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2000-08-18
So it all started a couple of days ago, when I was on AIM, as is customary, and Marble mentioned that an old friend from our school's literary magazine, The Eclectic, was online. We'll call him Glover. Marble was, apparently talking to him. Assuming you've read my Oasis columns, you're familiar with a certain neurosis I have about contacting old friends. I added him to my buddy list but I didn't contact him. I talked to Marble on and off. He left eventually. The next day, he contacted me via AIM. We got a little caught up on each other's lives. He said it'd be fun to get together with Marble and I, watch a few videos, since he was leaving Laredo pretty soon and we hadn't seen eacho other in a year, since the literary magazine went up in flames and Madre Maldita (the magazine club's sponsor) went up in a puff of smoke. POUF! That's all metaphorical, of course. No real fire was involved in the unmaking of our collective literary endeavors. It's a long story, but I'm not the one to tell it. I was close to the eye of the storm, Marble was at the very center of it, along with Madre Maldita.
Anyway, we (Glover, Marble & I) decide to get together and watch a few movies, very tentatively. I say I might be able to volunteer my house because the rest of the family is going to Corpus Christi... at the time, I wasn't sure if they were going to leave on Friday (making the plan viable) or on Saturday. Turns out they were leaving on Friday, so all was well. Glover also mentioned he liked this diary (I have a link to it in my little AIM info sheet). I wish I knew how much he'd read of it... for sure, he read the August 10th entry, which was serendipitously devoid of any overtly gay content. He didn't mention anything about me being gay,* so Marble and I were left to speculate: Had he read enough of the diary to get the message and if so, was he just playing it cool like Bee had been when I told him? (You can read the story at Oasis Magazine as my August Column.
This was at midnight or something... I'd been waking up at 11 or 12 and going to bed around noon. I knew that if I went to bed the way I normally did, I'd be asleep when Glover or Marble called to get together. So I stayed up. From 11 PM of the 17th, up to noon of the 18th, up past 4 PM, 5, 6, 7, until Marble called around 7:30 and said that she'd call Manuel to let him know I was awake and that we could get together. About 15-30 minutes later, the doorbell rings and it's Marble and Glover. They come in and we talk a little... we watch Kitty run around and bat at things. I run and get my shoes on and off we go to blockbuster. At the store, I drift in self-conscious semi-silence in formation with the two of them, looking racks and racks of positively unappealing videos. We'd originally hinted at renting a few cheesy b-movie type flicks, but end up going with Dogma, American Beauty, and Boys Don't Cry: last year's triumvirate of iconoclastic "if you want to be a culturally aware person you'll see them" flicks. Pitfall: Marble and Glover have both already seen Dogma and American Beauty, and rent them for my benefit. None of us have seen Boys Don't Cry.
Ambiguity remained as Glover made a couple of "faggot-joke" type comments... stuff that either a homophobe would say seriously or someone clued-in to irony and un-pc humor would in jest. Glover's sense of humor, to put this in context, depends very heavily on irony. He'll mimic the battle cries of slope-browed testosterone tragedies ("Que quieres, JOTO!?") as a way of making fun of those attitudes. I was ok with all what he was saying, as it was sarcastically referencing popular attitudes and not his own, but the question is, (assuming he didn't know) would he have still have been comfortable making them around me, knowing I'm gay? I hope so.
* FUCK FUCK FUCK. I hate obsessing about being gay, or any other "meta" thing about my existence. I've never been able to stand those who structure all of their statements like so: "Well, since I'm [insert whatever group here], I think [statement totally unrelated to that person's belonging to that group]." I'm not going to recite Pretentious Faux-Artistic Saying #4203 by saying that I prefer not to label myself, I will say that living your life around your labels will quickly eclipse what makes you human and unique. By meditating uselessly so much on something as simple and natural as my sexual orientation, I fear I'm starting to live my life around my labels.
As we were watching the movies, we'd occasionally add our own commentary. There were a few times when I could've said something that would've ended the uncertainty, but I kept my remarks innocent of my orientation, by and large, through Dogma and Boys Don't Cry. Dogma was a lot better than I thought it would be from what I saw in the previews. (Chris Rock: "Knew 'im? Nigga owes me ten bucks!" Kevin Smith tried for the most part to maintain a semi-historical authenticity... Chris Rock's little ear-tucked note from Jesus written in Aramaic and all, but he kinda fucked it away briefly for that really cheap joke.) Kevin Smith is an odd bird. He can take a totally mundane plot structure, reluctant hero racing against time to save the world, add some relatively superficial details, like the situation set up around two fallen angels' re-entry to heaven despite God's word (and the subsequent unmaking of the universe) and come up with a movie that's original and engaging. It was also interesting that some emphasis was put on idolatry, a commandment that I think a lot of christians hypocritically ignore. I don't pretend to worship any god, but I think that if you're going to structure your life around these archaic ideas, at least read the fucking book. Be honest with yourself and ignore church dogma. Realistically, the collection of catholic saints ironically mirrors the pantheon of gods dedicated to ideas, skills, or demographics (the Patron Saint of Lost Causes, the Patron Saint of child-bearing women, the Patron Saint of Mexico) that christianity tried to stamp out. They even assimilated and defamed one of those gods (half-goat half-man Pan) in a public relations campaign to get people to turn away from their previous faiths! Satan, this arch-enemy demigod, even has a consistent set of features associated with him. Is this not making a graven image of another diety? In preaching the hellfire and damnation admonitions against Satan, are they not giving Satan a relative primacy? And saying that Lucifer was a fallen angel and not a "true" god is nothing more than apologetic nonsense with a dangerous dependence on semantics.
Anyway, Boys Don't Cry was rather tedious. I'd developed a headache during Dogma and the slow pace and half-hearted narration of Boys Don't Cry wasn't helping matters. Hillary Swank certainly deserved her Oscar, but the directorial premise of the whole picture was flawed. There were a lot of times when these excruciatingly long sequences would've been better communicated with a few lines of after-the-fact dialogue, and times when dialogue glossed over what probably should've been a long, more elaborate sequence. What was up with Brandon's girlfriend and that minute-long shot of her making funny faces while s/he went down on her? Yes, you were trying to show the audience how the two of them could make sexual contact without the girlfriend knowing Brandon's biological gender... that shot seemed like it was trying to be an "unblinking" documentary but scared to show too much, lest it merit an X rating.
American Beauty was a refreshing change of pace. It used some artistic conceits very successfully (like the motif of rose petals) and managed to incorporate some of them tightly into the plot. I won't give away too much, but in the movie, there's a boy who videotapes everything, something that has a bit of a symbolic cast to it, but one of his videotapes acts as a catalyst for actions later on.
Some people might consider it a bit of a deus-ex-machina to put a neat end to the movie, but I like the way American Beauty ended. The movie, for all its criticisms of suburban life, is quite uplifting: the main character goes from living a numb existence to really vibrantly living once more, regaining considerable self-worth in the process.
I'm pretty sure Glover knows now that I'm gay. Up through Dogma and Boys Don't Cry, I'd kept silent during some golden opportunities to say something revealing. I kept quiet, wondering if Glover'd bring it up. Finally, during American Beauty, the main character's next-door neighbor made a comment along the lines of "Fucking faggots... how can they just walk around in broad daylight with no shame?" as he saw Scott Bakula and his "partner" pass by. I replied "I don't know. If I had Scott Bakula for a lover, I'd never leave the house." I smiled and kept my eyes fixed on the television set, wondering if Glover would say anything. Marble giggled a little bit. I know on an intuitive level that I'd come out to him then, because I got the now-semi-familiar rush of expectant anxiety that I always get when I come out to someone I know. I didn't want to spoil the trained off-handedness of that comment with a knowing look at Glover. I think out of the corner of my eye I saw him look at me slack-jawed, but I can't be sure. It may have just been the movement of the cat or a trick of the shadows. When he kept quiet and started making unrelated jokes a few minutes later I felt quite proud that I'd kept my superficial cool and properly communicated what is, in the long term, something so minor.
If it's so minor, why am I obsessing about it? Because I like to obsess about the best ways to deliver a message with all the proper nuances communicated. I'm a writer. (wow, I said that unself-consciously) It's what I have a natural inclination to do. Obsessing on when and how to come out to someone is something that's becoming a fun real-life challenge to those skills. How best to communicate the vital information while simultaneously communicating a casual approach and the idea that it's totally natural, not second nature but first?
Back on the subject of American Beauty, the homophobe neighbor screams to his son at one point "No son of mine is gonna become a God damned cocksucker!" His son, sadly, wasn't really a "cocksucker". That's besides the point. His father's vehemence made me think. The term cocksucker is usually considered an insult. Sucking cock is seen as something less than noble, but just think how dismal the world would be if there were no cock-suckers of any gender. I'm not sure that's a world I'd want to live in. And let's think, which is the more marketable skill, the more valuable service to the community: Giving excellent head or emotionally and physically abusing your child? That's what I thought. You know, someone should start a cocksuckers union or The Cocksuckers' Anti-Defamation League. The union wouldn't just have to be for professional cocksuckers. There's no reason to deny membership to hobbyists. You can bet that a strike of the Cock Suckers union would garner a whole hell lot more of attention than anything the teamsters could devise.
Cock Suckers of the World Unite!
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