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Stories from a man who fails to meet media expectations of what it means to be gay:
white, frivolous, over sexed yet sexless, shrill, single, stylish, a clown, unimportant, et al.
Tue 08/06/2002
IT�S ALL FOR YOU, a geek boy entry
The past weekend, I was witness to:
A dusty gang of white teen boys sporting matching sarongs, white t-shirts, loud ties and "you peons cannot even begin to comprehend how much cooler I am than you" attitudes,
tons of women in skimpy outfits surrounded by loads and loads of men asking if they could have their picture taken with the women,
a loud, brass man in a stomach revealing super hero costume grasping his big belly yelling that �this baby is real!�,
a couple of women squeezed into quite frankly far too small �Red Sonya� warrior chick metal bikini armor,
a loud, squeaking, clanking cluster of medieval knights in aluminum armor,
a young woman with very, very scary looking Hobbit feet,
assorted humans and aliens in star fleet dress uniforms,
dozens of furry folks sporting animal ears and tails,
a rather friendly looking wheelchair bound klingon,
a small squadron of gun toting laura crofts,
a posse of chipper female pirates,
lots of batmen and robins,
a lone angry ork,
and a four year old girl dressed in a sailor moon outfit having a temper tantrum while screaming at her mother that she wanted to be a powerpuff girl.
Not too unusual considering that I was at this years San Diego Comic-con.
I�ve attended the thing off and on for a while now, and considering just how annoying work has been lately, I decided that I really needed a break. The con seemed like a perfect excuse to take off and relax for a couple of days.
Not that getting down to San Diego was relaxing. The most direct route to San Diego, the 5 freeway, just happened to be shut down in the middle of Camp Pendleton, a very large nearby military base just a bit South of the San Onofre Nuclear plant. Traffic warning signs and radio reports were using words like: major accident, overturned big rigs, fire, spilled cargo, ingredients for making cement, catastrophe, end of the world!, stay away! Stay AWAY! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD!!!!PLEASE STAY AWAY!!!!!!!
So we did. We took a sort of inconvenient detour through the Cleveland National Forest, passing by folks heading out for a weekend of fun on Lake Elsinore, and driving by lots and lots of billboards advertising Indian casinos.
We eventually did get into San Diego proper and made our way down to the Convention Center along with the other 75, 000 folks that were there according to the papers. For various reasons this particular con has turned into one of the largest "celebrations of Popular culture," as they like to sell themselves.
A celebration of popular culture seems to mean a very large convention center packed full to the gills with all manner of people looking and buying all manner of stuff related to movies, television, science fiction, horror, fantasy, art, anime, role playing games, video games, toys, and even some comics.
As I mention above, some of those folks were in costume. I wasn't. I've never been interested in cosplay. Heck, I barely can barely even put together a half-assed costume for Halloween, let something as elaborate as the things these people were wearing.
Like the Anime expo I was at a while back, some of the costumes were very good, but also very impracticable. I was vaguely tempted to follow a guy dressed as Edward Scissorhands into a mensroom, just to see how he was going to manage using the facilities in that get up.
Most of the costumed folks up were just doing so to have fun, to show off, to be looked at. Some were doing it for far more mundane reasons, mainly commerce. There were lots and lots of men hanging around the booths which happened to feature scantily clad women. The concept of using scantily clad men to attract customers and hawk your wares has yet to reach this crowd.
It would probably work a lot better than you might think. While there are still a lot more men than women in attendance, many of these men were setting of the ol' gayer. This year had the gayest crowd I've ever seen here. It was by far the most attractive crowd I've seen as well. It may be presumptuous, but I'm assuming the two are somehow related.
Not that the herds of attractive, presumably gay men did me any good. Not one man looked at me the entire time I was in San Diego. Not at the con, not even in Hillcrest ( the "gay" neighborhood). Not that I cared since I'm an old married man, but still, it was a tad annoying that I didn't even merit a glance from anyone.
Well, anyone male that is. I noticed lots of women checking me out. I even caught teenage girls giving me half smiles. Once again, I'm giving out het boy signals. Oh well, there are worse things in life than being assumed straight.
Most of my time at the con was spent wandering through isles and isles of merchandize and promotional giveaways and junk. If you wanted a French movie poster for Amelie, it was there. Hmm, actually, that was a bad example. If I remember right, there was a small sold out sign on the French movie poster for Amelie. There were however, loads of ugly, puss covered Japanese import rubber kid toys with the lovely name of "Hell Babies." They were far worse than the garbage pail kids of my youth, although I'm guessing that they were similar in that they were aimed at young boys.
When I wasn't looking at junk, I was taking a break from all the walking, by sitting the art auction area getting stared at by female security guards. When that was too much, I went to an occasional presentation. I watched a Disney thing which has convinced me that Treasure Planet is probably NOT going to be as bad as I thought when I originally heard about the project. I�m still not sure about setting treasure island in outer space, but if nothing else, the animation looks great.
I also unintentionally sat through an episode of Smallville. I had assumed that a session called "Smallville/Birds of Prey Spotlight" would have had something about the new Birds of Prey program, but nope, not a thing. Then again, I did leave a ten or so minutes early, so maybe that's when they talked about the show.
I was surprised about one thing though. During the opening credits of Smallville, most the guys in the audience hooted and whistled when the actor playing Lana Lang appeared. When young lex Luthor showed, most of the women and several men screamed as well. All of the actors got got a good response except for the woman playing Mrs. kent, and the guy playing Clark Kent. He only got a polite smattering of applause. I hadn�t realized that the main guy in the show wasn�t overly popular with the fans.
I was not surprised that during a question and answer period, someone asked if there was a Yaoi (Boy-Boy romance) influence to the show because lots of folks were writing online about the "intensity" of the Clark/Lex relationship.
�Intensity� seems to be a new codeword for saying that every time the two actor have a scene together they tend to look like they want tear each others clothes off. Heck, even the straight teen couple sitting next to me were muttering things like �come on just kiss him already� during the especially "intense" Clark/Lex scene in the episode we were shown.
The producers official answer to whether this was intentional or not was something to effect of �Um, no...not really.�
Although, as someone mentioned afterwards, these guys were officially representing Warner Bros. They weren't exactly going to say �Why yes, we do purposely have scenes were Clark and Lex stand a bit too close to each other while discussing how nothing will ever come between their �friendship.� We�re glad you noticed.�
�After all, It's all for you"
more later,
nico
Music:
a random best of Ella Fitzgerald collection
Want:
Wild Orange tazo
Elsewhere:
yeash, I think I�m in lust.
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