R E C E N T L Y
The affirmative action of Gwyneth Paltrow
America's New Age obsessions: The good, the bad and the inner child-y
Tom Cruise is no cruiser
Celebrities' fatal attraction to public sex
Bill's victory stogie: Just a cigar?
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A L S O
About Camille Paglia
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C O L U M N I S T S
Sexpert Opinion From Niagara to Viagra Right On! Lovers and Writers Ask Camille Under the Covers Second Thoughts American Squirm Unzipped |
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While channel-surfing the night after the disastrous King show, I suddenly
came upon a stunning new Cinemax documentary that went cryptically undescribed
in my TV Guide. It turned out to be "Party Monster," produced and directed by
the brilliant team of Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato of World of Wonder, a
Los Angeles production company. This gripping film uses rare location footage
and scathingly honest interviews to explore the notorious 1996 murder of Angel
Melendez by Michael Alig that occurred among the omnisexual habitués of the
Limelight, an ultra-hip downtown New York nightclub created out of a spooky
old church.
With their ingenious, cartoonish costumes, the gender-bending Klub Kids (who
never had the incomes or high-profile careers of Studio 54 celebrities) were
like fantastic apparitions from Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death." "Party
Monster" captures the exhilarating brio, careless hedonism and mad delusion
of that drug-infested scene, including grisly, darkly comic necrophiliac
scenarios that belong in Bosch or Dante. It shows that Petronius Arbiter's
"Satyricon" (a decadent saga of the first-century Roman Empire that became an
extravagant 1969 Fellini film) was probably no fiction.
This sensational documentary inevitably confirmed Gary Bauer's portrayal of
the gay world rather than Barney Frank's. Conservatives aren't stupid. After
last year's murder of Gianni Versace in Miami, massive international news
coverage made completely public the fast-track, affluent gay "circuit" through
which the killer, Andrew Cunanan, had moved when he was younger, fresher meat.
While only a minority of gays are full-time inhabitants of that netherworld
(whose strata range from the penthouse to the gutter), activists must stop
their systematic lying about the actual facts of run-of-the-mill gay male
recreation, which is constantly going on in public toilets, parks, alleyways
and all-night clubs throughout the Western world. The dimensions and
intensity of that orgiasticism would stagger the minds of many well-meaning
liberals, I believe, were they to see it with their own eyes.
After a period of optimism about the long-range potential of gay men's one-on-one relationships, gay magazines are starting to acknowledge the more relaxed
standards operating here, with recent articles celebrating the bigger bang of
sex with strangers or proposing "monogamy without fidelity" -- the latest
Orwellian formulation to excuse having your cake and eating it too.
Again, it is my libertarian position that everyone is free to have consensual
sex with anybody else and in any style and quantity, as long as the rights of
others to enjoy public space are not infringed upon. But it's grotesque for
gay men to avoid asking themselves searching questions about their addiction
to cruising. The strange is always a flight from the oppressively too-familiar. It's an escape from "HOME and MOTHER," as D.H. Lawrence said about
Herman Melville's sea voyages.
Before the Stonewall rebellion of 1969, gay men could honestly deal with the
staggering power of woman, whom they hailed in their campy cult of the diva.
For example, Judy Garland, like Maria Callas, was the focus of their complex
ambivalence and adulation (an issue I addressed in my article
"Judy Garland as a Force of Nature" in the June 14 New York
Times). Drag queens, whom I love and revere, see the truth about life far
more clearly than do gay activists.
Today, many gay men pay lip service to PC feminism (which postulates woman
as helpless victim) while refusing to acknowledge any connection between their
sexual preference for men and their pressing need to mark off their singular
identity from shadowy female forces in their past.
Since psychotherapy is now ruled by the wishy-washy "I'm OK, You're OK" school
and since academe is infested by supine apologists for queer theory (a bag of
bombast by ignoramuses who got their jobs by kissing Michel Foucault's bony
ass), only conservatives, alas, are providing any challenge whatever to the
prevailing, simplistic, Pollyanna assumptions about homosexuality.
Gay activists had better realize that all their shouting and bullying, aided
and abetted by the manipulations of the liberal major media, will not make the
conservative opposition to homosexuality magically disappear. On the
contrary, things could get more vicious and dangerous if far-right cranks and
fanatics are drawn into the stalemated argument.
Gay artists are certainly not helping things either. They are producing a
whole lot more and mattering a whole lot less. As I said to Rod Dreher of the
New York Post (Page Six, June 12) about the controversy over Terrence McNally's
scheduled play, "Corpus Christi" (whose Christ figure in the current script
has offstage sex with an apostle), it does not help the gay movement for
Christian ideas to be routinely "defamed by so many childish, nihilist gay
writers." Playwright Tony Kushner, for example, who led the McNally defense
and whom I called a writer of "self-canonizing propaganda," falls pathetically
short of the artistic stature of Tennessee Williams, an openly gay man who
wrote masterpieces that are admired around the world.
As for Lott's classifying homosexuality with psychiatric disorders like
kleptomania and alcoholism (I don't accept the current party line about
alcoholism being a somatic disease, even if certain people have genetic
difficulty in metabolizing alcohol), it is perfectly consistent with his
beliefs as a conservative Christian. I view homosexuality not as a disease
but as a social adaptation, productive or destructive as the case may be, to
private and public pressures.
Gayness is certainly not innate, and those who trumpet that science has proved
otherwise should be condemned. That gayness may be intricately related in childhood development to other personality traits, like shyness, aggression
or artistic talent, is a more likely hypothesis.
I have been struck, in my brief encounters over the years with a half-dozen
prominent gay male activists, by the frightening coldness and deadness of
their eyes. Behind their smooth, bland faces I saw the seething hatreds of
Dostoevskian anarchists. Gay crusading, I concluded, was their way of handling
their own bitter misanthropy, which came from other sources. I found these
men more spiritually twisted than anyone I have encountered in my life. The
gay movement should not be left in their hands.
You call yourself "secular," as do I. Secular humanism is strong only when it
can offer science and art as vibrant substitutes to conventional religion in
the search for meaning. But militant gay academics and their jargon-spouting
post-structuralist minions have trashed science and art. As a teacher, I am
concerned about young people's cultural milieu. Until gay activism can expand
the imagination and feed the soul as well as religion does, give me religion.
Postscript: Salon reader Jersey
Tomato asks, "What's your take, as an art historian and pornographer, on Herb
Ritts' photo spread of Monica Lewinsky in Vanity Fair?" Alas, I think that
the Ritts photos are mediocre and that Lewinsky looks like an ox on the way to
slaughter. For a complete analysis, see my article, "Making Marilyn of
Monica" in the Focus section of the June 14 Boston Globe.
In regard to "Is Feminism Dead?" -- the cover story of the June 29
Time -- I find Ginia Bellafante's analysis of the state of feminism very interesting,
perceptive and persuasive. However, if I am truly responsible for that snippy, dithery
airhead, Ally McBeal, then I must make a pilgrimage of atonement to
Aphrodite's shrine on the island of Cnidos. Where's my leopard-skin pillbox
hat?
Feeling like an ox on the way to slaughter? Ask Camille.
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