Gay male poet write about cinema white woman fantasy
“I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise, / Regardless of others, ever regardful of others, / Maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man,” declares the great American poet Walt Whitman in his “Song of Myself,” originally part of Leaves of Grass (Selected Poems, Castle Books, 2000; page 26). Undertake we dare say as much? What do we share of emotion and thought, dreams and hopes, principles and virtues, beyond the confinements and ignorance of inherited belief and ritual, beyond the event and privilege of caste and class? What is civilization? Walt Whitman remains remarkable for his determined attempt to affirm the diversity of the human race and the fundamental interconnections of all people. Long Island born, Brooklyn educated, and once an office boy, printer, instructor, and journalist, Walt Whitman was an ordinary gentleman and a great innovative, an elemental and necessary poet of nature, flesh, spirit, pleasure, friendship, devotion, sex, democracy, and liberty. Walt Whitman’s incantatory rhetoric, with his lines of comparable objects, of perceived and willed bonds, remains a model for other citizens, other dreamers, other writers. Whitman first published Le A few weeks ago, I went on a date with a perfectly gentle person who I will probably never see again, and during this totally pleasant date that went nowhere, I told him all about this petty gay movie recapping project I’m doing. And I mentioned that I was about to revisit Jeffrey soon, but I was worried it might not work for The Agony of “Gay” “Cinema”; that it just wouldn’t do to make jokes about such an important, actually classic gay film. Fancy , maybe Jeffrey was too important or too good a movie to kinda roast. “Jeffrey’s…not a good movie,” he replied. Huh. That…was not a take I’d expected. Granted, it had been maybe 20 years since I last saw Jeffrey. Was it…not good? Let’s find out! So, maybe the first thing we necessitate to mention about Jeffrey is that it’s written by Paul Rudnick, who, you may think of, also wrote In & Out. Rudnick adapted Jeffrey from his own act, and the production predates In & Out by a couple years. Both films have a similar madcap, screwball energy and over-the-top side characters. But Jeffrey is scrappier, less polished, less Hollywood. It’s looser, more impressionistic at times, definitely weirder. It’s full of cu Actor, director, creator, fiction writer and poet James Franco knows how to get a reaction. Perhaps the prevailing response to him remains a swooning and fanning-of-self on the part of many women and men alike, a holdover from his days as an undifferentiated teen idol. But as his resume has change into more diverse and admittedly more commanding, an eyeroll seems just as likely. And in recent years, two groups of people in particular have get increasingly fed-up with (and increasingly antagonistic to) the public figure provocateur: poets and gay men. Both groups, it seems, participate the same aim of contention: that Franco, in his career as a poet, as in his ongoing joke/performance/trolling about the innateness of his sexuality, has simply not earned his place. It should appear as no surprise, then, that same-sex attracted poets can find especially riled about Franco’s play with identity and “literary manspreading,” to get a phrase from Purvi Shah’s piece for Vida on the Michael Derrick Hudson yellowface controversy. And yet Franco’s “queer public persona,” as he describes it in his latest poetry chapbook, Straight James / Homosexual Jam As a female homosexual, I came of age having my sexuality co-opted for the titillation of straight men and even women. No skin mag was complete without the requisite faux lesbian spread because every straight man’s fantasy was first to watch two women together and then join them. The first lesbian novels I ever read were purloined pulps found in the homes of people whose children I babysat for in high school. At the time I didn’t put together the truth that these straight couples were using my queer woman life to fuel their sexual fantasies, but that was definitely the case. One of my prompts for writing about lesbian lives as an adult has always been to portray lesbians in their entirety—we aren’t just pretty nubile “girls” doing that ridiculous tongue thing that no real lesbian has ever done in her experience. We have lives beyond what we do in bed. And what we do in bed never involves a man. Years ago when filmmaker Lizzie Borden made her iconic lesbian/political faux documentary “Born in Flames” she told me in an interview that she wanted to portray lesbians as real women, not objects of male desire–she wanted to include them seen through the fema Like a defunct pop star, Susan Sontag left behind a lot of fans who claim they knew her. After the release last September of Benjamin Moser’s novel biography, Susan Sontag: Her Life and Work, they were all over the internet, sharing stories. Writers, of course. Especially gender non-conforming writers. Does every lgbtq+ writer who lived in New York City and published a book sometime between 1960 and 2000 have a Sontag story? I do! Here’s mine: Eighteen years ago, shortly after she won the National Publication Award for her fourth novel, In America, some of which she had been accused of plagiarizing, and a few months before she published, in the New Yorker, maybe the only response to the 9/11 attacks, in their immediate aftermath, that was worth considering, she was invited, along with John Updike and Norman Mailer, to read at Queens College CUNY, where I teach creative writing. Surely the most striking trio of literary bigwigs of a certain era ever to read together in Flushing. Three idols. I had long regarded their work with awe and envy. In my preceding twenties, in the 1980s, in a studio apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, heated and airless in summe
A Queer Take on James Franco’s ‘Straight James / Queer James’
The Fetishizing of Queer Sexuality: A Response.
Hiding the Body: My Susan Sontag Story