Thursday, June 22, 2006

Now I don't know what the fuck to do

The Stranger, which is a Seattle free weekly newspaper, has an article on queer movies and why, in the writer's (Annie Wagner) view, most of 'em kinda suck.

Excerpts:


there's an abundance of great gay literature, and great gay visual art, and great gay theater—so what accounts for the fact that, given a random gay romantic comedy and its random straight equivalent, the gay movie will inevitably be lazier, duller, and generally more excruciating than its straight counterpart?

The answer is that gays, long starved for protagonists created in their own image, have unquestioningly gobbled up every last gay-themed movie. As Will of Will & Grace chirpily put it, "Let me tell you a little secret that we try to keep within the community: Gay movies suck. But until the laws change, we're still obligated to go see 'em." (Will has a lot of nerve to talk about sucky gay anything.) Whether it's about prissy preteens or wasting AIDS patients, wise old queens or shrill fag hags, obnoxious circuit boys or attractive trannies (or all possible combinations of the above, stuffed into one toneless cacophony), a gay movie will move tickets at the art-house box office. Not because it's good, but because it's good for "the community." And while gay-themed films have not sold tickets at a clip that would satisfy big studios—except for Brokeback Mountain—sales have been robust enough to maintain a entire pack of specialty distributors trafficking in hairless male chests (and, to a lesser extent, nuzzling pink-hawked girls).



And when queer filmmakers take on a tried-and-true formula, like Todd Stephen's Another Gay Movie, a twist on the virginity-shedding graduation summer of Porky's or American Pie, things go horribly wrong. Like hamster wrong. The words "butt cherry" and "man-snatch" wrong.

Lesbian movies, meanwhile, are susceptible to grave sins of their own. Coming-of-age movies like the catastrophically stupid Better Than Chocolate manage to hit every cliché in the (Rita Mae Brown) book—hidden vibrators, body-paint art, rainbow-festooned bookstores—while careening unevenly between featherweight comedy and dire melodrama.

Actually, I like Better Than Chocolate, except for a couple of things, but I'm only a member of the "gay-adjacent" community. And I think her larger point may be well-taken.

I'd say if anyone wants to read a witty (if I do say so myself) script for a human comedy with a wonderful lesbian couple in, they could contact me. But then I'd still have the problem that I don't want to give up control of my characters.

So as I say, I don't know what to do.

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