187. extol

Quick-ish thought for this afternoon.

I was reading an article in the New York Times this afternoon about the 25th annual NewFest (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender film festival) in New York City this weekend. The article’s author, Stephen Holden, had this to say about it:

The face of gay liberation in 2013 is a sanitized image of polite, smiling gay and lesbian couples parading hand in hand and exchanging chaste kisses at city halls in states where gay marriage has been legalized.

But if there’s a theme to the 25th annual NewFest … it is that gay liberation is fundamentally about sex.

At first, I inwardly cringed at these sentences, and then immediately did a mental self-check for any signs of lingering, internalized homophobia. There may be some of that left over from my Protestant days, but the main thought was one of dread. I thought:

Oh shit, now some conservative Christian bigot will get up and point to this as “conclusive” proof that gay and lesbian relationships are just about promiscuity and sex…

Then I stopped myself. Turn on the television or go to any movie these days, and you’ll see some hot, hunky guy getting it on with some voluptuous, burgeoning girl. There’s no talk of fidelity, or marriage, or children. They want to fuck. Like the animals they are.

The prudish Christians who object to sensuality in film and media today do so under the notion that humans are these exalted, divine beings who should rise above their physical needs and desires to something purer. (Never mind that this is a tenet of Gnosticism.)

Biology, however, tells a different story.

Taxonomically, we are animals. Primates, technically. But we share the same primal desire to mate and reproduce as any other life form on this planet. In fact, the only thing that seems to set us aside from our closest relatives on Earth is (1) our ability to use tools with a frightening efficacy, and (2) the awareness of our physical instincts and desires, and the ability to choose to not be dominated by them. This doesn’t make us better than other beings. Just different.

When humans experience romantic attraction, we desire to express that attractive (i.e., love) via physical means. Our genes have programmed us to respond with our genitals at the moment of sexual arousal. This is completely natural. It’s only because of the teachings of the church that we’ve come to think of this as dirty or sinful. Our ancient ancestors would have considered such a view bizarre, and unhealthy.

So why shouldn’t we have a film festival that celebrates sexual attraction between two men, or two women? Well, because it’s icky, many people (who shall remain Brian Brown) might say.

It’s true that we’ve sanitized the gay liberation movement in order to appeal to our heterosexual neighbors who would otherwise support marriage equality and LGBT rights, but find the actual reality of two men or two women expressing physical love (let alone — gasp — being sexual) towards each other (in the same way that heterosexuals express physical love) off-putting.

In doing that, however, we’ve conveniently allowed them to put away the reality that we are sexual beings, just like heterosexual couples. Yes, when we’re horny, we want to fuck. We also want to just hold each other and bask in the oxytocin-induced glow of mammalian physical intimacy. Because that’s how we’re wired.

So does that mean that we should ignore the fact that in the early days of gay liberation there was a lot of indulging in kink and promiscuity? Only if we ignore the fact of the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 70s; of key parties, wife-swapping, and “free love.” Like a dam bursting, we threw off the moral bonds that had kept us in a perpetual state of sexual tension for centuries. However, the pendulum seems to be swinging back towards the center, as it usually does.

As Holden writes in his Times article, the early days of the gay movement “were gripped by a kind of erotic delirium in which men pursued a hypermasculine ideal and promiscuity was rampant.” We were creating new boundaries, new norms, and new paradigms to make sense of the sexual chaos that had been unleashed. Now, as we’re seeing increasing acceptance of LGBT people in mainstream American society, and coming closer to full equality, that iconoclastic boundary-pushing is being replaced by a more mature desire for emotional belonging and intimacy.

One of the final boundaries we have to overcome in achieving full acceptance for LGBT people is the depiction of physical intimacy in media — where nobody bats an eye when two men kiss (or bloody just hold hands) in a movie (and it isn’t a joke), or where there can be a sex scene on TV between two women and they aren’t trying to get male attention.

It created a stir in the 1950s when Lucy and Ricky were shown sharing a bed on I Love Lucy. We’ve been pushing those limits ever since; to moving from some whitewashed notion of a “moral ideal” to depicting reality as it is lived by actual, living-and-breathing human beings. Because it’s ridiculous that we same-sex couples have to keep pretending that we aren’t sleeping together or having sex; that our expression of physical love for each other never moves beyond meaningful eye contact, holding hands, or a quick peck on the lips.

That’s not real life.

Reality is that we do have hot, sweaty, messy sex. We also make dinner together. Go on trips. Have fights. Tolerate in-laws. Argue about money. And if any of that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s what all human couples do. And as soon as everyone else gets on board with accepting that, we’ll be that much closer to having a more sane country.

And a saner world.

163. alexipharmic

My dislike of horror films goes back to an aversion to lack of control. I can still recall having the bejeezus scared out of me in that scene in The Princess Bride where Fezzik throws a rock at Westley’s head. The Fire Swamp and the ROUS were no problem, but for the first couple dozen times, though I knew what was coming and when, I’d still look away or leave the room until it was over.

Even today I watch scary movies by focusing on the lower left-hand corner. I found this advice a long time ago, that nothing ever happens there. It’s the combination of the visuals and the sound that cause my primitive lizard-primate amygdala to kick into high gear.

Friends of mine who love horror films, and even commentaries I’ve read on this, all talk about how the allure of the genre is that it makes you feel alive. In witnessing the (albeit simulated) gruesome ends of other human beings that, with the adrenaline rush and flood of other hormones, the viewer appreciates the fact that they’re not being devoured by zombies or vivisected by a crazy man with a chainsaw. It’s the relief of knowing the other monkey got eaten by the tiger and that you’ve lived to peel another banana. And, on some level, it speaks to the Marquis de Sade lurking in all of us.

It’s not that I’m squeamish. One of my favorite shows is Showtime’s Dexter, where a serial killer conscientiously (and creatively) dispatches other killers who slip through the cracks in the criminal justice system. It’s a show that has brought “kill room” into the cultural lexicon. It’s more that horror films have a way of haunting and lingering in my already overactive imagination.

This past weekend I discovered a new way of staying clear of horror movie dread. My boyfriend and his family enjoy scary movies, and the other day we were watching a 2007 German film called Butterfly: A Grimm Love Story, a 2003 movie inspired by the Armin Meiwes cannibal murder. If you can’t recall this story, it’s the one in which a German man (Meiwes) wrote an advert seeking a male volunteer who wanted to be killed and eaten. His lamb (or pig, I suppose, since human flesh allegedly tastes like pork) came in the person of Bernd Jürgen Brandes. In the film the names are changed, but the events mirror reality, as summarized by the Wikipedia page on Meiwes:

As is known from a videotape the two made when they met on 9 March 2001 in Meiwes’s home in the small town of Rotenburg, Meiwes amputated Brandes’ penis and the two men attempted to eat the penis together before Brandes was killed. Brandes had insisted that Meiwes attempt to bite his penis off. This did not work and ultimately, Meiwes used a knife to remove Brandes’ penis. Brandes apparently tried to eat some of his own penis raw, but could not because it was too tough and, as he put it, “chewy”. Meiwes then fried the penis in a pan with salt, pepper, wine and garlic; he then fried it with some of Brandes’ fat but by then it was too burned to be consumed. He then chopped it up into chunks and fed it to his dog.

In a post-Saw and –Hostel movie market, it’s perversely refreshing to find a film based on actual events instead of merely the sick and twisted things that people dream up. Hostel, according to the filmmakers, is supposedly based on “actual events” – in this case, rumors of $10,000 Thai “murder vacations.” This is not entirely far-fetched, for as writer David Sedaris writes in his book, When You Are Engulfed in Flames:

Tell someone the police picked you up in Bangkok, and they reasonably assume that, after having sex with the eight-year-old, you turned her inside out and roasted her over hot coals, this last part, the cooking without a permit, being illegal under Thai law.

Jason and I were watching Butterfly in his bedroom one evening a few hours before bed – you know, to unwind. He recently inherited an armchair from his grandmother, and it now rests adjacent to the television. It’s positioned so that it’s possible to lean comfortably (and safely) over to see what’s happening on screen. So while he was on the bed watching the movie, I was in the armchair with my trusty 760-page Jon Meacham biography of Thomas Jefferson (which is an absolute marvel of nonfiction and highly recommended, in my opinion).

Occasionally something would happen or Jason would make a comment about the movie, and I’d look up from my biography to peer over. My take on the movie is that it tries to put a desperate sympathetic spin on some very sick and twisted people. In the film, Meiwes becomes Oliver Hartwin, a gay man whose crazy, possessive mother drowned, leaving him riddled with guilt over her death. Brandes becomes Simon Grombeck. Keri Russell plays a criminal psychology student who’s obsessed with the case.

Throughout the movie I kept waiting for the Sassy Gay Friend to swoosh in to scold everyone, yelling, “What are you doing? What, what, what are you doing?” It’s a story of people making extremely poor life decisions; of looking a gift lion in the mouth and doing a triple salchow into its gaping maw.

No, that’s not a half-digested gazelle carcass in the lion’s stomach. It’s your own butchered and mangled corpse sizzling in a frying pan!

It wouldn’t have been so horrific had this not been a true story: that a grown man let another man try to bite his penis off. Most people watch this and wonder what could happen to bring two people to the edge of that cliff: a cannibal writes an ad, an equally crazy victim answers it, and then both of them jump off into the unthinkable.

I watch it knowing how close we probably are to becoming our own horror stories.