Everyday Gay

There have been a lot of movies lately about the persecution of homosexuals. Their trailers especially are like those of action movies, with pounding brass and bible-force quotations about "forbidden love." This is fine. The problem is thinking that these movies advance progressive causes, that these silver screen homosexuals, as incendiary as silver screen gas tanks, help the lives of real homosexuals.

Movies like Eyes Wide Open and Circumstance, archetypes of the persecution drama, are for people nestled in progressive enclaves looking to feel pity and disdain for those who don’t get to live in Greenwich Village. The star of the movies is bigotry, with persecuted homosexuals as a sideshow, as caged animals staring intensely at one another and having sex whenever they get the chance.

In dramas about straight people it's okay for them to be horny circus panthers now and then because the straight people in popular culture are whole people with whole lives that run the gamut of human experience. They have children and kidnap children, have wonderful, happy lives and die alone. Straight people are the prom queen and Carrie too. But homosexuals aren't. They're never not homosexuals. The essential problem with these persecution movies is their insistence that a homosexual is their stigmata. No straight person movie would so daringly dispense with backstory the way those about homosexuals so readily do; their sexual preference is all the explanation deemed necessary. Homosexuals are people though, and their qualities as people should be mostly what movies about homosexuals are about. So it's a triumph when some gay dude gets prosecuted for a good old-fashioned crime like embezzlement (see I Love You Phillip Morris). It's by chronicling their lives as criminals or gorillas or captains of normalcy – people like everyone else – that they will come to be treated like everyone else.

So long as homosexuals are sequestered in fantastic, oriental tales they will never be known for the exceedingly typical people they are. And until they are known in all their average glory their oppression will continue. One day some benighted bigot will enjoy a homosexual romantic comedy without realizing it and so stumble into revelation; it will be like being told what you thought was chicken are bull testicles and retching for absolution, but finally deciding that if it tastes like chicken, who cares? And that'll happen, just as soon as we stop making homosexual sex into an earth-shatteringly big deal because, after all, it all just tastes like chicken. 

on a different subject -- "we are listening to the words of a dead man dancing" a Libyan commenting on a radio broadcast by Qaddafi