Sure -- march against Russia: but what about Canada?

Does anyone remember Dr. Richard Schabas?

In 1990 Aids Action Now staged a protest against Dr. Richard Schabas, Ontario’s Chief Medical Officer.  Five hundred demonstrators marched on Queens Park (in February!) demanding Schabas’ resignation. And Ontario’s AIDS service organizations were outraged. Schabas believed that AIDS should be described as a ‘virulent’ disease  -- which would have empowered public health officers to quarantine carriers who were ‘knowingly exposing others’ to HIV. Dr. Schabas felt that any HIV positive person who engaged in sexual intercourse -- condom or not – should suffer the threat of quarantine.

Does anything sound familiar about this?

It should.

Just a few years later (in 1998) a Canada Supreme Court decision required individuals who are HIV-positive to disclose their HIV status to sexual partners before engaging in activities that pose a risk of transmission. Up to now, 98 people have been charged with crimes involved non-disclosure — almost half of them in Ontario.

Well hey -- I don’t see anybody marching.

In other words, Canada’s laws against what Dr. Schabas (in 1990) called ‘knowingly exposing others to HIV,’ have gone a little farther than the threat of quarantine. Now, HIV positive people – whether they use condoms or not – can be jailed on charges of assault for non-disclosure. Or (like Johnson Aziga of Hamilton) they may even serve a life sentence for murder.

So why doesn’t anybody seem to care?

Is it perhaps because gay men are racist and sexist? You see, in fact, not all who are jailed on the new HIV non-disclosure charges are gay. Some are heterosexual women, and a sizeable portion of high profile cases involve heterosexual men of colour. Could it be that gay men are only concerned about ‘rights’ when it only involves their own?

I think the real reason is this: 24 years ago gay men were much more concerned with the notion of justice than they are today. Now it’s all about gaining the approval of the straight community. These days if you ask a gay man if people should be put in jail for spreading HIV, he will answer -- robot-like -- as most straights do: “But aren’t people who knowingly spread HIV evil?”

Yes, those who do not disclose are sometimes (not always) very bad people. But should they go to jail? Firstly, remember that AIDS is no longer a death sentence – in fact it is now a chronically manageable disease. Secondly, incarceration for non-disclosure actually discourages people from getting tested, and thus encourages the spread of AIDS. Thirdly – and most importantly – jailing  people for non-disclosure is not a disinterested legal action: it’s all entwined with racism, sexism, and homophobia.

Back in 1990 we instinctively knew that Dr, Schabas and his ilk were homophobic and anti-sexual -- and assumed they were probably religious fundamentalists. Nowadays we seem fine with newspapers running photos of HIV positive women labeled promiscuous by scandal-mongering journalists, or of black men deemed to be hypersexual ‘dangerous offenders.’ In our eagerness to show straights how much we are willing to condemn promiscuity -- we have tossed some of the most vulnerable in our community directly under the bus. Queers would do well to remember pastor Martin Niemöller’s famous poem:

“First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out-- Because I was not a Socialist/Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out-- Because I was not a Trade Unionist/ Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out-- Because I was not a Jew /Then they came for me--and there was no one left to speak for me.”

Or is this -- like our outrage over Dr. Schabas – something gay people would rather forget?

The death of Philip Seymour Hoffman made me think......

            The death of Philip Seymour Hoffman made me think I’d better write this because who knows I might be dead soon.

            I mean we all might be.

            Anyway I was listening to a recording of the The Producers and it suddenly struck me how hard it is to run a gay theatre, anywhere.

            As you know I started a gay theatre many years ago called Buddies in Bad Times Theatre.

            Anyway, I was just listening to The Producers, you know, trying to be nice, I really was trying to like it (I was!) and some of the songs are fun I guess, and then I realized that the whole of The Producers is about two things. It’s about a pair of loser producers who decide to put on the worst surefire piece of crap play ever -- one that will be a flop on Broadway for sure. And the two things they decide it should be, in order for it to be a real failure, are:

a)   about Hitler

and

b)  gay 

And all I could think of was – wow! So here I was, all these years, trying to run a gay theatre but to no avail. Because it is, unfortunately, the most impossible thing to do in the world. Because everyone thinks that ‘gay theatre’ is pretty much as awful as fascism.

            Indeed, when I started the theatre many years ago, I wondered why so many gay musical theatre types hated me. Now I know why. It’s because the theatre has traditionally been a gigantic closet. It’s a place where men can be gay without being gay. Before Buddies in Bad times Theatre came along, an effeminate man could be an actor -- and his mannerisms would just mean that he was ‘flamboyant,’ or ‘expressive.’ But after Buddies in Bad Times opened in Toronto suddenly all the closeted gay actors were threatened because maybe the theatre wasn’t a place to hide anymore. Maybe the theatre was (god forbid!) actually a gay place.

            Well I happen to think the theatre is a gay place. Because it is a place for lies. (Don’t let the avant-garde-ists tell you that theatre should be like real life; theatre has been claiming to be ‘real’ since the dawn time, but no one has ever succeeded in putting on a play that was real, or even doing real life in front of other people. As soon as the play starts, it’s fake, we know it’s fake, and that’s why we love it and can get lost in it.)

            We learn how to lie from the theatre, and there’s nothing that gay men need to know more than how to lie. In the past, they used to lie about being gay. Now -- though they often admit to the man-kissing part --  they like to pretend we all want to be married, go to church, and adopt babies. (This is supposed to make being gay okay.)

Lesbians, of course, lie too. But the fact of the matter is that our culture is so sexist that when women lie about their sexuality it doesn’t matter as much as when men do. What if all the men were gay (the religious right really worries about this a lot) and there was no one to impregnate women anymore?

No more begetting.

And what if men weren’t strong and didn’t carry swords so they could kill lots of people -- sorry, I mean, so they could protect us all from evil?

Plato was right to be afraid of art, and artists, and theatre, and song.

And I do have to apologize to all those musical theatre fags for making it tough to stay in the closet.

I just wanted people to know how gay theatre really is.

But if Mel Brooks is right (and for sure he is!): people don’t really want to know.

So, what can I say?

 I screwed up.

STRANGER BY THE LAKE Betrays Us

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 21^st 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?

            

Grumplestiltkskin

Dear Nice Reader who probably never complains at all, here are a buncha things that bug my ass:

1.      I read in The National Post yesterday that several Canada-bashers -- including Gary Shteyngart and Stephen Marche -- are criticizing Canadian funding for the arts. You can always trust The National Post to publish anything that is critical of so-called government waste. (To Harper Devotees government waste means money that goes to marginalized people, as opposed to money that goes to rich businessmen.) In an interview on Vulture.com Mr. Shteyngart said that Canadian writers are boring because “Maybe they want to please the Ontario Arts Council or whatever it is.” Stephen Marche concurred, with the blithe comment -- “Canlit doesn’t take risks. My God what an amazingly controversial idea.” Yes Canlit can be boring -- but why don’t either of these guys blame Heather Reisman and/or capitalism itself? I love the way it was beneath Mr. Shteyngart to even remember the name of an arts council.  And Esquire’s Stephen Marche obviously knows the way to get ahead in American publishing is to trash Canadians. Canadian culture is boring only because it is being suffocated to death by American commercialism, and the banal digital media it spews out like so much kaka vomit. But what would Gary and Stephen know? Vulture.com (which quoted Shteyngart) is proud to supply us, daily, with ‘entertainment news, celebrity news and TV recaps’ and Marche’s Esquire features a webpage with a scintillating story on “The 10 Most Badass Female Action Stars.” Wow – that’s not boring, eh?

2. The ‘backlash’ against The Wolf of Wall Street would be incredibly hilarious if it

wasn’t so  tragic. After the movie was released worried fathers everywhere tweeted: “I brought my kids to see The Wolf of Wall Street over Christmas and had to shield their eyes! Is this what Hollywood calls quality family holiday entertainment?” Well what did you expect, you dufus? And hey, why are people so shocked by this flic, anyway? It’s because movies have gotten so Disneyfied (Saving Mr. Banks  anyone?) that if it isn’t a handful of treacle washed down with a spoonful of sugar people are ‘offended.’ Sure, a fraud like David. O. Russell can make a lousy Scorsese ripoff called American Hustle and get nominated for twenty Oscars, even though it’s just a bunch of stupid gags acted out by a bunch of cartoon characters (wow men in hair curlers, what could be funnier than that?). But when Scorsese crafts a real/ touching / brilliant / fantastic movie deeply exploring the human capacity for greed, folly and self-destruction, people are ‘offended.’ (I don’t even like Leonardo DiCaprio. But the scene where he’s stoned and crawling to his car is the scariest, most amazing thing I’ve ever watched in any movie, anywhere.)

3.     Did you have some travel headaches over the holidays? Well apparently it’s not the fault of the airline, or GO METROLINX, it’s the fault of the weather. Sorry but I’m not buying it. I was waiting four two hours in a lineup with a bunch of other frozen commuters while a bunch of GO drivers next to us were having a good laugh and a coffee. None of them thought to help. All we wanted wanted was a little communication. (What is going on? When is that bus coming?) My prediction is that travel will just get worse because our culture is dedicated to figuring out ways to make people stay home. Bad service when you visit the bank? Do your banking online. Your bus is late? Please email us with your comments! Frankly, why should any business provide good service in person anymore when most businesses would rather you did your shopping online? We travel to meet people and find new experiences, right? Well I don’t know how to tell you this, but people won’t be doing that shit in the future. In the future we’ll be doing all our traveling in cyberspace and having Skype sex.

  4. Speaking of sex. I’m tired of guys who want to ‘party.’ You know when they come into your    room at the baths, and they are so hot, and they start having sex with you, and then comes the inevitable ‘Do you party?’ question -- which means do you do drugs, probably heavy duty ones – like crack or Crystal Meth? And if you say ‘Sorry dude no, I don’t party’ the hot guy goes away. Now don’t get me wrong, I know people have always have liked sex and drugs together. But it seems to me (and I’m old enough to remember this) that there was a time when those drugs weren’t liable to kill you right on the spot (remember alcohol and marijuana?), or people were willing to just, you know, have sex. Remember sex? It can be a lot of fun without drugs. Or am I wrong?

So what is this world coming to?

Sincerely,

Grumplestiltskin

Some Beef for Christmas

Here is a list of things that annoy me greatly. As I have always been something of a curmudgeon, I am offering them in the spirit of the season.

1. Cuisine Movies.

I’ve had it with these stupid cuisine movies. I haven’t even seen any of them and I don’t intend to. First there was  ‘Juro ‘Dreams of Sushi’ and now there is ‘Spinning Plates.’ Who cares? It all comes from the mistaken notion that creating food is an art. It’s not.  (How do you tell if something is an art or a craft? Easy. If it’s an art then you simply must do it, you are compelled to do it. You’d go mad without doing it. And yet you can’t make a living from doing it, and your work will never be fully understood in your lifetime. If you are quite happy, generally, and you are doing something people not only love but fully understand, and buy up in droves -- then what you are doing is categorically not art.)  Anyway, rich, fat, bourgeois couples love to go to restaurants. So, somebody figured out that making movies about how wonderful restaurants are is a surefire moneymaker. But I don’t have to see the damn things, do I?

2. What after all, is an apology?

Rob Ford has been giving apologies a bad name. Recently he delivered a so-called apology for implying a Toronto Star reporter was a pedophile. But what he delivered instead was what I call a ‘Right Wing Hater’s Apology.' This is when you are a Tea Party Member or the Head Of Ford Nation and some left wing crackpot catches you red-handed in a dumb political correctness mistake.  So instead of a real apology you do a fake one. What’s great about a fake apology is that you not only take absolutely no responsibility for your actions but also manage to blame your accuser. Let’s say your right-wing fundamentalist dog tramples on some lefty’s lawn, and they go all crybaby on your ass, and you are obligated to apologize.  This is what you say: “I’m sorry that you feel that my dog trampled your lawn. I certainly didn’t mean for that to happen. But if that is what you think happened, I am sorry for any hurt you feel.” The meaning is clear: “You are demented. I would just say ‘put a sock in it’ but since everybody is pressuring me to apologize all I can say is that I’m sorry that you’re crazy, nuts, and insane, and that you imagined the whole thing."

3. Yes, women are evil too!

I got this idea from my female writer friends Moynan King and Lynn Crosbie both of whom have written fabulous stuff about female serial killers. Okay, so have you seen Chris Lilley’s new HBO show Ja’mie Private School Girl? The leading character is a deliciously horrible, selfish, racist, privileged, spoiled brat named Ja’mie. She is concerned only with keeping a tightly knit clique of close friends in awe of her, and excluding girls who she spurns as fat, lesbian, foreign or poor. This show will hopefully encourage many to entertain the radical notion that yes, women are just as evil as men, it’s only that most of them lack the brute force needed to carry out their schemes.  Fortunately for evil young women everywhere, social media is a very convenient tool that can be used by less physically powerful members of the female gender to drive their victims to depression, and sometimes, even, to suicide.

4. The demise of bathroom sex……

I don’t know how it is in straight clubs -- but in gay ones you’re not supposed to have sex in the bathroom anymore. I got lectured at Toronto’s Eagle recently for trying to have a bit of quite innocent sexual perversion in a bathroom cubicle. There was no one around. We were upstairs near a sex maze in a leather bar on Church Street. What was the problem? I don’t blame The Eagle; I blame the police for pressuring gay bars to clean up their act. I, of course, am the only gay man in Toronto who will ever complain about this, because apparently Toronto gay men are so busy getting married, attending church, and adopting little black babies, that they have little time for promiscuous sex. Which begs the question, who am I actually having my promiscuous sex with? Is it with men who don’t exist?  I leave this question -- which has a ‘who created something out of nothing’ quality to it -- for Stephen Hawking.

that's all for now.....

Good for you, Justine Sacco!

            In case you haven’t heard, Justine Sacco, an executive at an American internet corporation, recently tweeted from an airplane “Going to Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding. I'm white!” Justine, (who was born in South Africa) received a barrage of angry tweets, and the controversy has gone viral. TV pundits are shocked not only by Ms. Sacco’s racist sentiments, but by the online reaction, which ranged from ‘Total looser!’ to much more virulent, apparently unquotable, responses.

            I find Sacco’s tweet ideas not only racist, but homophobic as well -- especially in the context of her apology: ‘There is an AIDS crisis taking place in…(South Africa)…that we read about in America, but do not live with or face on a continuous basis.” Ahh. It seems that -- like so many people -- Justine Sacco has difficulty feeling empathy for the sorrows of others – especially those whose race or sexuality is different than hers. Well, I don’t know how to tell you this, Justine, but in the USA where you now live the AIDS crisis is not something that gay people have merely ‘read about.” No. It is a terrible personal tragedy that has ripped our lives apart.

            That said, I must applaud Justine Sacco for bursting the nauseating bubble of comforting hypocrisy that typifies our recent love affair with political correctness. As we all know, two forms of utterance are dictated by western culture’s relatively new conception of a diverse society: the public and the private. It is universally accepted that all forms of public speech – i.e. books, newspaper and magazine articles, speeches, and interviews – ban the n-word when referring to African Americans, the f-word when referring to gay men, and the c-word when referring to women.  Most of us abide by this rule most of the time, and congratulate each other ceaselessly for our civility, tolerance and open-mindedness.

            But private speech is another matter. When we are having a drink with a friend or whispering sweet nothings in the ever-ubiquitous post-coital ear – anything goes! It’s our private time, after all. How many of us have ever leaned over to a pal ‘sotto voce’ confiding – ‘I know I shouldn’t say this, but –‘ or -- ‘Shh… I hope know one’s listening…’ or the ever popular: ‘I know I say that, but what I really think is – .‘

            Civil society is as fragile as the civil laws that provide its coherence.  It’s one thing to legislate against hate speech, and quite another to wrench hate forever from the human heart.

            So thank God for the internet.

For though we may think we know the difference between public utterance and private speech, internet chit-chat has made it increasingly difficult to separate the two.

            Up until recently the worldwide web seemed like the wild west of ideology, where anything ‘went’  -- and anonymous scatalogical rants ruled. But now Google and Apple have decided that some books should not be available (it’s called censorship!), And Facebook categorically assures us that some of our interchanges are protected and others (how’s that again?) are not. At the same time we grow increasingly paranoid of government and corporate attempts to use computers to gather our personal information.

            In other words, we’re not entirely sure if the internet a public space or a private one.

            So classy, politically correct publicists like Justine Sacco can be caught with their panties down and their hate quite visible for all to see.

            Of course it’s not easy to eradicate racism, sexism and homophobia -- especially in an increasingly fundamentalist world  (witness the recent ‘Duck Dynasty’ controversy).

            On the other hand, the only we can deal with hate is not by pretending that it’s over, but by bringing the hate centre stage and discussing it, admonishing the sin (not the sinner): i.e. the hypocrisy that lies at the very core of western culture.

            So thank you, Justine Sacco. You remind us yet again that each and every one of us --when it comes dealing with our own, personal ingrown hate and prejudice, --is wholly, completely -- nay utterly -- FULL OF CRAP.

            You may quote me.

           

           

           

           

           

Why is Theatre so Boring?

            I used to think it was that all plays are now an hour and forty-five minutes with no intermission. Then, I used to think it was because theatres lie about even that. Plays are sometimes even longer. They usually say ‘90 minutes without an intermission’ in the program – and you know then that you’re in for up to 2 hours without a break, and you’d better go to the bathroom, now.

            But no, it’s not that.

It’s not because of  ‘the death of the intermission.’

            It’s certainly not the fault of the actors. They seem to get more and more talented every day. Musical comedy actors now have to be quadruple threats: they have to sing, dance, act and, if possible, play a musical instrument. (I’m sure glad I don’t go to musical theatre school!)

            No, I don’t blame the actors.

            I blame the writers and the directors.

            You see once upon a time there was a difference between plays and movies. 

            When you went to a movie you could go to sleep or have sex with your girlfriend in the back row -- and it didn’t really matter. But when you went to a play, you knew that whatever you did might have an effect on the action.

            What do I mean? Well I don’t mean ‘audience participation’ -- like in a hippie way, like having sex with the actors -- like in Dionysus in ’69. No, I don’t long for those days, don’t get me wrong. That whole experience always kinda scared me.

            What I mean is that there was a time, it seems to me (and of course I may be wrong), when the way the audience reacted affected the way the actors acted. If the audience laughed (and it was a comedy) the actors would play (delicately of course) to that laughter.  If the play was a drama, then the actors could feel, quite often, if the audience was ‘with’ them or not, and play to that energy. Watching a play wasn’t a passive experience; it was active, because you knew that it was in your power to affect what was going on in front of you.

            But alas, no more. Now we sit, and we watch, and the actors do their thing, and the set is fabulous! It twirls around, or it falls on our heads, or whatever, and it’s pretty clear that the actors know what they’re doing. And they won’t likely be doing anything else  -- i.e., responding to anything that we, the audience, do. If we’ve paid a lot of money for the show (which we usually have) and we’re out for an evening with ‘the wife’ or an afternoon with ‘the kids’ then we usually stand up and give the play a standing ovation no matter what.

            So how did things come to such a pretty pass?

            Well, the purpose of going to see a play these days is to pretty much just to have our view of life confirmed. It’s 2014 (almost) and we know very well what is right and what is wrong, and we certainly don’t have much more to learn. We know who the good people are. Good people are good citizens, usually, and they care about the environment, and the future, and the kids, and they go to work, and make a living, and they kinda care about things generally. And we know who the bad people are too. They are, for the most part, not like us at all. They do drugs, and they do not talk nicely, and they act inappropriately around --you know -- sexual matters, and they don’t care about children, the environment, or the future. And from the moment the play starts, it’s easy to tell the good guys from the bad guys. And if the good guys win, we will laugh -- and if they lose we cry. But there aren’t any surprises.

            Thank God.

            So in a way, going to a play is kinda like not going to a play; they’re both basically the same thing.

            The only thing that’s different is that going to a play is an occasion, cuz, after all, we went out to dinner first, and we got dressed up -- or at least we’re not wearing what we wore when we sat at home and watched something on youtube the night before, right?

            No, we’re civilized.

            And so are the actors.

            And that’s why theatre is so boring.