A Native New Yorker

Time does fly!  I got busy with some offline things late last week, and then went out of town for the weekend.  Next thing I know it's Tuesday and I haven't written here in almost a week.

I just finished reading the first volume of Out Spoken: A Vito Russo Reader, published this year by White Crane Books.  I had no idea such a project was in the works when I found the book at one of our local independent bookstores, and I was delighted.  One of the editors, Jeffrey Schwarz, worked on the film version of The Celluloid Closet and made a new documentary about Russo, Vito.  The first volume alone is almost 300 pages of Russo's journalism on film and celebrities; I expect to buy the second volume, devoted to other areas of his activism, next week.

As I remember, I first heard of him in the 1970s, when he wrote an angry letter to the Village Voice complaining about their coverage of Pride Week; not only was it angry, it was funny, but without sacrificing its seriousness. The IU campus gay group brought him to Bloomington for a gay conference not too long afterwards, so I was able to praise that letter to him in person.  "A lot of people liked that letter," he said, bemused.  "I should write when I'm angry more often."  At that conference he gave the presentation on Hollywood and homosexuals he'd been working on for a couple of years at the time, which eventually became the book The Celluloid Closet (Harper, 1981; revised edition, 1987).  The presentation, which included slides and (I think) film clips, not only began my education about gays in film but about film itself.  The only thing I specifically remember Russo saying in the lecture was that he thought it possible that in time The Boys in the Band would be seen very differently than we saw it at the time: instead of a parade of negative stereotypes, it would be an interesting portrayal of some gay men's lives in a much harder time.  That pleased me because I'd never seen Boys as an unrelentingly negative play, even when I read it as a closeted teen. 

The Celluloid Closet is still a groundbreaking book, though it wasn't the first book to deal with its subject -- Parker Tyler's Screening the Sexes: Homosexuality in the Movies (Holt, 1972) appeared nine years earlier.  Russo was doing something different than Tyler, though: he aimed at a full survey of the movies' treatment of homosexuality, viewed from an avowedly gay liberationist perspective.  Even if you disagreed with his judgments, and I often did, Russo did the groundwork for later study and discussion of queer film.  It's out of print now, which is a shame.

So it's great to have this new collection of his journalism.  Russo wrote for several publications, and Out Spoken contains interviews, reviews, and opinion pieces.  Some of this material went into The Celluloid Closet, but much didn't.  I was surprised to find Lily Tomlin almost coming out in print in the 1980s: she was willing for Russo to refer to her partner, Jane Wagner, as her partner, though I don't think "partner" had yet become the standard term for same-sex couples that it is now.

As I said, I have my disagreements with Russo.  I was annoyed when he complained, in the revised edition of The Celluloid Closet, that Gillian Armstrong's My Brilliant Career didn't deal with the lesbianism of the author.  The character Sybylla wasn't Miles Franklin, and I didn't notice any homoeroticism in the novel when I reread it a couple of years ago. I concede that's a sticky question, because adaptations can legitimately make all kinds of changes in source material.  If Armstrong had chosen to make that change, and it had worked within the film, I wouldn't have objected; but she wasn't obliged to.  (A biopic of Franklin would be a different matter.)

Some of the issues Russo grappled with are still with us, of course, like that of straight actors playing gay characters and vice versa.  In one piece Russo wrote:

When Harry Hamlin hesitated to accept the role of a gay writer in Making Love, producer Dan Melnick asked him, “If I came to you with a really great script and asked you to play Hitler, would you consider it?” Hamlin, of course, replied that he would. “So,” said Melnick, “you’re willing to play a mass murderer but not a homosexual. Think about that.” To his credit, Hamlin did think about it and eventually played the role in Making Love [235-6].

But what if the script isn't "great"?  Making Love is one of the worst Hollywood movies I've ever seen.  Maybe the original script was better.  As with the later Philadelphia, nervous Hollywood executives evidently interfered with the wishes and intentions of the gay men involved in the production, but I'm not sure they can be blamed for all the many faults of this turgid flop.  For example, the opening sequence indicates that the male leads lived together, but as I remember the main story they were basically tricks.

One thing that struck me especially odd was the juxtaposition of Russo's attack on the Tom Cruise vehicle Cocktail, "a duplicitous film that spends two hours making promiscuous sex, drinking, smoking, fake values and macho sexism look attractive and then turns around in the last ten minutes to say that fidelity and loyalty are really where it’s at" (222), with a complaint that "In this new world, gay boys are designed to be cute and alluring and slightly 'toyish,' but they don’t fuck around" (229) and a eulogy for Fred "Halsted’s generation, a group of men who lived to push sex to its limit in a way that became an anachronism all too soon" (261). (Halsted was a filmmaker and prophet of leather / S&M. Substance abuse was one of the pillars of his creed.)   These pieces were written at the height of the AIDS crisis, which may have had something to do with Russo's inconsistency.  I'm not casting the first stone here, I've fallen into such contradictions myself; but they're interesting.

Overall, though, Out Spoken is a great, very readable insider's view of the gay movement from the 1970s onward, and well worth your time.  I'm looking forward to getting and reading the second volume.

The Real Tinsel Underneath

Earlier this week Band of Thebes quoted a piece from the Onion (which you all know is satirical, right?) on the depiction of gay people in Hollywood, or rather "mainstream" films.

Seeking to honor filmmakers for fair and inclusive portrayals of the LGBT community, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation announced Sunday the establishment of a prestigious new prize to be awarded to any mainstream motion picture that gets even one thing right about being gay. "We're not asking for a two-hour-long pitch-perfect exploration of the gay and lesbian experience—just a single accurate, believable detail that feels in any way telling or true-to-life," said GLADD spokesperson Cheryl Weingardt, who promised a major cash prize and high-profile award ceremony to any Hollywood director able to deliver a film—any film at all—that includes a brief on-screen moment in which a gay character seems even somewhat authentic. "It can be a line of convincing dialogue, an emotionally honest reaction shot. All we ask is that you have someone gay in the frame for a couple seconds without it being completely insulting to the audience's intelligence." Weingardt added that she hopes her grandchildren will one day see a popular movie in which a gay person's role isn't limited to being the main character's witticism-spewing confidante.

Who could argue with that, really? But even as I read it, I realized that it would be imposing a double standard to expect Hollywood to depict a gay character who "seems even somewhat authentic," because Hollywood doesn't depict authentic straight characters either.

But what would authentic gay characters look like? I don't believe most gay people want authenticity, they want idealized "positive" images -- fantasy figures, in other words. Which isn't a bad thing; it's only bad when people claim falsely that they want realism.

Not only we but other minorities have been squabbling for decades about what images are positive and which aren't. When William Friedkin filmed his notorious 1980 film Cruising, using the leather bars of New York City as a backdrop for the story of a serial killer, gay activists attacked it as a negative portrayal of gay male life. But I remember reading that the gay leathermen who appeared in Cruising as extras were proud that they were providing some positive images of gay men, as opposed to the sissies and drag queens who were the most visible stereotypes then (as now). It's a mistake to assume that the controversy was only a leather / non-leather conflict, since numerous gay activists were leathermen themselves. I've been reading some of the retrospectives on the film for its 2007 revival and consequent DVD release, and they tend to overcompensate by taking the leather scene's fantasy images for reality: because these guys imagined and presented themselves as tough, macho, brutal, threatening, dangerous, they therefore must have been. Probably it was possible in a large city for some men to immerse themselves totally in the scene 24/7, but most had day jobs. The first leatherman I ever met, in 1970s Bloomington, was working on his MBA; his lover, another graduate student, was an organist in the music school.

One famous Manhattan bar, The Mineshaft, had a strict dress code. This site recounts that

According to Jack Fritscher, Mick Jagger was turned away for showing up with a couple of women, who, like sneakers and business suits, were not on the list. Once in a while, some women disguised as men made it into the Mine Shaft.

Punk rock singer and poet, Camille O'Grady, was actually admitted to the Shaft one night when she showed up in full leather with a couple of very hot male slaves in tow.

On another occasion, the famous leather daddy and pornographer John Preston was refused entrance to a leather bar because he was wearing "loafers, [a] dress shirt, slacks." Sensibly, he didn't make a fuss, since he understood the mindset involved: indeed, he'd helped propagate it. (He was taken aback when he realized that many readers took his S&M classic Looking for Mr. Benson utterly seriously, not recognizing its humor -- Mr. Benson was partly a sendup of James Bond novels, transposed to the gay leather scene.)

Preston explained he'd stopped wearing "regimental leather" anyway. All the cool kids had stopped, because the losers ("sightseers" was his word) had started wearing it.

I want to "be real," all right, but not in terms of fitting in. It seems that at some point, many of the men who were really into sadomasochism dropped the costume and started to challenge the others in leather bars with their conscious lack of dress. If you really want rough sex, it's better to dress against the fashion. Many of the denizens have given up their leather and gone back underground to reclaim their place on the cutting edge.*

But I digress, though there are important points of contact here with the question of "authenticity" in GLBTQ film. (I should probably return to Preston's complaint some other time.)

Now I'm drawing a blank. What else can I say about this that I haven't said before? But maybe you haven't read those posts. Much of the discussion I see about gays in film or other arts assumes -- and sometimes says explicitly -- that people should (or can) only be interested in work that shows them people just like them, which would mean among other things that straight people don't have to watch gay films. A lot of it is simply dishonest. Let me quote again the incredibly stupid gay director Andrew Haigh, who told the New York Times:

A wide swath of so-called gay cinema “never represented how I felt about being gay, ever,” Mr. Haigh said. “I haven’t got muscles and I don’t live in West Hollywood.”

I pointed out before that very little of "so-called gay cinema" took place in West Hollywood, so someone must have cruelly prevented Haigh from seeing Querelle and Law of Desire, but on rereading that excerpt I noticed something else wrong with it. "A wide swath" doesn't even necessarily mean to a majority of so-called gay cinema. What about the other swaths? Does Haigh mean that nobody should make or release movies he doesn't like? But "a wide swath" is the interviewer's language, not Haigh's. What Haigh says is that something never represented how he felt about being gay; it sounds like he's complaining about all of so-called gay cinema. Not that it matters, he makes no sense at all.

Personally I'd be surprised if Hollywood ever made a GLBTQ film that really worked for me, but that's okay, because I don't expect authenticity or truth from Hollywood; and I don't expect authenticity or truth in art of any kind to consist of looking like me, or looking like I wish I looked. Hollywood's gay critics seem unable to make up their minds what they do want, though.

One other funny thing I noticed in those articles about Cruising, though: the gay men who said things like "If we knew that all our struggle would just lead to 'Will and Grace,' we wouldn't have bothered." What they wanted, apparently, was "edgy", dark, gritty, Crisco-smeared fuckfests (simulated) that showed what gay life really was like. Except that leather bars aren't what gay life is really like; they're part of it, of course, but they are no more its core or its essence than sweater bars or twink bars or the Metropolitan Community Church or the Log Cabin Republicans. (It should be remembered that the MCC and the Log Cabin Republicans are not incompatible with the leather scene, bathhouses, and other 'disreputable' aspects of gay male life. MCC Founder Troy Perry has been a bathhouse patron, and I remember reading somewhere that he was into leather. I'm very wary of people who indignantly denounce what they call negative images in gay art; too often such people are accurately depicted by those negative images. We've got our own wide-stance gay people, alas.)

It doesn't really matter what kind of gay people a film (or other work) depicts: there will be gay people who will object that they don't look like them. Which is true, because we are not all alike, so it's not even a valid objection. It's at best a truism. The gay films that I've liked have not been about gay people like me, but I could still see something of myself in their characters. I'm not an Anglo-Pakistani slacker or his punk boyfriend, but I liked My Beautiful Laundrette. I'm not a gravel-voiced professional female impersonator, but I liked Torch Song Trilogy. I'm not a Spanish avant-garde filmmaker who uses too much cocaine and has his pick of hot boys at screenings, but I liked Law of Desire. I'm not a Hong Kong expat in a crumbling relationship in Buenos Aires, but I loved Happy Together. In many respects I have more in common with the Chicago political dykes in Go Fish, another favorite film, than with the men in any of the films I've named; go figure. I'm not sure what is missing from gay films, but it's not "positive images."

From what other gay men say, they want more "hot" sex in films about us, and I often get the impression that they'd like to see hardcore action: erections, penetration. I still have never seen either Queer as Folk series, but I remember how excited -- and by "excited" I mean all giggly and giddy -- many gay men my age were by a famous anus-view shot of a man being rimmed. I also remember gay critics who were displeased because Philadelphia didn't include a scene of Tom Hanks with his legs in the air, begging to be fucked. (When I read this I thought: well, why should it? The lack of sex scenes was the least of the trouble with Philadelphia.) I guess it's fair enough that they were pleased to see an acknowledgment of specific gay male sexual practices in films and TV shows, but I didn't really see the point. If you want to see hardcore action, there's plenty of readily accessible porn available, which has its own problems and limitations, and a lot of the criticisms that gay men make of gay films apply. (Come to think of it, maybe Andrew Haigh was complaining about gay pornography: I don't really think he was, but it does at least fit the muscles and West Hollywood criteria.) But I don't think that non-porn actors, including gay ones, owe it to their audiences to have real sex on camera.

Griping about the failings of gay movies is too often like the complaint that gay men only think about looks: it's more of a cliche, a way of passing the time, than a serious, meaningful criticism of what has been done in GLBT cinema. (A lot of lay criticism, as I'll call it, is thoughtless and ill-informed, often tainted by wishful thinking, and mainly consists of finding gay characters in movies whether they're there or not.) Commercial cinema is, by its very nature, never going to be as uncompromising as many critics evidently want. Independent, less-commercial filmmakers have done a lot of good work, but it's unlikely that any independent will produce work in the tradition of the Hollywood Dream Machine -- and I can't say I mind that in the slightest.

I liked Will and Grace, which I thought was remarkably bold for broadcast TV; more important, it was funny and well-made. It didn't give me everything I wanted, but why should it have done so? There is a sense in which I think the oft-made call for the End of Gay Cinema has some validity: not that there should be no more films with same-sex-loving protagonists or other characters, but in the sense that we shouldn't ask whether each new offering is The Great Gay Film. Greatness will take care of itself; all I ask is for filmmakers and other artists to tell more stories, as honestly and intelligently and passionately as they can.

* from My Life as a Pornographer, and Other Indecent Acts (Richard Kasak Books, 1993), p. 127

Those Who Remember History Are Doomed to Bang Their Heads Against the Wall -- Forever

I've begun reading The Brokeback Book, a collection of articles on Brokeback Mountain edited by William R. Handley and published this year by the University of Nebraska Press. Some of the articles are new, but others appeared before. One of these is David Leavitt's 2005 review of the film, which originally appeared at Slate. Leavitt is a novelist himself, but that doesn't really qualify him to write about either gay fiction or gay film. He showed himself to be quite ignorant on both subjects, in fact.

Of Jack Twist's pickup of a male hustler in Juarez, Mexico, Leavitt wrote:

For just a few seconds, we get a glimpse of the urban nightscape that was the locus of the very gay movies that might have been playing, in big cities, at the moment when the scene takes place—movies like Nighthawks and Taxi zum Klo, in which sexual profligacy is at once celebrated as a form of liberation and mourned as a pallid substitute for meaningful connection.

(Nighthawks is a British film, directed by Paul Hallam, that was released in 1978; the German Taxi zum Klo, directed by Frank Ripploh, was released in 1980.) Whatever else can be said about it, Jack's connection in Ciudad Juárez is something he could have found in most smaller cities in the US, and even many small towns, and he might not even have had to pay for the sex he found there. There's nothing specifically "urban" about that "nightscape." Juárez, lying just across the border, is simply convenient for a closeted Texan whose distant boyfriend wasn't available.

Leavitt went on:

It goes without saying that Brokeback Mountain is an entirely different kind of film. Perhaps it takes a woman to create a tale in which two men experience sex and love as a single thunderbolt, welding them together for life; certainly Proulx's story is a far cry from such canonical gay novels as Edmund White's The Farewell Symphony or Allan Hollinghurst's The Swimming Pool Library, which poeticize urban promiscuity and sexual adventuring. Proulx, by contrast, exalts coupledom by linking it to nature.

I suppose that The Swimming Pool Library (1988) and The Farewell Symphony (1997) are "canonical," but they're not the only canonical gay male novels. I presume Leavitt chose these two to make Brokeback Mountain look as utterly different from "canonical gay novels" as possible. He could just as well have cited his own novel, The Lost Language of Cranes (1986), which also depicted "urban promiscuity and sexual adventuring." But he chose to ignore any number of other canonical gay male novels built around coupledom, from Christopher Isherwood's A Single Man (1964) to Patricia Nell Warren's The Front Runner (1973) to Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City (1976-2010) to most of Christopher Bram's novels, starting with Surprising Myself (1987), and so on down to the present.

The same is true of films. I liked Brokeback Mountain when it was first released, but I think I was less impressed by it than many people were, including many gay men, because I knew what had gone before it; it didn't feel unique and unprecedented to me. When I think of gay male films, most of the best and most interesting were made independently of Hollywood, which preferred to use gay men and lesbians as symbols of dehumanized evil or mockery. From A Very Natural Thing (1974) to Parting Glances (1986) to Torch Song Trilogy (1988) to Brokeback Mountain director Ang Lee's The Wedding Banquet (1993), independent cinema about gay men can't be reduced to a celebration of urban sexual adventuring opposed to coupledom in a state of nature. For that matter, Richard Amory's 1966 pulp Song of the Loon and its sequels depicted sexual adventuring and romantic coupledom in the nineteenth-century Pacific Northwest. Song of the Loon was even made into a 1970 softcore film.

Remember that, except for The Swimming Pool Library, we're just talking about films and books produced in the United States. Look to traditions of homosexual literature in Europe, Latin America, Asia, and elsewhere, and Leavitt's account stands exposed more nakedly as the narrow and simplistic copout it is. It doesn't help that in the 1990s Leavitt co-edited an anthology of "homosexual literature in English from 1748 to 1914", and another of international gay writing. Of course, they may be as inadequate as this review; I haven't seen them. But it's hard to believe he's really as ignorant as he comes across in his review of Brokeback Mountain.

And of course, I've done a lot of complaining about the reductive and inaccurate accounts of gay history and literature produced by academics. Or about the distorted picture of gay history promulgated by self-serving hacks like Andrew Sullivan. (Leavitt has a history of the same sort of distortion, most notably a baffling essay on how Andrew Holleran's Dancer from the Dance freaked him out as a young fagling. Everyone's entitled to his own opinion, of course, but Leavitt seriously misread the book. Lev Raphael wrote a critical response to Leavitt for the Lambda Book Review in 1995, which unfortunately isn't available online.) This is a problem that extends beyond GLBTQ history, but I feel it acutely in that domain. Handley no doubt included Leavitt's review as a historical curiosity; I hope that other pieces in The Brokeback Book are better.