where to start with Terence Davies’ Benediction. I would say he is in a class all by himself, but there is a little club of bitter old fags many of whom are still alive (you see they didn’t have much sex, so they didn’t get AIDS) and who hate themselves for being gay, and hate gay culture, and have to write about it over and over again. Larry Kramer was the prime example of this type. It doesn’t matter how much that evil fag did for AIDS, he was still a nasty queen who hated the rest of us for getting laid and having fun. Don’t get me wrong. I hate gay culture as much as the next guy -- but frankly it’s all we’ve got, and it’s much better than straight culture -- which could put you to sleep when you’re already sleeping — it’s so boring and predictable and self-righteous that you just want to kick it in the ass and say "haven’t we listened to Beethoven’s 9th Symphony enough?" (Oh come on:"'Isn’t the Queen a Wonderful Person?" And: "When it comes down to it, there's just nothing at all quite like the loving warmth of ‘the family’"? Pullease.) Terence Davies new movie just makes me want to write something better. Benediction was for me, at first, addictively watchable. At last, a gay movie! But like The Power of the Dog, it must be set in another time and place because we mustn’t ever ever watch post-AIDS fags frequenting sex parties they booked online, or getting high on meth and ‘G’ and poppers, or cheating on their husbands because they are pretending to be nice middle-class straight people when they’re the furthest thing from it. So Davies brings us a biography of Siegfried Sassoon in which he relays the heart-wrenching tale of a poet (circa 1914) of great talent and integrity who somehow mistakenly forgets himself and ends up traipsing around being a homosexual during his misspent youth. And before he knows it, he’s dancing the tango with beautiful young bucks, sucking off Ivor Novello, and just generally acting like a bitchy, nauseating, promiscuous sissy! Of course these parts of the movie are the only thing that’s watchable —Sassoon’s eventual redemption (he converts to heterosexuality) and conversion to Catholicism — as well as his courageous anti-war stance — is supposed to be what we are engrossed by (and what we can congratulate ourselves for adoring when we leave the theatre). But how can we even pay attention to all that noble stuff when these days we never ever ever get to see cute gay men being bitchy and screwing each other — sometimes even at the same time! (Except, of course, in real life!). I’ve got news for you, gay men are not the only people in the world who are narcissistic, superficial, promiscuous, and mean. Everybody is. So why are we still making movies about how horrible gay men are? I go clubbing every weekend (yes I’m the old guy you see in the corner trying not to look like he’s a day over 50) and tons of gay men (young and old) are doing Very Bad Things, and yes acting just like they did before AIDS, but that’s why I like them! Don’t you see? Most straight people don’t even do enough Very Bad Things in their whole life to have anything to lie about. (I do pity them!) But why are we still lying? Isn’t that what gay liberation was all about? Why do we have to put up with the self-important inflated egos of damaged gay men who try to pull this load of hypocritical horseshit over our eyes — it’s all lies! Do you hear me? Lies?! I can’t f-in stand it anymore. Can we at least try a little bit to stop hating ourselves for one moment for being who we are? I daresay (and now I sound like a character in a Terence Davies movie) I daresay I am one of the few gay writers these days who writes about gay men, and also one of the few of those few, who doesn’t detest his own kind — or at the very least, knows that he hates himself, but really tries not too. I’m not pretending to be the wisest person on earth but I'm old enough to know that gay men are no more horrible than anybody else. The problem is not sexuality, the problem is that the only thing that seems to make people happy is comparing themselves to other people, and deciding they are better, and doing horrible things to those other people because they feel inadequate. You can search for the why and wherefore of such behaviour but I’m afraid it’s just human nature — schadenfreude — relishing the suffering others. We are all to some degree sociopaths. And we love it, especially when people suffer because they do Very Bad Things that we always wish we could do but never did because we were far too cowardly. Or heterosexual. Or something. Well I’m back! We’ll see how long I can keep this sort of thing up. I used to be able to do it for days, but I'm not quite the man I used to be (however I’m learning how to 'bottom,' don’t you know, and the rewards there are indescribable! We’ll talk more about that later!) Or maybe we should talk about it now. There is nothing quite like submission. There's a whole religion about it, Houellebecq wrote a whole lovely novel about it (I tried to do that too recently, but I guess I can’t, because it didn’t work out). Let’s just say this: what demeans you is what redeems you. And if you don’t understand that, then (sigh) — he said condescendingly — then for you, there is very little hope. But I’m crossing my fingers. (And they are, presently, up my bum!)
