Last Night I Saw ‘Cock’

Last night I saw ‘Cock’ and it made me think.

True, that’s what often happens to me on Friday nights.

 Only this time ‘Cock’ was a play at The Theatre Centre.

It was funny as hell.

But the play made me think about identity politics and of course what is wrong with the world and why we are all going to hell in a hand-basket.

            The play ‘Cock’ sends the message that sexual identity politics are (is?) not important. It doesn’t matter whether people are gay or straight. People fall in love with a human being, not a gender, and everyone is truly multi-(or omni) sexual.

            I have lots of problems with this; basically because it’s not true.

            But more important -- the ideas in ‘Cock’ are part of a new trend that presently flowers fiercely both inside and outside of academia:  the ‘Anti Identity Politics Movement’. These days it’s very hip to be against identity politics -- and very old fashioned to speak about straight vs. gay, or male vs. female. The trans movement and the bisexual movement send the same ultra-universal, ultra-inclusive message. If you identify as male or female, straight or gay, you are simply boxing yourself into an oppressive corner. Labels punish people. So why not live in a world without labels? In an ideal world, there would be no need for such exclusive categories such as gender, and there would be no sexual categories. We would be free to love whomever we pleased.

            This new anti-identity trend has put the feminist and queer communities in a unique dilemma. I know women today who still speak proudly of the special experience of being born into a woman’s body in a patriarchal culture. These women are now being told by some trans-activists that for women to talk of themselves proudly as Cisgender women (i.e. women born with vaginas and assigned as female at birth) is oppressive.

Hm. What ever happened to women’s lib? To feminism?  I guess that’s over.

            And Gay Liberation is, of course, necessarily over too.  

            But what’s ironic about this new ‘Anti Identity Politics Movement’ is that it promulgates the same mistaken ideas that were the foundation for Gay Liberation. You see the founders of Gay Liberation did not predict that the happy result of their policies would be a totally ‘gay world’ (all right-wing hate literature to the contrary). What early gay-libbers desired was a world without sexual identity categories where everyone loved whom they wished and sexual identity did not matter.

            Suffice it to say, that after nearly forty-five years of gay liberation and nearly fifty years of feminism in North America, we do not live in a genderless world, or a world without sexuality categories.

            But my big question is this: was this utopia ever possible? And is it even desirable?

            For all these future fantasies are based on a very human delusion – that people everywhere are all, basically the same.

            In our global, tolerant world, (which is of course also rife with hate and religious fundamentalism) we like to pretend that everyone is the same. But this deluded utopian vision simply helps us avoid the very thing we are all afraid of, that deep down we are all fundamentally different.

            It is this human ‘difference’ that is one of the most frightening things about being alive. Yes we might all be very shocked with how our neighbours -- and even some of our friends -- think, feel and act, deep down in their ‘private lives’  (to quote Noel Coward). But the challenge for humanity is to somehow not only be tolerant, but to learn -- from the vast differences that threaten to separate us on a daily basis.

            I do not wish to deny that there is much hate directed at trans people and bisexuals,  and that the hate is unfair and it should stop. But the answer isn’t to yearn for a genderless, ‘sexuality-less’ world.

            The answer is not that we are all the same, but that we must somehow come to terms with how we are all so frighteningly different.

            

WOMEN-HATING WOMEN

Susan Cole and and Margaret Wente have one thing in common. They’re both in heavy denial about what they really believe.

 It’s a wily tactic. These days everybody wants to appear hip, and most women want to appear as ‘post-feminist cool’ (whatever that means). And yet certain women are able to get away with supremely anti-feminist views without being branded as social conservatives. Margaret and Susan aren’t quite as bad as those niqab-wearing women who insist that by swathing their bodies from head to toe in black fabric they achieve a special kind of sexual equality and gender freedom -- but they’re basically up to the same thing.

Wente is an interesting case. Recently accused of plagiarism (but by no means exonerated) she claims not to be right wing. Yet her columns betray a fundamental, – well – fundamentalism, when it comes to issues of sexuality and gender.

            In a recent Globe and Mail article Wente attacked women pornographers. Her hate filled diatribe suggests that the some feminists find porn empowering “especially if it’s produced by lesbians.” This is patently not true. By allying lesbians with porn, she seems to thing she is taking a cheap jab at lesbians, who Wente obviously dislikes. Wente also has something against large women. She says that female pornographer Courtney Trouble’s films “feature a lot of fat women with nipple piercings and appliances.” And what, may I ask, is wrong with that?

            But the essence of Wente’s argument is also dangerous nonsense. She objects to students studying pornography at the university level, and specifically targets feminist pornographers recently visiting the University of Toronto. Obviously, for Wente, ignorance is bliss. We live in a porn-saturated, sexism-saturated culture. We are bombarded daily with explicit sexist images of women via the internet. These images are accessible to everyone, even children. Does it make sense for universities NOT to teach students how to cast a critical/ political eye on this cultural phenomenon?

            Susan Cole and Margaret Wente may sound like a strange bedfellows, however Cole shares the same anti-sex stance. I have tried to confront Susan in person and in print, about her anti-male, anti-porn position. It’s something she always denies. However in her latest pan of Lars Von Trier’s fascinating and important film Nymphomaniac, she prefers to falsely label Von Trier a misogynist instead of thoughtfully analyzing the thoughtful pro-feminist, pro-women stance the film presents.

            Susan Cole and Margaret Wente are unfortunately not stupid.  Cole knows that if she were to attack Von Trier’s film for defending women’s rights to their bodies, their sexuality, their promiscuity, and their ‘kink’ – she would be ‘outed’ as the sex-hater she really is.

            I’m not a fan of the pompous Von Trier, but this somewhat preachy film, is evidently on the side of women, down to the end (spoiler alert!) when the female protagonist shoots her so-called male friend for attempting to rape her.

            It’s not our fault that Margaret Wente and Susan Cole are a tad dusty and rusty below the belt. And it’s time for them to stop taking their own sexual frustrations out on their fellow women, ranting against pornography, promiscuity and women who like sex.

            And it’s time someone exposed them for what they really are. Old-fashioned women-haters masquerading as modern culture critics.

What’s Happening to our Universities?

            Recently, the former president of the University of Guelph (Alastair Summerlee) -- delivered a speech in which he urged students and faculty alike to embrace the future: ‘We're part of a legacy system that goes back to the days of monks. In the days since books were written one at a time, society embraced the printing press and now the internet. And yet we still teach by standing up and talking to people” The answer, Summerlee said  is to ‘create more online courses.’

            I disagree.

            It’s important to note that Alastair Summerlee is not alone in his views. George Mehaffey --Vice President of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities -- shares Summerlee’s ideas, stating that ‘technology can reduce the costs of post-secondary education by reducing reliance on faculty members.’ The University of Guelph is not singular; it seems that, increasingly, Canadian universities are looking to Americans like Mehaffey who offer a business/corporate approach to learning, one that is focused on getting more of a ‘bang for the student buck’ by jettisoning teachers and increasing reliance on technology.

            Let me state two things right away.

First, I am not worried about losing my teaching job. I’m terribly old and will retire soon, and after all I’ve spent most of my life in the theatre world, not the academic world. But this essay is not a desperate attempt to save my living. What I am trying to do is save education.

 And yes, save the children.

            I don’t hate technology. I think, however, that it’s foolish and short sighted to imagine that technology is the answer to every problem. Technology makes our lives easier – sometimes, but not all the time. And it’s important to remember that the internet is no longer a disinterested source of information. As Google begins to collect data for its massive world library it becomes more and more evident that various profit-making search engines and operating systems are competing for control of the lucrative digital world and the ‘information’ it supplies.

            To suggest that a professor standing up in front of a room full of students is a medieval concept, makes as much sense as to suggest that love and sex will someday have nothing to do with producing babies. Certainly we have technology to replace both traditional procreation and traditional teaching methods – but is a world without love and a world without interactive pedagogy one in which you wish to live?

            Not me.

            I will go far as to say that a world without university professors is in some ways equivalent to a world without love. Teaching and learning involves human beings, interaction, opinions, facial expressions, emotion, and yes even a touch of the hand or a warm, sweaty handshake. The dialectal method involves asking questions and getting answers, and this means living people sitting in a room together and spontaneously interacting (remember that?) experiencing all the excitement and disappointment, the frustration and fury, of involved discussion.

            This idea is neither antiquated nor old-fashioned; it is simply true. We don’t learn unless we can interact with others, unless we have real conversations and real experiences.        

            Online education is valuable for many reasons – for those who are disabled or who live far from a university for instance. But should technological pedagogy be universally and unequivocally embraced? Universities should be places where the effects of technology on human beings and human interaction are studied. They should not be simply places where the social, political and economic ramifications of technology are accepted without critical thought.

            There must be some better way to ‘cut costs’ than to destroy the very essence of analytical understanding that is the machine of our learning. Because when it comes to musing and thinking, creating and debating –  the teacher/student dialectic is the virtual machine of our intellectual love.

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