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Recently in Salon People

Nothing Personal
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[10/27/99]

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People Feature
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Nothing Personal
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It was Pat's mother (of German-Catholic descent, as I recall) who brought Catholicism to the offspring of her marriage to a Presbyterian man whose inherited family values would likely have been pro-English, anti-Irish. Thus Pat isn't an Irish Catholic, or Irish-American Catholic, as we generally understand those terms. His Irishness is pure Orange. Yet he has cloaked himself in the Green for the political effect of being seen to share Ted Kennedy's ancestry while standing against all aspects of the Massachusetts senator's social program. As a supreme rhetorician, Pat too much enjoys the taste of those ironies to claim publicly his descent from the likes of Ian Paisley.

Buchanan's announcement this week of his resignation from the Republican Party to seek the presidential nomination of the Reform Party will inject welcome drama into next year's national campaign, but his bitter attack on his own party is disturbing. Strong, independent voices of criticism and rebuke are desperately needed in this country, but Buchanan has shown little interest in the humdrum details of practical political work. He seems to have only one goal -- shooting to the top of the line like a late Roman Caesar. Buchanan appears less qualified for high office than the quirkily long-shot Donald Trump, an articulate, shrewdly observant, high-powered businessman and real estate developer with a genuine common touch.

More on ethnicity: Salon reader Maggie Balistreri, who grew up in Bensonhurst, writes to protest the stereotyping of Italians in the media: "Italians are portrayed by all as either buffoons (Benigni has a lot to answer for) or mobsters (DeNiro is blending the two roles nicely lately). So what happened to the image of the Italian? It used to be the utterly refined dandy, the aesthete. Now it's the grunting buffoon."

I applaud this indictment. It dovetails with a letter from Frank Francomano, who remarks, "I have long wondered why my ethnic group remains open to unpunished calumny, especially from supposedly sensitive and politically correct and often Jewish left and far left people."

Responding to a query last month about "The Sopranos" from TV critic Michele Greppi for Fashion Wire Daily, I denounced that over-praised HBO series about yet another Italian-American Mafia family as "a buffoonish caricature of my people" and "an ethnic minstrel show -- Amos and Andy for a TV industry that can no longer get away with demeaning stereotypes of blacks and Jews." Francis Ford Coppola's first two "Godfather" films are masterpieces that I adore, but there has been no creative progress in over 20 years. I told Greppi, "I'm sick and tired of Italian-Americans being used as monotonously one-note lowbrow fantasy figures by an entertainment industry too lazy and klutzy to get us right."

"'The Sopranos' is ethnic defamation," Dominic Amorosa of the National Ethnic Coalition of Organizations told the New York Daily News this fall. "Our goal is to get 'The Sopranos' off the air," said Frank Guarini, chairman of the National Italian-American Foundation. As a free speech advocate, I wouldn't go that far, but high-decibel consciousness-raising about this issue is urgently needed.

Two weeks ago, amid much furor, the French Parliament granted legal status to cohabiting unmarried couples, a development I welcome not just for its contribution to gay rights but for its incremental movement along the path toward my ultimate libertarian goal: the total disconnection of civil authority from the realm of consensual personal relationships, heterosexual or homosexual, which the secular state should neither sanction nor monitor. The modern economic liberation of women heralded the end of state paternalism and intrusion into private life, but the latter process remains incomplete.

On the home front, the trial of the second man charged with last year's murder of Matthew Shepard in Wyoming has been treated with blatant manipulation of the news by the liberal major media. As I wrote in my column immediately after that tragedy, the issue of exciting but dangerous gay-male cruising for stranger sex cannot be avoided in this case. But despite even the public warning by Shepard's mother that "Matt was not a saint," a censored and sanitized version of the fatal evening is being promulgated by newscasters in lockstep with gay activist groups.

It's now a simplistic melodrama of virtue versus villainy, as if Shepard -- who had a history of two known incidents that ended violently and who had just the prior week confessed to a fear of being killed -- had been ambushed and kidnapped from the bar because he was gay. Human nature is complex: Shepard, who had traveled abroad, was drawn to his assailants, I suspect, precisely because they were scuzzy punks whose look and manner fairly screamed trouble.

What happened to Matthew Shepard was brutal and barbaric, and as a supporter of capital punishment, I want his killers to fry. (One has already been sentenced to two consecutive life terms.) Both Alison and I have long been in favor of bringing torture back, which I argue would not fall under the rubric of "cruel and unusual punishment" prohibited by the Eighth Amendment if it were a strict replication of the suffering that had been inflicted on the victim -- heinous in this muddled, boozy case but even more atrocious in cold-blooded, precisely planned serial rape-murders of the Ted Bundy kind.

But it does not help the cause of gay rights to pump the public discourse full of intelligence-insulting schmaltz over exceptional incidents. Hate crimes legislation -- that fascist exercise in thought control -- will never make cruising 100 percent safe, particularly not when "rough trade" is involved, a walk on the wild side with besmirched archangels whose zap of primal energy is one step from savagery. To erase the questing, provocative, limits-testing, and even irrational (because id-driven) element in gay-male cruising is a form of castration -- which the glorified nurses and pious hand-holders of the gay activist hierarchy know very well how to do.

Check out the sinister finale of "The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone" (1961), where the stalked Vivien Leigh becomes Tennessee Williams' proxy for the extreme sport of gay stranger sex. And re-see last year's "Gods and Monsters" for gay actor Sir Ian McKellen's scrupulous charting of the tense pas de deux of trolling, needling and bruising masochistic ecstasy that hasn't changed much in the gay world since Heliogabalus staged his rambunctious porn games in the Roman imperial palace.

Next page | The sanctimonious iconography of gay rights groups