UNFASHIONABLE SEX

It seems the kids didn't like it.

Queerfest 15, the Lisbon Queer Film Festival 2011. Reaction to two seminal homo films, Boys in the Sand (USA - 1971) and Taxi Zum Klo ('Taxi to the Toilet' - Germany - 1981) ranged from indifference to "I'm outta here." I shed a few queer tears. Didn't they know their history? Didn't they care? Apparently nah mate. As I watched them wiggle it to Born This Way - AGAIN- I'd say they stayed to the end of Taxi just to enjoy the complimentary vodka afterparty.

I'm beautiful in my way 'Cause God makes no mistakes I'm on the right track, baby I was born this way

So, what gives with the gays? Are us oldies an embarrassment (of riches)? Are we crashing bores with our activism and Aids? Was our identity angst so 1981? Probably. I'll admit, your average gay film viewer doesn't give a damn about queer theory and why should he? He's looking for an experience that validates his way of life, and I doubt he's going to find it in the willowy paganism of 1971 or the grungy semi-despair of a decade teetering on the edge of an epidemic.

Don't be a drag, just be a queen

OK, Boys in the Sand's rose-crushed-to-the-bosom pornography was a little ripe. This is a world of sunlit opulence that many in the audience would be unfamiliar with. You should see Fire Island nowadays, really you should! But this secret world, and this movie, were born this way out of the fact homos felt they were under attack. It needed to show the world we were creatures of beauty. Not for nothing was it released (controversially) in mainstream theatres - and with great success. Two beautiful men fucking on a beach was to be envied, dammit! And in the end blondie got his guy, the big-dicked black panther fix it man, interestingly.





I miss that balls-to-the-wall quality of filmmaking of modern gay movies. I love that there was a time when gay movies were interested in documenting/fictionalising our experience with real dick-in-hole sex. It's as if busting their load on film made them work harder on their ideas. (see Shortbus). I haven't caught João Pedro Vale's Moby Dick, but most people hate it. But then we're jealous bitches, aren't we?

So, Taxi Zum Klo was no Fassbinder, but I loved the grainy, chill window into Berlin, I loved the gonzo documentary quality of the filmmaking, I loved the humour, and most of all I loved the messy, not-quite-linear narrative. I love its despair at gay lives biting their own tails - are we even allowed to show that any more? Films since then have been all about the veracity of the emotion, in a soapy, Hollywood way - it's all about poignancy and integrity - but have become more fake by trying to stay faithful to their emotional arc. We've become contaminated by Steel Magnolias, as if gays became relieved they could base their future discourse on that rather than Warhol or Kenneth Angers or even Gregg Araki. Mysterious Skin was the last great 'white' gay movie I saw that was bold and poetic.

Homework: I understand they're making great queer cinema in Asia and South America.

MY MUM DIED IN AUGUST

One day, Tuesday it was, she was a young woman for a moment there, tatty at the edges, but for a laugh she'd been singing Wild Thing, of all things,as my sister washed her hair. They were beginning to primp themselves for me, for my 'wedding' celebration with my partner Lennie, that coming weekend. She hadn't had her hair done in a long time, and it was starting to look like long grass, snagged and a bit threatening. It was grey as a dark sky, and as the colour had also seeped out of her green eyes, to leave them soapy and sad; it was as if she only shone in black and white. Age does this.

The hairdresser came round, and got to work. Mum perched uncomfortably on her seat, grimacing. But when it was done, the cut looked great - it took years off her. It was as if we believed a new do might actually have somehow turned back the clock. She looked at herself suspiciously in the mirror, not convinced.

Friday, she went into hospital with a thyroid condition. Tuesday was the last day we sat together, and she had told me a story about being evacuated with her little brother from Birmingham to their aunt's in the country near Coventry. They had been picking blackberries in the hedgerows, eating more than they dropped in their baskets. In the evening they were doubled up with awful stomach cramps, howling. But louder were the air raid sirens. That same night, bombers poured incendiary bombs like fairy dust on Coventry's munition factories and boxed-in streets. More and more bombs, more than ever seen. Mum and my uncle clutched their bellies, begging to be allowed out of the shelter and back in the house, oblivious to the world coming to its end. I didn't remember mum ever telling me that story before. She had a memory for things that happened long ago, and the memories sparkled. The present was dull as lead.

When I was a kid, I used to sit at mum and dad's feet watching TV. After 9pm there were always films and plays on BBC2 with adult content. Sometimes there were queers on these alluring screens, mostly desperate and decadent, and they often got murdered, or committed suicide. But I also saw a movie Parting Glances, set in New York, and despite the grim reality of Aids it suggested something resembling... hope? Parting Glances always meant a lot to me. Meanwhile before 9pm, the TV was chockablock with gays, but presenting all the variety shows and mincing like court jesters across rickety sitcom sets to the sound of canned laughter. Gloom or pink froth, you decide. Dad would head upstairs to bed, since he had to get up around 4 o´clock for his milk round. Mum and I then had a time to ourselves, an enigmatic space in which to talk. One day, she said she wouldn't want a gay child. I was maybe twelve, an ingenue, what I held within me darting like fireflies in the mysterious night. Nonetheless, the statement was harsh, and my heart beat faster with knowing, aware somehow such statements were a two-way mirror reflecting on me and her. Why, I asked? I wouldn't like to see my child suffer too, like they seem to always do, she replied.

Thirty years later, she would have been there, all dolled up at our commitment ceremony. My dad had already passed two years previously. But he would have wanted to come too.

Monday, her heart stopped. I hate to imagine her being scared, of being in hospital, of what was to come, but I think if anything she was just so tired of suffering. My sister had said she had called out for her own mother in her sleep. Something like this will happen to all of us. We all lose, and then eventually we too are lost. But there is an irony here. She was suffering, not me. Her gay child was living the happiest of days and she knew it.

AMERICA - give up?

"Idyllic pastoral gay friendship - smoking Virginia Slims."


"The battle going on over gay marriage in America reveals an awful lot. The Bible belt – people hate gay people. Because the Bible tells them? No, the Bible tells them an awful lot of things that they ignore."

Quote unquote Ian Mckellen.

But as freakish weather conditions continue to uproot, batter and squish normal, God-fearing American folk in droves, surely it's time to ask - is Someone telling them to quit? Because it seems they are truly losing the battle of building formica McMansions and mega-churches, strip malls and crumbling Interstates.


Perhaps it's time the country was repopulated by gender warriors, punk rock girl bands, urban faeries, gay farmers, and lesbian carpenters, thus recapturing the utopian purity the Founding Fathers originally dreamed of? Infant children can be democratically distributed between eager, nurturing same-sex parents (relieving middle Americans of the eternal problem of taking good care of their kids, when they are forceably deported).

As regards where these hordes can be relocated to, a valid suggestion might be Siberia, where they have plenty of room and should feel right at home, or China, which has an equally impressive record of ecological devastation at the expense of progress.




Tell it like it is.

debaser

The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye // Trailer from Marie Losier on Vimeo.

COP LOVE

This faggot grew up in a working class family with little or no money.

This faggot didn't go to college either.

This faggot wasn't particularly at an advantage for being a faggot. And still isn't.

This faggot doesn't believe in stealing.

This faggot doesn't need a flat screen TV, or designer sneakers.

This faggot believes in protesting. This faggot understands, to some extent.

This faggot would employ or work with a person of any colour or creed, if they had educated themselves to a level where I am impressed by their inner strength and determination to be better than the world they come from.

This faggot knows that the youths we are compelled to understand, would beat him to a bloody pulp for being a faggot in their world.

One Step Back, Two Steps Forward

It's wild that musicos and bands such as Tensnake, Azari and III, and The Art Department are revisiting the Deep Chicago House sound, as pioneered by the likes of Derrick May and Frankie Knuckles.

I was a just out of my teens in Brighton, UK, clubbing intensely at the Zap Club and the Escape. Here I heard Frankie Knuckles' "Your Love" for the first time, and it still blows me away. I bought some of the first compilations available showcasing this sound in the UK, and a s**tload of 12"s. Before long, all this mutated into Acid House, but nothing undresses my soul as fast as the Chicago Sound, certainly not Acid House which was all baggy, tie-dye and oops, lost my erection.

The new Azari album contains familiar, modern classics such as "Reckless With Your Love". I use 'modern' with caution, as the track is a blatant test-tube baby, a lab rat house track. But it all sounds so good!!! I'm sold. And listen to "Undecided", which shows they are not afraid to knock it out the ball park.

One thing. Does this get played on mainstream gay dancefloors? When I lived in NYC this would not have been bpm enough, where tired tribal and pathetic pots and pans techno ruled the drug-addled muscle marys. Bah! Hated the circuit, so much. Alegria, nul point. Azari & III - 8.5/10

n e w m a n i a

Sorry. I'm back. Will update soon.