This came across the Fark wire the other day, to much hilarity…

Miami Beach police: Man filmed Hooters contestants undressing in Fontainebleau

A woman participating in a Hooters Swimsuit Pageant notices a video camera recording her in the dressing room.  That was the excuse the owner of the camera gave to the cop who arrested him.  I suspect the reason he’s never had a girlfriend is he hasn’t figured out yet how to treat women like people.  Hey guy…there’s this perfectly legal thing called Pornography you can buy with lotsa lovely women willing to take their clothes off for your onanistic pleasures…

I read about this on Fark, read the comment hilarity that followed, and cringed inside.

There’s a flashback scene at the end of The Detective, where the William Windom character (Colin MacIver), a closeted self hating homosexual (who turns out (naturally) to be the real killer the Frank Sinatra character was looking for all through the movie), confesses the killing to his shrink in a sickening display of the kind of acid self hatred Hollywood was only too happy to tell everyone was the natural state of homosexuals.

It begins with MacIver walking back to his car with his girlfriend. They’re assaulted by robbers who call MacIver a faggot.  Somehow this causes him to go looking for sex with another guy. You have to remember this is 1960s Hollywood being all edgy and gritty now that they can take on taboo subject for mass entertainment and ticket sales. Even though he has a girlfriend, MacIver is really a sick and pathetic queer and the encounter with the thieves triggers his perversion and now he has to go get him some cock even though the very thought disgusts him. MacIver tells his shrink:  “The thought of turning…of turning involuntarily into one of them frightened me…and made me sick with anger.” Nonetheless he promptly drives down to the docks for a quickie.  Because queers can’t help themselves.

“I went down there. I had heard about the waterfront. People giggle and make jokes about it. I had had only two experiences before…once in college, once in the army. I thought I’d gotten it out of my life…but I hadn’t.”

Experiences.  Experiences.  Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex.  Anyway, it all builds up to MacIver going to the docks, then to a gay bar, walking slowly past every homosexual stereotype in the Twentieth Century Fox prop department, all leering back at him archly.  Because homosexuals always look back at you archly.

“I looked at them. Was this what I was like?  Oh my god…”

He stares in horror at the “twisted faces”…but he can’t help himself.  He’s just gotta have some cock tonight…

“And here I was and I couldn’t do anything about it. I couldn’t stop. I thought if I could have just one night, I could get it out of my system.  Just one more time…”

Just one more…experience…

Oh that poor pathetic faggot…pass the popcorn… It’s bullshit…yes, sane people these days understand that. But that was the accepted view of homosexuals back then, back when I was growing up, and what angers me about this film and that sequence in it is thinking about all my generational gay peers who accepted that this was what it was to be a homosexual; that they could either try as desperately hard as they could to overcome their “condition”, become straight or live their lives as pathetic faggots or psychotic killers, either way spending the rest of their lives loathing the person they were. Because a man having sex with another man was the most disgusting thing you could imagine, and to desire such a thing even if you never acted on it meant that you were the most loathsome thing there ever was. This is what Hollywood taught them about themselves, it’s what Hollywood taught their parents, their siblings and all their friends…and mine: to look at us with the same disgust and contempt with which MacIver looked upon himself.

This is what I grew up on.  This was pretty much the constant barrage from the culture around me about homosexuality. And it’s a big reason why, when I finally came out to myself, I swore I wasn’t going to live my life in the closet. Never mind the “Twisted faces” MacIver stared at with equal parts horror and desire that sickened him. At least they knew what they were about hanging out there. I’d fallen in love…I knew what I was and what I wasn’t. The ugly stereotypes of homosexuals didn’t frighten me because I knew I wasn’t that and for the honor and dignity of the one I loved I would never become that…nor would I allow myself to become a self hating basket case, horrified by my own sexuality.  The twisted face I was afraid of becoming, resolved never to become, was MacIver’s.

So I dug in my heels and lived an honest life.  And for that I can take some pride.  And yet…and yet…  I never found my other half.  And in the background of my life was another twisted face, another pathetic stereotype that I am still, deep in my heart, afraid of.

“Man to man, I did it because I’ve never had a girlfriend.”

It’s illogical, it’s irrational, I am simply not the sort of person who would ever do what this guy did. I dallied with gay pornography back when I was younger and found I didn’t even really like that all that much.  Yeah, there were lots of very attractive hot bodies in it.  But there was no romance. I am just not voyeur material. Sometimes I sit down to my drafting table and I draw myself a fantasy boyfriend and dream on him. That’s about my speed. I could never do what that guy did. Certainly not to someone I thought was beautiful. Desire should awaken something more noble in a person then that or it’s just empty greed.

But I have been single for so very very long and I read these things and get depressed. Is this what the rest of my life is going to look like? Is this how others see people like me?  Alone. Single. Old. Creepy.  How do you get to be fifty-eight years old and you’ve never had a boyfriend?  There must be something wrong with you.  Sometimes I wonder now, if maybe there is after all.  And I read stories like this about creepy single guys and I cringe inside.

“I looked at them. Was this what I was like?  Oh my god…”