Imagine How Tired I Am Of The Straight Stuff, No Really - Someone's pissed off that I dissed Bogey

IT IS SO FUNNY that you say you're sick and tired of all the gay stuff, imagine how sick LGBTQ+ people are of the 99.9999% of everything that is straight, except for the tiny percentage of viciously negative stereotyping of LGBTQ+ that is brought up.  Like the bad guys in the friggin' old Maltese Falcon.    Dashiell Hammett was a  gay hating bigot as well as a total asshole.  He is vastly over-rated as a writer.

I won't take it back, Chad Allen was a better actor than Bogart was, better looking, smarter, smart enough to get out of the business and good enough to  go into a helping profession.  And I liked the stories better than anything Hammett or Chandler (or, rather, their screen writers, since this is about the movies) made up.  In the Donald Strachey movies I mentioned,  Sebastian Spence is better looking than any of Bogart's co-stars and a better actor than most of them. It occurred to me that a gay man watching those movies with them as a monogamous married couple would have a problem that few if any of those who watched straight gum shoe movies would have, not being able to decide which of them they wanted to be and which of them they wanted to be married to. I never once thought I'd want to have an affair with Bogart in any movie he was in so that was never a problem for me, either way.  

I am grateful to my friend for lending me the Donald Strachey movies because it made me figure out one of the reasons I went off of the movies about forty years ago.  I'm a gay man, I got tired of seeing stories about straight men and that's what movies mostly are.   They're not even about straight women.  I don't like the roles that movies made up for straight men, I don't like privileged people.  I am amazed that even straight women aren't sick to death of that shit.  It's one of the things I'd concluded about most of fiction about the last time I decided that whatever part of Updike's stupid Rabbit series back in the 1970s. I gave up on him over that and with him most of fiction, I just lost interest in all of it for a while.  I'd rather read non-fiction any day.

And that was even earlier than I watched things like The Onion Field and Murder By Death and decided never to pay to see another movie again.  A vow I only broke once when I went to the dollar show at the end of the first run of Hairspray, the original one.  I am entirely over John Waters, too.  If I'm tired of straight men I'm even more tired of adolescent gay ones, too. Camp is about the most stupid thing there is as "gay culture."  It's gay minstrelsy.  I hate it. It's an expression of internalized self-hate. That was the last time I ever went to a movie theater and I really haven't missed it.

I read Chad Allen Lazzari's dissertation and while I am skeptical of psychology as a science, it was interesting and in some ways courageous.  I might possibly look into some of what he cited out of curiosity because I've come to respect him from the interviews I've read and watched.  I strongly suspect he might actually do his clients some good because his head seems to be screwed on the right way to do that.   I've always said that psychological counseling could be good at times under some circumstances but that it probably had more to do with the personality and moral character of the counselor than anything to do with the alleged science of psychology. 

I might, might try another movie about LGBTQ characters but I would bet that few to none have such positive portrayals of gay characters.  I'm not interested in negative portrayals of us because Hollywood has done quite enough of that already. I was tempted to say, you know, none of this is important, it's light entertainment but that's not true.  I think that there are probably lots of gay boys and men for whom seeing a positive portrayal of heroic, morally responsible, intelligent gay men is so unaccustomed that seeing those movies could have a very positive effect on their lives.   I doubt anyone was the better for seeing Sam Spade and certainly not Philip Marlowe,  surely not in the novels where neither of them are admirable characters. 

It's funny, this week I said scandalous things about classic movies and about Scripture and it's over slamming Bogart that I get the hate mail.  Off hand, I can't think of a "classic film" that I care to see again. Especially those from the 30s-50s.  I think I'll just read a book by an LGBTQ writer, instead.