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White Tower Musings

~ This blog will be an attempt to explain the significance of various works of great writing, the authors that create them, and some effort to understand correlations between great writing and contemporary events.

White Tower Musings

Tag Archives: Brokeback Mountain

WordPress Told Us Peaches are for Eating Not Masturbation but We Think They Missed the Point: Call me By Your Name and Queer First-Love

22 Saturday Dec 2018

Posted by Joshua Ryan "Jammer" Smith in Bisexuality, Film Review, Literature, Masculinity Studies, Novels, Sexuality

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Tags

"Love that dare not speak its name", Amira Casar, Andre Aciman, Annie Proulx, Armie Hammer, Attraction, Bisexuality, Bret Easton Ellis, Brokeback Mountain, Call Me By Your Name, Elio and Oliver, Esther Garrel, Father-Son Relationship, fathers, Film, film review, First Love, Gay, Gay Literature, Gay Men, Homosexuality, Italy, Literature, Love Story, Luca Guadagnino, Masculinity Studies, Michael Stuhlbarg, Mr. Perlman, Novel, Parents of LGBTQ+ Children, Peach, Queer-Bashing, Sexual Exploration, Sexual identity, Sexuality, Timothée Chalamet, Young Gay Love

Call Me By YOur Peach

I’ve never openly considered using any food for masturbation.  I know being of the American Pie generation I was supposed to have stuck my penis in some sort of food at this point.  Apparently the Millennial coming of age ritual, apart from eating tide-pods,  snorting condoms, and killing virtually every sector of the economy according to snarky facebook posts your uncle leaves on your facebook page, is performing some sort of onanistic ritual with a pie, a piece of fruit, or anything sweet and delectable.  This demonstrates a clear divide between the generations because, as Portnoy’s Complaint demonstrated, Baby Boomers had the luxury of getting their rocks off by jerking it into raw liver.  There’s almost assuredly a writer out there somewhere who is going to write an essay about generational dividesCall Me By YOur 9 and the compulsion to fuck food, and it’s probably me, but I’d prefer to write a few more reviews of great films before I tackle food lust.

Apart from my wife, who reminds me everyday that I’m hers and hers alone and then laughs maniacally before adoring her kitty cats, the reason why I could never date another man is because it would almost assuredly end in violence or bloodshed.  Now I’m not talking about Days of Our Lives Soap Opera bloodshed, where people are slapped and/or shot and hit the ground without starting to scream or hemorrhage out all over the credenza before Stefano’s evil twin drags the body away to clone the victim.  Violence against LGBTQ couples and individuals, often referred to as Queer bashing, is a mode of violence that has unfortunately become almost tropic.  If two gay people in a film love one another the ending will almost always imply that they cannot be together because straight people will not understand their love and will enact violence against one or both partners.

Perhaps the best example of this is the novella Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx. A melodrama about two ranch hands for hire who fall in love in the mountains of Montana, the pair are in bed together when Ennis explains why they can’t be seenBrokeback-Mountaintogether:

“Whoa, whoa, whoa. It ain’t goin a be that way. We can’t. I’m stuck with what I got, caught in my own loop. Can’t get out of it. Jack, I don’t want a be like them guys you see around sometimes. And I don’t want a be dead. There was these two old guys ranched together down home, Earl and Rich—Dad would pass a remark when he seen them. They was a joke even though they was pretty tough old birds. I was what, nine years old, and they found Earl dead in a irrigation ditch. They’d took a tire iron to him, spurred him up, drug him around by his dick until it pulled off, just bloody pulp. What the tire iron done looked like pieces a burned2013-06-25-proofimage9tomatoes all over him, nose tore down from skiddin on gravel.”

“You seen that?”

“Dad made sure I seen it. Took me to see it. Me and K.E. Dad laughed about it. Hell, for all I know he done the job. If he was alive and was to put his head in that door right now you bet he’d go get his tire iron. Two guys livin together? No. All I can see is we get together once in a while way the hell out in the back a nowhere—” (29-30).

This violence is a threat to existence is often at the root of something in Queer literature often referred to as “Love that dare not speak its name.”  Due often to the fact that homosexuality was often listed either as a sin, a vice, or as a mental disorder, homosexuals over the ages have had to bury their sexual and emotional passions, and those of us that were artists had to find a way to express our frustrations and desires through art.  Often is two characters in a story were gay, or often as was the case hinted at being gay, then by the end of their story no matter how happy they were there had to be a ending in which they could not be together.  Sometimes this resulted simply in heartbreak, but far more often it was the case that one or both partners wound up being killed.

The ‘Love that dare not speak it’s name” is a trope which has haunted queer literature and queer art for decades, even centuries and so when watching Call Me By Your Name I was waiting and expecting for it to happen.  And in a way it did, Oliver and Elio did not wind up together, but not because there was anything wrong with their love. Call Me By Your Name

The film, which is based on the novel by Andre Aciman, explores the life of Elio Perlman, the son of a jewish classical art professor.  The family lives in Italy and occasionally hosts graduate students of Elio’s father while he performs his research.  One such graduate student, an American by the name of Oliver arrives and very quickly catches the attention of Elio who is a teenager and developing his sexual and personal identity as he is on the cusp of adulthood.  Elio explores his sexuality with a young woman who lives in town, but he finds himself more and more drawn to Oliver who appears distant until, over time, the pair of them eventually abandon themselves to a love affair.  The story is about falling in love in a Pre-AIDS era and how two men were able to find one another, and for Elio, the story revolves around the discovery of his sexuality and the “first love” of his life.  By the end of the film the pair of them do not wind up together, Oliver winds up marrying a woman while never completely abandoning his erotic truth.

This would at first seem to satisfy the old “Love that Dare Not Speak It’s Name,” henceforward referred to as LTDNSIN, no never mind that’s a terrible acronym, but watching the film and having read the novel I’m not so quick to slap that label on what is arguably one of the most beautiful films I’ve ever watched.  Luca Guadagnino has made a visually stunning film that, even when it is not experimenting with camera angles, is just gorgeous to watch.  Guadagnino captures the landscape and feel of Italy taking timeCall Me By Your 7to film the peach trees, the ruins that litter the landscape, the pools of cold water in which the characters swim, or even simply the actual Italians themselves that call this beautiful country home.  Elio and Oliver exist in a sort of timeless space caught between antiquity and the contemporary period of the early 1980s.  And this attention to detail allows for the exploration of sensuality and sexuality of the characters.

In one moment of the film Elio and Oliver are discussing their mutual attraction beside a roman ruin and the camera follows them around the ruined edifice as they talk:

Oliver: Is there anything you don’t know?

Elio: I know nothing, Oliver.

Oliver: Well, you seem to know more than anyone else around here.

Elio: Well, if you only knew how little I really know about the things that matter.

Oliver: What “things that matter?”Call Me By Your 5

[long pause]

Elio: You know what things.

Oliver: Why are you telling me this?

Elio: Because I thought you should know.

Oliver: Because you thought I should know?

Elio: Because I wanted you to know.

Elio: [to himself] Because I wanted you to know. Because I wanted you to know. Because I wanted you to know.Call Me By YOur 17

Elio: [to Oliver] Because there’s no one else I can say this to but you.

Oliver: Are you saying what I think you’re saying?

[Elio nods]

Oliver: Wait for me here. Don’t go away.

Elio: You know I’m not going anywhere.

The scene is powerful for the shot Guadagnino uses and the way the music builds the dramatic tension.  By the end of the scene, even though it doesn’t at first appear that much of anything has actually taken place, the reader feels that something powerful has happened in the film.Call Me By YOur Name gif

The love affair between Elio and Oliver was beautiful to watch, and I admit that the film made me nostalgic for the days when I was young, discovering myself, and falling in love.  But for whatever reason the most powerful moment of the film was not any of the scenes between the two lovers, but a moment between Elio and his father after Oliver leaves the villa.  Elio is emotional about the separation and he goes to speak with his father, and what occurs between the pair of them is arguably one of the most powerful demonstrations of affection between a gay child and a parent in recent cinema.

Mr. Perlman offers his son several moments of honest sentiment.

Mr. Perlman: You two had a nice friendship.

Elio: Yeah…

Mr. Perlman: You’re too smart not to know how rare, how special what you two had was.

Elio: Oliver was Oliver.

Mr. Perlman: Parce-que c’etait lui, parce-que c’etait moi.Call Me By Your 12

Elio: Oliver may be very intelligent but…

Mr. Perlman: Oh no, no, no. He was more than intelligent. What you two had, had everything and nothing to do with intelligence. He was good. You were both lucky to have found each other, because you too are good.

Elio: I think he was better than me. I think he was better than me.

Mr. Perlman: I’m sure he’d say the same thing about you. Which flatters you both.

He clears through the suggestions and offers his honest take on the relationship,

Mr. Perlman: In my place, most parents would hope the whole thing goes away. Pray their sons land on their feet, but… I am not such a parent.

He continues,

Mr. Perlman: Right now you may not want to feel anything. Maybe you neverCall Me By Your 11wanted to feel anything. And maybe it’s not to me you’ll want to speak about these things. But feel something you obviously did. We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to make yourself feel nothing so as not to feel anything – what a waste!

And finally he offers his son, with obvious tears in his eyes, one last final offering.

Mr. Perlman: Have I spoken out of turn? Then I’ll say one more thing. It’ll clear the air. I may have come close, but I never had what you two have. Something always held me back or stood in the way. How you live your life is your business, just remember, our hearts and our bodies are given to us only once. And before youCall Me By YOur 13know it, your heart is worn out, and, as for your body, there comes a point when no one looks at it, much less wants to come near it. Right now, there’s sorrow, pain. Don’t kill it and with it the joy you’ve felt.

Elio: Does mom know?

[long pause]

Mr. Perlman: I don’t think she does.

There were so many moments during Call Me By Your Name, where I found myself “remembering.”  When Elio smells Olivers shirt I “remembered” the discovery of the sensual power of your partner’s smell.  When Oliver masturbates into a Peach I “remembered” the early experiments with masturbation.  When Elio tries to kiss Oliver I “remembered” the early attempts at demonstrations of affection and how some of them failed.  Mr. Perlman’s talk with his son however was the only moment of the film where I felt a real emotion to the point that I was actually crying.  I wish had I had a moment like that when I was young, and I wish I had had the courage to be myself, and have someone there to offer such a net.  I wish I hadn’t been so afraid to just be who I really was, which was gay.Jammer 2

I love my parents, and I do not wish to speak out of turn towards them.  I am who I am today because of them because they offered me endless love and support.  All I am saying is, there might have been a different man writing this post if I had had someone in the form of a guardian who allowed me the language and space to feel safe acknowledging my attraction. 

And this emotion isn’t just limited to myself, as Bret Easton Ellis points out on his review of the film, commenting first on Michael Stuhlbarg’s final speech,

And yet Stuhlberg sells it with a hushed technical virtuosity that makes every word land and vibrate even though at times he overdoes the saintly Jewish-Daddy thing. Stuhlberg makes this the real climax of the movie—it becomes a primal scene—and in the packed theater I saw the movie you could hear the gay men (at least half the audience) barely holding back muffled sobs. Call Me By Your Name is the movie generations of gay men have been waiting for: the fullest, least condescendingCall Me By YOur 10 expression of gay desire yet brought to mainstream film. It ends with a nearly wordless four-minute shot of a tear-stained Chalamet staring into a fireplace, a myriad of emotions subtly morphing over his face while the credits roll and which reminds us: there cannot be love without pain, the two are intertwined and intractable, and that the boy might be destroyed but a man will emerge and survive.

Mr. Perlman’s speech to his son can at times be just that, a speech.  And speeches are, by their nature, a one sided affair where one person delivers their thoughts, sentiments, philosophies, and opinions with an understanding that this is a passive affair for the listener.  What felt different while watching it was how the man seemed to be not just lecturing his son, but honestly trying to communicate to him.  Mr. Perlman is a man who has obviously experienced great frustration in his life, but just as likely he’s a man who’s starved for desire.Call Me By

Growing older is a sensation that is often defined by such starvation of spirit.  I find myself wondering more and more “what do I want out of life, and shouldn’t I have figured it out by now?”  And looking back only feeds such hunger as one feels the advantages of maturity and personal agency and wonders “why didn’t I take advantage of that?  Why did I choose not to pursue this?”  And this desire tends to feed a bitterness of spirit that can sap one dry.  Sexuality especially can starve the soul and leave one often wondering, why was I not more ambitious, spontaneous, more confident, and Mr. Perlman’s speech offers a kind of closure for such pain.

But as Ellis points out, Call Me By Your Name wasn’t an opportunity to mourn the loss ofCall Me By Your 14 love, but to recognize that love.  Too often the “first love” of our lives are encouraged to be forgotten or cynically dismissed as foolish or naive, but such a recommendation is not only barbaric it’s false.  That first love is real because it is felt with such profound passion that will never be repeated in our lives, and while some are fortunate enough to turn that love into a lasting commitment, often such passion just cannot last.  What’s important about the film is not simply that the film is a “gay movie,” but that it’s a film which explores the first love of homosexuality and does not dismiss it as something obscene, foolish, or doomed.  It’s instead portrayed as the first part of a long and beautiful life.

Call Me By Your Name is a film gay men have been waiting for for decades, centuries even.  And like the sexual grace carved into the hellenistic statues of Greek Gods, it’s a sexuality that cannot be denied, nor ignored, long after the men who experienced and recorded it are just the dust beneath the treads of bicycle wheels.

Call Me By Your 6

 

 

*Writer’s Note*

All quotes cited from Call Me By Your Name were provided by IMDB.com.  All quotes taken from OUT’s review of Call Me By Your Name were provided by their website.  If the reader is interested in reading the full review I’ve provided a link below:

https://www.out.com/out-exclusives/2017/12/18/movie-year-bret-easton-ellis-many-pleasures-call-me-your-name

**Writer’s Note**

I’ve taken the liberty of supplying a few reviews of the film and novel Call Me By Your Name below in case the reader would like a few more opportunities to read about the film instead of just taking my biased opinion.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/22/movies/call-me-by-your-name-review-armie-hammer.html?referrer=google_kp

https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/movie-reviews/call-me-by-your-name-review-steamy-tale-of-first-love-is-sexiest-film-of-2017-129281/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/goingoutguide/movies/call-me-by-your-name-a-summer-love-recognizable-in-any-country-in-any-era/2017/12/14/56ddad76-d47b-11e7-a986-d0a9770d9a3e_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.52522765defc

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/04/call-me-by-your-name-an-erotic-triumph

https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/call-me-by-your-name-2017

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/call_me_by_your_name/reviews/

 

***Writer’s Note***

In case the reader was curious, I really didn’t have any rhyme or reason for including the image below into the essay.  I just typed in “supergay” into Google Images and I got this wonder.  I used it as the temprary “Featured image” while I waited to get around to editing this one, and by the time I had everything ready I didn’t need it anymore, but I didn’t want to give up this guy because, he’s, well, perfect.

So, please enjoy this supergay photo because lord knows I certainly do.

Sublimely Gay

Jammer 3

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Knots and Hearts Aren’t Easily Broken: Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News

20 Thursday Jul 2017

Posted by Joshua Ryan "Jammer" Smith in Book Review, Literature, Novels, Writing

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Tags

"wrackers", adultery, Annie Proulx, Book Club, Book Review, Brokeback Mountain, depression, Eraserhead, Family Guy, fathers, journalism, Judi Dench, Kevin Spacey, knots, Literature, Novel, Passive, Philip Roth, Portnoy's Complain, ships, The Gaurdian, The Shipping News, Working Class Men, Writers, Writing

bookhatfamilyguy

It seems to me I could live my life A lot better than I think I am

–Working Man, RUSH

 

Anyone who suggests that Family Guy offers no intellectual opportunity clearly hasn’t watched the show.  My reader will note I’m making this comment here and not in the YouTube comment section, and that’s largely for my own safety.

I stand by this comment though because recently (if you can call two months ago “recent”) I sat down and watched one of the new episodes on Netflix.  It was a typical episode with plenty of cheap sex and fart jokes, but mid-way through the episode griffinyBrian was charged by Peter to get Chris (the teenage son) to become more intelligent so that he doesn’t become a big dope like his father.  Brian exposes Chris to culture and naturally Chris becomes more intelligent.  He even joins Brian at a book club at some nameless coffee shop.  It’s during this small scene though, where I managed to flex a bit of my intellectual muscle, because Chris introduces the book The Shipping News by Annie Proulx, and when Brian compares it to Portnoy’s Complaint Chris realizes what every regular viewer of Family Guys knows at this point: Brian is a fraud and a moron.images

If the reader has never read Portnoy’s Complaint, the novel is about a neurotic, sex-obsessed Jewish man dealing with his mother issues and complicated sex-life.  The Shipping News is a novel about a man who moves to a small New England town after his wife leaves him and sells their daughters to a sex-pervert.  If you don’t know either of the plots, or if you haven’t read the books you might almost buy Brian’s bullshit or else you might just laugh and pretend to be in on the joke and just wait for Peter to say something wacky.

But I start with this defense of Family Guy to really get into Proulx’s novel because this scene was enough to get me to sit down and read her book.  I had heard of The Shipping News before this, I just didn’t have any real context.  Having read Brokeback Mountain several times, and realizing that Proulx’s is probably one of the best proseists since Nabokov, I decided to buy a copy of Brokeback-Mountainthe book.  We had a copy at the library, but I needed to mark in the book and libraries tend to frown upon that.  In fact, let me be clear as a library employee, most librarians would like to hire Seal Team Six to track people who mark in books down and destroy them.  Just, so the reader knows next time they return a book with dog-eared pages.

The Shipping News hit me in a way I honestly didn’t expect.  I recognized, like I said before, after reading Brokeback Mountain that the woman was a brilliant prose writer, but the novel was powerful in the fact that every page had at least some string of words that left me flat.  Proulx doesn’t just write a narrative, she manages to craft a menagerie of beautiful yet simple sentences that will remind the reader what great writing is and what can be accomplished when it’s done right.  Proulx, much like Vladimir Nabokov, Ray Bradbury or Alice Walker, manages to blend poetics with prose into a style that is never pedantic or self-congratulating.  Instead it raises her human characters into something akin to a Byzantine mosaic.proulx

If it isn’t obvious I really, really enjoy her writing.  But evidence speaks louder than words, and so looking at just one early passage in which she observes Quoyle (the protagonist) and his character one can see how she is setting up her novel and style:

He abstracted his life from the times.  He believed he was a newspaper reporter, yet read no paper except the Mockingburg Record, and so managed to ignore terrorism, climatological change, collapsing governments, chemical spills, plagues, recession and failing banks, floating debris, the disintegrating ozone layer.  Volcanoes, earthquakes and hurricanes, religious frauds, defective vehicles and scientific charlatans, mass murderers and serial killers, tidal waves of cancer, AIDS, deforestation and exploding aircraft were as remote to him as braid catches, canions and rosette-embroidered garters.  Scientific proulx
journals spewed reports or mutant viruses, of machines pumping life through the near-dead, of the discovery that the galaxies were streaming apocalyptically toward an invisible Great Attractor like flies into a vacuum cleaner nozzle.  That was the stuff of other’s lives.  He was waiting for his to begin.  (11).

This opening description of Quoyle always reminds me of Camus or Dostoyevsky and I use those comparisons carefully.  Quoyle as a man is almost the existential anti-hero similar to those masters because, as Proulx carefully lists the great tragedies and struggles facing mankind, Quoyle seems entirely above or below it and so is oblivious to concerns of most of the common humanity.  He is almost Raskalnikov creating his own morality; he is almost Meursault oblivious as to whether his mother died today or yesterday.  What separates these existential champions from Quoyle though is the fact that, in his own way, Quoyle is simply a pathetic man drifting through life.  I would argue he might be what’s sometimes referred to as a Paragon, but the problem with that word is that it implies a strength of character that really doesn’t exist in Quoyle until the end of the novel.  He’s hardly a man of great integrity or supreme passion, or even of destiny and this is seen especially as he falls for his wife Petal.

Petal is a bitch.  I’m just being honest.  Quoyle’s opening act involves falling for Petal, who is a loose woman who marries him despite her own nature, and then proceeds to make the next six years of his life a living hell.  In another early passage the reader is given a chance to observe how their relationship operates, and further sees how Quoyle is hardly a man of great passion:The-Shipping-News-cate-blanchett-12650900-1024-576

One night he worked a crossword puzzle in bed, heard Petal come in, heard the gutter of voices.  Freezer door opened and closed, clink of the vodka bottle, sound the television and, after a while, squeaking, squeaking, squeaking of the hide-a-bed in the living room and the stranger’s shout.  The armor of indifference in which he protected his marriage was frail.  Even after he heard the door close behind the man and a car drive away he did not get up but lay on his back, the newspaper rustling with each heave of his chest, tears running down into his ears.  How could something done in another room by other people pain him so savagely?  Man Dies of Broken Heart. His hand went to the can of peanuts on the floor beside the bed.The_Shipping_News_RepILoveYou_640x360_108171843616

[…].

Quoyle believed in silent suffering, did not see that it goaded.  (16).

The reader may be disturbed by this passage, because often in narratives the cheating spouse is interrupted upon.  This is the stuff of melodramas and political thrillers, but Proulx is careful to keep Quoyle in the bedroom to bring out a certain point about Quoyle’s nature, and thus also the nature of certain portions of humanity.  There are people in this world who prefer to quietly suffer and keep whatever pain is in their hearts.  This may seem ridiculous to some, but as someone who suffers from undiagnosed depression this pain is all too real.theshippingnewspic

I recognize this is a hazardous comment but depression is in many ways a heightened form of narcissm.  The mind becomes supremely focused on the ego, specifically how miserable it is and how disconnected it is to other people.  I usually call my spells of depression my “raincloud” moments, because it reminds me of the old bits on the Loony Tunes when a character would walk around chased by a small raincloud that would pour down only upon them.  That’s just the way it feels.  And most of the time, despite the fact that I have friends who would listen to me and offer their emotional support, I keep my sadness (and suicidal thoughts) to myself because, like Quoyle, I would prefer to suffer in silence.  That pain, I assure my reader, is unbearable, but what’s truly pernicious about it is that I know a solution is possible, I just haven’t decided do anything about it.MCDSHNE EC015

My own condition is probably why I loved The Shipping News so much, and why I feel it’s painfully relevant.  Beneath everything that happens in the plot, the novel is an exploration of love and pain, and how those two are eventually reconciled.  Quoyle marries Petal who cheats on him regularly before eventually running away with a man and literally selling their two daughters to a stranger who is caught before he can rape them.  Petal dies in a car crash with her lover, and Quoyle, who observes all of this in a kind of daze, eventually moves in with his aunt in Newfoundland where he takes up a job as reporter writing “The Shipping News.”  This involves writing about ships, and Proulx is effective in creating the atmosphere of New England, while showing how the people of this region depend upon such structures.

In one passage one of Quoyle’s fellow reporters tells him about the shipping tradition:

“Truth be told,” said Billy, “there was many, many people here depended on shipwrecks to improve their lots.  Save what lives they could and then strip the vessel bare.  Seize the luxuries, butter, cheese, china plates, silver coffeepots and fine chests of drawers.  There’s many houses here still has treasures that come off wracked ships.  And the pirates always come up from the Caribbean water to6a0134802d7775970c01a5116e06a9970c
Newfoundland for their crews.  A place of natural pirates and wrackers.”  (172).

At first glance I see the reader’s reaction, what does this have to do with depression, heart-ache, and pain in general?  This just seems a small local history lesson.  At first I would agree with my reader, but looking at this quote in relation to everything that happens I believe this quote actually furthers the idea self-obsession and pain that works throughout The Shipping News, because this quote reveals a human need for self-preservation.  The “wrackers” mirror Petal and Quoyle because both people ultimately pursue their own self-interest.

People take what they need, oblivious to the long-lasting pain it will cause other people because they are concerned with their own interests, desires, and needs.  Proulx is continuing this idea that human beings are selfish, and that selfishness blinds us to pain that we might be causing others

One more quote should demonstrate this and then I will address my reader’s complaint.  Quoyle is talking with a few of the men who work with him in the newspaper office and they are discussing their boss:of9vR

“Have you ever noticed Jack’s uncanny use about assignments?  He gives you a beat that plays on your private inner fears.  Look at you.  Your wife was killed in an auto accident.  What does Jack ask you to cover?  Car wrecks, to get pictures while the upholstery is still on fire and the blood still hot.  He gives Billy, who has never married or reasons unknown, the home news, the women’s interest page, the details of the home and hearth—must be exquisitely painful to the old man.  And me.  I get to cover the wretched sexual assaults.  And with each one I relive my own childhood.  I was assaulted at school for three years, first by a miserable geometry teacher, the by older boys who were his cronies.  To this day I cannot sleep without wrapping up like a mummy in five or six blankets.  And what I don’t know is if Jack understands what he’s doing, if the pain is supposed to ease and dull through repetitive confrontation, or if it just persists, as fresh as on the day of the first personal event.  I’d say it persists.”The_Shipping_News_2001_7

[…]

It dulls it, the pain, I mean.  It dulls it because you see your condition is not unique, that other people suffer as you suffer.  There must be some kind of truth in the old saying, misery loves company.  That it’s easier to die if others around you are dying.”  (221).

Hopefully my reader has recognized at this point, the social relevance of The Shipping News, but I still understand their reaction.  This book sounds like one long depressing read about a mopish guy who is surrounded by other mopish people.  Why should I waste my time reading a book that has no hope to it?  Where’s the value in such a novel?

This would be a fair concern dear reader, if it was true.  In fact The Shipping News has a happy ending as Quoyle begins to realize he has a real ability at writing the events of the day, and also begins to date a woman who helps him internalize his own sense of self-worth.  And in fact the final passage of the novel ends with an observation of this dramatic change:boating_knots

For if Jack Buggit could escape from the pickle jar, if a bird with a broken neck could fly away, what else might be possible?  Water may be older than light, diamonds crack in hot goat’s blood, mountaintops give off the cold fire, forests appear in mid-ocean, it may happen that a crab is caught with the shadow of a hand on its back, that the wind be imprisoned in a bit of knotted string.  And it may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery.  (336-7).

Hopefully my reader has recognized at this point the real artistic power of The Shipping News, and why Annie Proulx has accomplished something simply incredible.  It’s not enough that the novel explores the complicated nature of love and pain and how these two forces tend to intertwine like strands of rope knots.  There are men and women like Quoyle that navigate these forces passively, allowing the pain to internalize into something corrosive rather than actively trying to make something of themselves.  Quoyle eventually overcomes this passivity and finds a real purpose in life, allowing the pain and tragedy of his past to become just that, the past.  And so looking at the larger social relevance, The Shipping News is a beautiful reminder than human life is what you make it.2449-3

My depression is something that isn’t going away, but rather than let it define me I actively try to make something out of my existence.  This shitty blog is a start.  I also listen to Slipknot and Korn.  I write fiction that no one reads.  I spend time with my family.  I work in a library.  And, with no ego here, I’m a damn good cook.

The impulse to allow pain to dominate your life and consciousness is a strong one, and I know this from experience.  It’s easy to crawl into your head and allow your pain to become the defining attribute of your existence.  But that path is ultimately just narcissism and eventual death.  Quoyle escapes this and finds a new purpose for living.

Writing about sinking ships may not seem like the way to build your life back, but it’s better than sitting bed devouring peanuts and feeling sorry for yourself.

7786_5

 

 

 

 

 

*Writer’s Note*

All quotes taken from The Shipping News came from the Scribner paperback edition.

 

 

**Writer’s Note**

I didn’t really get a chance to incorporate this quote into the text, but it still felt important to provide it here in relation to this essay:eraserhead1

Benny Fridge sat with his hands folded slightly on his clean desk as though at an arithmetic lesson.  His puffed hair made Quoyle think of Eraserhead.  (286).

My regular reader, or any David Lynch fan, will understand this reference, and while I love its inclusion in the text, I’m a little bothered by it.  Quoyle doesn’t seem like the type who would actually sit down and watch a film like Eraserhead, but at the same time I might be wrong.  Quoyle and Henry Spicer are both lethargic men who are largely floating through life passively receiving their existence and agony rather than actively fighting it and making something of themselves.

So.  Upon reflection, I think this reference actually works, but only if you’ve actually seen Eraserhead and realized that in Heaven everything is fine.  You’ve got yours, and I’ve got mine.

Eraserhead3

 

 

***Writer’s Note***

Below are two articles from the guardian about Proulx’s novel as well as the film about the novel starring Judi Dench and Kevin Spacey

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/dec/22/the-shipping-news-proulx-newfoundland

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/dec/08/shipping-news-annie-proulx-reading-group

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My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys, and They Still Are It Seems

05 Monday Sep 2016

Posted by Joshua Ryan "Jammer" Smith in Academic Books, Bisexuality, Literature, Masculinity Studies, Queer Theory, Sexuality

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Academic Book, Ang Lee, Annie Proulx, Brokeback Mountain, Chris Packard, Clint Eastwood, Cowboys, Fievel Goes West, Heath Ledger, Homo-Social Relationships, Homoeroticism, Homosexuality, Jake Gyllenhaal, Jane Tompkins, Jimmy Stewart, John Wayne, Kirk Douglass, Literature, masculinity, My Heroes Have Always Been Cowyboys, Novella, Queer, Queer Cowboys, Queer Cowboys: And Other Erotic Male Friendships in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Queer Theory, sexual Education, Sexual identity, Sexuality, The "Fairy", West of Everything-The Inner Life of Westerns, Westerns, Wiley Burp, Willie Nelson, Working Class Men

Brokeback_Mountain_Annie_Proulx

Just remember, Fievel – one man’s sunset is another man’s dawn. I don’t know what’s out there beyond those hills. But if you ride yonder… head up, eyes steady, heart open… I think one day you’ll find that you’re the hero you’ve been looking for.

–Wiley Burp, Fievel Goes West

Like many closeted young men at the time, I refused to believe that cowboys could be gay.  I also refused to acknowledge the fact cowboys-togetherthat cowboys had in fact, always been gay, or at least gay in the sense that they exhibit homoerotic tendencies.  When Brokeback Mountain came out in theatres, pun not intended, it caused a bit of an uproar and not just because it was one of the few watchable Jake Gyllenhaal movies made at that point, but because it was a mainstream film which featured openly gay, or at least bisexual, characters as the center point of the plot rather than as quirky side characters.  An unapologetic gay love story, while not unprecedented, hadn’t reached mainstream audiences in such a way.  The fact that Ang Lee dared to make a movie about honest love between two grown men in an atmosphere that satisfied the typical qualities of a Western, a film genre that is looked upon often with reverence despite the fact no film director since Sergio Leone has managed to make one worth watching (unless you count Django Unchained and I do), created a controversy for the reasons I just stated.  Brokeback Mountain challenged the masculinity of the Western because it placed two gay, or at least bisexual men, alongside men like Clint Eastwood, Jimmy Stewart, Kirk Douglass, and, my hero at the time, John Wayne.

As I said before I was closeted at the time and didn’t recognize that that weird feeling I got looking at the underwear models wasn’t just bad Chinese food I had eaten, and so at the time my reaction reeks of the typical desperation of those wanting to cling to the heterosexual identity.  cowboy7Cowboys for me were figures who answered the faults in my own masculinity because I was the young man often presented in cartoons and movies on the sidelines of the game, either my nose stuck in a book, or trying desperately (and pathetically) to talk to girls.  Growing up John Wayne was the answer to my masculinity problems, because he seemed to exemplify everything that a man was supposed to be.  Men were strong laborers and heroes while gay men were prissy fairies.

Growing up, cutting the shit, and reading lots of books has a remarkable way of changing your perspective.  In graduate school I took a Queer theory course (which I won’t shut up about as some readers may know) and while reading Butler, Bersani, Halberstam, and Sedgwick I decided to finally get around to reading Brokeback Mountain, the novella by Annie Proulx.  I’d bought the novella for a dollar curious, in every sense of the word, about the book because the media had portrayed the story as a homoerotic pornographic snuff film.  I’m sure like many people I was slightly disappointed when I opened the book and discovered, not an erotic masterpiece, but an emotional melodrama that was beautiful to read and imagine in my mind.

It was while studying this book, and producing a paper about how it queered the landscape of the Western, that I realized I was bisexual, came Brokeback-Mountainout to a friend and my wife respectively, and began to read more and more about male same-sex intimacy.

There are only two moments of intimacy between Ennis Delmar and Jack Twist described in the novella and Annie Proulx writes it carefully:

Ennis ran full-throttle on all roads whether fence mending or money spending, and he wanted none of it when Jack seized his left hand and brought it to his erect cock.  Ennis jerked his hand away as though he’d touched fire, got to his knees, unbuckled his belt, shoved his pants down, hauled Jack onto all fours and, with the help of the clear-slick and a little spit, entered him, nothing he’d done before but no instruction manual needed.  They went at it in silence except for a few sharp intakes of breath and Jack’s chocked “guns goin off.” Then out, down, and asleep.  (14).03c5a6437fc4abf0c0a7e8079f7a7628

It speaks to a heteronormative standard that the first sexual act between these two men is anal sex rather than a blowjob and in truth this is something I’ve struggled with as both a writer, a reader, and a critic of the novella.  On the one hand because Annie Proulx is a straight woman it does make sense that physical penetration would be the first sexual scene described, but many literary and queer critics have bashed her for this.  The argument is that it perpetuates the idea that the only kind of sex that can occur between men is anal sex because of old heteronormative standards of “active vs passive partner” best exemplified by the bullshit question: “So which one is the girl?”  I recognize the problem these critics have with the text and I agree that this does perpetuate a bad example of what male-male sexual behavior is, but at the same time I’m willing to forgive Proulx for this description simply because it makes sense to Ennis and Jack’s economic background.

Ennis and Jack are both working-class men who come from poor upbringings.  If I can write this without sounding elitist, it 0416846951670bd382f37c24fcac0d85d5691e78edd73552e11c66d6c6f4585ddoes stand to reason that both of these men are not exactly literate and so the nuances of sexual behavior and identity, or the idea that they could experiment sexually before anal sex occurred, would not be developed.  Proulx even goes so far as to write this out herself:

They were raised on small, poor ranches in opposite corners of the state […] both high school dropout country boys with no prospects, brought up to hard work and privation, both rough-mannered, rough-spoken, inured to the stoic life.  Ennis, reared by his older brother and sister after their parents drove off the only curve on Dead Horse Road leaving them twenty-four dollars in cash and a two-mortgage ranch, applied at age fourteen for a hardship license that left him make the hour-long trip from the ranch to the high school.  The pickup was old, no heater, one windshield wiper and bad tires; when the transmission went there was no money to fix it.  He had wanted to be a sophomore, felt the word carried a kind of distinction, but the truck broke down short of it, pitching him directly into ranch work.  (4-5).Brokeback-Mountain-Promotional-Stills-brokeback-mountain-31873878-1769-1191

Ennis and Jack are both men who have received little education and come from traditionally heterosexual families, as such both of these men have been raised with the idea of what masculinity is, what it isn’t, and how people are to behave during sex.  Looking back at the previous passage, this is clear when Proulx notes that Ennis “ran full-throttle on all roads whether fence mending or money spending, and he wanted none of it when Jack seized his left hand and brought it to his erect cock.”  Ennis in this moment has clearly bought into the idea that men do not “receive” during sex; that their role is instead to be active and penetrate their partner.  As such Ennis becomes the “top” and Jack becomes the “bottom.”  Both of these characters may be acting a traditionally heteronormative sexual behavior, but I think it would be unfair to expect anything else from these men.

At this brokeback-mountain nudepoint my contester emerges wondering why they should care?  I’m not gay and I don’t care how gay people fuck, that’s none of my business.  Why should I care about a novella about two gay guys who bang each other in Montana?  Where’s the relevance?

The relevance dear contester is in the fact that this sexual act opens up a new territory in the Western which, whether they like it or not, typically defines the American landscape in the minds of countries around the world.  The United States contribution to the collected consciousness tends to be “The West” and with that image came the figure of “The Cowboy.”  The other night at Graphic Novel Book Club we were reading Preacher and the idea of “The West” came up.  While we largely trashed the book, we did all recognize that the image of Texas, specifically cowboys and the desert, are usually the images of America that the rest of the world immediately perceives.  Cowboys have come to define what and who Americans are, Heath-Ledger-in-Brokeback-Mountain-heath-ledger-15596211-1067-800and anyone from Texas can attest to the fact that Texas itself captures a mythos.  Mentioning to someone that you’re from Texas usually creates a strong of questions running from “Do you ride horses to school” to “Is it true everyone has an oil well in their backyard?”

For the record only queers and democrats ride horses, Texans ride longhorn bulls to school, and we each only have one oil well and that’s only so we can fertilize the endless fields of blue bonnets planted by Pecos Bill before he and Elvis Ascended to Enlightenment.

That’s a joke for the record.

My pathetic attempts at humor aside Brokeback Mountain is important because of this perception of the Western as the 2977f740-7f02-0131-ef04-42aab1726324definitive narrative of the United States.  The important idea that emerges after Brokeback Mountain is that “The Cowboy” is no longer only straight.  Although there are some who would argue the cowboy never was truly straight in the first place.

Queer Cowboys: And Other Erotic Male Friendships in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, apart from having a monstrously long title (though it’s actually relatively short for an academic book, trust me on this) came to my attention after I received a rejection letter for my Brokeback Mountain paper.  One of the reviewers mentioned that I had clearly never read Queer Cowboys, and that any work on homoerotic behavior in westerns had to reference this book.  I could say that I pouted for several weeks imagining that reviewer’s face as a butt, but given what normally happens after criticism of any of my work I immediately looked for the book and devoured it.  Chris Packard’s small tome is a brilliantly researched text that looks at the genre of the Western and observes how homoerotic and homosocial bonds between men in Westerns constitute a queer lifestyle.  That’s all a fancy-pants way of saying Packard’s book looks at how cowboys were pretty gay in their own right.250909

Looking at just a small passage from his introduction he makes some compelling points:

Most people, if they think about it at all, assume that the cowboy in history and in literature practiced sexual abstention until he arrived in a town, where he practiced the acceptable vice of dalliances with female prostitutes.  But this explanation is counterintuitive and is not supported in the literary record.  Particularly in Westerns produced before 1900, references to lusty passions appear regularly, when the cowboy is on the trail with his partners, if one knows how to look for them.  In fact, in the often all-male world of the literary West, homoerotic affection holds a favored position.  A cowboy’s partner, after all, is his one emotional attachment, aside from his horse, and he will die to preserve the attachment.  Affection for women destroys cowboy comunitas and produces children, and both are unwanted hindrances to those who wish to ride the range freely.  (3).

Packard’s argument can be clearly seen in Proulx’s novella, for after Jack and Ennis have reconnected after four years apart they retreat to a hotel room and after they make love there’s a brief exchange where Ennis lays it out plain:

“I doubt there’s nothin now we can do,” said Ennis.  “What I’m saying, Jack, I built a life up in them years.  Love my little girls.  Alma?  brokeback-mountain-sacrificeIt ain’t her fault.  You got your baby and wife, that place in Texas.  You and me can’t hardly be decent together if what happened back there”—he jerked his head in the direction of the apartment— “grabs us on like that.  We do that in the wrong place we’ll be dead.  There’s no reins on this one.  It scares the piss out a me.”  (27).

It’s important to realize that while Proulx is laying out a melodrama about being closeted in rural communities, there’s still this idea that domestic relationships are what’s keeping the two of them apart.  Keeping in the tradition of the Western as a genre Garth and Ennis are left unsatisfied in their marriages, not because they don’t care for the women they’ve married, but because the opportunity to have a truly satisfying relationship together is denied to them.

If I can go back to Packard one more time, there is one passage that digs into the conflicts of marriage to the Western:2A98551900000578-3164423-image-a-16_1437076251275

The trouble with wives in Westerns, at least until Wister’s The Virginian came along, is that they come with a doctrine that annihilates the identity of a free spirited cowboy.  But as Wister showed, the partnership with a same-sex friend, when it resembles a marriage, provides safety, consolation, and perhaps erotic satisfaction either prior to marriage or alongside it.  (60).

Brokeback Mountain is, as I alluded to it a moment ago, a melodrama because the conflict of the plot is taken almost from Romeo & Juliet.  Two lovers discover one another in a fit of passion, express that love through physical acts, get swept up in their love, they are separated, and then ultimately they have to hide their love until it destroys them.  For Jack it’s being queer-bashed by his father and some locals, for Ennis it’s a lifetime of isolation and dissatisfaction.  Being gay in rural areas is ultimately going to lead to destruction, or at least that seems the end point of the novella, but looking to another book there is a logic behind the destruction of Jack and Ennis.

Jane Tompkin’s book West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns is a vital book in my library because it seems that hardly a day goes by when I don’t pluck it off the shelf to read or transcribe some quote from it.51gxLM4ThAL._SX322_BO1,204,203,200_  When I was actually writing my original Brokeback Mountain paper I cited heavily from it largely because Tompkins is a damn good writer, and partly because she opened my eyes to many of the tropes of standard Westerns I’d been watching and then reading for years.

In one passage she lays out a central concern for genre:

For the Western is secular, materialist, and antifeminist; it focuses on conflict in the public space, is obsessed by death, and worships the phallus.  (28).

And in a later passage she explains out part of the embedded homoeroticism:

 In the course of these struggles the  frequently forms a bond with another man–sometimes his rival, more often a comrade–a bond that is more important than any relationship he has with a woman and is frequently tinged with homoeroticism.  There is very little free expression of the motions.  The hero is a man of few words who expresses himself through physical action–usually fighting.  And when death occurs it is never at home in bed but always sudden death, usually murder.  (39).

And I suppose, with that in hand, my contester may still wonder then why they should bother reading it, but the previous quotes should be enough to explain.  Brokeback Mountain is a book which, by exploring the romance between Ennis and Jack has not only allowed a part of the Western that was always there to “come-out,” it does so while also following the standard “rules” that makes the genre what it is.

For my own part it goes back to the early passages of Brokeback Mountain when Jack and Ennis are watching the sheep and falling and love:brokebacktent16

As it did go.  They never talked about the sex, let it happen, at first only in the tent at night, then in the full daylight with the hot sun striking down, and at evening in the fire glow, quick, rough, laughing and snorting, no lack of noises, but saying not a goddamn word except once Ennis said, ‘I’m not no queer,’ and Jack jumped in with ‘Me neither.  A one-shot thing.  Nobody’s business but our ours’ (15)

I wouldn’t realize that I was bisexual until a year ago and this knowledge is troubling to me.  Growing up I always felt a sense of lacking in myself and I answered that largely by watching Westerns with my dad.  Most of them John Wayne films, but there was also Feivel Goes West.  The men in those movies, with their pistols, quick hands, horses, and cynical wisdom about humanity seemed like the kind of men I wanted to be when I brokeback-mountain-1024grew up, and when I made my discovery there was some part of me that felt that lacking again.  Brokeback Mountain checks that resolve however, for it in effect levels the playing field.  While the novella may be a melodrama about the tragedy of being gay, Ennis and Jack do queer the Western genre by their very existence.  Looking over articles and academic books about the genre I became more and more aware as well that cowboys weren’t the sole property of white male heterosexual audiences.  There was a queer behavior embedded in those mythic men who defined the identity of Americans to peoples all over the world.

To the young bisexual or homosexual man, unsure about the possibility of possessing masculinity and their sexuality, Brokeback Mountain provides them a model to work with.  proulxQueer men aren’t just prissy fairies (though if you want to be that be it and rock it), they can be working class men as well; hard men that work the land and have to fight for paychecks.  Proulx’s novella does an important job of reminding readers that while John Wayne might have gotten Angie Dickinson at the end of Rio Bravo, somewhere out there was a little boy who wanted to see Dean Martin wind up with Ricky Nelson too.

The cowboy was my hero growing up, and he still is.  Whether it’s Roland from the Dark Tower, Chance in Rio Bravo, Sherriff Wiley Burp in Fievel Goes West, or Ennis in Brokeback Mountain, all of these men have taught me how to be a man, and at least one has helped me finally understand why those SEARS underwear models made me feel funny.

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 *Writer’s Note*

All quotes from Brokeback Mountain came from the Scribner paperback printing of the novella.  All quotes from Queer Cowboys came from the Palgrave Macmillan paperback printing.  All quotes from West of Everything came from the Oxford University Press edition.

 

**Writer’s Note**

The title of this essay is a line of one of my favorite songs by one of my favorite singers.  Willie Nelson breathes the American spirit and sings the voice of long dead men.  WillieNelsonAnyway, I could wax poetic for days about the man, but the reader should listen to the song My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys at least once.  If you’re interested follow the link below:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gq9YKOpOvtE

 

***Writer’s FINAL Note***

I didn’t get a chance to put it in but another reason to read the novella is simply because Proulx as a writer has a beautiful prose that, when read aloud, rivals poetry in its ability to blend aesthetics with mood.  Take for instance this description of Brokeback mountain:

Dawn came glassy orange, stained from below by a gelatinous band of pale green. The sooty bulk of the mountain paled slowly until it was the same color as the smoke from Ennis’s breakfast fire.  The cold air sweetened, banded pebbles and crumbs of soil cast sudden pencil-long shadows and the rearing lodgepole pines below them massed in slabs of somber malachite.”  (9)

There are few passages about landscapes that ever achieve such beauty, and damn is Proulx doesn’t knock it out of the park.

 

****Writer’s REAL FINAL Note****

This is still one of the best conclusions to a Western.

Dem+childhood+feels+everyone+should+see+this+movie+the+feels_a5c9d5_4388559

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Homos, Schmomos: A Rather Gay Look at a Gay Academic Book

06 Friday Nov 2015

Posted by Joshua Ryan "Jammer" Smith in Academic Books, Bisexuality, Book Review, Masculinity Studies, Queer Theory, Sexuality

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Academic Book, anal penetration, Annie Proulx, Brokeback Mountain, Freud, Gore Vidal, Homos, Homosexuality, Leo Bersani, masculinity, Michel Foucault, Passive/Active Sexual Performance, Penis, phallocentrism, phallus, Queer Theory, Sexual Rhetoric, Sexuality, William F. Buckley Jr

41bm3ydzwUL._SX302_BO1,204,203,200_

There’s a point in your academic career when you realize that you’ve just spent the last three hours reading about anal penetration between men and none of it came anywhere near close to being erotic.

Most people will probably never read Homos. The simple reason is because few people possess an interest in Queer theory, though I may be selling a great portion of the Brokeback-Mountainpopulace short. The only problem with a book like Homos is it’s an academic work and right off the bat that means the readership dwindles to a handful of intellectuals working in an even smaller handful of universities. To be honest if it wasn’t for Brokeback Mountain I never would have even heard of the book. But I just realize you’re walking in on me mentally masturbating and my isn’t that a pleasant image that will get stuck in your head while your partner is busy talking about her day.

Maybe a little background will help. And listen to your partner more, seriously he married your butt when he could have shacked up with that rich dentist from Maui. He gives and gives and you don’t even try man. Five minutes, seriously, it’s the little things that make a marriage.

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Starting in January of this year I began an independent study dedicated entirely to Queer Theory, a brand of social, and in this case literary, theory that attempts to understand how homosexual, bisexual, queer, etc., identity fits and at times is at odds with the dominant discourses in society. A friend of mine who was the VP of the Gender, Sex, and Sexuality Alliance organization at the school, and who I had only recently discovered was transgender, told me about it and invited me to join him. I jumped right in eager to see how exploring sexuality in an academic setting would go. The class was really just a bi-weekly meeting with the professor, and often my friend and I would do most of the reading and talking over coffee. I started to confide in him more and more, and the reading list was a real challenge. I decided to do a Queer reading of the Western, focusing specifically on Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx. In my research I found a book listed in the works cited pages of several academic articles.

With a title like Homos, it’s hard to miss. Given the fact that most titles of academic works avoid cleverness like the plague, and the fact that all of them seem to require not only pythagoras-magic-of-numbers-meaningcolons but multi-line subtitles, Homos is like a breath of fresh air. However before my reader rushes off to buy a copy and bask in its warm glow of gay academic script I should probably make sure they are aware of something: This is an incredibly academic text. Take one sentence from the introduction:

Even more: why should sexual preference be the key to identity in the first place? And, more fundamentally, why should preference itself be understood only as a function of the homo-heterosexual dyad? That dyad imprisons the eroticized body within a rigidly gendered sexuality, in which pleasure is at once recognized and legitimized as a function of genital differences between the sexes. (4).

images

(*snort*) Huh? What? Sorry dozed off, where we? I’m kidding, but this quote does give a pretty solid example of what the reader can expect. Leo Bersani’s book, did I mention him, he’s the author, he might be important, is an attempt to situate and understand male homosexuality in Modern culture looking at works that deal with same-sex desire, to sadomasochism, and warning against group identity politics. That’s really just a fancy way of saying that Bersani looks at the way men desire other men and why society seems to have a problem with it. In fact, one of the reasons Bersani’s work is so interesting is the fact that, for an academic work about sex, he does actually spend a fair amount of time discussing sex. He says later:

De-gaying gayness can only fortify homosexual oppression; it accomplishes in its own way the principal aim of homophobia: the elimination of gays. […] Furthermore, gay critiques of homosexual identity have generally been desexualizing discourses. You would never know, from most of the works I discuss, that gay men, for all their homo1diversity, share a strong sexual interest in other human beings anatomically identifiable as male (5-6).

Speaking as somebody who typically reads a fair amount of queer theory, this sentence is as validating as it is charming, especially when you’re writing about male-male desire and you have to dig through Foucault. I love the man but he could have been a little more direct about dudes who like wang. And, not to be a nasty little butthole here, but that turtleneck, SO last fall.

I bought Bersani’s Homos because I needed to address how the anal sex scene, the only erotic moment in Brokeback Mountain, constituted a “queering” of the landscape of the Western. Since most of the canon of Queer theory are written more about the abstract notion of same-sex desire, and since many of them are written by women, tackling the issue of physical intimacy between men is difficult beyond citing the Joy of Gay Sex, and the trouble there is it becomes difficult for the academic community to take you seriously. And, to be honest, I bought it because it was a fun read.

While several of my steady readers shake their head and text their buddy to confirm Gay Paradesuspicions they have of the writer, I wanted to return to the idea of intimacy between men. This is a topic I’ve explored before, but since this is an academic work as opposed to a general non-fiction history or philosophy, Bersani is able to really explore how society has intellectually processed the act of anal penetration. In the past this has manifested in the question I’m sure many gay men have had to smile through, “So which one is the girl?” This question may alter in terms of language, but the sentiment remains the same. Bersani notes this perception and elaborates upon it while quoting David Halpern’s observations of male-male desire:

This meant, specifically, not only that phallic penetration of another person’s body expressed sexual activity and virility, while being penetrated was a sign of passivity and femininity, but, even more, that “the relation between ‘active’ and ‘passive’ sexual partner is thought of as the same kind of relation as that obtaining between social superior and social inferior.” (105).Édouard-Henri_Avril_anal_sex_detail

He continues this thought saying:

“In a sense, the Greeks were so open about their revulsion to what they understood as female sexuality, and so untroubled in their thinking about the relation between power and phallic penetration, that they didn’t need to pretend, as nineteenth century sexologists did, that men who went to bed with other men were all secretly women.

“Only half of them were women, and that judgement had enormous social implications; the adult male citizen who allowed himself to be penetrated, like inferior women and slaves, was politically disgraced. The persistence of this judgement throughout the centuries and in various cultures is well documented.” (106).

If you are the partner that typically “receives” your partner’s erection then you’re “the girl,” and therefore weak. The proliferation of the idea that if you enjoy being penetrated, then you must be a woman inside rather than a man is a patriarchal notion that, as he observes, goes back as far as Greek society. The conflict for really approaching this as imageshomosexuality is complicated because the gay behavior of the Greeks is really more pederasty than it is homosexuality, but the idea has continued throughout human society resulting in the term “invert” that rose to prominence during the late 1800s, early 1900s. Even after the Civil Rights movements in the 1960s that gained recognition of homosexuality, gay men still are asked whether they like getting fucked in the ass. It’s not just the barbarically rude curiosity that exists in this question, the larger concern is for men on the receiving end, for once the act of intercourse is complete they may compartmentalize this public perception and begin to question their own virility.

Am I still a man if I want to have a man fuck me? If I just give blowjobs does that constitute being the passive partner? What if I don’t want to fuck someone, and just be fucked, does that mean I have no say in anything? Am less of a man, or a human being, because I prefer receiving?

Bersani moves from this concern to Proust and the ultimately to Freud’s theory of the fear Interior Leather Barof castration during sex. The next quote in paperback copy is a big pink highlighted brick because, to be fair, it’s without a doubt the most entertaining and intriguing passages I’ve ever read in an academic book:

“We might imagine that a man being fucked is generously offering the sight of his own penis as a gift or even a replacement for what is temporarily being “lost” inside him—an offering not made in order to calm his partner’s fears of castration but rather as the gratuitous and therefore even lovelier protectiveness that all human beings need when they take the risk of merging with another, of risking their own boundaries for the sake of self-dissolving extensions. If there is no fantasy to read behind the happy faces of those two gays we began by observing, perhaps there were, supporting their lovemaking, the shadowy figures of the loving child and the daddy he coaxed out of his terrorizing and terrorized castrating identity, figures who may have helped them, Foucault’s couple, to spend a night of penile oblation” (112).

Who says the Humanities is boring now? Quote this to your republican brother-in-law who owns the Lamborghini at Thanksgiving and see if he’s still so quick to say you never do anything interesting as an English grad student. 72a72f95a0deb6aa94ee0477c4852d5aGo on, do it. He’ll respect you for it, I promise (*Results may vary*).

The above quote stands out to me as a kind of final summation revealing the inadequacy of the question, “Who’s the girl?” The people that ask reveal their own phallocentric view of the world in which it penis is designed to fill every physical and intellectual space of human existence and therefore the one who possesses it and uses it is truly strong, however the fault of this mindset is revealed in this Freudian understanding of the “Invert.” As the man buries himself in his partner, he loses that phallus while his partner is the one left holding the golden ticket, so to speak. Bersani is understanding the homosexual sexual relationship through Proust and Freud, but also challenging it. The man being penetrated may be being fucked, but he’s stronger for lacking fear in the act, actually supporting his “active” partner’s fear with an offering.

“Who’s the girl?” is a stupid question, because being a woman is not a sign of weakness. Second, it’s barbaric to keep asking that stupid question because if two men in a relationship are a cisgender homosexuals, neither of them are the girl, they’re both men. If a man says he’s gay, it means he like men and if either of them wanted to be with a girl they wouldn’t be gay. You’d think this was obvious, but alas it needs clarification.Gay-Guys-Pahing-On-The-Fence

It’s at this point my reader may be wondering: Why would I want to spend my time reading about gay sex unless I was gay? What does this have to do with my life?

This is a fair question since I have reiterated that this book is predominantly written for academics, but I feel I may have mislead the reader by stating that. Bersani’s book is certainly bound in theory, but like all books, it can be relevant to anyone possessing an interest in human sexuality, and given the number of people who have found this blog looking for black dick pics, I believe it’s fair to say a fair majority of the population shows an interest in such efforts. Bersani’s book is important because his claim is that the homosexual movement is “de-gaying” itself by merging into other identities. He says earlier:

“Our de-gaying resources seem limitless. Most recently, we have decided to be queer rather than gay. The history of gay is too bound up with efforts to define a homosexual identity. But queer has a double advantage: it repeats, with pride, a pejorative straight word for homosexual even as it unloads the term’s homosexual referent. For oppressed groups to accept the queer label is to identify themselves as being actively at odds with a male-dominated, white, capitalistic, heterosexist culture.” (71).

Speaking as a member of organizations on and off campus for LGBTQ individual rights and liberties, this statement does seem to possess a great deal of relevance. The term queer is indexoften, and has often, been thrown at people like a knife. William F. Buckley’s televised debates with Gore Vidal possibly being the most poignant and perfect example that springs to mind. Being a Queer theorist myself and bisexual to boot, I feel Bersani’s point to be a little troubling. I understand his concern as a gay man and wanting to find solace as a gay man, but does it seem he’s trying to stop Same-Sexual desire from changing generation to generation? I’m not sure he does for he says later:

“If Queerness means more than simply taking sexuality into account in our political analyses, if it means that modalities of desire are not only effects of social operations but are at the core of our very imagination of the social and political, then something has to be said about how erotic desire for the same might revolutionize our 569fecaf1f00005000216544understanding how the human subject is, or might be, socially implicated” (73).

Homos is an effort of love for a political identity. Sex in our culture is often politicized and treated with a grandiosity that distracts us from the simple act and joy of fucking, but books like Bersani’s are important to read even if you don’t have multiple PhDs and enjoy reading The New Yorker. Who you fuck, and how you fuck is a private matter, but it is also part of the narrative of your life and all Bersani really wants his reader, and my own to consider, is how important is that decision in the larger narrative.

“I’m a gay man,” is a story, and one worth telling, because for many young men in the world they may not have the language to even begin to know where they fit in the larger narratives of human society, or else they fear what their desire says according to other.

Queer theory only ever asks questions, and rather than accepting straight answers (see what I did there?), it asks more questions of the larger heteronormative trends to see if they ever really are heteronormative. Do you enjoy anal sex?  Do you like to recieve? Are you gay? And if all of these are true, does this really strip you of your humanity? More importantly, does this remove your chance to speak honestly about how you express your sexuality? If it does, then there’s something wrong in the world you live in, because everybody should be allowed to express themselves, no matter what the story they tell reveals.

large

 

*Writer’s Note*

I have explored my own reading of Bersani rather than providing an objective review of the book, but my training in Queer theory in general has taught me that ultimately studying sexuality is about asking questions rather than trying to arrive at one central conclusion. There may be some of my readers who are gay men that object to the ideas, if so please let me know what you think. I love conversations.

 

**Writer’s Second Note**

Also please note the title is not meant to be dismissive I just thought it sounded clever. My wife tells me I’m really not that funny.

 

***Writer’s Final Note***

1008633_825638398896_3875412439418899247_o

The image of the group of people was taken last year during National Coming Out Day.  I’m the dude on the far left wearing the purple shirt, polka-dot bow-tie, the kilt, and the hat who looks like I smelt a really lousy fart.  Here it is again.  You’re seeing it now aren’t you?  What was I smelling?

Still.  Fun day.

 

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Are You a Fag? If So Check “Other”

10 Sunday Aug 2014

Posted by Joshua Ryan "Jammer" Smith in Comics/Graphic Novels, Fun Home/Alison Bechdel, Literature, Masculinity Studies, Novels, Queer Theory, Satire/Humor, Sexuality

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"fuck-fest", Alison Bechdel, Annie Proulx, Barbara Love, Brokeback Mountain, Crisco, culture, dehumanization, Essay, Faggots, felching, Fun Home, Gay, Gay Sex, Homoeroticism, Homosexuality, Humor, Larry Kramer, Lesbian sex, Lesbianism, Literature, Male Sexuality, Oscar Wilde, Othering, Politics, Queer, Queer Theory, racism, Sappho Was a Right-On Woman, Satire, Scott Esk, Sense of Self, sex, sexual idealism, Sexual identity, Sexual politics, Sexual Rhetoric, Sexuality, Sidney Abbot, Social-sexual satire, The Other

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Fred Lemish states a summation of his character in what is by far one of the most brilliant, borderline pornographic, and uproarious social-sexual satires in human history when he thinks to himself:

I’m not gay. I’m not a fairy. I’m not a fruit. I’m not queer. A little crazy maybe. And I’m not a faggot. I’m a Homosexual Man. I’m me. Pretty Classy.

By today’s standards this statement is not pressingly significant. In an age where alison-bechdel_fun-home_lesbiangay pride parades have assumed the same social element as St. Patrick’s Day and Fourth of July processions and the ever echoing axiom, “I’m here, I’m queer, get used to it” feels old hat, such a comment seems to mean very little. And yet so important. I will admit that this passage from Larry Kramer’s novel Faggots is not an astounding one to open this essay, however, should one actually read the entirety of the work and eventually read this passage, Fred Lemish’s statement is not only powerful, it is one of the few sentiments not reeking of semen, piss, shit, Crisco, spit, or what other bodily fluid may be produced during the non-stop fuck-fest that is the plot. Few contemporary authors achieve the sexual power that Faggots conveys. In one page twenty men may participate in a circle jerk while others are being physically dominated with leather belts while multiple cocks slide in and out of assholes and the “slurping” is the heavenly opera that creates the background harmony to the hedonistic splendor…and that is merely one page. Contemporary works attempting to pass themselves off as erotic (I will lightly mention Fifty larry-kramer-faggotsshades of whatever-else publishers scrape the bottom of the bucket for) will approach Faggots and fail miserably in flames for the untapped sexual powerhouse of the work is so great one can become numb from the experience.

…Is there indeed a God who would understand such as:

“Baby I want you to piss all over me!”

Fred Lemish had never urinated on anything before, except perhaps some country grass late at night when he was drunk and no one was looking.

“Or let me piss on you!”

This Fred Lemish never allowed.

Fred stood there helplessly. Why was he inert in requiring action? The guy wasn’t bad looking. Should Fred enter of walk away?

“Or fuck my friend and I’ll suck your come out of his asshole.”Interior Leather Bar

This suggestion Fred recognized as felching. Was he interested in joining a felcher?

“Or I could tie you up. Or you could tie us up. Or either one of us. Or anything else your cock desires!”

The man certainly offered a range of choices. Should Fred? Shouldn’t Fred?

“Are you into shit?”

Fred shouldn’t.

This exchange introduces the hero of the novel and also introduces us to the satire of homosexual paradigms that governed the late 1970s. Should we consider the actual homosexual community at the time we are observing a liberated, albeit self depreciating race of human beings that had yet to realize its full humanity. Indeed, one of the totaltumblr_ohxfbxqo3g1tkjvpco2_1280 effects of Kramer’s novel is to give us the impression of the male homosexual mindset at this time. Before the brave souls at Stonewall fought back against social dictatorship, and the rise of the homosexual political movements that helped gain most of the civil liberties (not nearly enough but the fight continues) gays enjoy today actually occurred, there was perception of self that lingered on in the gay man’s memory. Before these movements and socially defining moments, homosexuality was a disease. Those considered homosexuals were perceived as being less than human or else insane. Any interested in indigestion of the intellect should research the appalling “treatments” to the disorder of homosexuality which included electroshock therapy and chemical or physical castration. As such, the weight of self (I don’t trust the word identity, it possess too many philosophical implications) was burdened by the idea if one was a homosexual there was something inherently wrong about them. This of course does not even begin to consider the religious implications. The fear of homosexuality was often manifested Oscar Wildein the charge of sodomy, a charge leveled to any and all sexual acts that did not eventually lead to fertilization. One realizes a conflict if it’s a Saturday night and you’d like a good blowjob, but let’s stay focused. One of most obvious examples of scape-goating was the charge of Oscar Wilde who suffered two years hard physical labor which in the end ultimately ended his life pre-maturely. (Wilde served his time and eventually chose exile in France where he died at the age of 46, a broken man and destitute; the empire looks after its own indeed). The trial of Oscar Wilde is just one of numerous examples of “queer-baiting” throughout human history. It remains the best known example, for many who were discovered before and after him have suffered far worse than a prison sentence. In short, the gay man discovering his sexual self would have most likely encountered a feeling of absolute terror coupled with revulsion.d5677bcddb7ff4523ed2fd75d620e5c3

But it has butts! Like so many butts!

Butts, my unusually dimwitted contester, is the least of your worries. There is, as there almost always seems to be, a greater social problem in the plot of Faggots, the tendency to create the “other.” Recently another essay of mine was published on the website Comicosity thanks to one of my friends who contributes regularly on the site and is currently building a nice career by publishing supplementary material of analysis of various comics and graphic novels. The article I submitted, and which he graciously hosted on his page (thank you Michael again), dealt with the graphic novel Batman Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth, and it was the attempt of the essay to demonstrate the way in which the story followed the traditional trope path of “the journey.” I bring this up, because within the journey there is a concept of “the Other World,” and any student of English, psychology, history, or anthropology is perhaps aware of the indications of “the other.” For those who don’t, it is a culture paradigm that dictates the way our cultural understanding operates. There is an “us,” in which the subtotal achievements of our society work together to create a sense of camaraderie (and unfortunately tribal unity), and there is a “them” or “other” which may or may not stand opposed to our interests and way of life. More importantly, the “other” is simply different and often de-humanized to justify “our” behavior when it tends, and it often does, to become violent or anti-social. This “other” concept has been employed effectively over the course of human history to dictate behavior into a particular direction. The Rwandan genocide of the Hutu people, the attempted extermination of the Jews (throughout history, Nazi’s didn’t invent homosexualsAnti-semitism though they did play their hand in that ongoing game), Eugenics, the entire institution of slavery, the imperialist system of Africa, India, China, South America, and North America,the anti-Muslim sentiment that dominated this country following the September 11th attacks, the Internment camps of Japanese-American citizens following the attack of Pearl Harbour, the cultural imperialist and near genocide of Native Americans, nearly every Christian denomination subscribes to their paradigm insinuating and suggesting damnation for those outside the “know,” and in fact the student of humanity quickly discovers that the concept of the “other” is an undying institution for our public consciousness. As long as there is an alternative party to our society, there will be an “other.” Take note of Boo Boo Bronstein’s reaction to his own self discovery, “I’m going to be a faggot! I’m going to be a faggot!”

TedShawn-2The dehumanizing slur employed with self discovery is what is most damning in the text, further demonstrating Kramer’s sharp wit. Rather than defining oneself as a homosexual, Boo Boo (don’t worry I’ll get to the names in a minute) adopts for his title a word rooted in an attempt to deny him any chance at participating in human society. Now the word “fag,” some would immediately protest, has become a word employed by homosexuals themselves as a form of identity much as intellectuals adopted the title for themselves in France during the Enlightenment or Suffragettes in the early twentieth century (inspiring a charming and unforgettable song in Mary Poppins that you may remember assuming you have a soul). What is wrong in assuming such a title for oneself? Kramer’s text demonstrates that power had yet to be assigned to that term. By today’s standards referring to oneself as a “fag” Aron-Ridge-35has little social meaning other than homosexual, however, as demonstrated through the long eloquent “fuck-fest” of the novel, it becomes clear that a “fag” is a sexually obsessed, self depreciating, borderline psychotic, druggie that is too concerned with satisfying physical needs than emotional or intellectual ones. Rather than try to build themselves as contributing and productive members of society, the faggots instead choose to fuck until they cannot walk. In which case The Gnome merely has to find you a bump and you may return to your rimming.

It’s no wonder Kramer’s text caused such a controversy when it was released. Not only from straight “purists” disgusted by all the ass-play, but from the homosexual community itself. At the time of publication, the sexual revolution was drawing to a close and homosexuals were coming into a kind of social-identity. Though of course AIDS (or Gay Cancer as it was originally and idiotically assigned in a moment of medical haste) was not but three years away which would create yet another homophobic hysteria in the populace. Many gays became outraged by the presentation of themselves as sex-obsessed heartless humanoids who possessed OB-XG816_larryk_DV_20130429155525no other ambition other than orgasms. So intense was feeling around the book that Kramer’s novel was banned even in the one openly gay bookstore in New York where it was released. Today, fortunately, the book remains and is actually studied in universities open minded enough to have a gender and sexuality program. It is encouraging to read testimony of professors who teach, even if it is only snippets of the text, and receive shocked reactions from students. Kramer’s sharp bite at his own community can be felt across the generations. Such is the mark of an astounding author. And such is the mark of great satire.

I promised I would touch on the names, but before we continue on it seems important to demonstrate further how the idea of label becomes important to the homosexual, even today. This leads to me a supplementary work, Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx. I purchased the short novella because I 1have, over the years, accumulated a gathering of friends and acquaintances who’s sexual habits and open-mindedness has forced me to confront my own sexual demons and ignorance. Where once there was a locked door bolted shut with rusted nails and paranoia that prevented further introspection, there is now an open closet door. Somewhat. I am not homosexual but becoming aroused or interested in others of the same sex for non-intellectual reasons no longer terrifies me as implication. I wanted to know what all the damn fuss was about. To this day I have never seen the film, and in some ways I do not want to. The writing is brilliant enough. Proulx’s pen works a magic of prose that I never tried of while reading through the whole of the text. Allow me a moment of weakness as I sample a passage for you.

Dawn came glassy orange, stained from below by a gelatinous band of pale green. The sooty bulk of the mountain paled slowly until it was the same color as the smoke from Ennis’s breakfast fire.

The reader is given prose that is as sweet on the tongue as honey, and perhaps the great feat of Brokeback Mountain is that we see two human beings falling in love surrounded by a combination of words that makes us drunk. But enough fawning. Brokeback afforded a new generation of readers and, as is often the case, audiences, a glimpse at the new social identity of homosexuals. The tragedy being there was still the Boo Boo reaction. The characters of Ennis and Jack begin what originally is the basis of any relationship, a purely physical affair, until it eventually deepens into love. Proulx then works what is perhaps the most over employed and, by this writing, hammed up trope an Brokeback_Mountain_Annie_Proulxauthor can attempt: the forbidden love affair. Following the literary standard of Courtly Love, stolen from the tomes of Medieval poetry, the forbidden love affair can only operate effectively in the instances when the reader is: young and newly discovering the power of love, there is an element in the text outside of the romance that helps progress the plot (much like adrenaline being pumped into a dying heart), or else the reader possess little actual care for motivation and simply wishes to enact fantasy through the text. Proulx takes the second option. With the coming years Brokeback Mountain is unlikely to be remembered as a powerful literary document (were it not for the prose I doubt it would survive at all), but nevertheless it is an effective human document because it does not “ham-up” the forbidden romance, instead it attempts to tackle it directly.

“I doubt there’s nothing now we can do,” said Ennis. “What I’m sayin, Jack, I built a life up in them years. Love my little girls. Alma? It ain’t her fault. You got your baby and wife, in Texas. You and me can’t hardly be decent together if what happened back there”—he jerked his head in the direction of the apartment—“grabs us on brokebacktent16like that. We do that in the wrong place we’ll be dead. There’s no reins on this one. It scares the piss out of me.”

Rather than build a dramatic romance, Proulx examines the reality of contemporary homosexual society outside of an urban environment. Which is damn frightening. Homosexuals have been subjected to “queer bashing” and even instances of psychological and physical torture. Being gay or a “fag” as enemies are so often to say in the midst of repugnant laughter, is no longer a mental disorder, but the lingering fragments of the “other” continues to dominate. Proulx then uses 30d3e600cf4f57bfb81464ee6c7ec027this tendency of society to create the “other” to reveal the conflict of modern gay men. Throughout the text Ennis and Jack carefully avoid the word “gay.” During the passages describing the initial, and note the only detailed account of their physical actions, we see a resistance even to touch upon this.

As it did go. They never talked about sex, let it happen, at first only in the tent at night, then in the full daylight, with the hot sun striking down, and at evening in the fire glow, quick, rough, laughing and snorting, no lack of noises but saying not a goddamn word except once Ennis said, “I’m not no queer,” and Jack jumped in with “Me neither. A one shot thing. Nobody’s business but ours.”

Proulx succeeds in capturing something powerful in the mindset of contemporary homosexuality, the desire to define oneself before others may define you. Kramer’s novel follows along the same sentiment.

“Everyone is so silly. Everyone wants too much. Being gay isn’t fun anymore.”Édouard-Henri_Avril_anal_sex_detail

It can be troublesome identifying yourself with a particular group or following. My regular conflict is declaring myself an atheist when the word skeptic is taking on more and more relevance. If I am an atheist I must hold myself to the standards of men such as Percy Shelly, Christopher Hitchens, and Carl Sagan which, some good ol boy said it best before me, are pretty damn big shoes to fill. I consider it an honor to share the same intellectual sentiment as men such as this. However for every intelligent and rational minded atheist, there is always an asshole. I will not mention names, suffice to say certain pompous and self promoting behavior seems detestable and sends me clamoring to the title of skeptic instead. Such is the case with homosexuality. Being gay, “isn’t fun,” because the society in which you operate defines you and your behavior before you can even begin to understand what being gay actually is.

This concept of the “other” is not an outdated institution as I demonstrated with the long (even by my standards) 0-femmelist of historical facts, that can be easily checked by scanning your local history books. Even today the concept of “others” is employed for odious justifications. The most recent example appears in the case of Scott Esk, a prospective representative from Oklahoma (why must they always be from the south, it’s becoming embarrassing) who has listed among his political ambitions to make divorce in his state more difficult, abolish gun licenses, disregard necessary organizations such as the EPA or FDA, punish abortionists for “murder,” but the most odious of this man’s claims is his consideration that homosexuals should be executed. Citing Leviticus, one grows tired of constantly rolling one’s eyes after hearing that phrase; Mr. Esk believes that he would be “totally within the right to do it.” It becomes clear as one reads about simple minded idiots like this, one who somehow finds supporters as pathetically minded as them, that the idea of the “other” for the homosexual community is alive and strong. Within America today there exists a cultural battle in which those who feel mn_tracy_059_mactheir way of life is being threatened quickly escalate their rhetoric into dim and brutish behavior because they lack the mental ability to frame logical sentences. Now should their opponents be praised however as great masters of prose. We have all suffered through facebook battles between individuals who apparently are so uneducated that they honestly believe you is spelled “u.” In our society today, there is a struggle between alternative perceptions of what this country’s moral and political values should be. While most of us would be content to allow this fight to remain in the hands of the extremists on either side butting heads until both are worn away or too disoriented to cause any further damage, those who are willing to enjoy the liberties attained from the political system should be on guard from such lunacy. Esk is unlikely to actually attain a position as a representative, but should he be, it would be an implication that we have allowed ourselves to turn a blind eye to the malicious hunger to create “others” and profit from their persecution.

This of course leads us to yet another essential text: Sappho was a Right-On Woman a Liberated View of Lesbianism. A philosophical and social manifesto, this work by Sidney Abbot and Barbara Love, catalogs the psychology and sexual politics of 6559955-Mwhat it meant to be a lesbian in 1972. Should one read the text it becomes clear women did not come out on top higher than men.

Living in an environment that is hostile or indifferent, Lesbians find themselves floundering for validation. They feel alien, uprooted—no longer able to count on acceptance from anyone or in any place. They feel they don’t count, don’t exist, in a system whose social institutions and resources do not include them. […] Sooner or Later, the lesbian begins to see her carefully constructed and valued seclusion as forced upon her. Isolation drains her will, her convictions of the rightness of her love, even her passion and feeling.

Abbot and Love’s manifesto carefully outlines the philosophical conundrum of being a creature outside of society’s grace. As we read, we discover that homosexuality was a game of drama in which a part must be played and never broken. Should a woman come forward, revealing her true self she would be met often with rejection from society indicating a loss of job, lack of familial support, and general exile from supposed friends.

Where does this leave us? It would appear then that being a “fag” or an “other” is 1-fun-home-alison-bechdel-cover1an unfortunate condition to find oneself in, particularly should you desire something more out of life. Rather than a perception of the self that leaves only self loathing and hedonistic distraction, all of us as human beings desire at our most inner core, to feel some kind of connection to other human beings. The graphic novel Fun Home, apart from being one of the most well written literary documents and memoirs I have expierienced, garners the same recommendation I have previously made for the novel Animal Farm. It is not a question of should one read Fun Home, but when. The graphic novel operates as an autobiography tracking Alison Bechdel’s life from her early days as a child growing up to her current age, all the while unraveling the façade of her father’s closeted sexuality. Bechdel is gay and the main theme working throughout the text is parental connection and support. Her father being a closeted gay man(or at least bisexual), and a femme to boot, can be seen working against his sexual impulses (rather poorly) thereby creating a disharmony within the familial unit. Bechdel follows her own sexual discovery until eventually coming out. The graphic novel ends with a powerful mutual conversation in which both parties understand one another and the author recognizes the gift her father ultimately gave her.

bechdelWhat is remarkable about the graphic novel, apart from the intricate psychological and literary power of the writing that would make Tolstoy weep and Freud smile(yes Freud smiling, it isn’t that hard to believe is it?), is that the sexuality expressed is not self loathing, for the most part. Like many gay people, Bechdel does retract somewhat at first from the knowledge of herself, but upon the realization, she is unapologetic. The presentation of homosexuality is not self loathing or maniacl, it just is. This is not to suggest that Bechdel does not struggle with her sexuality, for that conflict runs throughout the entire text, and continues in the sequel to the book Are You My Mother?, but that struggle never pushes her sense of self to the point that she feels less than human.

I promised I would touch upon the names in Faggots and so it seems appropriate to end this essay with them. Kramer’s Faggots floored me. Reading the text would require long breaks for one can only encounter so much sensual stimulation for so long. The characters in the text however, despite their eccentricity and erratic activities, never push themselves so far that they completely lose their humanity, even if they perceive themselves as somehow less than human. Who could forget a text with characters like Randy Dildough, Bruce Sex-toys, BLT, Leather Louie, The Gnome, Canadian Leon, Billy Bonner, Boo Boo Bronstein, Midnight Cowboy, Feffer, and our troubled Hero Fred Lemish. The latter soul, who is the central figure of the novel, attempts throughout the03c5a6437fc4abf0c0a7e8079f7a7628 text to find love, as the saying goes, in all the wrong places. In Turkish bathouses, in a bar called the Toilet Bowl, and finally on Fire Island where the faggots of the greater New York Area converge for a massive love-in. The effort of Fred Lemish ultimately fails, yet despite the failure Fred achieves a kind of satisfaction.

I’m a Homosexual Man. I’m me. Pretty Classy.

Despite the rampant fucking, Faggots is a crucial novel for any interested in the study of human culture. It transcends the homosexual self and attempts to understand why “the other” is assigned and accepted, both to outsiders, as well as to the group it is assigned. Kramer’s work shocked and offended the homosexual community upon its release, but there were those who understood the effort and praised the work. Stained with shit, and piss, and semen, spit, and Crisco, and sweat, and, yes Philadelphia, even love, Faggots is Kramer’s love letter to his own community. And what’s the point of love if you can’t have a little fun along the way.

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Smith How Hiram Really Died and What Came After HOWL How People Become Atheists How to Make Love like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale How To Talk to Girls At Parties How Unpleasant to Meet Mr. Eliot HR 40 Hubris Huckleberry Hound Hugh Hefner Hugh Jackman Human/Robot Love Story Human Beings Perception of Reality Human Body Human connection Human Developement Human evolution human exploration Human Ideas are Grander than any Religion humanity Human Memory Human Narcissim Humbert Humbert Humor humors Hunger Games Hunter S. Thompson Hurricane Lolita husbands and wives Hyena Hymn to Intellectual Beauty Hypersexualization of Female Breasts I'm almost positive the song Tribute is the song they couldn't remember but I realize that's a controversial position I'm Going to Go Back There Someday I'm Not a Racist But... I'm Tired I've Been Down That Road Before I, Claudius Icarian Games Icarus Ice Cream that ISN'T Ice Cream Ida Tarbell Idealism identification Identity Identity Crisis Idris Elba If a woman is upset it's not because she's on her period it's because you're being a dick If they ask if you want Pepsi throw over the table throat punch the shit out of them and then proceed to burn that motherf@#$er down If you're reading this pat yourself on the back because you can read and that's awesome ignorance I have Measured Out My Life in Coffee Spoons and K Cups I know too many Michaels I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings I Like It Like That I Like it Like That: True Stories of Gay Male Desire Illuminated Manuscripts illusion Illusion of choice I Love Lucy I Love Lucy Mug I Love Penis...Mug iMac Imaginary Time imagination Immanuel Kant immigrants imperialism Imposter Complex Impressionists In Bed with David amd Jonathan incest Incorporation of images in Pedagogy Independence Day Independent Comics Indie Fiction Individual Initiative Individual Will Industrial Nightmare industry infidelity Infinite Jest Infinite Jest Blogs Infinite Possibility Infinity Informed Democracy Inherit the Wind Injustice innocence vs ignorance In One Person Inquisition insanity Insects Inside Out inspiration integrity intellectual Intellectual Declaration of Independance Intellectual masculinity Intellectual Parent Inter Library Loan internet interracial relationships Interview Inu Yoshi invert Invisible Man Invitation to a Beheading Ion IOWA iPad Ipecac iPhone ipod IRA I Racist Iran-Contra Irish Breakfast Tea Irish history Irish Writers I Ruck, Therefore I Am Isaac Asmiov Isaac Deutscher Isabel Allende Isabella St. James Ishmael Islam isolation Israel Issa Rae It It's an Honor It's illegal in the state of Texas to own more than six "realistic" vibrators It's time to adopt the Metric System in America for crying out loud It's truly truly difficult to find good coffee and by good coffee I mean the type that leaves you feeling as if you've actually tasted something beyond human understanding close to the furnace of all Italy Ivory Tower of Academia ivy I wandered lonely as a cloud I Want a Wife I Was a Playboy Bunny I Will Fight No More Forever I work at a Public Library J.D. 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