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.

A list of all the gay bars I have visited to date

Hepburn's
Sisters
Woody's
Key West
The Bike Stop
The Post
12th Air Command
Silent Legacy
Paradise
The Ice Palace
Cherry's
Libations
Club 505
Aut Bar
The Nectarine
The Lexington
The Stud
Meow Mix
Cattyshack
Henrietta Hudson
Cubbyhole
Ginger's
The Monster
Fat Cock 29
Daddy
The Hole
The Cock
The Phoenix
Nowhere
The Metropolitan
The Eagle
Rubyfruit
The Boiler Room
Crazy Nanny's
Don Hill's
Stonewall
The Urge
The Boy's Room
Mother

School, Part 3

In middle school, I was very conflicted between wanting to fit in and wanting to be myself.  I just wanted to wear military surplus clothes all the time but I feared the consequences of emphasizing my masculinity.  I was already butch enough that I could not get through a single school day without my gender being commented upon by someone.  I developed a crush on an older girl.  She had short hair, wore camouflage pants to school and still managed to have friends.  I didn’t see how it was possible.

At my mother’s insistence, I attended weekly religious classes at a Lutheran church.  The class was a miserable collection of pre-teens, every last one of us enduring the drudgery because of our parents.  I doubt there was a single kid in that class who actually believed in god.  At the end of a year of old testament education, one of the this boys in the class asked me with sincere curiosity, “So why did your parents give you a girl’s name?”  Sometimes I tried to make light of these situations.  And every time something like this happened, I wondered: Why is it that when somebody gets your gender wrong they are never the ones who look stupid? 

What I learned in middle school were rules and taboos.  There are rules for being a man and there are rules for being a woman.  And then there is this big fat taboo against ambiguity.  I understood that my gender issue was unspeakable because the pronoun accidents and misunderstandings were never addressed directly.   In a 7^th grade math class, a substitute teacher asked me, “Are you in the right seat?  A girl is supposed to be sitting there.” She was not apologetic, she simply moved on.  I was the one in the wrong, even though she had just broadcast to the class that she thought I was a misbehaving boy who had stolen the seat of some good girl.  Laughter ensued, and if I had my way, I would have smote her on the spot.  Instead, I grew out my hair.

These experiences solidified my belief that while I did not belong among regular people, I also did not want to belong among them.  In response to my gender, people proved to be incapable of permitting the slightest deviance from stereotypical gender roles.  Each time they opened their mouths to me, I could see their frustration and inability to understand who or what I was.  It made them angry and impatient.  I did not have these words at the time, but I knew I was failing their expectations and frustrating them.  I also knew there were only two gender options and somehow I was ill suited to both.  On top of that I observed how deviating from gender roles produces disgust in others, real physical revulsion.  It was inconceivable to the adult denizens of my childhood that I could be a butch girl, so instead they looked at me and saw either a boy, or a disgusting girl, or an immature tomboy who needed to grow up already. That was a lot for a kid to deal with, so looking back now I understand how I spent a few years being fairly well shut down and distant from everything.

A friend’s mother literally asked, “Couldn’t she try to be more feminine?” I alternated between sharing their disgust with myself and being filled with rage at the confinement.  Folks proved themselves to be severely limited in their imagination and limited in their ability to see gender rules as just rules.  All I could see were rules, rules I could not keep.  Seeing gender as a set of made-up rules was one of the pivotal understandings in my life thus far because it shone a bright light on all the other norms that are taken for granted in our culture.  And it wasn’t just that others pressured me to obey the rules, it was that no one else seemed to understand that the rules were rules.  I imagine they thought, “This is just the way things are and always have been and always will be.  Girls don’t act/look/think/talk/dress/walk/behave that way.”  Sometimes the messages were direct and sometimes they were subtle.  Yet there was such universal agreement to these rules that usually no one even bothered to write them down.  So it wasn’t just that I was disobedient of gender rules, it was that I didn’t make any sense.  Men are like this, women are like that, anything else does not compute.  Anything else evokes disgust.  Becoming queer was not a matter of declaring my attraction to women, but more a permanent disengagement from following a given gender track, the simplifications, the either/or choices, the rules.  It felt liberating to realize this, but it also felt disconcerting and alienating.  But once that light came on, liberating, disconcerting or come what may, there was no turning back.   And I could not help but see that when the rule keepers weren’t criticizing me, they were busy attempting to control the bodies and sexuality of other girls with a similar set of rules about who is a whore, who is a slut, no abortions allowed, who is too fat, etc.

Later on in high school, we periodically held pep rallies to celebrate our treasured sports teams.  At the last pep rally I attended, this boy spit on me from the bleachers above where I was sitting by myself.  I do not remember if any words passed between us.  I only remember realizing there was spit in my hair, the long hair I had been growing since eighth grade in order to stop being mistaken for a boy, in order to minimize my surface differences from other girls.  When I think about simply walking out of the school building at the start of each subsequent pep rally, I feel these quiet exits capture the essence of my high school experience.

My senior year, I was awarded a scholarship based on my standardized test scores.  The corporate sponsor of the scholarship was the company where my father worked.  There was a dinner to be held at a nice restaurant with the principal of my high school, my parents, and some people from my father’s office.  Ordinarily, my parents barely noticed or commented on my clothes.  My mom had taken me dress shopping a few times because I had to dress up for orchestra concerts.  I hated having to wear a dress and always wore what ever I wanted outside of my time with the viola.  When we were getting ready to leave for this scholarship dinner and I came out in a black blazer I had bought for myself in the men’s department at macy’s.  I thought I looked OK.  My father insisted that I wear a dress and he was so mean and angry about it that I don’t even think I objected.  I very well may have, because we argued all the time back then, but what stands out most in my memory is the clarity of his contempt.  He was disgusted by me and ashamed for his colleagues to see me.  Now I understand that this was his problem and not mine. But at the time I absorbed it and felt disgusted and ashamed of myself too.  I wore the dress.  I barely spoke at dinner.  Instead of refusing the shame, I had made it my own and believed that I deserved it. 

Recently I told this story about my father for the first time, over dinner with a married friend and sometimes mentor.  He was asking me why I do not want to marry my girlfriend and I was attempting to talk about my coming out process with the gender police and the confinements of normalcy.  I described how walking away from traditional family values was a commitment to myself to make the best life I could imagine.  But another detail slipped out in the telling, which I had not previously articulated to myself or anyone else:  Growing up, I never really knew for sure if I was going to make it.  It was interesting to me that this came out spontaneously in the conversation, because I have consciously been working on ways of talking my past and simply telling the personal stories I haven’t told before.  It came out of my mouth as an additional detail, an unsightly little mess that plopped onto the dinner table.  I felt like part of me left the table for a few minutes to observe what would happen next.  I had admitted to uncertainty about the prospects of my living to adulthood. 

One of the reasons for my uncertainty was a lack of options I could live with.  Living a regular life, with a regular relationship and a regular gender was unattainable, repressive and ultimately undesirable.  So I never sought to broaden or revise regular to include me.  I never wanted to redefine normal.  I just wanted more options.  Now I know queers need to live in this world, not in an imaginary perfect world.  People need to live in this world without their bodies and genders and relationships being questioned and scrutinized and criticized and examined constantly.  Or even debated...  It feels like shit to have the substance of your reality subject to debate.  Queers need rights and protections under the laws we have now, not just the laws we imagine in a revolutionized future.  And yet to this day there remains no clearer or more persistent theme in my life than the need for more options.