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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: Heath Ledger

Why So Serious?-Christopher Nolan’s Joker

25 Friday Jan 2019

Posted by Joshua Ryan "Jammer" Smith in Comics/Graphic Novels, Film Review, horror

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"I like this job I like it", "Some men just want to watch the world burn", "Wanna know how I got these scars", "Why so Serious", 9/11, Alfred Pennyworth, Anti-Hero, Batman, Batman: The Animated Series, chaos, Christopher Nolan, Comics, Film, film review, Heath Ledger, Jack Nicholson, Joker, Joker's Scars, Mark Hamill, Psychosis, September 11th, terrorism, The Dark Knight, Tim Burton, violence

joker 11

My father can’t watch the movies Seven or The Dark Knight, and yet he never misses an opportunity to ingest every episode of CSI, including that episode where the teenager gets part of her skin chewed off by her friends…Google it.  This mystified my mother, my sister, and I when we found this out because often we have to bear the brunt of my dad’s television viewing habits and that often entails hour upon hour of crime shows in which human beings perform murder after murder, rape after rape, torture after torture and by the end the viewer is offered one more closure on the loss of another human being’s life while being interrupted for five minute intervals so that someone can sell them Viagra, Yogurt, A low-Rate Adjustable Reverse Mortgage, and maybe a Snickers Bar.  I’m not trying to mock my father, I really do love the old man, I just didn’t appreciate the fact that he said that he didn’t like the movie in a snide, pejorative tone, and then watched half the film with us before leaving during the climax scenes.  You’d think a film that involves a man dressed up as a bat ramming straight into a garbage joker 4truck would appeal to him, but, alas, such is life.

I can’t say for sure, but I think the reason my dad didn’t enjoy The Dark Knight was for the same reason I love the movie: The Joker.

To be honest, I don’t really give much of a damn about the character of Batman.  While I have some friends who worship the character as a god and have every individual issue of the comics memorized, I’ve approached Batman the way I’ve approached Fried Chicken.  In small doses, it can exactly the sort of thing I want to ingest, but when consumed in large quantities after a while it can become fattening and give me heartburn.  I love the possibilities of the character and the universe the character offers, but too often the culture of Batman, more specifically the fan-boy-gate-keeper culture of Batman can kill my passion before I’m even past the first page.nicholson joker

Fortunately, I discovered the character at the right point of my life: when I was a kid and found my parents VHS copy of Tim Burton’s Batman.  Even as a kid I absolutely loved Jack Nicholson’s Joker going to the trouble to memorize every line he had in the movie, and today even without having it playing I can recite entire passages of the film from memory.  And, for the record, I’m still the only one who realized that Jack said, “I’m of a mind to make some mooky.”  I had no idea what that actually meant, but it was really really fun to say when I was eight.

Along with Tim Burton’s now canonical masterpiece (not to mention one of the last truly great films the man’s directed), I was also brought up on Batman: The Animated Series.  While nostalgia has unfortunately dominated society at large, there are JokerMHBTAStimes when one can honestly look back at an animated television program and admit that what they spent every Saturday watching was a truly great show and not just an excuse to veg-out on the couch and inhale toy commercials and breakfast cereal.  The show was brilliant and beautifully animated, but most importantly it had The Joker played by Luke “Mutherfucking” Skywalker, a.k.a. Mark Hamill.  Hamill’s performance is still one of the standards of the Batman universe and it doesn’t hurt that he kept doing the part alongside Kevin Conroy in every subsequent Batman game.

These two experiences of the character seemed to define my idea of what the Joker and could be, and so as the Dark Knight came out, and I like many young fanboys were left mystified that the “gay cowboy actor” could be cast in the role I was terrified about what the new Batman film would do to a character that, at the time, I loved.

Heath Ledger’s Joker changed everything.  And that’s not just an empty statement.

joker 11

Watching The Dark Knight Again I was able to really observe how, in retrospect, the performance was truly paradigm altering in terms of what a villain could be in a film.  And I don’t mean to Bally about with hyperbole but I do truly believe that The Joker has permanently altered what a villain can and should be to a post-9/11 audience.  One scene, in particular, stands out to me, and it’s the torture recording.

The Joker: [the Joker has Brain Douglas captured and is recording him] Tell them your name.

Brian: Brian… Douglas.

The Joker: Are you the real Batman?

Brian: No.joker i like this job

The Joker: No?

Brian: No.

The Joker: No? Then why do you dress up like him?

[grabs Brian’s mask and dangles it in front of the camera]

The Joker: whooo-hoo-hoo-hoo!

Brian: Because he’s a symbol that we don’t have to be afraid of scum like you.

The Joker: Oh you do, Brian. You really do. Yeah. Oh shh, shh, shh, shh, shh. So, you think Batman’s made Gotham a better place? Hmm? Look at me. LOOK AT ME!

[turns camera to himself]joker hit me 2

The Joker: You see? This is how crazy Batman’s made Gotham! You want order in Gotham? Batman must take off his mask and turn himself in. Oh, and every day he doesn’t, people will die. Starting tonight. I’m a man of my word.

[laughs]

While I’m not a fan of posting videos in my essays, sometimes the delivery is far more important than the actual lines themselves:

The scene is impossible to forget, and I like many people remember it not because the laughter was genuinely disturbing, but because what immediately followed was a long silent shot of Bruce Wayne’s penthouse and the movie theater being completely silent. For once in the history of obnoxious people talking during the movie, nobody had anything to say.  It became clear at that moment that Batman movies were no longer about Bat-Shark Repellent and dancing the Bat-Tootsie.

bat tootsie

Heath Ledger’s Joker was not like anything that had come down the pike of the action movie franchise, let alone the superhero franchises as they existed in the Pre-Marvel blossoming.  Superhero movies had to be defined by a charm and feeling of positivity. I'm a man of my wordEven at their darkest, there was an understanding that certain levels of violence or psychosis just weren’t going to be explored.  And note, I’m writing principally about movies rather than the comics which always had elements in them that could be severely shocking or depressing or legitimately disturbing.  It’s just that the Joker that Heath Ledger was playing didn’t feel like anything I had ever seen before in a major motion picture.

It feels ridiculous now to write this honesty on the internet given the fact that Ledger’s Joker has become a freaking meme and a staple at comic con instead of a legitimately frightening terrorist dressed up as a clown.  Time has a tendency to lessen trauma and fear, and looking at the character again the use of the word terrorist doesn’t feel too bold.  Apart from the fact that the characters in the film regularly refer to The Joker as You Complete Mesuch, it’s important to remember that The Dark Knight was riding the wave of the Post-9/11 sentiment that was redefining villainy in art.  No longer were characters hyperbolic stand-ins for communists that were larger metaphors for the villainy of foreign nations.  The Joker was just nobody.

Mayor: [regarding The Joker that’s sitting a holding cell] What’d we got?

Lt. James Gordon: Nothing. No matches on prints, DNA, dental. Clothing is custom, no labels. Nothing in his pockets but knives and lint. No name, no other alias.

It didn’t seem real in 2008 that some random individual could cause such chaos and misery, but then it was easy to remember that some random individual in the Middle East, as far as the United States was concerned, was able to fund and mastermind the death of close to 3000 people.  It’s easy today to understand that any random person could walk into a school and shoot and kill children.  It’s easy to recognize that some random person could walk into a church during a bible study and kill people.  It’s easy to recognize that a lunatic could walk into a movie theater, call himself the Joker, and shoot the place up.  It’s easy to think this because that’s the world we’re living in, and so in many ways, The Dark Knight managed to capture the Zeitgeist before the culture was even aware.

I'm not a Monster

I don’t want my review to be only that The Joker changed things for filmmakers and the landscape of cinema period, because I’m positive that somebody’s probably already written that essay and done a better job than I could have.  For me watching The Dark Knight again I was struck by how incredible the film was in terms of its direction, but then also because Heath Ledger’s performance really was incredible and I recognized how much it had mattered to me.  I’ve written before about my fascination with anti-heroes when I was young, and  I like many young men became obsessed with the Joker when the movie came out because he became, all at once, the defining anti-hero of my generation.joker clapping

There was powerful darkness to The Joker that just couldn’t be denied and part of that was his now iconic stories about his scars.  The first scene remains the most powerful because of a single line:

Gambol’s Bodyguard: Yo, Gambol, there’s somebody here for you. They say they just killed the Joker.

Gambol’s Bodyguard: They brought the body.

[a body bag is brought in and dropped on the table; Gambol unzips it, revealing Joker’s face]

Gambol: So. For dead, that’s 500…joker 6

The Joker: [sitting up and sticking a blade in Gambol’s mouth] How ’bout alive?

[Joker’s men hold the bodyguards]

The Joker: You wanna know how I got these scars? My father, was a drinker, and a fiend. And one night, he goes off crazier than usual. Mommy gets the kitchen knife to defend herself. He doesn’t like that. Not. One. Bit. So, me watching, he takes the knife to her, laughing while he does it. He turns to me and says, “Why so serious?” Comes at me with the knife. “WHY SO SERIOUS?” He sticks the blade in my mouth… “Let’s put a smile on that face.” And…

[glancing at thug]Minolta DSC

The Joker: Why so serious?

[kills Gambol]

This scene was disturbing enough largely because the final action wasn’t actually shown, we only saw a reaction to the violence, but that in itself was effective enough.  What became more frightening, as the film went on, is how this changed in a later scene.  Rachael Dawes, Bruce Wayne’s former girlfriend, confronts the Joker at a party and he more or less attacks her while repeating the story, yet something’s changed:

The Joker: Well, hello, beautiful. You must be Harvey’s squeeze. And you *are* beautiful.

[he walks around her]

The Joker: Oh, you look nervous. Is it the scars? You want to know how I got ’em?

[He grabs Rachel’s head and positions the knife by her mouth]joker 12

The Joker: Come here. Hey! Look at me. So I had a wife. She was beautiful, like you. Who tells me I worry too much. Who tells me I ought to smile more. Who gambles and gets in deep with the sharks. One day, they carve her face. And we have no money for surgeries. She can’t take it. I just want to see her smile again. I just want her to know that I don’t care about the scars. So… I stick a razor in my mouth and do this…

[the Joker mimics slicing his mouth open with his tongue]

The Joker: …to myself. And you know what? She can’t stand the sight of me! She leaves. Now I see the funny side. Now I’m always smiling!joker 13

[Rachel knees the Joker in the groin; he merely laughs it off]

The Joker: A little fight in you. I like that.

As usual, my mother summed up what was scary about the Joker so beautifully the first time I showed it to her.  After the film had ended and we talked about it for close to an hour or more, she seemed to summarize the entire film when she observed, “Whatever has happened to The Joker is so horrible to even he can’t clearly remember what it was.”  It was a beautiful thought and I really, REALLY wish I had been the one to have it.

This observation though is probably what appealed to me about the Joker.  Watching thejoker 9 movie over and over again I would memorize his lines because there was something about that darkness that appealed to me.  I was young, depressed, not sure of who I was, frustrated by my seemingly perpetual virginity, and so looking at this character who just seemed so himself, there was some darkness of willpower that I either admired or else was simply fascinated by.

And perhaps one exchange in the film between Bruce Wayne and Alfred offers the clearest sentiment, which itself has become something of a cultural meme.  After the party, Bruce and Alfred are attempting to determine the identity of the Joker and while they are discussing his motivations Alfred offers Bruce, and the audience, a lesson about humanity at large:

Bruce Wayne: [while in the underground bat cave] Targeting me won’t get their money back. I knew the mob wouldn’t go down without a fight, but this is different. They crossed the line.

Alfred Pennyworth: You crossed the line first, sir. You squeezed them, you hammered them to the point of desperation. And in their desperation, they turned to a man they didn’t fully understand.joker 14

Bruce Wayne: Criminals aren’t complicated, Alfred. Just have to figure out what he’s after.

Alfred Pennyworth: With respect Master Wayne, perhaps this is a man that *you* don’t fully understand, either. A long time ago, I was in Burma. My friends and I were working for the local government. They were trying to buy the loyalty of tribal leaders by bribing them with precious stones. But their caravans were being raided in a forest north of Rangoon by a bandit. So, we went looking for the stones. But in six months, we never met anybody who traded with him. One day, I saw a child playing with a ruby the size of a tangerine. The bandit had been throwing them away.

Bruce Wayne: So why steal them?joker 1

Alfred Pennyworth: Well, because he thought it was good sport. Because some men aren’t looking for anything logical, like money. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.

This final line, much like the “Why so Serious,” is one that has entered the larger culture and can at times seem kitsch or cliche, but as I’m fond of writing cliches are cliches for a reason.  The Joker is a character defined simply by his desire for chaos and anarchy, and his sheer force of will.  Rather than try to contribute to society and make his life something that contributes positively to his community and culture, he finds far more amusement in breaking it all down.

One of the more annoying aspects of youth is its frustration with its own inexperience, and I’m not trying to talk down to teenagers, joker 2I’m trying to talk down to my former self.  But only slightly.  Being a young man I resented adults who seemed stable and comfortable and it didn’t make any sense that they seemed to have all the answers and all the power with what to do with my life, and so I, like many young men, gravitated to anti-hero because they provided me with some form of agency.  The only difference between me and the rest of my friends was that, while they bought rap CDs and played sports, I listened to heavy metal and bought a “Why So Serious Poster.”  The Joker became an icon to me not because I thought he was cool, but because he seemed to embody this idea of anti-authority which was exactly what I needed at that point in my life.

And watching the movie again I still absolutely loved The Joker, but not for the same reasons.  I loved him, this time around, because I realized how much he defined the villain of my culture and society.  No matter how many obnoxious libertarians, joker 3conservatives, and liberals turned The Joker into a meme about whatever-the-fuck-wh-the-fuck-cares, watching him getting beat up by Batman and still cackling was still legitimately frightening.  Watching him throw a lit cigar on a giant pile of money and kill Lau (Yeah don’t forget that shit, there was a living dude on that giant pile of money), and watching him kill a man with a pencil was still a reminder that this character had not only played a major impact on my life, but upon the lives of movie-goers the world over.

The Dark Knight is arguably one of the finest films made in the last two decades, not solely because of the Joker, but Ledger’s performance did permanently alter the zeitgeist in ways that are still apparent.  The Joker became part of the wider conversation about what is evil in our society and how can we recognize it?joker 7

The figure and face of atrocity is no longer a great body of a nation threatening nuclear war against one nation or another.  In our Information Age evil is a single man walking into a classroom and brandishing an automatic rifle.  It’s not a threat that is clean, or one that follows a real guiding philosophy or methodology and so fighting such an evil implies new moral questions about what can be done to stop such monsters.

It doesn’t seem like it should, but The Dark Knight is a film which always entertains and always leaves me wanting for more.  It explored and introduced me to a character that altered my perception of what true wickedness and evil could be, but it also gave me a chance to be yet another in a long line of douchebags at the party who only thinks he can do a great Heath Ledger impression.  And in the end, does that not somehow make me even more of the monster?

joker 8

*Writer’s Note*

 

**Writer’s Note**

While looking for a few reviews and examinations of The Dark Knight, I stumbled upon this video which I think is pretty great analysis of the character and his effect not only upon the other characters of the film, but also how this could impact the viewer as well.  Please enjoy.

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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.

30d3e600cf4f57bfb81464ee6c7ec027

 

 

 

 *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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Great Hooker’s Don’t Return My Calls: Happy Second Birthday White Tower Musings!

10 Sunday Jul 2016

Posted by Joshua Ryan "Jammer" Smith in Essay, Happy Birthday, Literature, White Tower Musings, Writing

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Aldis Hodge, Carrie, Chadwick Boseman, Crazy Harry, Cujo, Duma Key, Great Hookers I Have Known, Heart Shaped Box, Heath Ledger, Hookers, Horns, Joe Hill, Joker, Literature, Lock & Key, Mark Hamil, metacognition, On Writing, Pet Cemetary, Secret Windows: Essays and Fiction on the Craft of Writing, Stephen King, Stephen King's Gay Stalker, The Green Mile, The Illustrated Man, The Muppet Show, The North American Society for the Study of Romanticism, The Post American World, The Shining, White Tower Musings, Writers, Writing

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I’ve never been that successful with nailing a good hooker.  I promise you that isn’t what you think it means, and if you keep reading there will be an explanation.

I interrupted Maya Angelou for this and now I feel shitty.  It’s now been two years doing this and I promised myself that I would do a yearly exercise in metacognition.  If the reader doesn’t know what that is, fucking Google it…okay sorry for being a dick.  Metacognition is “thinking about thinking.”  This idea is best expressed in the sentiment by Socrates that “the unexamined life is not worth living.”  Socrates was a snarky fucker until the day he drank the hemlock, and while I have been reading and listening to works by existentialists who argue that endless thought is bad for the soul, it’s not a bad idea to stop what you’re doing and really consider what you’re doing.David_-_The_Death_of_Socrates

When I published the article about Fareed Zakaria’s book The Post-American World, WordPress informed me that I had finally hit 200 Posts.  Posts not essays, there’s a difference.  This made me feel like I had actually accomplished something, but there’s a problem with that.  I haven’t earned a penny from all of the writing I’ve done for this blog, and while it did get me the chance to write the for The North American Society For the Study of Romanticism’s Graduate Student Blog, it hasn’t translated over into any actual pay.  The reader may object, does that really matter, it’s just a blog, but it does matter.  I’m not a utilitarian by any means, I do believe in selfless action and the importance of aesthetics towards living a fulfilled life, but at the same time I am a corrupt cynic who tends to live by the philosophy best expressed by Joker:

JokerMHBTAS

Joker:  Well that was fun, who’s up for Chinese?

Sorry wrong Joker.

if-you-re-good-at-something-never-do-it-for-free-111

Joker:  If you’re good at something, never do it for free.

Hence my conflict.  Being a writer, or at least being able to call yourself a writer without being an ass about it comes from actually publishing something (which in all fairness I actually have done), and preferably being paid for it(which hasn’t happened yet).  If a man told me he was a chicken I would laugh at him.  Probably not to his face, most likely behind his back or else in that alley where my boys Monkey and Skinney Pete sell PCP to inner city Nuns (I blame the schools).  However, if this man told me that he wore a chicken suit and attended movie premieres and concert performances alongside beautiful women who paid him $800 an hour I wouldn’t be so quick to laugh.  In fact I’d probably ask if there were any openings available.  This is an absurd example to prove my conflict.writers-write

I think I’m a writer.  I’ve published one poem, and another is set to be published by the end of this year, and I write lots of essays for this blog.  I think I’m a writer, but I don’t get paid for this, so what exactly has all of this effort, work, and lonely hours hunched over my keyboard really brought me?  What have I actually done, or, more importantly, am I really doing myself a service by continually writing?

I honestly don’t have a good answer to this question.  I really don’t.  Metacognition can lead an individual to questions like this that often seem like dead-end statements or realities, but upon a break, and further reflection, the walls eventually open up and a new path becomes clear, or else you say fuck it and blow up the damn wall.  I’m partial to the latter but that’s only because I watched The Muppet Show growing up and Crazy Harry was a bad influence.Crazy_Harry

Looking at this identity problem of being a writer I look back to the person who made me want to become a writer in the first place.  Before my regular reader sighs and gets ready for Christopher Hitchens, it was actually Stephen King.

When I was a sophomore in High School my teacher Lugene Tucker encouraged me to watch a film called Pulp Fiction, she assigned Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man, we read MacBeth and King Lear, and between classes one day KingTypewriterphpshe reached behind her desk and handed me her water stained copy of The Green Mile.  This memory has become slightly polluted by nostalgia, but I do remember opening up the book, reading the first line, and then disappearing into the story.  Over the next few weeks I’d devour The Green Mile before moving onto Cujo, The Shining, Pet Cemetery, Carrie, Duma Key, and then eventually his book On Writing.

It was The Green Mile that made me recognize that I really wanted to become a writer, because before reading that book I honestly hadn’t come across a book that made me really want to read.  I enjoyed books for class, I loved smelling the glue that held them together, and I did enjoy the narratives, but something had always been lacking.  Reading was just part of school, but no one had ever successfully pitched to me how relevant reading could be to my individual being.  Reading The Green Mile, there was something about the way the characters acted, the way they spoke, the story was different, and every line King wrote was so unlike anything I read in class.  It might also be that because the novel used words like fuck, shit, damn, piss, and bastard freely my teenage boy brain thought “YES!” but I do think the writing itself made the first real appeal.  Whatever the cause, the result was that I began reading insatiably, and writing every chance that I could.

Much of it was crap and remained so until…

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I’ll get back to you on that.  Those early years of writing taught me however that everybody copies off of other people, and also that I had no idea what I was doing.

A book like On Writing was an invaluable gem because it taught the most important, and probably only worthwhile lesson I have ever read or heard from another writer:

If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.  There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut.  (145).

I remember attending the Alpha Chi fraternity convention in Chicago around a year ago, and the final night was a massive dinner to award the scholarships and then listen to the invited speaker.  I don’t remember her name, the title of any of her books, or what she stephen-king-on-writing-d1d225f2c6e25fcd45dce87de1f77d4d6e695e5factually said.  I just remember that she had dreadlocks that reached down to her kneecaps.  After her reading she gave her life story and then opened up for a Q/A and everyone there asked the same shit: where do you get your ideas, what made you want to become a writer, how do you go about getting published, what would you recommend to young writers, and blah blah blah fuckity blah.  It was all a farce, and as she waxed philosophic about how she lived in stories, and ideas come from everywhere what frustrated me more and more was the simple idea, the simple reality I had already learned from Stephen King.

If you want to be a writer, read every day and write every day.  Also make sure you have great hookers.

Being an avid fan of Stephen King (though my regular reading of his work has been lessened as of late) I buy most of his books in hardback, and one of the tomes on my shelf is called Secret Windows: Essays and Fiction on the Craft of Writing.  The reader, unless they’re Stephen King’s Gay Stalker*, is probably unfamiliar with this book and I was myself until I found it in the Stephen-King2King section at the Half Priced Book Store where I find most of the books currently in my library.  The book is everything the title promises, minus the specification about what makes the windows secret, and while I was looking over the table of contents I was struck by the title of an essay called Great Hookers I Have Known.  It starts off with a small anecdotal story about him answering a question his son Joe, Joe Hill the writer of Horns, Lock and Key, and Heart Shaped Box, asked him:

When I finally understood what my thirteen-year-old son was talking about, I told him no problem, I could find him a couple of good hookers easy—maybe even a couple of great ones.  (373).

While some would express horror, I could only laugh because I could honestly imagine my father, the seasoned Rugby player who taught me the Limerick about the man from Nantucket when I was only six, saying something similar to me.  This passage is important though because it sets up an important concept in writing while at the same time illustrating the effectiveness of the very mechanism it’s going to describe and explain, namely, hookers.

King explains what a hooker is:

In other words, Joe’s attracted to that same pulp fiction that attracted his old man, and his old man’s father.sk

That’s why I used that word when he asked his question.  He’d asked about opening lines, and pulp-magazine editors used the slang term “hooker” to describe such lines.  The editors knew pretty well who the audience was.  Truckers.  Short-order cooks.  Steelworkers.  Farmhands.  Working guys, in other words, who wanted to get away from the gray lives they lived and experience more exciting ones—lives that were bright with color and adventure.  If you were good enough to cut it, that readership would support you and the magazine would continue to publish you.  But if what you wrote started off flat, the readers would quickly flip past you to the next story.  When a two-hundred-page mag could be had for a dime, you could afford the pleasure of instant gratification.

Hence, hookers.  (375).

This, like the previous quote from On Writing, was an eye opener for me, not because it was the first time I recognized this, but instead because I recognized a fundamental part of my own craft.  Every writing project I began had to have a hooker, because I knew enough about the reading habits of average people to know that they’re insatiable when it comes to writing.  Every reader, whether they admit it or not, is looking for an excuse to put a book, essay, short story, poem, etc down and pick something else up.  Part of the reason I come home from book stores with piles rather than one or two works is because of this very same problem.  I start, I read, I stop, I pick something else up, rinse-repeat ad absurdum.  This being the case the writer’s job is to capture the reader’s attention, and then hold it.typewriter

Looking over some of the essays over the past year, every first sentence has been an attempt at a hooker.  Looking at each one seems like a good exercise, if only because it will get me back to metacognition:

Jason Walker needs no introduction, but this essay is different from the usual articles that appear on this site.

Moby Dick is a penis, that’s the joke.

It’s fair to say that I’m a nerd of epic proportions because I would honestly rather sit in my house reading The Declaration of Independence on the Fourth of July than I would being outside shooting off fireworks.

I’m part of a generation raised with porn.

If you look under the “About” Section of White Tower Musings, and the rather pompous “About” section is rather long, you’ll find an email address I created hoping that someone besides me would be interested in actually writing for my site.

Pixar has become in many ways an abusive boyfriend.

Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse on the same screen will never happen again.

I’ve become an old man in the last two years.

I’m so fucking tired.

Whenever people talk about the hypothetical of going “back in time” it’s usually so that they can kill (or not kill) Hitler.

A few years back I took a trip hosted by the art department at UT Tyler to the Rachofsky House.

I like Miley Cyrus.53044ed5e4cda

There really are few films that can be called truly great both subjectively as well as objectively.

A friend of mine recently asked, why are you so interested in all that Queer stuff?

I know this is cheap bait I do honestly wonder whether cicadas masturbate during those 17 years they’re underground.

Poe was many things, but critic is not the first word that comes to mind.

I want to say it was Stephen Fry who argued that John Keats might have gone on to become the next William Shakespeare had he lived a bit longer, though it may have in fact have been Christopher Hitchens.

I recognized Bruce the moment I picked the book off the shelf, even though I had never met him before in my life.

Alfred Hitchcock was afraid of eggs.

“Don’t re-nig 2012.”  Imagine reading that.

One of my co-workers, who sees far more in me that I do, asked honestly “Jim-Jam,” that’s what she calls me, “Is there any book you don’t love?”Joshua Smith

I watched the Pound the Alarm music video because of Nicki Minaj’s breasts.

It has only been three months into the year and already my reading list, the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet where I record everything and anything I read, is already past 1700 entries.

For the record I know several lesbians who don’t own or wear comfortable shoes. 

I think that’s enough…okay, one more, but only because it’s the hooker of the most popular essay I’ve written thus far:

We’ll get to big black dicks in a moment but first I wanted to ask you, the reader, a couple of questions.

Looking over this list, I realize that I have little to no luck with hookers.  Phrasing.  Wait does that work?  Doesn’t matter.  This essay, like the one that appeared a year ago on this day, was about reevaluation and metacognition.  I spend a great many hours locked in my office writing and reading books for quotes, and finding images that are funny or quirky or perfect, and for my efforts I’ve received only praise by my friends and family who tend to be the most avid readers of this site.  While praise is lovely, it doesn’t hold back the wanting and moral crisis that appears from time to time.

Then again, recently a woman left me this and my reaction reveals everything:

Kristin

Two years in, and while I have no financial or utilitarian proof that this site hasn’t been a colossal waste of time, I have the little moments like this.  When a friend tells me he loves my “letter from a young atheist” series, or a teacher shares one of my articles with their students, or my aunt tells me she used my Ayn Rand essay in her graduate dystopian course for a presentation, or somebody from out of the blue asks if she can write an essay for the blog.  These are the moments that matter the most, because they’re what actually keeps me writing.  It’s nice to hear my mother tell me she liked my essay about Jenna Jameson, or Dad make a joke and suggest lines for an essay about Hemingway, or a friend tell me that they absolutely adored the one about T.S. Eliot.

A writer is a writer if he or she writes every day, and after two years of writing for this site, and at least a decade actually writing for the sake of actually writing, I might not have mastered the fine art of hooking, but I know I’ve acquired consistent readers and a little hole in the world where people and come and give a shit, even if it’s just to hear about a porn star biography or black cocks.

The writer writes, and another essay leaves the White Tower…that sounds ungodly pompous but there are worse ways to end essays I suppose.

Thanks for reading.  I really appreciate it.

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*Writer’s Note*

For the record it’s me.  I’m the gay stalker.  One day we shall one Stephen.  One day…

 

**Writer’s Note**

I’m not actually gay for Stephen King, I’m really not.  I’m more of a Chadwick Boseman sort of guy.635979730501348212-SP-27131-R

Or Aldis Hodge he’s hot too.tumblr_no067rxl401rsrnw0o1_540

 

***Writer’s FINAL Note***

If I have any shred of integrity left, I just want to make sure the reader has one last chance to read the lesson I’ve come to embrace.  I may not be the best role model, writer wise, but I still think that everything about being a writer is contained in these two sentences:

If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.  There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut.  (145).

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Wilson AA Aaron Sorkin About Betty's Boob Abram Adams A Brief History of Time A Brief History of Time: From The Big Bang to Black Holes Absalom, Absalom abscence of evidence for god's existence Abscence of god abstinence and why it's shit abuse abuse of authority Abuse of Military authority abyss Academia Academic Book Academic Libraries Academic Writing Acadmic writing A Chilean Dictator's Dark Legacy Achilles A Christmas Carol A Clash of Kings A Clockwork Orange action Action Comics Action Films Action from Principle Activism Adam & Eve Adam Kesher Adam Piore Adam Smith Addiction ADHD Adolf Hitler A Doll's House Adrian Brody Adrian Cronauer adultery Adventure Fiction advertising advertizing A Dying Tiger—moaned for Drink— Aenema Aerosmith A Farewell to Arms Africa African History Afterlife A Game of Thrones Agency Agent Dale Cooper aging agriculture A Happy Death A Historical Guide to Ralph Waldo Emerson A History of the Breast A History of the World Part 1 A House Divided AIDS Airspeed Velocity of Swallows Aislinn Emirzion Alana Alan Berube Alan Cumming Alan Dean Foster Alan Ginsberg Alan Moore Alan Turing Albatross Albert Bigelow Paine Albert Camus Alberto Giocometti Alchemy Aldis Hodge Alec Baldwin Alec Baldwin Gets Under Trump's Skin A Letter to a Royal Academy Alex + Ada Alexander Dumas Alexander Nehamas & Paul Woodruff Alexandra Socarides Alfred Habegger Alfred Hitchcock Alfred Lord Tennyson Alfred Pennyworth Alfred Tennyson Alice in Wonderland Alice Walker alien alien-human sexuality Alien: A Film Franchise Based Entirely On Rape Alienation of Affection Alien Covenant aliens Alison Bechdel Allegory Allen Ginsberg Allison Pill Allison Williams All Star Superman All the President's Men Al Madrigal Almonds in Bloom Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace Alton Sterling Alvy Singer Amanda Palmer A Matter of Life Amazon Amelia Airheart America American Civil War American Creative Landscape American Dream American Empire American Exceptionalism American Flag American Gods American Horror Story American Horror Story: Freak Show American Landscape American literary Canon American Literature American Politics American Radical American Revolution American Soldiers American Territory A Midsummer Night's Dream A Mind of It's Own: A Cultural History of the Penis Amira Casar Ammon Shea A Modest Proposal Amon Hen A Moveable Feast A Muppet Christmas Carol Amuro Amy Holt Amy Poehler An-Nasir Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub anal penetration Anal Sex Ananssi Boys An Appeal to the People of England, on behalf of the Poor Man's Child Anatomy Anchors Aweigh Ancient Egypt Ancient Greece Ancient History Anderson Cooper 360 Anders Winroth Andre Aciman Andre Maurois Andres Serrano And Tango Makes Three And Yet... 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