Category: documentaries

Vogue

I finally watched Strike a Pose,  the documentary which takes a look at where the dancers from Madonna’s “Blonde Ambition” tour wound up, and what happened to them. That tour was also documented in another documentary, Truth or Dare, which was also extremely controversial at the time of its release.

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It was ironic, as I reflected on watching Strike a Pose and how it affected me; what it made me think, and what I wanted to say about it on here, that I checked Twitter and saw a tweet from one of my friends:

A gentle reminder that using “it’s so much better than it was” when queerfolk are talking about their daily life is a dick move, “allies.”

The Blond Ambition tour was in support of Madonna’s fourth album, Like a Prayer (which is one of my favorite albums of hers; I’ve never tired of the title song or the second single, “Express Yourself”), which was enormously controversial when it was released…of course, back then almost everything about Madonna was controversial. She’d signed a mega-million endorsement deal with Pepsi, which was also geared to promote the album. When the video for “Like a Prayer” was released, people got up in arms about it and Pepsi cancelled the endorsement deal–Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” Pepsi commercial never aired–which only got her more publicity. (In an aside, I’ve never understood the issues with the “Like a Prayer” video; it was all about racism, and finding the strength through prayer to stand up to it–but everyone, as usual, got caught up in images from it without the proper context.)

I didn’t go see Truth or Dare in the theater; I rented it from Blockbuster when it came out on video. I had an enormous crush on the dancer Salim–he was just so handsome in the “Vogue” video–and as a Madonna fan, I was curious to see what it was like backstage on one of these massive tours. I was also–and remain–grateful to Madonna for all she did for the LGBT community, as well as bringing attention to HIV/AIDS, and being one of the first celebrities to do so. It was quite an unusual experience to see all these gay men in the film, so openly and brazenly gay and unashamed and just being themselves. The 1980’s was an incredibly difficult decade for me, personally–I’ve still not unpacked my twenties completely, maybe I never will–and the 1990’s didn’t start off much better for me. But at the time I watched Truth or Dare I had already started down a path to make a better life for myself, coming to terms with myself and who I was, and who I wanted to become, the kind of life I wanted. So the documentary resonated for me a bit; these were gay men who’d followed their dreams, and despite everything, despite all the hate and homophobia and prejudice and bigotry, made those dreams came true.

That was kind of aspirational, if not inspirational.

Seeing where the dancers ended up afterwards, some twenty-five years or so later, in Strike a Pose was kind of sad in some ways, but good in others. Being a ‘Madonna dancer’ was both a blessing in some ways and a curse in others, but they all seem to be doing well now, and it was fun seeing them all together–the ones who are left; one died from AIDS complications–again; it was also painful to listen, and see, them talking about their own personal struggles with HIV, the stigma and the shame–another legacy from that time.

Recently I was given the opportunity to talk to a retirement specialist, to help me come up with a plan for my retirement, and she was a little nonplussed about how “unprepared” I was for my looming retirement. “You should have started in your twenties,” she gently chided me.

I replied, “When I was in my twenties I thought I would be dead before I was forty.”

My reply made her feel uncomfortable, and bad–which wasn’t my intent. I knew she wasn’t being insensitive…but I wasn’t trying to make her feel bad, either. I was merely stating the truth, awful as it might seem now.

We all thought–no, believed, we were going to die young.

So, yes, it is very true that things aren’t as bad as they used to be, that things have gotten better in our society and in our world and in our culture.

But for fuck’s sake, that’s a pretty goddamned low bar–and progress doesn’t mean we’ve overcome everything, either.

Now I’d like to see Truth or Dare again. Strike a Pose struck a chord in me, obviously, and I do think it’s an important film…I’m glad I saw it.

NOTE: The Blond Ambition tour was also supporting Madonna’s album I’m Breathless: Music from and Inspired by the Motion Picture Dick Tracy. It was that album that contained “Vogue,” which is a timeless classic.

 

Jumpin’ Jack Flash

Well, I finished the outline yesterday and am actually feeling pretty good about it. As I finished outlining the last chapters, I began to see with a much greater clarity what the problems with the manuscript were, the changes that needed to be made to it, and what would, in fact, make it a much stronger book than what I originally wrote. It’s going to require a lot of work to fix it, frankly–more than I would have preferred–but hopefully it will turn out to be exactly what I wanted it to be.

And that’s a good thing.

Yesterday was one of those days where I didn’t get as much done as I would have liked; I just felt off center and off-balance for most of the day. I’m not sure why that was; one of those eternal mysteries, I suppose. I did have some trouble sleeping last night as well, which sucked because I have a ten hour day of work today including bar testing tonight. Ah, well, I should sleep well tonight, one would think.

We watched the third episode of The Handmaid’s Tale last night, which continues to chill and disturb me. It is so incredibly well done,  and while the men are repugnant, the absolute most chilling characters to me are the collaborationist women. Atwood’s novel was such genius, really, and I love how the show is taking the time to fill in all of the backstories and develop the characters even more so than she did. The not-knowing in her book was particularly chilling, but I think the show is making it a much richer, complex tale–which is also necessary for something that is visual rather than simply read. I am thinking I need to find my copy and read it again.

We also watched a documentary about H. H. Holmes, billed as America’s first serial killer–although I would posit the Benders in Kansas were the first. I first knew of Holmes because Robert Bloch wrote a fictionalized account of his ‘murder castle’ that I read called American Gothic. (I love Bloch, and went through a period where I read all of his work I could get my hands on; Psycho is still one of my favorite crime novels) The documentary was very well done, but all I could think about while I watched was the Benders and wondering whether there were any books about them. I’ve wanted to write about them ever since I first heard about them, when I was a teenager living in Kansas, but am not sure if I want to do it as a historical crime novel, or as horror….or both. Someday!

I’m almost finished with Cleopatra’s Shadows, which I am sort of enjoying, but wish I was enjoying more. I know that sounds like damning with faint praise, because I am enjoying it, but I only have about sixty pages to go, and I will be curious to see how the author deals with the inevitable (I mean, it’s historical fiction, I know what happens) end.

I’m having lunch with a friend whom I haven’t seen in years today before work, which should be a rather pleasant experience. It’s always lovely to catch up with friends.

And on that note, it’s back to the spice mines with me. Here’s a Tuesday morning hunk for you, Constant Reader:

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The Unicorn

Monday morning, and not only a new week but a new month. May, of course, is when the Formosan termites swarm; usually they join us sometime around Mother’s Day, but I saw people posting about them last night on Facebook. Maybe it was the extremely mild winter; hopefully, the early start means an early end. It really does seem like one of the plagues of Egypt when the termites are swarming; our first experience with it back in May 1997 was absolutely horrifying. Even typing about it now makes my skin crawl. We’ve been relatively lucky over the past fourteen years or so; living in the back as we do, we only get a few inside the house and once they do, off go the lights and we light candles.

It really surprises me that there really isn’t anything that can be done with these things.

Last night, we watched the documentary Tower, which is about the first mass shooting at  a school, and another episode of The Handmaid’s Tale, which continues to be riveting. I vaguely remember the events of Tower;  I was almost five when Charles Whitman went up to the observation deck of the University of Texas Tower and started shooting people. It really did seem as though the world, and the country, was going crazy. Only a few weeks before the Texas Tower murders, Richard Speck raped and murdered eight nursing students in Chicago, and in retrospect, my mother’s paranoia about our safety–a young woman with two small children and a husband from the rural South living in the big city–really isn’t so surprising. There were also some horrible riots in Chicago in 1996, and of course, the riots in the wake of Dr. King’s murder in 1968 were still to come (in the wake of those riots, some of my father’s relatives who lived in Chicago packed up and moved back to Alabama). The Democratic National Convention was also in Chicago in 1968… and the Chicago Police Department’s brutality against the protestors documented by news cameras for the world to see.

Tower is incredibly powerful, and an interesting way to film a documentary. The filmmakers interviewed and spoke to the survivors, and then used filmed actors the right age to reenact what happened, then animating them, while interspersing actual film footage and photographs from the ninety-six minutes of pure hell the city of Austin, and the University of Texas, endured. What happened that day was horrifying enough, but reliving it through the personal stories of the survivors, and their memories of what happened that day, made it even more heartbreaking and moving. The documentary primarily focuses on the point of view of two of the police officers, one of the students who helped victims, another witness who watched it all happen through the windows of a nearby building (one of the most moving moments is when this woman, a young girl at the time, says, “This sort of thing is a defining moment. I stood there in the window, knowing there were people out there who needed help, but I was too afraid of being shot to do anything. That was when I knew I was a coward.”), the University bookstore manager who climbed the Tower with the three officers to take out Charles Whitman, but the two personal stories that moved me the most was the young paperboy who shouldn’t have even been there, but was filling in on the route for another boy, and had his young cousin riding on his bike with him when he was shot in the leg off his bicycle, and of course, Claire, one of the first victims, eight months pregnant and leaving the student union with her boyfriend, who was killed instantly. Claire’s baby was killed when she was shot in the abdomen, and she lay there, on the cement in front of the Tower, with her boyfriend lying dead near her, unable to move or get helped because anyone who went out there was in the line of fire, roasting on the hot cement in the heat of an August day in Austin. A young woman named Rita ran over to her, talked to her the entire time, lying on the ground near her, keeping her conscious and keeping her alive.

I cannot even imagine how horrible the ordeal must have been for her, or how she has lived with the memories of everything she lost that day for the rest of her life.

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Simply extraordinary.

I’ve almost finished reading Cleopatra’s Shadows–have maybe another hundred pages to go, and also made some serious progress on decluttering the apartment. I’ve decided that I am going to clean out the storage space–both the one over the laundry room as well as the rented one–and try to declutter the Lost Apartment as much as I can. I am only going to  keep research books, my children’s series collections, signed books by friends, and my Stephen King hardcovers. Anything else is going to be donated. If I had more time I might try to sell them on ebay or Amazon, but I just don’t have the time and I don’t want to mess with it, to be perfectly honest. So, every Saturday morning–or every morning when I have to work late–I am going to take boxes out of the storage places, go through them, and start donating. I feel very good about this decision, quite frankly.

I also intend to finish the outline of the WIP this week, as well as a second draft of “Quiet Desperation.”

Onward and upward, y’all.

La La (Means I Love You)

Good morning. It’s a lovely Sunday morning in New Orleans, as I look at the start of a relatively easy and short week for me at work. Good Friday is a paid holiday for me, so I only have four days to get through, and I have short days on both Monday and Thursday (horrifying long days on Tuesday and Wednesday, of course), so it’s kind of a ‘win some lose some’ kind of week. I ended up not writing much yesterday; instead I read Underground Airlines (which I am enjoying) and when Paul got home from his errands, I made dinner and we watched Rogue One and then the first two episodes of Five Came Back, a wonderful documentary about five Hollywood film directors (Frank Capra, John Ford, John Huston, William Wyler, and George Stevens) who spent World War II making documentaries about the war rather than directing films in Hollywood. It’s narrated by Meryl Streep, and is based on the book of the same title by Mark Harris (who also wrote the documentary). It’s very well done; and it does a really good job of capturing the era it’s about, while at the same time not only exposing how easy it is for film to be used as propaganda, but raising questions about the ethics of making propaganda during a time of war. As we as Americans are currently wrestling with the notion of news as propaganda, and how to tell what is real and what is not–a horrifying place to be, quite frankly–and how the news was controlled for the American public during the Second World War to keep them behind the war effort (which was prodigious) as well as buying war bonds to finance it, it raises difficult questions about truth, ethics, and the media. I cannot recommend it enough; I’m really looking forward to viewing the final episode.

I will undoubtedly spend today in a mix of cleaning, writing, and reading. My friend Stuart is in town, and hopefully we’ll get to have lunch or an early dinner together today, if not, it will be tomorrow.

Underground Airlines, like The Underground Railroad, is not an easy book to read. I’ve never read much alternate history (Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle being one of the few exceptions), and that’s what this book is; alternate history, and one that, as you learn more about the ‘history’ of the United States and its ‘peculiar institution’ the deeper you get into the book, is terribly disturbing because you can see how it might have gone this way.

American history, as it pertains to questions of race and equality, is difficult; and the truth of American history, as opposed to the deeply sanitized version we are taught in public school (or at least, the deeply ‘rah-rah-rah’ version I was taught in the 1960’s, predicated on the manifest destiny of white Europeans to take dominion over the Americas while eradicating the natives and enslaving Africans, required a lot of unlearning; I told one of my co-workers the other day that I’ve spent most of my adult life unlearning everything I was raised to believe while re-educating myself on the truth), is actually kind of ugly. I remember reading James Michener’s Centennial when I was in my teens, and realizing everything I’d been taught, read, or seen in movies about the native Americans, and their clash with white Europeans, was actually incredibly biased against the native ‘savages’. (If you’re interested in re-educating yourself on American history, please read Howard Zinn’s histories of the United States, starting with A People’s History of the United States.)

Anyway, when Underground Airlines was released, there was some controversy, given the subject matter and that author Ben H. Winters was white and writing from the perspective of an African-American who worked as a runaway slave catcher. Questions of cultural appropriation often dog the work of white people who write from outside their own experience; yet at the same time there is also a clamor for diversity within fiction and there has long been a Twitter hashtag #weneeddiversebooks. I don ‘t think–and I could be wrong–that the problem is so much cultural appropriation as it is that authors of color do not have the same easy access to publishing that white people do; it’s easier for a white author to get a book published with a person of color as the main character than it is for an author of color to do so. I’ve personally enjoyed seeing the progress made by film and television to cast people of color; when I was a kid I would have loved to find books or television shows or films where gay men weren’t tragic figures doomed to die, or the butt of the joke, or figures of contempt; I can only imagine the positive impact this is having on young minority children to be able to see characters like themselves on films and television shows, or finding them in books.

This is not a bad thing.

The book is very well-written, and I am enjoying it tremendously, but it’s not an easy read, as I said earlier. I had always, as I’ve said before, intended to read it and The Underground Railroad back-to-back, to get a sense of comparison and to see how the differences between how an author of color deals with the issues of race and white supremacy vs how a white author does. Both books have made me think about these issues–the racial divide/conflict that is so deeply woven into the fabric of our society and culture, and how it always has been there from the very beginning.

That’s not a bad thing. Being made to think, to reexamine your values and beliefs, to unlearn things you were taught that are wrong and to reeducate yourself is never a bad thing. I think we, as a country and a society and a culture, can do with some reexamination.

Heavy thoughts for a Sunday morning before I head back into the spice mines.

Here’s a happy Sunday morning hunk for you, Constant Reader.

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Applause

So, I went to see my doctor for my annual check-up and I am HEALTHY. My blood pressure is good, heart rate good, I’ve lost a total of nine pounds since the last time I saw her (and I only started trying a few weeks ago, with time off for Carnival, of course), I’m sleeping well–everything is remarkably better than when I last saw her six months ago. She also gave me a referral to a cardiologist, since we have recently discovered, thanks to the hemorrhagic stroke my mother had just before Christmas, that a congenital heart defect runs in her family (and may be why her father died in his sleep when he was in his late thirties). If I do have it, they may have to to preemptively put a stent in to correct it and prevent me from eventually having a stroke. Yay. But hey–it’s better to know so you can do something about it rather than just having a stroke, right?

I am going to give full credit to my good health to NO DEADLINES.

After work tonight I will have to walk home up the parade route–always fun–and tonight’s parades are Druids and Nyx. Druids is kind of dull, but Nyx is usually fun. I also have tomorrow off so I can run errands and stock our larder since I won’t be able to move the car again until next Wednesday, and of course, tomorrow night is Muses, after two others. Will this be the year our shoe-streak ends? I am a little concerned that it may be. We’ve had a really great run with shoes, though, so can’t really complain too much should a drought occur. But since I can’t move the car, I took the streetcar to see my doctor and then took it all the way back to the Quarter so I could walk the rest of the way to the office. It was a lovely ride–I really should take the streetcar more and go explore, just you know, go see things and play sight-seer in my own home town–and I got to read some more of my book (seriously, peeps, I know it’s taking me a long time to finish it but Lori Rader-Day’s Little Pretty Things is REALLY GOOD), which I hope to finish tomorrow. I’m not sure what to read next; I will certainly keep you in the loop, Constant Reader.

I have been obsessed by a true crime case lately; one that I am peripherally connected to (a friend knows one of the people from the case); which is kind of weird, when I think about it–I also have a connection to the whole Bobby Durst The Jinx mess; again, through some friends. I won’t talk about the case much–it involves a closeted millionaire/entrepreneur being brutally murdered, and the police had arrested a gay porn star for the crime…only to release him recently. I don’t want to write it as an actual true crime book; I’m not a good enough journalist to do something like that. But I think it’s an interesting basis for a novel, and I am chewing around ideas on how to do that–because there are several different angles to take and all of them, at least to me now, are fascinating and interesting. I’m just toying with it for now–I have a couple of other books I’d like to write first–but this part of creating a book, brainstorming and thinking and wondering what point of view you want to have, what you want the book to say–is so much more fun than actually writing it.

Ah, well.

And on that note, back to the spice mines.

Here’s today’s hunk:

Poker Face

So, last night I watched the documentary Author: The JT LeRoy Story. I’ve been digesting it ever since, and still am not really quite sure how I feel about it.

If you aren’t aware of the background story, essentially in the late 1990’s stories began to be published written by someone who wrote under the name “Terminator”, and they were quite good, actually. Eventually, a novel was published called Sarah; “Terminator” was now writing as “JT LeRoy.” By the time Sarah was released, I was working as editor of Lambda Book Report. We’d gotten a review copy of it along with a press release about the author’s background, and basically claiming that the novel was loosely autobiographical. JT’s mother, Sarah, had been a truckstop prostitute; and that was the world JT was raised in; JT was also very young and unsure of his gender/sexuality, and had also worked as a truckstop prostitute. It was a fascinating story, really; but at the same time it seemed kind of, well, off to me. People were raving about the book, and I didn’t actually have to assign it out to anyone: a reviewer emailed me, having just read it, and begged me to let her review it, so I did.

Hey, when someone volunteered to review, it made my life easier and I rarely said no. But I was able to keep the review copy that had been sent to us, and I read it in my spare time–when I wasn’t having to read something to review or determine whether it should be reviewed–and I was impressed. It was a very dark story, but very well written. So, I emailed JT to let him know how much I enjoyed the book, and to congratulate him as well as to let him know we were running a review of it, and since it was going to be a full page review, rather than one of the shorter ones we usually did, I needed an author photo. He emailed me back…and then another bell went off. The email was barely literate, for one thing: and while I knew editors sometimes work really hard with authors…it just didn’t seem to click for me. Something wasn’t right. And a few days later I got a letter thanking me for my interest in the book–again, a handwritten letter rife with grammatical and spelling errors.

And I recognized the author photo. It was an image that had run on the cover of a Dennis Cooper novel that had been published ten years earlier.

And since JT was supposedly only twenty or twenty one at the time…it didn’t compute. Had he been the model for the book cover image? But he would have only been ten or eleven at the time. Again, it didn’t make sense–but it was neither my place nor my job to question this, so I just let it go; and we didn’t run the author photo with the featured review.

As far as I was concerned, that was the end of it. I did get a copy of his next book, The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, but it never came out of my TBR pile, and I was no longer running the magazine, so it wasn’t that big of a deal. I did occasionally see notices about readings being held of JT’s work–with big name celebrities, like Winona Ryder and Matthew Modine, actually reading the work because JT wouldn’t do public appearances and was reclusive. Which, you know, was fine–but it was also interesting. But then he started showing up in magazines and so forth–always in sunglasses, and I also wondered if he was actually bald; because he was clearly wearing bad blond wigs. Again, I arched my eyebrows, but hey, whatever works. It was revealed that he was HIV positive, one of the books was being made into a movie…and then the scandal broke: JT LeRoy didn’t exist; he was a myth, a creation, and the person who was actually writing the books was a straight lady with a longtime male partner and a child, and the partner’s sister was ‘playing’ JT for public appearances and for photographs. I didn’t really see this as a huge scandal at the time; authors always use pseudonyms, and while there was some deception there–the woman pretending to be JT, the backstory, etc.–the bottom line for me was the writing was good, and the fact that it wasn’t autobiographical after all made the achievement even more extraordinary.

But the claiming to be HIV positive…that didn’t sit well with me. It was an insult to everyone infected and living with HIV; it was an insult to everyone we’ve lost to the disease. How very dare you claim HIV positive status to lend authenticity to your fabrication. You deserve to go to hell for that.

But I wanted to watch the documentary. I knew from seeing a review of it in the New York Times that it was primarily focused on Karen Albert, why she became first “Terminator” and then “JT LeRoy”. It’s an interesting story, and while I felt like the documentary was too busy apologizing and making excuses for Ms. Albert–the way she talked about all these different personas she took on–JT, his friend Speedy (which is who she appeared as in public with JT, so she could be there at the readings and everything else public that was going on for JT’s work)–it sounded almost like there was an element of dissociative identity disorder going on there; she certainly had the kind of childhood which tends to result in that particular psychiatric disorder. But she insists that isn’t the case; but she seems to fall back on a particular writerly trope that has always rather put me off as pompous and annoying: the notion that writers have no role in their actual writing and that the characters TAKE OVER.

Um, no. I don’t know where or why that trope about the experience of writing started or even how it got started, but I’ve always felt it’s a steaming pile of bullshit and whenever I hear any writer say something along those lines my eyes roll so hard they almost unscrew out of their sockets.

Don’t get me wrong; when I am writing, especially in the first person, I have to get completely inside the character I am writing about and channel them–but they don’t take me over. I don’t BECOME Chanse or Scotty when I am writing about them. They are a part of me but they aren’t me.

The documentary, though, is fascinating, and Karen Albert is an interesting person. Do I think she set out to pull a long con? No, I don’t. I do believe that it got out of control and she didn’t know how to contain it–and there were also money issues involved; why kill the goose that’s laying the golden eggs? But I also think she doesn’t own her part in any of it; she’s so busy (in the documentary) giving explanations and justifying the masquerade that she doesn’t really feel any remorse about the lying and the fraud. She only regrets being caught.

Interestingly enough, the publisher of the JT LeRoy books have published new editions to coincide with the release of the documentary–which makes the documentary and her role in it even more suspect. Hey, here’s another chance for me to sell some books!

And she never apologizes for, or even tries to justify, the HIV lie. She makes the point that the books are fiction and they exist, so calling the whole escapade a fraud isn’t honest; she seems to think the more grandiose word “myth” is more apt to describe what she did with the creation of JT LeRoy.

JT LeRoy, though, was a fraud. The books are real, of course, and nothing can take away from the fact that she wrote two really extraordinary books. Would the books have become so successful had she not created the fraud?

We’ll never know.

And here’s a hunk to slide you into the first weekend of Carnival parades: