Humanizing The Vacuum

Although like most coming-out movies the imaginative conceptions are hardly compensatory once the autobiographical material is consumed, Pariah is worth watching for the milieu and the wide-awake performance of young Adepero Oduye (the title is its most histrionic element).  A straight A high school senior who dabbles in poetry, Alike (Oduye) has been comfortable with her sexuality long enough to frequent lesbian bars with best pal Laura (Pernell Walker); in the movie’s first and best sequence writer-director Dee Rees makes the audience share Alike’s sensual abandon at one of these clubs. We so rarely watch a film in which a middle class black American home is sketched with something approaching verisimilitude that the stiff exchanges between Alike’s warring parents – a frustrated striver and employee at a health clinic (Kim Wayans) and a taciturn police detective (Charles Parnell) – matter less than Lee’s attention to nuance, such as the wine the mom drinks with dinner (Dad would rather drink beer) and how Lee’s younger sister acts more excited about Alike’s private life than Alike herself. The scenes between Parnell and Oduye are the film’s heart: a rational man who wants to believe the fiction he wrote about his daughter’s life collides against her own fiction.

I’m with Ta-Nehisi Coates on the sentencing of Dharun Ravi:

Jail is pretty awful. A ten year bid would have almost certainly subjected to the constant threat of violence. I can’t really see what good that would do. The criminal justice system can’t really make people “good.” It can’t exact vengeance upon slime-balls. And it can’t make Ravi and his supporters introspective at all. One of the problems of suicide it’s that it leaves the living groping for answers. I don’t a lengthy jail bid would have supplied any

And from one of his comments:

I guess I’m not sure he ever should have gone to jail in the first place. Basically, he tried to spy on a dude, and then invited some friends in a (failed) attempt to do the same. He did this, in part, because he was repulsed by his friends sexuality.

I guess my question is this–Should you go to jail for that? Perhaps this my jaded impression of jails, but I think of incarceration as pretty harsh. It’s not the time you serve–it’s proximity to other people (guards and prisoners) who are living in a place of systemic violence. If jail were merely confinement, I’d feel differently. But in America other things come with that confinement.

For anyone who’s been in jail one day is chilling enough.

On Dr. Robert L. Spitzer:

Dr. Spitzer was then a junior member of on an American Psychiatric Association committee helping to rewrite the field’s diagnostic manual, and he promptly organized a symposium to discuss the place of homosexuality.

That kicked off a series of bitter debates, pitting Dr. Spitzer against a pair of influential senior psychiatrists who would not budge. In the end, the psychiatric association in 1973 sided with Dr. Spitzer, deciding to drop homosexuality from its manual and replace it with his alternative, “sexual orientation disturbance,” to identify people whose sexual orientation, gay or straight, caused them distress.

The arcane language notwithstanding, homosexuality was no longer a “disorder.” Dr. Spitzer achieved a civil rights breakthrough in record time.

“I wouldn’t say that Robert Spitzer became a household name among the broader gay movement, but the declassification of homosexuality was widely celebrated as a victory,” said Ronald Bayer of the Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health at Columbia. “ ‘Sick No More’ was a headline in some gay newspapers.”

Thirty years later Spitzer wrote a study arguing that homosexuality could be “cured” if the patient wants to be.

Now he has apologized at last.

Andrew Sullivan posts a memo from an important GOP pollster: change or perish. Bits:

1. Support for same sex marriage has been growing and in the last few years support has grown at an accelerated rate with no sign of slowing down. A review of public polling shows that up to 2009 support for gay marriage increased at a rate of 1% a year. Starting in 2010 the change in the level of support accelerated to 5% a year. The most recent public polling shows supporters of gay marriage outnumber opponents by a margin of roughly 10% (for instance: NBC / WSJ poll in February / March: support 49%, oppose 40%).

2. The increase in support is taking place among all partisan groups. While more Democrats support gay marriage than Republicans, support levels among Republicans are increasing over time. The same is true of age: younger people support same sex marriage more often than older people, but the trends show that all age groups are rethinking their position.

“If I could have chosen, I would have been born a woman/My mother once told me she would have named me Laura” from “The Ocean” was the loudest kind of hint. Now Tom Gabel’s decision to begin hormone and electrolysis treatment snaps into place like a photo into a frame we’ve all gotten used to being crooked.

If I had knit the fabric of time White Crosses would have ruled the world like American Idiot did in 2004. Its portrait of aging men holding fast to ideals they’re disgusted by anyway peaked with the despair in “Ache With Me”: “Do you share the same sense of defeat? Have you realized all the things you’ll never be?” Commenting on the prescience of 2010′s “I Was A Teenage Anarchist,” Alex Ostroff wrote today:

It speaks really strongly to ways in which radical/anarchist/etc. spaces aren’t necessarily queer or trans friendly (or safe spaces for people who aren’t white) – not that they never are, and Against Me! have always been part of the progressive/lefty wing of punk but still…the spaces and music of not explicitly queer punk code white and male and straight.

My scant acquaintance with the hardcore scene extends towards friends who still plug away in local gigs and the spitballs that Against Me! endured when they sold out for hiring the producer of Nevermind, an album whose creator championed Top 40 darlings The Raincoats and Meat Puppets. Good luck to her.

Dale Carpenter’s Flagrant Conduct reminds us that memorable law cases often bloom in spite of the anonymity or even delinquency of the litigants. Dahlia Lithwihck‘s review reminds us who those men whose experience inspired 2003′s landmark Supreme Court decision Lawrence v. Texas:

When Lawrence, who was born in 1943 to devout white Southern Baptists, was enlisting in the Navy, he quizzed a buddy about the forms he was filling out. “What’s a homosexual?” he wondered. Neither knew the word. Both were gay. After leaving the Navy, Lawrence moved to Houston, worked as a medical technician, and totted up a slew of drunk-driving violations, including a conviction for murder by automobile, in 1967. In the late seventies, he moved into a run-down complex in East Houston populated by underemployed youngsters and strippers who liked to party. Lawrence largely kept his sexual orientation a secret at work, and was anything but a gay-rights activist. Right to the end of the litigation bearing his name, Lawrence’s principal beef was that overzealous policemen had invaded his home without a warrant.

Tyron Garner, the tenth child of black Baptist parents, was twenty-four years younger than Lawrence. He had no car and no fixed address, and supported himself by washing dishes and cleaning houses when he could. Described as “sweet” (despite three previous assault charges) and effeminate, Garner was involved in a stormy relationship with another white man from Houston, Robert Eubanks. And Eubanks, by all accounts, was a mess. Homeless and a heavy drinker, he was the person who called the police on September 17, 1998. Garner and Eubanks lived together wherever they could find an apartment, fighting viciously along the way. Garner and Lawrence, according to Carpenter’s research, were never much more than acquaintances. They weren’t lovers before the case or after.

David Oshinksy:

To some, Garner and Lawrence seemed a risky choice for this role. Both men had criminal records, and their “relationship” added a racial element to the mix. As Carpenter shows, however, these weaknesses were actually strengths. The pair’s transient roots meant they had “little to lose” in being outed as homosexuals in deeply conservative Houston, or in accepting a police report they knew to be false. When their time came to plead, the men followed their lawyers’ instructions and replied, “No contest.” These were “the last words Garner and Lawrence ever said in court about their case.”

Homer Plessy, after losing Plessy v. Ferguson, faded away. Dred Scott won emancipation (eventually) but ended his days as a porter.

Michelle Bachmann’s congressional district (in which you’ll also find her alma mater) doesn’t like teh gays. Meet Barb Anderson, a piece of work:

A bespectacled grandmother with lemony-blond hair she curls in severely toward her face, Anderson is a former district Spanish teacher and a longtime researcher for the MFC who’s been fighting gay influence in local schools for two decades, ever since she discovered that her nephew’s health class was teaching homosexuality as normal. “That really got me on a journey,” she said in a radio interview. When the Anoka-Hennepin district’s sex-ed curriculum came up for re-evaluation in 1994, Anderson and four like-minded parents managed to get on the review committee. They argued that any form of gay tolerance in school is actually an insidious means of promoting homosexuality – that openly discussing the matter would encourage kids to try it, turning straight kids gay.

“Open your eyes, people,” Anderson recently wrote to the local newspaper. “What if a 15-year-old is seduced into homosexual behavior and then contracts AIDS?”

Read the rest in Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s Rolling Stone story. Thanks to a decision by the school district, the very mention of homosexuality in any classroom context is forbidden. The result?

…on November 22nd, 2009, came yet another suicide: a Blaine High School student, 15-year-old Aaron Jurek – the district’s third suicide in just three months. After Christmas break, an Andover High School senior, Nick Lockwood, became the district’s fourth casualty: a boy who had never publicly identified as gay, but had nonetheless been teased as such. Suicide number five followed, that of recent Blaine High School grad Kevin Buchman, who had no apparent LGBT connection. Before the end of the school year there would be a sixth suicide, 15-year-old July Barrick of Champlin Park High School, who was also bullied for being perceived as gay, and who’d complained to her mother that classmates had started an “I Hate July Barrick” Facebook page. As mental-health counselors were hurriedly dispatched to each affected school, the district was blanketed by a sense of mourning and frightened shock.

Dahlia Lithwick analyzes the arguments made by proponents of Proposition 8 and finds them, well, wanting:

The evidence, the data, and the experts overwhelming agree that gay marriage does not harm children. And that leaves opponents of gay marriage to argue a tautology: Gay marriage is wrong because it’s wrong.

One thing is certain: The problem for proponents of Prop 8 wasn’t that they hadn’t had enough time to hone their argument. Four months later, during the argument at the appeals court, Charles Cooper again found himself unable to articulate a single plausible reason for why the ban existed in California. A far more empathetic judge in Randy Smith tried to coax one from Cooper: “But what is the rational basis for [the] initiative when California law says homosexual couples have all the rights of marriage, all the rights of child rearing, all the rights that others have?” asked Smith. “What is the rational basis then [for Proposition 8] if in fact the homosexual couples have all the rights that heterosexual couples have? We’re left with a word: marriage. What is the rational basis for that?”

At the podium, Cooper’s answer was more or less a Zen koan: “Your honor, you’re left with a word, but a word that essentially is the institution,” said Cooper. “If you redefine the word, you change the institution. You cannot separate the two.” It was either the sound of one hand clapping or the perfect response to a question that appears to have no good answer.

RAVI: Did you tell them we did it on purpose?
WEI: Yeah . . well that we didn’t know
what we were gonna see
Where is tyler . .
RAVI: Because I said we were just messing around with the camera. He told me he wanted to have a friend over and I didn’t realize they wanted to be all private.
WEI: Omg dharun why didnt u talk to me first i told them everything

A text conversation between Dharun Ravi and Molly Wei, the former charged with nvasion of privacy, bias intimidation, witness tampering, and evidence tampering in the suicide of Tyler Clementi in the fall of 2010, excerpted from Ian Parker’s New Yorker article. Ravi faces five to ten years in prison.

I know many students like Ravi. None fit the profile of Bully or Evil Men passed down from years of television and movie watching or comic book reading. Getting them to understand their moral blindness and lack of curiosity is the battle before us. It begins with smaller skirmishes; as many columnists and bloggers said at the time, removing “fag” and “gay’ from the conversation as signifiers of weakness and effeminacy is a start. The other, critical battle lies in reminding the teens who grew up in a world in which the meaning of privacy is being continuously redefined what they’ll accept as immoral behavior.

Frank Bruni:

Among adults, the right to love whom you’re moved to love — and to express it through sex and maybe, yes, marriage — is surely as vital to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as a Glock. And it’s a lot less likely to cause injury, if that’s a deciding factor: how a person’s actions affect the community around him or her.

I USE the words “moved to love” in an effort to define the significant, important territory between “born this way” and choice. That solid ground covers “built this way,” “oriented this way,” and “evolved this way”; it incorporates the possibility of a potent biological predisposition mingling with other factors beyond anyone’s ready control; and it probably applies to Nixon herself.

“Nixon” is Cynthia Nixon, who upset people on the Internet who care about such things for treating sexuality in a flippant manner. To which I respond: Yay! But well-meaning gay liberals, protecting the lives they’ve created, view Nixon’s remarks as a threat: if sexuality looks like a “choice,” then opponents to gay rights have a stronger case.

If humans have made any progress the last hundred years it’s dismissing the implications of determinism. What offends opponents is ambiguity, not clarity. Identity is as recombinant as DNA. Embracing its inherent frivolity adduces our commitment to treating existence as seriously as so-called heterosexuals.

For homosexuals there’s the epistemology of the closet, familiar as early as grade school lusts; and the epistemology of socializing, the impact of which hits them as they realize that even more uncomfortable than attending baptisms, children’s birthday parties, and Thanksgiving is the ritual of enduring their straight friends at their most solicitous. Andrew Haigh’s Weekend is most touching when Russell (Tom Cullen), a lifeguard at a public pool, smiles hollowly in an early scene in which he mingles at one of those parties; he doesn’t know the language of heterosexual discourse, so reduced to communicating via the semaphore of love and habit he turns himself into a ghost. The unease becomes more acute when his best mate, an amiable sort who looks Russell straight in the eye and genuinely loves him, tries to coax a romantic confession out of him. Russell has never told him about the tricks he’s picked up, and the shared history of these two men suddenly looks like ash.

The second 2011 film I’ve seen in a week in which the Walk and Talk or the Walk and Fuck has served as plot engine, Weekend is indebted to not just Before Sunrise and Before Sunset but The Clock, Vincent Minnelli’s music box comedy in which Robert Walker and an impossibly avid Judy Garland spend forty-eight hours enacting the arc of a love affair, with Manhattan and its citizens as setting and supporting cast. Bored after that get-together, Russell hits a gay club, gets very drunk very quickly, tries and fails to land one trick, and picks up another. When the scene dissolves we see Russell and the first trick, Glen, (Chris New), next morning in bed next to him. Glen has art school pretensions: within minutes of awakening he’s shoved a tape recorder in Russell’s face to get an aural record of what it was like to pick him up — a conceit I’m not sure I accept. He’s interested, he reveals later, in the gap between “who we really are” and “who we want to be”; the act of reconstructing the story into a narrative will show the difference.

The star of Weekend is Haigh’s lighting. A park behind an apartment building at dusk has rarely looked so desolate, especially after you’ve spent an afternoon smoking weed and making out with a trick. As a former editor Haigh knows how long to let a scene linger; each moment when a lonely Russell hangs out in his flat in undies and a wrinkled T-shirt resonates like Catherine Denueve in Repulsion. The other find is Chris New, who as Glen is the cleverer of the pair and to my ears is slumming by hanging out with the likes of the too-wet-by-half Russell. If Weekend has a leitmotif, it’s depicting how a generation of homosexuals accepted by quasi-families of straight friends have it a lot better than their predecessors yet want to enjoy the qualities that set them apart from these same friends. The film suggests — quietly — that these things are irreconcilable. New has the burden of voicing the didactic moments (mitigated somewhat by the impressive cocaine and marijuana use herein) but it’s to Haigh’s credit that he doesn’t mock his character’s political engagement as just a pick-up routine, just a line of Glen’s — which it is and it isn’t. The way in which Weekend uses concision to wring the most emotional impact of ambiguity is its greatest trait, enough to forgive its too poignant ending.

From Michaelangelo Matos‘ “Remembering Larry Levan,” about the Paradise Garage:

It was a very friendly welcome. It was not tense with bully-security-type people. You had to have a membership card to get in the Garage, or be with a friend [with one]. In the early days, you had to often notify them that you were bringing a guest. They were really, really smart. This is the first nightclub I went to — or anywhere besides an airport — where they had a metal detector. I never saw much trouble here at all, like fights or drama. It was all about prevention. I realized today, on the way here, that my membership card says “80-’81.’ I’m like, ‘Wow, 30 years! Ouch.’”

“After you paid your admission fee, there was a wonderful corridor entrance. If you went straight ahead you were in a lounge, and off to the right was a locker room. You could actually check your clothes here. Not all your clothes, but you could change your clothes, and some people did that. They got out of their jeans and put on tank tops and shorts, they even sold some garments like that, for more comfortable dancing.
………….
[A bell goes off at the garage] “Pink Floyd, ‘Time’ — you wouldn’t be surprised to hear that, too. That’s Larry ringing the bell from heaven. He’s adding a little drama to this moment.”