Prison Walls & Eros - Part 3: A Brutal Splash Of Hard Paint

   The Berlinale Teddy LGBT Film Awards are important inasmuch as we’re invariably reminded that the Anglo version of Queerness as represented in film is often remarkably shallow and universally untrue. From its first award (Almodovar’s 1987 Law Of Desire) through The Way He Looks to last year’s winner Hard Paint (Tinta Bruta), the Berlinale reliably and regularly commits to the real diversity of the Queer male. And just as importantly, across three decades it's never committed to the ongoing Anglo triteness of "coming out" as central to queer men's stories. The pathos of fuckups who can't or won't come out - as well as the recycled tragedies of AIDS and homophobic violence - very quickly become exploitation of misery when consistently purged of anything resembling enjoyed sexuality or an uplifting experience at Le Cinema.

   Hard Paint throws everybody who sees it. Is it a loosely-assembled docudrama about a very ordinary Gen Z guy, or a Queer New Wave masterpiece which cannily draws us into a lived experience, and then some? Co-directors / writers Filipe Matzembacher and Marcio Reolon have chosen to ignore the fact that housebound online nerds are usually dismissed with a presumption of asexuality, or something like it. A predictable filmic device would then be to utilize a leading man who employs fashioned looks and acting tricks to mirror our own wishes to be “revealed” and “awakened” as someone desirable or lovable. Pedro (Shico Menegat) however isn’t gaming us that way: he’s unpolished, ungendered and disaffected. Looks-wise, he’s counter-gay at best. All in all, he's an unlikely candidate upon whom to hang a film which defiantly challenges the genre of young and silly faux-queer filmschool fluff.  Much more about sex than it lets on, Hard Paint confidently splashes its way to manhood without contrived ideas about young queers.

NeonBoy on the job as objet naïf.

  Pedro’s also like a virgin, slightly on the other side of sex: he scrapes out a meagre living as NeonBoy, performing online by dancing around in cheap underwear and smeared in neon paint. This crude flagrance doesn’t quite contrast with a bleak and shabby life in the bleak and shabby port town in Porto Alegre, Brazil. His back-story is jolting: the introverted sissy has violently fought back against bullying and is facing criminal charges for doing so. He hunts down a competing online copycat Leo (Bruno Fernandes) who refuses to be warned off, and seduces him instead. While Leo’s seduction speech is corniness personified, it subverts the notion that conflict drives real hot 'n' horny sex: Pedro and Leo’s sex is disarmingly natural. Their ensuing relationship however isn’t to constitute the film’s central tension. Instead of predictable neurosis for the sake of drama, a more real (and decidedly more Brazilian) type of guileless loving just becomes part of the disjointed narrative.

   “Disjointed narrative” may be exactly what our young queer lives were all about if we care to remember. What we view later as a syrupy blur was probably just a jig-sawed melange of experiences around our life in general, as people "moved on" but our queerness remained static...almost as if it were our jailer. Sex and sexuality however form part of the classic Existentialist narrative when it's reduced to men attempting to live their lives as free men. Pedro and Leo are constantly menaced by ominous and stark threats to freedom: imprisonment in its many forms hangs over their lives at every turn. 

   Hard Paint however isn’t afraid to wield sex like a weapon: after a thriller-like episode with a pickup we’re left in no doubt about the difference between sexual performance and sex...if perhaps we missed the NeonBoy metaphors. Notably, Pedro and Leo aren’t “porno-matched” inasmuch as their physical selves defy the narcissistic overtones of much male same-sex casting, as we've come to know it. Their freshness isn't mere casting serendipity - performances like these usually only come from surrender to the intense intelligence of good direction. With few establishing shots and questionable editing choices, the film stays true to both cinematic and personal interiors, as accessed through themes of abandonment (as experienced) and voyeurism (as practiced). Virtually any political statement can be made utilizing the male body, but things are bound to become interesting when philosophy intrudes and humanizes the relatively masculine body.

Pedro & Leo

  In Latin regions the marketing for Hard Paint screamed Escándalo!, and sensationalized the bruta aspects of it all. The movie’s real strength however is within its innate acceptance of loneliness and dehumanization as part and parcel of the ongoing queer male experience. Depressing? Not necessarily...gay men in denial of their own existential loneliness often take it to extreme levels of acting out, and project loathing onto other guys who've come to honest terms with it. The odor of the "l-word" can be a cringe-worthy threat, as we court and carry on. The presumption that existential loneliness - and loneliness in general -  is both fatal psychological flaw and erection killer is erroneous. Neither mean "relationship problems", and needn't be read as cause for dismissal or masked as indifference.
 
  The self-deceiving homosexualist may casualize thoughts about dehumanization, and relegate the entire topic to vague social and technological abstractions in which he may or may not be an active participant...because after all we are of the flesh, and of our sex drive, right? Hard Paint forcefully disagrees, and is in singularly orthodox agreement with Sartre's Theory of Sexuality. The Being of the queer man is relatively robust when his sexuality isn't thwarted by bad faith about himself.  It's not too much of a stretch for the queer man to step away from the habitual male self-victimization anxiety patterns of heterosexuality, and sanely celebrate what he's not required to take on. Reolon and Matzembacher shatter a central gay vanity with the guns of psychological humanism: what remains is a not-so-fragile expose of two men experiencing what sex means by simply purposing it properly.

  Hard Paint keeps itself in check in terms of anger and melodrama, and appears to avoid liberation-through-love as the payoff. The takeaway? We’re enriched more than we know if can walk away from the show open to the possibility that the next charmless man we’re not attracted to may be the very man we should be with. Pedro takes us to that place in two hours flat; and without a hint of confected romance we're well and truly seduced.

Caveat

While Hard Paint is a new film, it must also be seen in an even newer context. The likelihood that gay men (and LGBT people) will in future experience the uneasy balance of freedom, rights and homophobic violence portrayed in Hard Paint is under immediate threat in Bolsonaro's Brazil. In terms of film history, it may very well be on its way to becoming one of those films: the pre-Nazi films of the Weimar Republic, which stand only as hope demolished by modern reactionary forces.

Hard Paint is free for Australian viewers at SBS On Demand.

Marvin Gaye: Sexual Healing, and Otherwise

    Hollywood sharks continue to circle the prey that is a big-budget Marvin Gaye musical biopic, as they've done for years, The call to a violent epic fleshed out with a baby-making sensibility is irresistible, obvious and highly lucrative. There's no need to muddy the waters with perversion or a sensitively questioning take on the man. To put it bluntly, there's little likelihood that anybody's planning on remaking "Glen Or Glenda" with a dope soundtrack.

Contemporary male bisexuals and cross-dressers have only themselves to blame if their broad “acceptance” hasn’t followed in the wake of LGBTIQ successes. Beginning with their inclusion at the onset of the Queer movement (where they enjoyed more currency than transgendered people), the vast majority have subsequently declined membership of the club. Often demonstrating little more than a determination to uphold that brand of closetry and disassociation whose by-line (and identity) begins and ends with “I’m not gay", they wonder why nobody's really taking them seriously these days.

There's been little movement since this 2014 New Republic piece on the matter, so perhaps these guys need to think some more about what they are, rather than what they’re not. And that would begin with a broad look at all aspects of sexual attraction and masculinity, rather than playing to a numbers game which invokes “preferences”, as proof of something beyond aspiration. Profits aside, there's little to be gained from re-imagining Marvin Gaye - there is however a persuasive case for more appropriately imagining the man himself.

Subverting Boundaries And Delusions

 

   Some males exhibit hysteria around their own sex appeal when it comes to other men. (It's traditionally been impossible to gauge in advance whether acknowledging or disavowing their same-sex appeal will cause most offense.) The many versions of  "I'm not gay" presented as discussion-ending fact can't pass reasonable scrutiny for homophobic motivations. And Gen Z's ideas about pansexuality and sexual fluidity are coming to dominate modern narratives (about sexual identity) in remarkably homophobic ways. Queering Marvin Gaye then simply means he's re-evaluated for our times and not his: as public property, straight-washing the guy serves only the purposes of straight-washing.

The evolving 60s  style of Motown's Prince Charming

   

The insinuating sex appeal of Marvin Gaye - one of music’s most sexually attractive men – is as intriguing as sexual attraction itself. Coltish thighs and rump packed into tight pants during his early Motown days was a nice way to package a girlish voice which swung easily to the R&B pop of the day. His boy/girl duets went a long way to cementing the genre, while establishing the boy's romantic appeal. Artistically he’d rather have been known for standards and show tunes, and he'd obviously learned more from Peggy Lee's contrived intimate vocal style than rowdier or assertively male influences. In lionizing Sinatra, his vocal shifts may or may not have taken something from that old adage of the opera world: "Tenors thrill the ladies but the baritones get to fuck them". With remarkable insight, his biographer David Ritz (in the excellent “Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye”)  challenged an older Marvin Gaye as to whether that voice was in fact indicative of a softer “woman within”: the sometimes candid Gaye dodged that bullet by attributing it to showmanship.

The bullets Marvin Gaye couldn’t dodge were those fired by his violent, cross-dressing father who shot him to death in 1984 – the day before his forty-fifth birthday. The father’s actual sexuality was never as well-defined as that of his siblings’: Marvin Gaye's paternal uncles were all gay. Suffice to say that the abused young Marvin’s shy sexuality, fueled by “daddy issues”, went on to define yet another conflict in a highly conflicted life. He pursued hyper-heterosexuality as an antidote to an unimaginably painful sexual insecurity - a pursuit which  could only sabotage a damaged boy’s potential for intimacy.

Humanizing A Heterosexual Fail

   While openly acknowledging his own cross-dressing tendencies as inheritance - as well as being intrigued by seeing himself as a woman - Marvin Gaye stopped short of acknowledging any inherited sexual ambiguity from father or uncles. Nor did he expound on the sexual aspect of his perhaps fetish. Religiously conflicted as well, he unsurprisingly embraced heterosexuality as religion, which compounded his woes to the degree that sexuality as well as his innate sensuality would bring him no worthwhile peace or comfort, spiritually or otherwise.

When Mediocrity Just Isn't Enough.

Toxic Masculinity: Are We In Or Out?

Are we not men?

   Gay Liberation hasn't lived up to the early-70s promises demonstrated by significant actions like forcing the American Psychiatric Association to de-pathologize homosexuality. For decades gay men have accepted limited rights within the rise and rise of Neo-liberalism and its attendant pitfalls. Homosexuality as practiced took a sharp turn from freewheeling counter-cultural liberation towards fetishizing hyper-masculinity & practically everything else. A slightly cleaner psychiatric bill of health doesn't necessarily mean that gay men automatically question the psychology of masculinity. Calling oneself a liberationist necessarily involves knowing what one needs to be liberated from.

For the homosexual to pursue and desire masculinity for the sake of masculinity means alighting upon a psychological minefield, best explored and navigated only with good psychology. As projection, we often indulge in desire for men we neither like nor respect - to much the same degree that our non-gay brothers cause exemplary shipwrecks in their pursuit of women. And since we're talking about male psychology, it's immaterial whether or not women do it, or the degree to which they might. While good psychology (and the life-skills acquired from it) are of prime importance to all, functioning as a man who wishes to experience positive outcomes from sex and intimacy with other men as well as negotiating life in general requires supportive psychology. That is, one which supports a unique, integrated self in being the best man he can be. Nothing "special" per se - just something which doesn't bulldoze the specifics.

I've complained for years that the field of studies we call Masculinities is a neglected and scattered pursuit which tends to retread time-worn tropes - especially notable when offset with related and component studies around feminism and gender. Ergo male homosexuality presents as a psychological dead-end street without some solid framing within masculinity as understood, and understood well. The likelihood of death for a man who desires other men at the hands of toxic masculinity is reflected in suicide and murder statistics, which aren't adequately or entirely explained by catch-alls like "homophobia". We can look at simple cause and effect only up to a certain point.
 
When it comes to masculinity, homosexualists certainly have skin in the game. And we owe it first to ourselves to sort out what masculinity is inherently good and healthy, and what is just plain toxic. Ruminating about men and masculinity is a pointless exercise if our discrimination isn't focused on concepts like "real men versus toxic masculinity" as opposed to silly platitudes like "There's no right or wrong way to be a man." We're probably on a winning trajectory if our daydreams about real men turn to equating sexy masculinity with characteristics like the easy-going kindness which only comes from real masculine security. Toxic masculinity is very much at home in a gendered regressive narrative about 'tops' and 'bottoms': homosexuals however don't spring out of the womb imitating narrow modern heterosexual paradigms.

The paradoxes of toxic masculinity are many, but the central paradox, i.e. that toxic masculinity seeks to both reward and punish its adherents goes a long way towards meaningful definition/s. And it's only recently been fingered as a belief system more akin to religion than good psychology. The appeal of toxic masculinity is both obvious and covert, with the dual promises of superiority and domination ahead of simple survival. Not unlike bad religion and bad psychiatry, its dark obverse is rooted in "curing" perceived threats to its ideological self by whatever means it takes.

Toxic Masculinity isn't an interchangeable term for "the patriarchy", and while the latter nurtures the former, toxic masculinity opposes any real tolerance which may emanate from within patriarchy. Its toxicity lies within its archly reactionary but changeable characteristics, as well as its punitive practices. Toxic masculinity's reach isn't restricted to heterosexist derision ("He throws like a girl!"), hurt feelings ("Just man up!") and exclusion ("Not man enough") but could present as latter-day attacks by a man in a dress...a man who has serious issues with maleness himself. 

 

So...are we in or out?

   That would seem to be entirely dependent on whether we rally around the LGBTIQ+ flag. And whether our thoughts about ourselves are shaped by Queer thinking. Both are quite opposed to the homo male who lives his maleness as a self-realized male. Both are vehemently opposed to the very idea of innate homosexuality, and invariably and often deviously suggest we're all 'a bit bi'. And both foment a climate of anti-male homophobia.

It's becoming clear that transvestites have the most to gain with the diminishment of male homosexuality. The drag queens who traditionally prowled gay bars may have been men in dresses who desired other men but they were never connecting with their own maleness or liberated male homosexuality. Only the names have changed - they now call themselves 'transwomen' and many undertake extreme surgical mutilations to deny what they loathe about themselves, while failing to be what they're not. Is that not toxic masculinity...done by 'our own kind'?

 If we struggle with the question, we can always ask women...those people who were the only people who stood by us and nurtured our asses while AIDS devastated us. The growing consensus seems to be that some or many gay men indeed are running a protection racket for 'trans' toxic masculinity which demands the erasure of women.    

  

 What's Next? Homos Acting All Entitled?

     The homosexualist may (or may not) well understand the impact of psychological warfare against him - including often hateful and violent exclusion from the boys-and-men club, as we knew it: homophobia wielded by the axe of toxic masculinity from extraneous sources. The contemporary homosexualist however is faced with lethal psyops coming from within our own "communities" and organizations. Young homo men especially are being targeted with psyops which exploit self-doubts traceable back to childhood. To psychologically gaslight a fundamental birthright to maleness as the foundation of healthy male homosexuality is to do intentional damage. It's a sure way to guarantee that damaged men will just go on to damage other men and not much more. Of late, we've become sloppy at seizing entitlements, with good mental health being a prime example which is costing us dearly. Bad psychology will always rush into a vacuum where no good psychology is permitted. 

Going forward, the homo man will earn entitlements - rather than special rights - by his contributions to society as a self-realized man who leads rather than follows. He's grounded, he gives, he dignifies manhood by being the antithesis of toxic masculinity. 

He'll look back at his history, take what is his and attract the love his loving self deserves. 

    (Expanded and revised November 2024)

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Bobbie Gentry In Four Easy Pieces, and Pass The Biscuits Please

The lavish “The Girl From Chickasaw County” collection is on its way to becoming the music box-set of the year, right when the compact disc format sails into its sunset era. After decades of low-level rumbling on behalf of The Legend of Bobbie Gentry, The Stuff been served by the overdue release of her entire Capitol Records efforts, and then some.

Legends of course need to grasp on to something more than core substance for real traction. The embellishments and the made-up stuff take care of things well enough when the personification of the legend itself/herself refuses to take the bait of publicity for any reason whatsoever. It remains to be seem what effect the glamorous box will have on The Legend: its most significant recent boost came courtesy of Neely Tucker from the Washington Post attempting - and failing - to flush Bobbie Gentry out in much the same way a zealous press would stalk a killer on the run. It doesn't seem too iconoclastic to suggest that 'finding where Bobbie Gentry lives' and 'a slow news day' are probably one and the same thing, but Legends can always use sustenance. Fifty years after the fact, Rolling Stone are finally on board with Bobbie Gentry - albeit dismissing her as a country artist. (In the counterculture heyday of the mag, artists who made career choices like Bobbie Gentry were only ever acknowledged with snotty contempt if they were acknowledged at all.)

While Bobbie Gentry’s 1967-71 Capitol recordings are almost her entire recorded output, they’re also representative of a career ethos which frustrates many who are looking for a musical integrity on their terms. Self-styled musicologists will miss the point of Bobbie Gentry if they’re looking for a slew of albums which 'legitimize' her as Swamp Rock’s First Goddess, and pop fans of the era might be wishing for a lot more Top 40 fodder of the Jimmy Webb persuasion. And that's too bad for them: Bobbie Gentry, you see has no interest at all in curating a legacy or a legend. And good luck to the self-appointed arbiters of what is highbrow and what is lowbrow because Bobby Gentry presents a paradox or two for further consideration.

The recordings aren't, or weren't, a woman's work in its entirety. They are however the best documentation we have. Which suggests the first bullet point regarding The Legend of Bobbie Gentry:

The Homoerotics of Orientalism

    While Homosexual History is a disjointed affair – the 1870's Victorian term “homosexual” being a relatively new concept comprising definition, pathology and vilification in equal parts – we the men who desire and have sex with other men can glean much from the past to know about our present day selves beyond modern Western ideas about identity.

We’re wise to take a “Well, yes and no…” approach when trusting academia to stay in its own lane: Queer integrity necessitates viewing LGBTIQ as a political collective whose successes rise and fall on being able to rally around overarching goals...goals which coincidentally intersect with race and broader gender issues only some of the time. Masculinity itself as an academic pursuit somewhat surprisingly however has been most poorly studied, and is consequently misunderstood. And male homosexuality as an offending sub-species of masculinity isn’t likely to fare well within that contextualization.

It’s then overwhelmingly impressive when an academic with impeccable credentials publishes something like “The Homoerotics of Orientalism”. Joseph A. Boone’s 520-page masterpiece (a fascinatingly informative and satisfying read) manages to take Orientalism from its old-tymey connotations and frame so much about how homosexualists are very real (and perhaps universal, if not timeless) participants in masculinity, although currently disenfranchised when it comes to effectively shaping masculinity.

No slouch himself when it comes to nutting out the finer points of Queerdom, race and transnational culture, (the following extract from) Eng-Beng Lim's excellent review highlights the degree of critical thought which pervades the book:

In Joseph A. Boone’s monumental tome, The Homoerotics of Orientalism , the conundrum of engaging in the evidentiary politics of homo-orientalism itself becomes a critical challenge. What the book helpfully provides is a surfeit of historical evidence for their comparative quotidian and sensationalist treatments. Such an exhaustive examination of the ‘cross-cultural interplay of homosexual desires and taboos throughout history’ is best read as a contribution to world sexuality studies rather than queer studies even as it steers astutely clear of identitarian-based readings of homosexuality.

Readers who marvel at the book’s interdisciplinary visual, literary, historical and ethnographic scope may be struck just the same by its particular strength as an encyclopedic endeavour. Its coverage of same- sex encounters or male-on-male love over a period of 400 years primarily in the Islamicate world and secondarily in Anglo-Europe and the United States is at times breathtaking and at times overwhelming. The sheer range of Western and Middle Eastern objects (miniaturist painting, salon art, diaries, travel writing, canonical texts, films, ethnography, pornography, advertising, cartoons) is itself a useful resource. Many visual artefacts are given relatively long treatments for those seeking close readings of representative images as texts. They are richly descriptive and often outweigh the theoretical framings ghosting them. This encyclopedia-plus approach serves as a kind of repository or locus for myriad meanings generated by the ‘echo’ chambers in the study. As Boone surmises, ‘reading these cultural manifestations contrapuntally, listening to their echo-effects they create, adds a density of texture that illuminates the staying power, connotative energies, and accretion of meanings that emanate from them’ (p. 53).

In this regard, the mounting evidence of what might count as orientalist homoerotica or homo-orientalist art reads like a ‘discovery’, toggling between colonial anthropology and the legal definition of the term to produce a kind of self-conscious, defensive or enlightened form of critical reading. It would seem that this archive of homo- evidence is so big that it can anticipate both homophobic pre-emptions and queer interrogatories around the question of same-sex desire and erotic practice from the precolonial to the transnational Islamic world. The book makes the case for a more textured, if also benign, form of humanistic understanding that is untethered from the overdeterminations or preformulations of power that some scholars are said to model (badly) after Edward Said and Michel Foucault. The result is a compendium of sex acts, courtship behaviours and eros between men that are sometimes observed in their own right as homoerotic evidence. Suffice to say, the book’s engagement with the critical ruminations of Said, Foucault or other theorists is secondary to the full descriptions of identifiable themes, encounters and tropes (such as the beautiful boy, the pasha and the eunuch) that appear in its many sympathetic readings of works by European writers and artists. Boone adopts a largely detached stance in his writing, which shines in the literary interpretations. Elsewhere, it seems almost campy as readers pore over rare images and graphic descriptions of men doing things to other men as he maintains his resolute tone of directed indifference.

    Boone's own preface reveals his clear understanding of the nuances of sexuality which must shape such a broad subject lest it be undone by dualistic assumptions, or an overemphasis on differences. He expertly rises to the challenge of addressing both homosexual acts as well as identity, as they've historically played out for, and by, men of what was once known as The Orient. The author hasn't assembled a linear history as such - more a highly successful attempt to empirically gather evidence which isn't assembled to suit any narrative or foregone conclusions.

von Gloeden's 1890s Orientalized Sicilians

An actual Oriental / Ottoman same-sex couple circa 1920s

 






In focusing on Orientalism, Boone is able to relieve homosexual history of being determined by, or rooted in, Occidental Classicism and its uncomfortable associations with pederasty. In fact, more modern bridging images (as photographed by the likes of von Gloeden) appear to be of rather old  'boys': he coated his subjects in emulsions and used filters to peddle real men as 'youths'. (Anti-pornographers and their missionary kind are usually smart enough to avoid scapegoating von Gloeden as an exploiter of the poor and/or non-consenting: his models received good royalties from their images, and did so with the blessings of their communities.)

Von Gloeden's images are important inasmuch as they are the earliest photographic evidence of homoerotic Orientalism as it straddled the art vs smut divide. They also effectively refute how European art had traditionally insisted on mitigating the penis size of sexually mature males from Classicism onwards. While some insist that the photograph itself is more of a vehicle of pornography  than any painting or sculpture (due to its infinite possibilities for reproduction), there's no doubting its superior ability to document. But what von Gloeden documented wasn't penises of exotic races - he documented forays into erotic Arcadianism and Orientalism by virtue of a then-revolutionary medium. In a way he made homoerotic Orientalism more real, and in doing so dignified it.

It would however be quite wrong to suggest that von Gloeden (or any image for that matter) defines or best represents homoerotic Orientalism, or that it had, or has, watershed moments. The Homoerotics of Orientalism successfully prevents the topic (and the men) from being dismissed as products and images of Western projection: Orientals themselves certainly bring enough meaningful homoeroticism to inform the topic.

 

Professor Joseph Boone address (Van Leer Jerusalem Institute 2016)

 
Of course "The Orient" nowadays refers to territories, races and peoples far removed from what and where Orientalism flourished - Boone's milieu encompasses cultures of North Africa, Asia Minor and a broad Arabia. Language, dress and religion have significantly gutted the Middle-Eastern man of his benign homoerotic appeal, and Boone is courageous enough to invoke Abu Ghraib images of men to demonstrate that demonically dark side of homoeroticism, as practiced by men (and women) who torture.

Orientalism as a viable homoerotic pursuit probably had its last days of innocence in our own times immediately before the demise of the busy cruising areas around the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. They hosted Israeli and Palestinian men coupling in the name of Eros...oblivious to the reality of The Other being rapidly recast as The Enemy. Given what came before (The Crusades) and what has since transpired, it's not too simplistic to isolate these acts of homosexuality as possibly the only tangible evidence of men behaving with any degree of sanity toward each other in the entire region, for a very long time.

The Seditions and Subversions of "Querelle"

The thought of murder often evokes thoughts of the sea…of sailors…and what 

eventually follows thoughts of the seas and murder is the thought of love and sexuality. 

Querelle by Cocteau 1947

   Or so the opening credits voice-over for R.W. Fassbinder’s Querelle claims. The credits themselves state that the film is about Genet’s “Querelle de Brest” - rather than "an adaption of” or “based on” the book. The novel's anti-hero is both pretty homosexualist and psychopathic killer. Some knowledge of the classic 1947 Existentialist tome may or may not be a hindrance in appoaching the 1982 Expressionist-cum-Surrealist film. Querelle challenges direct access from almost every approach: the narrative is Querelle himself, and that’s underscored by anti-cinema devices like bad dialog, obvious sets, melodrama and the darkest of comedy.

Film school teaches that script is of elementary importance. Consumers of porn know it isn’t. Fassbinder knows how to get ‘em where they think, and in doing so abandons most traditional elements of film-making in favor of images and sound which can steer a viewer in diverse or conflicting directions. The film's sound design incorporates narrations which mock the idea of Great Truths being told. Occasional title inserts from Genet serve as other theater-in-the-round asides. "Clues" are often thrown from long shots, and some scenes back-reference others within the labyrinthine plots. Querelle was gutted prior to release - twenty percent of the film was edited after Fassbinder's death for running-time considerations. Scenes have been rearranged, and secondary characters like Matrose and Mario's stool pigeon / boyfriend Dede are gone. Querelle's earlier murder and robbery of  The Armenian has been excised altogether.

Three and a half decades of being relegated to cult-but-not-camp status haven’t anointed Querelle with any revisionist patina, causing it to be celebrated for something it isn’t. And what it isn’t is a film with a clear story line – the auteur rightly deemed the book as coming up short on story. Nor did he attempt to create one: the convolutions of Querelle’s exposition challenge us to focus on what we get as fact or fantasy. As Dylan’s wordy “Lily, Rosemary and The Jack of Hearts” assembled shady characters, ideas and images for an unresolved musical tale with cabaret and crime motifs, Fassbinder does it cinematically. He approaches the source material thus:


“As far as discrepancy between objective plot and subjective fantasy is concerned, “Querelle de Brest” may be the most radical novel in world literature. On the surface, its story, when divorced from Genet’s world of images, is a fairly uninteresting (in fact, third-class) tale about a criminal, and as such is hardly worth our while.  

 
Only those who are truly identified with their own selves no longer need to fear fear. And only those who are rid of their fear are capable of loving nonjudgmentally. The ultimate goal of all human endeavor: to live one’s own life.” 

 

 Token Identities

 

Querelle...sailor

Lieutenant Seblon... Querelle's voyeuristic superior and closeted admirer 

Lysiane...Madame of the Feria Bar bordello, wife of Nono

Robert / Gil....Brother of Querelle, lover of Lysiane / Unwitting patsy to Querelle

Nono....Husband of Lysiane, gatekeeper of the Feria Bar

Vic...Querelle's partner in crime, his murder victim

Mario...Corrupt police officer, Feria fixture

Roger....pretty boy, brother/substitute of Gil's unseen girlfriend

A pox be upon this house and all it stands for: the Feria bordello

   On a massive soundstage sits the set of Brest redux - an Expressionistic  re-imagining of the French port destroyed in World War 2.  For cinematic purposes, the town is more lately dominated by the Feria Bar, replete with enormous phallic statuary. Like a mosque of sorts, there's little doubt about what overshadows the town's trade and sensibility. The theatrically lit and painted port of no fixed temporal identity is not unlike its denizens and visitors, inasmuch as they too are of identities of dubious substance, and of no particular age. All exist as interchangeable people - not limited to, but most notably within sexuality considerations and the inherent vagaries of same.

If a bordello's secondary social purpose is to keep men from straying to queerness, then the Feria (transl. "market", "fair") has certainly lost its way by the time Querelle arrives. It's probably not the place for a slow-starting son to come of manly age in the traditional sense, nor would it be an ideal mobile brothel for an army in need of approved sexual release. The identities of the Feria's top brass have caused its culture to morph from prostitution into something else.

  
Enter Querelle then, a loner fresh off the recently docked Le Vengeur ("The Avenger"). While negotiating an opium sale to Nono at the Feria, he runs into his brother Robert, currently ensconced as lover of the ageing voluptuary Lysiane. He decides he "wants" Lysiane - especially when he learns that a toss of dice will determine whether or not his ass first goes to Nono. Lysiane lives in a blurred world of confected desirability, womanly wiles and tarot cards. Games of chance it seems determine how love and sexuality become manifest at the Feria, or at least how they are deconstructed.

Both milieu and subculture conspire similarly with the individual in search of identity, and in the case of homosexuality, identity often is experienced as mirrored male bodies defined by dicks and asses and the what-nots of will-to-power. Querelle however is no genital fetishist: within his apparently disoriented sexuality he seeks a way to prevail without having to ritualistically compete with other men on time-honored terms. But not by assuming “fairy” characteristics (like affected softness and non-violence) will he seek identity: grabbing at crumbs from the table of "real men" isn't his style. Querelle’s world according to Fassbinder isn’t one of misogyny or fascism – it’s one in which femaleness and femininity are ineffective and superfluous...regardless of who attempts it.

Querelle will take upon himself what the Feria is failing to accomplish: the task of how to best purpose a hard dick towards one's own best interests. Too much a narcissist to think with his own -  or to assign magical powers to the dicks of others - the foundations of Querelle's sexuality lie far beyond the simple tawdriness of most men's fears and fantasies.

Subverting the Rough Trade Mystique

 

Querelle 1982

  The protagonist Georges Querelle, of no fixed past and no fixed morality (beyond being a sailor and a criminal) is presented for consideration. As exhibited by Fassbinder in the form of Brad Davis, he’s a ripe Tom of Finland cartoon come to life as a gay archetype: short-legged and working class and presenting as dubiously attractive...in a butch kinda way. Revealed as sexually submissive although murderous, the seafaring trash is enough to signal any homosexualist that there’s a rocky road ahead in terms of identifying with, or desiring Querelle. Within our own sensibilities, we’re not even sure that the boy-man can be pegged as gay or non-gay. And he’s not young enough in close-up to earn sympathies one way or the other, despite his claims to be a neophyte when it comes to bending over.

The murder of Vic has transpired for no good reason. While he's stripping down to wash, Querelle involves him in a hypothetical exchange about what men Vic would have sex with, culminating with Querelle himself on offer. Vic’s rejection costs him his life, and Querelle's sexuality becomes entwined with betrayal and killing. As penance for the murder of his partner in crime, Querelle returns to the Feria to purposely lose a toss of the dice. But the punishment is a most Catholic one: he unexpectedly climaxes quickly while being sodomized, and instead of expected pain he experiences pleasure and no sense of humiliation whatsoever.

Death - the wages of not sinning with Querelle

    While  Querelle inhabits no fixed era, Fassbinder is prepared to go balls-deep into rough homosexuality in a way that Genet couldn’t fully explore post-World War 2. Genet’s set pieces of homosexuality within Existentialism  might still tag him today as a literary enfant terrible, but the rough trade “bisexuals” who fuck, slice throats and betray without remorse weren’t unique to Genet’s tastes and times. Life, love and survival still often play out on the edge of a knife, symbolically and otherwise. 

Self-proclaimed “power bottoms” have much to learn from Querelle, inasmuch as doing it effectively possibly requires varying degrees of contemptuous psychopathy as well as a simple need to be loved and protected. By his own calculation, passive anal homosexuality requires no love at all, but actively fucking requires a little…for a short time at least. He therefore presses his body into service as an object upon which to turn the tables of power in his favor, with sexual gratification as a mere bonus rather than a Muse-like calling or a compulsion. The homosexual queerness of Querelle is of the entrenched European kind, and is repeatedly defined as acts between men: not binary Anglo-American gay couplings of tops and bottoms.

Jason Gould: Dangerous Man? Maybe. Maybe Not.

If ever a man was entitled to leave a media footprint, then Jason Gould’s remarkable talents would make it so. If ever a man was entitled to sip from the often poisoned chalice of fame and celebrity then that dubious honor would fall to Jason Gould before many others. Strange then, that we know so little of Jason Gould the artist. Or the man for that matter.

While Gould’s body of work thus far is too sparse to sustain fandomania - gay or otherwise – he has created earnestly, albeit on his own dabbling terms. In doing so he has dropped many clues of a road hard traveled as a gay man. Some time has passed since that intense boy with the violin piqued my attention in a clip from 1991's “The Prince of Tides”, and his just-released album “Dangerous Man”. In between there’s his triple-threat short feature “Inside Out” and a 2012 EP song folio which certainly proved that the boy can sing and write. Intriguing then, is just what kind of first album he'll present at age 50, as representative of a musical vision.

Jason Gould: more prodigy than prodigious.

Producer Quincy Jones isn't likely to waste his expertise on an album for an unimportant talent or his art: "Q"s diverse artist roster ranges from Sinatra to Ray Charles to Michael Jackson. For Jason Gould, he eschews current pop sensibility and dance beats in favor of something far more sympathetic to an essentially introspective artist.

“Dangerous Man” isn’t just another gay singer/songwriter strutting his stuff for the masses. Or for a  cabaret audience either. He sings with elan and polish, but not so much that you can’t hear “Please love me” as a theme. A siren song perhaps, and Gould seems honest enough to know it. He tinkers with romance and virtuoso performance early in the album: “Bridge Over Troubled Waters” is the go-to showcase for a great set of pipes. But he takes his time to set up an intimacy few others bother with before letting it rip on the song. His innate musicality is assured (and assuring) across familiar songs like “For All We Know” and “The Way You Look Tonight”, along with superior reworkings of “Morning Prayer” and “This Masquerade” from his earlier EP.

The real payoff however comes with the album’s second half. Jason Gould shines when the arrangements get adventurous. The title track (“Dangerous Man”) is an apparent victim song…with a sting in its tail for the sake of some truth. “All’s Forgiven” encapsulates a central tenet of Attitudinal Healing. But not as a sappy Hallmark Card set to musical schlock: here it’s an emphatic anthem. Modern crooners have much to learn about just how to get it right, and Gould's reading of Jones' obscure "The Pornbroker" is a worthy template. The closing track ("One Day") suggests a return to love, in order to best know the freedom of a heart at peace. In our saner moments, we always hope that's engraved on a gentleman's calling card.

And so Jason Gould steps up to the plate once and for all as another gay man with a tale or two to tell about loving and living. And abandonment, rescue and redemption of the spirit. Not for the sake of gaiety however: “Dangerous Man” is as rich a musical exploration of one man’s experiences as it’s likely to get this side of bad taste. We may not know the man, but his weathered authenticity is most attractive. A sex symbol for the thinking man? Why not? We all seduce ourselves ultimately, and if a man like Jason Gould gets us there musically it can’t be such a bad thing.

And a little less levity for the Holidays was all I asked for: how sweet it is that I got some music for grownups!  😌

When Is It Time To Start Paying For Sex?

Self-esteem is a wonderful thing. Regardless of age, we all should have it. But alas, sometimes The Mists of Avalon close in, and everybody is...well, just so dammed inadequate. They don’t seem to give us that self-esteem boost we need.

Take this simple test, and find out if it’s time to break out the wallet and pony up!


1. I think of myself as a 10, and therefore I deserve a 10.

2. I’m looking for fun, and whether or not I'm much fun isn't the issue.

3. Needy guys turn me right off.

4. I can’t quite bring myself to see a guy again after I’ve had sex with him.

5. I don’t like the guys who like me, and the guys I like don’t reciprocate.

6. I believe I have limitless choices, but haven’t crunched the actual numbers ‘round town recently.

7. My sexuality is entirely about having my desires, fantasies and fetishes met.

 8. I believe I have a lot to offer, but haven’t offered anybody anything lately.

 9. I prefer to have a social, intellectual and financial advantage over guys, but…

10. …I find it personally insulting when people suggest I should be paying for sex.

Scoring:

0-3: You might get laid soon for free.

4-6: Your freebie days are numbered…get familiar with curb-crawling and $$$ negotiations.

7-10: Make a weekly booking with an agency, and demand they send new meat every time!

Is That All There Is...to a Holocaust?

   

 

 

   Another Holocaust Memorial Day will come and go. Some will pause and reflect on what it means to humanity going forward. Others will just do what they do all year long: invoke Shoah to deceptively promote the very ideas which thrive when remembrance is nefariously re-purposed as emotive buzzwords and worse. Moral man has no great difficulties comprehending the annihilation of an individual and his or her family and culture - immoral society however collectively eschews what the numbers really mean. 

 
Holocausts and stuff…I’m reminded of delivering one of my best friends’ eulogy when he succumbed to AIDS. Steve loved the very best of everything, especially literature. For him I drew on Hemingway’s “A Farewell To Arms”, and how Papa H. likened the dead World War 1 soldiers to becoming nothing more than concrete numbers and dates on roads and regiments. And how honor and courage seemed like obscene abstractions. (I lost my audience in that little chapel early on: neither an ashamed mother nor a motley collection of homosexualists drew comfort from my words. But the non-denominational celebrant at least claimed to get it.)

 Broadway initially felt a direct effect of AIDS because it hit their bottom line hard: a multi-million dollar business was built on the back of homosexual creativity. The shows had much difficulty going on. But that particular loss was in and of itself. Schlagers and tits and feathers aside, it doesn’t address legacy or community: the cumulative knowledge and extraordinary talents of an era’s gay men weren’t handed on to homo replacements on Broadway or anywhere else. Our rate of replication couldn’t quickly assure that clever hands and astute minds would be replaced in a generation. Gay men worldwide lost our best and brightest across the boards, and as a generation or two of men on the planet we’re diminished for it.

 

Come as you are. Or are not.

 The fact that the modern skinhead haircut was pioneered by gay AIDS activists as a Holocaust reminder is something apparently forgotten by gays and fashionistas alike. Analogies don’t always work because nothing is quite the same as anything else. But Shoah teaching principles aren’t as exclusively Judeo-centric as one might think, and homosexualists can draw much from them. As we note that effects ripple from cause, we also note that ACT-UP was as much about honor and courage as it was about anger.

Perhaps all that some of us will take away from the Holocaust is that we’ll never meet or know the grandsons. Those nice Jewish and Gypsy and Slavic guys we should be meeting. And that’s okay, because at least we’re relating the 'then' to the 'now'. We can, and should, collectively remember 'our own kind as well. And also ask ourselves what legacy of theirs we’ve been deprived of. (Notably, our own kind weren’t liberated from concentration camps when the good guys showed up: they were transferred to other prisons to complete their sentences…‘cos, well, the law (for fags) is the law.)

Holocausts and stuff…we’ve recovered somewhat but only somewhat. One does not need to be a Jew or a homosexual to observe who and what's been lost in terms of homosexual culture. The generational continuance of history, knowledge, intellect and strong leadership was indiscriminately decimated, and the vacuum is sucking in sewerage. Better medical interventions and same-sex marriage don’t make the ever-increasing threats to our being go away. Legal changes by stealth and hubris are more threatening than ever. Political elites of all persuasions do their dirty deals without ever really acknowledging human rights – let alone bargaining for it. Many brothers-in-deviance are probably wishfully thinking our future is still just somewhere over the rainbow, at best.

Or is this the ideal climate from which the homosexualist can, or could, emerge to confidently and purposefully help reset the future? Our feminist sisters are also realistically seeing problems ahead for women, and they’re asking “Where are the gay men? We were there for you front and center when AIDS hit.” Are we forgetting our friends while we pretend to not hear the narratives about fags lives not mattering?

And, most of all, aren’t we forgetting that being a victim isn’t an easy job, and that one gets no thanks for it? Shoah teaching is most definitely not about perpetuating a state of victimhood as perceived or experienced. As we remember, we're encouraged to never again be victims for starters. We don’t have to be pacifists to make that fundamental thought-leap to becoming the change we wish to see in the world. We just have to change our mind about ourselves first, and then see optimism and opportunity. 

 

   

(Revised January 2023)

The Code of The HJW

Prison Walls & Eros - Part 2: The Ridiculously Sublimated

    The male heterosexual imperative isn’t as persuasive a force as we’re led to believe: we depend on media saturation and extensive social engineering to prevent men from naturally slipping into varying degrees of the homosexual experience. The truths and mythologies of male-to-male relationships within the most overtly segregated male institutions – schools, seminaries, the military and prisons – are rarely ever taken seriously beyond the assumption that no good will come of men being deprived of pussy. That assumption of course is entirely point-of-view dependent: for much to mull over there's always 1967's Fortune And Men's Eyes for theatrical references to everything from the high camp of sodomy and rape through the sentiments of Will Shakespeare himself. 

 Prior to punk rock and the 1970's re-framing of sexual politics, the specific 'punk' of prison sex was a behind-bars fixture: young, dressed up and made up to advertise his sexual availability. At a price, he was as much predator as victim since he was often of quite ruthless character. Not 'queen' nor 'fag', it’s highly debatable as to whether or not his place in the prison hierarchy was most subordinate. To arbitrarily define and dismiss him as someone who “assumes a submissive female role at the bottom of the inmate gender hierarchy” isn’t as informative as it purports to be. While acknowledging the system in which he functions, he isn’t necessarily the poster boy for a feminist degradation narrative. He may very well as a man experience his role as intensely physically satisfying, and that's just for starters.

 
The archetype of the prison 'punk' is mid-50s Elvis Presley: an obviously made-up and flamboyantly dressed longhair with wide hips tilted slightly forward just like a lurid stripper. He didn’t disturb males of decent society for no good reason: if you hadn’t spent time in the slammer yourself (and simply knew what Elvis Presley was), then the striptease drum features would probably get you where you think. He wasn’t a non-threatening joke-queer like Liberace who laughed at himself: he was something else again…something dangerous, with heavy makeup and hair dye and silks and satins in defiance of repressed and suited conformity.

While much has been made of the fact that he further popularized 'race music', the gender nuances of the young and raw Elvis Presley have become obscured by time and revisionist history. His self-invention as a punk for the masses can probably be attributed to the exhibitionist naiveté of a mama’s boy following intuitive gender callings, while hopped-up on pharmacy-grade speed. He hadn’t had the experience of incarceration, but was hypnotically attracted to the flashy drag and not-quite-male sexuality he promoted.

Prison Walls & Eros - Part 1: The Sublime

    We don’t often delve into our psychosexuality when responding to the homoeroticism of sex behind bars. It’s a staple of modern pornography. From a getting-off perspective it’s a no-brainer. One aspect of why prison sexuality continues to figure so strongly in both gay and non-gay male sexual fantasies is quite obvious: incarceration is a very good excuse to fully and without inhibition explore the male taboo of enjoyment of the homosexual experience. The fact that it’s best enjoyed with another man’s body isn’t helpful in honestly addressing what is usually felt as internalized homophobia, but experienced as most pleasurable. In short, choice has nothing to do with men’s attachment to thoughts of prison sex, and that’s its attraction.

But pornography only addresses desire – that’s its band-aid purpose. It doesn’t address existential loneliness, or the pervasive longing which in many ways defines much of our culture and individual selves, regardless of what relationships we may experience (or, all too often, reject).

It’s tempting to imagine that bridging the gap between pornography and longing is a future topic to be addressed by gay men. However, some digging into our culture yields up Jean Genet’s 1950 silent film 'Un Chant d’Amour'(“Song Of Love”). Reviled as pornography from its onset, this short masterpiece of homoerotic existentialism is peculiarly more relevant than ever. It’s still deeply subversive inasmuch as there is no refuge within for the homophobe of any persuasion – the viewer is denied that dubious payoff.

Set in an oppressively gloomy prison, the familiar dance of The Boy’s capitulation to both The Man and homosexuality is perfunctory and speedy – the need for connection jolts him from his narcissistic auto-eroticism. The Man’s tears of nothingness give way to a bashful smile of being, when he's "accepted".  The film has been fairly critiqued as a damnation of the walls men build around themselves.

Juxtaposing the bleakness of the wall of separation, Genet offers a sweet counterpoint fantasy of bucolic contact, respect, sensuality and liberation. Much has been made of Genet’s insistence on aberrant homosexualism as a valid and menacing repudiation of 'civilized society', but 'Un Chant d’Amour' is as decent as it gets for the thinking homosexualist: as it documents immuration, it also documents our lost history when homosexuals (and homosexuality) actually had the ability to transcend age, race, gender and identity.

Aberrance Is Its Own Reward: The Michael Lucas Edition

As a veteran of the Queer Wars of the 90s, I’m all ears when an activist with a dissenting voice is denounced as a revolting extremist, a moronic bigot, a hate spewer, a hypocrite and a whore. (It’s par for the course, and you’re probably not doing anything worthwhile if you haven’t been similarly denounced by “your own kind”). The reactionary loathing which Lucas’ brand of Zionism attracts from Queerish gay men isn’t substantiated by logic or reason, and we’re wise to ask why. While not wishing Israel well isn’t proof of anti-Semitism, it just happens to be one of the very best indicators currently at our disposal.


For close to a decade, Michael Lucas has been a very uppity homosexual. He’s the aberrant homosexualist par excellence. Not happy to just live the shadowy dual persona of pornographer and pornographee, he regularly walks the burning coals between political left and political right and lives to yell about it.  An opinionated homosexual is nothing new, but one who can actually put up without drowning himself in Post Modernist rhetoric certainly is.

One case in point is the subject of Israel. Lucas regularly picks at one of the sores of sloppy liberalism: concurrent promotion of gay rights as well as so-called Palestinian rights... a cause which bathes itself in claims of no anti-Antisemitism whatsoever. It’s indeed a rich mother lode to be mined by the skeptic: the narrative is always framed in terms of a juggernaut of Israeli violence committed against innocent victims, with but one historical reference being the Holocaust - as in “They’re doing exactly what Hitler did!” That the fallacy isn’t regularly repudiated by facts - or simply laughed off – is certainly indicative of a mindset which doesn’t accommodate at its core a Jew’s basic right to exist. By logical extension, you can be certain that a militarily-protected homosexual state would similarly unleash a hatred which is masked by sympathy for the “victims”, no matter how loathsome their beliefs or what ends they desire. Lucas was quick off the mark to point out a fundamental lie of the broadened “Islamophobia” trope: despising a murderous religious ideology can’t be seriously construed as racism unless you're a stupid dilettante, or worse.

"The Way He Looks": Another Look

Whatever voyeuristic discomfort a grown man expects to experience with the subject of pubescent boys “coming of age” is quickly dissipated by this 2014 Brazilian charmer. Writer/director Daniel Ribeiro deftly delivers a big romance within a smallish movie, disarmingly free of any obvious agenda - we don't even get to find out whether or not first love lasts. Decidedly purged of Americanized LGBTism and its attendant pretense and posturing, “The Way He Looks” is thematically Old Hollywood: part “Enchanted Cottage”, part “Ugly Duckling”. 

You see, Leo (as unforgettably played by Guilherme Lobo), is blind. His disability is compounded by over-protective parents who curb his desires for independence at every turn. Physically awkward, he’s looked after by school gal-pal Giovana, who soon will be replaced by The New Boy In School, Gabriel. Just about the right amount of teen angst ensues, as clumsy non-starting heterosexuality is replaced by a surer homosexuality. Latin sensibility (and Latin sensuality) easily dispense with “the blindness problem”: Leo can’t look at his beloved, but he sure can similarly experience him by sense of smell. Free of sighted self-consciousness, Leo can treat Gabriel to an extended perusal of his rump in the shower to nobody’s embarrassment: the camera pointedly reminds the rest of us that he’s to be desired and not pitied. Perhaps he’s also admirably blessed: he knows as proven fact that looks have nothing to do with the homosexual matrix, or love for that matter.

As an unapologetic homage to the transformative power of love, “The Way He Looks” is on sure footing from beginning to end. Director Ribeiro refuses the viewer predictable distractions like the grubbiness of guilt and shame, gratuitous violence and messages about “real” homosexuality.  As a movie experience, it’s a deeply satisfying emotional manipulation. We just know these guys are going to be okay, and maybe our take-away is that we’re going to be okay too.