Happy Pride, people!
I am going to take the occasion of NYC Pride (which I actually went to this year – imagine that! Usually I can only work up the energy to walk out my front door as the one float in the Brooklyn Pride parade rolls by. Wife and I are going to wear our “just married” shirts with two ladies on them. As long as the issue is timely I think we can still call ourselves “just married”…) to comment on some gay stuff. Since that other topic of my blog, cats and kittens (also koalas now maybe?) has gotten a good amount of attention.
First of all – I’ve been slowly easing myself back into listening to WNYC now that I’m back in the country, and I’ve spent most of the week getting annoyed at a certain morning talk show host who shall go unnamed who I feel like often manages to miss the point, especially when he’s talking about queer issues. They’ve got this new “Greene Space” where they can do live shows in front of an audience, and evidently that means having so many guests that there isn’t enough time to talk to all of them, never mind time for them to start a dialog with each other. There’s just such an effort to keep things neat and make sure you get everything in (within the 15 minutes allotted to a segment, which makes me nuts coming from my Dad who will ramble on his show about something for hours if he thinks it’s needed) that it makes me just want to run in there and mess up everybody’s hair or something. This is why people hate public radio – it’s stuffy and restrained and overly structured. If there’s an opportunity for a really interesting (and possibly messy) debate, why not let that happen?
I guess what I’m saying is that it makes me angry when public radio is simultaneously dumber and more boring than it should be. I mean, if this is the only place where meaningful conversation can happen on the radio, then let’s do it.
To his credit, I think Mr. Morning Talk Show knew that by having 30 guests on his show where Pride was discussed he had shortchanged a few issues, so on Friday he brought back Pauline Park – a transgender rights activist with the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy. But the question he posed to her was basically a less offensive form of “what’s up with trannies?” Well, Ms Park was way more democratic in answering his questions than I would ever have been. One of my main problems with Mr. MTS is that on his show I think he frequently hides behind a weird mask of journalistic neutrality that has this attitude of “I have a responsibility to my listeners to consider every point of view as valid.” So he actually says to Pauline Park something like, “What would you say to people who get that sexuality isn’t a choice, that you’re born that way so it’s not your fault, but think that transgendered people are just weird, so why should there be laws to protect them?”
Well, if I had been in Ms Park’s position I would have yelled in his face, “First of all – many people claim that changing their gender isn’t a choice, that they were born a certain way and never felt comfortable with themselves before they transitioned – so if you’re going to go with the ‘born that way’ argument why would you just stop at gays?”
And then I would have said:
“Second of all – this whole ‘sexuality is not a choice so don’t blame me’ thing is a slippery slope that people need to get the hell off of asap. It’s one step away from saying, ‘I would never choose to be this way,’ and it perpetuates a victim mentality that needs to end. The point is that it’s none of anyone’s damn business. There’s a quote by a gay activist whose name I can’t remember that I loved which basically says – why would it be so bad if it was a choice?”
But Pauline said something that I thought was very smart, which was that there are plenty of laws to protect things that are not inherent parts of people’s makeup – people are protected against being discriminated against on the basis of their religion, even if they chose that religion.
Basically it’s the opposite of saying that, for example, if you convert to Judaism and then are discriminated against because of it, it’s your own damn fault for deciding to join a group of people that are discriminated against. Which goes back then to the “is it a choice?” sexuality question. I think people are so afraid of this question because it puts a level of responsibility on the individual in the face of a discriminating society – if you chose this then it’s your own fault. You have made yourself the victim. So then all of a sudden the challenge turns into saying, no – these are not people that you can discriminate against and they are not going to stand for it.
Of course, this very thoughtful answer was not allowed to lead to any sort of discussion because it was on to the next idiot on the phone and the next inane question. Okay, so maybe I am being a little overly critical of Mr. Radio here – he did bring up these issues in the first place, so his heart is in the right place. It’s possible that I’m just getting a little sick of listening to straight people talk about things they don’t know anything about, and then imagining how proud of themselves they feel for really addressing these tough topics.
Which brings me to my next point of gayness for today – a few things I want to say about the movie “Milk.” Because it worked out very nicely for the folks who made that movie that one of Harvey Milk’s main messages – that being out and visible is the first step toward any progress – is so important right now with the whole marriage issue. And I really think there are so many ways that this movie could have gone wrong and didn’t. Like I’ve said before – putting a famous, straight actor in the role of an important gay martyr is skating on potentially thin ice, and you could end up with a “Philadelphia” situation on your hands where it’s like, “Did Tom Hanks and Antonio Banderas just kiss or did I imagine it?” – where sex is intentionally not an issue, either because they don’t want to scare off their mainstream audience or because their straight stars are not willing to go there.
(Footnote: recently watched “The Boys in the Band” for the first time, and while the film was kind of just the weird, dated, self-hating gay drama I expected, it was the interviews in the DVD extras that were the most revealing. A lot of the gay actors in the movie died of AIDS, so it was mostly the straight guy who had played the more buttoned up, “had been married to a woman” character telling all of the stories. So he was talking about how at the end of the movie he and the other straight actor who played his boyfriend go off to reconcile in a room off-camera, and he was explaining how the director had told them that he wanted to film the reconciliation scene, and these two actors were like, “okay, we can do this.” And it was this huge, awkward thing that they really had to psych themselves up to do and then in the end the scene wasn’t even used.)
Okay, so it’s not the ’80s or the ’90s anymore (even though sometimes it’s hard to remember that). And I would argue that “Milk” marks a huge step forward in something really important – this level of boldness that can be tracked through attitudes toward gayness in film, not just because it’s a movie celebrating Harvey Milk, but because it was directed by a gay man who was not afraid to make this movie about real gayness. I mean, you get Gus van Sant to direct a movie and it’s going to be pretty gay, that’s a given. And what it means is that there is not going to be any big dumb “will Sean Penn kiss a boy?” controversy. This movie is going to be all Sean Penn kissing boys. And hitting on boys. And rolling around naked with boys. This movie is out in a way that I’m not sure any other movie has ever been – because it was intended for the mainstream and it is completely unapologetic in its depiction of sexuality.
And so on this day of Pride 2009, and the 40th anniversary of Stonewall, when things seem to just need a little extra push in this world to get them to where they need to be, I’m going to focus on the unavoidable signs of progress – Sean Penn kissing boys and my iron-on “Just Married” ladies tank top.
