Category: homophobia

I Just Called To Say I Love You

How was your Thanksgiving? Ours was rather lovely; we had our deep dish pizza and a lovely visit with our friend Lisa; then Paul and I watched three movies on Netflix: Fourth Man Out, Closet Monster, and Handsome Devil. We also watched another episode of a Hulu original series, Future Man; which we had given one more episode to get better. And the fourth episode definitely delivered. We laughed a lot all the way through it; and it finally started delivering on its premise.

The three movies were all gay films, which we generally don’t watch very often. I know I should be supportive of gay films, but so often they’re aren’t very good–or at least that used to be the case. When a major studio makes one (Philadelphia, In and Out, To Wong Foo, etc.) they’re awful; indies always mean well but don’t have the budget to really do them well or cast good actors, so we stopped watching them a long time ago. Every so often, a film like Beautiful Thing or Latter Days will come along, but still, fairly rare. My incredibly cynical self is very pleased to say that the three films we watched yesterday were enjoyable in varying degrees, which also makes me tend to think that perhaps we should watch more gay cinema. And really, isn’t mainstream film always a crapshoot, too?

Fourth Man Out was the first movie we watched; its about a group of four guys who’ve been best friends since they were kids and then one of them comes out to the others. It was a comedy, so the coming out was handled in a comedic fashion; the friends were a little taken aback, and then there was some awkwardness about what you can or can’t say around your gay friend which was sweet and kind of cute. The gay character was a mechanic, so there was a sense to me of ‘see, a gay guy can be just a regular guy’ about the movie which was well-intentioned but…the really charming part of the movie was watching the friends try to help him navigate the gay dating world, and there was a really charming scene where they take him to his first gay bar. And the ‘meeting someone from on-line’ trope was treated as comedy (and who hasn’t met someone whose picture wasn’t them?) and there were some moments that I thought might have been in questionable taste–but overall the film was charming. The lead, gay Adam, was played by Evan Todd, who’s very good-looking:

tumblr_o9jmg5lCng1urvepco3_1280

His best friend, Chris–and their relationship/chemistry was quite charming, was played by the impossibly good-looking Parker Young:

mgid_uma_image_logotv

Another one of the guys was played by Glee’s Chord Overstreet, almost recognizable in a heavy beard. But the movie’s true charm was the relationship between Adam and Chris; how they learn from each other and grow and finally find their perfect matches because of their friendship.

Closet Monster starred Connor Jessup from American Crime, who is an appealing and talented young actor I would pretty much watch in anything.

la-et-vn-emmy-contenders-chat-connor-jessup-20160510

This movie was apparently very popular on the indie art film festival circuit and won lots of awards; for me, it was the weakest of the three and were it not for Connor Jessup, we would have probably stopped watching. As a little boy, around the time his parents broke up in a very nasty and volatile break-up, young Oscar witnessed a violent hate crime against a gay teenager–and that, plus the divorce, have been deeply internalized and traumatized him as he comes of age as a gay teenager with an interest in horror movies and a desire to become a make-up artist for horror films. He’s applied to the best school for this in New York, and cannot wait to get away from this awful town he lives in. He’s desperately unhappy–who can’t relate to that–with big dreams, and is developing a crush on another boy he works with at a Home Depot type store. Wilder, played by Aliocha Schneider, is coolly confident in himself and tries to draw Oscar out of his own shell, with some success.

MV5BMTgxNTcwNTI1M15BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwNTczOTQyNjE@._V1_UY317_CR10,0,214,317_AL_

The point of the movie is ultimately that Oscar needs to stop spinning his wheels and move in a positive direction in his life; and it does eventually get there after a bizarre costume party where he has his first sexual experience with a stranger and comes to terms with his feelings for his mother; his relationship with his father remains unresolved. But it was an arty film; Oscar’s hamster speaks to him in Isabella Rossellini’s voice–he got the hamster originally the day his mother left his father so it symbolizes the last time he was happy; and there’s a lot of moments where the director slaps the viewer in the face with his symbolism and hidden depths. There are some gorgeous shots, particularly at the end, but there are also some serious plot holes. But as I said, Connor Jessup is a very talented and appealing young actor, and he carries the entire movie.

The last film we watched, Handsome Devil, was by far and away the best of the three. Set in an Irish boarding school obsessed with its rugby team, it’s from the point of view of young Ned, who is bullied by his schoolmates in no small part because he doesn’t care about rugby and doesn’t fit in; he is played charmingly by Fionn O’Shea. He comes back to school against his will–his father and stepmother live in Dubai and for some reason he can’t live with them there; it’s kind of implied that he’s an inconvenience for them. He’s delighted when he gets to school to find out he’s got a single room and won’t be sharing. There’s also a really funny sequence where he talks about his English teacher; he simply turns in the lyrics to old songs for papers and get’s A’s; the song that is handed back to him with an A written on it to illustrate this voice over is Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Walk Side,” which is hilarious if you know the words.

Handsome-Devil2-1024x512

But he winds up with a roommate after all, Connor. Connor can’t go back to his old school–he was kicked out for ‘fighting’–AND it turns out Connor is a great rugby player; the long-missing piece for the school’s team which will make them champions. Ned reacts by moving all of their furniture to the center of the room, kind of forming a Berlin wall. They also have a new English teacher this term, Mr. Sherry, who is played by Sherlock’s Andrew Scott. Mr. Sherry, and his class, reminded me of Dead Poets’ Society, and I don’t think that was accidental. But Ned and Connor slowly become friends–Connor is Ned’s first friend, really–and of course there’s the requisite homophobia (they all treat Ned like he’s gay, but we never really know for sure) and obstacles for the boys to face before the film’s end. This movie is really charming, and is about friendship, and has some absolutely lovely moments. O’Shea is fantastic as Ned, and you can’t help but root for him as he learns who he is and what being a friend really means; Nicholas Galitzine plays Connor and does a fine job with a less complex part; but the chemistry between the two boys is terrific. I highly recommend this movie.

MV5BMjI4ZmRkMTYtNTFmOC00NDFjLWFhYjEtMTJhYjg4ODc5NjQyL2ltYWdlXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyNDY5NTM2NjY@._V1_UY317_CR20,0,214,317_AL_

It was also highly educational to watch these films, and it also made me realize that I’m a bit of a snob when it comes to gay-themed films; I should probably watch more of them in the future–and I think I’m going to. Watching these movies reminded me of the kinds of novels Kensington used to publish after the turn of the century; particularly the novels of Timothy James Beck. I miss those novels, and Kensington did a great job of finding and publishing fun gay-themed novels in those days. I was one of Kensington’s authors; Kensington was where the first three Scotty books were published, and pulling together the Scotty Bible has also put me in mind of those days again. Kensington first published Rob Byrnes,  and also those wonderful novels by Michael Thomas Ford. Kensington was also home to William J. Mann’s fiction, from The Biograph Girl to The Men from the Boys, All-American Boy, and several others; Kensington also published Andrew Beierle’s The Winter of Our Discotheque, which remains to this day one of my favorite gay novels.

Sigh.

And now back to the spice mines.

Try Again

Stephen King, in his seminal work on horror Danse Macabre, talked about two different kinds of house horror novels–the haunted house, and the bad place. The primary difference between the two is that a haunted house story is about the actual spirits and what they do; what must be done to put the spirit to rest (Barbara Michaels’ brilliant Ammie Come Home fits into this category), and the bad place where you don’t really know what is causing whatever it is that is going on in the place; it’s just a bad, bad place. Examples of the bad place  are of course Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, Stephen King’s The Shining, and Michael MacDowell’s The Elementals.

While I was traveling to and from Toronto, I read two short novels about ‘bad places’; Robert Marasco’s Burnt Offerings and Christopher Rice’s The Vines. 

I remember Burnt Offerings from when I was a kid, and we used to go to the Zayre’s department store every Saturday. I would spend the entire time my mother was shopping looking at every book in the book racks, and I picked it up numerous times only to always set it back and pick something else; I’m not sure why. I remember it was also made into a movie with Bette Davis that I’ve also never seen, and periodically it appears on lists of ‘best haunted house’ novels. Vaillancourt Books recently reissued it, and I bought a copy. It’s good, even if it subscribes to one of those horror tropes that always requires the suspension of belief–if something seems too good to be true, it usually is. A family from the city–Queens, i believe–take a summer rental out on Long Island that, of course, is too good to be true; a dilapidated but once stately manor. Husband, wife, young son, and the husband’s aunt–despite the husband’s misgivings–move out there for the summer; the only requirement of them (other than the rent) is that three times a day the wife must take a tray of food up to the owners’ mother’s suite of rooms and never knock–just leave the tray outside. The wife soon becomes obsessed with the house and cleaning it, putting it into order; finding treasures in closets and cupboards and bringing them out…and ignoring the distance growing between her and her husband, his aunt, and her son. Strange things start to happen, and occasionally she is aware that something’s terribly amiss…and then goes back to cleaning. The story is told very simply, the setting is perfect, and the descriptions of the treasures she finds are lovingly written–and the sense of growing impending doom and claustrophobia are perfect.

The Vines is Christopher Rice’s second horror novel (The Heavens Rise is the first; it’s still in my TBR pile) and it, too, is a variation of the bad place horror convention; Spring House is a gorgeously restored house outside of New Orleans with a horrifying history of its own. The night of owner Caitlin Chaisson’s birthday party, she sees her husband having sex with a beautiful young woman who works for the catering company; emotionally distraught, she leaves the house intent on slashing her wrists and killing herself in the estate’s gazebo. But as she cuts at her wrists, her husband and his one-nighter come outside to the gardening shed, and something monstrous grows up out of the ground to drink her blood and avenge her betrayal. The one-nighter loses her mind and the husband disappears; none of this makes any sense to the police who arrive and are not willing to upset the wealthiest woman in the parish. There are two other primary characters–Nova, the African-American daughter of Caitlin’s groundskeeper and a student at LSU who is there that night, and Caitlin’s former best friend, a gay nurse who has been estranged from her since he told her the truth about her husband’s infidelities–and years earlier, Blake and his teenaged boyfriend were attacked in a hate crime, the boyfriend dying…the true story of the attack has never come out, and it’s a lot more complicated than anyone ever knew. It’s a terrific tale of vengeance from the past and vengeance for the present, with the tension building as it hurries to its climax. I was also impressed with how Christopher handled the bloody, slave-owning history of Spring House–something I’ve wondered about how to handle without being too heavy-handed with a ghost story I’ve been wanting to write with its origins in the Civil War period in rural Alabama.

And now, back to the spice mines.

Wanna Be Startin’ Something

Well, I finished the tragic mess that is currently known as Chapter Seven’s first draft yesterday. And it is a mess; this is easily one of the sloppiest first drafts of a novel I’ve ever written. In fact, I feel so bad about how shitty it is I may even go back and rewrite the entire first half once I finish Chapter Ten. This book is so bad, I can’t even believe how badly I can write a Scotty novel. Oh, well, that’s what rewrites and revisions and future drafts are for.

I also finished rereading It yesterday. Wow, you are undoubtedly saying, that’s a lot of reading. But truth be told, much like the Losers Club when they return to Derry twenty-seven years later, the more I read the more I remembered. And yes, I skimmed some sections, and skipped some entirely. It’s a perfectly fine novel, and I would recommend it..but there are problematic sections, and yes, I do feel like I’m committing treason by saying anything negative about Stephen King and his work, because he is my writing idol, and he has been since I was a teenager. What works in this book works extremely well; no one writes about the lives of children, how they relate to other children, and what it’s like to be a loser as a child (or feel like one) the way he does. I identify with every one of those kids, I feel for them, I desperately want them to succeed and have great lives and live happily ever after. Their return as adults doesn’t work quite as well as the parts that are set in the past; the characters are still richly defined, and their relationships still work–but I still didn’t like the resolution of the story, either when they were kids or when they were adults; I didn’t like the way the book ended (but for the life of me, I couldn’t write such a book nor could I think of a way to end such a book), and it reminded me a lot of Floating Dragon by Peter Straub in many ways (or vice versa; I think I read the King first and then the Straub originally and was struck by the similarities; I do love both books and think of them fondly). I’m not sorry I took the time to reread It and reacquaint myself with Derry and the Losers Club; there are some genuinely good scares in the book, and it’s one of the best books about a small city I’ve read–King really does a great job of depicting life in these smallish towns/cities and how the social dynamics work in them, whether it’s Derry, Castle Rock, or Jerusalem’s Lot. (That was one of the best parts of Needful Things for me; how the town dynamics worked and how the characters and their lives and their petty foibles and feuds all were entwined so intricately together.)

One of the other interesting things I found in rereading It was there was an LSU connection in it; in the town Ben has moved to and currently lives in there was a local kid who was a star athlete and went to LSU, only to party too hard and flunk out, and wound up coming back to the small town as an alcoholic. The town is Hemingford Home, where of course Miss Abigail lived in The Stand; also in that same book when Nick Andros is jumped, one of the assailants was wearing his fraternity ring from LSU–he was the sheriff’s brother-in-law, and he partied too hard and flunked out of LSU as well. Methinks Mr. King knows someone who went to LSU and flunked out for partying too hard. Those are the only two references to LSU in King’s work that I know of; would that Rocky Wood was alive so I could email and ask him.

Maybe someday I’ll get to ask Mr. King.

And of course, It is very reminiscent of the novella “The Body.” which is probably my favorite work of King’s, if pressed to name a favorite–the Losers Club, like the smaller group of friends in “The Body”, has the fat kid, the kid whose brother died and parents haven’t gotten over it, the poor kid (only switched from male to female in It), and the kid who gets beaten up a lot because of his smart mouth.

And there’s also the writer character–King often throws a writer in his work (Ben in ‘salem’s Lot, Jack in The Shining), but this was the first book where he really went all-in on  writer character with Bill Denbrough–and of course, his next novel was Misery, which of course took the writer character, and the dangers of fame, to a whole new level.

But yeah, the gang bang scene has a whole different vibe about in 2017. It didn’t phase me thirty-one years ago, but now it’s just kind of…icky.

As I said, I’m not sorry I reread it; most of it still stands up, and I still think it’s a terrific, if flawed, novel.

Today I need to get this kitchen in order, and I want to work some more on both the WIP and the new Scotty, maybe even a short story. Next up for my reading is Michael MacDowell’s The Elementals.

And now, back to the spice mines. Here’s a hunk to get your week off to a nice start.

17523549_1306428822738512_2755094986544804343_n

Family Man

So, last night I started my reread of Stephen King’s It. The book is slightly over 1100 pages long; and was the second novel King published that I never reread after the initial read (the other being Pet Sematary, which I think I will reread at some point now; I really disliked the book, but I think it was more because of its subject matter than anything King did, if that makes sense?). I sat down with it in my easy chair, and before I knew it the evening had passed and I was well past page two hundred. King is always compulsively readable; I can’t think of a single King novel where I just thought, meh and was able to put it down and walk away from it without regret. Likewise, I was so enmeshed in the story last night that when Paul wanted to watch some of our shows (How to Get Away with Murder, Will and Grace) I was a little annoyed to put the book down. I have no doubts that i will be able to get the entire thing reread in a matter of days; it’s simply a matter of finding the time to read.

Over the years since I first read It, I’ve seen some negative commentary on the book; I myself can distinctly remember not being overly thrilled with the ending, and being more than a little disappointed, which was a first with a King novel for me. The criticisms I’ve seen leveled at the book have included its length (I thought about that while reading last night, and frankly couldn’t imagine being King’s editor, trying to decide what to cut and what to leave behind), which I suppose can be justified in some ways; 1100 is awfully long. But as I was reading, I couldn’t imagine what needed to be cut from the book. King brings Derry vividly to life, and almost every word, every sentence, used to create his characters seems absolutely necessary. One of the things I’ve always loved about King was his realistic-seeming characters; whether it’s Stan Uris’ wife with her bitter recollection of not being allowed into the after-prom party at the country club because she and her date were Jewish, or Eddie Kasprack’s realization that in his overweight and needy and clingy wife, he has actually married his mother; and so on. No other writer I can recall has ever captured childhood, or written about children and the way their minds work, the way King has; the children he creates take me back to memories, long buried and forgotten, about my own childhood and its insecurities and its terrors–like Ben Hanscom when I was a kid I loved the library and lost myself in books, and was never lonely because I never really knew what it was like to have friends or a gang of friends. I always had books, you see, and I could see myself in some way in each and all of his characters as children.

Another one of the criticisms I’ve seen leveled at It has to do with the gay-bashing murder of Adrian Mellon in the second chapter of the book; it’s this murder that brings the cycle of death back to Derry; just as the the first chapter’s depiction of how Georgie Denbrough dies, chasing his paper boat down the gutter triggers the cycle of death in 1958. I’ve seen criticism of the Adrian Mellon death as proof that King is homophobic, or criticism that the depiction of Adrian and his lover, Don Hagarty, was homophobic. Rereading it last night, I never once got that sense. The book was originally published in 1986, at the height of the AIDS epidemic and the societal terror/homophobia that was triggered by the epidemic; some thirty years later it is easy to forget, or downplay what a truly terrifying time that was. And here was King, one of the biggest selling and most read authors of our time, putting in a vicious homophobic attack at the start of one of his biggest and most ambitious novels to date. Was his depiction of Adrian and Don, with their lipstick and tight pants and glittery eye shadow, indeed homophobic?

No, I didn’t think so in 1986 and I don’t think so in 2017.

Maybe Adrian and Don weren’t the most masculine gay men King could have chosen to write about, but the thing that we, in our more ‘enlightened’ times, tend to forget was that back in the day, back when the community was primarily focused on not dying and getting medical research into treating and preventing HIV/AIDS, the big butch straight-acting gay men were deep in the closet and desperately terrified that anyone might find out their truth. The effeminate gay men, ones who embraced who they were and wore make-up and flashy clothing and might have minced and pranced around a bit, flaunting their homosexuality–they were out because they didn’t have a choice. They weren’t straight-acting, the societal definition of masculine; they couldn’t hide their sexuality if they wanted to. Even if they remained closeted, everyone thought they were gay and treated them accordingly anyway, so they came out and got in everyone’s face.

And sometimes, getting in people’s faces, being so defiant about who they were, got them killed, as was the case with Adrian Mellon in Chapter Two of It.

King doesn’t show this hate crime as two fags getting what they deserved, either, by the way; he makes both Adrian and Don sympathetic, making the point that no one deserves to be beaten, attacked, or killed for simply being who they are. This was a radical statement to come from a straight white man whose books always shot up to Number One on the bestseller lists and had become a cultural phenomenon. Even the cops, who themselves were homophobic, made it clear that they maybe didn’t like gays but felt they should be left alone. King even talks about the small gay community in Derry, that it exists. He shows the death of Adrian as a tragedy, what happened to him as undeserved, wrong and terrible. He also shows, in a scene where Don shows Adrian, who has fallen in love with the small city and wants to stay there, the homophobic graffiti on the bridge where he ultimately dies–and the horrible words made this reader recoil, in horror and revulsion, at the inhuman sentiments expressed there with spray paint; the way the scene plays out only the most homophobic monster, without any feelings or heart, could possibly read any of it and think, well, that fag got what he deserved or agree with the sentiments spray painted on the bridge.

I’m sure there are others who can find this scene homophobic; I remember reading it back in my closeted days and having my decision to stay closeted confirmed; this is what happens to out gay men. I don’t think that was King’s intent; I believe King was trying, in his way, to show the oppression and abuse that gay men in 1986 were subjected to, something you didn’t find very often in mainstream novels of the time or even in mainstream novels of today.

He showed homophobia in all of its ugliness, and it still resonates today, thirty-one years later.

I have to go to the grocery store this morning, and I have a lot of cleaning and writing to do. So here’s a hunk to get your Saturday going, as I head back into the spice mines.

17309042_10158389426205290_7953415716721709226_n