It must be something in the Perrier

After two weeks in the biggest gay resort in Europe, it's tempting to believe that the whole world has added Dorothy on Facebook.

Thousands of underdressed homosexuals hanging off luridly coloured pride floats. Drag queens in every shape, size and colour - the good, the bad, and the 'hand me the Optrex'. Not one, but two Scott-Lee siblings on the main stage. Pick up a conch shell here, and rather than the sounds of the ocean you'll hear the Electrolightz remix of Telephone.

It's all too much for one small island to contain. And looking at some of the stories making the news this week, it seems as though the concentrated explosion of gay on Gran Canaria is taking to the air like volcanic ash.

Airspace over the blogosphere is heavy with innuendo and speculation as a series of high profile male celebrities find themselves in the pink spotlight. For instance, Daniel Craig set tongues (and other body parts) wagging when he put in an appearance at a Los Angeles gay bar called Roosterfish.

Although he was there to check out the 80s cover-band, eyewitnesses are inferring that he found more than a quantum of solace in the arms of his male friend. Spare a thought for poor stretchy-faced Rupert Everett, whose dreams of being the first gay James Bond look set to crash and burn like a henchman's helicopter.

James Franco has also been making himself comfortable in the company of men, taking to the stage at a Campari party to sing a duet about bad men with a sort-of drag performer called Kalup Linzy. Not too much a surprise, given that he's tackled more gay parts than Jeff Stryker, and made a student film at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts that "featured a boy dreaming in graphic detail about the jocks on the basketball court".

It's not so long ago that even a whiff of this kind of behaviour could kill an actor's career. Nowadays, it simply makes them a little more enigmatic. As long as people are guessing, it means they're still interested in you.

Speaking of which, Johnny Galecki and Chace Crawford have both been interrogated about gay rumours this week, and handled the enquiries with similar good taste. When asked by Whoopi Goldberg whether he was gay, Big Bang Theory star Galecki said "I've never really addressed those rumors because I always figured why defend yourself against something that's not offensive?"

Likewise, Chace was asked about the speculation around his relationship with Gossip Girl co-star Ed Westwick (the exact same question he'd been asked two years before) and commented "I just throw my head back and laugh. It’s not hard to deal with when there’s no truth to it. Just ignore it and it’ll go away." Although maybe it was the way he throws his head back that got those rumours started in the first place.

Even the animal kingdom is proudly hoisting a rainbow flag, with an article in today's Mail discovering with dismay that incidents of homosexuality have been documented in over 450 species.

Accompanied by a series of photos depicting spooning pandas, skipping penguins and a particularly mincing pair of giraffes, the feature makes the point that "Gay-rights campaigners have seized on evidence of animal homosexuality as proof that same-sex couples are a natural occurrence." There's even a book on the subject, amusingly titled 'Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality And Natural Diversity'.

After a fortnight of biological exuberance, I'm looking forward to getting back to normal. Whatever that is...

Is it art?

American daytime soap operas are a TV staple - impossibly beautiful people doing beautifully impossible things, with an arched eyebrow and tongue so firmly in-cheek it's sometimes hard for the actors to spit out their lines. Intellectually void and highly addictive, they're junk food for the eyes, gobbled up by people who can't follow the labyrinthine plots of Big Brother or Biggest Loser.

The world of soap opera acting is also similarly inexplicable, operating as it does like a self-contained ecosystem, with its own food chain and hierarchy. Occasionally, a Demi Moore or Eva Longoria Parker will manage to dig under the fence and break out into 'proper' acting, whilst the majority of them are stuck inside the compound for the rest of their career. But even more rare, are the established and successful actors who turn their back on Hollywood success in exchange for a role in a daytime soap.

So it was shocked faces all round (frozen in place while the end-credits rolled) when James Franco, star of Pineapple Express and the Spider-Man trilogy, announced that he was taking a role in General Hospital. After all, it's a little like a major movie star deciding to take a gig switching on Christmas lights. Stranger things have happened, I guess.

Meanwhile, back on General Hospital... The popular daytime soap is something of an institution, having been on the air since Joan Collins was sticking her hands down short trousers. And yet, despite its considerable track record, it's not exactly a logical career move for an actor like Franco.

It turns out that it's all part of a high-brow experiment in performance art, engineered by Franco who is currently enrolled in courses on filmmaking and fiction writing. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, in an article that feels more like a first-year thesis than a piece of journalism, James reveals his creative aspirations.

Having explained his passion for performance art, he continues: "I disrupted the audience's suspension of disbelief, because no matter how far I got into the character, I was going to be perceived as something that doesn't belong to the incredibly stylized world of soap operas. Everyone watching would see an actor they recognized, a real person in a made-up world. In performance art, the outcome is uncertain and this was no exception."

As much as he'd like to think that everyone knows who he is (call it the curse of celebrity), he spent most of the Spider-Man movies dressed like a Power Ranger. The rest of his career, whilst eclectic and interesting, has hardly been headline grabbing.

One outcome that is certain though, is the planned finale for Franco's time in America's best-loved fake hospital. "After all of the Franco episodes are aired, my character's storyline will be advanced in a special episode filmed in a "legitimate" New York gallery. One more layer will be added to this already layer-heavy experiment. If all goes according to plan, it will definitely be weird. But is it art?"

The problem is, he's prioritising his need to make a statement about art, over the audience's need for an enjoyable, compelling and consistent soap opera. And that's the reason why so many regular people turn their nose up at the pretentious artistic expression. It doesn't just exclude them, it actively critiques them. To use a much-loved soap cliche, maybe modern art is just popular culture's evil twin.