saving love for another day
by Douglas Messerli
Todd Haynes (screenwriter and director) Dottie
Gets Spanked / 1993
As Will Fabro muses at the beginning of his
excellent essay in Bright Wall/Dark Room on Todd Haynes’ 1993 short film, Dottie
Gets Spanked:
“Queer people are often asked “When did you
know?” as though there was simply one irrevocable event that changed us, a
clearly signposted fork leading us off the default path of heteronormativity.
The question is fallacious at its core, not just in its presumption of a
dominant heterosexual identity compromised, but also in its binary notion of
cause and effect, i.e. This happened and you became That. My experience,
instead, was one of sporadic but seismic rumblings—sometimes self-aware, mostly
subconscious, and others externally applied—of difference throughout childhood
that marked me as queer long before any actual sexuality asserted itself during
puberty.”
So
too did I experience my own unconscious and knowing instances of self-awareness
that ultimately led me to perceive I was gay. There are hundreds of small
moments that began early in childhood—one time asking a neighborhood girl to
switch roles in our game-playing activities so that I might be the Mother and
she be the Father; the early bullying and name-calling which baffled me,
particularly when I was designated as a “queer,” which, without knowing its
sexual meaning I gladly accepted, knowing I was indeed a bit “odd” in
comparison with my male companions; my early childhood attraction to theater,
even as a six-year-old asking a friend to “play play,” for which his mother
rapidly accused me of speaking baby-talk and, soon after, my complete devouring
of the Burns Mantle Best Play Books I’d discovered in the local library from
which I memorized the dates of plays, the theaters in New York in which they
were performed, and the number of performances they survived; and my general
disinterest in all male-oriented toys, my parents finally breaking down one
Christmas to buy me a marionette, Robin (as in Robin Hood), the closest thing
to a doll they might have imagined as an appropriate gift for their eldest
son—but only four mind-searingly instances in my later youth that served as
deeper revelations of my hidden sexuality. After two years in high school
revealing to the head coach that I had utterly no talent in any sport, he
offered the former basketball coach and current superintendent of school’s son,
me, the opportunity to serve as team “mascot”—which meant traveling with the
various football, basketball, and track teams to all their venues and cleaning
up after the athletes’ showers the towels and other debris they left behind. At
one point, while hanging out in the locker room while they changed back into
their street clothes I caught a glimpse of the football team captain, Doug
Reed, in the nude. I don’t know if anyone noticed my eyes captivated by the
sight, but I do recall my immediate erection, which might explain why later
that day several of the team members grabbed and stripped me with the intention
of some vague sexual initiation which, upon noting my bodily immaturity, they
quickly abandoned. I remember being disappointed instead of relieved as I
should have been.
A
second moment of self-awareness stole over me as I found myself in a drugstore
leafing through the pages of a fan magazine, lusting after the image of the
long-flowing mane and hairy chest of Barry Gibbs of the Bee-Gees, his penis
out-lined clearly by his tight pants. I could hardly put the magazine down but
was embarrassed in case anyone might spot my entranced stare at the pages of a
magazine clearly intended for teenage females.
At
sixteen I had finally admitted to myself, as Adam Lambert has recently
described his own childhood self-revelation, that “I was not wired like most of
the other guys.” Living in a dormitory in Norway I had developed a secret crush
on the dark-haired ice-speedskating champion of the school, Halvard. One
afternoon, as I laid reading on my bed, he entered my room, obviously
frustrated by my unconscious flirtations, and, marching over to my bed, splayed
his body face-to-face across my own. What was I to do with my roommate sitting
across the room? I gasped and laid as still as if I were dead, an act I still
regret and will to the moment of my actual death. If only I could have lifted
my arms and wound then round him. I was still not gay in my head.
Finally, having returned to the US that same year, I read in the June
24, 1964 issue of Life magazine their pictorial commentary on
homosexuality in America, accompanied by an essay, basically outlining the
“sad, sickness of these desperately lonely men,” by Paul Welch. I recently
reread that sad and sick essay, but can’t find the phrase I remember it for. It
doesn’t matter, I felt that it suggested that they had even seen men kissing
one another, which I might have concocted in my 17-year-old mind from their
account of how the police watched to see if these men demonstrated any sexual
enticement, which in those days might even be evidenced by placing one’s hand
on the shoulder of a friend. But I do remember that I was not disturbed by any
such enticement but the reporter’s seemingly incredulousness about the fact
that two men, attracted to one another, might want to follow it up with a kiss,
and found it absurd that this was something about on which they felt they
needed to comment. I never once had discussed anything about sex with my
father, but for unknown reasons felt it necessary to mention my observation to
him. Suddenly the seemingly quiet, gentle man I knew grew enraged, his face
almost turning red. “If ever a son of mine would be found to be a homosexual,”
he almost screamed, “I would immediately disown him!” If I had merely spoken
out of my confusion, I now was suddenly awakened into a new realization. I
didn’t know the word then, but I might now express by describing father a
brutal homophobe. His terror took my breath away, transforming my innocent
wonderment of two men wanting to kiss into something darkly and emotionally
terrifying—and inviting. I didn’t “come out” until two years later, but I now
already knew I had been waiting all those years to be raped, or at least
kissed.
At
the same time that I was “playing play” or as I would now describe it,
performing improvisatory theater with my friends and even, from time to time,
my disinterested brother and sister, Hayne’s six-and a half-year-old, Steven
Gale, was fixated by the television show starring Dottie Frank (Julie Halston),
based loosely on Lucille Ball’s I Love Lucy. I too watched that weekly
with my mother, knowing, as does Steven, that it was not my father’s idea of
good TV, which consisted for him, as it does for Steven’s father (Robert Pall),
of westerns and football broadcasts. Steven is as utterly focused on Dottie as
I was on all things theater, drawing pictures of Dottie and her fellow
characters with a creative energy that I put into listing and learning about
Broadway venues and playwrights.
And gradually the child at the center of Haynes work grows to realize
that unwittingly his infatuation is somehow not quite normal. The first time he
perceives this is when his mother is being visited by a neighborhood lady who,
observing Steven’s total attention to the situation comedy, remarks on how
strange it is that he is so completely wrapped up in his observations,
reporting that they can hardly keep their daughter still despite her husband’s
regular spankings. Mrs. Gale, who might remind one of Barbara Billingsley who
played the mother on TV’s Leave It to Beaver, quietly objects “We don’t
believe in hitting.” Yet Steven, like most children, has overheard what parents
often think their children have tuned out, an inexplicable comment about the
appropriateness of his behavior.
This process of gendering even public entertainment continues as the
next day Steven boards the bus, where three girls are engaged in an intense
conversation about their personal likes and dislikes, including their shared
enjoyment of the Dottie show. Later, while he waits at the end of the day to be
bussed back home he overhears his three female classmates discussing the color
of Dottie’s hair (red, apparently, as was Lucy’s) and her hairdo, information
which he knows—probably through a fan magazine like the one I was consulting at
a far too advanced age—and cannot resist sharing with them: she wears a wig,
and the natural color of her hair is brunette. The girls giggle in horror that
a male has entered into their female territory, knowing more than they do about
hair color and appliances. In a long-held camera frieze Steven looks down at
his white and black leather oxfords in embarrassment for having entered a
territory that he had not even recognized as being defined by gender. By the
next morning, one of the girls calls Steven over to taunt him for his
intrusion: “My sister says you’re a feminino!” I doubt that Steven even knows
what that might mean, but like the word “queer” hurled at me, he recognizes it
as a label of otherness, of something he was supposed not to be.
By
the time his father demonstrates irritation for his son’s sacred program that
interrupts his time for watching football, Steven has begun to learn he too is
not “wired” like the other boys at his school, and that his innocent love of a
television figure is somehow not appropriate. As Fabro nicely summarizes the
situation:
“Steven, with loving parents and an almost
satirically archetypal suburban home, seems like a fairly ordinary child—sweet
and dutiful, though maybe too meek for a “normal” boy—until the intensity of
his heroine-worship initiates a slow but persistent recognition of his
difference, a minor but profound transgression that Haynes insinuates as queer.
Steven’s love for Dottie is desire, but not a normative/heterosexual one; it is
instead an act of emotional transference and identification. To be a queer child
is to disrupt norms you are just beginning to understand; to be aware of the
burgeoning self-consciousness of your othering. Over the course of Dottie
Gets Spanked’s 30 minutes, Steven Gale’s Dottie idolatry increasingly
ostracizes him from his family and peers due to the implications of his
deviation from a more conventional, and less complicated, expression of
desire.”
Although his father resists, Steven’s mother helps him to fill out an
application for her son to attend a shooting session of Dottie’s series, which
despite Mr. Gale’s refusal to even put it in the mail, he wins, along with
girls and their mothers from other parts of the country.
Is
it any wonder that he dreams of himself as being a sort of king who nonetheless
has been ordered to be spanked by a muscleman of enormous proportions, almost
as if he were a muscle-builder out of the 1950s bodybuilding magazines of Bob
Mizer and others? Through his love of Dottie (Lucy) he has himself somehow
become a powerful force which must be punished for transgressing the standard
patriarchal order.
The
only solution is to destroy the evidence of that transformation. Carefully
folding the “Dottie Gets Spanked” drawing, the boy wraps it up in foil—just as
one would a precious leftover treat to sustain oneself at a later date—taking
it out in the middle of the night to bury, with a few other sacred relics, near
a tree for a later time when he may need it. Dottie’s spanking, accordingly,
does not represent the subservience it pretends, but portrays instead a potent
secretly sexual energy (little wonder that so many gay and straight porn films
feature spanking as a prelude to the sexual act).
Having just written about Werner Schroeter’s important film, The Rose
King, I cannot but be reminded that Steven’s almost sacramental act is
similar to the young Albert of Schroeter’s film burying his rose king in a
sacred grove with the hope that it/he may flower at another time with the full
force of love with which it/he has been recreated and temporarily
sacrificed.
Los Angeles, New Year’s Eve, 2020
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and
World Cinema Review (December 2020).
No comments:
Post a Comment