NBC has cancelled The Playboy Club, the sexy melodrama–set in the mid-1960s Chicago and centering around the flagship key club–which was one of the most subversive series on network television. TalkAboutEquality explained why:

The two characters who they try to make us believe are a young attractive married couple happen to be gay. And not only that – they are running a meeting of the Chicago chapter of the Mattachine Society! …

The characters in the Playboy Club (a lesbian Playboy Bunny and a gay man) are in what was referred to as a “lavender marriage.” This was a common occurrence and still exists today when someone feels the need to hide their sexuality by marrying someone of the opposite gender.

Plus, openly gay Sean Maher plays the male half of the lavender marriage, while Amber Heard, who stars as the blond Bunny-in-training with a deadly secret, has been dating a woman for three years:

To say I came out implies that I was once in. Let me be straight about that—no pun intended—I never came out from anywhere. I’ve always lived my life the way I’ve wanted and have been honest with myself and everyone around me. It didn’t really affect anything in my career. I don’t think the producers and directors I’ve worked with care one way or another … I don’t want to be labeled as one thing or another. In the past I’ve had successful relationships with men, and now I’m in this successful relationship with a woman. When it comes to love I am totally open. And I don’t want to be put into a category, as in ‘I’m this’ or ‘I’m that.’ … [Gay marriage] is an important issue, and I’m fighting for the right to get married. For other people.

The Parents’ Television Council targeted advertisers, upset over what they perceived as a mainstreaming of pornography and the objectification of women; and Gloria Steinem, herself once a Playboy Bunny, both called for a boycott.

I watched the show and thought it was a fun morality play, complete with politics, America on the brink of change, murder, secrets, love, intrigue, and great costumes. Plus it showed the strides being made in civil rights for African Americans.

Regarding the Parents Television Council calling the whaambulance: seriously, it was on after 9pm, and as parents, it’s your responsibility to monitor what your kids watch. And you don’t like it, don’t watch it!

If  you ever needed evidence beyond the absurdist creations on Cupcake Wars–Cheeto topped cupcakes, anyone?—that the gourmet cupcake craze is over, rap group Odd Future have proven without a doubt that the frosted, twee fad food is absolutely dead.

Before Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All (OFWGKTA)–a foul-mouthed Los Angeles based rap group signed to Sony Records, fond of the usual conjugations and variants of that four-letter f-word; tired, overused, crude terms for women;  expressions of violence including kidnapping, rape, and murder; sexual epithets; as well as  expounding anti-gay sentiments–played Chicago’s Pitchfork Festival in what music critic Jim DeRogatis called

the most controversial booking in the seven-year history of the Pitchfork Music Festival

the band, accompanied by their publicist, passed out cupcakes to volunteers manning the festival’s outreach booths for LGBTQ awareness, domestic violence resources, and rape victim advocates– groups whose message was specifically geared

to counter what they [the organizations] saw as dangerous expressions of hate, violence and homophobia in Odd Future’s music.

DeRogatis called Odd Future an

unexceptional live hip-hop act, no better or worse than a hundred other mediocre ones you’ve seen before, albeit even more than usually foul-mouthed,

while Chicago Sun Times’ Thomas O’Connor recounted that

the 45-minute set was a very average hip-hop show…nothing radical.

In a break between songs (which O’Connor described as)

hate speech…more like listening to Oi! (a racist punk subgenre) without guitars

replete with plenty of

f–k you bitch…f–ckin ‘ho…smack you, bitch

ad nauseum, lead singer Tyler the Creator acknowledged the recipients of his cupcake diplomacy with

“A big shoutout to the domestic violence groups out here”

then launched into one of the group’s masterpieces “I Got a Gun (You Better Run).” I guess that passes as humor? Irony?

As Odd Future closed with “Pidgeons,” with its chorus of

Kill people, burn s—, f— school

Tyler the Creator dedicated

this beautiful song to everyone who don’t like me, every protester … everyone writing a faggot-ass review of this show.

And what did Tyler tweet to fans along a photo of himself holding a box of cupcakes out to a volunteer?

Went And Gave The People Who Don’t Like Us Some Cupcakes.

Yes, the cupcake is dead, its final death throes not cause by perky bakers with squeaky, childlike voices and frilly aprons squeezing swirls of rose-scented, pink sparkly butter cream onto variations of red velvet bombes; but by crass performers who shallowly grandstanded the treats as calculated sop for the ignorance they spew.

[HT: Pop N Stuff/WBRZ.org, Thomas O'Connor]

photo: screenshot from the Food Network show Cupcake Wars