Homosexuality and Hollywood have always had a tumultuous relationship, from '50s stars like Rock Hudson and Tab Hunter to Ellen's "Yep I'm Gay" Time magazine cover and the trend for certain websites to attempt to out celebrities. And as Salon's Heather Havrilesky notes, while there are more gay characters on TV these days, they are the Token Gays: "Just like straight people, only smarter and funnier and more interesting." Clichés abound. Yet despite hosting the Tonys, NPH manages to avoid most gay stereotypes.

When talking about his sexuality, NPH says that for years, "I wasn't thought of in a sexual way, which is easy when you have big ears and are called Doogie all the time." For a time, NPH was in the "glass closet": Friends and family knew he was gay; he had no fake girlfriends, and he answered a People magazine question about his "dream date" by leaving out the pronoun.

When he heard about the Harold &Kumar script — in which the character of "Neil Patrick Harris" snorts coke and talks about "fur burgers," he wasn't sure if they were mocking his gayness. Turns out the writers just didn't know he was gay.

Writes New York's Emily Nussbaum:

He also wasn't precisely out when he was cast as Barney Stinson on How I Met Your Mother in 2005, although he brought Burtka to the first cast barbecue. But as Harris's star rose, it became inevitable that his life-however open to those who knew him-might become a tabloid story. The blogger Perez Hilton was on the attack. And Harris and his team met to strategize, striving to make their statement succinct and positive. "No one was ever old-school Hollywood, with a cigar in their mouth, saying ‘You can't do this, see! It'll ruin your career, kid.' " With his mild New Age streak, Harris expresses faith that intentions are what matter: "So long as you're representing yourself well, you're making good choices for good reasons, all of the circumstantial things will vanish."

(By the by: NPH and his partner, David Burtka, would love to have a kid: "We'd make very good parents," NPH says. When they spend time with Burtka's twins — from a previous relationship, NPH says he gets to "be the fun guy who takes them to Disneyland.")

There's certainly no right or wrong way to be gay in Hollywood, but NPH seems to have a found a way that works for him. He's signed on to play a married father in a flick called The Best and the Brightest, which is a comedy about New York private school admissions. Will audiences buy him as a straight dad? Director Josh Shelov tells New York: "There was a four-second conversation about sexuality. But our team were big How I Met Your Mother fans. And we basically felt like the audience has spoken already, they've said they find him acceptable in a straight role. There's no stigma here, it's a pure talent issue at this point."

High-Wire Act [New York]
Fear Of A Gay Planet [Salon]

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For starters, it's pretty easy to put together a Stevie Nicks costume in five minutes at any Salvation Army. It's sort of like the adage about what you're supposed to wear for your wedding, except instead of "Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue," it's more like "Something old, something black, something fringey, and some kind of a shawl or cape or corset or top hat or sparkly beret." The theme of NOTS 18 was "Nightbirds," and in the song "Nightbirds" Stevie actually gives specific instructions for how to replicate her signature look:

"And then the summer became the fall/ I was not ready for the winter/it makes no difference at all/Cause I wear boots all summer long ... Eye makeup dark and it's careless ..."

Keeping this in mind, I applied Bennett's makeup very carelessly.

After a beer, we headed out to the Hammerstein Ballroom.

My costume was a little bit less dramatic than Bennett's, partly because I had decided to wear my real hair instead of a wig and partly because I was born female.

Once inside, we encountered a few setbacks. The entertainment was not, at first, as awesome as we had hoped. One too many drag queens had elected to lip synch "Stand Back," which has never been a favorite song of mine. (Note from Bennett: "I LOVE STAND BACK!!!") It's from Stevie's second, more disco-y solo album, and I'm more of a fan of her work with Fleetwood Mac and her first solo album, Bella Donna, which was made when she was dating that guy from the Eagles. The great thing about being a fan of Stevie Nicks, though, is that Stevieism is a big tent. Here is my theory about the demographics represented at NOTS:

1) Theater nerd girls who just enjoy wearing capes and corsets and crushed velvet. See also: Renaissance Faire Laydies. Their favorite song is Rhiannon, of course, because it's about a witch from Welsh mythology.

2)The male equivalent of these girls. These dudes would have grown up playing Dungeons and Dragons and reading Lord of the Rings if they were straight, but instead they had to like Stevie Nicks.

3)Gays who are into the coke-addled era of Stevie. Their favorite song is "Stand Back."

4) Heterosexual couples who are into the romance of Fleetwood Mac — the idea of being in a band with someone you're in love with, and then breaking up with them in a messy, druggy, cheating-related way, but always sort of carrying a torch — and singing about it! That is hot. We saw a lot of these couples, including a few who were dressed as Stevie and Lindsay Buckingham. If I ever find a guy who is willing to accompany me to this kind of event dressed as Lindsay Buckingham, or Mick Fleetwood, or even Don Henley, I will have found my soulmate, I think. Extra bonus points if he also wants to learn the harmony to "Leather and Lace."

This couple wasn't dressed up, but they were getting really amorous in a cute way.

Outside, we caught performance artist Julie Atlas-Muz and took a picture of her as though we were the paparazzi, and she gamely played along:

The second setback we encountered was that someone stole Bennett's wig! They just came up behind him and yanked it off his head and disappeared back into the crowd!
In a moment of true STEVIE REALNESS, Bennett chased after the thief, felled him with a fierce karate kick, and bit him in the face, leaving a puddle of blood and sparkles in the dance floor. Just kidding! Actually, a frightened and humiliated Bennett just made a pathetic face and turned his cape into a headdress, making him look more like Little Edie than Stevie, but whatever. Later someone complimented the headdress as being "very Timespace" and he was happy again.

Night Of A Thousand Stevies [Mother NYC]

• Is a bridal line in Kate Moss's future? Her boyfriend, supposedly sober Pete Doherty, says that if he can stay clean, he hopes to marry Moss this summer. We say there's as good a chance of that happening as there is our voting for Giuliani in 2008. [Yahoo News]
  
• New names being tossed around to replace Rosie O'Donnell. Yay, the gays! Sex and the City's Mario Cantone and Ross "The Intern" Mathews (of Tonight Show fame) are both being considered for the gig. [E!]
  
• Speaking of the gays, Jerusalem's Gay Pride Parade went off without a hitch this year. And by "without a hitch" we mean, aside from those 18 arrests of ultra-orthodox Jews during the parade, including one who attempted to bomb it. [BBC]
  
• And while we're still on the topic, maybe-homophobe Isaiah Washington continues his reign of victimhood, now saying that it is his Grey's Anatomy castmate T.R. Knight who should have been fired from the show, not him. Dude! Get over it! [People.com]
  
• Wes Craven is suing his neighbor Pauly Shore, claiming that water seeped from Shore's property onto his own and caused major damage. Wow: Pauly Shore and Wes Craven are neighbors? That's fucking hilarious. [USA Today]
  
• No porn or booze for Australian Aborigines. Glad to know that colonial paternalism is still alive and well! [CNN]
  
• First it was the whales, then the dolphins, and now all we can do is worry about the seals. Haven't marine mammals been through enough?! [Reuters]
  
• 9 U.S. casualties identified today. [DoD]