Maybe I can get away with just getting braces

Tired of being "the gay one"? Try an "in" illness (not AIDS, of course). Or become homeless!

Rocker Melissa Etheridge says breast cancer has helped her lots. "[I]t's like wow, man! NASCAR has asked me to go sing the national anthem at one of their events," Etheridge confides in The Advocate's Oct. 25 cover story. "It's like cancer knocked gay out. Now I'm no longer the gay one." [Laughs.]

The Advocate reporter asks: "You wrote in your book, 'Skin,' that for a while, gay trumped your music. So cancer has now trumped gay?"

Etheridge: "Yeah! People come up to me now.... It used to be just the sisters, and that was my core. And it still is -- what would I do without my gay audience? But when somebody told me that their 80-year-old grandmother has breast cancer and is gonna go through chemo, and they mentioned wigs, and the woman said, 'If Melissa Etheridge can go on the Grammies bald, I don't need a wig!'

"... You start realizing, whoo, it went that far, to Grandma World -- now they're gonna see past the gay stuff. It won't stop at gay anymore. And maybe that's my job, to have the world think that they know a gay person, you know? And that they're OK."

I wonder how Ryan Larkin fits into that. Chris Landreth's Oscar-winning short animated film "Ryan" shows the former National Film Board wunderkid as he is -- alcoholic, formerly drug addled, begging and living in shelters. The flick propelled Larkin back into the limelight. His work now adorns a poster for the anniversary celebrations of The Main in Montreal, and he was expected to take part in the quickie challenge of this month's Kino Kabaret, where you make a movie in 48 hours.

Left out of "Ryan" -- but mentioned in the making-of movie, "Alter Egos," which has a much smaller audience -- is the fact that Larkin is gay. Good thing he's got so much tragedy in his life.