8:10 a.m. - 2007-01-30
I Want Woodwinds and a Young Antonio Banderas, Now!
I tried to write this entry last night, after I'd indulged in certain illicit substances. I will never try to write an entry in such a condition again.
I am always iffy, at best, about seeing gay movies. They have the potential to be traumatic, either because 1) they present a highly inaccurate image of queer life, or 2) they present a highly accurate image of queer life. This is one of those things that separates minorities of any stripe from middle-class white heterosexuals, not to mention ethnic or regional groups. When someone sees a romantic comedy with Jennifer Aniston or Owen Wilson, they don't really think to themselves, "But people don't really crash weddings THAT way" or "I mean, I really liked the fact that they understood the pain and loneliness of being an art gallery assistant, but I didn't need to be reminded of it, you know?" After all, you only have to wait a month or so to see if they don't have better luck with Ben Stiller and Sarah Jessica Parker, and if you want something edgy you can head over to the edgy cinema where they serve, like, coffee and beer and stuff and see if Michelle Williams in hooking up with Jake Gyllenhaal. Not so if you are a person of color, or queer, or from a socioeconomic class or even part of the country (the South rarely comes across well in films, even though there are just as many open-minded, tolerant, intelligent people in Atlanta, New Orleans, and--well, Austin, Austin counts, right?--as there are stupid, ignorant bigots in New York and LA) that is different from what the movies and television usually portray. If you go see a movie where people that you expect to be like you wind up looking and sounding totally different, the way that OTHER PEOPLE expect you to be, it can ruin your week, and the same goes for those movies that remind you just how much people like you kinda suck.
Let's all take a moment of silence on behalf of every American of Middle Eastern heritage, remembering, during the moment, that NOBODY but NOBODY has been getting a shittier deal in the past few decades . . . . . thank you. I've dealt with gay psychopaths and Latino drug dealers, but no one of my ethnic or sexual background has ever blown shit up in a movie, much less EVERY OTHER MOVIE EVER.
The reason for all this is that I saw The Celluloid Closet last night for my roommate's film history class. As if that weren't enough to indicate that her teacher is queer, he or she has assigned them Gregg Araki's The Living End, and there is no reason to watch Gregg Araki in a film history class unless you're queer or really love movies about people on drugs. I had seen the film many years ago, while I was still in high school, and I honestly can't remember whether I was out to myself and other people then or not. It may very well have been during that interstitial time right before coming out, when I was devouring up gay culture and yet had not admitted to myself that the fantasies I was having about other men meant that maybe, just maybe, I was gay, too. It was tremendously interesting to come back to it after all these years, particularly since I don't remember laughing as much then as I did last night. The film is a history of queer representation in cinema, beginning with an experimental film by Thomas Edison that featured two men dancing. It moves quickly into the 20s and 30s, when the major figure of gay men was the sissy, an effeminate man whose sexuality was never explicitly mentioned, albeit abundantly clear. They showed a few clips, and I laughed heartily at each one, particularly one who said, "If we got runs for the show like these girls get runs in their stockings, we'd be rich!" When a chorus girl told him to put her costume away and not wear it himself, he said, after she left, "Selfish!" I laughed yet again, and then an old Hollywood screenwriter came on to talk about how horrible the figure of the sissy was, how it was the gay equivalent of the black minstrel, and I have to say, I felt a bit awkward. Then Harvey Fierstein, a man perhaps most famous to mainstream audiences as Robin Williams's gay brother and makeup artist in Mrs. Doubtfire, but also the author of a series of touching plays called Torch Song Trilogy, came on, and he said, conveying the same embarrasment that I felt, "I loved the sissy." His explanation was that he believed in visibility at all costs, but he also said, "I loved the sissy because I was the sissy."
That's the strange tautology of stereotypes: I don't want to say they're based on Truth, capital T or otherwise, but there is, quite often, a sense of recognition and a desire to mirror that accompanies feelings of "that's what they think of me, and what I shouldn't be." I felt admiration and kinship when I saw the sissy, but I also wonder to what extent seeing sissies in the movies has shaped me. I was laughing at him, but also laughing at myself in him, and laughing at yourself is, in my mind, always a good move.
I think that the costumer-sissy in particular was one I appreciated, and not simply because I've been a costumer myself. I loved that he was clever, that he had the great line. He didn't have the greatest line in the film, though. That went to Antonio Fargas, perhaps most famous for his role as Huggy Bear, who began his career with a queer role in Car Wash. Car Wash was on the other day, and I watched the whole god-awful thing just so I could hear his line in its original context, the line I remembered from the first time I saw The Celluloid Closet. He's confronting a young man who has embraced the Nation of Islam and who is condemning his queer coworker, saying that his sexuality and gender expression are symptomatic of white society's emasculation of the black man. Fargas, making queer history, replies, "Honey, I'm more man than you'll ever be, and more woman than you'll ever get."
Suffice to say, LOVED that line when I heard it during The Celluloid Closet, loved it in Car Wash, and loved it again last night. I think there is something tremendously powerful in the object of the joke--the butt, appropriately enough--turning the joke back around. I think there is a wonderful power in inhabiting a stereotype and granting it both dimension and agency. In my first year of grad school, we were talking about this in the context of one of my favorite musicals, Flower Drum Song, which is much better now that an Asian-American has rewritten it to be less about assimilation and more about preserving an Asian identity as an American, a difficult task for any child of immigrants (the end of the new version, where the cast breaks the third wall and announces their birth places, both American and Asian and even Canadian, in the middle of "100 Million Miracles," is making me cry even now). A colleague of mine, who shall remain nameless, said that he was dubious about the argument offered by the article, that types could be used by minorities to navigate their identities, provided those types did not fossilize into stereotypes. He mentioned the offense he took over the song "Keep It Gay!" in Mel Brooks's The Producers. I saw The Producers only a few days ago, and although much of the movie sucks, "Keep It Gay" is one of my favorite parts, to the point where I timed where the number was in the movie so I could flip back to it when it repeated on the umpteen movie channels. The song, as much as being about gay stereotypes, is also about the fact that queers make Broadway happen, as performers, techies (my fave in the song is the dyke lighting designer, Shirley Markowitz), and audience. If you haven't seen the show (or the overall funnier original with Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder), two producers realize they can scam more money with a flop than with a hit, and decide to guarantee the flop with a Nazi musical entitled "Springtime for Hitler." Yet on opening night, at least in the current version, the gay director takes the leading role, making Hitler into "The German Ethel Merman, dontcha knooooow!" In other wrods, a gay sensibility reveals what is ridiculous, foolish, and yes, even a little gay about Nazism, in a musical written by a Jew. I would say that's about as homophobic as it is anti-semitic.
Suffice to say, the sissy is alive and well and living, up until last year, on Will and Grace, for better or worse, only now the sissy is acknowledged as a sexual and even a romantic being (the director in The Producers is very much in love with his "common law assistant," who manages to even steal scenes from Will Ferrell). The sissy is far from the only stereotype in the film, however, and it was interesting to watch the progression years after I'd taken a class on queer representation in college. There's decidedly a narrative of progress devised in the film that was echoed in the class. In the 40s and 50s, after The Code (of censorship) became dogma in Hollywood, queers were nearly invisible, available only as utter villains (like a lesbian vampire in Dracula's Daughter, or the monstrous Sebastian in Suddenly Last Summer, which I will return to shortly) or between the lines (I still haven't seen Rebel Without a Cause, but apparently there's a shitload of gay subtext in there). Then came the 60s, when we became visible only to kill ourselves or each other. The most famous of these films is probably The Children's Hour, where a rumored affair between Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine results in Shirley's character discovering that she is a lesbian and hanging herself. By the 70s, queers were allowed to survive, provided we were miserable, as in The Killing of Sister George or The Boys in the Band, which has some really sweet moments but which ends with a whole lot of self-loathing. It wasn't until the 80s that queer people could conceivably live and be happy on film, and now we arrive in the 21st Century, where a film about a pair of gay cowboys can almost win the academy award.
Except, you know, that one of them is killed by a homophobic mob and the other then lives alone with a shirt for the rest of his life. And, well, there was Philadelphia, where Tom Hanks is a heroic gay guy who, you know, dies. And Boys Don't Cry, the moving story of a transgender youth who, also, um, dies. Um. You can't stop progress!
Okay, so it's going to be a while before a gay couple can ride off into the sunset AND the Oscar, but progress has been made. I have to admit, though, that I find myself a bit of a curmudgeon when it comes to gay progress. I want to make a T-shirt that says "In my day, we had to walk ten miles, barefoot, in the snow, uphill, both ways to even THINK about fucking another man!" And as much as I love the one movie in a hundred that celebrates queer life and queer love in ways that I enjoy--movies like The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, All About My Mother, I Think I Do, Bedrooms and Hallways, and Beautiful Thing--I have to say that I think a documentary like The Celluloid Closet should be seen not simply as a litany of woe about how awful it was to have to see all these bigoted gay images, or a triumphalist narrative insisting that we've come a long way, baby, but as a celebration of all the ways in which queers have, over the years, found ways to express themselves even when hidden. I laughed and, I have to say, got a little turned on by Montgomery Clift and his buddy on the range comparing their guns, in such a way that would have been ruined if they'd actually taken their cocks out as well, or even kissed. Then there was the practical joke played on noted homophobe Charlton Heston in Ben Hur, where his costar was told that his character and Ben Hur had been lovers and Heston wasn't. I don't think that those moments should be lost, and we run the risk of it. The young woman I was watching this with didn't know, for example, that Rock Hudson was gay, and that in his films with Doris Day, he was often a gay man playing the role of a straight man pretending to be a gay man. Although I will always champion visibility, there is something erotic about the fantasies conjured by the closet. Not for nothing is it the setting of seven minutes in heaven.
Which brings me back to Suddenly Last Summer, which I did not see last night because I wasn't in the Bay Area, and therefore could not be at the Camp Movie Screening Party hosted by this extremely sexy guy named Joey. I'd been going to these screenings once a month for three months before I left, thanks to my colleague in grad school, Josh, who was a Berkeley undergrad and therefore knows tons of gay men in the area. The first night I went over there, we watched All About Eve, which I had never seen and which I loved. Then came Straight Jacket, and INSANE and TERRIBLE and AWESOME movie starring Joan Crawford, who embodies all those capitalized adjectives. The third month, the film chosen was my suggestion: Barbarella. I wrote a blurb about the movie that was quite well-received, and the day of the screening people emailed me and called me to make sure I would be there. When I arrived, everyone was happy to see me, and someone said that I was the one that everyone most wanted to see there that evening.
Now, a movie that I didn't talk about in this entry is The Broken Hearts Club, a movie I hate and that I have written about in a previous diary. I went and looked at that entry, and there is a line in the movie that I made a cornerstone of my entry: "All I'm good at is being gay." I included that line because I thought, at the time, that I totally sucked at being gay. I didn't look right, or dress right, and although I was defiant about it what I envied most about the characters in the movie--and those in the Boys in the Band, to a degree, and those in Priscilla, and in a lot of other movies--was gay friendship. I often feel shy and nervous around other gay men. There have been a lot of gay men who want nothing to do with me, for one reason or another, whether it's because I'm too femme-y or too fat or just because I don't fit in. I concluded, eventually, that I sucked at being gay, and there wasn't much I could do about it. I had my lesbian buddies, whom I loved, and that was about as much queer as I was gonna get.
Hanging out with those guys, though, watching old movies that had become part of gay culture whether they liked it or not, was loads of fun, and then, just as I was about to leave, I found myself with a group of gay guys who actually wanted me around. It is those guys, strangely enough, that I think of most when I think I want to return to the Bay Area. If I don't, I might start a movie night of my own. And I'll keep in touch. But when I saw the clip of Suddenly Last Summer, which was shown Sunday night and which I still haven't seen, I wanted to fly right back to California, at least once a month.
It occurs to me that I haven't explained the title of the entry. As the sublimation and violence of the 60s and 70s gave way to the possbilities of the 80s, queers started getting kisses on screen, even loving ones accompanied by swelling music. Tom Hanks and Antonio Banderas got to stare lovingly into one another's eyes, as did, eventually, Hilary Swank and Chloe Sevigny, and Heath and Jake. I admit to wanting, in addition to gay friends, to have the kind of kiss that started to emerge in the 80s, the kind that has woodwinds behind it. If worse comes to worse, I have an iPod, a speaker, and a remote control. The next guy I bring home might have a surprise waiting for him. I just hope he doesn't think I'm yet another gay axe murderer.
