When it comes to his favorite roles, does Gale Harold prefer Liberty Avenue or Wisteria Lane? Neither, he told AfterElton.com. It turns out he's more of a Christmas Town kind of guy.

We talked to Gale after he joined the cast of Desperate Housewives earlier this year. But when a serious motorcycle accident put him in the hospital with a brain injury and fractured shoulder in October, we put the piece on hold until we knew if he'd be all right, and whether or not he'd be able to return to the series.

Because AfterElton.com editor Michael Jensen made the mistake of letting our readers know we'd done the interview, he started getting a steady stream of emails from Gale's fans wondering if and when it would see the light of day. We're still holding back on the Desperate Housewives parts – and some QAF comments, too – for a future article, but that's not all Gale talked about. And since a lot of what he did say was downright Christmas-y, we decided to take advantage of the holidays and share it with you.

Find out what role Gale would love to find in his stocking, after the jump!

I don't think Harvey would approve: the CEO of one of the film chains that will be showing Milk this fall was a major donor to the Yes on Prop 8 campaign.

Alan Stock, CEO of the Cinemark chain of theaters, donated $9,999 to strip California's lesbian and gay citizens of our right to marry. So it's a bit hard to swallow that Cinemark will also be showing Gus Van Sant's epic biography of Harvey Milk, due for release Thanksgiving weekend in some cities, and December 5 nationwide.

Cinemark owns the “Century”, “CinéArts”, and “Tinseltown” theaters nationwide. You can plug in your town and state on this website to find out which theaters near you are part of the chain, and make sure they don't get your gay pennies. And then go join the Facebook group for the organizers of the Cinemark boycott. 

More details on the boycott and other Prop 8 news, after the jump...

 
Gus Van Sant and the cast of Milk

In case you were wondering what San Francisco, and the struggle for gay rights, would have looked like if Harvey Milk had lived, you should have been on Castro Street Tuesday night for the premiere of Gus Van Sant's Milk.

Yes, it was glitzy and glamorous. Yes, the stars turned out in their fancy clothes, and the press was there in force. But the night belonged to the hundreds of chanting, sign-waving, fist-pumping demonstrators across the street, telling the world to vote "No on Prop 8!"

Sean Penn and Diego Luna at the Milk premiere

On the eve of Tuesday night's premiere of Milk, the long-awaited biopic of Harvey Milk, Mexico's Diego Luna (Y tu mama tambien, Havana Nights) sat down at a press roundtable to discuss his role as Milk's young lover, Jack Lira. AfterElton.com was there to hear what he had to say.

Luna was soft-spoken but intense, sometimes pausing to find the English word for what he wanted to say. He said seeing the documentary The Times of Harvey Milk, which won an Academy Award for its director Rob Epstein in 1984, convinced him that a larger audience, including young people who might not even have heard of Harvey Milk, needed to know his story.

"I believe the story of Harvey Milk is a story that needs to be told," he said. "My generation and the generation that is behind me need to know that there was someone like him. Harvey was very important, and we should remind people that there are a few stories like Harvey's," he said.

"We cannot forget."

Earlier this year, when AfterElton.com editor Michael Jensen and I asked an assortment of pundits and political analysts to gaze into their crystal balls and predict how this issue would play out for our "Gay-Baiting '08" article, most of them believed it would be a non-issue nationally, but potentially useful for the right in local races and in the battle over marriage equality in California. And they pretty much got it right.

Carpetbaggers including the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in Utah, Colorado's Focus on the Family, and the Traditional Values Coalition in Arizona are flooding California with millions of dollars to produce and air blisteringly deceitful anti-gay ads concerning Proposition 8, the amendment to our state constitution to take away our right to marry legally — a right we have today. This would be the first time the state constitution has ever been amended to strip people of rights they already have.

Just how good is HGTV's David Bromstad (Color Splash)? We'll find out Sunday night, when he takes on rival color diva Constance Ramos (Color Correction) in a mega-gay episode of Summer Showdown. It's kind of like reality competition television but featuring the network's hosts and stars instead of desperate understudies clawing their way up the ladder hoping in search of their fifteen minutes in the spotlight.

David will be joining forces with carpenter Jared Walker Dostie (from Rate My Space, pictured at left), who, like so many in the building trades, is a former actor and model.

David and Jared are going to do a makeover on the tragic bedroom of a young woman who went a little crazy with the maroon paint and lace accents. Will she like David's design best, or Constance's? David told me she liked them both, even though they were worlds apart in design vision.

"Both designs were great, but very different, even though they had similar color stories," he said. "It's amazing what we did with similar color palettes, and how completely different the two designs looked. It was night and day -- which makes for really good TV."

David's not responsible for Summer Showdown's entire gayness factor, though. Not only was Josh "Sparkle" Johnson a judge on the series' first episode, but out gay design team Mitchell Gold and Bob Williams are judging for the rest of the season's challenges. It's like Project Runway, yo, but with furniture and paint.

David thrives on competition, so he didn't mind the tight timeline and other constraints inherent in these types of challenges. "I was scared, I was going into it like I was going to throw up, like it was Design Star all over again," he told me. "But it was just fun. I had a great time doing it. I love competition. I love things on a time limit. I love the Olympics! I love anything that has to do with competing."

He also didn't mind working with Jared. "He's adorable. He's a hottie. I called us 'Team Hot,'" David told me. I'm sure our readers will agree.

Team Hot

David's fans will be seeing a lot more of him soon, too. Not only has HGTV renewed Color Splash for a fifth season, but he just got signed as a spokesperson for Mythic Paint, a line of house paint aimed at those of us who want our walls pretty but without all the volatile organic compounds and various toxins and annoying oderiferous things that make painting so unpleasant.

Unless we can somehow get David to come over and paint the place. Which given that I live in San Francisco, where Color Splash is filmed, I'm working on. 

Design Star's Matte Locke and Michael "Mikey V" Verdugo

In the meantime, be sure to check out my new, revealing interview with Design Star's Mikey V, who discusses why he wasn't introduced to the press as gay when the season started.

Summer Showdown airs Sunday, August 17, at 9 PM Eastern/Pacific on HGTV.

It's true. Team Gay bit the dust last night, after the wildly talented and popular Matt Locke made it to the final two in Design Star's third season. The winner was bubbly blonde Jennifer Bertrand, whose artistic way with a paintbrush triumphed over Matt's minimalist design style.

Before I go on — and oh yes, I will be going on — a few words about words.

I believe not just that the world would be a betterplace had Al Gore won the 2000 presidential election, but that in fact, he should have won it. The distinction being that I think his loss was not just unfortunate but the result of an injustice that resulted in the unspeakable hideousness of the last eight years. Are you with me?

So when I say that I was rooting for Matt to become the new Design Star last night, all I'm saying is that I wish he had won, not that I in any way, shape or form think Jenn is the George W. Bush of reality television. As much as I love Matt, I think (and frequently wrote) that Jenn has an amazing on-screen personality. I think she's incredibly cute, too, even though I liked her more with her headbands than the post-makeover Jenn we saw in the finale.

The two faces hairdos of Jenn

No, I like Jenn, and I think she may well have won no matter who was with her in the final two. I'll watch her show. But here's the thing: the winner was chosen not by its panel of judges but a vote by viewers. And I admit to a little worry that some of the vitriolic anti-gay crap that got spewed — and immediately removed, bless HGTV's heart — from theDesign Star message boards might indicate that the pool of voters was not entirely unaffected by the fact that Matt is gay.

I'm going to be speaking with Matt later today — we'll see what he thinks.

When we finally have full equality under the law, I promise to be the best post-gay dyke ever to recap a reality competition television show. Until then, I'm all about the gay. Which is my way of encouraging you to do your civic duty and get out the vote for Matt Locke, the out gay designer who is one of two finalists in the third season of HGTV's Design Star.

Matt and Jenn

Fortunately, Matt is both talented and charismatic, so you won't have to sacrifice one principle in favor of another to vote for him. Which hasn't stopped a few of the Neanderthals on the Design Star message boards over at HGTV from mumbling that, since Season One was won by a gay man, David Bromstad (Color Splash), there have already been too many "Cinderfellas" on the network and we don't need another. By which logic -- well, I guess that's not logic -- we've used up our entire allottment with that one show. Which seems fair, and certainly reflects the number of gay men in the design field.

Season One Design Star David Bromstad: Nice guy, nice arms

Matt shares something else with David Bromstad, and with last season's winner, Kim Myles (Myles of Style), too: he's really nice. Being nice is apparently a pre-requisite for winning this show, perhaps because it's the viewers, not the judges, who select the ultimate winner.

Of course, Jennifer Bertrand, who is competing with Matt for the win this season, is also very nice. And so was the final challenge: to give a makeover to two families whose homes were destroyed in Hurricane Katrina. Joining Matt and Jenn in the final challenge were earlier contestants Trish Beaudet and Mike Verdugo, our own sort-of-out-although-he-won't-talk-about-it Mikey V.

Trish and Mikey V come home

The challenge was daunting: a living room, dining room, and kitchen makeover. They had 36 hours, twenty grand plus appliances and flooring, and a team of carpenters to give them a hand. Which is good, because a few things went wrong.

I'll violate the first rule of journalism and give you the ending right at the beginning: Team Gay is goin' to the Design Star finals, kids.

I'm telling you this because without that little tidbit of information, you might not all tune in next week and vote, and that's what it will take to get Matt Locke his own show. Because the judges are done, and now it's up to us.

But first, back to the beginning.

The final three (Trish, Jennifer, and Matt) brought it home this week, literally. They were put on airplanes and flown to their hometowns to do makeovers on their families' houses. Trish made over her parents' living room, Jennifer made over her sister's living room/dining room, and Matt? Well, Matt flew to Colorado Springs, CO, to redesign his mother's craft room.

In my pre-season interview with Matt, he told me his relationship with his mother suffered a serious blow when she found out he was gay, and that HGTV was one of the things that helped bring them together again. There certainly didn't seem to be any lack of affection between them inthis episode, although the craft room was certainly more of a challengethan a more conventional room might have been.

Welcome home, son

Still, as ten seconds on Matt's website would tell you, designing innovative solutions for odd spaces and uses is exactly what he's best at, so I had high hopes for this makever. Hopes that didn't really get anywhere, sadly, since the time constraints on this challenge were so severe it didn't give him an opportunity to design, say, a brilliant wall unit or radical lighting system, which is what this particular room needed.

Matt's mom's craft room, before

One challenge he met with complete success was trying to incorporate his mom's kiln (which looked like a giant metal crockpot) into the room. He built a movable wall that wrapped around it, and used it to mount the ubitquitous plasma TV. Very Matt-esque, and it got lots of praise from the judges. Unlike the big black leather chairs, which were probably both comfortable and practical for the space, but didn't do anything for it visually.

Matt's redesigned craft room for his mom

Jennifer did her usual clever job for her family, turning a badly-laid-out living room/dining room combo into something from, well, an HGTV design show.

Jenn's dazzling after

Trish, who as of last week was the one to beat due to her extraordinarily relaxed and gracious hosting persona, had the tough task of turning her parents' outdated and extremely conventional (the judges said traditional, but they were being kind) living room into something that was, in her words, "Pleasing to my parents, pleasing to the judges, and somewhere finding me in all that."

She completely aced the first, but the second, sadly, not so much. They found her design boring, saying it looked like a furniture showroom.

Find out if Matt made the cut after the break!

No sooner do we lose half of Team Gay than we get a new, secret member in the person of cop-by-day, designer-by-night Mikey V. So Team Gay is back up to full force for the scariest challenge of them all, the 24-hour kitchen makeover.

Last season Team Gay member Sparkle Josh, facing the dreaded kitchen challenge

Keep in mind that no previous Design Star team has ever finished its kitchen challenge. However, no Design Star team has ever attempted its kitchen challenge with two Team Gay members, either. Did it make the difference?

Yes, if you mean, "Did they finish?" As to the rest, therein lies the story.

We began with this, a basic 70s kitchen/dining area with dark paneling, outdated appliances, and tired surfaces.

The kitchen, before

Tragically, Tracee won the draw and was made team leader, to the clearly expressed dismay of, well, everyone else. I may possibly have screamed at the television. She made up a nicely graphed plan of action, negotiated a great deal on new countertops, and then went shopping for what turned out to be pretty much the entire 24-hour period they had for the makeover.

Sparkle remembering kitchen challenge hell; "I'd rather makeover an outhouse," he said.

As one of last season's members of Team Gay, Sparkle Josh, commented, shopping is a very important part of design, certainly his favorite part. I sympathize with this, truly I do, but seeing her trying to decide what color pot holders to buy while Mikey V was kicking the old counters out with his feet didn't exactly endear her to me.