Celebration: An Anthology to Commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the Silliman University National Writers Workshop Sands and Coral, 2011-2013
Silliman University, 2013
Last year, photographer Ed Freeman landed himself in hot water over a photograph he took ten years prior. That photograph, commissioned in 2005 for a cover in Frontiers, a gay magazine, did not stir controversy when it was initially published. The magazine had a small circulation, and its readers were people who could very well "read" into the image's intentions. It was also a very beautiful photograph: it featured four muscled young men of various ethnicities, some half-naked, all trying to hoist a gay pride flag -- that rainbow-themed symbol of LGBTs everywhere.
For anyone who knows history, the image is every bit a recreation of a famous older photograph, one taken on 23 February 1945 by Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal who snapped a picture of five American marines trying to hoist the American flag in the heat of battle in Iwo Jima during World War II. It was a powerful image even then, a galvanising one that led the U.S. to use it for propaganda purposes (Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers is a mannered account of that piece of history), and it won Rosenthal the Pulitzer Prize.
Since then, Rosenthal's photo has taken on a kind of sacred iconography -- meaning to say it touches the raw nerves of people who see it being repurposed for something else. Over the years, such sensitivity has erupted to small brawls of words. For example: Time Magazine, for a global warming issue in 2008, was criticized for publishing a cover in which the American flag was replaced with a tree.
But when the Frontiers cover came out in 2005, nobody said anything.
And it was likely because it was a time in our lives where most people were "pre-internet." The web was already around at that time, but social media -- and its predisposition to sharing -- had yet to take root. (Facebook was founded in 2004, but it would only start gaining global reach in 2008.)
In 2015, in celebration of the U.S. Supreme Court's unprecedented ruling on same-sex marriage, LGBT everywhere rejoiced by sharing a lot of things in the name of "victory" -- and this time around, Ed Freeman's ten-year-old image was whisked from the shadows of the past and into the maelstrom of things in the Instagrammable present. The picture above was shared everywhere and by everyone -- and only then did the backlash begin for Ed Freeman, and with that even some death threats.
I try to make myself understand the anger and incredulity of these folks and their insistence of keeping "pure" an iconic image. After all, it is a real image: some of those men hoisting the flag died soon after in the war. It is symbolic of real-life sacrifice, and real-life shedding of blood. I understood their pain, even if I did not quite get their anger and its underlying homophobia.
But a year hence, and so soon after Orlando, I find the image by Freeman even more appropriate to use. Because the LGBT, truth to tell, has been in a protracted war, too -- this one being fought for decades and decades, even longer than World War II. And many foot soldiers have died, have lost family, have been lobotomised, have been fired from their jobs, have been ostracised, have suffered diseased because of negligent homophobic institutions, all in the fight for equal rights. The latest victims are the 49 in Orlando whose only sin was that they wanted to be in a place where they could express their authentic selves truly. They died for that, because a gun man believed they didn't deserve that right, or that wish.
We are fighting a war. Homophobia is our Iwo Jima. And we have all the right to hoist our rainbow flag in the big battlefield of this long horrible cultural war.
As the news unfolds about the terror that has consumed Orlando, Florida [The New York Times keeps a comprehensive live update, and the official news story is here] -- at around 2 AM and lasting until 5 AM yesterday, a gun man took to a gay club named Pulse and shot 50 people dead as of the last count, and injured 53 more -- I thought about the massacre at the Upstairs Lounge in New Orleans in 1973, and realised that while many things have changed since then, the same kind of murderous homophobic terror can erupt at any given moment, and the years hence have made no difference.
At least, for the Orlando shootings, there has been police response, there has been mourning and calls for condolences, and there has been an accounting of the victims complete with faces. The President of the United States has issued a statement and called it a devastating “act of terror.” He continued: “Today as Americans, we grieve the brutal murder and horrific massacre of dozens of innocent people. We pray for the families who are grasping for answers with broken hearts.” [More here.]
There was only silence in 1973.
That year, on the 24th of June, 32 people died in an arson attack on a gay bar located on the second floor of a 3-storey building in the French Quarter of New Orleans in Louisiana. The official cause is still listed as of "undetermined origin," and it has come down in history as the deadliest arson attack in the United States, and, until the Orlando shooting last night, the biggest killing spree targeting the LGBT. Elizabeth Dias writes in Time Magazine:
From the outside, the Upstairs didn’t look much different from the other gay bars on a particularly seedy stretch of Iberville Street. But up 13 steps on the second floor was a refuge: three adjoining rooms, decorated with red wallpaper and frilly curtains, where people could laugh, love, even worship without fear. The Metropolitan Community Church (MCC), a national Christian denomination founded to serve gays and lesbians, often held services in the bar’s back-room theater. At other times the space was used for the elaborately costumed drag cabaret performances that regulars called 'nelly dramas.' 'It was my safe haven,' says [Francis] Dufrene, [a regular].
The beer bust on June 24, 1973, was typically festive. A pianist from the nearby Marriott played Broadway and ragtime tunes as patrons sang along. Dufrene was there, as usual, this time on a first date with Eddie Hosea Warren, a 'husky country boy' he met at a hamburger joint near the Upstairs. Warren’s brother James and mother Inez came with him. Duane George Mitchell, an associate pastor at the MCC known for his Queen Victoria impersonation, and his partner Louis Horace Broussard stopped by after dropping Mitchell’s sons off at a movie. The bust prices ended at 7, but at least 65 people were still hanging around nearly an hour later when the door buzzer went off. It kept ringing, even though no one had ordered a taxi. The bartender sent a regular to check it out. When he opened the door, a fireball burst through as if shot from a flamethrower.
An updraft sucked the fire in, and within seconds the walls were aflame. Panic erupted inside. The bartender, Douglas 'Buddy' Rasmussen, called for people to follow him and led at least 20 of them to safety through a back exit and onto adjoining rooftops–before closing the door behind them when he didn’t see anyone else coming to prevent the fire from spreading. Many raced to jump out of the three large windows that were covered by metal bars. Dufrene was one of the few who squeezed through, body on fire.
'The small people seemed to get through the window, but the bigger people just couldn’t get out,' a survivor told the New Orleans Times-Picayune.
One of those trapped was the MCC’s pastor, Bill Larson, who struggled to push an air-conditioning unit through the window to escape. His head, torso and one arm made it halfway out before the glass pane above collapsed, trapping his body. In the street below, his friends heard him scream, 'Oh, God, no!' as flames consumed him. His body was left in the window for hours, with his watch, stopped at a few minutes after 8, a haunting relic.
The other singular shocking thing about the massacre, beside the body count, was the widespread indifference to the attack.
After the news spread, the jokes began. According to the Time story, a radio host asked on air, “What do we bury them in?” and the punchline was: “Fruit jars.” The police dragged their feet identifying the remains, maintaining that most of the victims carried counterfeit identity cards, and that the place itself was reputed to have crawled with thieves and low-lifes. Several families refused to claim victims' bodies out of shame. One survivor was fired from his teaching job once his whereabouts in the bar was made public knowledge, and once the papers published the list of victims, it became a virtual outing. Some other survivors had to go back to work on Monday pretending they knew nothing. Churches closed their doors upon request of memorials -- and one Episcopal Church that did dare have a prayer service received dozens of angry phone calls and letters of protest. The mayor and the governor declined to issue statements of condolence, even though a month earlier they did so for two far-less deadlier fires. The investigation that followed went cold soon after.
Robert L. Camina, director of Upstairs Inferno (2015), the documentary about the fire, said in 2013: “I was shocked at the disproportionate reaction by the city government. The city declared days of mourning for victims of other mass tragedies in the city. It shocked me that despite the magnitude of the fire, it was largely ignored."
And today, the Upstairs Lounge has become a forgotten affair, barely even acknowledged as a sad milestone in the gay rights movement.
Forty-three years later, a similar horror comes -- and I'm kinda glad people are taking notice, are making statements of condolences. But it won't bring back the fifty now dead who just wanted to go out for a night of fun, among friends who loved them for who they were, in a place that was supposed to be a safe haven for people of their kind. But some homophobe decided they deserved no such haven, and opened fire on them.
We may live in a culture of increasing tolerance and enlightenment but there are still people out there who still insist on their own fanaticism, and sometimes it turns deadly.
May we always remember the Upstairs Lounge and now Pulse.
I have a really good friend, a good and very talented man, and somebody I've worked with before so many times -- but his homophobia unsettles me. I've tried my bit of "setting a good example," subscribing to the notion that most homophobes are the way they are because they don't really have good friends who happen to be gay. I've tried enlightening discourse, going through intricacies of queer theory and narrating what I could the normalcy of gay lives. But there's really no stopping his entrenched view that my being gay is a rot of a life that begs scandal. That's his favourite word: "scandal." As in: "I pray that you won't be dragged into a scandal, Ian." Like my life is a pressure-cooker just waiting for a scandal to happen, just because I'm gay. I don't know what to do. Again, he's so good in so many other respect, but his homophobia is galling.
In my attempt to understand him, I see perhaps his religiosity as the final reason for his homophobia. He is intensely a fundamentalist Christian and although he doesn't quote verses from Leviticus to me, I feel those unspoken verses stab at me every time he opens his mouth and invariably calls me scandalous.
Homomphobia is the strangest thing. Long before I understood the full breadth of its psychology, I have always taken it as a kind of mask. I realised one day that most homophobes are really closeted gay men and women who see openly gay men and women as mirrors of their possible selves -- and because of the culture of compulsory heterosexuality (often violent) that they are embraced in, they lash out at these mirrors. The denial gets articulated as abuse -- sometimes verbal ("Faggot!" "Bayot!"), sometimes physical. It becomes their short cut to assurances that they are not, in fact, gay. It is internalised hatred.
In a 1993 study, levels of homophobia were assessed among 64 men along with their sexual arousal (measured by increases in penile circumference) in response to erotic videos of heterosexual, same-sex female, and same-sex male encounters. Those who scored high on homophobia were more likely to also manifest sexual arousal in response to the videos of male homosexual encounters. In a more recent study it was found that men raised in authoritative households were more likely to repress same-sex attractions and to exhibit more hostility to gay people.
Emile Griffith, a recently deceased welterweight and middleweight champion, pummeled an opponent to death after he had called him an anti-gay slur, Griffith continuing to punch him in the head well after he had clearly won the fight. Though he denied he was gay or bisexual at that time, later in his life Griffith admitted to having had affairs with several men including a male partner who cared for him up until his death.
Add this anecdote to several others including that of right wing politician Larry Craig, who pled guilty to lewd behavior toward other men in an airport bathroom but who also championed anti-gay legislation during his political career, and Ted Haggard, leader of the famously anti-gay National Association of the Evangelicals, who resigned after it was discovered he was engaging male prostitutes.
Same-sex attractions have proven intractable throughout history and are notoriously difficult to extinguish, either by people who harbor them or societies that seek to repress them. As stated previously, there are over a half a dozen countries, including Iran and Saudi Arabia where homosexual contact is punishable by death and many whose governments penalize such behavior with harsh prison sentences. However, Iran has a flourishing underground gay society and Pakistanis have been found to be the most frequent Googlers of gay porn. An acquaintance of mine who is a flight attendant and a gay male will attest that when he visits these homophobic countries, he is frequently approached by men for sex in hotels, gym saunas, parks and certain streets. So despite the obstacles of profoundly punitive laws and homophobic cultures, same-sex sexual behavior cannot be completely constrained—and this has been known for a long time.
Is my friend then gay? Could be. Who knows. My gaydar tells me his son definitely is, hahaha.
What galls me about homophobia, however, is when it gets manifested as bullying. Drown, a film by Dean Francis, is the perfect film that articulates homophobic bullying: it contends that it comes from an explosive cocktail of jealousy and dangerous desire. The film, according to its website, follows Len, "a Surf Lifesaving champion in the cloistered surf club, just like his father. But when the younger, fitter Phil arrives at the club, Len’s legendary status starts to crumble. Then Len sees Phil in the company of another man. Phil is gay. Over the summer, Len forms unexpected, confusing feelings for Phil. When Phil de-thrones Len at the annual surf competition, Len and his buddy Meat take Phil out on an intoxicated bender through the seedy city. Jealousy, homophobic fear and unrequited lust culminate in a tragic late night trip back to beach where Len seeks total oblivion."
6:04 PM |
From William Haines to Matt Bomer, With Love
I was watching Gino M. Santos' Love Me Tomorrow (2016) straight through the lunchtime screening with two good friends because we wanted to escape from the mundane demands of work, and figured that a Star Cinema romantic drama -- with all the expected gloss and silliness -- would be enough of an escape from the pressing world. I also went because I loved Santos' two earlier features -- The Animals (2012) and #Y (2014) -- which made the cut for the Cinemalaya of their respective years, but ever since he made the leap to commercial filmmaking, I've lost track of his output. Ex With Benefits (2015), anyone? This new Piolo Pascual starrer proved to be a good way to be reintroduced to the gloriously burgis cinema of Gino Santos, clearly the heir apparent of Danny Zialcita even if the wit of the old master has yet to really embrace the young director. And so we traipsed through the inoffensive story about a DJ past his prime (played with jagged cockiness by Mr. Pascual), who happens to bed occasionally on the side a pretty "social media influencer" (Coleen Garcia transcending a thankless role) -- but finds himself unwittingly falling for an older widow and budding fashion designer (gamely portrayed by Dawn Zulueta, who reminds us that old movie stars shatter everyone else in their light). There's not much to this old chestnut of reverse May-December romance, and I could recommend it for its insistence that life has no villains. But what got me thinking after exiting the movie house was this: Piolo Pascual -- an enduring moviestar whose beauty is not diminished by the years -- has done almost all sorts of romantic pairings, but not once has he ever played half of a gay couple. In that respect, his contemporaries Dennis Trillo and John Lloyd Cruz have him beat, and to think these two remain the ultimate of machismo in Philippine contemporary cinema. There have been the persistent rumours of course regarding Mr. Pascual's sexuality, and his refusal to play gay only seem to magnify it.
I can understand the dilemma. It is an unfortunate truism in show business that being openly gay is bad for business for movie actors of certain box office categories. A character actor, forever in a supporting role, may be able to get away with being out of the closet, but stars?
Hollywood itself is littered with stories of actors in and out of the closet. I love the story of William Haines who once ruled Hollywood as its biggest box office star. Out Magazine writes about him: "Known as a wisecracking leading man, William 'Billy' Haines was the top box office draw of 1929, was friends with a young Cary Grant and remained lifelong besties with Joan Crawford. Through it all he was more or less openly gay, at the cost of his movie career, and married for 50 years to the same sailor he picked up on a publicity trip to New York in 1926. Crawford once called the relationship between Haines and Jimmy Shields 'the happiest marriage in Hollywood.'" [More here. Slate also has a story here.] That marriage was what cost him his movie career, but it was a cost he was willing to pay. Forced by MGM honcho Louis B. Meyer to give up Jimmy for the sake of moral policing in the wake of the restrictive Hollywood Code, he gave up movie stardom instead of giving up on the love of his life. Known for his opulent taste, he went on to have a very successful second career as an interior designer. His fascinating life has been made into a 2001 documentary for AMC titled Out of the Closet, Off the Screen: The Life of William Haines...
Then there's Tab Hunter. He came to the movies in 1950 with a role in The Lawless, but his blonde good looks soon landed him a meaty role in Island of Desire (1952) opposite Linda Darnell, and soon he was starring in a string of films including Gun Belt (1953), The Steel Lady (1953), Return to Treasure Island (1954), Track of the Cat (1954), and Battle Cry (1955). In September of 1955, the tabloid magazine Confidential wrote about his 1950 arrest for disorderly conduct, and alluded that the actor perhaps was gay. It had no impact on his career, however, and a few months later, Hunter was named Most Promising New Personality in a nationwide poll sponsored by the Council of Motion Picture Organizations. He went on to star in many movies, and later took to television, and oversaw a career that had its highs and lows -- but he never became the full-fledged movie star he promised to become early in his career. But I'm not sure his being gay had something to do with that. Some actors become big stars, some don't -- and that's that.
Tab Hunter's life as a gay actor working in Hollywood has been immortalised in the recent documentary Tab Hunter Confidential (2015), directed by Jeffrey Schwarz -- The Hollywood Reporter writes about it here.
Of late, many well-known actors have since bucked the trend -- perhaps a reflection of a new openness. And so we have the likes of James Franco, Joel Grey, Ellen Page, Maria Bello, Anna Paquin, Wentworth Miller, Matt Dallas, Raven-Symone, Ellen Degeneres, Portia DiRossi, Jodie Foster, Jim Parsons, Evan Rachel Wood, Neil Patrick Harris, and others in various stages of coming out [The New York Daily News has a list here. The Los Angeles Times also has a list here. And so does Entertainment Tonight, here.] Among them all, Matt Bomer stands tall. Openly gay -- and yet still remaining irresistible to both men and women alike. The roles he is given do not even consider his gayness. He plays straight, too -- and convincingly so. And nobody minds.
But will some of the most major movie stars hounded for so long about their sexuality -- they will remain unnamed here -- ever choose to come out? Perhaps not. One gets used to the confines of the closet sometimes.
Nicolas Kazamia's Gay Hollywood: The Last Taboo (2009)is a good documentary that tackles the issue. The film, according to its catalogue, "looks at the challenges facing gay artists in Hollywood past and present. Hollywood in the 1920s was the most homosexual friendly place to be as most of the behind-the-camera staff were gay. However, for those in front of the camera there was no tolerance from the movie-going public. Any homosexual who wanted to maintain a career had to remain in a well-locked closet. During the 1950s, the studios provided their own 'police' who would be the first to arrive at any scene of an 'indiscretion' or other scandalous act. Their task was to collect and remove any evidence and then call the real police if necessary. The studios, wanting to safeguard their investments, even forced male gay actors, like Rock Hudson and Cary Grant, into sham marriages." You can see the entire film below...
So, will Mr. Pascual ever choose to play a gay role? Let's hope he does...
"[We are] still drenched in cultural homophobia, so that ordinary people who individually like the gay people around them, are often homophobic, and oppose gay marriage for homophobic reasons. This doesn’t mean that those people aren’t very likely nice, pleasant people in a multitude of ways, who would happily sit down with their gay friends and neighbors. But they are homophobic, and when they act on their homophobia in the public space so as to try to limit the rights of gay people, it is perfectly fair game to call them out on it. Saying that someone is homophobic is not necessarily to imply that they individually hate and fear gay people. It is to imply that they are prejudiced (whether because of principle, culture, or active detestation) against gay people in ways that lead them passively or actively to oppose gay people participating fully, with full rights, in public and private life."
~ Henry Farrell, Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University
[Full article here]
7:25 PM |
The War Isn't Over
