And I thought it was over. I
thought that we were no longer blaming ourselves, and that others were through
blaming us. But no, the blaming will never end.
I just
caught the movie Stranger By The Lake.
I was drawn to it because it was a gay film – boasting graphic gay sex scenes.
Indeed it is a gay film, and it’s
very sexy.
I don’t know. I was crazy I
guess. For one nutty moment I thought that someone might have made an
intelligent gay flic for the 21st century. One that wasn’t homophobic.
Boy was I wrong.
The movie
starts out well. It features very accurate depictions of cruising and park sex.
I know cruising situations more than very
well. So, I was at first impressed by the array of ‘types’ so faithfully
displayed: the okay looking guy you have sex with to settle, the unattractive
loser who follows you around (and ends up sucking you off when you’re horny),
the ‘straight’ man who disavows any knowledge that this is actually a gay
cruising ground, the sad but sweet bisexual guy looking for a friend, and – of
course – the tall tanned super cute guy you really really want to fuck, and
(finally!) eventually do.
Yes, all
this is portrayed with tact, sweetness and even beauty, Make no doubt about it,
French director Alan Guiraudie is skilled at his craft. Too bad the movie is
ultimately a big pile of steaming, smelly crap.
You see,
our young hero witnesses a really, really, cute tanned guy drowning someone at
the cruising ground. Instead of reporting the crime to authorities, he proceeds
to fall in love with the really, really, cute guy and – have an affair with him. I was still trying to like the movie
at this point, shielding my eyes to the inevitable. I hoped it was just going
to be about demon lovers in general, or human sexual ethics everywhere.
But, alas, no.
The movie is about us.
For at one
point the investigating policeman takes our hero aside, and berates him (or,
rather, the whole gay community) for being so foolish. I must paraphrase, but
it’s something to the effect of ‘”Why can’t you get some self-respect? You call
this a community? A man has died and you don’t care? You just continue having
sex with each other willy-nilly?”
I think you
get the idea. Now where might we have heard this before? Well it is certainly
the subtext of countless admonitions the gay community has received from
doctors, members of the religious right, and the straight establishment,
concerning AIDS. You will find echoes of it in Dr. Brookner’s plaintive cry from
The Normal Heart “Why can’t you just
stop having sex?”
Of course
it is appalling that Stranger By The Lake
(like The Dallas Buyers Club) manages
to ignore the incredibly kindness, intuitiveness, co-operation, and heroism of
gay men, who (in Western countries) within the space of 15 years, transformed
what was forecast to become a ‘worldwide plague’ into a manageable disease –
and quite often with no help from doctors. (And AIDS would today be a
manageable disease worldwide if it wasn’t for the greed of pharmaceutical
companies.)
As
irritating as that omission is, that is not the true crime committed by Stranger By The Lake.
Stranger By The Lake is a movie in which gay men are blamed, yet
again, for simply wanting to have sex.
So can I
say, once more, that gay men did nothing wrong? That we didn’t ‘bring it on
ourselves?’ Can I say that gays and lesbians are loving people, that they
always have been, always will be, and that AIDS was not a mistake that gay men
made, or a consequence of gay recklessness or gay ‘hypersexuality.’ The fact
that gay men wished to continue having sex even when AIDS was ‘discovered’ is merely
human. Would anyone in their right
mind ever think of asking straight people to stop having sex? Wouldn’t straight people recognize such a barbaric
demand as anti-human?
Sex is a human need.
Period.
And sex never killed anyone.
Only a disease can do that.
Movies like
Stranger By The Lake confirm something
I’ve always wished not to believe.
People want men to stop having
sex with men. They wanted it before AIDS. They wanted it at the height of the
epidemic, and now that AIDS is a manageable disease, they want it again. And homophobes
will twist the truth about AIDS in any way they can, because the blame game will
not be over for a very a very long time.
But I ask you
(no, I plead with you) must it go on
forever?