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6/29/2019

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Mythological Quest
Another column from the vaults

In honour of
World Pride in New York City and the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots I dug out this old nugget... my Xtra column from 25 years ago on the 25th anniversary of Stonewall. That was my first-ever trip to NYC, an emotional and intellectual roller-coaster experience... which included being cruised by David Bowie outside the Walter Kerr Theatre! I was still a relatively new homo and seeing Tony Kushner's epic Angels in America, my first Broadway play, had an enormous impact. Twenty-five years ago AIDS was the leading cause of death of Americans 25 to 44. Reflecting the urgency of the LGBTQ2 movement back then, there was a renegade parade down Fifth Ave organized by ACT UP, in addition to the sanctioned one that marched down First Ave.

Plus ça change. There are two rival parades again this year in New York, and universal healthcare is still an unrealized dream. I don' know whether to delight or despair on how relevant this 25-year-old piece of writing remains. 
I love its ambition; as usual I'm trying to do too much in too short a space.

"[Canada's] benevolent Crown is as tarnished as Liberty’s torch. All national myths are bogus." The other thing I like is how the piece exemplifies one of the most important and appealing aspects of LGBTQ2 identities: Being queer is not a static identity; it's the repeated act of querying and queering, a questioning, a quest. We have many marches to go.

Happy Pride everyone.


“There She Is, Myth America”
Bent Dissent column
July 22, 1994, Xtra

I only had a few moments between Stonewall 25 in New York City and Pride Day in Toronto to write this column. As the homos parade pass my window with their free spirits and genitalia, I’m thinking big thoughts. (No, I’m not a size queen.) Problem is, I’ve got one brain cell left... too much fuel has spilled on this jet-setter. So please bear with me through this scribbled postcard.

Everything my friends and I did in New York revolved around the US mythology of the individual: the anniversary of Stonewall, the Broadway production of Angels in America, cheap drinks and the talk of geniuses.

It was exhilarating to be in New York for the first time. I’ve seen the buildings before, I’ve walked the streets. It all seems so familiar. This is the centre of one of the world’s greatest powers, the US media. This is the home of Myth America -- the Statue of Liberty with its grand exterior and hollow construction.

A land of immigrants; the home of the free. That’s the fundamental lie that Tony Kushner’s Angels in America holds up to the sky to twist slowly in the chilling winds of the US landscape.

The character Belize is an African-American nurse on an AIDS ward. In the second part of this magnum opus, entitled Perestroika, he has the line: “The white cracker who wrote the national anthem knew what he was doing. He set the word ‘free’ to a note so high nobody can reach it.”

As Kushner and others have observed elsewhere, one of the highest prices paid for the myth of the free individual is the absence of universal healthcare in the US.

That was blatantly clear when my friends and I joined the renegade ACT UP march along Fifth Ave. In the US, the lesbian and gay civil rights movement is inextricably tied to healthcare reform. There’s no freedom if your only choice is between dragging your family into destitution to pay your medical bills, or going off quietly to die alone.

But I’m beginning to sound like the usual smug Canadian tourist listing the benefits of Canadian collectivism over US individualism. Our benevolent Crown is as tarnished as Liberty’s torch. All national myths are bogus.
Instead of debating specific strategies for real change, Angels presents a very US response, one also very familiar to any homo -- the personal is political.

The play is not about rights per se, it’s about responsibility -- not the responsibility of the state, but individual responsibility. Simply put, if you are able to love, then you are no longer a free individual. (Of course, love ain’t simple – that’s why both parts of Angels run seven hours.)

Eventually, the ACT UP march folded into the official international march. Both proceeded into Central Park. What a beautiful sight: dancing lesbians, nude rude boys in the bush, teenagers rollerblading backward down the steps to the Bethesda Fountain passed a queen giving them an Evita salute -- for a fleeting moment, a million queers of all persuasions created an enchanted forest.

I smuggled these images through Canada Customs because they are evidence of love, of people caring for one another, of countless individual acts of benevolence and grace -- the acts of angels, of faeries, in the woods.

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6/13/2019

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PictureGENERATIONAL & RACIAL DIVIDES LAID BARE. Bryan Batt, Stephen Spinella, Charlie Barnett and Murray Bartlett star in episode 4 of Netflix' Tales of the City.
Privilege & Pain on Tales of the City
Why a middle-age-versus-millennial meltdown is must-see TV

“The Price of Oil,” episode 4 of Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City currently streaming on Netflix, is must-see TV.  It offers one of the most terrifying scenes in recent television history. A group of middle-aged, gay white men at a dinner party discuss their holiday exploits: well-known anecdotes, one-upmanship, exuberant hands, screaming laughter and a self-regard bordering on insularity. The performances are pitch perfect.

When one of the group uses the word “tranny” in a less than flattering connotation, he is taken to task by a younger, gay, African American man. “I don’t think that we use that word…. Tranny, it’s offensive.”

The older gays get their hackles up. “I just don’t really appreciate that we have to be policed,” says one guest. “At a fucking gay dinner party,” adds another. The younger man refuses to back down. The rest of the party desperately wants to avoid going there: they ignore the brewing confrontation, they change the subject, say anything to avoid a middle-age-versus-millennial meltdown. To no avail.

The younger man’s sense of timing might be off, but his argument is bang on. He presses the case. “What you call someone is important,” he says, “It’s about dignity. It’s about visibility. I think we owe that to people, especially when you are coming from a place of privilege.”

The room explodes. The blow-up is worth quoting at length because it produces a passionate enunciation of struggle and survival, a cri de coeur for a generation of gay men who might find themselves at odds with the politically correct activism of today.

“So you look at me… and see what?” asks the main antagonist. “A rich white man… is that what you mean? Is that my privilege?”

The younger man, 28-year-old Ben (played by Charlie Barnett), agrees.

“Let me tell you about dignity and visibility,” continues the older man (Stephen Spinella). “Any so-called privilege that we happen to enjoy at this moment was won. Okay? And by that I mean clawed tooth and nail from a society that didn’t give two shits if we lived or died… and, indeed, did not care when all our friends started to die. When I was 28, I wasn’t going to fucking dinner parties. I was going to funerals, three or four a week. All of us were.”

“I understand,” Ben begins to say.

“Oh, you do? Really? Why? Because you saw Angels in America? Fuck that. Fuck that! You have no idea. This world that you get to live in, with its safe spaces and intersectionalities…”

“Gay marriage,” offers another guest. “Fucking without condoms,” adds another.

“… all of it,” continues the older man. “This entitlement you now have… to dignity and visibility as a gay person. Do you even know where that came from? Do you know who built that world? Do you know the cost of that progress? No, of course not. Because it would more than your generation could ever bear to comprehend. So if a bunch of old queens wants to sit around a table and use the word tranny,” his voice trails off. “I will not be told off by someone who wasn’t fucking there.”

Is your heart beating faster? Are you shaking your head in agreement... or dismay?

If you find that scene cutting, the next one twists the knife. Ben confronts his lover Michael (Murray Bartlett) for not supporting him during the argument, for tacitly agreeing with the rest of the white men at the party. “A society that doesn’t care whether we live or die,” says Ben, tearing up. “Really? Really? You are going to say that to a black man?”

Devastating.

Why do I find this terrifying? Because every character is right, in their pain and in their righteousness. Because I see myself in both “sides.”

“I think it’s a conversation we don’t get to have,” Tales of the City showrunner Lauren Morelli told me recently while I was on assignment for the LGBTQ2 publication Xtra. “I came in thinking there was a lot of resentment in our community, and we don’t get to talk about it. A lot of the resentment is because a generation of men didn’t get to grieve.”

This brief moment on Tales of the City encapsulates the incredible ambition of the series: to encourage different generations, different communities, to see each other, to empathize with each other’s pain… and forgive.

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    This is not a (b)log

    Gordon Bowness is a Toronto-based writer with more than 25 years' media and entertainment experience. Apparently, he still has a few more things to say.

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