Lindsay Lohan as a gay icon

I think all the negative reviews about Lindsay Lohan’s performance in Liz & Dick are unwarranted. She’s a great actress! She was raw and fully alive in her performance. The film’s clichéd writing was what made Lifetime’s bio-pic about Hollywood star-crossed lovers Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor a mediocre portrayal of one of the most iconic love stories of the 20th century.

I don’t think people are able to separate Lindsay’s personal life from her acting. She’s being unfairly picked apart because critics aren’t looking at her work objectively. I found her entertaining and emotional. I thought Lindsay was believable as Elizabeth, and her version of the screen legend was worth the hour and a half of my day. There isn’t a boring frame in the film filled with old Hollywood allurement. Liz & Dick did feel like a guilty pleasure and is worth the indulgence.

Lindsay’s fame is from an entirely different world than Elizabeth’s, but like her predecessor, she knows how to get people talking. She was a trending topic on Twitter last night, and three and a half million people tuned in to see her perform on Lifetime. She not only possesses Elizabeth’s liquid eyes, but the power they held, making it unable to look away. And if while looking all you saw is a trainwreck, I think you missed the beauty of the ride.

If Elizabeth were a child star coming into adulthood in a century fuelled by instant celebrity, social media and the intrusiveness of modern fame, her life would resemble that of Lindsay Lohan, who, like Elizabeth before her, is a product of her time.

They’re both gay icons. While Elizabeth won gay hearts with her AIDS activism and larger-than-life glamour, I can’t keep track of all the gays in their 20s who grew up watching Lindsay’s movies (I think I lost my virginity to Mean Girls) and still worship her. She secured the respect of her admirers for not only dating a woman, Samantha Ronson, but for being defiant about it. In a recent interview about their toxic relationship, Lindsay revealed that she was “bold enough to say, ‘Yeah, I like a girl. And?’”

Through the years, Elizabeth’s fans remained loyal because they liked to live vicariously through her. Lindsay’s fans are the same. Vodka, Dexedrine and diamonds (stolen or otherwise) included.