Gus Van Sant | Milk / 2008

out of sync

Dustin Lance Black (screenplay), Gus Van Sant (director) Milk / 2008

 

I missed the original showing of this 2008 biopic about San Francisco supervisor, Harvey Milk (Sean Penn), shot to death by his highly disturbed fellow supervisor, Dan White (Josh Brolin), along with then San Francisco mayor, George Moscone (Victor Garber); my companion Howard saw it at the time, and encouraged me to see it, but for some reason I cannot now recall, I never visited the theater.

      Although I might have wished that Harvey Milk might have been portrayed by a truly gay actor, Penn’s performance is excellent, as is the (perhaps) closeted Brolin figure and many of the others, not truly gay, but who nonetheless play gay figures credibly, including James Franco as Milk’s early lover, Scott Smith, the man who brought him out of the closet and into the crucible of San Francisco’s Castro district.

      Using a kind of fake-documentary style, Gus Van Sant’s film early on establishes the context of where Milk, previously an insurance man in New York City, suddenly ended up; the film begins with his death, and gradually moves backwards with a sort of awkward last tape session, in which Milk tries to restate his activities from the early 1970s to his death in 1978. Although it works to tie the various fragments of his life together, the movie also ties up the narrative in a somewhat false logical process, where I might guess that his true transformation from a kind of late hippie lover, to small-time businessman, and ultimately, his self-declared position as “mayor of the Castro,” took far more twists and turns that this movie shows us.

      In Van Sant’s telling, it almost appears that Milk was destined to his political aspirations and ultimate achievements from the beginning. But the few scenes we have early on, as Milk picks up a cute boy in the subway to help him celebrate his 40th birthday, do not even suggest that this transformation might have been imaginable, despite his ability to even convince the young pick-up, who claims he does not have sex with men over forty, to not only join him for the night, but to move across the nation with him as his companion.

     In fact, the whole movie, despite its dedication to the actual events, seemed to be somehow out of sync with my own personal memories and experiences. Who would have thought that in the early 1970s San Francisco was still a very difficult place in which to be gay, with regular police raids on Castro bars, regular arrestment of gay denizens, and even street murders of gays simply walking their lovers home?

      I tried desperately to remind myself of those horrible events. But my year in 1969 in New York, where every night I visited gay bars—many of them far tawdrier and more controversial than the Castro bars mentioned—simply did not accord. I never once, in almost a year in New York, encountered an intruding policeman, and never for one instant did I feel threatened. Perhaps I should have been. Certainly, Milk, at the same period of time, was almost paranoid, warning his young friend that he should not have agreed to go with the elder man.

      Only a few days after I left New York, on June 28th, 1969, the Stonewall riots took place, almost permanently, so I imagined, changing the entire landscape for gays throughout the country. I had often stopped by the Stonewall, on my way to a much wilder place—with a late night back room for open group sex. But I have never felt any possible danger. Clearly, I was wrong; maybe I was just lucky.

      Yet in Madison, Wisconsin the year after, when I met my long-time companion and now husband, Howard, at that campus’ first gay liberation meeting, I still felt no danger. Politics, yes, could land you in jail, and I experienced the violent campus riots in late 1969 and 1970. But not for sex! Howard and I were a few of the first University of Wisconsin students to openly protest the seminal gay film, The Boys in the Band, for its stereotypical characters. We’d seen—and even appreciated the film (I had even been an usher for its off-Broadway productions in New York)—but both of us and others resented its presentation of gay “types.”

      When we moved to Washington, D.C., we were quickly accepted as a couple at the University of Maryland. And soon after, when Howard became a curator at the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, we were invited, as a couple, as guests of Walter and Joan Mondale at the Vice President’s Mansion (I later became a good friend of both, and was invited to their home while he was running for President); and, during the same period that Milk recounts, I was invited to President Carter’s White House for a celebration of American poets, and was able to take Howard with me to the event. When we left Washington, soon after Milk’s death, The Washington Post announced Howard’s move to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, along with his companion, my (giving my name) departure. In short, it now seems, upon seeing this movie, that San Francisco was not as open-minded, in some respects, as Washington, D.C.—one of the most slow-to-change cities in the nation.

 

    I am not doubting, given the facts, that Milk made radical governmental changes in San Francisco and across the nation, particularly with regard to Anita Bryant’s terrifying attempts (much like some supporters of Trump) to take away gay rights, which Milk quite brilliantly stood up for. And I am sure that in San Francisco, the gay wealthy were not quick to embrace his open populism and his true challenges to the local governmental machines. I’m just saying that the facts rather startled me. I had no idea, at the time, that we gays were still being treated like deviants and second-class citizens in the most openly gay community in the nation. Let me just admit, that this movie was terribly revealing to me, and brought a lot of tears to my eyes. Milk’s challenges to the young street boy, Cleve Jones, were even a bit shocking.

     I too was taunted as a gay boy in my high school days in 1960, but that it had continued to happen in Phoenix (Jones’ hometown) in the mid-1970s tortured me. Maybe Howard and I, embedded in the liberal art and literary world, had just been isolated from what so many others suffered, even in totally liberal societies such as San Francisco. Today, I can only explain it that we were in the bubble that is now most of California.

     But Milk helped make that bubble, even if he had to offer up his own life to make it possible. And what you realize in watching Van Sant’s fine film is that it could revert to another reality in a flip of the hand. Well, maybe not that quickly, but in a blink and a nod. The rights the LBGT community has achieved are not there forever, and might be revoked, as they were in Weimar Germany, without our even imagining that possibility. Rights must be fought for, as Milk every day realized, and which helped to make him the hero that nearly everybody in the Castro perceived him to be. Around us there is always the bigotry and hate, despite even the protections of money, prestige, position, which I guess we had—although we never perceived it that way. Milk was a populist street-fighter and knew that such a position might surely cost him his life.

      The way Penn beautifully portrays him, Milk always had a sense of hope and a delightfully sly smile that charmed the best of his friends and even the worst of his enemies. And perhaps it was that charming smile that finally got to the heart of the angry man hating himself for who he was: Dan White, who after release from prison—shockingly only seven years for manslaughter instead of murder— committed suicide. He was no longer welcome in any major California community, had lost his marriage, and, clearly, his entire identity, even if he had been saved from what was surely a hate crime. Later, it came out that he had originally intended on killing two others, supervisor Ruth Carol Silver and future San Francisco mayor, Willie Brown.

      The events are still so shocking and change gay history so extensively that it is hard to imagine that such a world as Harvey Milk had so suffer still existed, and may, at any moment return to today.

 

Los Angeles, February 20, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2017).

Steven Mckenna | Lover Boy / 2018

sex without a kiss

by Douglas Messerli

 

Shane Stokes and Steven Mckenna (screenplay and story), Steven Mckenna (director) Lover Boy / 2018 [16 minutes]

 

This short Irish film from 2018 deals with issues that frankly I have never previously given much thought to. The young central figure, Mark (Jamie Lloyd Belton) is clearly out to his friends and roommates Leah (Amy Gallagher) and Barry (Ruadhán Mew), but has problems regarding his desired sexual encounters due to problems with intimacy, most particularly with kissing and close hugging.

     Like many a male prostitute, he appears ready for someone to sexually touch his cock and, perhaps, even fuck him or allow him to fuck them; but he isn’t immediately ready for the most important part of gay sexuality, the very personal expressions of love that go with facial and non-sexual body embracement. It’s difficult to define the root of the problem, if it can even be described as such; it may have to do the behavior of his father and mother, with their denial of outward expressions of sexual love; or it may simply be a manifestation of his inability to fully give himself up to a total stranger, to abandon the control of body to his sexual desires. 

    For male prostitutes, it often appears to represent a commitment to homosexuality that they cannot admit to themselves. They are paid for sex, but the intimacies of kissing, hugging, and long embracement suggests a full enjoyment and acceptance of the homosexual act to which they are not willing to admit. Sex is represented as work, not sensual enjoyment.

     But clearly it is not something that occurs only in males, but in women as well, as Mark’s friend Leah attests, hating people who invade her “territory” even in talking to her—an experience which I also find uncomfortable—or individuals who come up behind her while she’d dancing and grind themselves into her. What she likes is when two individuals catch eyes across the room, as in a romantic fable, moving closer to one another to discover themselves of one mind, of one desire, and possible lovemaking.

      We realize that the handsome young Mark suffers this problem when he meets up with a good-looking gay man, Allen (David Greene), whom he’s evidently hooked up with through Grindr or some such service. He won’t even allow the preliminaries such as getting a drink with the boy, but demands to be taken directly to the guy’s apartment for sex. But even then, he stops in an alley nearby, ready apparently to share in the sexual act. But when Allen goes to kiss him, he pulls away, instead moving Allen’s hand directly to his cock. The stranger seems kind and willing, as he explains, that if Mark wants, he’s ready to take things slower, but Mark is clearly available only for the direct lust of lips on cock or a cock entering an ass. Finally, in frustration Allen moves off, realizing that his meet-up is too limited and frightened in his ability to engage in the full sex experience.

      Mark returns home, where Leah has been painting up her own and Barry’s faces for either Halloween or some such costumed holiday. She pulls Mark away to his bedroom to work her art upon him, at the same time trying to find out what happened on his meet-up. All Mark can say is that it was “strange,” without seemingly being able to perceive any strangeness was most on his part.

      Leah does up only half of Mark’s face, allowing everyone to see him as the beautifully handsome boy that he naturally it is.

      At the bar, he dances with his friends, but in the bathroom encounters a quite handsome young man who attempts to attract him by watching him in the mirror. Mark immediately pulls away and leaves.

 

     But then, just as suddenly, he spots a dark young man, Ashley (Abe Smyth) also half-made-up just as he is. As their eyes meet, our “hero” suddenly imagines them bare chested in a deep kissing session while he apparently paints the other man’s body with a red dye.

       The two continue staring at each other as, finally, Mark makes the move, the two finally standing face to face. Seeming to break the taboo Mark leans forward and kisses him on the lips. Ashley pulls back, seemingly taken aback by the beautiful gesture. But if you think his next movement forward with his entire face is a return of the kiss, you are sadly mistaken as—after a sudden black-out and a cut in the film—we encounter Mark and Leah walking outside the next morning. Mark’s lip has a deep red cut and his nose shows another red mark where he apparently bled. He’s been either face-butted and slugged out for his gentle maneuver.

       Leah, evidently a witness to the scene, argues that she would have killed anyone who did that to her; but Mark demurs, knowing just how Ashely, obviously suffering from the fear of deep intimacy even more than he is, feels. What this may do to his ability to commit to the normal patterns of love-making in the future is not established. But surely it will be a long time before he is again ready to break through the taboos of intimacy which he and others suffer, meaning perhaps that he will continue to be an outsider in the normal patterns of gay sex.

 

Los Angeles, November 27, 2023

Reprinted from My Gay Cinema blog (November 2023).

 

Lisa Immordino Vreeland | Truman & Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation / 2020

a difference between laughs

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lisa Immordino Vreeland (director) Truman & Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation / 2020

 

The last paragraph of Variety reviewer Peter Debruge pretty much sums up many of my reactions to the 2020 documentary by Lisa Immordino Vreeland, Truman & Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation:

 

“The experience of watching “Truman & Tennessee” will surely feel familiar to anyone who has ever purchased a shrink-wrapped coffee-table book about a beloved subject, only to take it home, open it and realize the treatment doesn’t quite measure up. It’s a pleasure to spend an hour and a half in the resurrected company of these two intellects, but the experience feels like the lazy alternative to reading biographies about either man, while the iMovie-style editing strategy of slow-fading between layers of old photographs makes them feel like ghosts of a long-forgotten past.”

    What’s even more disturbing after you’re removed the plastic wrap is the sudden realization that although it certainly might be fun to follow along in the careers of these iconic gay 20th century writers, that first of all they actually didn’t have that much to say to each other, and although they maintained, apparently, a vague life-time relationship, they most certainly did not have anything even close to being described as “an intimate conversation,” unless you pretend that the numerous interviews that Capote and Williams had with David Frost, Dick Cavett, and others was a vicarious conversation between the two men.

      And finally, there’s the truth that isn’t ever spoken regarding the two writers. Unlike the argument of many that these two men were geniuses, that although they might both be described a gay literary pioneers—although even then I can think of many other men and women more deserving of that title—only one of these figures might be perceived as a literary genius, namely Tennessee Williams, the other being only a sometimes poetic wordsmith who touted his own works, particularly In Cold Blood, as being innovative and brilliant, without providing the evidence to me that his works were anything more some good examples of story-telling. I mean, can we really compare, as this film does, major works of theater such as The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire with Breakfast at Tiffany’s—and even then using primarily clips from the movie version which Capote hated and which has little relationship to the actual novella? Movies, in fact, are not perhaps the best way to reveal the wonders of Williams’ dramas either, despite the remarkable performances of Marlon Brando, George C. Scott, Katharine Hepburn, and Elizabeth Taylor.

      It’s a bit like if one were to attempt to trace a relationship between James Branch Cabell—a witty fantasist, long rumored to be gay, now nearly forgotten, but at the time much beloved by Mark Twain, Sinclair Lewis, H. L. Mencken, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Carl Van Vechten, and others—with William Faulkner, although Faulkner’s most important novels did indeed demonstrate the influences of Cabell, whereas I can detect no direct textual literary connections between Capote and Williams.

 

     Both Williams and Capote drank too much and pontificated endlessly, although Capote seemed always to believe the often silly words he spoke, while Williams shadowed everything he wrote and spoke with painful inner doubt. As Austin Chronicle critic Marc Savlov points out, perhaps the most similar viewpoints they shared were about the self-driven personal nature of being a writer, Capote noting early in the film: "People to whom I first showed my writing said I couldn’t write, shouldn’t write. But I feel that if you are a writer and are going to be one then absolutely nothing in the world will interfere.”

       Later in the documentary, Williams observes: “[Writing is] a simple function, never meant to be a profession, perhaps not even a vocation…simply meant to be single man’s calling out to others.” But even in these somewhat similar refrains, we see the vast difference between Capote’s determination to confront, please, and dazzle his audience, whereas Williams recognizes it as an almost desperate plea to possibly to heard and comprehended as a human being.

      Even after breaking into Williams’ apartment and about to be put under arrest, Capote hands the officer a copy of Other Voices, Other Rooms to prove to the female officer that he is a writer. The situation, when one thinks about it carefully, is absolutely ludicrous, Capote evidently carrying with him even on the late nights that he chooses to break into a friend’s apartment, a copy of his book as a kind of badge of self-importance. His character does a similar thing in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, pulling Holly Golightly into The New York Public Library in order to show her his first and only publication.

     Despite his endlessly funny put downs and catty remarks, we realize that Capote was absolutely serious about the camp role he performed, while Williams’ plays almost always contained an enormous amount of truly ridiculous campy humor, particularly when Blanche falls into one of her Southern belle trances, muttering meaningless metaphors such as she and her sister Stella representing an instance of “The blind leading the blind” or her endless dependence upon “the kindness of strangers.” Even the mother’s shrill call for her children to greet each day with the blinding cheerfulness of “Rise and shine!” is a comic trope.

      There is no humor in the terrifyingly dark gay sub-text of Richard Hickock and Perry Smith’s torture and murder of the Clutter family. And, unlike the fatally naïve believers in Williams’ dramas, representations perhaps of own inner self, such figures in Capote’s works are generally simply eccentrics, not complex women and men with desperate needs. One senses in almost all of Williams’ comments the playwright’s true interest in the inner workings of the human heart, while, as my friend Sherry Bernstein—who spent many a night with Capote at Club 54—once whispered to me, almost as if it were a confession she had to get off her chest: “You know, Truman was not a very nice man.”

     It is true that both men’s careers took a nose-dive in their later lives, as their works in drama and fiction seemed to no longer fully represent the worlds from which they had come, challenged, and embraced—Williams from the angst and sexual frustrations of the 1940s and 1950s, and Capote from his isolated childhood in the South during the 1930s and 40s, and his later society-celebrity status of the 1960s.

 

    And in reaction to this a lifetime habits both men became alcoholics and patients of the notorious Dr. Feelgood, who prescribed various life-changing drugs for every mood that his patients encountered. And although both men had long-term relationships with other men, one gets the feeling that because Williams came so late to realize his homosexuality and because of Capote’s general appearance and stature that they felt they had missed out in the gay sexual revolutions which they each had helped to generate.

     Yet what Vreeland basically shows us is surely no “intimate” relationship between the two men and very little commonality, with probably no true literary influences. Other than the numerous TV interviews, often, particularly in David Frost’s case, somewhat snarky in his curiosity about their private sexual lives, they seldom shared the same space except occasionally in their Italian vacations to Capri and Ischia. The director fills in, unfortunately, with readings of their letters and other personal comments read, in the rather unconvincing pretense of their respective voices by Jim Parsons and Zachary Quinto.

     As their darker days began to move in upon them at same moment that death lurked on the horizon, we can still imagine Williams laughing, something even Capote, through Parsons’ reading, recognized was special about the man: “He had a remarkable laugh. It wasn’t coarse or vulgar or even especially loud. It just had an amazing sort of throaty Mississippi River man ring to it. You could always tell when he walked into a room, no matter how many people were there.”

      Despite Williams’ own evaluation of Capote’s sense of humor, I cannot quite imagine the ailing, alcoholic author of the never completed Unanswered Prayers taking Tennessee’s advice:     

“I care about you more than you know. Perhaps the thing most to help you right now is your incomparable sense of humor. Rest a bit and never, never stop laughing.” I hear a cackle perhaps, another venomous put-down, even a snarl, but no joyous ring of genuine pleasure emanating from his throat.

     Alas, Vreeland’s “intimate conversation” is one of her own making.

 

Los Angeles, November 27, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2023).