Mark Caro of the Chicago Tribune wonders why there are no openly gay leading men in Hollywood. (For my part, I wondered why Mark Caro was asking such a silly question until I saw the accompanying promotional still from Milk.) There aren’t any openly gay leading ladies in Hollywood, either, but never mind that; the answer to Caro’s question is simple — the entertainment industry is full of cowards, the media is full of cowards, and the public is full of idiots.
My Pacino cop of choice — one who doesn’t kill gay people.
I threw in the “sorta” because, let’s be honest, a lot of this brief interview Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir conducted with Boys in the Band director William Friedkin is simply O’Hehir (also known as O’Hewho, because Stephanie Zacharek is the only Salon critic anyone reads now that Charles Taylor is gone) kissing Friedkin’s ass.
O’Hehir, I’ll admit, lost me before the interview even started, when he referred to Cruising, Friedkin’s second cinematic run-in with the gays, as a “powerful, intriguing and unfairly demonized picture.” Once he gets going with Friedkin, he adds, “Cruising is also out on DVD now, and also ripe for reappraisal.”
Except for the part where there’s nothing to reappraise. Cruising, which presents gayness as a deadly virus that is sexually transmitted from one cock-crazed leather enthusiast to another (Ed Gonzalez called it “an AIDS metaphor ahead of its time, except in this heterosexual fantasy of the gay world, every gay man gets it”), is a movie that only Fred Phelps and Pat Robertson could love.
That Friedkin is a skilled director does not make Cruising any less vile now than it was 28 years ago, and to call it unfairly demonized is a bit like suggesting that Gordon Willis’ Windows — the one about the psychotic lesbian who, lacking a penis of her own, hires a man to rape the woman she’s obsessed with — was misunderstood and deserves a second, more open-minded look. As the gay critic David Ehrenstein opined in a 1995 article aboutCruising: “This is a horror film. And we are the monster.” Time has not, and cannot, change that.
Now, had O’Hehir called Jade unfairly maligned and questioned whether it might be a classic on par with The French Connection and The Exorcist, that would’ve been a whole different kettle of fish…
From Maureen Dowd’s Sunday column about gay marriage (and Harvey Milk):
I e-mailed Larry Kramer, the leading activist for gay rights in the era that followed Milk’s, to get his read on Prop 8. (In 1983, I interviewed Kramer about the new scourge of AIDS, and he read me a list from a green notebook of 37 friends who had died. )
“DON’T WE HAVE THE RIGHT TO HAVE RIGHTS?” he e-mailed back, blessedly cantankerous. “I AM ASHAMED OF YOU THAT YOU HAD TO ASK ME THAT QUESTION.”
Being a jerk myself (just ask anyone who knows me!), I’d have preferred something nastier — maybe a dig at Newt’s three marriages, two divorces, history of infidelity, or the way he treated his first wife when she was battling uterine cancer — but she sums things up nicely at the end when she writes:
What really worries me is that you are always willing to use LGBT Americans as political weapons to further your ambitions. That’s really so ’90s, Newt. In this day and age, it’s embarrassing to watch you talk like that. You should be more afraid of the new political climate in America, because, there is no place for you in it.
Then again, I’m pretty sure that any “new political climate in America” that has room for Michele “Krazee-Eyez Killa” Bachmann can accommodate Newt Gingrich and his enormous head (and even bigger ego) as well.
Because I feel bad about not posting anything today (in addition to not posting anything of substance yesterday, or practically any day since starting this blog), here’s a picture of a monkey crashing a party in the old Warner Brothers comedy Lady Killer.
Isn’t that awesome? The movie, one of five starring James Cagney to be released in 1933, would be pretty humdrum if not for the monkeys gone wild scene (in which Cagney adds a little too much life to Margaret Lindsay’s birthday bash with the help of a barrelful of monkeys) and the blink-and-you-miss-it kiss a naughty Cagney plants on Mae Clarke’s breast.
Part of the problem is the lack of chemistry between Cagney and Lindsay, who’d have made a more believable pair as platonic friends whose heads were both turned by Clarke. What I’m trying to say — read this next part in the voice of that office slut character Cheri Oteri played on Saturday Night Live — what I’m trying to say is that Margaret Lindsay was a giant lesbian. Like Cagney and Lacey rolled into one, if you’re looking to quantify it. I’ll grant you she wore a dress better than Hope Emerson or Marjorie Main, but she couldn’t have seemed less interested in James Cagney in Lady Killer if he’d been wearing a giant sign that said “Get Your Herpes Here.”
But it appears they still want us to keep our distance from the mother ship, and will instead be directing us to our own special gay site from which our homo cooties can’t infect all the normal, healthy heterosexual customers who are seeking opposite-sex partners for Bible-approved, procreation-oriented, missionary-positioned hookups within the miserable bounds of traditional man-woman holy matrimony over at “regular” eHarmony.
I’d type more, but I confused myself with all of that.
One of the only Hitchcock films that bores me to tears.
This kind of stuff freaks me out. Jason Jones, a 26-year-old forklift operator, was arrested in May for the shooting death of a government witness in a drug case. Jones maintained his innocence and offered investigators an easy way to verify his alibi: they could check his MetroCard history to see where he’d been on the night of the murder. He said he had used public transportation to first stop at a cash-checking joint and later to visit his girlfriend, but police didn’t bother looking into it. That didn’t stop federal prosecutors from charging him with murder, which can carry a possible death sentence.
You can guess where this is going, right? A private investigator working for Jones’s attorney went to the jail where Jones had been held and found the MetroCard in question. He took it to the New York City Transit Authority, which was able to confirm that Jones had been on every bus and subway he said he’d been on that night. The investigator also found time-stamped, photographic proof that Jones had been at the cash-checking office with his coworkers just as he had always claimed. It was enough to get him released on bond, but the charges have yet to be dropped.
Aren’t the authorities supposed to check into these things before charges are filed, or is that the kind of silly, old-fashioned concept that’s essentially meaningless now, like the separation of church and state?
When money is tight and Elton John needs to spend another $40,000 on flowers, he simply finds a new pot of gold to raid.
At least that’s what I gleaned from these survey results about straights and gays of both genders and how they’re reacting to the economy going down the drain. And, hey, as long as they can afford it, good for them! Stimulating the economy is a dirty job (someone like Michael Lucas should probably make a movie about just how dirty such stimulation can be), but someone’s gotta do it. Me, I’m more the financially conservative type. My last big purchase was about $30 worth of books from Amazon, and even that I wouldn’t have bothered with if I hadn’t had a gift certificate to use.*
You might recall that back in June, gay and lesbian consumers were surprisingly unconcerned about the state of the economy. Around the same time, business owners and politicians in California were rubbing their hands in glee when a study projected that gay marriage, if it remained legal past November 4, would bring hundreds of millions of dollars into the state in a span of only three years. Ah, June. It was only five months ago, but we were all so innocent then.
* The books, by the way, were David Simon’s Homicide, Nella Larsen’s Passing, and Andrey Platonov’s Soul: And Other Stories. I’m sure this knowledge has enriched your life in unimaginable ways. If you want me to come back tomorrow and tell you what I had for lunch, I’d be happy to do so.
It’s been a while since I last attempted to transcribe any Howard Stern Show shenanigans (I’m still worn out from his Tracy Morgan appearance in March), but this morning Howard devoted a few minutes to Wanda Sykes coming out at a Prop 8 protest rally in Nevada over the weekend and it led to a brief conversation that gave us some insight into what the straightest people on radio think about prominent lesbians.
The first volume of Susan Sontag’s diaries (edited by her son, David Rieff) will be published in the U.S. by Farrar, Straus and Giroux next month. In England they’ll have to wait until January, but today’s Independent quotes a couple of passages dealing with Sontag’s sexuality, including this one that she wrote at the age of 15: “I am very young, and perhaps the most disturbing aspects of my ambitions will be outgrown … so now I feel I have lesbian tendencies (how reluctantly I write this).”
She sounded less reluctant a year later, when she wrote about having sex with another woman, but if the Times excerpts are any indication, Sontag continued to have a complicated relationship with her sexuality for many years to come. In December of 1959, at the age of 26, she wrote:
My desire to write is connected with my homosexuality. I need the identity as a weapon, to match the weapon that society has against me.
It doesn’t justify my homosexuality. But it would give me — I feel — a license.
I am just becoming aware of how guilty I feel being queer. With H., I thought it didn’t bother me, but I was lying to myself. I let other people (e.g. Annette [Michelson, film scholar]) believe that it was H. who was my vice, and that apart from her I wouldn’t be queer or at least not mainly so.
