Hollywood is dead. Long live Hollywood!

IT ALL SEEMS to be falling apart, doesn't it? Hollywood, the monolith that used to be known as the Dream Factory, is getting shook up harder than Jason Bourne on a motorbike. At press time there was no end in sight to the writers strike. And as suits and scribes battle over how to divvy up the profits on new media, the audience is already filing out of the theater. The young are hanging out on Facebook; the old are struggling with Blu-ray.

We're not really entertained anymore by one story told in one medium. We've seen them all. We want to information-surf, gather bits of what we find, shake them up, and make them ours. We don't just watch: We cherry-pick, judge, discard, and pass along, with a double shot of irony. To paraphrase the pillow talk of Greys Anatomy's lovers Meredith and McDreamy, on one of those episodes back when the show still had writers, We're into S&M--sex and mockery.

Which brings us to our cover girl, Kathy Griffin--the gay sweetheart of the entertainment apocalypse. Picking over celebrity scandals like so many bonbons, Kathy treats "her gays" to a steady diet of delicious morsels. Like her equally gay-friendly comedy forebear, Joan Rivers (who's getting back to her roots with a new stage show), Griffin tells truths nobody else would dare to utter. But, in a measure of how times have changed, Kathy puts her bond with us front and center. We're not behind the scenes, intercepting double entendres. We get the joke first; everybody else gets to catch up.

Advocate arts and entertainment editor Corey Scholibo sits down with Griffin to explore how Kathy and her gays are helping to scuttle the old Hollywood and create the new one.

That new gay Hollywood is well under way, as the rest of our Hollywood 2008 package shows. We skewer gay political correctness courtesy of Rosie O'Donnell's Big Gay Sketch Show on Logo. We shine light on the very tough streets of Baltimore with Felicia "Snoop" Pearson, a young lesbian costar of HBO's superb drama The Wire. And in San Francisco we talk to out director Gus Van Sant and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, who are now, finally, filming the story of the great gay truth-teller Harvey Milk.

Elsewhere in the issue, don't miss our chilling story on antigay hate speech on the Web. And welcome the return of k.d. lang, who's coming out with her first new album of original solo material in seven years. Hollywood may ebb and flow, but a voice like k.d.'s is forever.

ANNE STOCKWELL

EDITOR IN CHIEF