Stampede (1949)
It’s a perfectly good western, written and produced by Blake Edwards. But I must say I was impressed by Rod Cameron. The plot centres on the conflict between cattle ranchers and settlers. At first Gale Storm and Rod Cameron don’t like each other — she’s a settler and he’s a rancher. She’s short, so when Rod first meets her he picks her up, saying “Let me put you up here so I can see you.” She promptly slaps him. By the end of the movie, though, she’s perfectly fine with being picked up and kissed because her romantic preference is clear. Though Don Castle (Rod Cameron’s little brother) is sweet on her, she says to her father: “If you insist on marrying me off to a McCall, make it the tall skinny one.” Quite right, too. Rod Cameron looks great in chaps, (we can admire them with impunity, he wears them because he’s a cowboy). My favourite scene is when his attorney (Jonathan Hale) bursts into Rod’s rooms when Rod’s taking a bath. Hale offers him a cigarette, and spends a lot of time looking down into the suds. It’s just two friends chewing the fat, so to speak, but Cameron looks pretty fetching with his long hairy legs perched on the edge of that old tin tub; I couldn’t help wondering what Hale was peering at — down there. Gale Storm was born Josephine Owaissa Cottle and she brings back memories of My Little Margie — my favourite childhood TV viewing (besides I Love Lucy). Storm was always getting into trouble — just like Lucy — and when she did she would make an arch little purring noise with her tongue. Later came Oh Susanna! with co-star Zazu Pitts (an ageing silent film actress who starred in Erich Von Stroheim’s Greed). The terms plucky, feisty, high spirited and ‘full of juice’ would aptly apply to Gale Storm, a pre-women’s-lib feminine warrior. At several points in Stampede she packs a gun, and when her adversary says — “You talk mighty big for a little girl,” she quips: “Take a look at this gun it makes me grow like a weed.” Sigh. If only I wasn’t so large. Drag is certainly the triumph of imagination over dull reality. I always thought I looked gorgeous in drag, but photos of my feminine personae Jane don’t always attest to that fact. I remember when Jason Sherman said to me, years ago: “I really love it that you don’t even try to look attractive when you dress in drag.” (It’s not his fault, he’s straight and he was just trying to be nice.) I have also been insulted by my own kind; some drag queen at Colby’s bar once told me in no uncertain terms: “Girl, get a girdle!” But I must forget all that; Jane was eternally gorgeous and resplendent in fake furs (and still is, occasionally) and I won’t hear another word. Drag was my revenge against everyone who looked at my big body and said “you should play football.” Well I didn’t want to, and that was that. In my own mind, I am always Lucy Ricardo or Gale Storm, who were both gorgeous female clowns. A beautiful young man once said to me: 'I don’t know why you have to do drag, you’re such a big sexy guy.’ I say that to brag, but also because the point that is being missed there is an important one; gay men don’t do drag because they have no choice, but because they would rather live in their imaginations than the real world. And that is noble — and what separates us from animals (will you please just forget ‘reason’?). And also, it’s why I’ve been watching old bad movies for three and a half months. It takes a good five hours out of my day; and that’s five hours that I don’t live in this world, thank God. I am not a fan of this world. I just realised last night — for instance — that I am becoming somewhat of a regular in the sleazy Montreal street scene — and that my closest friends (which means people who talk to me, and wink at me, occasionally, and occasionally feel me up) are mostly drug dealers (tho I don’t partake). I would rather forget this; and I am a tourist in their world, which makes me doubly despicable — I’m not even the real thing when it comes to being real. But I am despicable in so many ways. However, this afternoon I lived in the world of Stampede for 75 minutes, watching Rod Cameron ride vigorously in chaps (wishing I was the horse), beating up the bad guys, and realising (after his brother died) that his feeling for Gale Storm was love. Can we talk about Gale Storm’s name? It’s a drag name. I’ve always regretted calling myself Jane. I was supposed to be Jane as in ‘Tarzan and -.’ The first night I did drag I went to a big gay party wearing basically a loincloth and tiny leopardskin bra, telling everyone I was looking for Tarzan. (I can’t remember if I found him, but as always, it was the search that mattered.) For a moment I wasn’t Sky Gilbert — the controversial, mean-looking slightly-overweight, publicity junkie, I was — in my own mind— a glamorous maiden who had lost her way in the dark, and was looking for someone tall and strong to comfort me. The ‘minds eye’ is a late medieval term for the imagination — it was called ‘memory’ — and artists cultivated their memory places — palaces and castles -- with multiple rooms: housing dragons, blood, and damsels in distress -- wearing very little or next to nothing. These palaces were of course destroyed. But for a time, when you said ‘in the first place’ you were calling up that place in your memory bank that was inhabited by a demon or a seductress that helped you remember something beautiful you had to say. Okay. We all have to make toast and do the laundry, and somebody has to fight the wars —not me (I’ve gone on about that at length, my cowardice) — but someone also must write the poems — be Rupert Brook in other words — or there isn’t anything to fight for. Would you rather die for nothing, because that’s what the world is — nothing? Without poets there is nothing to live or die for, unless you believe in God. (But someone invented him too). When I rail against the fiction which is COVID-19, I’m not railing against all fiction; I’m just appealing to you to to you find a better one — one that doesn’t involve puritanism, paranoia and putting yourself above other people. Instead I would recommend living in a palace of pleasure, with maidens and monsters, where you are always the hero. Living in ‘denial' is not just living in a river in Africa, it’s having the courage of your own dreams.
