King of the Hill and Parks And Recreation actor Jonathan Joss killed in shooting aged 59
The actor Jonathan Joss, best known for voicing John Redcorn in King of the Hill, has died in a shooting.
San Antonio police in the
US
confirmed to Variety that the 59-year-old died on Saturday after an incident. Officers were reportedly dispatched while the shooting was in process and found him near the road. After an attempt to revive him, he was pronounced dead on the scene.
According to a police report, he died from 'injuries sustained after multiple gun shots'.
The shooter, 56-year-old Sigfredo Alvarez Ceja, has been detained and TMZ is reporting that it was the result of 'a heated argument' with a neighbour.
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In a statement posted on Facebook, Joss's husband Tristan Kern de Gonzales wrote that he was 'murdered by someone who could not stand the sight of two men loving each other'. He said: 'Jonathan is my husband. He gave me more love in our time together than most people ever get ... I was with him when he passed. I told him how much he was loved.'
In January, it had been reported that Joss had lost his home and his two dogs in a fire. He said that the house had been built by his father in the 1950s.
'We may have lost our home, but not our hope,' he wrote on Facebook earlier this year. 'We're moving forward with love, humour, and a little elbow grease ... and we're incredibly grateful for every ounce of support.'
Joss's early career included an appearance in Walker, Texas Ranger before he landed the role of John Redcorn in Mike Judge and Greg Daniels' hit animated comedy King of the Hill. He was one of the key voices until the show ended after 13 seasons. A reboot is also set to air this year.
Other television roles included ER, Charmed, Friday Night Lights, Ray Donovan and a five-episode stint on Parks and Recreation. On the big screen, he was also seen in True Grit, The Magnificent Seven and The Forever Purge.
He also known as a musician, performing as part of The Red Corn Band, a reference to his most-known character. Joss had recently posted on Facebook about a performance over the weekend. 'Last night's gig was amazing – huge thanks to everyone who came out and showed us love!' he wrote. 'We're feeling so grateful for the support and good vibes.' – Guardian
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Irish Times
an hour ago
- Irish Times
Writers remember Edmund White: The chronicler, artist and patron saint of queer literature
Edmund White, the American writer, playwright and essayist who attracted acclaim for his semi-autobiographical novels such as A Boy's Own Story – and literally wrote the book on gay sex, with the pioneering The Joy of Gay Sex – has died aged 85. Over his career, White wrote more than 30 books and was a major influence on modern gay literature. Here, Colm Tóibín, Alan Hollinghurst, Adam Mars-Jones and more recall the high style and libidinous freedom of a writer who 'was not a gateway to gay literature but a main destination'. 'He loved gossip and intrigue' – Colm Tóibín, novelist Edmund White wrote with style; he cared about style; he made it seem natural and effortless. He wrote and indeed spoke with a kind of delightful candour. He loved revelation and gossip and intrigue. The idea that everyone he knew had secrets fascinated him. He chuckled a lot. He read all the latest French novels. He saw no reason why he should keep things to himself and, because he was gay in a time when gay life had not appeared much in fiction, that became one of his great subjects. A Boy's Own Story, which came out in 1982, had enormous influence. It was an essential book for several generations of gay men. In The Beautiful Room Is Empty and The Farewell Symphony, White charted the changes and the tragedies of the gay life that had seemed so promising in A Boy's Own Story. READ MORE In writing about gay characters, White also became one of the chroniclers of city life, especially New York and Paris . (During a brief stay in Princeton, he suggested that the only relief from tedium was to howl nightly at the moon.) White was in full possession of a prose style that was deceptive in how it functioned. His writing could feel like conversation or someone thinking clearly and honestly or taking you slowly into his confidence. The cadences were close to the rhythms of speaking, but there was also a mannered tone buried in the phrasing, which moved the diction to a level above the casual and the conversational. The book of his that I love most is his 2000 novel The Married Man, which is a kind of retelling of Henry James's The Ambassadors. White dramatises with considerable subtlety the conflict between the idea that the personal is political ('which,' White wrote in 2002, 'may be America's most salient contribution to the armamentarium of progressive politics') and the legacy of Vichy France filled with secrecy and ambiguity and the ability to live several compartmentalised lives. In the recent years, White's apartment in Chelsea, shared with his husband, the writer Michael Carroll, was a centre of fun and laughter, a place where you got all the latest news. Books were piled up. They, too, were treated as kind of news. He worked every day, writing at the diningroom table. He made light of his illness. He was, in many essential ways, a lesson to us all. 'He showed me gay fiction could also be high art' – Alan Hollinghurst, novelist Edmund White in 1986. Photograph: Louis Monier/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images Edmund White's luminous career was in part a matter of often dark history: he lived through it all. He was a gay teenager in an age of repression, self-hatred and anxious longing for a 'cure'; he was a young man in the heyday of gay liberation, and the libidinous free-for-all of 1970s New York; he was a witness to the terrifying destruction of the gay world in the Aids epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s. All these things he wrote about, in a long-term commitment to autofiction – a narrative adventure he embarked on with no knowledge of where or when the story would end. He is often called a chronicler of these extraordinary epochs, but he was something much more than that, an artist with an utterly distinctive sensibility, humorous, elegant, avidly international. You read him not just for the unsparing account of sexual life but for the thrill of his richly cultured mind and his astonishingly observant eye. What amazed me about A Boy's Own Story, when it came out in 1982, was that a stark new candour about sexual experience should be conveyed with such gorgeous luxuriance of style, such richness of metaphor and allusion. This new genre, gay fiction, could also be high art, and almost at once a worldwide bestseller. It was an amazing moment, which would be liberating for generations of queer writers who followed. These younger writers Edmund himself followed and fostered with unusual generosity – I feel my whole career as a novelist has been sustained by his example and encouragement. In novels and peerless memoirs right up to the last year of his life he kept telling the truth about what he had done and thought and felt – he was a matchless explorer of the painful comedy of ageing and failing physically while the libido stayed insatiably strong. It's hard to take in that this magnificent experiment has now come to a close. 'He brought a lightness into my life' – Yiyun Li, author Edmund White in 1988. Photograph: Peter Kevin Solness/Fairfax Media via Getty Images About 10 days ago, when I left the east coast for a book launch in London, Edmund and I were in the middle of reading Elizabeth Bowen's first novel, The Hotel. 'Don't you worry, darling, we'll finish when you get back,' he said. Edmund and I were close friends for the past eight years. At the beginning of the pandemic, we met at 5pm on Skype, Monday through Friday, which became our two-person book club. This continued after the pandemic. The first book we read was The Complete Stories by Elizabeth Bowen. Between that collection and The Hotel, my estimation is that we read between 80 and 120 books. Sometimes we marvelled with fake shivering ( Muriel Spark's The Driver's Seat, for instance). Sometimes we compared our underlined parts in the books, and when we found we underlined the same adjective, the same phrase, or the same paragraph, we pretended, once again, to be surprised. When we read Henry Green's novels, Edmund would act the dialogues out in a British accent. There was a detail from a Yasunari Kawabata novel that we returned to often as a private joke: 'Are you low on B?' (As in Vitamin B.) 'Yes, I feel low on B.' This would be the closest that we would admit that we were feeling saddened by the losses in our lives. Edmund lost many beloveds to Aids; I lost two children to suicide. And yet there was never a heaviness in our conversations. I think Edmund brought a lightness and a cloudlessness into my life. We gossiped, we giggled, and sometimes I would stare at my little screen, dumbfounded, when Edmund enlightened me with a graphic reminisce of gay sex from 20 or 30 years ago, in a castle or back alley in Europe. Then we would stare at each other before bursting into laughter. When we first read Bowen together, sometimes Edmund or I would say, 'I wish I could write like this.' And the other person would repeat, 'I wish I could write like this.' In a few days, I shall return to the US where Edmund Valentine White III is no more, and I shall finish The Hotel by myself. Neither he nor I will make our friendship into fiction. I wish I knew a pair of characters like us in literature. 'I gave his novel a bad review – which positively inflamed his charm' Adam Mars-Jones, novelist Author Edmund White at his home in New York in 2019. Photograph: Mary Altaffer/AP I met Ed White in London in 1983, at the time of the UK publication of A Boy's Own Story. I had reviewed the novel for Gay News, and he knew that my verdict was unfavourable but not what my objection was (I described it as a cake that had been iced but not baked). This didn't deter him from making a conquest of some sort – a degree of resistance could positively inflame his charm. We took a stroll round Covent Garden. I bought him a punnet of whitecurrants, a fruit with which he was unfamiliar, though feigning ignorance to please me would have been perfectly in character. He must have registered my lack of carnal interest but went on sexualising our promenade, asking me if one bystander was my type, telling me that another had given me the eye. To have become his friend without even a moment of sexual closeness was, a least at that time in the New York gay world, an anomaly and perhaps even a distinction. I visited Ed several times in Paris, sleeping on the daybed in his enviable flat on the Île Saint-Louis. In the morning he would help his ex-lover John Purcell get ready for a day of graduate study, a routine – as he was well aware – with overtones of a mother packing her son off to school. We would have one more cup of coffee and listen to some chamber music, Poulenc a favourite. Then he would say, 'I must get back to the darling novel' (he was working on Caracole at the time), and lie on his bed to write in longhand. I loved those visits, and some of that was down to Paris, but most to his hospitality. For a night in he might buy rabbit loin in mustard sauce pre-prepared from a traîteur, unthinkable sophistication. It was from him I learned that 'cutting the nose off the brie' was not just bad mannersBrie I hadn't known, but a named crime. He was writing a monthly column for American Vogue, socialising was a job requirement as well as a pleasure. Even so, I was mildly scandalised that his French literary friends took it for granted that he would pick up the tab in restaurants. Priggishly I would treat him to a meal now and then, though I think he took more pleasure in largesse than in the presumption of equality. 'He expanded the bounds of what could be written about' – Olivia Laing, writer Edmund White in his New York home in 2016. Photograph: Ethan Hill/New York Times I saw Edmund White on the A train once, like glimpsing an emperor in the grocery shop. I must have been barely in my teens when I first read A Boy's Own Story, the Picador paperback with the brooding boy in a purple vest on the cover. I was seduced by everything: the lovely, supple, almost shimmering language, the explicit precision applied to sex and class. Cornholing, a word I'd never heard before. Above all, it held out an invitation. It was from White that I realised a writer takes the rough material life gives – unwanted, shabby, maybe repellent – and makes it their own by way of sensibility and style, that alchemical translation. Years later, I met him. He was at an adjoining table when my first American editor took me out for lunch. He was celebrating too, toasting the publication of Justin Spring's Secret Historian, a book about the unconventional sexual researcher Samuel Steward. It was pure White territory: sex explored exactly and without shame. His presence that day felt like a blessing. He interwove the elegant and the explicit, he expanded the bounds of what could be written about and also how a life could be lived. There is a generation of writers you write for without quite realising it. They set the bar, and then they go. That beautiful room is emptier now. 'His work was as fresh as gay bar gossip' – Mendez, novelist Edmund White was one of those writers whose work was as fresh and immediate as gay bar gossip, but from a place of deeper learning and knowledge. I met him once in 2019, over dinner with Alan Hollinghurst in New York, and he remained every bit as witty and sex-positive as I'd found him in his books. The incredible thing about him is that he was one of very few gay writers to remember the pre-Aids era and survive into old age. When I think of White I think of the bathhouses of 1970s New York City and his conspiratorial storytelling, though that's not to undersell him as a prose stylist. Such was his keenness to connect with a gay-literate rather than a mainstream, almost anthropologically minded audience, that The Joy of Gay Sex, which he co-wrote, retains a contraband feel to this day. 'He showed us what was really going on' – Tom Crewe, novelist Edmund White in New York City, 2000. Photograph: David Corio/MichaelEdmund White was not a gateway to gay literature, or to the gay experience, since that would imply that he was not in himself a main destination. However, he was very often the man who opened the door to the expectant reader, who took them by the elbow, led them inside and eagerly showed them everything that was going on – that was really going on. There are his novels and his memoirs, of course, with their brave, bracing, dirty and dignifying candour, and his biographies, of Genet, Proust, Rimbaud, not to mention The Joy of Gay Sex, co-authored with Charles Silverstein. But I am thinking especially of States of Desire: Travels in Gay America (1980), which records his visits to the diverse gay communities across the country, before they were united by the internet and representation in mainstream culture. It is of its time – often magnificently so, as in its description of the 'San Francisco look': A strongly marked mouth and swimming, soulful eyes (the effect of the moustache); a V-shaped torso by metonymy from the open V of the half-unbuttoned shirt above the sweaty chest; rounded buttocks squeezed in jeans, swelling out from the cinched-in waist, further emphasised by the charged erotic insignia of coloured handkerchiefs and keys; a crotch instantly accessible through the buttons (button one already undone) and enlarged by being pressed, along with the scrotum, to one side; legs moulded in perfect, powerful detail; the feet simplified, brutalised and magnified by the boots. For gay men there are three erotic zones – mouth, penis and anus – and all three are vividly dramatised by this costume. But it is also of its time in its repeated, inevitable attention to the brute facts of homophobia and how it crowds, limits and costs lives. The book, accidentally, became a vital record of gay life on the brink of Aids: the epidemic's outsize impact in the US (which White went on to describe and protest) was a direct consequence of this indulged prejudice. But States of Desire doesn't memorialise a lost Eden – 'Gay life,' White said, 'will never please an ideologue; it's too untidy, too linked to the unpredictable vagaries of anarchic desire.' At one point in his travels, in Portland, he discovered 'an unusual degree of integration with the straight community' worthy of remark: 'A gay single or couple must deal with the family next door and the widow across the street; the proximity promotes a mixed gay-straight social life – parties, dinners, bridge games, a shared cup of coffee.' It's a reminder of how amazingly far we've travelled. Edmund White was one of the people that brought us here – but he didn't think integration and toleration, the right to marriage and a family, was an end-pend pointwas just one sight on the tour, and White showed us, with a proper absence of shame or embarrassment, many others rather more thrilling. Gay life shouldn't ever mean one thing in particular; but what it can provide, as he wrote in States of Desire, 'is some give in the social machine'. 'His books were a fabulous reel of anecdote and savage humour' – Seán Hewitt, writer Edmund White was true giant of letters, the patron saint of queer literature. I can still remember, vividly, reading (in the wrong order), the books of the trilogy from A Boy's Own Story to The Farewell Symphony, completely absorbed in White's camp, biting humour, his name-dropping, his ability to capture self-delusion, fantasy, disappointment, anger, lust and romance in a heady, whirling voice. I remember saying to a friend, then, that I thought I could read him forever. White's books were a fabulous, unending reel of anecdote and savage humour, attuned to the erotic impulse of writing, full of mincing queens, effeminate boys and brutal men: a fully stocked world of idolatry and abnegation. What stays with me, years later, is not only the biting social observation, but also the religious tenor of his mind, the affinities of his characters with the world of the sacred, of mystics and martyrs, which processed shame with such exuberance of feeling. I felt, in the company of his voice, educated in a secret, glamorous world, which was operatic in its emotion and brilliantly arch in its range of reference. In his final book, The Loves of My Life, White proved himself an iconoclast to the end. Even the epigraph made me chuckle, because I could almost hear him chuckling to himself while setting it down: 'Mae West hearing a bad actress auditioning for West's hit comedy Sex: 'She's flushin' my play down the terlet!''. His honesty, even in his last years, was still enough to make you wince, still sharp enough to bring a shock of laughter, still melancholy and occasionally self-pitying enough to catch you off guard with all the many sadnesses of the world. I'm grateful that he left us so much work, and that the full, unadulterated sound of his voice is so potent, so convivial, so fresh and living on every page. – Guardian
Irish Times
an hour ago
- Irish Times
What is Trump's new travel ban, and which countries are affected?
Nearly five months into his second term, Donald Trump has announced a new sweeping travel ban that could reshape the US borders more dramatically than any policy in modern memory. The restrictions, revealed through a presidential proclamation on Wednesday, would target citizens from more than a dozen countries – creating a three-tiered system of escalating barriers to entry. The proclamation represents one of the most ambitious attempts to reshape the US's approach to global mobility in modern history and potentially affects millions of people coming to the United States for relocation, travel, work or school. What is a travel ban? A travel ban restricts or prohibits citizens of specific countries from entering the United States. These restrictions can range from complete visa suspensions to specific limitations on certain visa categories. READ MORE Trump's day one executive order required the state department to identify countries 'for which vetting and screening information is so deficient as to warrant a partial or full suspension on the admission of nationals from those countries'. His travel ban proclamation referenced the previous executive order, as well as the recent attack by an Egyptian national in Boulder, Colorado, upon a group of people demonstrating for the release of Israeli hostages in Gaza. [ Trump signs ban on citizens entering the US from 12 countries, including Iran, Haiti and Afghanistan Opens in new window ] What is a presidential proclamation? A presidential proclamation is a decree that is often ceremonial or can have legal implications when it comes to national emergencies. Unlike an executive order, which is a directive to heads of agencies in the administration, the proclamation primarily signals a broad change in policy. Which countries are listed in the travel ban? The following countries were identified for total bans of any nationals seeking to travel to the US for immigrant or non-immigrant reasons: Afghanistan Myanmar Chad Republic of the Congo Equatorial Guinea Eritrea Haiti Iran Libya Somalia Sudan Yemen He's also partially restricting the travel of people from Burundi Cuba Laos Sierra Leone Togo Turkmenistan Venezuela Why were these countries chosen? The proclamation broadly cites national security issues for including the countries, but specifies a few different issues that reach the level of concern for the travel ban. For some countries, such as Afghanistan, Eritrea, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, Libya and Venezuela, the proclamation claims that there is no reliable central authority for issuing passports or screening and vetting nationals travelling out of the country. For other countries, such as Myanmar, Chad, Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Burundi, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo and Turkmenistan, the proclamation cites a high rate of immigrants overstaying their visas in the US. Finally, there are several countries that are included because of terrorist activity or state- sponsored terrorism, including Iran, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia and Cuba. How does this travel ban differ from the one in 2017? The 2017 ban initially targeted seven predominantly Muslim countries before expanding to include North Korea and Venezuela. This new proclamation is broader and also makes the notable addition of Haiti. During his 2024 campaign for the presidency, Trump amplified false claims made by his running mate, JD Vance, that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were 'eating the pets of the people that live there'. The proclamation falsely claims that 'hundreds of thousands of illegal Haitian aliens flooded into the United States during the Biden administration' and this 'influx harms American communities'. In fact, about 200,000 Haitians were granted temporary protected status, which gives legal residency permits to foreign nationals who are unable to return home safely due to conditions in their home countries. Also notable are the restrictions on Afghans, given that many of the Afghans approved to live in the US as refugees were forced to flee their home country as a result of working to support US troops there, before the full withdrawal of US forces in 2021.0 The agreement with the Taliban to withdraw US troops was negotiated by Trump during his first term. Last month, homeland security secretary Kristi Noem announced 'the termination of temporary protected status for Afghanistan', effective May 20th. – Guardian
Irish Times
6 hours ago
- Irish Times
Your Monster: Audacious debut swerves from romcom to horror. Be prepared for it to cast a spell
Your Monster Director : Caroline Lindy Cert : None Genre : Horror-Comedy Starring : Melissa Barrera, Tommy Dewey, Edmund Donovan, Meghann Fahy, Kayla Foster Running Time : 1 hr 38 mins How is Caroline Lindy doing this? The American writer-director's auspicious debut sustains a tonal balancing act so audacious and death-defying that you'd normally expect a spectacular tumble. Broadway ingenue Laura (a never-better Melissa Barrera, keeping pace with Lindy's genre swerves) is diagnosed with cancer just as her rubbish boyfriend (Edmund Donovan) dumps her – mid-chemo, no less – to return to the musical that she helped him write and that she was supposed to star in. It's a moment that's both heartbreakingly raw and Reddit-problem-sub absurd, and Lindy leans into both extremes, as the game Barrera wrings humour, pathos and emotion from every post-break-up carb binge. So far so romcom. READ MORE Enter the Monster (Tommy Dewey), a shaggy, forgotten figure from Laura's childhood closet, who returns to terrorise – and assist – her through a snot-nosed emotional breakdown. Picture Ron Perlman's character in the 1980s TV series Beauty and the Beast reimagined as a sighing, sardonic millennial, all quips, claws and codependency. Dewey wants Laura out of the house, but the interspecies chemistry proves too strong. Much of Your Monster could be a snarky self-help title, as Laura finds her voice, sense of worth and rage with the help of her bestial companion. It's one way to get through bitter rehearsal-room sessions as Laura finds herself playing understudy while her toxic ex fawns over her replacement, the shiny Broadway babe Jackie (Meghann Fahy, from the second season of The White Lotus). [ The Encampments review: Taut, disciplined documentary about Palestine protests at Columbia University Opens in new window ] Just when we've settled into genre convention – the genre being riotous, wrenching monster comedy – Lindy throws a late curveball, steering the traumatised heroine into a full-blown horror climax, replete with an emotionally overwrought musical number. Songs from The Lazours and the veteran blockbuster composer Timothy Williams add Broadway sparkle to the break-up woe and creature-feature puppy love. An appropriately monstrous hit with audiences at London's Sundance and Dublin's Horrorthon festivals, this is not quite a fairy tale, but it comes close enough to cast a spell. Premieres on Sky Cinema on Monday, June 9th
