Why Gay Films Suck

I just watched the fabulous French film Yves St. Laurent starring the brilliant Pierre Niney as the tragic designer. It was so gorgeous and sad and true. Why then, does it get 46% on the Rotten Tomatoes enjoyment metre? Why are all the reviewers calling it ‘empty’ and ‘overdressed’ and ‘about nothing? I’ll tell you. Because it’s gay. Very gay. And not in a nice way either.

If you want a NICE gay movie there are a lot of them out there. People are making new ones all the time. For instance, there’s a really nice gay movie opening soon with Alfred Molina and John Lithgow, erroneously titled Love is Strange. Critics are raving about it, and I’m sure it will be a big hit. 

It sounds perfectly horrid. It’s about a portly old pair of very unsexual looking gay men who have been together for thirty-nine years and are forced to live apart. Why? Because one of the older men (Alfred Molina) is fired from his job as a Catholic school teacher (“Aww……!”) cuz he’s gay. Gee whiz, I can feel the tears welling up already. And John Lithgow, who is forced to live in a house with his young possibly gay nephew, teaches the young man some unique (unsexual of course!) lessons about life. The crux of the film is  that these two messily bearded, lovable old piles of dough can’t stand to be apart for more than five minutes after thirty-nine years. (To repeat: “Aw……!”)

The title is of course a misnomer. It should be called ‘Love is The Same for Everybody and It’s Unbelievably Banal.’ Or perhaps ‘Love is a Cloyingly Sentimental Figment of Hollywood’s Imagination.’

Jalil Lespert’s Yves St. Laurent is, on the other hand, the story of two gay men (Yves St. Laurent and Pierre Berge), who were also lovers for four decades but whose lives don’t have the antiseptic, homespun, family-centred cheeriness that will undoubtedly warm the hearts of the masses in the upcoming Love is Strange. No, Yves St. Laurent is a very real and somewhat gritty look at a deeply touching open relationship between two very sexual queer men, one of who (St. Laurent) has a drug problem. Yves St. Laurent dares to urges us to sympathize with two very real guys, who have a lot of sex with a lot of people — and who like to party and have a good time — and there are no impressionable nephews or Catholic schools in sight.

This is the sad and sorry state of gay film — and also, to some degree, of film in general. We are entering a period (how long will it last, oh Lord, how long?) of depressingly banal sentimentalism — where wit has been replaced with gentle humour, and ideas replaced with homespun thoughts. There is reason to be afraid; the last era of aesthetic sentimentalism lasted almost two hundred years — from 1700 to 1900. It was a dark age for theatre; David Garrick issued in ‘bardolatry;’ a movement devoted to making Shakespeare palatable by giving his plays happy Christian endings. It took the likes of Oscar Wilde and Alfred Jarry at the turn of the last century to drag us out of all the mediocre schmarmy muck.

The amazing thing is that the heartbreaking new French film Yves St. Laurent has the same theme as the musical Coco. Coco was a huge musical comedy hit in the early 70s, starring Katherine Hepburn. In Coco, the leading character — Coco Chanel — weighed her rejection of family values against her devotion to fashion. At the end of the musical a vast array of Chanel’s designs were displayed to Andre Previn’s soaring score, the message being: Coco Chanel’s art redeemed her imperfect life. Everybody loved it. No one called it ‘empty’ or ‘pointless.’

Yves St. Laurent’s art redeemed his imperfect life in quite the same way, and that is the point of the director Jalil Lespert’s film; but I guess nothing redeems the life of a promiscuous, drug addicted homosexual, does it?

Call me crazy, but that’s one heartwarming, homespun thought I had conveniently forgotten.

For Margaret Wente and The Whitewashers: The Truths of Ferguson, Missouri

 I don’t mean to pick on Margaret Wente. But she seems to be the epitome of what I call the ‘whitewash’ movement. (I use the term ‘whitewash’ because it is a kind of ‘washing’ that is favoured by privileged white people). The whitewash movement is mainly concerned with making sure that we know that racism, sexism, and homophobia are over. Members of the ‘whitewash’ campaign are hard to pin down on the political spectrum. It serves them well not to identify as being right or left-wing, because they can simply claim to be well intentioned. But unfortunately their views lead us directly back to our racist, sexist and homophobic past.
 Wente has been ‘whitewashing’ a lot lately in terms of feminism — and what she sees as a made up problem: rape culture. The idea is that misogyny is over, and women have achieved most of what they wanted — ergo, we must say goodbye to feminism. The same argument can be used about homophobia (Look at all the gay designer guys on TV -- and look at ‘Modern Family.’ Homophobia is a dead issue!) and racism (There is a black president in the USA -- so racism is over!). All this -- of course -- leads us to Ferguson Missouri. 
 What’s fascinating and very important about the ant-racist riots in Ferguson, is how they have confounded politically correct media discourse. CNN Reporters are saying things like “We don’t want to get too focused on race — that would be race baiting.” You see, the right-wing has managed to make it a  impolite to discuss racism. If you accuse someone of saying or doing something racist you are attacked as playing the ‘race card’ — which means unfairly using anti-racist rhetoric in order to tip the argument. The justification goes like this: “Racism is over, and the only time people talk about racism these days is when they want to attack someone unjustly.”
 I think the situation in Ferguson may make some realize that it’s still very important to discuss racism — just as important as discussing sexism and homophobia. Here we have a town that is the apotheosis of  American inequality. Despite Oprah Winfrey, despite Barack Obama, despite the much heralded death of racism in America, in Ferguson 70 percent of the population is black and yet only 3 out of 57 police officers are persons of colour (apparently Ferguson claims to have an Asian and/or Native American police officer too!). Sure, there is a black president in the USA, but old habits die hard, and people continue -- stubbornly -- to be racist. The same thing could be said about homophobia. Yes, we now have gay marriage, but the victories of the gay marriage lobby may have done more to encourage hatred of gays and lesbians than to alleviate it. And after all, has Roe vs. Wade changed the minds of rabid anti-abortionists, or has it just rooted them even more firmly to their prejudices? You can legislate all you want, but it’s much, much harder to change the human heart. I’ve got nothing against civil rights for queers, women and people of colour, but I do have something against those who think such legislation is all we need to make the world a better place.
 In other words, racism, sexism and homophobia are alive and well. No matter how many people talk about the death of racism — the people in the USA and Canada who hold the power are still white, and the people who are so often oppressed by that power are often non-white. Similarly, no matter how much Wente talks about the end of feminism  and the ‘myth’ of rape culture — we still live in a society where most politicians and CEOs are white men. And when people rant on about homophobia being over, I always ask: “When was the last time you saw a drag queen anchorperson — or even a mildly effeminate newscaster on the CBC who wasn’t relegated to weather or celebrity gossip?” Whitewashing over the real and frightening ills of racism, sexism and homophobia is merely a very clever right-wing tactic to take us back to our racist, sexist and homophobic past.
 Will the wounds of Ferguson induce us to see things as they really are? Will Ferguson — at last — open the eyes of those who love to imagine that the world was long ago cleared of hate?

 We’ll have to wait and see.

The Return of Bad Acting

I’ve had it with the latest acting trend. And though I don’t want to blame anybody, I think I kind of have to.

What I’m talking about is much more than good old-fashioned bad acting. I  got the idea for this article from talking with a friend of mine — a veteran of Canadian theatre. I asked him if he’s seen any good plays lately. He said “Well I saw this play, but the actors in it were doing that bad acting thing that’s so popular right now.” “Oh what do you mean?” I asked. He said, “Oh you know, when they are trying to show you what good actors they are all the time.”

Right.

What my friend was talking about was actors who have great technique and are always showing it off. In other words, they’ve been to theatre school. They’ve learned how to project their voices and how to move their bodies with exquisite poise. But when you see them onstage they are so busy showing off they’ve forgotten to pay a character.

When you watch these actors you may be fooled into thinking you are watching great acting (especially when we rarely get to see any really good old-fashioned good acting these days).

You might think Brecht is to blame for all this, because he went on about alienation. But I don’t think so. Brecht wanted audiences to be wrenched out of their rapture, their ‘hypnotism’ — as he called it. But in order for alienation to work, the audience has to be pulled in at some point so that they have something to be wrenched out of. A truly Brechtian performance pulls you in and out — it doesn’t just leave you at the sidelines, admiring the actors.

I think David Mamet is somewhat guilty, because in his book True and False, he goes on about how actors don’t have to play characters, they just have to say the lines and express the emotions. Well call me crazy, might Mamet’s wife Rebecca Pigeon be a credible exponent of his acting style? Then why is her acting so boring? (Answer: because she’s always playing Rebecca Pigeon).

But I’m afraid the real origins of this new acting style can be found in mega-musicals and the schools that train actors for them. These days acting students all want to get the big bucks by starring in American megamusical touring productions. In megamusicals actors do nothing but show us how talented they are. And when called on to sing, they just step downstage and deliver directly to the audience — usually fierce anthems about AIDS or poverty. But playing a character— that’s the furthest thing from their minds.

Recently I bought a recording of Crazy for You (yes, I am a trash queen), and was listening to a duet version of ‘They Can’t Take That Away From Me.’ I noticed that the guy was singing the line “the way you sing offkey’ to a girl who was doing a passable imitation of Kristin Chenoweth (don’t they all?). Well of course an actress in a jukebox musical would never think of actually singing off-key. What if some mega-director saw her?  

A part of me welcomes the latest reality theatre trend (i.e. people talking to their moms or their best friends, people arguing about politics, people talking about their lack of privilege). At least these people aren’t showing off what great actors they are.

Recently at a party I was introduced to a couple of students from Randolph. I couldn’t help myself. I was just a teensy bit tipsy, so I leaned over and said — “I bet you’re triple threats, right?” “Oh yes,” said one, beaming, unaware of my irony. The other was a bit craftier.  “I’m a double threat “ he said. brazenly, “acting and “ — (he  pointed to his brain) —  “thinking.”

Which one do you think gets the part?

It’s Time To Say Goodbye

I’ve been feeling depressed lately — partially because one of our cats has tendency to poo on the floor and we can’t figure out why. But it isn’t only that. Richard Gwyn recently wrote an article in the Star that made me realize it’s time to say goodbye to universities as we know them.

In his article, Gwyn suggests that university professors should not have tenure because they misuse it, and that they are overpaid anyway, and students learn better online.

 Once I would have said: ’Hey, Richard, it isn’t the system that’s wrong, it’s the bad apples. Maybe some tenured professors are lazy and abuse the system. But that doesn’t mean the system itself is wrong. There are lots of car accidents, but have we decided to abolish roads?’

I have realized, finally, that this argument is based on a false analogy. The reason we don’t abolish roads is because roads serve a greater good. But what is the greater good of tenure?

Well, we used to think that the purpose of tenure was for professors at universities to do research. The idea was that if they were coming up with challenging ideas, then they should be paid for that, and not be in danger of being fired.

But the idea of universities as places for professors and students to do research is outdated. We now know that universities have one purpose and one purpose only: to prepare students for jobs. In fact universities of the future will probably have to guarantee  that students  get placements somewhere, or else close down.

You see the focus of our lives has changed (God knows what it was before!). We know now we should concentrate on feeding our children and improving our standard of living. In the past, discussions of what is ‘truth’ — or what is ‘good’ — mattered, because it was important for people to figure out how to make the world better place. Now we know that a better world just means a higher standard of living.

And if we have any other questions, Wikipedia will answer them. In olden days, university professors asked students to question the information they got from the web. But that’s complicated and it takes time. And the great thing about Wikipedia is that if you don’t like the information you find there, you can go online and change it.  So now, truth is democratic.

Who cares what is good or bad, right or wrong, real or unreal, anyway? The important question is: how many people like it? How many thumbs up does it get on facebook or iTunes? If something is popular than most people are going to buy it, and that means you can sell it. This is really all that matters.

I want to apologise to all those people who read the articles I wrote defending universities in the past. I also want to apologize to all the students I bored with my hopeless attempts to get them to do what I called ‘critical thinking.’

I’m sorry about that. I always knew you kids didn’t want to think critically — so what was the point of putting you through all that stress? It’s very difficult to take every little bit of information you get from the web and try to figure out if it’s ‘accurate.’ 

I’m sorry I wasted your time.

Common sense is the wave of the future. Once only Tory politicians like Mike Harris believed in the importance of common sense — but now even NDP politicians like Andrea Horvath believe in it too.

Come on. We all just instinctively know what’s right and what’s wrong.We know in our heart of hearts how to act, and how to be. We just need to follow those ‘inner promptings.’ And universities are  boring, snooty, elitist places where rich, effeminate, tenured professors earn fat salaries investigating nonsense. Unless universities prepare young people for jobs, they should be abolished.

I’m glad I finally figured it out.

What is Rob Ford REALLY saying about Karen Stintz?

Rob Ford's recent comments about Karen Stintz made me think about heterosexuality.

“I'd like to fucking jam her, but she don't want...(laughter)....”

What Ford is saying here is not simply that he is sexually attracted to Karen Stintz and would gladly have sex with her if she consented. In itself, this would be disrespectful and unprofessional. But I’m pretty sure that Ford is not so much expressing his attraction for Karen Stintz, as he is expressing his anger against her. After all, Karen Stintz is a Toronto city councilor and former chair of the Toronto Transit Commission who is now running for Mayor against him. She has fiercely opposed Ford’s views on public transportation. She has verbally attacked him in public. Ford is angry with Stintz, and he expresses that anger by saying that he would like to ‘jam’ her, i.e., have sexual intercourse with her.

Many have objected to Ford’s comments. Some have gone so far as to label his remarks ‘misogynistic.’

I think we can go much further than that.

I must admit that I approach heterosexuality from an odd perspective. I was ostensibly a heterosexual until I was thirty -- that is I had sex exclusively with women even though I wished I was having sex with men. As a kind of ‘lapsed heterosexual,’ I tend to look on heterosexuality the way some people look at homosexuality. In other words, to me, heterosexuality is a cultural oddity, a freakish and contradictory bundle of customs and attitudes. Heterosexuality is something that I constantly turn over and over in my head, examining it in different lights, with the (perhaps) doomed hope of someday figuring it all out.

In this case, I am shocked and appalled by Rob Ford’s remarks because they seem to find their origins in the very heart of rape culture.

Like Rob Ford, I am a privileged, somewhat overweight, middle-aged white male, who is often attacked (verbally and in print) by others. And in my case, those people are sometimes men -- men who I may, or may not, be sexually attracted to. But never in my wildest dream would it occur to me to express my anger at those men by ‘jamming’ them. 

Now I am certainly no saint. In fact I am not one of those who necessarily connects the act of sex with love, or even with affection. For me, sex is primarily about physical desire. Nevertheless the idea of using sex as a way to do violence against another human being is, to me, completely alien.

I’m not saying I don’t understand ‘s/m’ or the various violent aspects of consensual sex (bite me on the ear, honey!).  Sex is, I think quite naturally related to violence. What I’m talking about is one person doing unwanted, unexpected violence to another through the act of sex (i.e., rape).

I don’t think that Ford’s comments are isolated, unusual, or simply vaguely misogynistic.

Notice that after the remarks in the transcript there is one word:  ‘laughter.’ It seems that some of the other men in the room with Ford found his quip humourous. Indeed, I would suggest that there are some men who -- seeing the Ford quotation on the news -- might have gotten a good laugh out of it too.

Why does this happen? Why does the idea of using sex to hurt a woman something that many heterosexual men respond to with a chuckle of recognition? Why do some straight men think that the way to get back at a woman is to ‘jam’ her – and that ‘jamming’ is something like ‘hitting’? Is this sentiment hard wired into male bodies, or is it something learned culturally? And how can we stop it?

It strikes me that humans are quite naturally not the calm sensible rational beings Enlightenment philosophers imagined us to be, but unthinking passionate animals. Thus, the urge that many men have to use sex to hurt women is simply a manifestation of ancient  ‘survival of the fittest’ hardwiring, i.e., the notion that those who are physically bigger and stronger are better and have the right to kill, maim and devour the weak.

If my theory is correct and human beings are hardwired like this, it might make sense to think about how we could re-educate heterosexual men so that they might learn that sex should not be used as a way to hurt someone.

And we might start with Rob Ford.

Last Night I Saw ‘Cock’

Last night I saw ‘Cock’ and it made me think.

True, that’s what often happens to me on Friday nights.

 Only this time ‘Cock’ was a play at The Theatre Centre.

It was funny as hell.

But the play made me think about identity politics and of course what is wrong with the world and why we are all going to hell in a hand-basket.

            The play ‘Cock’ sends the message that sexual identity politics are (is?) not important. It doesn’t matter whether people are gay or straight. People fall in love with a human being, not a gender, and everyone is truly multi-(or omni) sexual.

            I have lots of problems with this; basically because it’s not true.

            But more important -- the ideas in ‘Cock’ are part of a new trend that presently flowers fiercely both inside and outside of academia:  the ‘Anti Identity Politics Movement’. These days it’s very hip to be against identity politics -- and very old fashioned to speak about straight vs. gay, or male vs. female. The trans movement and the bisexual movement send the same ultra-universal, ultra-inclusive message. If you identify as male or female, straight or gay, you are simply boxing yourself into an oppressive corner. Labels punish people. So why not live in a world without labels? In an ideal world, there would be no need for such exclusive categories such as gender, and there would be no sexual categories. We would be free to love whomever we pleased.

            This new anti-identity trend has put the feminist and queer communities in a unique dilemma. I know women today who still speak proudly of the special experience of being born into a woman’s body in a patriarchal culture. These women are now being told by some trans-activists that for women to talk of themselves proudly as Cisgender women (i.e. women born with vaginas and assigned as female at birth) is oppressive.

Hm. What ever happened to women’s lib? To feminism?  I guess that’s over.

            And Gay Liberation is, of course, necessarily over too.  

            But what’s ironic about this new ‘Anti Identity Politics Movement’ is that it promulgates the same mistaken ideas that were the foundation for Gay Liberation. You see the founders of Gay Liberation did not predict that the happy result of their policies would be a totally ‘gay world’ (all right-wing hate literature to the contrary). What early gay-libbers desired was a world without sexual identity categories where everyone loved whom they wished and sexual identity did not matter.

            Suffice it to say, that after nearly forty-five years of gay liberation and nearly fifty years of feminism in North America, we do not live in a genderless world, or a world without sexuality categories.

            But my big question is this: was this utopia ever possible? And is it even desirable?

            For all these future fantasies are based on a very human delusion – that people everywhere are all, basically the same.

            In our global, tolerant world, (which is of course also rife with hate and religious fundamentalism) we like to pretend that everyone is the same. But this deluded utopian vision simply helps us avoid the very thing we are all afraid of, that deep down we are all fundamentally different.

            It is this human ‘difference’ that is one of the most frightening things about being alive. Yes we might all be very shocked with how our neighbours -- and even some of our friends -- think, feel and act, deep down in their ‘private lives’  (to quote Noel Coward). But the challenge for humanity is to somehow not only be tolerant, but to learn -- from the vast differences that threaten to separate us on a daily basis.

            I do not wish to deny that there is much hate directed at trans people and bisexuals,  and that the hate is unfair and it should stop. But the answer isn’t to yearn for a genderless, ‘sexuality-less’ world.

            The answer is not that we are all the same, but that we must somehow come to terms with how we are all so frighteningly different.

            

WOMEN-HATING WOMEN

Susan Cole and and Margaret Wente have one thing in common. They’re both in heavy denial about what they really believe.

 It’s a wily tactic. These days everybody wants to appear hip, and most women want to appear as ‘post-feminist cool’ (whatever that means). And yet certain women are able to get away with supremely anti-feminist views without being branded as social conservatives. Margaret and Susan aren’t quite as bad as those niqab-wearing women who insist that by swathing their bodies from head to toe in black fabric they achieve a special kind of sexual equality and gender freedom -- but they’re basically up to the same thing.

Wente is an interesting case. Recently accused of plagiarism (but by no means exonerated) she claims not to be right wing. Yet her columns betray a fundamental, – well – fundamentalism, when it comes to issues of sexuality and gender.

            In a recent Globe and Mail article Wente attacked women pornographers. Her hate filled diatribe suggests that the some feminists find porn empowering “especially if it’s produced by lesbians.” This is patently not true. By allying lesbians with porn, she seems to thing she is taking a cheap jab at lesbians, who Wente obviously dislikes. Wente also has something against large women. She says that female pornographer Courtney Trouble’s films “feature a lot of fat women with nipple piercings and appliances.” And what, may I ask, is wrong with that?

            But the essence of Wente’s argument is also dangerous nonsense. She objects to students studying pornography at the university level, and specifically targets feminist pornographers recently visiting the University of Toronto. Obviously, for Wente, ignorance is bliss. We live in a porn-saturated, sexism-saturated culture. We are bombarded daily with explicit sexist images of women via the internet. These images are accessible to everyone, even children. Does it make sense for universities NOT to teach students how to cast a critical/ political eye on this cultural phenomenon?

            Susan Cole and Margaret Wente may sound like a strange bedfellows, however Cole shares the same anti-sex stance. I have tried to confront Susan in person and in print, about her anti-male, anti-porn position. It’s something she always denies. However in her latest pan of Lars Von Trier’s fascinating and important film Nymphomaniac, she prefers to falsely label Von Trier a misogynist instead of thoughtfully analyzing the thoughtful pro-feminist, pro-women stance the film presents.

            Susan Cole and Margaret Wente are unfortunately not stupid.  Cole knows that if she were to attack Von Trier’s film for defending women’s rights to their bodies, their sexuality, their promiscuity, and their ‘kink’ – she would be ‘outed’ as the sex-hater she really is.

            I’m not a fan of the pompous Von Trier, but this somewhat preachy film, is evidently on the side of women, down to the end (spoiler alert!) when the female protagonist shoots her so-called male friend for attempting to rape her.

            It’s not our fault that Margaret Wente and Susan Cole are a tad dusty and rusty below the belt. And it’s time for them to stop taking their own sexual frustrations out on their fellow women, ranting against pornography, promiscuity and women who like sex.

            And it’s time someone exposed them for what they really are. Old-fashioned women-haters masquerading as modern culture critics.