arrive. She recently returned from a trip to Los Angeles, where her busy schedule included a meeting at A-list talent agency CAA. Were she to sign with them, the likely first order of business would be setting her up with another client for a mutually beneficial and exhaustively photographed courtship. With nothing but dear Amy’s happiness in mind, this column hereby proposes “Gossip Girl” dreamboat Chace Crawford for the job. The poor love will be needing a British palate cleanser after his onscreen kisses with Liz Hurley (which, according to showbiz lore, curse an actor to seven years of roles Josh Lucas passed on unless an antidote is swiftly administered) while Amy would achieve instant stateside coverage as Chace’s latest borderline-convincing gal pal. No need to thank me, Hollywood Directorate of Fauxmances, we’ll just call it my good deed for the decade.

Previously: Jordan and Boris Johnson.

Emma Garman no longer lives in her native UK, but she still watches lots of its TV. She’s also on Twitter.

The best present I got this Christmas was The Bear: History of a Fallen King, by Michel Pastoureau, a French cultural historian previously unknown to me. I’m about halfway through, and while it can get a bit academic at times, I have found it wildly fascinating. It is less about bears as bears than it is about the way the Church, as part of its campaign to eradicate pagan ritual, deposed the animal as king of the beasts. (You’ll find a much more informative review here.) Anyway, if bears and Christianity and cultural histories translated from French are your thing, consider this a recommendation.

Is this the world’s smallest egg? Sure, why the hell not.