Gay old time

MICHAEL BRONSKI — Wed, 30 May 2007 21:42:00 GMT

Ten moments when the mainstream assimilated gay culture and made it its own
Many people take for granted that the divide between gay culture and mainstream culture is as thin as the latex of an expensive condom.

In our post–Queer Eye for the Straight Guy world, many people — particularly younger people — take for granted that the divide between gay culture and mainstream culture is as thin as the latex of an expensive condom. This has not always been the case. Since the Stonewall Riots of 1969, the underground gay counterculture has consistently, and vitally, influenced mainstream popular culture in style, music, fashion, language, sexual mores, and politics. Here are 10 moments — all of them decisive — that chart the gradual, but irrefutable, queering of American culture.

1970: Bette Midler, camp out
In 1970, Bette Midler, mixing an outrageous blend of camp, sex talk, and Andrews Sisters tunes began performing at Manhattan’s Continental Baths. Within six months, she was one of Johnny Carson’s favorite guests, and in early 1973, her LP The Divine Miss M went gold. The rest has been wind beneath her wings.

1972: David Bowie, alien sex
If the Rolling Stones shocked middle-class sensibilities with their rough, thrusting cock-rock swagger, it was Ziggy Stardust — a/k/a David Bowie — in 1972 who single-handedly invented glam rock, making androgyny, glitter, face paint, and ambisexual posturing the newest threat to red-blooded American youth, spawning artists such as KISS and Boy George.

1977: The Village People, muscle shirts
In 1977, producer Jacques Morali manufactured disco sensation the Village People, who satirized butch gay-male stereotypes. What began as an insider parody sold more than 85 million albums and “YMCA” — a testimonial to anonymous gay-boy sex — is now a staple of summer-camp sing-alongs.

1984: Madonna, art of the shallow
Her impersonations of Marilyn Monroe in her 1984 “Material Girl” video and appropriation of black-gay voguing in the 1990 hit “Vogue” made Madonna a premiere conduit of gay culture to the young masses. Aside from instructing teenage girls to wear devotional jewelry, she also was vehement in her endorsement of gay rights.

1985: Rock Hudson, a crack in the mirror
Rock Hudson, the 1950s’ most vital, masculine, heterosexual heartthrob, died of AIDS-related infections in 1985, making Hudson’s long-rumored homosexuality all too visible. The culture shock was a result not only of his death, but of the new understanding that life beneath the tinsel of Hollywood was queerer than moviegoers had previously suspected.

1992: Calvin Klein briefs, mmm . . .
Men’s bodies have always been sexualized in gay-male culture — Physique Pictorial of the 1950s became the template for male bods everywhere. But in 1992, photographer Herb Ritts upped the ante — and the booty — with his Calvin Klein ads, which brought a gay-porn sensibility to Vanity Fair.

1997: Ellen, soft butch next door
In 1997, Ellen Degeneres — the most famous soft-butch in America, after Hillary Clinton — “came out” on her TV sit-com. The show was cancelled a year later, but Ellen made Will and Grace, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, Queer as Folk, and The L World possible.

1998: Dennis rodman, boa bad
Dennis Rodman’s 1998 autobiography Bad as I Wanna Be was as revealing as his flagrant display of body art. Rodman’s fondness of tattoos, piercings, flamboyantly colored cranial plumage, and wedding dresses was a triumph of mix-messaged drag/punk/biker gay sensibility — the precursor to the milder metrosexual.

1998: Still more Sex and the City
It’s no surprise that critics thought Sex and the City (1998–2004) was the ultimate integration of gay-male sensibility into TV: it was written by gay men, and it’s edgy sexual dialogue and plots were gayer than Will and Grace. Is this what heterosexual women really sounded like in private? Only their screenwriters know for sure. Het-sexual freedom, once again, turned out to be a copy of queer life and love.

2006: Mark Foley, closeted conservative
In September 2006, Florida Republican Congressman Mark Foley resigned amid allegations of improper behavior toward male pages; heterosexuals breathed a sigh of relief that it wasn’t — yet again — one of them. But Foley’s indiscretions evinced not only another crack in the facade of Republican respectability, but a true sign of the old gay-lib adage: we are everywhere.

Deadly art

MICHAEL BRONSKI — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 15:03:28 GMT

Sorting out the life and career of Leni Riefenstahl
It’s tempting to see two new biographies of Leni Riefenstahl and assume they’ll push the envelope, and expose the dirt about her personal life.

Star Wars and The Lion King quote Riefenstahl, and advertising art — from Calvin Klein to the Gap and Abercrombie & Fitch — reflect her aesthetic in a way that’s so ingrained we hardly notice.

The past quarter-century has reveled in the increasing detail of the tell-all biography — from Christina Crawford’s 1978 gold standard, Mommie Dearest to In Touch Weekly’s “Britney’s Gay Secret: Shocking Revelations About Her Lesbian Flings” — so it’s tempting to see two new biographies of Leni Riefenstahl and assume they’ll push the envelope, and expose the dirt about her personal life. Of course, we already know she was a Nazi sympathizer who supported the Third Reich with the brilliant propaganda films Triumph des Willens (“Triumph of the Will”) and Olympia. We know she was rumored to be Hitler’s girlfriend. We know she was accused of removing adult and child Gypsies from Maxglan, a concentration camp for those who would die in Auschwitz, to use as extras in Tiefland (“Lowlands”), only to send them to their deaths when filming was finished.

So is there any shocking, new information in these biographies from Stephen Bach and Jürgen Trimborn? Well, there is a great episode, generally unnoted in the Riefenstahl mythology, that in 1938, when Riefenstahl arrived in Hollywood expecting to be lauded as a genius but instead was shunned as a Nazi, one of the few people to be at all supportive of her was Walt Disney. But even this isn’t a real surprise, since we already know that Disney, who was obsessed with the negative “Jewish influence” on Hollywood, regularly attended American Nazi Party meetings before the United States entered the war.

Her Disney friendship aside, Riefenstahl has occupied a central, or at least peripheral, position in 20th-century cinema. No question she’s an authoritative director: Triumph des Willens and Olympia are mesmerizing and powerful films. But her National Socialist politics — which she vehemently denied from after the war until her death in 2003, at age 101 — have been a stumbling block, to say the least. Germany has always treated her with the utmost caution; she could not deny her close association with the Third Reich, and her de-Nazification hearings were thought by many to be a sham. In the United States, however, she’s been less-severely critiqued. Indeed, a flurry of Riefenstahl admiration — the 1973 publication of her The Last of the Nuba, a book-length photographic essay on the “primitive” African people; an invitation to the 1974 Telluride Film Festival; her well-publicized connections to Mick Jagger and David Bowie — prompted Susan Sontag to write her 1974 essay “Fascinating Fascism,” a forceful analysis and denunciation of Riefenstahl and her “fascist aesthetics,” which Sontag describes as, in part, the idolization of masculine power and the glorification of the perfected virile body.

Major embarrassment?

MICHAEL BRONSKI — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 14:14:57 GMT

VIDEO: Michael Bronski assesses the gay-porn career of O'Reilly Factor fave Matt Sanchez
Matt Sanchez was a darling of the conservative media establishment, but then news broke that he was, only a few years ago, performing in famous gay porn films.

VIDEO: Michael Bronski on the gay-porn career of "Rod Majors," including a clip from Jawbreaker

Matt Sanchez cut a striking figure on The O’Reilly Factor and Hannity & Colmes. In January, the USMC reservist and third-year Columbia University student had complained about being mistreated and called a “baby killer” by members of a campus socialist organization, and soon found himself a darling of the conservative media establishment. But then news broke on the gay blog Joe.My.God that Sanchez was, only a few years ago, performing under the name Rod Majors in famous gay porn films with titles such as such as Beat Off Frenzy (1994), Jawbreaker (1995), and Touched by an Anal (1997). And who can forget the inimitable Glory Holes of Fame series (through 1998)? Sanchez also had his own escort service for several years, charging $200 for at-home sessions, $250 for work involving travel to a client’s home.

To Sanchez’s credit, he immediately admitted that all of this was true — although he did fudge on the timeline, claiming that his porn and hustling career was over 15 years ago — and denied that escort ads with his phone number and photos that appeared three years ago were placed by an imposter. Sanchez valiantly, and pointlessly, defended himself on these discrepancies to a kind but unrelenting Alan Colmes on the latter’s radio show.

Sanchez also claims he is not gay, that his porn work was just a job, and that he is now a deeply conservative, patriotic Marine who regrets his past actions. In a piece he wrote for Salon, he claims that porn “reduces the mind, flattens the soul.” There is no reason not to take his word on all of this. Not everyone in gay porn is actually gay, people change all the time, and, as feminists have always pointed out, sex work is, well, work, and probably a prime example of what Marx calls alienated labor.

Smart, witty, gay bloggers such as Tom Baccus have attacked Sanchez for hypocrisy, as has Nation commentator Max Blumenthal. But is this really the case? If anything, the hypocrisy lies all on the side of the likes of O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and Ann Coulter — with whom Sanchez had his photo taken at the early-March Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at which she made her infamous “faggot” remark about John Edwards — for whom homosexuality trumps all other virtues.

Observing Global Orgasm Day

MICHAEL BRONSKI — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 22:05:13 GMT

Show you care
Sure, everyone looks forward to winter solstice because we know that after weeks of dreary darkness, they days will get longer and brighter.

The Rhoda Reaction

MICHAEL BRONSKI — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 20:19:05 GMT

Why The Bad Seed teaches us more about “evil” than George W. Bush ever could
what are the causes of evil and how do we eradicate it — or at least keep it in abeyance?

Rhoda Penmark

She is instantly recognizable as a camp icon. With her flouncing gingham dress, blond pigtails, obnoxious bangs, and disingenuously angelic voice, eight-year-old Rhoda Penmark — “the bad seed” — exhibits the thin veneer that can mask criminal insanity. Over the past decade, Mervyn Leroy’s 1956 film The Bad Seed has been endlessly parodied by drag queens, screened at teenage parties, and plumbed by David Letterman for laughs. But despite the mirth it elicits today, The Bad Seed — as well as the 1954 novel by William March (whose real name was William Edward Campbell) on which it is based — is deadly serious. We may laugh at it now but when March wrote The Bad Seed, he intended to engage fully the most important question on everyone’s mind in the aftermath of the Holocaust and Hiroshima: what are the causes of evil and how do we eradicate it — or at least keep it in abeyance?

It is probably no coincidence that, as naughty little Rhoda got camped to the max, the word “evil” found a secure place in our political vocabulary. Ronald Reagan first popularized its use as a political concept in a 1982 speech condemning the Soviet Union before the British House of Commons. Clearly a reference to Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, which was released a scant year and a half earlier, Reagan’s rhetoric was pure Hollywood PR schmaltz. Among the emergent Christian right, however, the word had serious theological resonance. And that was George W. Bush’s intent when in his 2002 State of the Union address he charged Iraq, Iran, and North Korea with being an “axis of evil.” With that sop to his fundamentalist base — speechwriter David Frum originally suggested the term “axis of hatred” — Bush set the stage for the US invasion of Iraq and the next three-plus years of carnage. Just four months later, in May 2002, John Bolton, in his new role as unconfirmed US ambassador to the United Nations, gave a speech titled “Beyond the Axis of Evil,” to which he added Libya, Syria, and Cuba to the list of Satan’s army. The Bush administration so normalized the idea that an enemy like Hugo Chavez turned it against them, referring to Bush himself as “the devil” who left behind the smell of sulfur when he stepped out of the room.

My Ellen Willis

MICHAEL BRONSKI — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 23:18:51 GMT

Making sense of a woman who was always two or three steps ahead of the Zeitgeist
When I was a queer teenager in suburban New Jersey in the early 1960s, I decided that I wanted to be Susan Sontag.

WHAT’S WRONG WITH F-U-N?: Ellen Willis was as unpredictable as she was utopian in her musings on feminism, music, pop culture, and the left.

When I was a queer teenager in suburban New Jersey in the early 1960s, I decided that I wanted to be Susan Sontag. She was smart, in the center of New York’s intellectual circles, and had fabulous hair that matched her feline persona. It was only when I turned 20, in 1969, and began reading Ellen Willis that I found myself wanting to aim higher. For my developing countercultural tastes, journalist, cultural critic, and activist Willis had it all over Sontag. She was not just smart, but totally cued into popular culture: she was Rolling Stone, not New York Review of Books. She was not only intellectual but political — on-the-streets political. And she had fabulous hair — not old school, post-beatnik, New York–intellectual hair, but Bob Dylan, frizzed out, all-over-the-place hair.

I am not usually shocked by obituaries, but when I read in the November 10 New York Times that Willis, 64, had died the day before I was shaken. It wasn’t her age that startled me — I’ve lived through the AIDS epidemic since 1980, and have nurtured friends and acquaintances of all ages through death. It was the shock of realizing that there would be no new Ellen Willis articles to read.

Pleasure principle
Willis and I were not friends — we met twice at conferences and I interviewed her once for the Boston Phoenix in 1999 — but she has had a profound effect on my growth as a thinker and writer for nearly four decades. She emerged from the New York–feminist scene in the mid 1960s — as one of the original Redstockings, a radical women’s collective that produced some of the finest political think pieces of the time — and began writing on music for fledgling ’60s rock publications such as Cheetah and Rolling Stone. Soon after, she began writing for more upscale venues like The New Yorker, and then became a fixture at the Village Voice.

Ralph Ginzburg, American provocateur (1929–2006)

MICHAEL BRONSKI — Wed, 12 Jul 2006 16:41:36 GMT

In memoriam
I first read Ralph Ginzburg’s magazine Fact in 1964, and it was a revelation.

I first read Ralph Ginzburg’s magazine Fact in 1964 — as a teenager in the New Jersey suburbs — and it was a revelation. I was not unaware of edgier literary material. I often read Evergreen Review and saw as many foreign films as New Jersey and my parents would allow. But Fact was different. It was overtly political and flagrantly provocative. It ran a long interview with George Lincoln Rockwell, the leader of the American Nazi Party, which allowed him to spew out his hatred and indict himself. It printed Ralph Nader’s first article about Detroit’s efforts to conceal the structural dangers of American cars. It ran an article exposing America’s pastime — baseball — as being nothing more than a gauzily veiled, pathological Oedipal fixation in which the mythical son tries to throw his semen at his mother, only to have it batted away by the aggressive, phallic-wielding father before she can catch it. Fact — which lasted only 12 issues — was an in-your-face “fuck you” to American mainstream culture and politics. For young, anti-social, budding-radical, future gay liberationists, this was heaven: Fact hated Nazis, cars, sports, and Republicans.

But as important as Fact was — it is the inspiration for many contemporary news outlets like 20/20, The Daily Show, and the Drudge Report — Ginzburg, who died on July 6, will always be more famous for his earlier, far more scandalous publication.

The ritzy cloth-bound quarterly, Eros, of which he published only four volumes in 1962 before it was shut down by the feds, was about all about sex. But by contemporary standards, it was a cross between the literary pretensions of the New York Review of Books, the politics of the Village Voice, and the more tasteful aspects of Hustler. Ginzburg took his cue from the 1950s quarterly Aphrodite, which was published by arch pornographer Samuel Roth — famed for the groundbreaking 1957 Supreme Court decision Roth v. United States — and sold his magazine only to mail subscribers. Ever the showman (Ginzburg was as good at PR as he was at publishing), he applied with great fanfare for bulk-mailing permits from Blue Ball, Pennsylvania; Intercourse, Pennsylvania; and Middlesex, New Jersey (ultimately, he chose the last one).

Libbing it up

MICHAEL BRONSKI — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 21:42:23 GMT

The future of gay politics can be found in its past — with a few tweaks
The gay-rights movement has hit a brick wall.

CHILDREN OF PARADISE: Peter Hujar’s iconic photograph for a Gay Liberation Front poster, circa 1970

The gay-rights movement has hit a brick wall. Yes, we have same-sex marriage in Massachusetts. Yes, the Supreme Court overturned state anti-sodomy laws. Yes, gay characters are all over mainstream TV. Still, after 35 years of slow, incremental progress, we are at a decisive crossroads. Simply put: to bring about real social change — dependent on truly transforming hearts and minds — it needs to reassess what kind of movement it wants to be. Will it be a movement that continues arguing, with diminishing success, merely for the rights of its own people — and even at that, only for those who, say, want to formalize a relationship? Or will it argue wholeheartedly, and without reservation, for a broader vision of justice and fairness that includes all Americans? If the movement does not choose the latter course, it runs the risk of becoming not just irrelevant, but a political stumbling block to progressive social change in general.

The right template for the future can be found in the gay-rights movement’s own history, in the insights of gay liberation — the radical, grassroots politics that emerged in June 1969, when queers rioted for three days in the streets of Greenwich Village to protest police harassment.

A week after the riots came to an end, the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) was formed. While its original membership included drag queens, ragtag queer youth, and old-time reformist gay activists, it was spearheaded by men and women seasoned in progressive, coalition-based politics with ties to labor, women’s-liberation, peace, economic-justice, and black- and Latino-liberation groups. In addition, almost everyone was engaged in some aspect of the national movement to stop the war in Vietnam. And — no surprise — all of these people were influenced by the late-’60s culture of anti-authoritarianism, sexual freedom, and personal liberation that was sweeping the country.

While I was not at the Stonewall riots (I think I was uptown at the New Yorker theater seeing a double bill of Ingmar Bergman films), I joined the GLF shortly after it formed. I was a 20-year-old lower-middle-class college student, active in Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and anti-war protests. But the very idea of a politics that acknowledged — was actually based on affirming — my sexual desires was initially mind-boggling. This was the key, the cornerstone, that made all my other political work make sense. Of course, much of my, and my friends’, thinking was hopelessly naïve about both human nature and politics — particularly international politics — but on balance, it offered a more capacious and workable vision of justice than anything suggested by those who called simply for equal rights.

Queering the Code

MICHAEL BRONSKI — Wed, 17 May 2006 17:21:29 GMT

Leonardo da Vinci’s work is coded, all right — as gay
With close to 60 million copies in print worldwide and a film version starring Tom Hanks opening on May 18, The Da Vinci Code is a galloping success.

BELOVED APOSTLE: Jesus and John, clockwise from top: Jacopo Bassano’s The Last Supper (1542); Christus-Johannes-Gruppe, 16th-century German stone carving; late-15th-century Dutch painter Meister des Hausbuchs’s The Last Supper.

With close to 60 million copies in print worldwide and a film version starring Tom Hanks opening May 18, The Da Vinci Code is a galloping success. That, of course, has whipped up the fury of traditionalist Christians who object to author Dan Brown’s heretical re-imagining of Christian history: that Jesus had a child with Mary Magdalene whose descendents live in France, and that this “proof” of the feminine principle in Christianity has been kept alive by a secret cult that included Leonardo da Vinci, who hinted at it in his art. Da Vinci’s “code,” the story goes, is encrypted in the artist’s rendering of St. John the Evangelist in his famous painting The Last Supper (1498): the androgynous St. John, often called the Beloved Apostle because of Jesus’s special affection for him, is actually Mary Magdalene. Going even further down a feminist path, Brown casts the Mona Lisa (1506) as an epicene vision of da Vinci himself.

All this may seem quite a stretch, but the Vatican, which normally keeps above the popular-culture fray, has voiced strong objections. On Sunday, May 7, Nigerian cardinal Francis Arinze, a runner-up in the last papal election, even urged Catholics to take some unspecified “legal action” against the book and the film.

The Vatican is right about one thing: Brown’s story doesn’t really make historical or artistic sense. And yet Brown is on to something: there are sexual and religious codes in da Vinci’s paintings (and in much other medieval and Renaissance art), but they are not of some “feminine principle” ruthlessly subjugated by the Roman Catholic Church. Rather, da Vinci’s code exposes a homoerotic bond between Jesus and St. John, and it posits that this bond was the basis for religious acceptance of not only same-sex love, but also divinely accepted same-sex unions as well. And the Vatican was annoyed by Dan Brown’s interpretation!

Second time around

MICHAEL BRONSKI — Mon, 08 May 2006 19:46:59 GMT

Meeting the high costs of going back to school
If you are thinking of going back to school, you will want to do four things before making that commitment.

Few pay the full fare without assistance of some kind

Sure, it looks like great fun as Joan and Barri, two desperate 40-year-old housewives, frolic with 19-year-old boys, experiment with lesbianism, sample sex toys, and do beer runs for their new underage friends on the new TV sitcom Campus Ladies. But the show never answers a basic question: how are they paying for college?

A college education — at any time of life — costs money, often a lot of money. A four-year undergraduate education now runs close to $40,000 a year for tuition, room, and board for both large and small private colleges. Boston University clocks in at $42,046, and Stonehill, a small Catholic college in Easton, is $38,121. State universities are, of course, cheaper. Attending UMass Amherst costs $15,795 for residents, and $24,914 for out-of-staters, and attending UMass Boston is a third of that.

These days few students — or, let's be honest, parents — pay the full fare without assistance, and all schools have financial-aid offices to help put together the best package of federal loans, bank loans, and, if possible, scholarships to finance college. But these programs are, to a large degree, geared toward students who are just out of high school and following a traditional, kindergarten-through-bachelor’s-degree educational track. What about all those people — and there are plenty of them — in their late 20s, 30s, or even older who want to take the plunge into higher education?

There are lots of reasons why adults return to school to pursue long- or short-term academic careers: to get that never-completed Bachelor of Arts, to enhance their earning power with a master’s degree, to prepare for a new mid-career profession, or simply for personal growth.

Taking courses toward a degree is going to cost you money — there’s no way around it — but if you just want to pursue course work that interests you, school can be much cheaper. Harvard Extension, for instance, offers a wide variety of courses that can be taken on graduate, undergraduate, or noncredit basis. For example, you can take “The Vikings and the Nordic Heroic Tradition” for $1450 for graduate credit, $550 for undergraduate credit, or $325 for noncredit. (Most of the syllabi for these courses are available online, so if you are unusually disciplined and simply interested in learning about a given topic, you can easily put together your own at-home course.)

Gay meant guilty

MICHAEL BRONSKI — Fri, 05 May 2006 13:54:20 GMT

How gay-history experts could help free a man convicted of murder 25 years ago
On April 8, 1981, Wayne Healy, a 29-year-old gay man, was convicted of brutally murdering his former brother-in-law during a sexual encounter.

Al Pacino in Cruising

On April 8, 1981, Wayne Healy, a 29-year-old gay man, was convicted of brutally murdering his former brother-in-law during a sexual encounter. After a highly problematic trial, Healy was sentenced to life without parole and remanded to MCI-Norfolk. Healy’s conviction was upheld in a series of appeals to state courts — including the Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) — until January, when US District Court Judge Michael A. Posner ruled that he should be released or retried. Not only had the state prosecutor used a blatantly homophobic strategy that emphasized a “homosexual element to the murder,” argued Posner, but the state also suppressed (either intentionally or not) vital evidence that no sexual encounter had taken place. On May 5, the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit will hear arguments in Wayne Blyth Healy v. Luis Spencer (the Superintendent at Norfolk who, by law, must be named as the state’s respondent). This is Healy’s last chance at vindication.

The big arrow in the quiver of Healy’s lawyer, Wendy Sibbison, is a relatively new legal tactic that uses historical and literary scholarship to help judges and juries better understand how the culture of the past influenced courtroom decisions. In Healy’s case, this means explicating how deeply ingrained homophobic attitudes, psychological theories, and even popular culture — including Hollywood films like Cruising and Deliverance — played a major role in sentencing a potentially innocent man to life in prison.

The case in question
At around 1:30 am on August 8, 1980, Richard Chalue, 29, was found dead in his Holyoke apartment. Because he was in his bedroom, his pants around his knees, gagged with socks, his hands tied behind his back, the police immediately assumed, even before Healy was a suspect, that this was “a homosexual related homicide.” Healy, the victim’s former brother-in-law, had visited Chalue at 9 pm for a few minutes but returned to the home he shared with his lover, George Roy, by 12:10 am. Although there was no ill will between the two men, no physical evidence linking Healy to the crime, and no proof that Chalue was gay or bisexual, Holyoke police began to piece together a scenario in which Healy violently murdered Chalue during a sexual tryst. This fanciful plot began to seem more reasonable after Healy, a licensed practical nurse and EMT who was closeted at the time, did not tell the police that he had visited two gay bars after leaving Chalue and before arriving home, leading them to believe he was at Chalue’s apartment longer than he had stated.

Finding religion

MICHAEL BRONSKI — Wed, 12 Apr 2006 18:52:12 GMT

Will this Judas save us?
He is the epitome of traitorousness in Western culture, his name synonymous with evil and betrayal.

He is the epitome of traitorousness in Western culture, his name synonymous with evil and betrayal. He has also been the main single figure behind much of the anti-Semitism in Western culture. While the Jewish hierarchy and populace may have been labeled Christ killers, it was Judas the apostle who was directly responsible for his arrest and death, selling out Jesus for 30 pieces of silver.

No wonder so much attention has been paid to the discovery of the Gospel of Judas, a 26-page text translated from crumbling parchment discovered in Egypt in the 1970s, but only now published through the efforts of scholars and the National Geographic Society. The text, written decades after the now-canonical Gospels of Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John, essentially recounts a conversation between Judas and Jesus. Here Judas is the favored apostle, and Jesus tells him that he “will exceed” his fellow apostles, and while he may be cursed by later generations, he will “come to rule over” them. The main plot twist here is that Jesus asks Judas to betray him — to “sacrifice the man that clothes me” — which makes Judas’s betrayal an act of fealty and love.

It’s true that Judas doesn’t come off well in the four canonical gospels. Matthew charges that Judas betrayed his spiritual leader for a paltry 30 pieces of silver (interestingly, this detail is in the Judas gospel as well), the equivalent of five months of food or the price of a slave. Both Luke and John connect Judas with Satan. John goes even further, identifying him with “night” and thus with the forces of evil (though there are also indications in John that Jesus asked Judas to betray him). And to varying degrees the four traditional evangelists blame not just Judas, but all of the Jews for the death of Jesus. “His blood shall be on us and our children,” cries a Jewish member of the mob during Jesus’s persecution, and that was good enough for Christian tradition until very recently.

Bad behavior

MICHAEL BRONSKI — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 20:26:10 GMT

You can’t do that here in Massachusetts
When the Supreme Judicial Court ruled that prohibiting same-sex couples from marrying was illegal, everyone knew that it marked the beginning of a long war.

When the Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) ruled that prohibiting same-sex couples from marrying was illegal, everyone knew that it marked the beginning of a long war. No one suspected, however, that the next major battle would be sparked by Governor Mitt Romney — an implacable foe of gay marriage — who dusted off an antiquated 1913 state statute (Chapter 207, Section 12) that forbade Massachusetts city and town clerks from performing marriages for out-of-state couples who could not marry in their home states. The law was intended, in large part, to prevent interracial marriage. While the intent of the Massachusetts law was voided in 1967 by the Supreme Court in Loving v. Virginia, the law still stands because race was not specifically invoked in the statute. And so Romney insisted that it be enforced against all same-sex couples whose states ban gay marriage. After all, claimed the governor, the law is the law. And last week, with only one dissenting vote, the SJC agreed.

Well, plenty of laws on the books do not get enforced. Here is a quick sampling. Enforcement, anyone?

MASSACHUSETTS GENERAL LAW, CHAPTER 272, SECTION 14 forbids adultery, and anyone found guilty should be imprisoned for not more than three years or by “a fine of not more than five hundred dollars.” (This statute was upheld by the SJC in Commonwealth v. Stowell in 1983.)

CHAPTER 272, SECTION 18 forbids fornication (not defined in the statute) and mandates imprisonment for not more than three months or by a fine of not more than thirty dollars.

CHAPTER 272, SECTION 17 forbids both incestuous marriage and sexual activities for a whole range of relatives, including in-laws. Culprits “shall be punished by imprisonment in the state prison for not more than 20 years.”

CHAPTER 272, SECTION 36 forbids “willfully” blaspheming “the holy name of God by denying, cursing or contumeliously reproaching God, his creation, government or final judging of the world” or “exposing to contempt and ridicule, the holy word of God contained in the holy scriptures.” Punishment: “imprisonment in jail for not more than one year or by a fine of not more than three hundred dollars.”

CHAPTER 272, SECTION 33 forbids exhibiting “for hire an albino person, a minor or mentally ill person who is deformed or a person who has an appearance of deformity produced by artificial means.” Fine: “not more than five hundred dollars.”

Faith-based TV

MICHAEL BRONSKI — Fri, 31 Mar 2006 14:09:07 GMT

Those edgy UCCs are at it again
As liturgical organ music fills the sanctuary, good-looking white families respectfully fill the pews of a high-ceilinged, beautifully ornamented church.

As liturgical organ music fills the sanctuary, good-looking white families respectfully fill the pews of a high-ceilinged, beautifully ornamented church. The camera focuses on an African-American woman and a crying infant as some white parishioners look askance. Cut to an aged white hand pressing a bright-red button, and suddenly the mother and child are catapulted high into the air. Seconds later the button is pressed again, and an interracial gay-male couple is similarly ejected. After five more people fly into the church’s rafters, the words “God Doesn’t Reject People and Neither Do We” appear on the screen. A voice-over then tells viewers, “No matter who you are or where you are in life’s journey, you’re welcome here,” and the words united church of christ appear on the screen.

As welcoming as the United Church of Christ (UCC) may be, the three major networks are not reciprocating the gesture. ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox have all rejected the 30-second paid television commercial, which is set to air on April 3, as being too “controversial.” (The ad will appear on, among other stations, AMC, BET, Discovery, Hallmark, History, Nick@Nite, TBS, and TNT.) That’s not surprising, since in 2004 the big three rejected a similar ad that featured musclebound bouncers behind a velvet rope letting only select worshipers into a church. The fact that that promo won the 2005 Association of National Advertisers Award for Multicultural Excellence made no difference this time around.

Produced by UCC’s Stillspeaking Initiative, which is in charge of media outreach for the church’s progressive social projects, the “ejector seat” ad is a witty cross between a Monty Python skit and a postmodern Sunday-school lecture. But as surprising as it may be for a mainstream Protestant denomination to evangelize with edgy humor, the fact that the major networks have refused the paid advertisement — UCC raised $2.5 million to produce the commercial and buy the airtime — is just plain shocking. While NBC simply labeled the earlier ad “too controversial,” CBS was more forthcoming, stating that “because this commercial touches on the exclusion of gay couples ... and the fact the Executive Branch has recently proposed a Constitutional Amendment to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman, this spot is unacceptable for broadcast on the [CBS and UPN] networks.” ABC was more hypocritical: claiming that it does not accept commercials from religious groups, it has in fact broadcast several spots about child rearing from James Dobson’s right-wing Focus on the Family.

Not kidding

MICHAEL BRONSKI — Thu, 09 Mar 2006 16:41:24 GMT

Catholic Charities depart from tradition
While the battle over same-sex marriage dominates the headlines in the ongoing struggle for gay-and-lesbian equality, many other battles are just as important, if not more so.

While the battle over same-sex marriage dominates the headlines in the ongoing struggle for gay-and-lesbian equality, many other battles are just as important, if not more so. Two such issues — adoption rights and organized religions’ views on homosexuality — surfaced over the past week, and both reflected major social and theological shifts in two of our most important religious institutions. One skulks unashamedly into the past, while the other promises to move boldly into the future.

On February 15, four Massachusetts bishops instructed the board of Catholic Charities of Boston — the church’s principal social-service agency in the state, whose self-declared “mission” is “tobuild a just and compassionate society rooted in the dignity of all people” — to cease facilitating adoption by same-sex couples on the grounds that such adoptions are morally dangerous for children. (In the past two decades only 13 out of 720 placements were made to same-sex couples.) Over the past week, eight of the 42 Catholic Charities board members resigned in protest. Because many of its corporate and nonprofit contributors must abide by their own nondiscrimination policies, Catholic Charities may also lose millions of dollars in donations.

But as Catholic bishops in Massachusetts conspired to deprive gay and lesbian couples of basic civil rights under state law, a very different story was unfolding at an undisclosed site near Baltimore, Maryland, where on March 7 and 8 the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards (the body that adjudicates religious law for Conservative Judaism) debated whether to discard the denomination’s traditional prohibitions against homosexual behavior, and recognize same-sex unions as well as ordain gay and lesbian rabbis. Commentary in the Jewish press suggests that the committee will likely liberalize interpretation of Halakah, or Jewish law.

Where is the love?

MICHAEL BRONSKI — Mon, 06 Mar 2006 15:08:18 GMT

Brokeback Mountain perfectly captures our ambivalence about marriage — gay and straight
Within a couple months of its release, Brokeback Mountain went from being simply a well-made, serious film to a widely recognized, highly satirized cultural artifact.

Within a couple months of its release, Brokeback Mountain went from being simply a well-made, serious film to a widely recognized, highly satirized cultural artifact. Ang Lee’s “gay cowboy” movie has been deluged with more than 90 nominations and awards — including eight Oscar nominations — but it has also become joke fodder, not only for the likes of Leno, Letterman, and Stewart but for the advertising geniuses at National Car Rental. Its iconic two-men-in-cowboy-hats poster has been used to parody everything from George Bush’s relationship with Jack Abramoff (KickBack Mountain) to Star Wars’s Mandalorian warriors. There is an online video parody — Broke Back to the Future— with Christopher Lloyd and Michael J. Fox as lovers, and last week’s New Yorker cover featured sharpshooting Dick Cheney and Squint-eyed bush in that now iconic Brokeback pose. Why has America been so discomfited yet so gripped by Brokeback fever?

It’s not as though we haven’t seen this before. For years, Hollywood has been churning out “buddy movies,” from Red River (1948) to the more-recent Lethal Weapon series, whose homoeroticism is barely concealed. As Stephen Holden pointed out in his New York Times review, Brokeback Mountain belongs in a tradition identified by Leslie Fiedler nearly 60 years ago in an influential Partisan Review essay titled “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey!”, which argued that homoeroticism — from Moby-Dick and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to Batman and Robin — is the primal American romance.

Nor are we unfamiliar with mold-breaking portrayals of gay love. While Hollywood has had its fair share of movies about flamboyant boys-in-the-band homos living gay lives — from 1969’s Staircase, featuring Rex Harrison and Richard Burton as bickering boyfriends, to 1996’s Birdcage, featuring Robin Williams and Nathan Lane as, well, bickering boyfriends — it has also produced a wealth of serious, critically appraised, and award-winning films that explored gay male relationships in a variety of settings (see “We Are Everywhere”). Brokeback Mountain is just the latest addition to a well-established Hollywood tradition.

The Boyfriend

MICHAEL BRONSKI — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 20:07:55 GMT

Valley of the dolls: Is the new Ken gay?
At the American International Toy Fair in New York this past Sunday, Barbie’s old flame was presented to a whole new generation of American girls. Let’s just say that he is no longer the all-American boy.

By any other name

MICHAEL BRONSKI — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 20:02:01 GMT

Gauging the distance between a horrific attack and a hate crime
From being physically harassed in my middle-class catholic high school in the mid 1960s to being assaulted in boston’s outdoor cruising areas, i’ve seen a lot of anti-gay violence up close.

From being physically harassed in my middle-class catholic high school in the mid 1960s to being assaulted in boston’s outdoor cruising areas, i’ve seen a lot of anti-gay violence up close. The closest i’ve come to deadly violence was on November 18, 1980. I had been standing in front of the Ramrod bar in New York’s Greenwich Village, as several dozen men in leather jackets and jeans were chatting and cruising, taking a break from the small, always smoky bar. Soon, I left for the Mineshaft, another west village club, noted for its rowdy thursday two-for-one night. Thirty minutes later, Ronald K. Crumpley fired 40 rounds from a semiautomatic rifle and two pistols into the cluster of men i’d been standing with in front of the ramrod, killing two and wounding six others. Bartenders at the Mineshaft quietly told us what had happened and urged us to be careful, since no one was certain there was only one shooter. In the ’60s and ’70s, public expressions of homosexuality and physical violence were so intricately bound together that, as a community, we simply expected it. In this part of the world, in 2006, things have indeed changed for gay men. That is why the attacks at puzzles lounge in new bedford were truly shocking.

Last Thursday, just after midnight, Jacob D. Robida, an 18-year-old high-school dropout, entered Puzzles Lounge, and after being served two drinks asked if it was “a gay bar.” When told that it was, he assaulted patrons with a handgun and a hatchet, wounding three men, two seriously. He fled home, left a note for his mother that apologized and expressed his love, but added, “I have to go out by my means.” He then took her car and left, picked up his ex-girlfriend Jennifer Bailey in West Virginia, and drove to Arkansas, where he shot and killed a part-time police officer. After a 16-mile chase, Robida crashed his car and then shot Bailey in the head, before he shot himself as he was beset by state troopers and police. He died the following day. According to news reports, when New Bedford police searched Robida’s bedroom they found “homemade posters disparaging African-Americans and Jews; neo-Nazi literature and skinhead paraphernalia,” as well as an empty coffin.

Betty Friedan, 1921–2006

MICHAEL BRONSKI — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 08:54:31 GMT

In memoriam
Friedan’s astute, savagely humorous critique of how women’s magazines dictated the terms of many female lives rang true.

Last spring I taught a course called “Beatniks, Hot Rods, and the Feminine Mystique: Sex and Gender in 1950s Films” at Dartmouth College. It was a First Year Seminar, and all the students were 18 years old, born in 1987. For them the 1950s were ancient history. Many had never even seen a black-and-white film.

The awful truth

MICHAEL BRONSKI — Thu, 26 Jan 2006 03:06:19 GMT

Recent revelations about fictitious memoirs have exposed our society’s lust for stories about savaging helpless children
Not to be outdone by recent Beltway-corruption scandals, the ordinarily more-subdued literary world found itself two weeks ago grappling with its own grim little fraud.

Not to be outdone by recent Beltway-corruption scandals, the ordinarily more-subdued literary world found itself two weeks ago grappling with its own grim little fraud. On January 8, TheSmokingGun.com ran a lengthy exposé of the massive exaggerations and outright lies in James Frey’s Oprah-promoted, drugs-and-alcohol-drenched memoir A Million Little Pieces. Then, on January 9, the New York Times reported that J.T. LeRoy — author of the 2000 autobiographical cult novel Sarah, about a sexually abused transgender teen with AIDS, and the 2001 autobiographical story collection The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things — didn’t exist. Or rather, the person who has been appearing at readings as “J.T. LeRoy” is really a San Francisco–based woman named Savannah Knoop. It is still unclear who wrote the books, but most probably it was Laura Albert, the partner of Knoop’s half-brother Geoffrey.

While national news and op-ed columns have been filled with harsh dissections of James Frey’s fictional embellishments — since its original story the Times has run 17 news, feature, and op-ed pieces on the subject — the J.T. LeRoy story has received far less attention. And when it has, the LeRoy scam hasn’t been taken very seriously. Indeed, in a Sunday, January 15, Times op-ed, memoirist Mary Karr lambasted Frey as a mendacious “skunk” fouling the literary waters, but found J.T. LeRoy to be a “fine little prankster.” The discrepancy can be attributed simply to scale: in contrast with Frey, who launched a big-bucks-bestseller scandal, LeRoy — although championed by glitterati (Courtney Love) and writers (Mary Gaitskill) alike — engaged in nothing more than penny-ante grifting. Whatever the explanation, everyone seems to have missed the important story here: in a monstrous act of literary sadomasochism, J.T. LeRoy published emotional pornography that features implausibly sick-and-dying, destitute, sexually abused teens. What’s more, readers have been lapping it up.

Damaged goods
Few have made the obvious connection between J.T. LeRoy’s masquerade as a gay kid dying of AIDS and Anthony Godby Johnson’s 1993 AIDS memoir A Rock and a Hard Place. In that literary scandal, the book’s author — supposedly a 14-year-old boy dying of AIDS, but actually, according to a November 6, 2001, article in the New Yorker by Tad Friend, a woman named Vicky Johnson who later claimed to be “Anthony’s” adoptive mother — wrote about his childhood of horrific sexual abuse. With that in mind, LeRoy’s abject literary hoax looks like a copycat crime, mimicking not just the sexually lurid, damaged-child motif of Johnson’s book but its promotional strategy as well.