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falsebooles123 · 2 years ago

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Finding The First Gay Kiss - Diary of a Big Ole Gay 1/7/23

Edit: Yes I know that I published this three days late, suck my dick.

Hey Whores, Today I am sad, not because of movies but just because being unemployed is depressing and I am someone who deals with ... that sort of thing.

(also thank you tumblr for checking on my mental health, you real for that)

I don't like to talk about my depression because honestly its not that bad like compared to some peoples, like I can always get out of bed in the morning, I'm not suicidal. Its just sometimes even when everything in life is fine I just have no energy and I want to cry for no reason. or I sleep for 10 hours everynight and I still feel tired.

and I know that my pain and sickness is valid as much as everyone elses but I feel that I'm stealing valor for being someone with like mild depression symptoms. What I'm saying is that I'm a fake emo.

(go on fuck me emo boy go on fuck me emo boy, wait what was I doing...)

Its Day 4 of the job hunt and I'm typing this up before I go job hunting today but its just so hard when life sucks not to catasphize I hate this feeling of freefall, of feeling like you have slipped off of the tight rope of life and you are just falling

falling

sure at any moment you will either hit the net or feel every single bone in your body break simultaniously. The body eletric, a petit mort of estatic orgasmic pain before nothing.

and I know that that isn't true, i know that I am capable that I am strong, that I am more then the obstucles that get put in my way. and even if thats not true I could always be a nihilist and know that the human desire to keep on keeping on will keep my mortal flesh in pained wretcheness for awhile longer.

Well now that i was a little emo about this shit lets actually talk about the movies I watched this week. BTW I rented a bunch from my local library so thanks taxes.

Glen or Glenda (1953) dir. Edward D. Wood Jr.

Glen or Glenda is something else. On its surface its almost the transsexual Anders Die Al Aldern, complete with a psycologist and plee for sympathy, on the other hand it is a bizarre acid trip of imagery that is impossible to discribe outside of 1940s experimental film, on the third hand it is a anderson-esque autobiography work where wood confronts his own desires for transvesticism to the point that it greatly misreads the room.

This film greatly misunderstans transness, it conflates crossdressing, (which is presented as a fruedian fetishism for lace and fur), with being trans and it doesn't spend a lot of time exploring either of these ideas well. Psuedo-anaylsis is applied to find the roots of their GNC and tbh a lot of this films messaging is outdated.

However I have also had the good fortune of reading a book on the subject, (the name escapes me and I'm to lazy to look it up), and a lot of the way that transness is discussed is period accurate. A lot of people that were getting medical care, (including the influential christina jorgensine), were doing so because of hormone inbalances or because they were intersex. transmedicalism has been the bread and butter of trans health care and while I absolutely don't support it political for a variety of reasons it is the framework people had at the time. The notion of gender identity or even dsyphoria, (are modern transmedical metric)), are woefully modern.

that being said it should also be noted that a lot of people really didn't care about the distinction insofar as it purtained to being part of the queer community. The desire to be GNC was seen in itself enough and our distictions of queer identity are also more modern in the same way that before the 1970s bisexual wasn't a weirdly used label or the notion of asexuals, (who were under the bi umbrella), didn't politically branch off until the 1990s or later.

I don't want to excuse the politics of this film but I do think it is a queer work, dealing with one mans experience of bigotry and trying to heart-felt make an acceptance piece. The fact that this film is so deragated, not by a trans audience, but by a mainstream one, to me comes off as aggresively queerphobic.

I am not going to say that this film gets to be in the cult status of problematic faves like RHPS or its even more problamatic cousin Hedwig and the Angry Inch but I do think that it is being cut from a very similar cloth.

The Detective (1968) dir. Gordon Douglas

At some piont around the 60s and into the 70s Crime Prods went into this almost ACAB era, where instead of explicet copaganda, (y'know like the post-9/11 stuff), they were shown as almost anti-villians and this film is no different.

Usually this gets compared to Serpico or Victim, I don't watch a lot of '60s films so it reminds me of Cruising(1980) which came out later on.

Basically ol blue eyes is a third generation pig and he's investigating the murder of a gay man. but see hes one of the good guys because he doesn't think its nice to call the queers f*ggots, oh and be clear the pigs are very homophobic in this. they love calling us fags and fudgepackers and fairy queens and who the fuck knows what else.

But see Sinatra is a good guy so he only emotional abuses his unfaithful wife a little, and also totally didn't beat a confession out of a innocent man and get him sent to jail.

Its differcult with these films because on one hand pigs are pigs and its at least honest but on the other hand these films do glorify this violence. I don't know i'm not a film scholar, (I say as I write my academic ass essay on this subject).

I do want to rewatch Cruising at some point one causes its very hot.

(i literally had to type in the year and director because tumblr won't let me search for Cruising. What if I want to see a man get sucked off in the bushes tumblr-bumbly thats my progative)

and second because the film I feel has a more neutral idea of cops. I think that depicting them as all racist pigs and all good guys as a gun is a disservice. Being the jack boot thug of the regime is obvious a moral gray area and while I refuse to sympathize with shit like "The boy in the stripe pajamas" I do have some interest in see people deal with a corrupt system.

Rope (1948) dir. Alfred Hitchcock

There Lesbians Harold.

so first before I discribe this film let me first discuss how gay the origins of this are. For those not in the know Rope is based off of a 1929 play Ropes End, (well in the broadway run), which in turn was inspired by the case of Leopald and Loeb.

There were two young students, (teenaged at the time I believe), who murdered a 14 year old boy because they had read too much nietzche

Not only were the two murderes but it turned out that they were indeed gay lovers, with the sexual relationship feeding into the more toxic dom/sub aspect of the killing team, (OK I watched a lot of criminal minds and they fit the model to a tee).

this of course was tawdry and shocking and of course it feeled the fucked up imaginations of people and so the gay codependence of these two murderers found there way into Ropes End which dramaticised the events.

This was then picked up somewhere by Alfred Hitchcock and given to Arthur Laurents, also gay, (btw according to wikipedia he got set up with his partner by Gore Vidal of all people).

Also both of the main actors in this John Dall and Farley Granger were MLM. Another fun fact was that the Prof, (who was explicitely a daddy in the play), was originally offered to Cary Grant, a man who has never been accused of liking other men. He turned it down supposedly to the queer intonations of the work, (I want to be clear that Grant has stared in other queer works but thats not the point).

Laurents discusses in Rope Unleased (which was nicely enough included as an extra on the DVD I borrowed from the ibrary), how the whole movie was about "It" and everyone was in on it. And it kinda is.

The Murder scene is sexual, with the men holding up Davids prostate body, one with there hands around his throat, the other having his hand inside the jacket feeling his heart beat slowly stop. This death is in someway Le Petit Mort.

Laurents says once again in the doc

"Hitchcock was fascinated by the fact that they were gay murderers, if they were gay he wouldn't care, if they were murderers, but both"

(I'm paraphrasing here)

and this film conflates murder with sex in a way that is palpable. The body becomes almost this symbol of there homosexuality something that can be revealed and outed. Theres another prescient quote by Dom Prof along the lines of

"You Know Phillip, I wish I could come Straight out with what I know

Unfortunetly I don't know any, I merely Suspect"

and lets be clear there is a lot of lines in this work that have that kind of double meaning.

This Movie is gay, it is so fucking gay and everyone knew what they were doing. Good Shit.

Michael (1924) dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer

Michael as has been stated before on this blog is based off of the 1902 novel by Herman Bang. This film is a lot more explicet in the plot probably for the fact that this film wasn't mostly lost. Theres more drama with the characters and overall its basically about a guy whose boyfriend/little starts getting bamboozled by this scammer and ruins his life because of it. Its in a weirdly weird way Its about toxic queer love but like in a way thats not problematic. Which is nice.

What I mean by that is that in modern queer storys tend to have a lot of gay trauma, its a lot of repression and homophobia and people being called faggots and dying of aids.

(you get what I'm getting at)

However in this film its more that these gay people just have like a toxic relationship that has fuck all to do with being gay. Its straight people nonsense but for people who are not straight. Which is honestly kinda refreshing.

#diary #queercinema #FirstGaykiss #Transphobia #Homophobia #Slurs #Queerphobia

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