Speaking of the South...

On the weekend, I also finished watching Tiger King, including the "after show" interviews with some of the key figures.

Probably hard to add anything new to what people have already said about it, but there is this - it was hard to tell whether Joe's flamboyant style of gayness ever hurt his business in a conservative state.  Was it a a case of American conservatives making toleration exceptions for showbiz gay - like Liberace, or Siegfreid and Roy, perhaps?  I thought it a bit funny that the young-ish campaign manager guy (who says in the after show that he also is gay) blamed Oklahoman hatred of gays for Joe's poor electoral performance in the governor race - seemingly discounting the "nutjob" factor a bit too much, I reckon.   (The campaign manager seems to be still mentally scarred by the experience - but he had extremely questionable judgement in getting involved in the first place.)

The after show was also good for seeing the "cleaned up" version of John Finlay - the heavily tattooed husband who appeared shirtless and meth-mouthed in every interview.   Oddly, he seemed to claim he had no problem with appearing shirtless - I would have guessed it was the documentary directors trying to make him look as bad as possible.   I also thought the story the (rather odd) producer guy told in the after show was very telling - about how Joe took in a woman's old horse and promised to give it a good remaining life, only to immediately go and shoot it and feed it to the tigers when she left.

I hope the success of the show does not lead to documentary makers seeking out ever greater collections of bizarre characters to follow, though.