In 5th grade, I learned the phrase “Crimes Against Nature” from the Alabama penal code and/or the state Constitution (I don’t remember exactly), which we were reading through as a class. My teacher, Mrs. Goss, wouldn’t tell me what this phrase meant.
“What do you think it means?” she said, finally — I think she thought I was just messing with her to get her to say something dirty.
I took her seriously, though. I pondered long and hard. Eventually I decided it must mean stuff like clearcutting, polluting, littering, and strip mining. Turns out it was actually a reference to homosexuality!
Freedom of speech, as enshrined in the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, means that the government itself is not allowed to impair your ability to say whatever it is you want to say — within certain boundaries laid down by various Supreme Courts over the years. The government can prosecute you for shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theater (um, maybe), for example, or for uttering ‘fighting words,’ whatever those are.
Ender’s Game
Freedom of speech does not mean that you can say whatever you want to say without consequence. It just protects you from legal consequence. Non-governmental consequences often follow controversial or inappropriate statements. For example, if you smart off to your cranky old grandmother, she might slap you in the face. If you submit a plagiarized story to your editor, you might get fired from your job as a reporter. If you make up stuff in your memoir, you might make Oprah angry. In none of these cases will you go to jail.
More to the point: if you are a prominent and raging anti-gay activist, I’m not going to pay money to see your movie, even if the movie has nothing to do with your anti-gay activism or your rage. The government isn’t involved in this decision of mine. The First Amendment doesn’t apply. I’m also going to be encouraging everybody I know to Skip Ender’s Game, which is my own exercise of my own free speech rights! Ta da! See how it works!
Speech has consequences, because speech matters. It would be a terrible world to live in if the things we say were completely irrelevant all the time, because they were “just words” or “just opinions” or “just” whatever. There’s no “just” about it. Words and opinions are powerful; they matter, and like anything that matters, they have consequences. There would be no reason to speak at all, otherwise. A world where anything can be said because nobody cares is a world where nothing is really said — and that’s the opposite of a world with free speech.
I don’t understand why this is a difficult concept for Orson Scott Card or his whiny-ass fans to understand.
The only reason for a law forcing teachers and counselors to out gay teens to their parents? Increase suicide among gays. That’s the only possible outcome. “Mainstream” Republicans, when you stand with these people, these hateful, vile, people, you stand directly against me and my friends, against our lives and our livelihoods, so don’t expect me to cut you any slack. You want small government and low taxes? Fine. Disavow the religious right — work within your party to limit its influence, even if that means you lose some electoral oomph in the South — and I will take a look at your agenda with an open mind. Meanwhile, you are in bed with hate, depending on pandering to the worst in our society to win elections, so you can’t expect to be taken seriously except by those who also hate.
One of the characters in my next novel attended Virginia Military Institute during the 1950s. I chose VMI specifically because all of their old yearbooks are available online, at the Internet Archive. The 1950s were a strange time, especially, I guess, at a southern military school with a tradition of conservatism. In the course of reading through these yearbooks, I can’t help but see all kinds of weird, and, yes, frightening, little (and sometimes big!) references to homosexuality. \
Although not a “ladies’ man” by VMI standards, Bill was never one to turn down a trip to Hollins or Randolph-Macon. Not one to be easily shaken from what he believes is right, Bill has nevertheless endeared himself to cadets in all four classes by his gentle, easy-going manner, no matter how trying the circumstances may be.
If you’re not gay, or if you didn’t grow up in a place where homosexuality was a taboo subject, only permissible on the edges of the conversation, you are probably shaking your head in confusion. But I can’t help but think there’s something queer about Bill, and that that’s what the author of this description was trying to tell us. How, precisely, did his “gentle, easy-going manner” endear him to all the cadets, and why describe his circumstances as “trying?”
“You’re reading too much into it, Manley.” I can hear you guys now.
So try this on for size. It’s also from the 1957 VMI yearbook:
Even more interesting is how closely this image, from 55 years ago, mirrors this one, from 7 years ago, also from the Virginia Military Institute (though they didn’t put this one in their yearbook):
Gay sex is happening everywhere around you. When you drive down your suburban street on the way home from work in the evening, ready to settle yourself into some good television time and/or Bible study, at least one of the shut curtains on every other block is hiding a gay sex event from you. And that’s assuming private houses with low residency. Don’t get me started on hotels and office buildings, dormitories and boarding schools, apartment buildings, and public housing. The walls shake with gay sex in those places. The walls wiggle and whammy with gay sex.
Gay sex is happening in public spaces, too. It’s happening in cars parked along the far edges of every Wal-Mart parking lot you pass — if not at this very instant, then within the last hour, two hours, three. It’s happening in cold, gray WPA-constructed shower buildings at the heart of every National Forest and State Park. It’s happening in rest areas and under railroad bridges, in dressing rooms and housing shelters, in the bathrooms of businesses as varied as Frenchy’s Adult Cineplex and Arby’s and Sardi’s and Wells Fargo Bank. It’s happening at the Food Court at the mall, back where the food is prepared, behind that wall hiding the non-cashier workers from your easy view. It’s happening in churches and synagogues and mosques. It’s happening in your head right now (you’re welcome).
Straight sex? That’s even worse. Even more widespread. Take what I said above and multiply by ten or twenty or a thousand. Straight sex. Those guys fuck like rabbits. Bah.
In Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, science fiction writer and linguistic theorist Samuel R. Delany makes the best case I’ve seen for the necessity of “red light districts,” — and specifically for the necessity of what was once the world’s most famous seedy neighborhood — in the lives of the cities whose desires they create, reflect, and service. Places for anonymous sex, by Delany’s lights, should be included in any city planner’s bag of tricks. No pun intended.
His points ring truer to me than they might to you, especially the case he makes for these kinds of spaces as rare examples of venues where cross-class, cross-ethnicity and cross-generational friendships — no matter how fleeting — can occur. Having access to educated, well-off gay men in my late teens (after I got my driver’s license, before I went away to college), despite the generally uneducated rednecky environment I grew up in, shaped my intellect and my ambitions, and improved my conversational skills, my networking skills, and my sociability generally, in ways that my straight buddies, from the same socioeconomic class, never could have imagined. It’s hard to describe without sounding icky. It’s not that I became a kept boy (I did not!). Nor was I anything like a hustler. It’s just the socialization that occurred around and between and on top of everything else in the cruising areas I frequented was, ultimately, life-changing, in a million uncannily tiny increments, mainly because I met people I never would have met in the ordinary course of my days. Delany does a good job of explaining it, much better than I can.
The first half of the book, which breezily documents some of the human contacts Delany made while cruising for anonymous sex in the Times Square area over the course of about thirty years, is a more entertaining read. The second half veers into academic rigor and analysis of “superstructure” versus “infrastructure” and linguistic subtleties within subtleties about the ways we talk about and legislate around sexuality and class differences. I was prepared for both modes, but many readers will love one half, hate the other.
The temptation is to imagine that Delany is being sentimental about the changes wrought on Times Square — changes which, by all accounts, have proven to be successful in ways that he was deeply suspicious would never materialize. But then I had my own little sentimental moment when I decided, after reading this, to Google “Peep World,” one of the last holdouts in the area’s sleaze trade, a place where I myself have had a Delany-esque fun time or two, just to see if Delany, or anybody else, has ever written about it in its heydey, only to discover that it has been recently demolished and will be replaced by (of all obscene things) a fucking Hooters.
I have seen “Without You I’m Nothing,” the 1990 movie based on Sandra Bernhard’s standup routine/performance art piece/one-woman show, many, many times. I used to love it. It used to define me. My mid-20s would have been a very different time for me if I’d never seen this movie.
If you want to funk, I can show you how.
This time, nearing my 50s, I did not love it at all.
Note: most of the times I have seen this film were in a tight cluster of months shortly after it was released to home video. My college buddies and I thought it was the greatest thing ever. Queer cabaret culture generally had a vibrancy to it back then. This was the era of Phranc and Paris is Burning and Wigstock and whatever. It was also the era of George H. W. Bush. We had never heard a president of the United States utter the word “gay.” We had been on the outside for a long, long time, but we felt the change coming. That our culture was starting to move into the mainstream — and Bernhard, her lesbian bona-fides just barely held out of our view, but hinted at often, represented a move of our culture into the mainstream, believe it or not, despite how far she was from the mainstream, because we were even — this sentence is too long! — farther from it still — gave us a sense of inevitability and conquest. That growing power and relevance culminated, I think, in the election of Bill Clinton in 1992, and then crested and fell afterwards, when he broke his promises to us. This week was the first time I’ve seen “Without You I’m Nothing” since then.
Which is maybe why I don’t like this movie anymore. It makes me miss those days, when we thought we were on the verge of taking over the world, and yet it also points out to me their hollowness, the emptiness of our aspirations, via the thinness of Bernhard’s own commitment to her poses. Her rendition and rehabilitation of Sylvester’s “Do You Want to Funk” as a liberation anthem was revelatory after almost a decades’ worth of “Disco Sucks” backlash and AIDS hysteria, for example. I literally jumped out of my chair and pointed at the screen, the first time I saw it. (I was a silly queen in my 20s; I know this is difficult to believe.) Now it just sounds a little bit off-key, a little bit desperate, a little too easy. Its primary targets — Jim Bakker, Jerry Falwell, Jimmy Swaggart — had already been the targets of late-night television comedy for four or five or eight years by this time, made into easy targets precisely because of the thousands upon thousands of jokes that had already been made about them by people who had no political agenda at all. These three television preachers were certainly the enemy, don’t get me wrong, but they were the individual examples of the enemy who had already been personally defeated. The real enemy remained untouched by Bernhard’s song. That’s a fairly moderate form of liberation.
My friends and I didn’t notice the offkeyness and the emptiness before because the very act of celebrating that particular song, at that particular time in our history, was enough for us.
Queer stuff has to speak to a higher standard now, I think. It has to go a little deeper. It’s not enough just to wave at its queerness. And even Bernhard’s waving at queerness comes off as a little too subtle, nowadays, come to think of it anyway. Was she, or was she not? Do we even need to know anymore? Probably we don’t.
None of what I have said should be taken as a minimization of the movie’s importance for its time. But it is of its time, is what I’m finding myself believing — and is sort of stuck in its own time. Which may simply be a function of cabaret generally. Or maybe I’m just too close to it, and too mired, myself in its time, to see what this movie is capable of inspiring in anybody today. That’s always possible.
Joe Botts and I met twenty years ago today (more or less — we know it was in August, and have decided to celebrate in the middle of the month), in Birmingham, Alabama’s Rushton Park, which was a gay hangout back then. Maybe it still is. I dunno. Most of the results for “gay Rushton Park” on Google point back to this very blog. Maybe I am the last one who remembers those days.
I was wearing Daisy Dukes.
He was on a date with another guy.
I thought he was cute because he blushed when one of the other people with us — a chubby DJ named Fluffy — said the word “dildo.” Turned bright red, all the way out to the tips of his ears. That was the first time I really noticed him. He offered me a ride home. He and his date came up to my apartment. When the guy went to use the bathroom, Joe grabbed me by my neck and shoved me against the wall and started kissing me. Then he took the guy home, came back, spent the night.
I quit my job as a waiter’s assistant at Highlands Bar & Grill the next morning so I could continue to hang out with Joe. I hated that job anyway.
“You’ve put me in a very difficult position,” said the lady.
“Sounds like a personal problem,” I said to her, because that was one of her favorite phrases to use with her staff.
I moved in with Joe that next morning. We’ve been together ever since.
Some random memories of our early days:
I sat on our dining room table, looking out the window, and said, “Let’s never, ever fight.”
Joe was the manager of a Haagen Dazs. He took me to work with him. I hung out in the storage closet — which was on the other side of the mall from the food court where his actual store was. Every now and then he would come back to the storage closet and we would make out, then he would go back to work.
Love is not about refusing to fight one another. Love is not about uncontrollable passion, either. We started fighting, and we stopped making out at every opportunity, not too long into our time together. But we will never stop loving one another. I can’t imagine a life without him. I can’t wait until we are even older together than we already are. That’s gonna be great.
After finally catching The Dark Knight Rises the other day, I mentioned on Facebook that Tom Hardy (who plays Bane in DKR) and Henry Cavill (who was in the Superman trailer they showed before the film) need to have a kissing competition, so I can figure out which one is cuter. I still believe this.
Who is cuter? It’s so hard to decide …
A friend recommended I watch Bronson, one of Hardy’s earlier movies. “Half-naked, covered in tattoos and body paint, shaved head, huge mustache, acts like a psychopath — you will drool!” she enthused.
She was right. It’s a little disturbing that she knew me so well.
Bronson is the story of Britain’s most famously violent prisoner, one Mickey Peterson, who gave himself the stage name of “Charlie Bronson,” after the American actor. Usually, I like my tragic biopics to be more naturalistic. This one kept up a tight ironic shell around itself: you couldn’t care about anybody in the movie because the characters were never allowed to be more than fun little meatmasks for actors over-acting — especially Tom Hardy. He gets his maximum daily allowance of scenery chewing, and more, in every single scene. He was irresistible to watch, though, and not just because of his sexy psycholiciousness. It takes a rare charisma to be able to overact this widely and keep an audience on your side.
That’s why I think he may be the William Shatner of his generation.
I do not say this sneeringly. Shatner’s gifts are astounding, flailing arms, halting lilt and all. He would have been considered the greatest actor of his day, if his day had been a hundred or two hundred years earlier, before naturalistic acting and “the Method” came into play.
Think of Shatner and Hardy as cousins of the Booths and the original Barrymores. They’re still playing to the balcony seats in the back, shouting their lines and mugging their faces. I like it. Johnny Depp goes in that direction a bit, too, but he’s not nearly as hot shirtless as either Hardy or (the young) Shatner.
I am overstating my case a little bit. The quiet, dangerous things that Hardy does with his voice sometimes — in Bronson, in DKR, and in every other role I’ve seen him play — would be impossible without the microphone, and it is the microphone (as well as the close-up) that ushered in the age of the intimate, understated performance.
But I can ignore that, because I’m a blogger, and bloggers don’t have to actually believe everything they say, especially when the subject is Cute Actors.
As for the original impetus behind this post: I kind of think Henry Cavill might be hotter than Hardy, though he’s a far more conventional contemporary actor. I still need to see that kiss! Maybe Shatner should join the competition as well.
Updated to add: in a post from a few months ago, my friend Christopher Wright makes a convincing case that “the Method” is precisely what was responsible for Shatner’s acting style, and the quiet, understated performances we are accustomed to are what replaced “the Method.” Chris has actually studied this stuff, so he knows whereof he speaks. His post on the subject is really good, too — you should read it, if you have any interest in the evolution of acting styles (and how that relates to writing, which is where he ultimately takes it).
In 5th grade, I learned the phrase “Crimes Against Nature” from the Alabama penal code and/or the state Constitution (I don’t remember exactly), which we were reading through as a class. My teacher, Mrs. Goss, wouldn’t tell me what this phrase meant.
