This is for

Ida Lupino. In 1953 she created the first film noir flick ever to be directed by a woman  — The Hitch-Hiker. It’s very, very good. Back 13 years earlier she ate up the screen as the femme fatale murderess in They Drive By Night, breaking down on the witness stand screaming: “The doors made me do it!”” (In her single-minded passion to bed the disinterested Joe, ‘Lana Carlsen’ kills her husband Ed by lowering the seeing eye doors in the garage when he’s asleep in a running car.) But Ida gets her own back; The Hitch-Hiker is not just a film noir movie, it is an all-male movie, in fact there are no female characters in it at all. The plot revolves around two men who are kidnapped and psychologically tortured by a sadist hitch-hiker/killer on a road trip through Mexico. It’s kinda like Ida is saying — “You made me star in all those stupid so-called ‘women’s movies,’ well I’m going to show you how to make a man’s movie.” There’s not a lot of dialogue but what’s here is ‘cherce.’ There are things that make this film very special — the killer hitch-hiker only has one good eye, he sleeps with his bad eye constantly open — always watching them.  Later, Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto plays on the radio while the hitch-hiker ponders his next move. Lupino not only directed films, but produced them, she  was one of the first directors to do ‘product placement.' I don’t know if modern day feminists would champion her, because these days we pay an enormous amount of lip service to the notion that masculinity is inherently toxic and women are perpetual victims. The kind of masculinity depicted in The Hitch-Hiker — like battles of physical strength, courage, and sheer force of will — is out of style. I am not a fan of masculinity — I’m not very masculine myself (and I'm proud of it) but the kind of shaming that masculine men receive today is largely undeserved. Most masculine men are really nice guys. It’s the patriarchy — i.e. institutionalised sexism —  that's toxic -- not masculinity perse. If this film is any indication, Lupino liked men a lot, and she liked guns, and she was excited by the threat of violence, and by  displays of physical courage. A lot of women like that stuff; in themselves -- and in the men they love, and that’s okay too. Women are not inherently nicer, or less violent than men, they are just more physically weaker than men and significantly oppressed by them. The way to fight sexism is not to wipe out masculinity -- or demonise men -- but allow women to grab what the patriarchy claims as theirs alone — anger and desire. Who am I to say all this? Well, I’m a drag queen, baby! This doesn't mean I’m a ‘tourist’ in relation to femininity; I live every day as a feminine man, and I’m consistently surprised at how visible my infirmity is to others; how it shocks and upsets. But I’m not claiming victim status here — just pissing on my territory. I don’t know what it’s like to have a vagina, but I do know what it’s like to be feminine, so nothing excites me more than the ‘Ida Lupinos’ of the world — who know how to pick up passel of guns and throw them in a politically correct feminist’s face. In Montreal, COVID-19 is now officially over -- when I go there Ida Lupino will be on my mind; she lived the life she wanted. Montreal is waiting -- for me, for Ida, for all of us; it will be the only city in Canada to open up with the full force of its closing. Ontarians will sit, percolating and pondering, worrying and adjusting their masks, writing vituperous rants on Facebook and Instagram —then finally venturing out — one ‘little toe’ at a time. When Ontarians are set free of COVID-19 no one will notice; everyone will be too afraid to talk about it, and if they do celebrate, they will be censored for having good time. Montreal will be ecstatic: they have finally burst the chains of curfew! In two weeks I will be on St. Catherine Street waving what is left of my ass and tits about (I don’t have much of left of either commodity, since I haven’t been to the gym for five months) trying desperately to get some young man’s attention. I will be as pitiable and exultant as I was meant to be, and no one can stop me. I’m already having fantasies of the guy I met in an alley who dragged me into a parking lot where I enjoyed giving him what appeared to be one of the most magnificent experiences  of oral pleasuring he might ever be priviliged to endure, or the boy who pulled down his pants on a side street and let me touch it — for a moment —or the boy at the bathhouse who I was afraid to reveal my age to, but when I told him, he lept on me  like a gazelle, yelling ‘You’re not just daddy, you’re grandaddy!’, or the magnificent young stud who balanced a family-sized chocolate chip cookie on his erection (and yes, I ate it). I don’t know how I have survived COVID-19 for a year and almost 3 months. How does a storyteller survive if he has no stories to tell? You make them up, or you tell the ones you’ve told before. It will be refreshing to actually have something to say, something that has been pricked by the prong of experience — not dredged up from the still waters of of memory. I imagine they are readying themselves for me; the Montreal drag queens are putting on their makeup, prepping their dogs for their long midnight walks (drag queens who parade about with their Chihuahuas at 2:00 in the morning are my favourite thing), the boys at the strip clubs will be telling themselves -- and their girlfriends -- that they are straight, but right now they really need the money, and ergo it will be surprisingly easy for them to bend over and display their bumholes for my expert perusal. I do all this for Ida Lupino, who in They Drive By Night utilised the then nascent seeing-eye technology as a hopeless alibi, but in The Hitch Hiker outgunned the dimwitted males who said it couldn’t be done; that no mere woman knows as much men about guns or suspense. No one gave Ida any credit; but she did it anyway, because she had to to prove she was more alive than dead, more woman than feminine, and that she was everything — god bless her — that she was not expected to be.