When he left his gig at Gucci in 2004, Tom Ford declared that he wanted to go into the movie business. Most people just laughed and the dream seemed to die when Ford opened his eponymous design house.

Ford again fueled rumors last November, when he announced that he'd bought the rights to novelist Christopher Isherwood's 1964 novel, A Single Man, about a middle-aged gay professor.

Still, most people simply shrugged at the news, but now Ford seems closer to ever to achieving his big screen dreams, complete with A-list actors, says Marc Malkin:

Sources reveal exclusively to me that it looks like Colin Firth will star as a gay college professor who deals with the sudden death of his lover. The character is helped in his efforts by a lifelong female friend and one of his students.

Firth's rep tells me "he's in discussions" but it's not a done deal.

Julianne Moore will play the friend while Jamie Bell has signed for the student role, my sources say. The story takes place in 1962 in Los Angeles.

The movie, which has yet to find a studio, will begin shooting in November.

• You really do learn something new everyday. Crime novelist Patricia Cornwell, whose work we've never read, apparently likes ladies. She liked a woman so much, in fact, she married one! Cornwell opens up to UK's Telegraph about her wife, Dr. Staci Gruber:

I finally feel rooted somewhere. I feel a sense of responsibility and stability that I didn't have before.
…
I've never been a soapbox person for gay rights, but now I'm in a same-sex marriage I tend to be more open, because I am outraged that it should be illegal in other states.

Looking at this picture really puts things in perspective.

• Refinery 29 gets behind our imaginary main squeeze, Thom Browne.

• Barack, Babs, Oprah and Hillary get into a campaign menage-a-quatre.

• Legendary lobbyist Aubrey Sarvis goes after Don't Ask, Don't Tell.

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Launching "The New Issue" with an old publishing great probably strikes some of you as a bit, well, you know - queer - but that's our style. Faithful readers know we like to turn things bottoms up. Remember our very first issue, "The Narcissist Issue," in which we took a new, more positive look at that tired old concept, narcissism?

We're inaugurating this, "The New Issue," with a fresh look at legendary Condé Nast editor Leo Lerman for a number of reasons. First and foremost, Knopf recently published over 600-pages of Lerman's insightful, touching and celebrity filled journals, letters and general scrawlings. Reading through The Grand Surprise, it struck us how much we - yourselves included - can all learn from a man like Lerman.

From modest beginnings, gay, Jewish and "no beauty," as Lerman's former assistant Stephen Pascal described his late boss' looks, Lerman rose to the highest echelons of New York society. He wined, dined, danced and - most importantly - laughed with the likes of Marlene Dietrich, Truman Capote, Andy Warhol, a few Rockefellers and some Kennedys. The index to The Grand Surprise reads like the best invite list in the world. In history, perhaps. No surprise Lerman loved to party. He could turn what appeared to be nothing into the most spectacular something. Sure, Leo was special, but his pages reveal the "grand surprise:" we're all capable of something great. We just have to find out what that "something" could be.

As part of our mission to learn more about Lerman, we sent our editor, Andrew Belonsky uptown to sit down with a few of the editor's old chums: Joel Kaye, Jonathan Marder, the aforesaid Pascal and, of course, Lerman's long-time lover, Gray Foy. Read the results, some excerpts and find a few surprises, after the jump…

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