I have nothing against Jen Sookfong Lee. All this is not her fault. She’s a great writer — that is she writes well, and insightfully, and with great wit. I do have something against ECW Press -- or rather I am very sad when I think of them, for I had a professional relationship with them for nearly 20 years. They published several novels of mine and also several books of poetry. I really counted on them them to support me — not financially but emotionally. I needed to know they were there and were committed to my work -- and then suddenly they disappeared. There was no explanation really, just after 20 years a committee was now making editorial decisions and that committee had decided that my work was not suitable. There was no why or wherefore, but it became clear to me what was going on when I submitted a proposal for their ‘pop classics’ series of tiny essay-books. Or let’s just say it's become clear now after reading Jen Sookfong Lee’s lovely essay gentleman of the shade. my own private idaho. Again, this is not about Jen Sookfong Lee, it is about ECW Press. My proposal to ECW in 2018 was to review several movies from a gay perspective (I can’t find the proposal now, I'm not sure exactly what it was —maybe I wanted to write about a John Waters’ films, unsure). Anyway, I was planning a book much like gentleman of the shade. my own private idaho — that is a chatty analysis of a queer film. They didn’t want me, so they hired Jen Sookfong Lee. What’s missing here? Jen Sookfong Lee is not a gay man. She is, as far as I can tell from her book, a heterosexual woman, although she hints that she is not only into ‘gender fluidity’ but also bisexuality — though she never identifies with either of those labels. You may say ‘why is Sky so attached to labels?’ I'm not, but because I have sex with men, I have experience with several things that Jen Sookfong Lee does not I.e. — homophobia, and having sex with another man. She says of the director of My Own Private Idaho (Gus Van Sant) that "he uses established tropes and expands them with sexuality or gender fluidity or jerky camera shots.” She says Van Sant’s view of queer sexuality in the movie now seems to her "sweetly naive.” She speaks a lot about mass culture and how fake and shallow it is, and she treats Van Sant’s movie as ‘authentic’ in that it alerted her to new realities. Part of that seems to be a certain class consciousness, as -- though she identifies as working class -- it is clear from her 'epilogue' that she is a middle class person: “I left my real job at 29 to write full-time and my agent worried that I would starve. …I decided to keep freelancing instead of looking for a steady job.” No working class person blithely quits their job and makes light of starving, let me tell you. I have nothing against Jen Sookfong Lee for being middle class -- I am middle class -- but being gay has opened up a whole new world of class consciousness for me that Jen Sookfong Lee only gets secondhand from viewing a film about gay street hustlers. The fact that she finds Van Sant’s view of the characters' sexuality ‘sweetly naive’ indicates she doesn’t know much about gay men, or hustlers. I have hired boys to strip for me in bars, and had a boyfriend who was a sex trade worker. Sometimes their work is as sweet and lovely -- as it is portrayed occasionally in My Own Private Idaho -- and at other times it is oddly detached and cold. But so, of course, is most of life. The overall impression one gets from reading Jen Sookfong Lee is that when she first saw My Own Private Idaho at age 15 she was a tourist in the gay world, and she began to get a taste of what it might mean to live an 'alternative' lifestyle. All that’s great, but as a gay man my experience of the film is very different. It made me think very much about what it means to be a straight acting fag (which I am not) and what it means to be paid for sex (Jen Sookfong Lee mentions this, to be fair, but her experience was not mine as a gay man). Finally Jen Sookfong Lee does not know what it means to live in a cultural wasteland, a vast desert of feeling where everything that is important to your sexuality and your emotional life is barred from you, because these feelings are verboten, obscene, fatally outside the mainstream. She does not know what it means to live every day for years fearing AIDs, and never losing the shame of AIDs. Or what it means to be sexually and emotionally castrated by homophobia -- to live the first 30 years of your life jerking off to pictures in porn magazines, and then throwing the magazines in trash bins distant from your home because you are terrified that your mother, or girlfriend, or anyone, will find them. The problem is that no one cares to hear from gay men anymore about anything. We are actually barred from writing about our lives, because it is assumed that other voices are more acceptable or politically correct than ours. What about all the young gay men who are lost and rejected -- considering suicide? They aren’t looking for essays about how looking at gay movies helps straight women feel better about being rebellious -- they're looking for some way out of their suicidal anxiety. Well good luck to them. The powers that be have decreed that our voices are to be silenced -- and that means that lives will be obliterated too. Oh, well.
