I’ve been seeing ads for the movie All Of Us Strangers and avoiding it because it seemed like the same old struggle for self acceptance kind of gay themed movie that I was over with back in the 20th century. I didn’t bother trying to find out what it was actually about until the other day, when I saw a news article about one of the actors, Andew Scott, being snubbed at the SAG awards because he’s an openly gay actor. So I dug into it and now I really regret that I did.
I should have seen it coming from all the comments all over social media about how the file is So Wonderful and yet it leaves audiences crying as the leave the theater…
He [Adam] is just going back into the everyday feelings that he hasn’t had the luxury of feeling: It’s a luxury for your parents to be annoying you; it’s your luxury for them to be smothering. And that’s what he immerses himself in. It’s a luxury to be able to touch your parents, to be able to hug them, to be able to get into their bed and to get back all that sensuality that he’s missing so much. He lives in this apartment block, he’s eating cookies on the couch, he’s living in a comfort zone. And so by going into that world, telling them who he is, by having that difficult conversation, then he sees himself — and when he sees himself, he’s able to go and let somebody else in and love somebody else.
Yeah. And then what happens?
I am so tired, so deathly tired, of this eternal trope of gay male romances that end tragically. I don’t know…maybe some of the rest of you, who have had some share of love and joy and contentment, regardless of how long it ended up lasting, maybe some of you can watch this stuff and think of it as a tribute to love. But what I see is the film industry’s insistence that we don’t exist, or if we do, that our love can’t. Because…lets face it…two guys in love is just, you know…Unnatural. It can’t possibly be real, or if it is it can’t possibly last. The subcategory of the Kill Your Gays trope is Kill Your Gay’s Love. Because let’s be real here…honestly…can two men really love each other? I mean…you know…like THAT???
Perhaps this is only the bitter ranting of some old gay troll who never found a boyfriend and, like the guy Adam was finally ready to let in, just needs to drink himself to death alone. Or perhaps this is a howl of outrage from someone who bears the scars of this culture teaching, and is Still Teaching Its Gay Young That To Love And Be Loved By Another Is Just Simply Not Their Due In This Life.
Don’t Expect Love…it isn’t yours to have. But hey…we Accept you! Now anyway. Isn’t that Wonderful?
I really wish I’d never heard of this movie. But I have a list of those, so, whatever.
I wake up early this morning, still a bit miserable that I read that synopsis. I see it’s almost sunrise and I could just get up and have my morning coffee, but I’ve no energy to face the day for some reason, and I tell myself I’m old, I’m retired, I can sleep in and waste another day doing nothing if I want to. So I pull up the covers and try to get more sleep. Those early morning nods almost always produce vivid dreams, and this time was no exception.
I’m in a courtroom, apparently fighting with a landlord about getting access to my, and my boyfriend’s things so we can finish moving elsewhere. My boyfriend in this dream is a Woodward classmate, but not the one I’m always going on about being my first ever crush. This is another guy who I will not identify, other than I’m pretty sure he and the other classmate he was always hanging out with were a couple. In this dream he’s my boyfriend, and we had rented space in that apartment complex, and the previous landlord knew we were a couple and was fine with it. But this new landlord had sincere religious beliefs and told us we had to leave. Fine. Okay. But we were only able to get some of our stuff out when the locks were changed and now I’m in court trying to get our stuff back.
The religious fanatic landlord is accusing me of hacking into her renters database with, of all things my graphic editor, GIMP. She’s holding our stuff hostage until I pay her a fine for doing that. The judge (and this is pretty funny like dreams can often be) is Fred Gwynne, reprising his role as the judge from My Cousin Vinny.
I tell the judge that you can’t possibly hack into someone’s database with GIMP. The fanatical landlord says I admitted GIMP has a programming language. Yes, I say, but it’s just for automating tasks in GIMP. You can’t write a program to hack a database with it. The judge asks to see documentation for the GIMP’s Script-Fu language. Somehow I actually have paper documentation of it, and I hand that to the judge, along with the lease we’d signed with the prior landlord. This new landlord never asked us to sign another lease, just told us to get out, and I think the lease we signed is still controlling.
The judge looks over the Script-Fu documentation, shakes his head and looks at the fanatic landlord. “I don’t see how this allows someone to hack into a database.”
She says “Well he did.”
“With this?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“Well I don’t know how I’m not a programmer.”
“But you know he hacked into your database with this tool.”
“Yes!”
“But if you’re not a programmer then tell me how you know he did that with this tool.”
“Well…what else could have happened? It had to be him.”
“How do you know your database was hacked into?”
“Because that’s just what people like them do!”
“Tell me what was changed in your database.”
“Well I don’t know yet, I haven’t looked.”
“But you know there is damage.”
“Yes! There has to be! Because I told them to get out.”
“Have they caused any damage to your property that you can document for me now?”
“Yes. They were occupying it.”
“How did that damage your property.”
“It’s against my sincerely held religious beliefs!”
And with that the judge shakes his head, and dismisses the charge of hacking into her database. Then he says something that brings me nearly to tears. Not the kind of tears people leaving All of Us Strangers are shedding though.
Saying my boyfriend’s name along with mine he says “Bruce and [boyfriend] are a couple, and as such they are entitled to the respect and support a decent civilized society gives to all its couples in love. But also, they are married (I’m a bit surprised to hear this because in this dream I wasn’t aware that we were married, just that we were a couple in love), they took that next step, made that deeply profound commitment to each other and to their community, and now in the eyes of the law they are a family, with all the rights and responsibilities that conveys. You are hereby ordered to immediately allow Bruce and [boyfriend] to enter their apartment to retrieve their property, and if you refuse or if any of it is found to have been damaged by you or anyone in your employ the fines will be severe.”
And that was that. I walk out of the courtroom near to tears, not simply of joy, not even of acceptance. Acceptance isn’t quite what I was feeling overwhelmed by then. It was Acknowledgement.
We were Acknowledged. Our place at the American table was Acknowledged. We existed. Our love existed! We belonged. Our love belonged. It was acknowledged.
I woke up still feeling those powerful emotions.
Made me feel a bit better, but I’m still really sorry I read that movie synopsis. This is why I have no fucks to give for movies about beautifully tragic gay male romances. Why do so many people eat those up? Is it because they can give us acceptance, but not acknowledgement?
As long as Facebook keeps allowing the gay history pages I follow to stay up, I reckon I’ll keep using Facebook. This came across one of the pages I follow the other day…
Lester Callaway Hunt, Sr. (July 8, 1892 – June 19, 1954), was an American Democratic politician from the state of Wyoming. Hunt was the first to be elected to two consecutive terms as Wyoming’s governor, serving as its 19th Governor from January 4, 1943, to January 3, 1949. In 1948, he was elected by an overwhelming margin to the U.S. Senate, and began his term on January 3, 1949.
Hunt supported a number of federal social programs and advocated for federal support of low-cost health and dental insurance policies. He also supported a variety of programs proposed by the Eisenhower administration following the Republican landslide in the 1952 elections, including the abolition of racial segregation in the District of Columbia, and the expansion of Social Security.
An outspoken opponent of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist campaign, Hunt challenged McCarthy and his senatorial allies by championing a proposed law restricting Congressional immunity and allowing individuals to sue members of Congress for slanderous statements. In June 1953, Hunt’s son was arrested in Washington, D.C., on charges of soliciting sex from an undercover male police officer (homosexual acts were prohibited by law at the time). Several Republican senators, including McCarthy, threatened Hunt with prosecution of his son and wide publication of the event unless he abandoned plans to run for re-election and resigned immediately, which Hunt refused to do. His son was convicted and fined on October 6, 1953. On April 15, 1954, Hunt announced his intention to run for re-election. He changed his mind, however, after McCarthy renewed the threat to use his son’s arrest against him. On June 19, Hunt died by suicide in his Senate office; his death dealt a serious blow to McCarthy’s image and was one of the factors that led to his censure by the Senate later in 1954.
I did not know about any of this. And you can suppose that if tinpot dictators like Ron DeSantis and the rest of the MAGA crowd in government have their way no one will ever know it happened. But it instantly put me in mind of something. A movie from the early 60s, from a time when even a brief reference to The Homosexual in passing was considered extremely daring for any filmmaker, and in some parts of the country might even get your movie confiscated by the local authorities.
The movie was Advise & Consent. Released in 1962, it was directed by Otto Preminger who was a powerful opponent of the Hays Code, and was based on the 1959 novel by Allen Drury. The story concerns the nomination process of a candidate for US Secretary of State, who may or may not be a communist. As the political battle heats up, it gets dirtier.
The movie’s claim to fame was broaching the subject of homosexuality when the Hays Code was still a thing and Preminger was a force for contesting it. There’s this cringe worthy scene toward the end of the movie where the clean cut all American senator with a secret, Brig Anderson of Utah, visits the stereotypical Hollywood gay bar of all stereotypical Hollywood gay bars to confront the long ago lover he was now being blackmailed over…
Who among us has never been to this bar?
In his book The Celluloid Closet Vito Russo eviscerates the movie for virtually canonising Anderson as a Good Homosexual, because he eventually married a woman and began a family, versus the Bad Homosexuals who lurk in the homosexual underworld and gather in piss elegant bars that play Frank Sinatra songs all the time.
Wait…Don’t Go…Maybe the jukebox has some Village People too!
Dury’s novel was published in 1959. Hunt’s suicide happened in 1954. Dury always maintained that his novel was not based on any actual people or events, but was merely made of composites meant to illuminate the realities of Washington politics. But this falls a little too pat. While senator Hunt was not himself a homosexual, it was blackmail over his son’s homosexuality, blackmail effected so as to stop his attacks on McCarthy, that brought him to suicide, and which as it turned out was a key event in turning the senate against McCarthy. The entire story reads to me now, like as of a second rate draftsman tracing over a portrait, and simply changing the hairstyle of the subject, and calling it an original work.
Because the most…interesting…part of all this to me now is how Dury reversed the motivations of the players in that drama. It was a bunch of hard right republican red baiters, including McCarthy, that blackmailed Hunt to the point of suicide. In Dury’s telling, it was democratic communist sympathisers that blackmailed the clean cut all American senator from Utah who had a regrettable secret, so they could install a communist as the head of the State Department. I don’t think all that was merely to lift the specifics of history into the realm of art. I think he was trying to rewrite history into a form he found more palatable.
I have a certain fondness for the old Burke’s Law TV series. It’s a very weird concept even for its day: a millionaire playboy police captain who investigates homicides among Los Angeles’ fabulously rich in his chauffeur driven Rolls Royce Silver Cloud II, in between makeout sessions with one lovely babe after another. And it’s certainly a product of its time in its regard for women. But all that went over my head when I was a kid. My interest in the show was I liked Gene Barry, having loved his stint as Bat Masterson previously, and the stories were pretty engaging mysteries that usually played fair with the audience. But the big draw for me at that age was that Rolls Royce. I was absolutely fascinated by that Rolls Royce.
Years later I’m sitting at home watching an episode from the first season DVD set. Because even with all the early 1960s sexist baggage I find I still enjoy the whodunnit mystery format, the writing is better than I remembered (at least two episodes were written by Harlan Ellison, and in one of them Sammy Davis Jr. Plays a suspect named Cordwainer Bird (!)), the Rolls Royce still fascinates me, and I get to watch a ton of famous dead Hollywood stars bring their magic to life again. The episode I’m watching is Who Killed Annie Foran? (the episode titles always began with “Who Killed…”).
The episode synopsis is thus…
Party girl Annie Foran is found strangled in the back seat of a customer’s car at the exclusive restaurant Club Nova. Suspicion falls on her ex-boyfriend, baseball sensation Eddie Dineen, who was there at the time in the company of his mentor, the acerbic columnist Whitman Saunders, and Saunder’s assistant, Milo Morgan.
Don Ameche does a killer job playing Whitman Saunders, a slimy Hollywood gossip columnist whose evil just oozes of the TV screen. The scenes between him and Gene Barry are electrifying in this one, and all the more when you consider that Saunders is a pitch perfect embodiment of the evil faux moralizing gossip columnist and Burke is a millionaire playboy giving Saunders all the righteous shade you could ask for.
Saunders has been playing up Eddie Dineen in his columns, and wrote a hit piece on his ex girlfriend Annie to get the couple to break up and get Dineen matched with the more socially glamorous and acceptable (I think…I’m typing this from memory at the moment) Mitzi Carlisle. The episode begins at dinner party in a very exclusive club with Saunders, his assistant Milo, Eddie and Mitzi. Ameche just oozes evil as he pontificates about this and that, abuses the waiter over some slight he won’t even explain, while dictating his next column on Eddie to Milo. As they are leaving a valet pulls what they think is Saunders’ car around and when the valet opens the back passenger door Annie falls out, dead. Cue the screams from the ladies in the crowd.
But the car didn’t belong to Saunders. It was another man’s car that was nearly identical to his. Burke quickly rules that man out as a suspect and quickly focuses on Eddie, who may have thought Annie was a drag on his career. Annie as it turns out, was a call girl, though this was 1964 TV and you didn’t come right out and say so. So it’s implied as Burke and detective Tilson search her apartment looking for her address book because…suspects. Burke finds a picture of Eddie he autographed for her. But maybe it was Mitzi, who didn’t want her respectable socialite name associated with Annie’s in one of Saunder’s columns. Or maybe Mitzi tried to set up Saunders because she really loves Eddie and hates Saunders for being such an evil manipulator but she dumped the body in the wrong car. Or maybe it was Eddie’s coach (played tough as nails by Jackie Coogan). Or maybe it was Fisk, the shifty night clerk of the hotel Annie stayed at, and worked out of (played by Sterling Holloway the way Sterling Holloway always plays anybody). Fisk tries to blackmail Eddie over his relationship with Annie and Eddie goes on the run and is eventually captured by Detective Tilson (the series young nerd to Les Hart’s hardboiled old school cop). But by this time Burke is convinced Eddie didn’t do it. He had arrived at the dinner party with Saunders, and couldn’t have put the body in the wrong car.
But Milo…meek mild deferential Milo, always dutifully writing down Saunders’ dictation arrived at the party late. In the Big Reveal at episode’s end, Burke confronts Milo in his apartment and asks why he did it. Milo as it turns out, worked at the same Chicago newspaper as Saunders and was a bright and rising star, slated to get his own column, until Saunders dug up some dirt on him. Remember, this is 1964 so the writers couldn’t come right out and say he’s a homosexual. You had to allude to it, just as they did in 1972, in that Hawaii Five-O episode I was bellyaching about previously, though with a bit more of a heavy hand. Words…bad words…about Milo…were thrown about, he tells Burke as he lounges in his evening attire in his piss elegantly furnished stereotypical homosexual apartment, and he lost his job and his career when no newspaper would touch him afterward. Then Saunders, who gets the column and the fame Milo would have but for him…graciously…offers Milo a job as his assistant. And if you’re thinking now that if it was the last job on earth you’d tell Saunders to go stuff it rather than work for him after what he did, you need to understand a basic fact about homosexuals on TV and in the Movies of the period…and well after: These are homosexual characters written by heterosexual men whose only understanding of homosexuals and homosexuality is everything their cheapshit bar stool prejudices tell them.
Milo kills Annie and tries to frame Saunders because all this time he’s hated the man’s guts (and Don Ameche plays a intensely evil stone hearted narcissistic man in this one). He killed Annie because she was a call girl. Evil, he tells Burke, destroying evil. Burke observes that’s a bit psychotic. Milo, being homosexual, doesn’t deny it. The one slim shred of decency the writer, Tony Barrett, allows him is to say if Eddie had been arrested for the murder of Annie he would have stepped up and confessed to the crime himself, to keep Eddie out of jail.
(I’m paraphrasing this from memory at the moment, and might replay the episode later to get it right…)
BURKE: Would you have confessed if it looked like Eddie was going to to take the fall for Annie’s murder
MILO: Would it help my case?
BURKE: Not in the least.
MILO: I would have confessed.
Somewhere, in some better place, maybe, Vito Russo nods his head…
Hollywood is too busy trying to make old formulas hit the jackpot again to see the future. Hollywood is yesterday, forever catching up with what’s happening today. This will change only when it becomes financially profitable, and reality will never be profitable until society overcomes its fear and hatred of difference and begins to see that we’re all in this together. –Vito Russo
I Could Stop Living In The Past If The Past Could Stop Living In Me…
The past is never completely put to rest within us. It taps us on the shoulder from time to time, often when we least expect or want it to. I was participating in a diversity workshop last week at the 2018 American Astronomical Society conference, bringing to it my experiences growing up gay in 1970s America, sharing what I’d learned since then about the culture that shaped me. I have my moments of nostalgia for certain things…favorite TV shows…the music of my times…even some of the technology: after all, we did go to the moon back then. But don’t ask me if I ever want to go back to those days when forty-six out of fifty states still had their sodomy laws on the books, and the pop culture screamed it’s disgust at your very existence at you from every direction. No…that is not hyperbole.
Favorite TV shows. In November 1972, some months after I graduated from high school, still grieving deeply over the sudden disappearance of my first crush and his family for parts unknown (I wouldn’t set eyes on him again for 33 years…), CBS network aired the second episode in a two part Hawaii Five-O story, V for Vashon. I’ve no idea what I was doing that night but it wasn’t watching Hawaii Five-O or I’d have remembered this one. Even then the show was in the category of Good, but not Must Watch. I liked the combination of action and detective work, as opposed to the plodding cadence of the Dragnet episodes. I picked up a copy of the Five-O soundtrack LP at one point, as I did with many TV shows and movies I watched back then. It’s interesting how the passing of years somehow distills away everything you hated about the times reflected in the TV shows you used to watch, and leaves only a pleasant sense of enjoyment.
I can pick up MeTV on the household antenna and tonight, since the weather is still too damn cold for a nightly walk, I lounged on the sofa and watched Hawaii Five-O again, and for the first time viewed V for Vashon – The Patriarch. Even though I was walking in on the middle of the story it caught my interest. In it, a crime family boss works a clever plot to frame McGarrett for putting his son in jail and killing his grandson. They arrange a hit on McGarrett in a parking garage. But unbeknownst to the hit man his gun only has blanks and when McGarrett returns fire the hit man is killed, but no gun is found and McGarrett is prosecuted for murder 2. His only witness who could verify the hit man fired a gun is the most respected attorney in the state (so we are told), an absolutely unimpeachable witness. But on the witness stand he mysteriously recants. So McGarrett is convicted and stripped of his police powers while the case goes on appeal.
So the search is on, for the missing gun, but also to solve the mystery of why this eminently respected attorney would give false testimony in what had all the signs of a setup orchestrated by the crime family boss as revenge. Clearly the boss had some sort of blackmail to hold over the attorney. But what could it have been?
Oh…oh…I Know…I Know…! Or I should have known. But time passes, and sometimes you forget how it was. Mysterious phone calls made to the attorney’s office that were uncharacteristically not returned, tweak the attention of one of the Five-O team. They trace it to a young man convicted of buying pot and sentenced to a prison term. Are we getting warmer? It seemed he was trying to get the eminently respectable attorney to represent him at his trial. Now he’s in the same prison block as the son of the crime family boss. Perhaps he was passing messages from the crime boss’s son to the attorney. But why would they use him to get to the eminently respectable attorney? What could Possibly have been the connection between such an eminently respectable attorney, a crime family, and a young guy whose only conviction was a pot offence? Getting warmer? They go to his last known place of residence to look for clues. It turns out to be a Very Upscale apartment…something this young guy could not possibly afford on his own. Warmer? It was being rented by the attorney. Getting hot are we?
Yes, yes…the big reveal at the end was that the eminently respectable attorney was having a homosexual affair, which of course led to his being blackmailed by the crime boss, because homosexuality and blackmail go together like apple and pie!
The producers trotted out this Very Good Looking (to my eyes anyway) longhaired blond guy…
…who I swear they must have voice coached for hours to get that faggoty voice down Just Right: not too campy, but just enough for the audience to catch on to what is going on even before he calls the eminently respectable attorney an old queen. Because that’s how the homos talk to each other, just ask Joe Leland (aka Frank Sinatra) in The Detective. And of course everyone knew back then that those longhaired hippy freaks were all homos too because what Real Man would wear his hair like a girl. Do you know, says beautiful young gay guy, what happens to people Like Me inside? You need friends, protection…I had to do it. What, audition for the part? Cue the actor playing the district attorney to say “Get Him Out Of Here” with just the right amount of masculine disgust on his face and in his voice. And of course the words Gay, let alone Homosexual, were never actually uttered. This is family friendly TV. Emmys For Everyone!
Well thank You for taking me back to the happier simpler days of my youth MeTV. Or at least reminding me to be more careful what I watch on the temporally displaced airwaves. Not everything on MeTV is memorable.
I posted a short cartoon below about how it was being a gay teenager growing up in the late 60s to early 70s. How, no matter which direction you turned, the message was you don’t exist, or if you did, you should not. At best you were invisible…something not spoken of in polite company. At worst…well…you probably don’t want to hear it here.
Now at least we are visable. We can’t be arrested simply for being visible. Before Stonewall that was a fact of life. The riot happened you may recall, when the police came to raid one of our few bars in New York City. Now we can live our lives openly. Now we can tell our stories in our own words. And now we are, tentatively, becoming part of the audience. Stories are being told, not just about us, but To us.
That’s a problem for some people, who would rather the old rules still applied…
This was about the recent trend in comics to include, or even reimagine characters as women, black and gay. A recent storyline in the X-Men series had younger versions of the team being transported in time to meet their adult selves. One of them, Bobby Drake aka Iceman, is forced to come to terms with his sexual orientation that his adult self relentlessly denied. It made for some amazing and heartfelt drama, of the sort you didn’t use to see in the comics, especially of the super hero kind, and yet which you could have only have found within that genre…
Marvel Comics – Uncanny X-Men #60
This was just amazing, absolutely amazing storytelling. It took the gay generation gap and played it at an angle only this, or a science fiction tale could do, and in doing it made plain the horrible burden the older generation lived under due to the prejudices of their day. What do you do when the kid you once were, comes face to face with you and asks why he should have to live his life in the closet? It’s one thing to tell how it was to the new generation that doesn’t have to live it the way you did, doesn’t have to make the bargains with hate that you did. They need to know this history, if only to keep their watch against it all coming back. But how do you justify it to the kid you once were? What do you say to him?
This is what those retailers, and the readers they speak for, were protesting. And what you reliably hear is something along the lines of hey I don’t have anything against the gays, I just don’t want it shoved in my face. ‘It’ being the fact of our existence. Yes, you don’t have anything against the gays…so long as you don’t have to know we’re there among you. But it’s more than that.
Stories have power. Stories are how we pass down knowledge of what it is to be human. How are we supposed to grow and mature and live our lives as fully realized human beings if we are not allowed to know the stories of the lives of others like us. How are we supposed to grow as decent people if we cannot hear the stories of others who are not like us. How do we see the common human heart we all share. The myths, the legends. The hero’s journey.
The answer of course, is we’re not supposed to grow at all. Black…homo…freaking females. We have to stay where we’re told. In our place.
The Militant Homosexual I Became Was Nurtured By Hollywood’s Homosexual
A friend on Facebook turned me onto this…
I have both editions of “The Celluloid Closet” published while he was still with us. If any one thing could have been said to have radicalized my attitudes toward gay equality it was this one, even more so than “And The Band Played On”. The book opens with a story about how a gay friend of his was telling another gay friend about a new movie that had a gay character in it, and the other friend immediately asks how the character dies. In a nutshell, that’s how it was.
I ordered the DVD of Vito and it came Friday and I had housework to do so it just sat for a while. Last night before bed I watched the first two thirds of it. It filled in a lot of blanks for me because I only knew of Vito Russo from his groundbreaking film history The Celluloid Closet. I didn’t know, but I should have guessed, how the activist predated the historian. The part showing him struggling to pull together all the hidden threads of our presence in the movies really brought back home to me that sense of isolation and cultural invisibility I hadn’t felt in decades.
Back in the 1970s, that homosexual characters were occasionally included in movies, either for laughs if they were flaming sissies or as the embodiment of unnatural evil, was something probably everyone knew. Russo was the first person to actually gather all the pieces together, all the little walk on toss off parts along with the major roles, all the sissies, all the evil psychos, all the tragically damned, and look at all critically. And the book he produced hit gay people everywhere who read it like a ton of bricks. Because you knew the scapegoating and stereotyping weren’t just how your heterosexual neighbors were taught to look at you, but also how you were taught to see yourself.
Heterosexuals could dream of the happily ever after, could see that dream on the silver screen, could picture themselves there, having that life, or something like it. Hollywood flushed our dreams into the sewer from the moment we first walked into a movie house. We weren’t lovers, we were sissies, we were dangerous sexual psychopaths, we were the butt of dirty jokes, we were the personification of unnatural evil, we were pathetic, we were terrifying, we were not human. But you really didn’t see it all that clearly because the one thing we were most of all was something not to be discussed in public among decent normal people.
Then Vito Russo gathered it all together and put it in front of us. And it just took your breath away…to see it all there, laid out in front of you.
All Together Mouseketeers…You Too Tommy…You’re One Of Us Too…
This was a part of my childhood. Not a huge one, but an important one…
I never became a member…even at that tender age I wasn’t much of a joiner…but I watched what Walt Disney put on my TV screen regularly. Mostly it was for this…
And this…
His vision of the future was a big part of my kidhood dreams. I wanted to be there, to grow up into that world where a great big beautiful tomorrow was shining at the end of every day. Somewhere along the line I stopped dreaming it. Somewhere past adolescence, somewhere after the country as a whole, tired of the war in Vietnam, tired of the race riots, fatigued by so much inter generational conflict, lost interest in the frontier of space, so terribly soon after we’d just put our footsteps on the moon.
Though I never stopped dreaming about it, I stopped believing in Disney’s great big beautiful tomorrow. I put it down to fantasy…a beautiful story I was told as a kid that I wanted to believe in, but would never happen. The world just didn’t work that way. But I think there was something else that was missing from that dream. Something that, had I seen it, might have made me hold onto it for a little longer…maybe even leave childhood behind with a vow to work a little harder to make it real.
That something, was me. I was missing from that future. And so were a lot of other kids just like me.
In the original ‘The Flintstones’ series, the only characters of color to appear were natives of Africa who participated in a cave scout jamboree. Worse yet, far off into the distant future, on ‘The Jetsons,’ the universe seemed completely dominated by white people as well.
These were just signs of the times and while toon tones began changing in the 1970s, it’s almost blasphemous nowadays to have a television show that doesn’t include diversity, often to a point where it almost just seems forced.
So at four decades post-Stonewall and more than a decade into the age of ‘After Ellen,’ it wouldn’t be unnatural for one to wonder just where The Walt Disney Company draws the line at diversity. In all fairness, the company has teetered on the issue, having both progressive human resources policies for same-sex couples (which incited the infamous and rather seemingly innocuous Southern Baptist boycott) as well as just recently relenting on allowing same-sex commitment ceremonies at the theme park resorts under public pressure.
So where exactly does Disney draw the line when it comes to acceptance of gays in ‘everyday life’?
Well you already know the answer. Yes, Disney has been very progressive when compared to other media and entertainment companies. Behind the stage. On it…well we’re all still in the closet. And if we’re invisible on stage, we’re also invisible in the audience. To each other. To ourselves.
That’s a shame. Disney wholesomeness isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, and in fact it’s only mine provisionally. I like it to be there, but a steady diet of it would suffocate me. And it would have when I was a teenager too. But that Disney-esq sensibility about life is more me then not. I like my visits to Key West, they relax and de-stress me nicely. But my visits to Walt Disney World rekindle something inside of me that I had thought long dead. That, it’s a small world after all attitude. That idealized Main Street USA. That Tomorrowland, where we would all live someday in a world where science and the pursuit of knowledge weren’t just good things, but a great adventure. Sniff at it if you like, but there are worse visions to have become attached to as a kid, to keep close to your heart as an adult, to hand down now to the kids among us.
I should have been a part of that vision when I was a kid. All of us gay kids should have. We were there in the audience, but invisible…even to ourselves. So instead of Disney’s future, we got told we were mentally ill. Instead of Disney wholesomeness we were taught that our desires were a sickness best kept hidden away from decent people, and especially children. Our friends got the happily ever after. We got the gutter. The great big beautiful tomorrow we could all look forward too would be a better place because we would not be in it. You can’t tell me that didn’t make a difference in the adults we all eventually became.
One of these kids will later come out of the closet…
I like to think that if Disney was alive today (yeah…he’d be 110 now…But if…), we Would be a part of that vision of the future. Walt Disney was a pioneer, who revered the old days and idealized them in his Disneyland. But he also never let the past keep him from moving forward. The caretakers of his vision today alas, aren’t the visionaries he was. But this world doesn’t get very many of those…
So according to [Disney Channel Worldwide President of Entertainment, Gary Marsh], if a character hasn’t had a crush on someone, it’s okay for the viewer to assume they character is implicitly gay and that should simply be enough. At least until the character develops an attraction for the opposite sex anyway.
Perhaps the correct answer is “we just aren’t ready yet.”
“A man should never neglect his family for business.”
-Walt Disney
Gay kids need to be brought into the Disney “family” audience too because they are part of the family too and there are worse examples out there to set for them then Disney. “Someday” should come sooner rather then later.
“All our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them.”
-Walt Disney
The other day, while Judy Shepard, the mother of murdered gay college student Matthew Shepard, was giving a talk about hate crimes, a man rose from the audience to call her a liar…
About 45 minutes in, a man rose and asked a question that amounted to repeating a current popular right-wing lie – Matthew Shepard was killed because his killers were high and wanted to rob him; his sexual orientation was irrelevant. Mrs. Shepard refuted the claim – pointing out that in one of the killer’s confessions, he admitted they acted because of Shepard’s sexual orientation; the other, in his statement in court, admitted the same. Neither men tested positive for drugs or alcohol after Matthew’s murder. The interlocutor asserted at this point that she was lying and doing a disservice to history by lying about the reasons for her son’s murder. To my eyes, Judy Shepard appeared visibly upset by the man’s accusations. He claimed to be relying on a report from 20/20…
Ah yes…the 20/20 whitewash. That gift to America’s bigots that keeps on giving…
“The Matthew Shepard Story: Secrets of a Murder,” which aired Nov. 26, promised shocking new information about the case. But it contained mostly speculation, scandalous details, unreliable new witnesses and revised confessions. The premise of the report by Elizabeth Vargas was that McKinney attacked Shepard during a robbery under the influence of crystal meth and that the murder had nothing to do with the victim’s sexuality…
Vargas went out of her way to show that McKinney and Henderson did not hate gay people. She questioned previous reports that characterized them as “rednecks” (her word), and tells viewers that in fact they had steady jobs and girlfriends. Vargas reported that Shepard’s friends promoted the hate crime theory in the days following the attack…
Emphasis mine. I’ve written about the hacktacular 20/20 piece before. But it is best summed up by Rob DeBree, the lead investigator on the case…
In his confession to DeBree, McKinney had denied using meth the day of the murder, and while McKinney had been arrested too late for the police to confirm this through blood testing, DeBree felt certain that McKinney had for once told the truth. Obviously it’s unsurprising that the lead investigator would disagree with the defense, but DeBree had some compelling reasons on his side. "There’s no way" it was a meth crime, DeBree argued, still passionate about the issue when I met him nearly six months after the trial had ended. No evidence of recent drug use was "found in a search of their residences. There was no evidence in the truck. From everything we were able to investigate, the last time they would have done meth would have been two to three weeks previous to that night. What the defense attempted to do was a bluff." Meth crimes do have hallmarks. One, "Overkill," certainly seems to describe what happened to Matt, but no others so seamlessly fit that night: "A meth crime is going to be a quick attack," DeBree pointed out. "It’s going to be a manic attack… No. This was a sustained event. And somebody that’s high on meth is not going to be targeting and zeroing in on a head, and deliver the blows that they did in the way that they did," with such precision. "Consistently it was targeted, and even if you’re drunk, you’re going to have a tough time trying to keep your target. No. There’s absolutely no involvement with drugs."
Beth Loffreda, Loosing Matt Shepard. pg 133 – 134
A week after we met in his office, Rob [DeBree] took me to the crime scene. As we drove out to the fence in a Sheriff’s Office SUV, he stopped in mid-sentence by the Wal-Mart" "Here’s where it began," he told me and gestured in imitation of McKinney striking Matt. We restart the conversation, but he’s made his point: the drive to the fence seems unimaginably long. It’s not far – no more then a mile or two – but the rutted dirt road they turned on to makes for extremely slow driving. When I say something to Rob about how long it takes, he agrees. "They were coming here to finish him." On that dirt track, it is hard to believe the defense attorney’s claims that the two killers had been drunk or high on drugs or crazed by homosexual panic. It just takes too long to get to the fence…
Beth Loffreda, Loosing Matt Shepard. pg 155 – 156
"I have never worked a homicide with this much evidence," Rob says, all these months later a bit of wonder still bleeding into his voice. "It was like a case of God giving it to us. I’m not kidding. The whole way it broke down from the beginning to the end – it was like, here it is, boys: work it. It’s almost like it pissed off God, and he says, oh well, come here, let me walk you over here, walk you over there, pick up all this, pick up all that. It was just a gift.
Beth Loffreda, Loosing Matt Shepard. pg 157
I drove that same path when I was in Laramie, to the extent I was able to before coming upon all the "private property signs", and that same impression swept over me like a cold clammy sickness. You simply cannot drive the path that Shepard’s killers took and come away from it believing that it was simply a robbery gone bad. Unless of course, that is what you need to believe.
Considering the sorry state of American journalism, to say the 20/20 piece represented a new low is almost complementary. But historically it is unremarkable. Since the 1950s, mainstream American journalism has always excused anti-gay violence, usually by blaming the victim. ABC didn’t so much sink to a new low, as pound some well worn territory. There is no violent anti-gay hatred in America, only homosexuals who go too far and suffer the consequences. That is what the news media in this country believes, if not on the beat, then without a doubt in the boardroom.
But now the creators of The Laramie Project have returned to their work to write an epilogue. And in the process they’ve interviewed one of the killers, Aaron McKinney…
"As far as Matt is concerned, I don’t have any remorse," McKinney is quoted as saying in the script, which was provided to The Associated Press by the production company.
McKinney, according to the script, reiterates his claim that the 1998 killing in Laramie, Wyo., started out as a robbery, but makes clear that his antipathy toward gays played a role.
"The night I did it, I did have hatred for homosexuals," McKinney is quoted as saying. He goes on, according to the script, to say that he still dislikes gays and that his perceptions about Shepard’s sex life bolstered his belief that the killing was justified.
Emphasis mine. But wait…there’s More…
According to the script, McKinney expresses empathy with Shepard’s parents over the loss of their son, though he adds about Judy Shepard: "Still, she never shuts up about it, and it’s been like 10 years."
Gaze for a moment, if you have the nerve, into that utterly empty heart and then contemplate this fact: mainstream American news publishers, editors, owners, that rarefied media club of old boy straight male testosterone, still believes, 40 years after Stonewall, decades into the gay community’s struggle for equality here in America, that gay kids like Matthew Shepard are less a normal part of American society then this cold blooded killer is. The killer they can understand. They don’t approve of what he did that night, but they understand him. The gay kid they simply cannot. He was flaunting it. He was coming on to someone who was disgusted by homosexuals. He should have known better. He brought it on himself. In the end, when all the other excuses have withered away…it was a robbery gone bad…it was drugs…that knee-jerk understanding of McKinney’s disgust at homosexuals, that if Shepard hadn’t come onto him he would still be alive today, will remain, unmovable.
The media establishment does not regard homophobia as a problem because in the boardrooms, among the CEOs, media owners and big dollar producers, disgust is a normal reaction to homosexuality. See it here, in this article on 10 Sexual Controversies That Changed TV…
With everything from the new Melrose Place to trashy Twilight knockoffs, the new Fall TV season promises steamy viewing. Hemlines may rise and morals may fall, but TV writers would do well to remember that presenting sex on network TV has always been a tricky business. Though we’ve come a long way since Ricky Ricardo knocked up Lucy, only to discover that the network censors wouldn’t let him say the word “pregnant,” it’s amazing how sensitive the suits still are to sex. Here are ten TV shows in which the sex lives of their characters dramatically changed the entire series, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse.
Yet in one instance after another that the authors cite, it’s homosexuality that causes an uproar, not so much among the viewing audience, as in the boardroom. Are you old enough to remember watching all of these TV shows and wonder why the gay characters never had lovers and somehow always ended up dating women…?
In the end, the network had it both ways, collecting their big ratings when everyone tuned in at the start to see what the fuss was about, then ordering that the creators downplay the sexy stuff and reshape the central storyline into a murder mystery. The worst damage was done to Crystal’s character, who attempted suicide in the hospital after being dumped by his boyfriend on the eve of his gender-reassignment surgery. He survived, but while the character continued to identify as gay, he never hooked up with another guy in the course of the series; instead, he had a quick fling with a woman, got her pregnant, and spent much of his remaining time on the show fighting for custody of his daughter…
…
…religious groups, rather than being impressed with Sidney’s anti-abortion bona fides, made such a stink about the idea of a gay man on TV that NBC delayed airing the pilot for a year, then insisted that Sidney be gelded. Apparently Sidney was so crushed by the death of his one male lover (whose photo on the mantelpiece watched over the action like a baleful ghost) that he could never date again. When, towards the end of the second season, he dipped one toe back into the dating pool, it was with a woman, as if he’d been on the shelf so long that he’d forgotten his orientation…
…
…Early ratings were shaky, and the CBS brass decided that it must have something to do with viewers being put off by threatening lesbian vibes. Though both characters were supposed to be straight, it was felt that when the two dark-haired, hard-edged actresses were seen in close proximity to each other, they looked like, in the words of an unidentified CBS executive, “a couple of dykes.” It was decided that the best way to solve the problem was to fire Foster and replace herwith the blonde Sharon Gless, who, according to some mysterious executive calculation, was judged more Malibu Beach than Isle of Lesbos…
…
…Coming at the end of an episode, the kiss was tantamount to a cliffhanger; it all but guaranteed that slack-jawed viewers would tune in next week. Those who did got to see Donohoe deliver a back-pedaling speech about how she liked both men and women equally and would be happy just to be friends if that’s what her new friend preferred, while Greene “considered” exploring a new side of herself before deciding that, nope, she wouldn’t be going there…
…
The show had a resident good-looking gay guy — Matt Fielding, played by Doug Savant — who, in contrast to the juicy goings-on by the hormonally deranged straight people all around him, seemed almost pathologically stable. When Matt was permitted to enjoy an on-screen kiss with a man, the network edited it out of the program before allowing the episode to be broadcast, though they had no problem with having him gay-bashed on camera, twice…
…
…As the show neared its seventh season, there was a persistent and widespread rumor that the youngest Connor child, D.J., was going to announce he was gay. It never happened — the big surprise of the season premiere turned out to be that Roseanne herself was pregnant again…
In 2005 the Hollywood establishment fled from Brokeback Mountain into the comforting arms of Crash, a self-serving story about racism in Los Angles, so John Wayne wouldn’t be rolling in his grave. Next year saw a remake of 3:10 to Yuma, with an added psychotic homosexual killer subtext that wasn’t in the original. Of course the psychotic homosexual killer is himself killed in the film’s climax, to avenge the heterosexuality of the hero. So the establishment returns again and again to its comfort food: Homophobia isn’t a problem, homosexuality is. Disgust toward homosexuals is both natural and normal. It is only when homosexuals flaunt it that things get violent and that is simply to be expected.
20/20 didn’t do a story about why Matthew Shepard was murdered, it did a story about why anti-gay hate coudn;t possibly have had anything to do with it. And if you think this latest confession from his killer changes that you aren’t paying attention. McKinney’s disgust and acid loathing are understood and shared throughout the media establishment, and so they see nothing out of the ordinary. It merely confirms for them that essential truth that it was Shepard’s being open about his homosexuality that got him killed. If you are a homosexual and you are open about it then you bring it on yourself. You should have known better. In the old media boardrooms that’s not considered hate, but merely a fact of life.
Brüno is, in more than one sense, beyond gay. Is any viewer really going to think that this hyperbolically crass and ridiculous narcissist—who wears mesh tops and eye-searing lederhosen, refers to his adopted African baby as a "dick magnet," and drops faux-Teutonic vulgarities about his waxed arschenhaller—represents "the mainstream of the gay community," as one troubled Hollywood "gay insider" put it?
Okay…I have a question for you. How many top grossing box office movies can you name that honestly represented that mainstream of gay people you speak of? How many? No…not just a walk-on token gay character, but a movie About gay people that wasn’t full of the same stupid ignorant stereotypes that are propelling Sacha Baron Cohen’s gayface act to number one? How many?
That one about the gay cowboys? The one that couldn’t win an academy award because John Wayne was rolling in his grave? The one academy members openly said they’d never vote for. The one they made Bruno-esq jokes about at the award ceremony? The one that got practically no cable channel airplay after it left the theaters, even though it was nominated for best picture? That one?
I’ve been seeing the "news" headline pop up on my Google News page, that Stan Lee is working on a new gay superhero he’s planning to debut soon. Swell, thinks I, another mainstream gay stereotype, only this time in tights, is just what we need. Not. But no…as it turns out, there’s more to it. Lots more. Would you believe, that the actual creator of this new gay superhero, Perry Moore, is a gay Christian and the executive producer on the Chronicles of Narnia films?
What the hell do you care for the people of this planet?” a powerful savior-turned-villain bellows at Thom Creed, the eponymous teenage superhero in Perry Moore’s Lambda Award-winning novel, Hero. “They hate you, they call you names and they’re ashamed of you,” the bad guy says as he prepares to unleash a terrifying monster known as the Planet Eater. “You know I’m telling the truth. You’re all so stupid, and you’re killing this world anyway. I’m just giving you a little nudge, a gentle push.” Perhaps it’s not giving too much away to reveal that Thom, a young gay man whose sexuality is only one of several special gifts, manages to save the Earth and find true love by the novel’s last pages.
That dramatic arc may be unremarkable in a story where a boy-hero wins the heart of his ladylove, but as the scion of a literary genre—comic books—in which gay characters tend to meet a gruesome end, Hero is nothing short of revolutionary. And as Moore puts the finishing touches on the serialized small-screen adaptation of his novel for Showtime, it appears that the revolution will indeed be televised.
“Look at these tent-pole gay movies like Milk and Brokeback that straight people get behind,” Moore said in a telephone interview from his home in New York City. “The heroes die terrible deaths or endure terrible tragedies. And the characters like us that we see on TV are often the gay version of the Stepin Fetchit stereotype. Mine will be the first show where the gay character is a true hero and he isn’t doomed.”
Well Perry Moore has just won himself a fan. That Tragic Gay Ending is one of my biggest beefs with mainstream pop culture’s representation of us. Same sex love isn’t allowed to win. It has to die horribly. Either that, or the gay characters aren’t allowed to be whole people, just soulless, sexless, Stepin Fetchit stereotypes.
“God has a really big mission for me,” says Moore, who’s producing the Showtime series with Stan Lee, the former head of Marvel Comics who has supervised the development of successful crossover storylines like Spider-Man, the X-Men, Iron Man and the Hulk. “A younger generation needs to supplant the older generation of bigots—that’s why Thom’s story is important.”
Ohhh… Take that James Dobson. I gotta go buy me this book…
43 years ago today, this is what the nation was being told about its gay citizens, by one of the big national news magazines…
It used to be "the abominable crime not to be mentioned." Today it is not only mentioned; it is freely discussed and widely analyzed. Yet the general attitude toward homosexuality is, if anything, more uncertain than before. Beset by inner conflicts, the homosexual is unsure of his position in society, ambivalent about his attitudes and identity—but he gains a certain amount of security through the fact that society is equally ambivalent about him.
A vast majority of people retain a deep loathing toward him, but there is a growing mixture of tolerance, empathy or apathy. Society is torn between condemnation and compassion, fear and curiosity, between attempts to turn the problem into a joke and the knowledge that it is anything but funny, between the deviate’s plea to be treated just like everybody else and the knowledge that he simply is not like everybody else.
…In 1948, Sexologist Alfred Kinsey published figures that homosexuals found cheering. He estimated that 4% of American white males are exclusively homosexual and that about two in five had "at least some" homosexual experience after puberty. Given Kinsey’s naive sampling methods, the figures were almost certainly wrong. But chances are that growing permissiveness about homosexuality and a hedonistic attitude toward all sex have helped "convert" many people who might have repressed their inclinations in another time or place.
Homosexuals are present in every walk of life, on any social level, often anxiously camouflaged; the camouflage will sometimes even include a wife and children, and psychoanalysts are busy treating wives who have suddenly discovered a husband’s homosexuality. But increasingly, deviates are out in the open, particularly in fashion and the arts. Women and homosexual men work together designing, marketing, retailing, and wrapping it all up in the fashion magazines. The interior decorator and the stockbroker’s wife conspire over curtains. And the symbiosis is not limited to working hours. For many a woman with a busy or absent husband, the presentable homosexual is in demand as an escort —witty, pretty, catty, and no problem to keep at arm’s length. Rich dowagers often have a permanent traveling court of charming international types who exert influence over what pictures and houses their patronesses buy, what decorators they use, and where they spend which season.
…
There is no denying the considerable talent of a great many homosexuals, and ideally, talent alone is what should count. But the great artists so often cited as evidence of the homosexual’s creativity—the Leonardos and Michelangelos —are probably the exceptions of genius. For the most part, thinks Los Angeles Psychiatrist Edward Stainbrook, homosexuals are failed artists, and their special creative gift a myth. No less an authority than Somerset Maugham felt that the homosexual, "however subtly he sees life, cannot see it whole," and lacks "the deep seriousness over certain things that normal men take seriously … He has small power of invention, but a wonderful gift for delightful embroidery.
Homosexual ethics and esthetics are staging a vengeful, derisive counterattack on what deviates call the "straight" world. This is evident in "pop," which insists on reducing art to the trivial, and in the "camp" movement, which pretends that the ugly and banal are fun. It is evident among writers, who used to disguise homosexual stories in heterosexual dress but now delight in explicit descriptions of male intercourse and orgiastic nightmares. It is evident in the theater, with many a play dedicated to the degradation of women and the derision of normal sex. The most sophisticated theatrical joke is now built around a homosexual situation; shock comes not from sex but from perversion. Attacks on women or society in general are neither new in U.S. writing nor necessarily homosexual, but they do offer a special opportunity for a consciously or unconsciously homosexual outlook.
They represent a kind of inverted romance, since homosexual situations as such can never be made romantic for normal audiences.
…
Even in ordinary conversation, most homosexuals will sooner or later attack the "things that normal men take seriously." This does not mean that homosexuals do not and cannot talk seriously; but there is often a subtle sea change in the conversation: sex (unspoken) pervades the atmosphere. Among other matters, this raises the question of whether there is such a thing as a discernible homosexual type. Some authorities, notably Research Psychologist Evelyn Hooker of U.C.L.A., deny it—against what seems to be the opinion of most psychiatrists. The late Dr. Edmund Bergler found certain traits present in all homosexuals, including inner depression and guilt, irrational jealousy and a megalomaniac conviction that homosexual trends are universal. Though Bergler conceded that homosexuals are not responsible for their inner conflicts, he found that these conflicts "sap so much of their inner energy that the shell is a mixture of superciliousness, fake aggression and whimpering. Like all psychic masochists, they are subservient when confronted by a stronger person, merciless when in power, unscrupulous about trampling on a weaker person."
Another homosexual trait noted by Bergler and others is chronic dissatisfaction, a constant tendency to prowl or "cruise" in search of new partners. This is one reason why the "gay" bars flourishing all over the U.S. attract even the more respectable deviates.
…
The once widespread view that homosexuality is caused by heredity, or by some derangement of hormones, has been generally discarded. The consensus is that it is caused psychically, through a disabling fear of the opposite sex. The origins of this fear lie in the homosexual’s parents. The mother—either domineering and contemptuous of the father, or feeling rejected by him—makes her son a substitute for her husband, with a close-binding, overprotective relationship. Thus, she unconsciously demasculinizes him. If at the same time the father is weakly submissive to his wife or aloof and unconsciously competitive with his son, he reinforces the process. To attain normal sexual development, according to current psychoanalytic theory, a boy should be able to identify with his father’s masculine role.
Fear of the opposite sex is also believed to be the cause of Lesbianism, which is far less visible but, according to many experts, no less widespread than male homosexuality—and far more readily tolerated. Both forms are essentially a case of arrested development, a failure of learning, a refusal to accept the full responsibilities of life. This is nowhere more apparent than in the pathetic pseudo marriages in which many homosexuals act out conventional roles—wearing wedding rings, calling themselves "he" and "she."
Is homosexuality curable? Freud thought not. In the main, he felt that analysis could only bring the deviant patient relief from his neurotic conflicts by giving him "harmony, peace of mind, full efficiency, whether he remains a homosexual or gets changed." Many of Freud’s successors are more optimistic. Philadelphia’s Dr. Samuel Hadden reported last year that he had achieved twelve conversions out of 32 male homosexuals in group therapy. Paris Psychiatrist Sacha Nacht reports that about a third of his patients turn heterosexual, a third adjust to what they are, and a third get no help at all. But he feels that only about one in ten is moved to seek help in the first place.
That is the crux: most homosexuals apparently do not desire a cure…
Focus on the Family? The Mormon Times? No…Time Magazine, issue of January 21, 1966 – The Homosexual In America
I was 12 years old. By the end of the year I would turn 13, and enter my teen years in an America where the common view of gay people were that we were sick tortured twisted sexual deviants who ought to be locked up for the safety of the community. When I was 14 I would sit with my grade school peers in a sex ed class, taught by our gym teachers, who told us that homosexuals typically killed the people they had sex with, and preferred to kidnap and rape children and seduce young heterosexuals, rather then seek out other homosexuals for sexual trysts, precisely because we knew how dangerous we were. They taught us that homosexuals would become so excited during sex that we often mutilated the genitals of the people we were having sex with. They taught us that we were confused about which gender we were, and hated ourselves, and would take out that hate on other people by killing them horribly. Most unsolved murders we were told, were committed by homosexuals. That was the world I came to know myself in.
How I managed to come out of my teen years into adulthood not completely loathing myself as others of my generation did is a story I’m (very slowly I’m afraid…) telling in cartoon form in A Coming Out Story. I was so lucky…especially in that my first high school crush was so completely decent to me. Those of us who made it out of there in one piece emotionally and mentally, pretty much swore to make sure other gay kids didn’t have to go through what we did, and to fight for the honor and the dignity of our lives, and our loves, so that future generations wouldn’t have to know what it was like to have your teachers look you in the face and try to make you and all your friends believe that you were a sexual monster…a deviant…a pervert…
The Presidential Inauguration Committee just issued a statement saying, "We had always intended and planned for Rt. Rev. Robinson’s invocation to be included in the televised portion of yesterday’s program. We regret the error in executing this plan – but are gratified that hundreds of thousands of people who gathered on the mall heard his eloquent prayer for our nation that was a fitting start to our event.” — PIC communications director Josh Earnest.
When Barack Obama chose anti-gay, anti-choice, anti-porn Rick Warren to give the invocation at his inauguration, gays and lesbians—still smarting from Prop 8—were understandably upset. Well, I thought our dismay was understandable. But a lot of folks in the comments threads here, there, and everywhere disagreed. Barack was just trying to bring the country together, to find common ground, and Rick Warren invited him to his church, and how dare you get upset, trust the man, let him get into office before you start grousing at him about this, why are you worrying about symbolism when it’s policy that matters, and blah blah blah.
…
Then when Barack Obama chose Gene Robinson, the gay Episcopal bishop, to give the invocation at tonight’s pre-inaugural festivities—the concert tonight at the Lincoln Memorial—the folks defending Obama were all like, "SEE? Obama is bringing the country together! Anti-gay preachers, gay preachers—everyone is equal and equally welcome!" And Gene Robinson did give the invocation at tonight’s concert…and his words were very moving. You can read the full text of Robinson’s prayer here.
But if you were watching HBO’s broadcast of tonight’s concert you didn’t see Robinson, or hear his remarks… because Robinson’s invocation wasn’t included in the broadcast. Skipped over during the live broadcast, edited out of the rebroadcast.
Dig it. Not just skipped over, but edited out. And Bishop Robinson wasn’t the only thing edited out…
How about the fact that tonight’s other big gay moment—the D.C. gay men’s chorus singing with Josh Groban—passed without the chorus, unlike every other performer, being identified?
Nice. Welcome to morning in America. No matter what little token we may think we’ve managed to win, never doubt the ability or the willingness of the corporate media to make sure we remain invisible. And it’s not just that they’d rather have republicans in power then democrats. It’s not just that allowing people to see their gay and lesbian neighbors for the human beings we are, makes it hard for us to be the monsters we have to become every election year so that republicans can gay bash their way into winning elections. Homophobia is as much a fact of life in the high testosterone boardrooms of corporate America as it is in the megachurch stadium seating big screen TV cathedrals of the heartland. They hate us. First of all you have to understand that they hate us.
The democrats are sill late in coming to this fight. Obama and his people probably genuinely thought they were being actively inclusive in bringing in Gene Robinson. They were probably totally blind-sided by all this. Like a lot of decent rational people, they just don’t get the depth of contempt toward gay people. They never believe it until they actually see it for themselves. You can’t just take a rhetorical stand in favor of gay equality. You can’t just make a few gestures of sympathy and expect any progress to be made. This is a knife fight. They hate us. They hate us with a venom that is as bottomless as it is bitter. Every inch of progress in this fight, every inch, every painful, bloody inch of progress we make toward equality, toward the day when we are free to love and hope and dream and make decent lives for ourselves to the best of our ability, is its own poisonous scorched earth total war. Every inch. It will be like that right up to the bitter end and for generations after. They hate us. They will never stop hating us. Of course HBO censored Gene Robinson. Of course they shoved the Gay Men’s chorus into the closet. The corporate media will keep on making us invisable, will keep on shoving us back into the closet, will enable the demonization of gay people, and look the other way at the toll of death and destruction until someone makes them stop. Asking politely will not change one single solitary thing. They hate us.
My maternal grandmother was a hard woman to live with. For me especially because he absolutely hated my dad. Being his son, every time she laid eyes on me she saw him and I had to suffer for it. She never saw anything good in anything or anyone, never saw joy or happiness or fun in any terms other then sinning. I never saw her smile unless it was at someone else’s misery.
She loved her soap operas. Even more then her radio preachers. When I came home from school, one of them was reliably on the TV and it was an open question of my youth whether or not that was because they chased me out of the living room into my bedroom. I hated those things. I could never understand how someone could be entertained watching people being mean and cruel to one another. Understand, this was in an age before reality TV.
Her two favorites were General Hospital and As The World Turns. Swear to God to this day I can still hear that theme song from As The World Turns playing though my head whenever I think about soap operas.
So it is with pleasure…no…relish…that I read today that the young, cute, same sex couple on the current storyline of As The World Turns finally had sex…
The breakthrough scene on As the World Turns begins at about 3:03. Of course what we see is simply the before and after, but for a show that took seventh months and an extended internet campaign from fans for producers to have its two main characters share a kiss, the sex, or evidence of it, is a revelation.
Henry Seltzer writes, in The Daily Beast: “And you know the best part? The person responsible for getting them back together after the fallout from Luke kissing his step-grandfather was his grandmother, the show’s matriarch (played by Elizabeth Hubbard for the past 25 years), who was also the most understanding when Luke first came out. So not only is this not your grandmother’s soap, leave it to the grandmother-who-unwittingly-played-a-beard to get the boys back together. She even delights in sharing their post-sex ice cream sundae.”
Hey grandma…I just watched two cute boys having sex on your favorite soap opera while drinking tequila! Yes…I’m a stinking rotten good-for-nothing Garrett just like my Pap! And your favorite soap opera has homosexuals on it now! Just like me! Only cuter. It’s still a wicked, wicked world grandma. Cheers!
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