Considering Bruno

The film Bruno with Sacha Baron Cohen generated so much heated discussion. I saw it the day after it opened, and found it hilarious to see scare stories from my childhood made real. This was the perverted, unnatural, ungodly gayness I had been warned against, and it was portrayed with gusto. And I enjoyed the parody of our current celebrity magazine baby fascination too.

Many reviews have described Bruno as a stereotype, but that is not exactly accurate. He IS homophobia in the form of a sassy, sexualized man. Bruno creates a spectacle, a comedic nightmare of our deep fears, right down to a drawer full of gerbils. The movie functions like a catalog of our culture’s gay panic buttons, like the fear that gay guys will try to seduce straight guys by appearing naked in front of them, or emasculate them with questions and suggestions of cock-sucking lips, or adopt children and be atrocious parents. What we make of that spectacle is very revealing.

From the NY Times: “An early sequence that graphically shows Brüno and his lover exerting themselves in various positions and with the assistance of, among other things, a Champagne bottle, a fire extinguisher and a specially modified exercise machine, derives its humor less from the extremity of their practices than from the assumption that sex between men is inherently weird, gross and comical.” Whose assumption is that? For me, the sequence derived its humor from the joyous defiance of the kind of sex typically shown in movies and from the wild abandon demonstrated by the characters.

The NY Times article mentions 3 times that the humor in the film comes from laughing at people, people the reporter refers to as “dumb rednecks” and “dumb losers.” Who thinks who is dumb here? The Times shows its own various prejudices by publishing these terms as if they were unproblematic. The people in the movie were not merely “targets of the film’s humor” as the reviewer claims, but rather participants in a spectacle, witnesses to Bruno. Sure there is some reality-TV style humor in watching people in outrageous situations, but it is the Times calling them dumb, not Bruno.

In a statement from the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation: "Some people in the gay community will be as troubled as GLAAD is that the movie doesn't decrease homophobia, but decreases the public's comfort with gay people.” On what basis were we looking for this film to increase the public’s comfort with us? Thus GLAAD reveals exactly how un-ambitious they are about gay rights. Comfort is antithetical to progress, we do not learn and evolve by becoming more comfortable.

More from GLAAD: “Scenes like that don't help America understand the hundreds of thousands of gay families who get up every day, do the carpool then rush home to make dinner and be with their children," And what has GLAAD done to help America understand the hundreds of thousands of queers who live in close affiliations, tribes, chosen families and intentional communities? How about the childless, the unemployed, the homeless, the single? The wealthiest among us may live this way but certainly not all of us. And certainly not all straight people live that way either.

The scene they were decrying showed sex. GLAAD is supposed to be against defamation, not sexuality. Their statement describing gay life reads a lot like an order, dictating how we are to be gay in order to make the public more comfortable. Carpools and children may be GLAAD’s picture of homosexuality, but they are going to have to take a deep breath and learn to tolerate different lifestyles. And I do mean styles of life, ways of living that are outside their narrow image of normalcy. Maybe the folks at GLAAD could use some diversity training.

Brad Luna, a spokesman for the Human Rights Campaign, warns the movie should come with disclaimer. "We strongly feel that Sacha Baron Cohen and UNIVERSAL PICTURES have a responsibility to remind the viewing public right there in the theater that this is intended to expose homophobia." In this single sentence about a comedy, HRC is controlling, intolerant and condescending. Even more so than GLAAD, they want to control messages in the media about gays. They want the messages not only to depict us in a way that makes conservative people comfortable, but also to tell us directly how to understand what we are seeing. HRC has worked tirelessly to re-brand the queer liberation movement as a struggle for gay marriage, so it is no surprise that they want to re-brand Bruno. It seems that HRC gays do not think highly of gays or anyone else, at least not highly enough to allow us to form our own opinions. I wish GLAAD and HRC would consider that never in the course of history has telling people what to think been an effective strategy for change. Their dictation of monolithic lifestyles and opinions just breeds silence and resentment on all sides of the issue.

I have saved the best for last... On “The View”, Barbara Walters called the movie “almost as pornographic as any pornographic thing that I’ve seen,” adding that unlike porno flicks, you can catch this flick around the corner in your neighborhood movie theater. Walters: “I don’t like seeing close ups of anal sex.” I don’t remember any close ups, but Bruno certainly references anal sex. What is the one thing GLAAD, HRC and even the NY Times do NOT want you to think about when you think about gays?

ANAL SEX. One of our culture’s worst fears is getting pleasure from the business end; it’s the very definition of dirty. Castrated queers fit more comfortably into the culture. Better to do the carpool and rush home than to make jokes about getting fucked in the ass. Better to be seen as mocking heterosexuals, better to be seen as looking down on people than to be seen exuberantly fucking. Better to have national organizations that are supposedly fighting for our rights talk about making people more comfortable with us rather than talking about changing the status quo. Better to simply tell people the “right” interpretation of the film than let them experience it themselves. Bruno was certainly not a serious exploration of queer sex. It was just a silly comedy with a lot of jokes about queer sex. And I think that’s how it triggered the NY Times, GLAAD and HRC into showing us just how far they are willing to go in order to avoid acknowledging queer sexuality or as Barbara Walters so vividly and salaciously intoned: CLOSE UPS OF ANAL SEX.