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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.
Wednesday 01/22/2003
Bad fashion and the mechanics of gay sex
The highlight of my workday today was either eating my third chocolate dipped Hawaiian shortbread cookie (shh, don't tell), or my getting so annoyed at my �so f*ing cheap, I can�t even staple two sheets of paper together with it� stapler, that I threw it in the trash. I even cursed a bit. Most unprofessional like behavior.
So, enough about work. Which doesn�t leave that much to write about, since there really hasn�t been a lot going on in the real sections of my life. I've spent most of the past few weeks in a vague funk. Luckily, I seem to be over acting like a moody teenager. A good thing to, since I saw The Hours last night. It was a very good film, but it would have also been more than enough to push me screaming over the edge into real depression had I seen it last week.
One of the extra features of the Celluloid Closet dvd is a lecture by Vitto Russo. I had been listening to it before John and I went to go see The Hours. I mention this because there is a section where Mr. Russo was talking about mainstream audiences reactions to seeing same sex couples kiss on screen. Women kissing is not usually too much of problem since it can possibly play into straight male fantasies, but men kissing for various reasons can be seen as antagonistic and tend to get a more extreme reaction. Generally nervousness/anger where the entire audience starts to talk, whisper, and giggle because they don't know haw to react.
In The Hours there's a couple of kissing scenes between women. The audience whispered and fidgeted. John even heard someone mutter something about "what's with all the kissing?"
This was a more than a bit annoying, and maybe a bit funny. Possibly a bit sad as well.
Anyway, when I am in one of my funks, I invariably end up end up wasting time collapsed on the couch watching nonsense on tv. The past few weeks have not been an exception. Among the things which I have wasted my time with were:
Big Eden: I think less of myself since I now want to be able to make straight men doubt and question their sexual orientation. Anyway, it's a nice, calm, gentle flick. Rather good natured, if a bit of a fantasy. I doubt there is such a place where everyone would get together and conspire to pair off two gay men. It is a nice idea though. A town where the only real concern over your sexual orientation would be that the town busybody widow doesn't waste her time introducing eligible singles of the wrong gender to you.
Space 1999: I bought one of the collections a while back on a whim. It's an odd science fiction tv show from the mid seventies, notable for having a very weird premise. The inhabitants of Moon Base Alpha have a mighty bad day on September 13, 1999, when a very, very large nuclear explosion knocks the moon out of orbit and into deep space at such a high speed that they pass a new inhabited solar system nearly every week. Just in time for each episode.
Unlike Star Trek, where they want to be out in space in space exploring and poking around, these folks would like nothing better than to get the heck off the speeding death trap that the moon has become. Considering that in the three episodes I've seen, five characters have died, if the show hadn't had been canceled after two seasons, there wouldn't have been anyone left alive by the time they found a new planet to settle.
Of the episodes I have watched, one had a nuclear technician getting possessed by some sort of alien force and running around killing people; another had the Alphans visiting a planet of large Styrofoam balls, where they then disrobed and started up with a lotus eating act; and the third had a baby being born. Being science fiction, the baby quickly grows up and becomes a hostile alien man with mental powers and terrible fashion sense.
Considering that he was dressed in what looked to be a shiny silver sleeveless t-shirt, shiny silver arm bands, shiny sliver hot pants, and shiny silver slippers, it's a wonder no one laughed at him as he took over the base. Then again, considering that he could kill you by looking at you funny, maybe laughing and pointing at him wouldn't be the best thing to do.
Despite my snarky comments, I think I like the show, so be forewarned that it may come up again in the journal.
Come Undone: A depressed French 19 year old young man acts depressed and remembers his exboyfriend. It was a good film, although I don't think I enjoyed it very much. I wasn't in the best of moods to watch a sulky teenager be sulky I guess. I should eventually watch it again and see if my opinion changes. If nothing else, there are a lot of rolling around nekkid love scenes.
Them!: Nothing like watching giant, radioactive, monster insects ravage Los Angeles when you're depressed. As far as these kinds of movies go this one wasn't to bad. I laughed during the scene where the policeman dies saving some lost boys from the giant rubber ants. I couldn't help thinking that the only reason he was killed was so that his friend, a handsome, fbi man could woo the uppity female scientist with no competition.
Maybe the cop died so no one would suspect that he had the hots for the FBI man. His death saves the heterosexual family unit!
OK, that is a bit over the top, but I'm wondering if there is such a thing as Them! Slash, where the cop and the fbi man ignore the token scientist woman and instead have a tragic, ill fated affair.
This sounds like a natural time to mention that when I wasn't losing brain cells in front of the tv, I was losing brain cells sitting in front of the computer reading poorly written slash fiction. Since I'm not treating these things as porn, I tend to skim/skip through the sex. Even with the skimming, there have been times I end up stumbling over occasional weird physical descriptions of gay male sex. It�s not to hard to figure out which authors are not too overly familiar with male anatomy.
There's an old entry somewhere in the archives where I gave some advise to would be slash writers. Here's some more:
Even though men tend to obsess with penis size and heft, they are neither that large, nor that hard. Impale is a dorky macho figure of speech, not a literal description of anal sex. While I guess you could argue that the penis can a be a metaphor for a weapon, in real life gay men don't go around beating/stabbing each other with their "equipment." Additionally, in real life men don't keel over off balance every time they get an erection.
Strange physical descriptions aside, I spent some of my time reading genres I had never bothered with before. I read different slash stories featuring Friends. It seems that all the friends know the big secret that Joey is a bisexual slut stud, and that Chandler is his ever willing bottom boy. Even Chandlers wife. Much more interesting than the tv show.
I also read some Andromeda slash. Apparently there is a rule that any story featuring the superhuman Tyr guy has to automatically be an S&M story. The more bondage the better. No one can look at the big guy and not think leather daddy. A mean one at that. Folks into writing Farscape slash also have a thing for bondage stories. I don't, so I didn't spend much time with these.
The strangest thing I came across was an MPreg (Male Pregnancy) series featuring Xander and Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The boys weren't practicing safe sex or something, because somehow the xander boy got his male undead vampire lover pregnant. Yes, there are so many things wrong with that sentence.
I only looked at the first story of this huge multi part epic. Actually trying to read it all is totally unnecessary. Knowing that someone took the time to write such a thing is more enough.
More later,
nico
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