Yes, it Does Matter, and Will You Shut Up?

            I’m sorry to be so annoyed about this but I’m really tired of hearing that it doesn’t matter anymore whether or not your are gay. And to find an article by Paul Gallant in In Toronto magazine with just that theme (Open Closet Policy: Does coming out even matter anymore?) just makes me weary with frustration.

            All the people that Paul mentions in his article are people I admire. But in each and every case, coming out has been, I would argue, a huge issue for them.

            Gallant mentions Anderson Cooper, Ellen DeGeneres, Trevor Boris, Maggie Cassella, Ann- Marie MacDonald, Rick Mercer, and Kathleen Wynne – and though it’s hard to figure out exactly what he’s saying about most of them, his general conclusion is – if it mattered once whether or not you came out, it’s no big deal now.

            I beg to disagree. I think it’s important to note that Rick Mercer, Ellen de Generes,  and Anderson Cooper came out once their careers were established; and for good reason – they wanted to get a little respect before everyone made a big deal about their sexuality. Maggie Cassella and Ann- Marie MacDonald --  god bless them -- are beautiful, enormously talented, femme-looking white women. Maggie has always been very out, and Ann-Marie MacDonald is lesbian if anyone asks -- but frankly if you’re femme, white and beautiful nobody really wants to know. Trevor Boris is funny as hell. He is also out and effeminate and – well I don’t know how to tell him this – but as talented as he is, he is likely to be always known as one of  Canada’s ‘gay comics.’

            Kathleen Wynne is out and though she tries to look femme, her efforts lead her to resemble your high school gym teacher dressed up for prom (again, God bless you girlfriend -- but a string a pearls just isn’t going to do the trick!).

So much for it all not mattering.

            All of these celebrities should be commended, not only for their achievements, but also for their coming out whenever they have done so -- early or late in their careers (or even just if someone asks!). But for anyone to assert that it hasn’t mattered whether or not they have come out or not, is just….well – that notion is filled with more bullshit than a post-video apology from Rob Ford.

            Anyone who is not lying through their teeth knows it matters very much whether or not you are queer and whether or not you are out. Yes, in the western world (and only in the western world I might add) we have two things -- human rights and political correctness -- that help us to imagine that homophobia is over. But we all know that you can’t erase hate from the human heart. Human hypocrisy is rampant (again Rob Ford comes to mind) and the amount of acceptance we queers get from the straight community depends completely on

a)    how gender regular we are

b)   how little we talk about sex

In other words, if you’re a boy who looks and acts like a boy, or a girl who looks and acts like a girl, you will experience less homophobia than if you are not. And if you just never talk about sex -- ever -- straight people may manage to forget that you gobble knobs and/or munch carpet in your spare time.

            So why do queers these days have so much invested in pretending no one cares whether or not they are straight or gay? It really makes me laugh to watch the new prototype of the respectable fag who thinks he’s ‘fitting in’ –  um….skinny jeans, immaculately trimmed beard, funny glasses, and a bow tie? Hey, I don’t know how to tell you this, but you ain’t foolin’ nobody, no time, honey! And despite these futile efforts to look just like everyone else, straight men in most cases just don’t give a shit about that pot belly  (why can’t I stop thinking about Rob Ford?).

But we gays care very much.

            Truth be told, we really do.

            So why the denial? The best I can do is to suggest that gay men -- like everyone -- want life to be nice.  They think they can rid the world of homophobia by wishing it away. Well I don’t know how to tell you this, Dorothy, but all the wishing in the world will not, in actuality, get you home.

            And in fact, the hours you spend dreaming that lies are true is valuable time wasted – time that could be used in trying to change the human hearts around you, by practicing complete honesty and timely disclosure of the full truth and nothing but  (whether it makes straights queasy or not!).

            Sorry Paul Gallant, but on this one I happen to think you are dead wrong.

No More Alice Munros!

So isn’t it wonderful that Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize for Literature on October 10, 2013? I’m very happy for her, and for Canada. But, unfortunately it may very well be the last time that Canada is able to celebrate the international success of one of its writers in this way. For if the recent trend in funding universities continues, there may very well be No More Munros.

As the University of Western Ontario’s website is proud to proclaim, Alice Munro’s “publishing life started at Western. Munro’s first connection to Western’s Department of English came while she was an undergraduate student pursuing an English major. As a student, she published three short stories in Western’s undergraduate English magazine, Folio, from 1949-51.”

But the English Department that nurtured Munro’s creative writing career may be a thing of the past. The new trend in the new tough economic climate, is that universities should only support programs that lead to instant jobs upon graduation. Peter Cohan offered this solution in Forbes magazine for the problems plaguing cash strapped universities in 2012: “The solution could be as simple as eliminating the departments that offer majors that employers do not value. To that end, I would suggest that every university develop an income statement for each of its academic departments….Departments that are profitable and likely to remain so would stick around. Those that are not and would not, get cut.”

Are American and Canadian universities following Forbes advice? Well it certainly seems so. Christine McKenna, in her report on the Canadian Federation of Humanities and Social Sciences 2013 Congress mentions “a recent trend among other Canadian universities of funding cuts to humanities programs.”

Yes folks, English programs are not likely to guarantee students immediate employment when they graduate, so in the future there may be no more Alice Munros. I know what you’re going to say.  That writers don’t need to go to university. Most likely, Shakespeare didn’t go to university. So why should people like Alice Munro? And after all, doesn’t it do those writers some good to suffer? If a writer is going to be a writer, shouldn’t they be able to do it without a university education?

            Matters aren’t helped when Canadian writers like Robertson Davies decry government funding to the arts. But he -- like many others -- have received and continue to receive government help. Robertson Davies made his living as an academic (teaching at the University of Toronto, which receives ample government support).

            It isn’t only that writers like Alice Munro take courses at Universities, but that University humanities departments create a culture of reading and literacy in Canada, and an appreciation for art -- one that not only helps to enrich our lives but also insures that people will in fact continue to read, and appreciate creativity in general.

            But we are, increasingly, morphing into a world that doesn’t understand the value of anything unless it has a dollar sign on it.

            That’s too bad. Canada’s Group of Seven, for instance, believed that art offered us a direct connection (through nature) to the mysteries of the human spirit. Canadian theatre pioneer and Group of Seven affiliate Roy Mitchell spoke of: “a statement of the spiritual power which theatre could attain as religion towards the awakening of the soul.”

            Yes, it’s really too bad. As we cut university humanities programs we are not only abandoning the Group of Seven’s vision, we are abandoning our souls.

And just a side note: there will more Alice Munros, and no more Nobel prizes for literature, for Canada.

Shame.

Our Great Leader Would Prefer You Turned Your Attention to….Sandra Bullock’s Thighs

            I’m really sick of these American blockbuster movies. Have you noticed that every week Hollywood releases a new big expensive-to-make film, and, luckily, it just happens to get a 95% rating on Rotten Tomatoes? We discover, to our surprise, that it has also ‘rocked the box office’ in its first week, and set a new record (a new record every week wow!) in ticket sales.  Co-incidentally – well no, obviously because the film is just so fabulous -- everyone is talking about it. Well lately, the media has added a new twist. Whatever the big film happens to be, it also just happens to be the centre of a giant debate that keeps tongues a-flappin’. Last week the record-breaking blockbuster was Gravity. All America was just itchin’ to see it, CNN told us. And, also – astronauts were being interviewed about the requisite ‘controversy.’ Were depictions of space travel in Gravity accurate? They had to get a rocket scientist on CNN to discuss this one. Gee whiz, Sandra Bullock is bouncing around from space station to space station, and manages to return to the earth on her own, and she’s never even flown a plane -- and her makeup doesn’t get mussed. How accurate could this piece of humungous garbage filmmaking possibly be?

This week it’s Captain Philips – starring the Oscar winning Tom Hanks, who, amazingly, has managed to master a New England accent for the role – wow, what acting chops, eh? But check this out -- there’s a huge controversy over the film. Was Captain Philips really a hero, or did he steer his ship into pirate-infested waters -- effectively causing the entire bloody attack himself?

Well I guess you’re just going to have to go to the stupid movie and create your own opinion.

I’m sorry to be so sarcastic about this whole damn thing, but it's not just that our brains are being destroyed by bad movies. I’m frightened of the Brave New World we live in, where even our entertainment has been homogenized to such an extent that most people are being fooled into thinking they are watching challenging art when they are in truth watching the latest government approved crap to keep us all docile and compliant.

Hey, wait, this isn’t Old Soviet Russia! This isn’t Woody Allen’s Sleeper! These are not messages from our fearless leader telling us all that our lives our okay, and we should not oppose the government and just shut up.

Or are they?

I remember -- when I was a kid --learning that there were two kinds of dictatorships, fascist and communist. Communist dictatorships sprang from socialism, whereas fascist dictatorship sprang from capitalism. This never made sense to me. How could capitalism be totalitarian?

But capitalism IS totalitarian; the profit motive insures that – if it is not checked – we will never again have to deal with radical ideas that might disturb us. Remember when the internet used to be the wild wild west of information and ideas? Now, watch out -- don’t try putting too much gay stuff into a youtube video or it might get censored. Don’t try and sell a book with too many naked pictures on Apple Online. And Google is starting a World Library. Hey don’t be fooled by that. Google is not starting a World Library, they are hoping to become the World’s Biggest Bookstore (which is why Toronto is closing the store by that name downtown!). As profit motive becomes the primary engine driving the web, we will only be reading what the capitalists want us to read, nothing else.

Adorno and Horkheimer predicted it all many years ago in The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception. They said that as Hollywood became more and more driven by the profit motive we would no longer see movies that artists wanted to make, but instead movies that movie moguls would like us to see.

Yes, folks, the time has come to clear your mind. No more troubling thoughts about the worldwide rise of fundamentalist religions that oppress women and gays (isn’t that too complicated to figure out, what with political correctness and all?), or global warming (aren’t we just tired of it?) or the implications of a global capitalism that manages to enslave the east in a massive project to provide cheap labour and cheap goods for the affluent west?

Clear your mind of these ideas. They are far too tiring for your tiny brains, anyway.

            Worry about Sandra Bullock tumbling through space in her tiny gym shorts, and Tom Hanks’s potential, as he gets older, to to transform himself into Everybody’s Cuddly Daddy.

            That’s the kinda stuff that should keep you busy.

Cuz, this is the way the world ends…..

             

           

Hi! My Name is Sky and I’m an Unserious Homosexual Guy!

        Reading all the huffing and puffing about U of T instructor David Gilmour’s recent comments on Hazlitt (‘When I was given this job I said I would only teach the people that I truly, truly love. Unfortunately, none of those happen to be Chinese, or women.’) I am struck by the amazing hypocrisy of it all.

         Gilmour’s remarks are just typical of the racism, sexism and homophobia out there in our culture. What’s the big surprise? Unless of course, you’d like to pretend that David Gilmour is the only person who thinks this way. Why do you think the Toronto Sun put him on their front page? We can try and shut Gilmour down -- but his bespectacled little old lady face wears the ‘what me worry?’ expression found on every proud member of Rob Ford’s loyal constituency. As much as we all profess political correctness in public, many in our society (even professional people of all stripes) still believe that marriage is for straights only, that the East Indians are taking over, and that women who talk too much are just good old fashioned bitches.

         But most hypocritical of all are the academics who say things like -- ‘David Gilmour is not a true scholar because he insists on teaching only writers that inspire him.’

         Bullshit. If that was true, why would universities spend months looking for an actual Asian person to teach Asian studies, using the argument that only a real Asian person should and can teach it? Why did we all go to graduate school and concentrate on our specialties, writing doctoral theses on subjects like “The Aural Practices of the Tseste Fly’?

         I’m not defending David Gilmour. But he’s certainly expressing what most people think about gay writers.  I can’t talk about what it’s like to be a female writer or a Chinese writer. But I can tell you what it’s like to be a gay one. You see, David Gilmour prefers ‘serious heterosexual guys.’ Big news flash: most  serious literary pundits prefer them too. Women writers may be selling a lot of books these days, but who do we really take seriously?  

Take a trip to Key West. You will find Ernest Hemingway’s house lovingly restored, and advertised in Key West tourist brochures. Do you know who else lived and worked in Key West? Tennessee Williams (he wrote a little play called Streetcar Named Desire there). Is his house an historic site? Sorry, no. Can you even find it? (It took me a couple of days on my bicycle to ferret out the place.)

Also in Key West you will find hundreds of bars called ‘Hemingway’s’ or ‘Ernest’s Joint’ in honour of Ernest Hemingway’s fabulous and much admired manly hobby of drinking way too much. You will not, however, find a single bar called “Tennessee’s.’ Furthermore, part of the myth of Hemingway’s much admired masculinity is all bound up with his hard drinkin’ reputation. And how do we remember Tennessee Williams? As a sad, dissipated alcoholic. And what’s the real difference between these two famous addicts?

You tell me.

Gilmour says that he has put two stories by Truman Capote on his course. But all he can say about Proust is he’s ‘very, very funny about human vanity. Particularly gay vanity.’ If that’s the primary thing David Gilmour has to say about Proust then he should never teach the guy. Proust is one of the greatest and most profound writers ever. He deals with all the big issues -- including time, mortality, and the ephemeral nature of love. But let’s face it -- to Gilmour -- and I’m sure to a lot of other people -- Proust was just another homo who sure knew a lot about vanity (we homos are very vain, did you know that?).

Gay writers will never be taken seriously in our homophobic culture. The best they can hope for, is that like -- David Sedaris --they might be praised as master humourists (as long as they don’t mention their homosexuality too much).

Thanks, David Gilmour, for saying out loud what everybody really thinks about gay writers. Thanks for saying that since we don’t procreate we can never do anything other than be ‘amusing ’ -- like Proust, and his fellow funnyman, David Sedaris. I always remember Ian Brown’s comment on Sacha Baron Cohen’s Bruno in The Globe and Mail, 2009. He and Gilmour are obviously (if you’ll pardon the expression) in bed together, when it comes to the whole gay thing: 

“I was on the floor with laughter. If you held a gun to my head and forced me to justify myself, I would say there’s something inherently edgy in the ideal of male on male sex – the primacy of desire, it’s genetic futility – and anything that defrays that tension can be funny.”

It’s true, I’ve always found gay sex pretty amusing, too.

So go ahead. Call us gay writers amusing, flighty, vain, whatever – and by the way, please put two of our short stories on your course, will you? I mean, I guess it’s better than no attention at all.

         

Ten Reasons Not to Go See ANGELS IN AMERICA

1.     It’s old.

2.     It’s a play about the United States of America. It’s ‘A Gay Fantasia on Nation Themes’  -- but that’s not our nation. Hey, this is Canada, remember?

3.     It’s a TV show. It’s already been on TV. You can download it from itunes.

4.     It has a token black character, who gets to be black and effeminate, that way none of the other characters have to be like that.

5.     There is one horrible scene where a character goes to the park and has disgusting guilty ‘park sex.’ This scenes makes people --  especially gay men -- feel bad about sex and sexuality.  For us queers, being openly and proudly sexual is, historically, part of our culture.

6.     The play uses Christian imagery (angels). But devout Christians have traditionally demonized gay men in the name of their religion and continue to do so today.

7.     If Tony Kushner was such a great playwright then he would have written another equally successful play. Face it, part two of Angels in America  (Perestroika) is unwatchable.

8.      It’s preachy.

9.      It’s long.

10.  The play presents an antiquated vision of AIDS, and completely misrepresents our community and our culture.  Straight people see it and it gives them a false idea of who we are and what we are going through. I don’t understand why gay people would want to see it. Oh, I know. Because they are in denial. Here are some ways in which the play is completely irrelevant to what is going on right now in Canada around AIDS and HIV. In Angels in America everyone is afraid of AIDS because it automatically kills people. But now AIDS is a manageable chronic illness and many who have it live to a ripe old age. When this play was first written gay men still thought of themselves as ‘outlaws’ and ‘outsiders.’ Now we have gay marriage in Canada, and most gay men in the western world are trying to forget that homophobia still exists (even though homophobia does exist and is especially harsh in places like Russia). So gay men in Canada get married and go to church and try and act like straight people. But the pressure to be straight acting and adopt a straight lifestyle is too much for a lot of gay men (we know many many Canadian marriages end in divorce, so it doesn’t work too well for straight people either!). This pressure has a lot to do with why a lot of gay men are taking drugs and practicing unsafe sex. So, gay times have changed significantly; unfortunately many members of the audience are also significantly unaware of that, or wish to live in denial. But the scariest thing of all -- and something that the play doesn’t deal with in any way -- is the recent criminalization of HIV in Canada. The criminalization of HIV is a much greater issue than fear of death from HIV for many of those living with HIV in Canada.  Since the 1998 R. v. Cuerrier decision (R. v. Cuerrier said that a person living with HIV could be charged with aggravated assault for having sex with someone without disclosure) persecutions of HIV positive people have significantly increased. The law is so imprecise on this topic that it is possible that an HIV positive person could face imprisonment for having sex with a condom – if they don’t disclose, or for having sex without a condom – even if they are honest about their status. Putting people in jail for not disclosing does not encourage people to be more honest with their partners, in fact it does the opposite. It drives people into secrecy, loneliness, and away from the advice, help and medications they need. The truth is, we live in a culture that still seems to think that AIDS is the most horrible disease a person could ever have, even though the face of the disease has changed significantly. A play like Angels in America completely ignores the realities facing HIV positive people today (and gay men today) and presents a false image of AIDS that is only related to the distant past. This play actually makes life worse for those living with HIV. Please do not go and see it.