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News and commentary about the anti-gay lobbySeptember 11th, 2011
I’ve heard antigays argue our relationships don’t merit recognition. I’ve heard others go further and declare the only legal recognition should be punishment.
I’ve sat through speeches calling our love immoral, and talking heads who think that if we can’t help our nature, then we ought just be celibate. I’ve read essays that deny our families by calling same-sex marriage just a “registry of friendships.”
I’ve heard some tolerant folk declare they don’t mind gays and lesbians as long as we don’t flaunt ourselves in public. I’ve learned this includes standing too close and rubbing elbows.
I’ve had to recall that even this level of intolerance is a win for us, that not long ago being gay might be a ticket to a sanitarium or a lobotomy. That even mentioning your partner could cost you your job. Then I remember that in many states it still could.
And the saddest part is that this second-class status is genuine progress. Our opponents call it going too far, call it ramming our agenda down their throats.
I thought of all this during Tom Ford’s adaptation of Chistopher Isherwood’s short novel, A Single Man. Watch this scene. It’s 1962, and George Falconer’s partner Jim is away visiting his family. George (played by Colin Firth) has been waiting all evening for Jim to call. Julianne Moore plays George’s best friend.
“The service is just for family.”
This is the life our worst opponents want for us. What they want our culture to go back to. What they consider the proper order of things. They might object, perhaps with truth, that they don’t wish on us this trauma and grief.They merely want us to be celibate, to avoid temptation, to stifle our chances for a loving partner.
But if we refuse to do that, we certainly shouldn’t expect to be family.
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Andrew
September 11th, 2011
And how joyous it is that things are so very different (not good enough) in such a short space of time. I was marveling with some friends yesterday (straight friends who are even fiercer proponents of gay marriage than I am), how quickly change has come, and in what queer quarters (pun intended) we find it. Even amongh the politically conservative, religiously pious, so many are adapting. Even among those who parrot hateful rhetoric, we find many who, somehow, carve out an exception for their gay siblings partner in their family space and accept them as “ours”. I’d prefer outright acceptance to cognitive dissonance, but I’ll recognize the baby steps as progress. We still have a ways to go, but damn have we come far.
Hue-Man
September 11th, 2011
Mad Men’s Jon Hamm is the (unseen) bearer of bad news in the video. It’s hard to imagine such cold, heartless people – I would have drafted my will to bar them from all funeral ceremonies, after making sure that they received not a nickel from my estate.
Mary in Austin
September 11th, 2011
Well said, Rob.
We are never going back.
Stephen
September 11th, 2011
While I take your point I think that this particular movie is a very bad example as it drags along behind itself an enormous amount of designer baggage. In the novel, Jim’s brother calls to INVITE George to the funeral. It is GEORGE who refuses to go.
The story with the dogs, one dead the other missing, is also a bizarre change to the source which has Jim collect semi-wild animals all of which George sells to a dealer.
The house the men live in is simply preposterous as is the treatment of George’s old friend. The scene in which she declares his relationship to be not really real is, of course, not in the novel and makes no sense whatsoever in the movie.
Why everything is so relentless glammed up to the point of parody is a complete mystery to me. The whole suicide story has been imposed on the novel’s spare frame very much to the detriment of the story. And why is everyone so gorgeous? This is not an idle comment. The director’s relentless obsession with the look of things signals to me a complete capitulation to consumerism. I wonder if by making all the gays so very very fancy the director is somehow trying subconsciously to deflect the contempt of the straight world by presenting the lives of gay men as being completely divorced from the real world.
It’s a fine novel about a different time. This movie serves it very ill.
And as someone who was around for Stonewall I constantly marvel at how much the world has changed. So yay for our team.
David Ehrenstein
September 11th, 2011
A great scene from a great film from a great book.
There’s nothing preposterous about the house. It’s a slightly dolled-up recreation of Chris and Don’s place in Santa Monica canyon, which I’ve vistied several times.
The only “glammed up” person in the film is Julianne Moore — and that’s a result of her character’s determination to “stay young” against all odds.
Jus tbecause Tom Ford is a designer doesn’t mean the film has “baggage.”
You’re projecting.
Charles
September 11th, 2011
I will have to watch he movie….. Last weekend I went to the funeral of man who married into our family There were a number of eulogies. One of the four daughters got up and denounced her father as an abusive alcoholic. I have never seen anything like that before. The man was extremely wealthy. I did not really know him. I am sixty this year and still dealing with fact that I bought into the stupidity that homosexuality was the ultimate sin ……….. it nearly cost me life four years ago when I finally snapped and had to to be committed. I dared not tell anyone my secret except for my parents in 1969 and I never wanted to disappoint them. I have never know the love that a partner can bring. I can only pray that gay teenagers today know that they are not mentally ill and will be accepted for whom God made them.
Erin
September 11th, 2011
Charles, it is never too late. You will know the love of a partner. I wish you the best.
David Ehrenstein
September 11th, 2011
I wish you the best too Charles. And today’s gay teengers are facing a far friendlier context than we did. (I’m 64)
Charles
September 11th, 2011
Thanks Erin and David ………… thanks.
Dave H
September 12th, 2011
@Hue-Man – maybe so, but most of the time we don’t know in advance how we will be treated after our partner dies, and we’re in for a rude surprise after it happens. Perfectly lovely people turn ugly when someone dies and there are funeral wishes and an estate to be claimed. There are many, many LGBT people out there who can attest that they were treated at least acceptably by their in-laws, only to be cruelly shat upon after their partner’s death.
Yes, we’ve come a long way. More important, our vision of what we have a right to expect and what we can dream of having for ourselves has some a long way.
TJ Davis
September 12th, 2011
I am 62, and I now have a partner. We will celebrate our 9th anniversary in October 2011.
I didn’t think it would ever happen either.
It did.
It’s never too late.
BTW my very loving but very Catholic parents sent me to a psychiatrist when I was about 14. Many of us have lived through that.
No one knows what tomorrow brings Charles. No one!
Ben in Atlanta
September 12th, 2011
Although it may not be a very good explanantion, it’s something:
http://www.sociallunchbox.com/image/pets/why-because-fuck-you-thats-why
Which brings to mind:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpkmtweNQ-U
David Waite
September 12th, 2011
I knew I shouldn’t watch that clip. It’s taken me nearly 3 hours to get to where I could post this. My friend Jose (we wouldn’t have dared say “partner” back then) committed suicide while on an overnight visit with his family in the Bronx, on November 18, 1972. He and I shared an apartment in lower Manhattan.
Jose’s family had never met me, but they knew of my existence and they knew our address. On November 20th, as I worried about why Jose hadn’t been back home the day before, our supervisor on our job sent for me (I was off that week) and broke the news to me.
Jose’s family had brought a wake and funeral announcement to the job, along with a verbal message for me, asking me to spare Jose’s family my presence. I’m pretty sure our supervisor sanitized their original message.
They wanted nothing of his from our apartment. Three weeks later, they refused to tell our supervisor where Jose was buried, lest his foster mother run into me at his grave. It took me several months of investigation to locate it, and an additional year to find out he committed suicide.
@ Stephen: Based on my experience and that of nearly twenty friends who lost partners a few years later, the movie’s plotline is a lot more realistic than the book on which it is based.
@ Hue-Man: Even today it is almost impossible to legally safeguard the surviving partner’s legitimate interests from the deceased partner’s blood relations; only marriage does that.
@ Charles: I wish you luck and love; David and Erin are right. Just be ready to accept it and love is quite likely to find you at any age. Even if it doesn’t, your receptive-to-love state of mind guarantees you a happier life and an easier death. I’m 69 now, and I know a great deal about both those things.
DN
September 12th, 2011
An acquaintance from the Deep South, who’s about 35ish was told exactly this *by his mother* when he came out about two years ago.
She wrote him a hand-written, four page letter (ie she drafted it and wrote a final copy with no corrections so she put a *lot* of thought into it), about how “such things just aren’t discussed in our family” or “people like this were known in my day as ‘confirmed bachelors.'”
From. His. Mother.
g_whiz
September 12th, 2011
I loved a Single Man and hold it out as one of the finest films about a gay character in the universe. The inability for the character in question to grieve the love of his life was an awful wound to inflict an already heartbroken man.
Stephen
September 13th, 2011
I was talking about the movie as movie and as adaptation of Isherwood’s prickly, utterly convincing novel. I find the movie to be peculiar on many levels and also a very talented piece of work. Why the movie distorted so much of the truthfulness of the novel remains perplexing to me. I’m very surprised the Isherwood estate allowed it. Perhaps the rights had already been sold, who knows?
If one wants to see a much more truthful account of the lives of gay men in the early 60s I’d recommend Victim in which a gay movie star plays a closeted gay man. Dirk Bogarde was not at all closeted in his personal life but his sexuality was a carefully guarded ‘secret’ so far as the public was concerned. It remains a fine film.
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