Lesbian writers have had a lot of influence on me, ever since Jill Johnston's 1971 "Lois Lane Is a Lesbian" essays in the Village Voice prompted me to come out. Since then, lesbian writers have written many of my favorite books, whether about gay men (The Front Runner, Memoirs of Hadrian, The Persian Boy) or about, well, lesbians. From Kate Millett and Isabel Miller to Sarah Waters and Alison Bechdel, they've been among my role models as writers.
Emma Donoghue is another. I first read Passion Between Women, her historical study, and from there moved to her first two novels, Stir-fry and Hood. I liked the idea of Kissing the Witch, her retelling of fairy tales from a lesbian sensibility, but the result didn't do much for me, though the book seems to be one of her more popular. Slammerkin, a largely heterosexual historical novel, also enlarged her audience, though it wouldn't have won me over if it had been the first thing I'd read by her. After a collection of stories based on historical anomalies, The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits (which I almost wrote as Brith to Rabbis), and another historical novel, Life Mask, it's not surprising that many of her readers think of Donoghue primarily as a historical novelist, and were surprised by her move to the present in the stories of Touchy Subjects and her new novel, Landing.
To me that return was a relief. I feel sure that writing about historical subjects is important to Donoghue, but I also feel sure that her heart goes into her novels about contemporary, preferably Irish, lesbians. (I don't think this is because I can't connect to historical fiction; I really love Sarah Waters's books, for instance.) Hood swept me off my feet: it follows Pen O'Reilly, a young woman whose lover since high school has died in an auto accident, through her first week of shock, grief, and adjustment. It's exquisitely written, and her account of Pen's tangled feelings moved me deeply.
So I was eager to read Landing, and it didn't disappoint. Landing is about the coming together of Jude Turner, a small-town Canadian dyke of 25, who runs the historical museum in a hamlet called Ireland, Ontario. (Inspired by but not modeled on Dublin, Ontario.) Jude is stubbornly resistant to modernity: she has no cell phone, no e-mail (except for museum business), and has never flown. When her mother becomes ill during a visit to England, however, Jude bites the bullet and boards a plane. Along the trip she strikes up an acquaintance with a flight attendant, Síle (pronounced Sheila) O'Shaughnessy, a very cosmopolitan 39-year-old Indo-Irishwoman with a female partner of five years. It's just one of those random bumpings-together that happen during travel -- they don't even know at first that they're both gay -- but they find reasons to get in touch. They begin to correspond (Jude overcomes her aversion to e-mail), to bond, and next thing you know they're crossing the pond for holiday visits. Síle's relationship ends, messily, and Jude has loose ends of her own to tie up.
Donoghue does her usual wonderful job of recounting the progress of their growing connection. But the real barrier is their respective rootedness, or in Síle's case, her determined lack thereof. Who's going to risk giving up the life she's used to? Will Síle move to Canada, or Jude to Ireland? I suppose I'm especially ready to respond to a story like this, because I so often wonder about trying to start a life with someone new in middle age -- not a likely prospect right now, but it comforts me in my confirmed bachelorhood -- and fantasize about moving out of state, or (better) out of the country when I retire, but what will I do with all my books? One reason to read a novel like Landing is to experience vicariously how such scenarios might play out. It helps that Landing is told from the viewpoints of both protagonists alternatively, since I identified with both in different ways.
I see from customer reviews on Amazon that some people find the story insufficiently action-packed, which I suppose is true. In some ways Landing is a very old-fashioned novel, and Donoghue an old-fashioned novelist -- witness her fondness for the 18th century. (You want action, try something like Nicola Griffith's The Blue Place, another favorite of mine.) But one of the things a novel can do is to take things slowly, to take its time developing characters, to depict relationships in all their complexity. Donoghue does that very well, and I'm glad to have her back in the 21st century.
Thursday, June 14, 2007
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
Not For the Squeamish
In his audio commentary for the Korean DVD of Kim In-shik's Road Movie, film writer Tony Rayns describes the opening sex scene as "brutal." May I comment that I don't see it that way? In the first place, this scene and the later one with a worker in a teahouse look less "brutal" than acrobatic to me; sort of like Dae-shik's Homo-Aerobic Workout Video. I'm reminded of the way many viewers reacted to the opening sex scene in Wong Kar Wai's Happy Together: terms like "rough sex, "dysfunctional", and the like appeared with scandalized prurience in print discussion of the film. Well, that's us homosexuals for you.
To my queer eye, however, that scene suggested words like "breathtaking" and "intimate"; it depicted a long term couple who know what works for them. Lai Yu-fai's (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai) voice-over narration establishes the context: they've been together six years on and off, and whenever Ho Po-Wing says "We could start over," it gets him right here. The intensity of the scene comes from two long-term partners reunited after separation -- no wonder Ho gobbles Lai hungrily. As for "rough," that probably came from the light slap Leslie Cheung Kwok-wing delivered to Leung's ass as they wrestled playfully on the bed. Not exactly whips and chains and bruises, but... the eye of the beholder, darling. Or maybe: it takes one to know one.
On first viewing it's also easy to miss the edit between the foreplay and the homestretch to orgasm, which makes the sex feel rushed. Once that is taken into account, the scene seems merely realistic to me. I wish it were longer and more leisurely myself, but I suspect Wong knew that a longer, more "romantic" version would have driven homophobic audiences screaming from the theater: Eeeeeek! Two men! Having sex! That is so gay! And not just any two men, but two big Hong Kong stars! Like, my ghod! ... which is, of course, a major part of what I like about it. I want more. Please, Sir, can I have a little more?
In the second place, I detect in "brutal" a certain queasiness about the body that in the West dates back to Shakespeare at least. It's a gut level belief that nice sex isn't sweaty, noisy, or messy; by preference it should be soft-focus, candlelit, hushed, with a New Age or cool jazz soundtrack, and no noisome body fluids emitted, let alone exchanged. (I always loved to observe audience reactions to the closeup, in Lizzie Borden's Working Girls, of a used condom being wrapped in a tissue and deposited in the trash -- with lots of liquid squelching sound effects. Or the scene in South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut, where Saddam Hussein mounts and penetrates a whimpering Satan in total darkness, with similar slippery mucous noises on the soundtrack.) That may just be me, of course, but I think Road Movie's final sex scene bears me out. When you're In Love (or at least having a mercy fuck, as here), Sex Is Beautiful: nearly silent, dry, and clean. Maybe it would be nice if it were so, but it isn't so.
Third, "brutal" should be questioned because of the scene that follows the opening, where Dae-shik's pickup begs him to stay on. Would he do so if he'd just had brutal sex inflicted on him? It isn't gay sex, or even that sex scene, that is the problem so much as Dae-shik's self-hatred. The pickup, also Korean, doesn't seem to suffer from it. (Think what a very different breakthrough queer Korean film could have been made by making the pickup the main character.)
Road Movie is a much more conventional, and so less realistic work than Happy Together. It can be viewed as a three-hanky male weeper in the Glengarry Glenn Ross mode, about the pain of being a man in an uncaring, un-understanding world. It's also an advocacy tract in the mode of Jonathan Demme's Philadelphia, which teaches that minorities deserve our sympathy because they suffer beautifully and die at the end. (The only good queer is a dead queer -- an enduring principle of homosexual literature.) Gay self-pity is so much less threatening than gay pride; phobes want to be reassured that we don't really enjoy our nasty, brutal, and short lives. Family must be as unattainable as love. We can only wander in isolation until death releases us.
I don't believe in linear, developmental models of history, so it's not clear to me why Korean queer films (or life) must use these worn-out Western tropes and models. The rationale seems to be: Korean society is totally conservative, not ready to accept gays, and therefore Korean queer representations of the 1990s and after must begin by imitating or reinventing Western representations from the 1950s or earlier. If all goes well, in a century or two it will be possible to move forward from there. Get over it, children: The Well of Loneliness is, like, so 1928; it's been done.
In general, even many Western scholars of Asian queer culture exhibit near-total ignorance of Western queer culture, which is not surprising given the embattled and rudimentary status of queer studies in Western academia at present -- where would they learn what they need to know? Many if not most Asian scholars of Asian queer culture, at least those who publish in English, have been educated in the West, so their ignorance isn't surprising either. But that doesn't excuse the invidious and often homophobic generalizations they feel compelled to make about queer life and culture here.
It's true that tragedy, to say nothing of Liebestod, plays an enduring role in heterosexual love stories as well. But Road Movie is bathos, not tragedy. Thirty-five years after Stonewall, neutral (let alone affirmative) depictions of queers simply living their lives remain in short supply. Stephen Frears's My Beautiful Laundrette is still a beautiful, tantalizing anomaly, the exception that proves the rule -- a story of two boys in love that isn't "about" being gay.
This problem accompanies an Othering of the queer past by queers ourselves. In the bad old days (so the story goes), gays lived lives of fear, guilt, and isolation, often ending in suicide if some kindly phobe or speeding bus didn't come along to put us out of our misery -- so unlike us modern liberated Homo-Americans full of gay pride and a 30% suicide rate! Substance abusers! Victims of hate crimes! Pity us as we pity ourselves!
The Well of Loneliness is emblematic of this mythos, even or especially among those who've never read it. Or The Children's Hour -- remember, US society was so homophobic that the first film version had to be heterosexualized. Few people nowadays can have seen Otto Preminger's Advise and Consent (let alone read Allen Drury's novel), in which a closeted Senator, threatened with blackmail, kills himself. Many, though, will have seen excerpts from the film in The Celluloid Closet, a useful but flawed documentary that perpetuates the very stereotypes it deplores.
When a young lesbian friend of mine was reading The Well of Loneliness, I urged her to look also at Radclyffe Hall's other novels The Unlit Lamp (1924) and A Saturday Life (1925), both written before Well but depicting mythic mannish lesbians in a much less doom-laden way. A Saturday Life, in fact, is a comic novel. I could also point the interested reader to Sylvia Townsend Warner's Summer Will Show (1936), a remarkable historical novel set in mid-1800s France in which two women fall in love with each other, just like that, without benefit of Ani Di Franco CDs or Eddie Bauer apparel. Or to James Barr's Quatrefoil (1950), in which two butch sailor men fall in love and make it last. Or Christopher Isherwood's A Single Man (1964), a witty and humane religious novel about aging and mortality whose main character is queer and not particularly tortured about it. Or Sanford Friedman's Totempole (1965), about a tortured young American fag who comes to accept himself through an affair with a North Korean POW.
I could go on, but I hope you see my point. There's a lot of queer fiction from before 1969 in which the characters possess or find the courage to reject self-pity. (One of the achievements of gay scholarship has been to rediscover works like these and stress their importance over against the iconic works of heterosexual supremacy.) It has always been possible to do so; when artists have not done so, it was an artistic and moral choice to represent queers as wretched cripples. Neither artists nor critics should presume to claim this choice was a necessity; it wasn't.
(Again, I'm not constructing here a linear progression from self-hatred to acceptance, which historically is false anyhow, but pointing out that both attitudes have always coexisted. If self-hatred has been more visible, it's because homophobic straights have been more tolerant of depictions of queer life as a vale of tears; and because homophobic queers found it satisfying to view themselves as martyrs.)
The question, then, is why artists make this choice. To explore the answer fully is beyond the scope of this article. For now I'll just point briefly to overt censorship by government or publishers; to moral choice on the part of the artist, queer or straight, who genuinely believes that homosexuality is intrinsically disordered; to artistic choice, using anti-queer tropes as nodes of dramatic or narrative tension; or as in Road Movie, as political strategy to win sympathy for the downtrodden. Aside from my personal and principled distaste for this strategy, I don't believe it works very well. I have never heard of a bigot changing his or her mind because of it.
It might also be useful to remember that even in South Korean cinema it is possible to depict same-sex lovers in different ways: the earnest, awkwardly liberal Bungee Jumping of their Own, for instance, or the sweetly subversive and underrated Wanee and Junah. (To say nothing of Asian movies from outside Korea, such as The Accident and Hold You Tight from Hong Kong, both of which have happy but not unrealistic endings.) It may be that in time, Road Movie will look different. As the Korean critic Jung Jae-hyung points out (in "Road Movie: Queerish Reasonableness of Nomadic Existence", Film Critiques: FIPRESCI Korea vol. 3 [Seoul: Happy House, 2004], it draws on specifically Asian traditions of itinerancy that might appear more prominent as homosexuality becomes less of a hot-button issue in Korea. More good Korean queer films could contextualize Dae-Sik not as a tautologically self-hating homosexual but as a self-hating man. But self-hatred is not very interesting to me, personally or artistically, so I doubt I'll ever enjoy Road Movie despite its fine photography, acting, and other technical virtues. I doubt it will age as well as it might, had writer/director Kim In-sik made other artistic and moral choices. (As he tells it in this interview, the choice wasn't his: he was hired to make a movie about a gay man who dies in the end.) The wandering theme could have been handled as well, or better, with two men who didn't agonize over their sexualities. Or it could have been about a wandering gay man who picks up men along the way, not because he doesn't believe in love but because he doesn't believe in monogamy. As it stands, homosexuality is a distraction in Road Movie.
One final qualification: In an interview clip from The Celluloid Closet, actor/writer Harvey Fierstein declared, " ... my view has always been, visibility at any cost. I'd rather have negative than nothing." For those queers who wanted Hollywood to bless us with its cinematic attention, the alternatives historically have usually been "negative" or "nothing." Even dreck like Advise and Consent acknowledged that queers (barely) exist. The most negative images can be, and have been, a lifeline to young and/or isolated queers, reassuring them that somewhere there are others like them. (And what's "negative" to me might not be negative to you. As Fierstein also said, "I like the sissy ... because I am a sissy." Me too. But that also opens horizons that are beyond the scope, etc.) Road Movie may give hope to some young Korean fagling, who might even look at Dae-Shik and say to himself, not "Oh, god, I'm doomed!" but "My god, what a dork! Why didn't he, like, get over himself? And what's the phone number of that cute guy he dumped at the start of the movie?"
To my queer eye, however, that scene suggested words like "breathtaking" and "intimate"; it depicted a long term couple who know what works for them. Lai Yu-fai's (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai) voice-over narration establishes the context: they've been together six years on and off, and whenever Ho Po-Wing says "We could start over," it gets him right here. The intensity of the scene comes from two long-term partners reunited after separation -- no wonder Ho gobbles Lai hungrily. As for "rough," that probably came from the light slap Leslie Cheung Kwok-wing delivered to Leung's ass as they wrestled playfully on the bed. Not exactly whips and chains and bruises, but... the eye of the beholder, darling. Or maybe: it takes one to know one.
On first viewing it's also easy to miss the edit between the foreplay and the homestretch to orgasm, which makes the sex feel rushed. Once that is taken into account, the scene seems merely realistic to me. I wish it were longer and more leisurely myself, but I suspect Wong knew that a longer, more "romantic" version would have driven homophobic audiences screaming from the theater: Eeeeeek! Two men! Having sex! That is so gay! And not just any two men, but two big Hong Kong stars! Like, my ghod! ... which is, of course, a major part of what I like about it. I want more. Please, Sir, can I have a little more?
In the second place, I detect in "brutal" a certain queasiness about the body that in the West dates back to Shakespeare at least. It's a gut level belief that nice sex isn't sweaty, noisy, or messy; by preference it should be soft-focus, candlelit, hushed, with a New Age or cool jazz soundtrack, and no noisome body fluids emitted, let alone exchanged. (I always loved to observe audience reactions to the closeup, in Lizzie Borden's Working Girls, of a used condom being wrapped in a tissue and deposited in the trash -- with lots of liquid squelching sound effects. Or the scene in South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut, where Saddam Hussein mounts and penetrates a whimpering Satan in total darkness, with similar slippery mucous noises on the soundtrack.) That may just be me, of course, but I think Road Movie's final sex scene bears me out. When you're In Love (or at least having a mercy fuck, as here), Sex Is Beautiful: nearly silent, dry, and clean. Maybe it would be nice if it were so, but it isn't so.
Third, "brutal" should be questioned because of the scene that follows the opening, where Dae-shik's pickup begs him to stay on. Would he do so if he'd just had brutal sex inflicted on him? It isn't gay sex, or even that sex scene, that is the problem so much as Dae-shik's self-hatred. The pickup, also Korean, doesn't seem to suffer from it. (Think what a very different breakthrough queer Korean film could have been made by making the pickup the main character.)
Road Movie is a much more conventional, and so less realistic work than Happy Together. It can be viewed as a three-hanky male weeper in the Glengarry Glenn Ross mode, about the pain of being a man in an uncaring, un-understanding world. It's also an advocacy tract in the mode of Jonathan Demme's Philadelphia, which teaches that minorities deserve our sympathy because they suffer beautifully and die at the end. (The only good queer is a dead queer -- an enduring principle of homosexual literature.) Gay self-pity is so much less threatening than gay pride; phobes want to be reassured that we don't really enjoy our nasty, brutal, and short lives. Family must be as unattainable as love. We can only wander in isolation until death releases us.
I don't believe in linear, developmental models of history, so it's not clear to me why Korean queer films (or life) must use these worn-out Western tropes and models. The rationale seems to be: Korean society is totally conservative, not ready to accept gays, and therefore Korean queer representations of the 1990s and after must begin by imitating or reinventing Western representations from the 1950s or earlier. If all goes well, in a century or two it will be possible to move forward from there. Get over it, children: The Well of Loneliness is, like, so 1928; it's been done.
In general, even many Western scholars of Asian queer culture exhibit near-total ignorance of Western queer culture, which is not surprising given the embattled and rudimentary status of queer studies in Western academia at present -- where would they learn what they need to know? Many if not most Asian scholars of Asian queer culture, at least those who publish in English, have been educated in the West, so their ignorance isn't surprising either. But that doesn't excuse the invidious and often homophobic generalizations they feel compelled to make about queer life and culture here.
It's true that tragedy, to say nothing of Liebestod, plays an enduring role in heterosexual love stories as well. But Road Movie is bathos, not tragedy. Thirty-five years after Stonewall, neutral (let alone affirmative) depictions of queers simply living their lives remain in short supply. Stephen Frears's My Beautiful Laundrette is still a beautiful, tantalizing anomaly, the exception that proves the rule -- a story of two boys in love that isn't "about" being gay.
This problem accompanies an Othering of the queer past by queers ourselves. In the bad old days (so the story goes), gays lived lives of fear, guilt, and isolation, often ending in suicide if some kindly phobe or speeding bus didn't come along to put us out of our misery -- so unlike us modern liberated Homo-Americans full of gay pride and a 30% suicide rate! Substance abusers! Victims of hate crimes! Pity us as we pity ourselves!
The Well of Loneliness is emblematic of this mythos, even or especially among those who've never read it. Or The Children's Hour -- remember, US society was so homophobic that the first film version had to be heterosexualized. Few people nowadays can have seen Otto Preminger's Advise and Consent (let alone read Allen Drury's novel), in which a closeted Senator, threatened with blackmail, kills himself. Many, though, will have seen excerpts from the film in The Celluloid Closet, a useful but flawed documentary that perpetuates the very stereotypes it deplores.
When a young lesbian friend of mine was reading The Well of Loneliness, I urged her to look also at Radclyffe Hall's other novels The Unlit Lamp (1924) and A Saturday Life (1925), both written before Well but depicting mythic mannish lesbians in a much less doom-laden way. A Saturday Life, in fact, is a comic novel. I could also point the interested reader to Sylvia Townsend Warner's Summer Will Show (1936), a remarkable historical novel set in mid-1800s France in which two women fall in love with each other, just like that, without benefit of Ani Di Franco CDs or Eddie Bauer apparel. Or to James Barr's Quatrefoil (1950), in which two butch sailor men fall in love and make it last. Or Christopher Isherwood's A Single Man (1964), a witty and humane religious novel about aging and mortality whose main character is queer and not particularly tortured about it. Or Sanford Friedman's Totempole (1965), about a tortured young American fag who comes to accept himself through an affair with a North Korean POW.
I could go on, but I hope you see my point. There's a lot of queer fiction from before 1969 in which the characters possess or find the courage to reject self-pity. (One of the achievements of gay scholarship has been to rediscover works like these and stress their importance over against the iconic works of heterosexual supremacy.) It has always been possible to do so; when artists have not done so, it was an artistic and moral choice to represent queers as wretched cripples. Neither artists nor critics should presume to claim this choice was a necessity; it wasn't.
(Again, I'm not constructing here a linear progression from self-hatred to acceptance, which historically is false anyhow, but pointing out that both attitudes have always coexisted. If self-hatred has been more visible, it's because homophobic straights have been more tolerant of depictions of queer life as a vale of tears; and because homophobic queers found it satisfying to view themselves as martyrs.)
The question, then, is why artists make this choice. To explore the answer fully is beyond the scope of this article. For now I'll just point briefly to overt censorship by government or publishers; to moral choice on the part of the artist, queer or straight, who genuinely believes that homosexuality is intrinsically disordered; to artistic choice, using anti-queer tropes as nodes of dramatic or narrative tension; or as in Road Movie, as political strategy to win sympathy for the downtrodden. Aside from my personal and principled distaste for this strategy, I don't believe it works very well. I have never heard of a bigot changing his or her mind because of it.
It might also be useful to remember that even in South Korean cinema it is possible to depict same-sex lovers in different ways: the earnest, awkwardly liberal Bungee Jumping of their Own, for instance, or the sweetly subversive and underrated Wanee and Junah. (To say nothing of Asian movies from outside Korea, such as The Accident and Hold You Tight from Hong Kong, both of which have happy but not unrealistic endings.) It may be that in time, Road Movie will look different. As the Korean critic Jung Jae-hyung points out (in "Road Movie: Queerish Reasonableness of Nomadic Existence", Film Critiques: FIPRESCI Korea vol. 3 [Seoul: Happy House, 2004], it draws on specifically Asian traditions of itinerancy that might appear more prominent as homosexuality becomes less of a hot-button issue in Korea. More good Korean queer films could contextualize Dae-Sik not as a tautologically self-hating homosexual but as a self-hating man. But self-hatred is not very interesting to me, personally or artistically, so I doubt I'll ever enjoy Road Movie despite its fine photography, acting, and other technical virtues. I doubt it will age as well as it might, had writer/director Kim In-sik made other artistic and moral choices. (As he tells it in this interview, the choice wasn't his: he was hired to make a movie about a gay man who dies in the end.) The wandering theme could have been handled as well, or better, with two men who didn't agonize over their sexualities. Or it could have been about a wandering gay man who picks up men along the way, not because he doesn't believe in love but because he doesn't believe in monogamy. As it stands, homosexuality is a distraction in Road Movie.
One final qualification: In an interview clip from The Celluloid Closet, actor/writer Harvey Fierstein declared, " ... my view has always been, visibility at any cost. I'd rather have negative than nothing." For those queers who wanted Hollywood to bless us with its cinematic attention, the alternatives historically have usually been "negative" or "nothing." Even dreck like Advise and Consent acknowledged that queers (barely) exist. The most negative images can be, and have been, a lifeline to young and/or isolated queers, reassuring them that somewhere there are others like them. (And what's "negative" to me might not be negative to you. As Fierstein also said, "I like the sissy ... because I am a sissy." Me too. But that also opens horizons that are beyond the scope, etc.) Road Movie may give hope to some young Korean fagling, who might even look at Dae-Shik and say to himself, not "Oh, god, I'm doomed!" but "My god, what a dork! Why didn't he, like, get over himself? And what's the phone number of that cute guy he dumped at the start of the movie?"
Wednesday, June 6, 2007
Seeds And Stems Will Rend My Hems
Published in GCN, 15 March 1980. After writing this review I found a long article in Rolling Stone, from which I learned that "K. Levise" was Ryder's wife Kimberley. Ryder, born "William Levise, Jr." told the interviewer that the songs on How I Spent My Vacation were indeed born of his own experience, including a long-ago affair with politico John Sinclair of Detroit's White Panthers (and manager of the MC5) that inspired "The Jon." But, Ryder assured us, that was all in the past, though at article's end he invited the interviewer to accompany him to a gay bar -- just to hang out, of course. (That's how I remember it now, I haven't been able to track the article down.)
This 2004 Detroit Metro article has an impressive photo of Ryder in 1970. No wonder John Sinclair jumped his bones.
How I Spent My Vacation
Mitch Ryder
Seeds and Stems Records
SS 7801
This is not an album that inspires confidence at first glance. Nor does it warn the prospective buyer that its contents are - how shall I say it? - unusual. In the front cover painting a long-haired, mustachioed male in shades is snorting coke in the mountains while listening through headphones to a transistor radio. This is, the title informs, How I Spent My Vacation. On the back cover are the usual musicians' credits and photos (they look like the guy on the front), song titles, and a handwritten inset (liner notes?) that startles by its hostility: "Say sucker, Does this mean we start at the top/Does this needle in your eye ball feel good/...So screw ya!/I can't even get a good Cuban cigar - Willard."
I first saw How I Spent My Vacation in a used record store and passed it up despite Sixties nostalgia. Typical macho shit, I thought, nastier than usual though. Too much cocaine, I guess. Too bad...If Robert Christgau hadn't reviewed it in one of his Consumer Guides, I never would have reconsidered. "What he remembers best," wrote Christgau, "is sex with men." Mitch Ryder?!
Now that I have heard the album I can report that it still doesn't inspire confidence. It does inspire a wish to play it a lot, which I do. The music is quite competent: guitar-dominated, blues-derived rock 'n' roll, often catchy and danceable, and Ryder is indeed singing about buggery. Whether this means he's actually Doin' It, I have no idea. He did co-write the songs, sometimes with members of his band, sometimes with someone named K. Levise. Who is responsible for the lyrics is not specified. They are often pretty bad. Only once, as as I can tell ("Falling Forming"), are they addressed to a woman.
Whatever Ryder's sex life may be like, I think it's safe to say that he doesn't look on sex between men wholly positively. At times I even suspect that he is really a born-again Christian describing a descent into Hell as an indirect commercial for Jesus, partly because of the frequent religious references in the songs. How I Spent My Vacation is certainly not a commercial for homosexuality.
At first, though, that is what "Cherry Poppin" sounds like. Ryder seems to be exhorting young men to come into his arms, in terms that sometimes echo, sometimes almost parody, heterosexual cock-rock at its worst:
You will be first to feel this burst
of love and hate for Mommy
So dry your tears and dash your fears
roll over on your tummy
You are all men, you are a man
Now stop this shit, I swear to you again
Roll over a bit and left me stick it in
Nothin's queer, just the loss of fear
Cherry poppin', cherry poppin', love is grand
Cherry poppin', I hold it in my hand
Cherry poppin', poppa stick it unh
Cherry poppin', cherry poppin'
There's nothing resembling gay pride here. Rather we have the sort of arguments macho men have always used to rationalize a little friendly cornholing. Is Ryder satirizing this kind of attitude or endorsing it? I hear it either way at different times. The verses are so convoluted, changing attitudes from line to line, it is almost impossible to tell what is going on; but the chorus is simply celebration: "Cherry poppin', love is grand." The question is: Is sexual pleasure being celebrated, or is it power? Yet "Cherry Poppin'" is the closest thing to an upbeat gay song on the album.
"The Jon," a light jazzy shuffle, seems a reversal: the verse may be more positive than the chorus. And "Poster," which closes the album, sounds to me like a Doors retread. The lead guitar recalls Robbie Krieger's fluid style, and Ryder's voice recalls Jim Morrison's in his last sodden days. The lyrics are trendily decadent, apparently about a hustler: Strange Days meets City of Night.
This is certainly not the gay male rock 'n' roll I've been waiting for, though I've just about given up hope of ever getting that. Even Tom Robinson, whom I respect immensely, is at his best when he writes anthems like "Power in the Darkness"; when he writes non-political gay songs like "Crossin' Over the Road" (from TRB Two), the result is almost as ambivalent ("A dirty rat is what I am") as Ryder's songs. And Mitch Ryder makes much better, more exciting music than Robinson does.
And yet it must have taken courage to make this album. Ryder has been trying to make a comeback for a long time. I doubt How I Spent My Vacation will do it. There doesn't seem to be much of a market for rock 'n' roll among gay men, even (or especially) if it's overtly gay. Nor will this album enhance Ryder's following among straights, who would, it's true, rather hear bad things than good things about gays, but would much rather not hear anything about us at all. I suspect too that many straight men would find "Cherry Poppin'" a very threatening song. So I can't say that Ryder is pandering to bigotry, but I don't know what he thinks he is doing.
Coming out was not easy for me, and if (as I suspect) How I Spent My Vacation is largely autobiographical, I can sympathize with Ryder's evident conflict, if not his machismo. I'm glad he chose to write songs about what was happening to him and recorded them, considering how easy it would have been never to commit them to vinyl. That he did is reason for hope, and I hope and believe that this will prove to be a transitional album. Maybe in time Mitch Ryder will be able to give us, if not love songs, at least music which truly celebrates sex between men.
March 15, 1980
This 2004 Detroit Metro article has an impressive photo of Ryder in 1970. No wonder John Sinclair jumped his bones.
How I Spent My Vacation
Mitch Ryder
Seeds and Stems Records
SS 7801
This is not an album that inspires confidence at first glance. Nor does it warn the prospective buyer that its contents are - how shall I say it? - unusual. In the front cover painting a long-haired, mustachioed male in shades is snorting coke in the mountains while listening through headphones to a transistor radio. This is, the title informs, How I Spent My Vacation. On the back cover are the usual musicians' credits and photos (they look like the guy on the front), song titles, and a handwritten inset (liner notes?) that startles by its hostility: "Say sucker, Does this mean we start at the top/Does this needle in your eye ball feel good/...So screw ya!/I can't even get a good Cuban cigar - Willard."
I first saw How I Spent My Vacation in a used record store and passed it up despite Sixties nostalgia. Typical macho shit, I thought, nastier than usual though. Too much cocaine, I guess. Too bad...If Robert Christgau hadn't reviewed it in one of his Consumer Guides, I never would have reconsidered. "What he remembers best," wrote Christgau, "is sex with men." Mitch Ryder?!
Now that I have heard the album I can report that it still doesn't inspire confidence. It does inspire a wish to play it a lot, which I do. The music is quite competent: guitar-dominated, blues-derived rock 'n' roll, often catchy and danceable, and Ryder is indeed singing about buggery. Whether this means he's actually Doin' It, I have no idea. He did co-write the songs, sometimes with members of his band, sometimes with someone named K. Levise. Who is responsible for the lyrics is not specified. They are often pretty bad. Only once, as as I can tell ("Falling Forming"), are they addressed to a woman.
Whatever Ryder's sex life may be like, I think it's safe to say that he doesn't look on sex between men wholly positively. At times I even suspect that he is really a born-again Christian describing a descent into Hell as an indirect commercial for Jesus, partly because of the frequent religious references in the songs. How I Spent My Vacation is certainly not a commercial for homosexuality.
At first, though, that is what "Cherry Poppin" sounds like. Ryder seems to be exhorting young men to come into his arms, in terms that sometimes echo, sometimes almost parody, heterosexual cock-rock at its worst:
You will be first to feel this burst
of love and hate for Mommy
So dry your tears and dash your fears
roll over on your tummy
You are all men, you are a man
Now stop this shit, I swear to you again
Roll over a bit and left me stick it in
Nothin's queer, just the loss of fear
Cherry poppin', cherry poppin', love is grand
Cherry poppin', I hold it in my hand
Cherry poppin', poppa stick it unh
Cherry poppin', cherry poppin'
There's nothing resembling gay pride here. Rather we have the sort of arguments macho men have always used to rationalize a little friendly cornholing. Is Ryder satirizing this kind of attitude or endorsing it? I hear it either way at different times. The verses are so convoluted, changing attitudes from line to line, it is almost impossible to tell what is going on; but the chorus is simply celebration: "Cherry poppin', love is grand." The question is: Is sexual pleasure being celebrated, or is it power? Yet "Cherry Poppin'" is the closest thing to an upbeat gay song on the album.
"The Jon," a light jazzy shuffle, seems a reversal: the verse may be more positive than the chorus. And "Poster," which closes the album, sounds to me like a Doors retread. The lead guitar recalls Robbie Krieger's fluid style, and Ryder's voice recalls Jim Morrison's in his last sodden days. The lyrics are trendily decadent, apparently about a hustler: Strange Days meets City of Night.
This is certainly not the gay male rock 'n' roll I've been waiting for, though I've just about given up hope of ever getting that. Even Tom Robinson, whom I respect immensely, is at his best when he writes anthems like "Power in the Darkness"; when he writes non-political gay songs like "Crossin' Over the Road" (from TRB Two), the result is almost as ambivalent ("A dirty rat is what I am") as Ryder's songs. And Mitch Ryder makes much better, more exciting music than Robinson does.
And yet it must have taken courage to make this album. Ryder has been trying to make a comeback for a long time. I doubt How I Spent My Vacation will do it. There doesn't seem to be much of a market for rock 'n' roll among gay men, even (or especially) if it's overtly gay. Nor will this album enhance Ryder's following among straights, who would, it's true, rather hear bad things than good things about gays, but would much rather not hear anything about us at all. I suspect too that many straight men would find "Cherry Poppin'" a very threatening song. So I can't say that Ryder is pandering to bigotry, but I don't know what he thinks he is doing.
Coming out was not easy for me, and if (as I suspect) How I Spent My Vacation is largely autobiographical, I can sympathize with Ryder's evident conflict, if not his machismo. I'm glad he chose to write songs about what was happening to him and recorded them, considering how easy it would have been never to commit them to vinyl. That he did is reason for hope, and I hope and believe that this will prove to be a transitional album. Maybe in time Mitch Ryder will be able to give us, if not love songs, at least music which truly celebrates sex between men.
March 15, 1980
Tuesday, June 5, 2007
Skin To Skin
I just finished reading two new gay-themed novels from the British Isles. The first, Neil Bartlett's new novel Skin Lane (London: Serpent's Tail, 2007), doesn't seem to be scheduled for US publication (it's not listed on Amazon US), though the copy I read lists the price in US dollars as well as English pounds.
Bartlett first came to my attention with Who Was That Man?: A Present for Mr. Oscar Wilde, an extended essay in gay history that went deeper than most gay history I'd read up to that time. Instead of reciting the Acts and Martyrdom of St. Oscar, Bartlett probed nineteenth-century English life to show where Wilde fit into it: the scandals were after all just the tip of the iceberg, the people who got caught and made examples of, the ones the heterosexuals couldn't pretend weren't there. Bartlett pointed out that "the prosecution's pose of outraged, fascinated ignorance, its portrayal (amplified in the press) of homosexuality as something which had suddenly, shockingly appeared in the form of Oscar Wilde was precisely that -- a pose." But then too, "Wilde, throughout his three trials, was lying all the time. ... He was a sodomite." (Strictly speaking, it appears that Wilde didn't engage in sodomy, but such niceties were of little interest to his persecutors and prosecutors. Wilde wasn't charged with sodomy anyway, but of "gross indecency with another male person" under the Labouchere Amendment of 1885, which punished a far wider range of acts than mere buggery, and of that he was certainly guilty as charged.) Who Was That Man? would have been difficult for anyone but an openly gay man to write. At the time it appeared, most biographies of famous queers were written by heterosexuals who tried to psychoanalyze their subjects , searching for someone or something to blame, to explain why they hadn't turned out normal. Bartlett simply took for granted that we exist in the world, a radical approach in 1989 and still not common enough today.
Bartlett followed Who Was That Man? in 1991 with Ready To Catch Him Should He Fall, which I recall (I'd better reread it) as an icy, rather opaque prose poem about English gay bar life. Then, in 1997, he returned to historical settings with Mr Clive and Mr Page (The House on Brooke Street in the US), which narrated, in a prim middle-class English diction, from the viewpoint of the 1950s a romantic obsession between two men that began in 1923. (Rock Hudson made a cameo appearance, too.) I'd had to work to get through Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall, but Mr Clive and Mr Page entranced and moved me.
Since then Bartlett has apparently concentrated on theatre work, but after ten years we have Skin Lane, another historical novel. In 1967, Mr F (as the protagonist, Mr Freeman, is known) has worked for thirty-three years for M. Scheiner Ltd., a furrier on Skin Lane, where he is now Head Cutter. Mr F is forty-six years old, "a rather large man, nearly six foot, with broad shoulders and the sort of build that most people would describe as sturdy" (7). In the well-worn routine of his life, "he has never invited anyone to join him in that single bed of his" (45), nor does he seem to be conscious of having wanted to.
An omniscient narrator tells us this story from the standpoint of, roughly, the present, with a great deal of lore about the fur trade and the redevelopment of London since the 1960s. But he tells the story in the present tense, which creates an eerie tension, where 1967 and (let's say) 2007 are both Now. Since 1967 was the year that sexual relations between adult males were made legal in Britain, as well as the prime of swinging London (the Beatles' Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was released on June 1), it makes a conveniently symbolic time to set this story.
Two things happen to jolt Mr F out of his rut. First, he begins to have a recurring dream of the naked body of a dead man, hung up by its ankles in his bathroom, arms dangling into the tub. He can see and remember everything about this body but its face. Second, the sixteen-year-old nephew of Mr F's employer comes to learn the ropes at M. Scheiner Ltd, expecting that ultimately he will take over the business. "Quick, dark and bright-eyed, he is one of those neatly built young men who not only knows exactly what they look like ... but is already well-versed in the uses such looks can be put to" (93). The young women who work downstairs, stitching skins into stoles and coats, nickname him Mr Schein, Mr. Beautiful, and the novel's narrator calls him simply Beauty.
When the youth is moved upstairs and Mr F is assigned to tutor him in the craft of cutting skins, he must struggle to maintain his composure as he becomes increasingly obsessed with Beauty. He also comes to realize that, if he were to invite anyone into that single bed of his, it would be a male. Beauty is busy flirting with one of the young women downstairs, but he's aware that he has an unsettling effect on Mr F. I don't believe I'll be giving away too much if I reveal that Mr F comes to realize that the young man in (of) his dreams is Beauty (oh, the metaphorical possibilities of that proper noun!).
By now I was getting nervous, between the narrator's calm account of Mr F's skill with all those skin-cutting knives and the dead Beauty dangling in Mr F's dream. The sly cover blurb from Will Self ("A fiendishly tight little psycho-shocker") didn't help. Though the narrator is quite garrulous, he doesn't give much away and is not averse to hinting that there are dreadful things to come. Which, in a way, there are. With The Silence of the Lambs now part of the cultural background of most people in the English-speaking world, I began to read faster, both wanting to know how things turned out and afraid that Bartlett had written another Queer Monster story. There's a place for such things, I concede, but Skin Lane was so vivid that I didn't want anyone in it, even the cocky and adolescently obnoxious Beauty, to be disposable for the sake of genre.
I'm relieved to report that Skin Lane doesn't end horribly, and I hope that's not a spoiler. My complaint is that Bartlett turns out to be something of a tease. He seems to be setting up his story so that the reader will anticipate horror, yet it feels odd to feel let down because the horror is not delivered. Since Bartlett comes within a hair's breadth of doing so, I'm sure that the forebodings I felt were not just something I brought to my reading: the author wanted me to feel them. But to what end? To suggest that, although gay men have so often figured as monsters in art and entertainment, we really are just regular folks who want to love and be loved? I think I already know that. Would the story have carried me along as well without the tease, just accompanying Mr F on his voyage of self-discovery? I don't know.
Still, Skin Lane is wonderful to read. With its rich factual background, its sure-footed, sneaky narrator, and its strange ending, it immerses the reader in one queer English life forty years ago.
I wanted to write about Emma Donoghue's new novel too, but this is already long enough. Tomorrow, then, or the day after.
Bartlett first came to my attention with Who Was That Man?: A Present for Mr. Oscar Wilde, an extended essay in gay history that went deeper than most gay history I'd read up to that time. Instead of reciting the Acts and Martyrdom of St. Oscar, Bartlett probed nineteenth-century English life to show where Wilde fit into it: the scandals were after all just the tip of the iceberg, the people who got caught and made examples of, the ones the heterosexuals couldn't pretend weren't there. Bartlett pointed out that "the prosecution's pose of outraged, fascinated ignorance, its portrayal (amplified in the press) of homosexuality as something which had suddenly, shockingly appeared in the form of Oscar Wilde was precisely that -- a pose." But then too, "Wilde, throughout his three trials, was lying all the time. ... He was a sodomite." (Strictly speaking, it appears that Wilde didn't engage in sodomy, but such niceties were of little interest to his persecutors and prosecutors. Wilde wasn't charged with sodomy anyway, but of "gross indecency with another male person" under the Labouchere Amendment of 1885, which punished a far wider range of acts than mere buggery, and of that he was certainly guilty as charged.) Who Was That Man? would have been difficult for anyone but an openly gay man to write. At the time it appeared, most biographies of famous queers were written by heterosexuals who tried to psychoanalyze their subjects , searching for someone or something to blame, to explain why they hadn't turned out normal. Bartlett simply took for granted that we exist in the world, a radical approach in 1989 and still not common enough today.
Bartlett followed Who Was That Man? in 1991 with Ready To Catch Him Should He Fall, which I recall (I'd better reread it) as an icy, rather opaque prose poem about English gay bar life. Then, in 1997, he returned to historical settings with Mr Clive and Mr Page (The House on Brooke Street in the US), which narrated, in a prim middle-class English diction, from the viewpoint of the 1950s a romantic obsession between two men that began in 1923. (Rock Hudson made a cameo appearance, too.) I'd had to work to get through Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall, but Mr Clive and Mr Page entranced and moved me.
Since then Bartlett has apparently concentrated on theatre work, but after ten years we have Skin Lane, another historical novel. In 1967, Mr F (as the protagonist, Mr Freeman, is known) has worked for thirty-three years for M. Scheiner Ltd., a furrier on Skin Lane, where he is now Head Cutter. Mr F is forty-six years old, "a rather large man, nearly six foot, with broad shoulders and the sort of build that most people would describe as sturdy" (7). In the well-worn routine of his life, "he has never invited anyone to join him in that single bed of his" (45), nor does he seem to be conscious of having wanted to.
An omniscient narrator tells us this story from the standpoint of, roughly, the present, with a great deal of lore about the fur trade and the redevelopment of London since the 1960s. But he tells the story in the present tense, which creates an eerie tension, where 1967 and (let's say) 2007 are both Now. Since 1967 was the year that sexual relations between adult males were made legal in Britain, as well as the prime of swinging London (the Beatles' Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was released on June 1), it makes a conveniently symbolic time to set this story.
Two things happen to jolt Mr F out of his rut. First, he begins to have a recurring dream of the naked body of a dead man, hung up by its ankles in his bathroom, arms dangling into the tub. He can see and remember everything about this body but its face. Second, the sixteen-year-old nephew of Mr F's employer comes to learn the ropes at M. Scheiner Ltd, expecting that ultimately he will take over the business. "Quick, dark and bright-eyed, he is one of those neatly built young men who not only knows exactly what they look like ... but is already well-versed in the uses such looks can be put to" (93). The young women who work downstairs, stitching skins into stoles and coats, nickname him Mr Schein, Mr. Beautiful, and the novel's narrator calls him simply Beauty.
When the youth is moved upstairs and Mr F is assigned to tutor him in the craft of cutting skins, he must struggle to maintain his composure as he becomes increasingly obsessed with Beauty. He also comes to realize that, if he were to invite anyone into that single bed of his, it would be a male. Beauty is busy flirting with one of the young women downstairs, but he's aware that he has an unsettling effect on Mr F. I don't believe I'll be giving away too much if I reveal that Mr F comes to realize that the young man in (of) his dreams is Beauty (oh, the metaphorical possibilities of that proper noun!).
By now I was getting nervous, between the narrator's calm account of Mr F's skill with all those skin-cutting knives and the dead Beauty dangling in Mr F's dream. The sly cover blurb from Will Self ("A fiendishly tight little psycho-shocker") didn't help. Though the narrator is quite garrulous, he doesn't give much away and is not averse to hinting that there are dreadful things to come. Which, in a way, there are. With The Silence of the Lambs now part of the cultural background of most people in the English-speaking world, I began to read faster, both wanting to know how things turned out and afraid that Bartlett had written another Queer Monster story. There's a place for such things, I concede, but Skin Lane was so vivid that I didn't want anyone in it, even the cocky and adolescently obnoxious Beauty, to be disposable for the sake of genre.
I'm relieved to report that Skin Lane doesn't end horribly, and I hope that's not a spoiler. My complaint is that Bartlett turns out to be something of a tease. He seems to be setting up his story so that the reader will anticipate horror, yet it feels odd to feel let down because the horror is not delivered. Since Bartlett comes within a hair's breadth of doing so, I'm sure that the forebodings I felt were not just something I brought to my reading: the author wanted me to feel them. But to what end? To suggest that, although gay men have so often figured as monsters in art and entertainment, we really are just regular folks who want to love and be loved? I think I already know that. Would the story have carried me along as well without the tease, just accompanying Mr F on his voyage of self-discovery? I don't know.
Still, Skin Lane is wonderful to read. With its rich factual background, its sure-footed, sneaky narrator, and its strange ending, it immerses the reader in one queer English life forty years ago.
I wanted to write about Emma Donoghue's new novel too, but this is already long enough. Tomorrow, then, or the day after.
Monday, June 4, 2007
The Girl in the Basement
This was the first book review I wrote for Gay Community News, a Boston gay liberationist newspaper published from 1973 to 1992. The review appeared in the fall of 1979. I haven´t changed it except for to correct punctuation here and there. Gertrude Baniszewski, I learned while preparing this post, got a second trial in 1971, and her sentence was changed from life without parole to 18 years to life. She was paroled, despite a great outcry, in 1985, and moved to Iowa where she died in 1990.
The book itself is long out of print, like most of Millett´s work, but the case of Sylvia Likens has not been forgotten. Like any gruesome crime, it has been written about by others beside Millett, in standard True Crime fashion. In fact, a movie about it is scheduled for release in August 2007. I doubt I´ll see it; I´ve never reread the book.
The Basement: Meditations on a Human Sacrifice
By Kate Millett
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979
To read The Basement is to have a haunted woman tugging at your sleeve, insisting that she has something important to tell you, demanding that you pay attention. She wants to upset you, and she can hardly fail, given her avowed obsession with her subject and its inherent horror. That it upsets the reader doesn't mean that a book is good, though -- only that it has got our attention, which is only the beginning.
In case you haven't heard, The Basement was inspired by a sixteen-year-old girl named Sylvia Likens, who was tortured to death over a period of months in 1965 in Indianapolis by a gang of teenager sled by Gertrude Baniszewski, a woman with whom Sylvia and her younger sister Jenny had been left to board by their parents. Emblematic of her treatment at their hands was the legend killers etched on Sylvia's belly: "I am a prostitute and proud of it!" At Gertrude Baniszewski's trial the Deputy Coroner testified: "At the time I saw the body ... I thought it was the work of a madman."
Kate Millett, at the time a graduate student at Columbia with her own fame years in the future, read of Sylvia Likens' death in Time, and found herself haunted by it. Her first artistic response, since she was primarily a sculptor, not yet a writer, was to build cages with statues of women in them. Not until 1978 did she devote an exhibition overtly to Sylvia, nor did she write about her till then. She was, she writes, "waiting for the time to be perfect, waiting to be good enough."
The Basement: Meditations on a Human Sacrifice is written in two modes. One is documentary and analytical: an account of Sylvia's long death and of Gertrude Banizsewski's trial (she was convicted, by the way, and sentenced to life in prison), attempting to find the meaning of Sylvia's ordeal, to put it in some kind of context, to understand how it could happen -- why, for example, Sylvia didn't run away, or why the neighbors, who heard her screams, didn't intervene. There is also some account of Millett's struggle with her material; for example, the story of her meeting a young woman who, years before, had gone to school briefly with Sylvia Likens.
The other mode might be called dramatic and projective: Millett attempts to imagine herself into the minds of Gertrude and Sylvia. These portions of the book, at first interspersed with portions in the first mode but gradually dominating it, consist sometimes of interior monologues and sometimes of narratives with dialogue. It is these sections of the book which give me -- and Millett herself-- the most difficulty. "I am a fraud," she writes, "my Gertrude never the real one. ... One does not say, 'I will torture this child to death.' Torture was surely not a word Gertrude permitted herself"(250). Or again: "Can a child in Sylvia's position, given the degree of her fright, even be said to think ... in the sense of coherent phrases[?] ... Do you think in coherent sentences and achieve Gertrude's acts?" (81). Millett thinks not, and I agree. Nevertheless she spends almost 150 pages out of 342 trying to make them think in sentences. At best, her Sylvia and Gertrude engage in introspection as though they were Kate Millett. At worst they are --well, see for yourself.
"That little slut, hole between her legs and she is gone learn to understan it. Probably thinks it's a toy. Plays with it when weleave her alone, I'll bet. If we could just catch her doin that! The devil's work right on her fingers. Her own dirty little smell" (258). That is supposed to be Gertrude. So is this: "They corner her and I get so excited my asthma flares up but I ain't felt so good in years, like bein young or waitin for a man to stick his thing in, not that we're doin nothin like that but the thing of bein all keyed up. ...Sometimes you wonder maybe it's gonna get outa hand and this much of a good time might be a sin, but all you gotta do is remember it's for her own good and she asked for it" (226). I don't doubt that Gertrude Banieszewski was obsessed with Sylvia's sexuality for sexual reasons of her own, but I do doubt that she ever let them hover so close to consciousness (and so does Millett -- see page 290). More important, I think that Millett's Gertrude is a straw woman, too clearly, too self-consciously manipulated, and that in passages like these the backdrop almost falls down to reveal the puppeteer.
Sometimes Millett's efforts at lifelike banality veer over the edge into the ridiculous: "A Coke bottle. Coke aint like that. Just the sight of it makes you feel good, the green bottle and the brown syrup. You stop and have a Coke. Pause that refreshes they always say and really it's the best damn thing on a hot day" (235). That is supposed to be Sylvia, musing on having been forced to jam a Coke bottle into her own vagina. I can't help feeling that Millett's craft is not yet up to the task she has set herself, that she is not yet good enough for Sylvia.
In Part Two of the book, when Millett's inventions alternate with excerpts from trial testimony, I found they came as a relief from the latter's horrifying simplicity and artlessness: "I have seen her cry before but I imagine the reason she did not cry [when they beat her] was because she did not have enough water" (91). That is Sylvia's sister Jenny, from the trial transcript. This is Gertrude's daughter Marie, telling what Gertrude did while one of her teenaged accomplices practiced judo on Sylvia by throwing her against a wall: "She just sit there and crochet" (178).
And yet, toward the end of the book, Millett's depiction of Sylvia's last days is powerfully affecting:
The documentary / analytic parts of The Basement seem to me brilliant, a reminder that Kate Millett is one of the finest minds writing today. It is in these sections that I think she comes closest to achieving what appears to be her objective: a fusion of the impersonal analysis of Sexual Politics with the passionate personal witness of Flying and Sita. Of course, Flying and Sita were not raw journal entries, but the product of revision after time had permitted some perspective and distance; nor should Sexual Politics' doctoral-thesis style obscure Millett's intense personal concern with its subject. If I'm not mistaken, she must have become involved with the women's movement not long after she read about Sylvia Likens, with whom she identified so deeply: "Because I was Sylvia Likens. She was me. ... She was the terror at the back of the cave, she was what 'happens' to girls. ... We all had a story like this, and I had found mine" (14).
The reader of this review -- much less of the book -- is likely to wonder why Kate Millett wanted to write about such a repellent subject, and why anyone else should want to read about it. A reviewer in the September issue of The Atlantic complained that Gertrude Baniszewski's crime was "too eccentric to exemplify anything"; it had nothing to do with the everyday relations of adults and children, women and women, or men and women. Or, as Nancy Walker wrote in GCN last January a propos the "boylove" controversy, "Americans ... love their children." Only a minority abuse them, and that minority doesn't count.
In fact it would be much more accurate and honest to say that Americans (like adults everywhere) are intensely ambivalent about their children. What Millett is trying to do in The Basement is explore the depths of the ugly side of that ambivalence, in the belief that the extreme illuminates the ordinary. She isn't the first feminist writer to tie the oppression of children to that of women. In The Dialectic of Sex (1970) Shulamith Firestone concluded a long analysis of children's place in a world of adults by saying,
Consider why Sylvia didn't try to run away from her torturers. Millett gives a number of good reasons: she couldn't abandon Jenny to them, they had broken her spirit, and she had no faith in other adults' willingness to protect her. Indeed Millett argues correctly that before Sylvia's bruised and starved condition was visible -- after which she did make at least one futile attempt to escape -- she would most likely have been sent back to Gertrude's house by any adult she sought out. But would anyone believe this who hasn't read John Holt's account, in Escape from Childhood, of a six-year-old Chicago boy who begged social workers not to return him to his father from the foster home where he had been placed? Those benign adults sent him back to his "real home," where four months later his father beat him to death.
One reason Sylvia Likens' story is so threatening is that it shows that adults don't necessarily know what is best for children, and I am not referring here to Gertrude Baniszewski. I am talking about the neighbors who heard Sylvia's screams but accepted Gertrude's explanation that the girl was incorrigible, boy-crazy, a thief, a tramp. How frighteningly easily she seems to have convinced them. No one seems to have bothered to ask about Sylvia's side of the story until it was too late -- not the neighbors, not the pastor, not the public health nurse who came to see Gertrude because she had been told there was a child in the house with running sores. (Everybody wants to be reassured that Sylvia wasn't a prostitute, as if that makes any difference at all.) And if adults can make such errors of judgment in such an extreme case, who can doubt that they err every day in less extreme ones? And if they do, how can anyone argue that adults should have the power to punish children, to correct them, to direct their lives? My word, we can't even direct our own. There is no question that parents, including mothers, have all too often compensated for their own feelings of helplessness by exercising power over their children.
The "boylove" controversy that raised so many hackles in these pages during the past year is relevant here. Opponents of child/adult sexual relationships who argued that such relationships were necessarily exploitative were amazingly uncritical of the unequal power distribution in all other child/adult relationships. Usually they called for more "protection" of children by adults. When men offer to "protect" women we know what is really meant. I think children can best be protected by giving them more real control over their lives. Certainly one lesson of The Basement is that Sylvia Likens died partly because she had too little autonomy even though she was accused of having too much.
The only trouble with The Basement is that it doesn't go deep enough. It touches on the plight of children, but too briefly. But more important, Kate Millett has let herself hide behind her projections of Sylvia and Gertrude, which do not connect us to them or to her. I kept wishing she would say something about the sculptures she created out of her obsession with Sylvia, and more of the process by which she came to understand the meaning of that obsession, her identification with the girl in the basement. After fourteen years, Sylvia Likens and Gertrude Baniszewski remain opaque to her, if we are to judge by her attempts to imitate their voices. If she had told us more about Kate Millett, she would have told us more about them as well -- as in her previous books, by telling us about herself she has told us about ourselves.
The book itself is long out of print, like most of Millett´s work, but the case of Sylvia Likens has not been forgotten. Like any gruesome crime, it has been written about by others beside Millett, in standard True Crime fashion. In fact, a movie about it is scheduled for release in August 2007. I doubt I´ll see it; I´ve never reread the book.
The Basement: Meditations on a Human Sacrifice
By Kate Millett
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979
To read The Basement is to have a haunted woman tugging at your sleeve, insisting that she has something important to tell you, demanding that you pay attention. She wants to upset you, and she can hardly fail, given her avowed obsession with her subject and its inherent horror. That it upsets the reader doesn't mean that a book is good, though -- only that it has got our attention, which is only the beginning.
In case you haven't heard, The Basement was inspired by a sixteen-year-old girl named Sylvia Likens, who was tortured to death over a period of months in 1965 in Indianapolis by a gang of teenager sled by Gertrude Baniszewski, a woman with whom Sylvia and her younger sister Jenny had been left to board by their parents. Emblematic of her treatment at their hands was the legend killers etched on Sylvia's belly: "I am a prostitute and proud of it!" At Gertrude Baniszewski's trial the Deputy Coroner testified: "At the time I saw the body ... I thought it was the work of a madman."
Kate Millett, at the time a graduate student at Columbia with her own fame years in the future, read of Sylvia Likens' death in Time, and found herself haunted by it. Her first artistic response, since she was primarily a sculptor, not yet a writer, was to build cages with statues of women in them. Not until 1978 did she devote an exhibition overtly to Sylvia, nor did she write about her till then. She was, she writes, "waiting for the time to be perfect, waiting to be good enough."
The Basement: Meditations on a Human Sacrifice is written in two modes. One is documentary and analytical: an account of Sylvia's long death and of Gertrude Banizsewski's trial (she was convicted, by the way, and sentenced to life in prison), attempting to find the meaning of Sylvia's ordeal, to put it in some kind of context, to understand how it could happen -- why, for example, Sylvia didn't run away, or why the neighbors, who heard her screams, didn't intervene. There is also some account of Millett's struggle with her material; for example, the story of her meeting a young woman who, years before, had gone to school briefly with Sylvia Likens.
The other mode might be called dramatic and projective: Millett attempts to imagine herself into the minds of Gertrude and Sylvia. These portions of the book, at first interspersed with portions in the first mode but gradually dominating it, consist sometimes of interior monologues and sometimes of narratives with dialogue. It is these sections of the book which give me -- and Millett herself-- the most difficulty. "I am a fraud," she writes, "my Gertrude never the real one. ... One does not say, 'I will torture this child to death.' Torture was surely not a word Gertrude permitted herself"(250). Or again: "Can a child in Sylvia's position, given the degree of her fright, even be said to think ... in the sense of coherent phrases[?] ... Do you think in coherent sentences and achieve Gertrude's acts?" (81). Millett thinks not, and I agree. Nevertheless she spends almost 150 pages out of 342 trying to make them think in sentences. At best, her Sylvia and Gertrude engage in introspection as though they were Kate Millett. At worst they are --well, see for yourself.
"That little slut, hole between her legs and she is gone learn to understan it. Probably thinks it's a toy. Plays with it when weleave her alone, I'll bet. If we could just catch her doin that! The devil's work right on her fingers. Her own dirty little smell" (258). That is supposed to be Gertrude. So is this: "They corner her and I get so excited my asthma flares up but I ain't felt so good in years, like bein young or waitin for a man to stick his thing in, not that we're doin nothin like that but the thing of bein all keyed up. ...Sometimes you wonder maybe it's gonna get outa hand and this much of a good time might be a sin, but all you gotta do is remember it's for her own good and she asked for it" (226). I don't doubt that Gertrude Banieszewski was obsessed with Sylvia's sexuality for sexual reasons of her own, but I do doubt that she ever let them hover so close to consciousness (and so does Millett -- see page 290). More important, I think that Millett's Gertrude is a straw woman, too clearly, too self-consciously manipulated, and that in passages like these the backdrop almost falls down to reveal the puppeteer.
Sometimes Millett's efforts at lifelike banality veer over the edge into the ridiculous: "A Coke bottle. Coke aint like that. Just the sight of it makes you feel good, the green bottle and the brown syrup. You stop and have a Coke. Pause that refreshes they always say and really it's the best damn thing on a hot day" (235). That is supposed to be Sylvia, musing on having been forced to jam a Coke bottle into her own vagina. I can't help feeling that Millett's craft is not yet up to the task she has set herself, that she is not yet good enough for Sylvia.
In Part Two of the book, when Millett's inventions alternate with excerpts from trial testimony, I found they came as a relief from the latter's horrifying simplicity and artlessness: "I have seen her cry before but I imagine the reason she did not cry [when they beat her] was because she did not have enough water" (91). That is Sylvia's sister Jenny, from the trial transcript. This is Gertrude's daughter Marie, telling what Gertrude did while one of her teenaged accomplices practiced judo on Sylvia by throwing her against a wall: "She just sit there and crochet" (178).
And yet, toward the end of the book, Millett's depiction of Sylvia's last days is powerfully affecting:
All in the dark. And I come to and hear the quiet. Cause after all I couldn't. Don't know how long. Tryin and it turned out I couldn't. Waited too long before I started. ... Never mind. I'm gettin out anyway. I got a way. I know one way still and it's less trouble than shovels. Just wait and you make it anyway. One way or another [337-8].Is this because Millett finally has gained control of her material, or is it because the reality she invokes is so overwhelming that she can't miss? I suspect I will go on rereading this part of the book for a long time, trying to decide.
It don't matter. Finally it don't matter. You all go under, everybody gets to see the light comin through a window once just when it stops comin in your eyes [340].
The documentary / analytic parts of The Basement seem to me brilliant, a reminder that Kate Millett is one of the finest minds writing today. It is in these sections that I think she comes closest to achieving what appears to be her objective: a fusion of the impersonal analysis of Sexual Politics with the passionate personal witness of Flying and Sita. Of course, Flying and Sita were not raw journal entries, but the product of revision after time had permitted some perspective and distance; nor should Sexual Politics' doctoral-thesis style obscure Millett's intense personal concern with its subject. If I'm not mistaken, she must have become involved with the women's movement not long after she read about Sylvia Likens, with whom she identified so deeply: "Because I was Sylvia Likens. She was me. ... She was the terror at the back of the cave, she was what 'happens' to girls. ... We all had a story like this, and I had found mine" (14).
The reader of this review -- much less of the book -- is likely to wonder why Kate Millett wanted to write about such a repellent subject, and why anyone else should want to read about it. A reviewer in the September issue of The Atlantic complained that Gertrude Baniszewski's crime was "too eccentric to exemplify anything"; it had nothing to do with the everyday relations of adults and children, women and women, or men and women. Or, as Nancy Walker wrote in GCN last January a propos the "boylove" controversy, "Americans ... love their children." Only a minority abuse them, and that minority doesn't count.
In fact it would be much more accurate and honest to say that Americans (like adults everywhere) are intensely ambivalent about their children. What Millett is trying to do in The Basement is explore the depths of the ugly side of that ambivalence, in the belief that the extreme illuminates the ordinary. She isn't the first feminist writer to tie the oppression of children to that of women. In The Dialectic of Sex (1970) Shulamith Firestone concluded a long analysis of children's place in a world of adults by saying,
Childhood is hell. ... We must include the oppression of children in any program for feminist revolution or we will be subject to the same failing of which we have so often accused men: of not having gone deep enough in our analysis ... merely because it didn't directly concern us. ... The mother who wants to kill her child for what she has had to sacrifice for it (a common desire) learns to love that child only when she learns that it is as helpless, as oppressed, as she is. ...In Of Woman Born (1976) Adrienne Rich devoted a chapter to "Violence: The Heart of Maternal Darkness". "When we think of motherhood," she wrote,
we are not supposed to think of what infanticide feels like, or fantasies of infanticide, or day after wintry day spent alone in the house with ailing children, or of months spent in sweatshop, prison, or someone else's kitchen, in anxiety for children left at home with an older child, or alone [276].Writing of a woman who murdered two of her own children, Rich made`observations not inapplicable to Gertrude Baniszewski:
She became a scapegoat, the one around whom the darkness of maternity is allowed to swirl. ... So much of this heart of darkness is an undramatic, undramatized suffering: the woman who serves her family their food but cannot sit down with them, the woman who cannot get out of bed in the morning, the woman polishing the same place on the table over and over and over, reading labels in the supermarket as if they were in a foreign language, looking into a drawer where there is a butcher knife. ... The scapegoat is different from the martyr; she cannot teach resistance or revolt. She represents a terrible temptation: to suffer uniquely, to assume that I, the individual woman, am the "problem" [277].Millett might have used material like this, for Rich could easily have been writing about Gertrude Baniszewski, who suffered chronically from asthma and so couldn't hold a job, whose common-law husband beat her (when he was around at all), who took in ironing -- and Sylvia and Jenny Likens -- to earn a little money. It is one of the flaws of The Basement that she did not, for it may be that a reader who has not read Firestone or Rich or, for that matter, John Holt's excellent book Escape from Childhood, may fail to understand why Sylvia Likens' ordeal was unique mainly in degree.
Consider why Sylvia didn't try to run away from her torturers. Millett gives a number of good reasons: she couldn't abandon Jenny to them, they had broken her spirit, and she had no faith in other adults' willingness to protect her. Indeed Millett argues correctly that before Sylvia's bruised and starved condition was visible -- after which she did make at least one futile attempt to escape -- she would most likely have been sent back to Gertrude's house by any adult she sought out. But would anyone believe this who hasn't read John Holt's account, in Escape from Childhood, of a six-year-old Chicago boy who begged social workers not to return him to his father from the foster home where he had been placed? Those benign adults sent him back to his "real home," where four months later his father beat him to death.
One reason Sylvia Likens' story is so threatening is that it shows that adults don't necessarily know what is best for children, and I am not referring here to Gertrude Baniszewski. I am talking about the neighbors who heard Sylvia's screams but accepted Gertrude's explanation that the girl was incorrigible, boy-crazy, a thief, a tramp. How frighteningly easily she seems to have convinced them. No one seems to have bothered to ask about Sylvia's side of the story until it was too late -- not the neighbors, not the pastor, not the public health nurse who came to see Gertrude because she had been told there was a child in the house with running sores. (Everybody wants to be reassured that Sylvia wasn't a prostitute, as if that makes any difference at all.) And if adults can make such errors of judgment in such an extreme case, who can doubt that they err every day in less extreme ones? And if they do, how can anyone argue that adults should have the power to punish children, to correct them, to direct their lives? My word, we can't even direct our own. There is no question that parents, including mothers, have all too often compensated for their own feelings of helplessness by exercising power over their children.
The "boylove" controversy that raised so many hackles in these pages during the past year is relevant here. Opponents of child/adult sexual relationships who argued that such relationships were necessarily exploitative were amazingly uncritical of the unequal power distribution in all other child/adult relationships. Usually they called for more "protection" of children by adults. When men offer to "protect" women we know what is really meant. I think children can best be protected by giving them more real control over their lives. Certainly one lesson of The Basement is that Sylvia Likens died partly because she had too little autonomy even though she was accused of having too much.
The only trouble with The Basement is that it doesn't go deep enough. It touches on the plight of children, but too briefly. But more important, Kate Millett has let herself hide behind her projections of Sylvia and Gertrude, which do not connect us to them or to her. I kept wishing she would say something about the sculptures she created out of her obsession with Sylvia, and more of the process by which she came to understand the meaning of that obsession, her identification with the girl in the basement. After fourteen years, Sylvia Likens and Gertrude Baniszewski remain opaque to her, if we are to judge by her attempts to imitate their voices. If she had told us more about Kate Millett, she would have told us more about them as well -- as in her previous books, by telling us about herself she has told us about ourselves.
Sunday, June 3, 2007
By Their Fruits Shall Ye Know Them
When Brokeback Mountain became a middling hit a couple of years ago,there was speculation that its success might inspire Hollywood to dust off some long-stalled gay projects. Patricia Nell Warren's 1974 novel The Front Runner, about the love between an Olympic runner and his coach, or Peter Lefcourt's The Dreyfus Affair, about the coming out of a gay pro baseball player, were titles I saw mentioned. According to IMDB, both of those are scheduled for 2007 release, but only Dreyfus is listed as in production, meaning a script is being written. The Front Runner, like Jesus, has been on the verge of coming for a long time now. We'll see.
But now we're seeing the first fruits, so to speak, of Hollywood's new gay-friendliness: I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, starring Adam Sandler and Kevin James as two straight firefighters who pose as gay in order to get domestic partner benefits. Though it isn't scheduled for release until July, there's already a thriving controversy about Chuck and Larry in the IMDB message boards, based on the trailer. (One user reported having seen and enjoyed a preview screening.)
Based on the trailer, I see no reason whatsoever to see this film. (If someone else wants to pay for my ticket, I'll consider it, just so I can write about it from a better-informed perspective.) Not because it makes gays look bad, but because it makes straights look bad. Haw haw haw, at their wedding (a wedding? I guess a mere domestic partnership wasn´t funny enough) Sandler slugs James when he starts to obey the rabbi's (Chinese [though played by a gwailo in the true Hollywood tradition], with a thick accent and thicker glasses) instruction to kiss his new husband. The wedding is an expensive affair, but apparently there was no rehearsal, so the instruction apparently came as a complete surprise. Recovering his balance, Sandler explains that that's how they get it on in their household, and the rabbi leers approvingly. Haw haw haw, what fresh, inventive humor! Could I ever get tired of seeing a straight guy prove his manhood by violence at the threat of a man's lips on his, erm, lips? (And I'm just as annoyed when queens express disgust at the thought of kissing a woman. I've kissed a few women in my time, and a few straight guys have kissed me, without any detectable nausea. Bigotry is disgusting; kissing is not.)
But as I said, this all makes straights look bad, not gays. Not that Sandler's going to relax and give James a smooch later on, I daresay. The hot city attorney (Jessica Biel, looking a bit leathery, but I'm not a straight boy) who investigates the pair to see if they're really gay, decides to seduce Sandler (whose boyish charms, such as they are, are fading). So there are numerous shots of Biel undressing in front of Sandler, assuring him that her breasts are real, etc., while Sandler drools like a bloodhound over a bowl of fresh chopped liver. Haw haw haw, what creativity! Who's ever seen anything like this before, a straight guy going cross-eyed over a pair of female breasts? Just in case you might suspect that Adam Sandler might be turning queer, even in a movie; don't worry, boys and girls, they checked his pulse and other vital signs after the daily breast exposures, and he's still All Man.
It's really daring of Paramount to blaze this trail. Of course, this trail is already as well travelled as, erm, well, you know, I don't think I'll go there. Anyway, Chuck and Larry appears to be a cross between Some Like It Hot (which was a lot more daring, even for the early 21st century let alone the 1950s), the Hope-Crosby Road movies that featured a lot of fag jokes, and a green-card comedy like Green Card or Ang Lee's The Wedding Banquet. (Mark Rappaport´s documentary The Silver Screen: Color Me Lavender contains a good look at the male-anxiety fag jokes in the Road movies, by the way.)
In The Wedding Banquet, a gay Chinese pretends to be straight to provide a young Chinese woman with a green card, and incidentally trick his parents into stop nagging him to get married. It has plenty of humor, plus some pathos, and its relatively weak production values don't get in the way. The Wedding Banquet did quite well, both in the US and in Lee's native Taiwan, and stayed popular enough to be remade as a stage musical. Fourteen years later, emboldened by the breakthroughs of GLBT independent cinema, Hollywood is still giving us shite like Chuck and Larry.
But hey, I'm the very model of a modern post-modernist -- I know there's no such thing as progress. I don't think Chuck and Larry will do any real harm; it's just a symptom, not a cause, of the homophobia that still saturates American society. If it confuses marriage with civil union with domestic partnership, well, most Americans (including gay ones) are confused. I don´t object to gay humor itself; I was very entertained, for example, by The Naked Gun movies, which portrayed Lt. Frank Drebin (Leslie Neilsen) as a pious homophobe with a weakness for men. ("Sex, Frank?" "Uh, no, not right now, Ed.") If Adam Sandler's character were to turn out to have been a regular in the Ramble (the infamous cruising area of Central Park) in between scouring the singles bars for babes, that might be funny. Or funnier, at least. And of course there have been plenty of gay comedies, where gay men and lesbians made fun of our own foibles, often to hilarious effect. Straight people are welcome to laugh at us with us, as far as I'm concerned. But, even if Chuck and Larry contains a few liberal platitudes about the importance of tolerance and acceptance for Them (i.e., Us), this kind of comedy is concerned with keeping the boundaries sharply and clearly defined. It's been done, you know? On the basis of the trailer and the excuses that are already being made for Chuck and Larry, I'm not even slightly tempted to spend my money to see it.
But now we're seeing the first fruits, so to speak, of Hollywood's new gay-friendliness: I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, starring Adam Sandler and Kevin James as two straight firefighters who pose as gay in order to get domestic partner benefits. Though it isn't scheduled for release until July, there's already a thriving controversy about Chuck and Larry in the IMDB message boards, based on the trailer. (One user reported having seen and enjoyed a preview screening.)
Based on the trailer, I see no reason whatsoever to see this film. (If someone else wants to pay for my ticket, I'll consider it, just so I can write about it from a better-informed perspective.) Not because it makes gays look bad, but because it makes straights look bad. Haw haw haw, at their wedding (a wedding? I guess a mere domestic partnership wasn´t funny enough) Sandler slugs James when he starts to obey the rabbi's (Chinese [though played by a gwailo in the true Hollywood tradition], with a thick accent and thicker glasses) instruction to kiss his new husband. The wedding is an expensive affair, but apparently there was no rehearsal, so the instruction apparently came as a complete surprise. Recovering his balance, Sandler explains that that's how they get it on in their household, and the rabbi leers approvingly. Haw haw haw, what fresh, inventive humor! Could I ever get tired of seeing a straight guy prove his manhood by violence at the threat of a man's lips on his, erm, lips? (And I'm just as annoyed when queens express disgust at the thought of kissing a woman. I've kissed a few women in my time, and a few straight guys have kissed me, without any detectable nausea. Bigotry is disgusting; kissing is not.)
But as I said, this all makes straights look bad, not gays. Not that Sandler's going to relax and give James a smooch later on, I daresay. The hot city attorney (Jessica Biel, looking a bit leathery, but I'm not a straight boy) who investigates the pair to see if they're really gay, decides to seduce Sandler (whose boyish charms, such as they are, are fading). So there are numerous shots of Biel undressing in front of Sandler, assuring him that her breasts are real, etc., while Sandler drools like a bloodhound over a bowl of fresh chopped liver. Haw haw haw, what creativity! Who's ever seen anything like this before, a straight guy going cross-eyed over a pair of female breasts? Just in case you might suspect that Adam Sandler might be turning queer, even in a movie; don't worry, boys and girls, they checked his pulse and other vital signs after the daily breast exposures, and he's still All Man.
It's really daring of Paramount to blaze this trail. Of course, this trail is already as well travelled as, erm, well, you know, I don't think I'll go there. Anyway, Chuck and Larry appears to be a cross between Some Like It Hot (which was a lot more daring, even for the early 21st century let alone the 1950s), the Hope-Crosby Road movies that featured a lot of fag jokes, and a green-card comedy like Green Card or Ang Lee's The Wedding Banquet. (Mark Rappaport´s documentary The Silver Screen: Color Me Lavender contains a good look at the male-anxiety fag jokes in the Road movies, by the way.)
In The Wedding Banquet, a gay Chinese pretends to be straight to provide a young Chinese woman with a green card, and incidentally trick his parents into stop nagging him to get married. It has plenty of humor, plus some pathos, and its relatively weak production values don't get in the way. The Wedding Banquet did quite well, both in the US and in Lee's native Taiwan, and stayed popular enough to be remade as a stage musical. Fourteen years later, emboldened by the breakthroughs of GLBT independent cinema, Hollywood is still giving us shite like Chuck and Larry.
But hey, I'm the very model of a modern post-modernist -- I know there's no such thing as progress. I don't think Chuck and Larry will do any real harm; it's just a symptom, not a cause, of the homophobia that still saturates American society. If it confuses marriage with civil union with domestic partnership, well, most Americans (including gay ones) are confused. I don´t object to gay humor itself; I was very entertained, for example, by The Naked Gun movies, which portrayed Lt. Frank Drebin (Leslie Neilsen) as a pious homophobe with a weakness for men. ("Sex, Frank?" "Uh, no, not right now, Ed.") If Adam Sandler's character were to turn out to have been a regular in the Ramble (the infamous cruising area of Central Park) in between scouring the singles bars for babes, that might be funny. Or funnier, at least. And of course there have been plenty of gay comedies, where gay men and lesbians made fun of our own foibles, often to hilarious effect. Straight people are welcome to laugh at us with us, as far as I'm concerned. But, even if Chuck and Larry contains a few liberal platitudes about the importance of tolerance and acceptance for Them (i.e., Us), this kind of comedy is concerned with keeping the boundaries sharply and clearly defined. It's been done, you know? On the basis of the trailer and the excuses that are already being made for Chuck and Larry, I'm not even slightly tempted to spend my money to see it.
Saturday, June 2, 2007
Stopping Bravely At The Surface
Lamenting gay men's shallow obsession with looks is always good for livening up a slow session in a chat room or for taking a break while guy-watching at the bar. Of course, the complaint is almost always about other gay men's shallowness. I can't recall ever having heard someone moan, "I'm so shallow -- all I care about is looks. Personality doesn't matter to me at all." Very often the underlying complaint turns out to be that some hot guy has judged the complainer by his looks, not by his personality. That the complainer might pursue someone else's inner beauty doesn't seem to be an option.
Case in point: some time ago, five HIV-positive men wrote on gay.com about the adjustments they were having to make because of the effects of the virus and their medications on their formerly hot, buff, toned bodies. All of them wrote in terms of maintaining their own self-esteem, and argued that other men should appreciate them for their personalities, not for their deteriorating flesh. None of them spoke of rethinking their own attitudes to other men's looks; all of them took for granted that the gym-toned body of a porn star or an advertising model was the only desirable body possible -- but now, with their bodies failing them, they demanded that other men lose this obsession with "the perfect body", and look at their inner beauty. I can't say I sympathize with them much. Men like these think of being gay as a competitive sport, a view they're welcome to. But in every athlete's life a time comes when he can't cut it any more, for whatever reason. I am more interested in other ways of being gay. I want to suggest another possibility, one which I think all of us know on some level, but I don't often (if ever) see put into words.
We already desire men who don't resemble the porn video ideal, and we should indulge and celebrate that liking. Look around you: lots of guys who will never appear in a Tom Bianchi coffee-table book have boyfriends, often of long standing. I was never a hot hunky stud even when I was young; yet I've been able to find boyfriends, lovers, and a fair number of non-committed sexual partners. These boyfriends, lovers, and sexual partners weren't coffee-table book material either, but I didn't feel I was making do with second-best. There are many kinds of beauty and sexiness in the world. There are different kinds of "perfect" looks, if we understand that word to mean "perfect" for pushing my erotic buttons, or yours.
The trouble isn't gay men's fixation on looks in general, but their schoolyard determination to police each other's tastes, to narrow the range of acceptable desire to a junior high school level. In the early 1970s, when I was freshly out and socializing in groups of gay men, we would often compare notes on passersby in the Commons of the student union building. This was partly a way of bonding against the straight world, and of validating our desire for other men; partly, as with straight men, an erotic sharing of the people we rated. But it was also a way of ruling some men out of bounds as objects of desire. Some men you must want; others you must not want.
I soon learned that many of the men I wanted were out of bounds. I tended to like younger, boyish-looking men; but since we and the passing scenery were almost all college undergraduates, this didn't involve much of an age gap. (Need I mention that visibly older men were also out of bounds? Or non-white men?) Mostly, though, I think the men I singled out were just the wrong men. They didn't look remotely like porn stars, actors, or clones, and lacked the calculated, ironic masculinity that gay objects of desire were supposed to have. They didn't have gym-toned bodies; they were too thin or too chunky -- in short, they were just Average Guys, the kind of men who wouldn't stand out in the crowd. But they stood out for me. My media crushes in those days were Bud Cort in Harold and Maude and more esoterically, Hakan Hagegard, the Papageno in Ingmar Bergman's film version of The Magic Flute. Having already decided by coming out that I could resist pressure from the heterosexual majority, I brushed aside the same kind of pressure from my gay peers. It was years before I fully recognized it as pressure.
I think I was about thirty when an old friend told me that when some mutual acquaintances commented negatively on my taste in men, he told them cheerfully: "Someone has to love people like that; let's be glad it's Duncan, and not us!" Notice that even in my absence I could be the object of gossip and censure for failing to fit in. How much could it matter to them if I was attracted to men they didn't want, or if I didn't want men they wanted? A fair amount, evidently.
I don't know exactly who my critics were, but knowing my local community, I doubt that any of them came up to the community standards they were trying to enforce. (Someone has to love people like that -- I'm glad it's their boyfriends, and not me!) I wonder now how much of my outsider status among local gay men comes not just from my outdated, liberationist politics, or from my personal combativeness, or from having been prematurely openly gay (though all of these are surely factors) -- and how much comes from my liking the wrong men. I suspect too that I could get away with dating the Wrong men, if only I would pay lip service to the superiority of the Right ones. (This resembles the way that political right wingers consider it okay to dodge military service, as long as you vocally support whichever war you'd presently rather not fight in.)
The remedy is not to substitute another single look. The Bear movement valorizes a look the exact opposite of the Bianchi Boys', but too often bears can't affirm their own type without putting down others. I've heard a lot of sneering among bears at "twinks" and other undesirables. Not all bears do this, of course: when one guy in a bears' newsgroup went into hysterics over a rumor that some famous leather daddy had shaved off his famous moustache, several others tried to cajole him into a more sensible attitude. But "woof" and "eeuuww" among bears serve the same boundary-drawing function they do among other gays, or among straights: to police each other's desires. I'm in with the In Crowd, both because I would do Mr. X in a New York minute, and because I wouldn't touch Mr. Y with a ten-foot pole.
This policing assumes that sexual desire is a natural -- indeed, genetically programmed! -- response to very specific and fairly rare physical traits, a gift of the genes or the fruit of long intense labor in the gym. Talk of gay men's obsession with "looks" usually means only one look: the kind of men whose photographs appear in photography books aimed at a gay male market, with just enough variation permitted to include some chest hair or a tasteful sprinkling of salt and pepper in the severely trimmed beard. That, and only that, is beauty; it can be objectively determined and scientifically measured. No one else has any looks to be attracted to. Either you've got it, and may commune with the other members of the inner circle; or you are condemned to the outer darkness, jerking off to photos of the elite, wishing that others could see your inner Ryan Philippe, buried beneath the flab and acne.
I suppose there must be some gay men who genuinely can't get it up for anyone but a Tom Bianchi model, but I don't believe they are a majority. (Personally, I'm not sure I could get it up for a Bianchi muscle queen; they look grotesque to me. But to each his own.) After 35 years in and around gay men's communities, I know that most gay men can and do take genuine delight in men who don't fit the porn star ideal. Some may feel that they are settling for second-best, just as many gay men feel that being gay is second-best to being straight; but not all do.
The models and celebrities who are promoted as ideals for all the world actually represent the lowest common denominator of beauty: the faces and bodies which large numbers of people can agree are desirable. Because they are comparatively rare, access to their images can be controlled and parcelled out, as posters or magazine photos, or the vast peep show of movies and television. But the media couldn't do this if people didn't already have a tendency they could exploit.
Now, please bear in mind: I'm not saying that these lowest common denominators are unattractive. What I'm saying is that they aren't the only people who are attractive. Go ahead and fantasize about Ben Affleck or Matt Damon or whoever is the current Hollywood flavor of the month. And if Ben or Matt comes knocking at your door to tell you he must have you or he'll die, accept him with my blessings. (I'm burning a light in my window for Eric Tsang myself.) But if you're so busy fantasizing about starlets and models that you can't see the guy across the street who will never get closer to Hollywood than a studio tour on his vacation, but who for some reason stirs your deeper feelings anyway -- well, it's your loss.
People who like competition can dream of winning the love of one of these lowest common denominators, and being envied by millions; which means that only one person in millions can get what he or she wants. The rarity of these ideal objects of desire is assumed to be part of their appeal: being desired by millions supposedly makes them special. Oddly, being one of the millions who desire them doesn't stigmatize you as one of the ignorant, debased masses. Since polls show that about 75 to 80 percent of Americans consider themselves above average, I suppose each of the drooling millions sees himself (or herself) as standing out among the crowd, the One who will win the lottery for the heart of the Homecoming King.
Let me try to make this as clear as possible: I am not telling gay men (or anyone else) to have sex with people they're not attracted to. I am not arguing that gay men should change their sexual tastes, trying through sheer will-power to crave non-buff non-hunks; if anything, it's most critics of gay male looksism who talk as if they believed that. (Close your eyes, think of England and fuck his personality. It's an odd notion to encounter in individuals who believe that we are born with our sexual desires genetically programmed into us, and that they are absolutely impossible to change.) I'm not even saying that my taste in men is superior to that of most gay men. What I am saying is that our tastes are already broader than we admit.
Why don't we admit it, then? Damned if I know. As I said at the beginning, (other) gay men's shallowness and obsession with superficial beauty is virtually a cliché, and has been for a long time. It's widely, almost universally believed. Everybody knows that gay men are, like, totally obsessed with looks. But what everybody knows is often false, and this case is no exception. (A related case where what "everybody knows" is false is the belief that nobody desires gay men over a certain age -- 30? 25? -- the "nobody loves you when you're old and gay" line.) Again, the complainers are usually the ones who are obsessed, though they project it onto others: for example, the aging men who aren't interested in other aging men, but who complain that younger men won't look at them. It's always the other guy who is supposed to compromise his sexual integrity.
Aren't people's personalities important, then? Of course. But, having neither X-ray vision nor telepathy, I can't look inside a person and see his personality. The thing is, bodies matter too. If personality were everything, we could just find ourselves nice women for lovers and save ourselves a lot of grief. If gay men (and not only gay men) will simply acknowledge the desires we already have in their full range -- not just the narrow range peddled by our peers -- we'll find a lot of beauty and sexiness around us.
It's a common gripe in the chat rooms that guys who claim to be "VGL" (Very Good Looking) very often are not. I think, though, that someone who labels himself Very Good Looking is telling me something about his personality. I'm just as skeptical of guys who bill themselves as "nice," "friendly," or "great personality." Unlike physical traits, personality can be evaluated over the Net. Not perfectly -- cyberspace discriminates against people who can't express themselves fluently through a keyboard -- but over time you get a sense of who you're talking to. If you are a nice guy, others will figure that out for themselves.
It's true off the net, too. Even in a one-night stand, interpersonal chemistry and compatibility help make the difference between good and bad sex. If you go on seeing the same guy awhile, you will increasingly deal with his personality whether you want to or not. Does he show up when he says he will? Does he notice whether what he's doing in bed feels good to you? These things matter even in the most fleeting sexual encounter, and they are expressions of his personality -- as how you treat him is an expression of yours. You can't photograph a personality. It exists in time, and only through time do you get to know someone else, no matter what he looks like.
What I'm saying here will probably mean little to those American gay men (both of them?) who are fully satisfied with their sexual and emotional lives. That's fine. I'm addressing those who are dissatisfied, but not to tell them what they can do to change other gay men -- those other gay men are you yourselves. (As for me, I already like the Wrong Men, remember?) Here are some ideas for changing ourselves. They're not final or set in stone. Other people will have other suggestions. We need to hear them too.
First, don't say derogatory things about other people's appearance, or about the kind of people they find attractive. You're not obligated to have sex with people you find unappealing, but you're not entitled to insult them either. Try not to be one of those people who take the existence of people they consider unattractive as a personal affront. The fat woman next door, the old man (he must be, like, at least twenty-five!) who smiles at you at the bar, the gross guy at the gym with hair on his back -- they aren't living just to ruin your day.
Second, turn off your TV for a while, and pass up the next two or three (or more) Hollywood films. Buy some non-glossy magazines, magazines without undraped models pimping for clothes, underwear, toiletries -- and read the articles. Box up the porn collection and put it out of convenient reach for a month. Looking at commercial media images tends to make me dissatisfied with the real people around me. I find myself wanting one of those guys in the catalog, who may be for rent but they aren't for sale. I suppose there's no reason why commercial media shouldn't capitalize on the human tendency to flock like sheep and go bleating after someone else's goal, but we don't have to give them our money -- especially for a "commodity" that's in abundant supply all around us.
Third, look at the real people around you. If your local bar is too dark and smoky for you to see them, find a better-lit alternative. If you are lucky enough to have alternatives in your city, use them. I've had a lot of good experience in gay discussion groups, as a way of making friends and even for finding boyfriends. Talking in a group takes the pressure off each individual, giving you time to see someone's face, to see what happens to it when he talks, and to hear what he has to say.
If you live in a city large enough that its gym queens can fill a club, so you can pretend that no other gay men exist, then you also live in a city with alternatives to that scene. If you spend all your gay social time in such clubs, don't blame the "media" or even "the gay community" for pressuring you into it.
If you don't live in a city that large, then you will see gay men who aren't gym queens whenever you go out. Stop pretending that they're second-class trash who shouldn't be let in (that's you, dummy), and start looking at them. Ask yourself if you have a personality, though, before you deign to approach; you might not be, indeed probably are not, good enough for them.
Finally, if you're bored all the time -- and "bored" turns up with disturbing regularity in chat profiles, sometimes as a mere code word for "horny" but often as simple truth -- then you're boring. No matter where you live, there are things to do, people to meet, interests to cultivate. If there really aren't, then find something that interests you and do it yourself. I'm a big believer in DIY (Do It Yourself), so I urge people to start gay book groups, gay baseball teams, discussion groups, choruses, antique shopping outings -- whatever -- where they don't exist already. (Contrary to one gay man's indignant reaction when I mentioned these ideas to him, this is not "Balkanization." Putting everyone together into one big Nuremberg rally is, however, fascist. People need to learn to live in and enjoy a world of difference, not try to eliminate it.)
A crucial requirement is that whenever it's possible, these activities and events should be public, announced in local community calendars or their equivalent, not just restricted to your clique and their boyfriends. Otherwise you're shutting out the people you need to include. It doesn't matter if everyone in the group is cute, or "straight-acting," let alone "hot." There will be pressure to be more selective, lest people think that the group is nothing but queens; this pressure must be resisted, and jeered at. It's okay to have purely social friendship circles, even cliques, but we also need public group-based activities that are open to anyone who's interested in them. Newbies should be welcomed by at least one established member of the group, whether they're cute or not.
So, join me at the (rather ample) margins of gay male life: those of us who like non-buff non-hunks, and don't feel we're making do with second best. Let those who just have to date gym queens segregate themselves in the circuit parties and the exclusive clubs; it'll keep them out of our hair. Though I suspect, to be honest, that some of the gym queens will eventually notice that life is richer, more interesting, more humane at the margins. Some of them already harbor guilty longings for the nerd next door. There's plenty of room, even for the lowest common denominator of looks. Join the conversation, guys, and explore the rest of your selves.
Case in point: some time ago, five HIV-positive men wrote on gay.com about the adjustments they were having to make because of the effects of the virus and their medications on their formerly hot, buff, toned bodies. All of them wrote in terms of maintaining their own self-esteem, and argued that other men should appreciate them for their personalities, not for their deteriorating flesh. None of them spoke of rethinking their own attitudes to other men's looks; all of them took for granted that the gym-toned body of a porn star or an advertising model was the only desirable body possible -- but now, with their bodies failing them, they demanded that other men lose this obsession with "the perfect body", and look at their inner beauty. I can't say I sympathize with them much. Men like these think of being gay as a competitive sport, a view they're welcome to. But in every athlete's life a time comes when he can't cut it any more, for whatever reason. I am more interested in other ways of being gay. I want to suggest another possibility, one which I think all of us know on some level, but I don't often (if ever) see put into words.
We already desire men who don't resemble the porn video ideal, and we should indulge and celebrate that liking. Look around you: lots of guys who will never appear in a Tom Bianchi coffee-table book have boyfriends, often of long standing. I was never a hot hunky stud even when I was young; yet I've been able to find boyfriends, lovers, and a fair number of non-committed sexual partners. These boyfriends, lovers, and sexual partners weren't coffee-table book material either, but I didn't feel I was making do with second-best. There are many kinds of beauty and sexiness in the world. There are different kinds of "perfect" looks, if we understand that word to mean "perfect" for pushing my erotic buttons, or yours.
The trouble isn't gay men's fixation on looks in general, but their schoolyard determination to police each other's tastes, to narrow the range of acceptable desire to a junior high school level. In the early 1970s, when I was freshly out and socializing in groups of gay men, we would often compare notes on passersby in the Commons of the student union building. This was partly a way of bonding against the straight world, and of validating our desire for other men; partly, as with straight men, an erotic sharing of the people we rated. But it was also a way of ruling some men out of bounds as objects of desire. Some men you must want; others you must not want.
I soon learned that many of the men I wanted were out of bounds. I tended to like younger, boyish-looking men; but since we and the passing scenery were almost all college undergraduates, this didn't involve much of an age gap. (Need I mention that visibly older men were also out of bounds? Or non-white men?) Mostly, though, I think the men I singled out were just the wrong men. They didn't look remotely like porn stars, actors, or clones, and lacked the calculated, ironic masculinity that gay objects of desire were supposed to have. They didn't have gym-toned bodies; they were too thin or too chunky -- in short, they were just Average Guys, the kind of men who wouldn't stand out in the crowd. But they stood out for me. My media crushes in those days were Bud Cort in Harold and Maude and more esoterically, Hakan Hagegard, the Papageno in Ingmar Bergman's film version of The Magic Flute. Having already decided by coming out that I could resist pressure from the heterosexual majority, I brushed aside the same kind of pressure from my gay peers. It was years before I fully recognized it as pressure.
I think I was about thirty when an old friend told me that when some mutual acquaintances commented negatively on my taste in men, he told them cheerfully: "Someone has to love people like that; let's be glad it's Duncan, and not us!" Notice that even in my absence I could be the object of gossip and censure for failing to fit in. How much could it matter to them if I was attracted to men they didn't want, or if I didn't want men they wanted? A fair amount, evidently.
I don't know exactly who my critics were, but knowing my local community, I doubt that any of them came up to the community standards they were trying to enforce. (Someone has to love people like that -- I'm glad it's their boyfriends, and not me!) I wonder now how much of my outsider status among local gay men comes not just from my outdated, liberationist politics, or from my personal combativeness, or from having been prematurely openly gay (though all of these are surely factors) -- and how much comes from my liking the wrong men. I suspect too that I could get away with dating the Wrong men, if only I would pay lip service to the superiority of the Right ones. (This resembles the way that political right wingers consider it okay to dodge military service, as long as you vocally support whichever war you'd presently rather not fight in.)
The remedy is not to substitute another single look. The Bear movement valorizes a look the exact opposite of the Bianchi Boys', but too often bears can't affirm their own type without putting down others. I've heard a lot of sneering among bears at "twinks" and other undesirables. Not all bears do this, of course: when one guy in a bears' newsgroup went into hysterics over a rumor that some famous leather daddy had shaved off his famous moustache, several others tried to cajole him into a more sensible attitude. But "woof" and "eeuuww" among bears serve the same boundary-drawing function they do among other gays, or among straights: to police each other's desires. I'm in with the In Crowd, both because I would do Mr. X in a New York minute, and because I wouldn't touch Mr. Y with a ten-foot pole.
This policing assumes that sexual desire is a natural -- indeed, genetically programmed! -- response to very specific and fairly rare physical traits, a gift of the genes or the fruit of long intense labor in the gym. Talk of gay men's obsession with "looks" usually means only one look: the kind of men whose photographs appear in photography books aimed at a gay male market, with just enough variation permitted to include some chest hair or a tasteful sprinkling of salt and pepper in the severely trimmed beard. That, and only that, is beauty; it can be objectively determined and scientifically measured. No one else has any looks to be attracted to. Either you've got it, and may commune with the other members of the inner circle; or you are condemned to the outer darkness, jerking off to photos of the elite, wishing that others could see your inner Ryan Philippe, buried beneath the flab and acne.
I suppose there must be some gay men who genuinely can't get it up for anyone but a Tom Bianchi model, but I don't believe they are a majority. (Personally, I'm not sure I could get it up for a Bianchi muscle queen; they look grotesque to me. But to each his own.) After 35 years in and around gay men's communities, I know that most gay men can and do take genuine delight in men who don't fit the porn star ideal. Some may feel that they are settling for second-best, just as many gay men feel that being gay is second-best to being straight; but not all do.
The models and celebrities who are promoted as ideals for all the world actually represent the lowest common denominator of beauty: the faces and bodies which large numbers of people can agree are desirable. Because they are comparatively rare, access to their images can be controlled and parcelled out, as posters or magazine photos, or the vast peep show of movies and television. But the media couldn't do this if people didn't already have a tendency they could exploit.
Now, please bear in mind: I'm not saying that these lowest common denominators are unattractive. What I'm saying is that they aren't the only people who are attractive. Go ahead and fantasize about Ben Affleck or Matt Damon or whoever is the current Hollywood flavor of the month. And if Ben or Matt comes knocking at your door to tell you he must have you or he'll die, accept him with my blessings. (I'm burning a light in my window for Eric Tsang myself.) But if you're so busy fantasizing about starlets and models that you can't see the guy across the street who will never get closer to Hollywood than a studio tour on his vacation, but who for some reason stirs your deeper feelings anyway -- well, it's your loss.
People who like competition can dream of winning the love of one of these lowest common denominators, and being envied by millions; which means that only one person in millions can get what he or she wants. The rarity of these ideal objects of desire is assumed to be part of their appeal: being desired by millions supposedly makes them special. Oddly, being one of the millions who desire them doesn't stigmatize you as one of the ignorant, debased masses. Since polls show that about 75 to 80 percent of Americans consider themselves above average, I suppose each of the drooling millions sees himself (or herself) as standing out among the crowd, the One who will win the lottery for the heart of the Homecoming King.
Let me try to make this as clear as possible: I am not telling gay men (or anyone else) to have sex with people they're not attracted to. I am not arguing that gay men should change their sexual tastes, trying through sheer will-power to crave non-buff non-hunks; if anything, it's most critics of gay male looksism who talk as if they believed that. (Close your eyes, think of England and fuck his personality. It's an odd notion to encounter in individuals who believe that we are born with our sexual desires genetically programmed into us, and that they are absolutely impossible to change.) I'm not even saying that my taste in men is superior to that of most gay men. What I am saying is that our tastes are already broader than we admit.
Why don't we admit it, then? Damned if I know. As I said at the beginning, (other) gay men's shallowness and obsession with superficial beauty is virtually a cliché, and has been for a long time. It's widely, almost universally believed. Everybody knows that gay men are, like, totally obsessed with looks. But what everybody knows is often false, and this case is no exception. (A related case where what "everybody knows" is false is the belief that nobody desires gay men over a certain age -- 30? 25? -- the "nobody loves you when you're old and gay" line.) Again, the complainers are usually the ones who are obsessed, though they project it onto others: for example, the aging men who aren't interested in other aging men, but who complain that younger men won't look at them. It's always the other guy who is supposed to compromise his sexual integrity.
Aren't people's personalities important, then? Of course. But, having neither X-ray vision nor telepathy, I can't look inside a person and see his personality. The thing is, bodies matter too. If personality were everything, we could just find ourselves nice women for lovers and save ourselves a lot of grief. If gay men (and not only gay men) will simply acknowledge the desires we already have in their full range -- not just the narrow range peddled by our peers -- we'll find a lot of beauty and sexiness around us.
It's a common gripe in the chat rooms that guys who claim to be "VGL" (Very Good Looking) very often are not. I think, though, that someone who labels himself Very Good Looking is telling me something about his personality. I'm just as skeptical of guys who bill themselves as "nice," "friendly," or "great personality." Unlike physical traits, personality can be evaluated over the Net. Not perfectly -- cyberspace discriminates against people who can't express themselves fluently through a keyboard -- but over time you get a sense of who you're talking to. If you are a nice guy, others will figure that out for themselves.
It's true off the net, too. Even in a one-night stand, interpersonal chemistry and compatibility help make the difference between good and bad sex. If you go on seeing the same guy awhile, you will increasingly deal with his personality whether you want to or not. Does he show up when he says he will? Does he notice whether what he's doing in bed feels good to you? These things matter even in the most fleeting sexual encounter, and they are expressions of his personality -- as how you treat him is an expression of yours. You can't photograph a personality. It exists in time, and only through time do you get to know someone else, no matter what he looks like.
What I'm saying here will probably mean little to those American gay men (both of them?) who are fully satisfied with their sexual and emotional lives. That's fine. I'm addressing those who are dissatisfied, but not to tell them what they can do to change other gay men -- those other gay men are you yourselves. (As for me, I already like the Wrong Men, remember?) Here are some ideas for changing ourselves. They're not final or set in stone. Other people will have other suggestions. We need to hear them too.
First, don't say derogatory things about other people's appearance, or about the kind of people they find attractive. You're not obligated to have sex with people you find unappealing, but you're not entitled to insult them either. Try not to be one of those people who take the existence of people they consider unattractive as a personal affront. The fat woman next door, the old man (he must be, like, at least twenty-five!) who smiles at you at the bar, the gross guy at the gym with hair on his back -- they aren't living just to ruin your day.
Second, turn off your TV for a while, and pass up the next two or three (or more) Hollywood films. Buy some non-glossy magazines, magazines without undraped models pimping for clothes, underwear, toiletries -- and read the articles. Box up the porn collection and put it out of convenient reach for a month. Looking at commercial media images tends to make me dissatisfied with the real people around me. I find myself wanting one of those guys in the catalog, who may be for rent but they aren't for sale. I suppose there's no reason why commercial media shouldn't capitalize on the human tendency to flock like sheep and go bleating after someone else's goal, but we don't have to give them our money -- especially for a "commodity" that's in abundant supply all around us.
Third, look at the real people around you. If your local bar is too dark and smoky for you to see them, find a better-lit alternative. If you are lucky enough to have alternatives in your city, use them. I've had a lot of good experience in gay discussion groups, as a way of making friends and even for finding boyfriends. Talking in a group takes the pressure off each individual, giving you time to see someone's face, to see what happens to it when he talks, and to hear what he has to say.
If you live in a city large enough that its gym queens can fill a club, so you can pretend that no other gay men exist, then you also live in a city with alternatives to that scene. If you spend all your gay social time in such clubs, don't blame the "media" or even "the gay community" for pressuring you into it.
If you don't live in a city that large, then you will see gay men who aren't gym queens whenever you go out. Stop pretending that they're second-class trash who shouldn't be let in (that's you, dummy), and start looking at them. Ask yourself if you have a personality, though, before you deign to approach; you might not be, indeed probably are not, good enough for them.
Finally, if you're bored all the time -- and "bored" turns up with disturbing regularity in chat profiles, sometimes as a mere code word for "horny" but often as simple truth -- then you're boring. No matter where you live, there are things to do, people to meet, interests to cultivate. If there really aren't, then find something that interests you and do it yourself. I'm a big believer in DIY (Do It Yourself), so I urge people to start gay book groups, gay baseball teams, discussion groups, choruses, antique shopping outings -- whatever -- where they don't exist already. (Contrary to one gay man's indignant reaction when I mentioned these ideas to him, this is not "Balkanization." Putting everyone together into one big Nuremberg rally is, however, fascist. People need to learn to live in and enjoy a world of difference, not try to eliminate it.)
A crucial requirement is that whenever it's possible, these activities and events should be public, announced in local community calendars or their equivalent, not just restricted to your clique and their boyfriends. Otherwise you're shutting out the people you need to include. It doesn't matter if everyone in the group is cute, or "straight-acting," let alone "hot." There will be pressure to be more selective, lest people think that the group is nothing but queens; this pressure must be resisted, and jeered at. It's okay to have purely social friendship circles, even cliques, but we also need public group-based activities that are open to anyone who's interested in them. Newbies should be welcomed by at least one established member of the group, whether they're cute or not.
So, join me at the (rather ample) margins of gay male life: those of us who like non-buff non-hunks, and don't feel we're making do with second best. Let those who just have to date gym queens segregate themselves in the circuit parties and the exclusive clubs; it'll keep them out of our hair. Though I suspect, to be honest, that some of the gym queens will eventually notice that life is richer, more interesting, more humane at the margins. Some of them already harbor guilty longings for the nerd next door. There's plenty of room, even for the lowest common denominator of looks. Join the conversation, guys, and explore the rest of your selves.
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