THE NEW TRIUMPHALISM: HOMOSEXUALS BOAST OF OSCAR SWEEP

by Paul Likoudis

Anticipating a "gay sweep" of the Oscars, the nation's most prominent homosexual magazine, the Advocate, devoted its March 28 issue to Hollywood, offering its readers a sumptuous serving of gay triumphalism.

Homosexuals, gloats the Advocate, control Hollywood and the engines of the entire American entertainment industry — film and television, music and theater. The overwhelming impression left by the Advocate is that America's new homosexual power elite has taken a lesson from Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and has harnessed the communications media to ridicule, belittle, intimidate, and demonize middle-class American marriage and family life.

In article after article, homosexual actors and actresses, writers and producers, directors and gay pundits celebrate their ability to use the entertainment industry to homosexualize the culture and shape the minds of millions of American middle-class youth to accept homosexuality and transgenderism as a progressive development of the human condition.

But if any Americans think that films such as American Beauty and Boys Don't Cry, which portray homosexuals as more normal, happy, and well adjusted than suburban, middle-class families, mark the end of the journey toward acceptability, one has only to look at the last essay in the issue by homosexual philosopher and pundit Gabriel Rotello. He points the way for future filmmaking: the mainstreaming of hard-core homosexual, lesbian, and transgendered pornography by removing the stigma attached to it.

Pornography, he writes, is so important to gay identity, so powerful in shaping the sexual mores and activities of the next generation, so necessary for expanding the range of sexual practices, that the talented, politically conscious film makers in Hollywood should make pornography as acceptable as they have homosexuality.

In the "Last Word" feature, "That's Sexertainment," Rotello tells the story of being called to the deathbed of a friend who was dying of AIDS, who had a last request: He wanted Rotello to go into his beautiful, antique-stuffed apartment and "get rid of the porn." How could his friend, Rotello wondered, who was "so incredibly open" about sex and so wonderfully and "fearlessly" promiscuous, be so ashamed of his porn collection that "the most pressing thing on his mind was figuring out how to get rid of the evidence and make his apartment presentable."

Rotello continues: "For gay men, porn is perhaps the gayest form of entertainment we have, . . . the one that speaks most directly to what makes us gay — our sexuality. Entertainment can't get much more sexual than direct representations of sex, much more erotic than scenes of blatant eroticism. Porn, in all its black-white, bi-trans, vanilla-S/M diversity, also is probably more sexually influential than any other element of gay life....

"Yet despite its inherent gayness, diversity, and influence, porn is still the crazy aunt in the attic of gay life, the form of entertainment that dare not speak its name. It rakes in hundreds of millions a year, yet sometimes it's hard to find a single gay man at a party who acknowledges who Ken Ryker is…

"Sexertainment is big business and an essential part of gay life, and as long as we deny it, we set ourselves up for all sorts of problems. Not the least being that although porn helps define what it means to be gay, helps shape the eroticism of the next generation, and helps determine our ideas of safe sex, it's still disproportionately controlled by talentless, apolitical sleazeballs, in part because talented, politically conscious folks don't want anything to do with it....

"But we should get real. Just as gay activists fight for better exposure on primetime TV, we should spend some quality time thinking about this massive form of entertainment. It's time we acknowledge its immense power, work to make it better, and admit that it's a vital, and vitally important, part of millions of our lives."

More Gloating

The same issue of the Advocate gloats over other homosexual triumphs. In the field of religion, there is now an out and proud homosexual, living openly with his male lover, as rector of the Episcopal cathedral in Seattle; in science, researchers are working on producing human offspring from the sperm of two male partners and the egg of one female, to make a so-called chimera, a child who is made with the combined traits of two males; in politics, homosexuals are preparing for the million-man millennium march on Washington, D.C.; and in education, "gay in America" programs are proliferating in public schools.

And yet it is the homosexuals' dominance of the entertainment industry, which is perceived by the Advocate as the greatest triumph, because millions of middle-class Americans are giving billions of their dollars to fund the corruption of their children and the homosexual takeover of culture, now recognized as a fait accompli.

In the face of this triumphal victory celebration, of course, Tinsel-town's archbishop, Roger Cardinal Mahony, is silent — though he does from time to time dispense papal knighthoods to movie and media moguls who generously contribute to his $170 million transdenominational cathedral/ center project.

A direct example of Mahony's toadying to Hollywood was his handling of Dr. Dennis Jarrard, his own staff person who was serious about dealing with Hollywood's pornography and had called for a new Catholic rating system. Mahony, responding to Hollywood outrage, delivered the head of Jarrard on a platter, figuratively, by firing and publicly denouncing him. By contrast, when Mahony's director of gay and lesbian outreach publicly opposed the California bishops on Proposition 22, the marriage initiative, he was allowed to use the diocesan newspaper for his polemics and continues in his office.

Among the Advocate's articles:

• Alan Ball, creator and scriptwriter for American Beauty, and a television writer and producer, explains why he wrote the award-winning movie in "Beauty and the Box Office," and of the thrills he's had from the movie's success and the public's approval. He acknowledges that the homosexual partners in the movie are the "most well-adjusted people in the movie . . . the most traditional… The movie is in part about how homophobia is based in fear and repression and what fear and repression can do."

• The gossip feature, "The Buzz," reports that Buffy the Vampire Slayer character Willow (actress Alyson Hannigan) "is indeed taking witch-in-training steps toward a same-sex relationship… 'There is a romance growing between Tara and Willow,' says creator Joss Whedon."

Also, actor Robin Williams' company, Blue Wolf Productions, is producing a TV series on "gay parenting," called The Kid, and Fox TV has "committed to 13 episodes of an as-yet-untitled sitcom featuring John Goodman as a gay blue-collar pop."

• The feature article, "The Hollywood Issue," "salutes the creative forces who have helped divert the river of Hollywood story telling: the women (straight and gay) of Boys Don't Cry, the gay men behind American Beauty, and two directors who have long charted their own course and waited for the mainstream to catch up — the current Oscar nominee [he won — editor] for Best Foreign Film, Pedro Almodovar, and former Oscar winner John Schlesinger."

The article gives special attention to Boys Don't Cry actresses Hilary Swank and Chloe Sevigny, and their off-screen advocacy for homosexuality and future film projects, including made-for-TV movies promoting lesbianism.

• In "American Success Story," Jeffrey Epstein (a regular writer for Cosmopolitan) comments on the "exciting road" traveled by American Beauty's producers, Dan Jinks and Bruce Cohen, over the past year, which included a personal phone call from Hillary Clinton telling how much she and the President loved the movie. Clinton crony Steven Spielberg, incidentally, was so enthusiastic about the movie's script that he quickly gave approval to a budget request of $15 million for production.

The homosexual partners in American Beauty, the two Jims, writes Epstein authoritatively, "will pave the way for more gay folk in studio films. 'To me, the future of gay subject matter in mainstream film is in movies that have gay content but no one's really talking about it—it's not what the movie is about,' says Cohen, who knows 'gay film' well from spending some six years on the board of Outfest, the Los Angeles gay and lesbian film festival. I feel like that happened with American Beauty. The excitement about mainstream films is the chance to get these messages across subtly in films that mainstream America is going to see. We have definitely hit a segment of the audience that is not used to seeing gay and lesbian characters…

"But even though gay people may be involved behind the scenes in this wave of culture-changing films, Cohen is quick to point out that there's no great gay agenda at work. I don't think we're redefining [studio film making] as gays and lesbians as much as it is by our generation in Hollywood,' he notes. 'We're younger. I think this year has boded well for studios supporting film makers' visions and making movies that are going to surprise people'."

• In the "Fourth Annual Gay Guide to the Oscars," a survey of the major contenders, Greg Kilday shows how all the major contenders for the Oscars celebrate homosexuality "as part of the warp and weave of American life." Of Beauty, he observes: "Beauty's victory would also mark the coming-of-age of gay Hollywood heavyweight David Geffen's fledgling studio, Dreamworks SKG."

Along with Beauty and Boys Don't Cry, Kilday was rooting for lesbian writer Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley, which evokes sympathy for a gay serial killer "trapped in a closet of his own making," the sexually disoriented Being John Malkovich, and the openly gay Spanish director Pedro Almodovar's All About My Mother which features a "transgendered hustler-father and pregnant nun."

Most important, Kilday's survey of these films, and many others, reveals the extent to which gay and lesbian actors and actresses, writers and directors, and musicians insert their lifestyle into the movies. For example, in South Park, singer-songwriter Sarah McLachlan croons away in her Oscar-nominated "girl-girl love song."

Kilday, who also writes for TV Guide and Variety, completes his survey with mention of The Straight Story, which he liked for its portrayal of straight life. "Why we care: Hey, some of our best friends are straight. We're always interested in learning how the other nine-tenths live."

The Alarm Has Sounded

The Advocate's triumphalism was not shared by two other journalists.

Syndicated columnist Suzanne Fields produced "The Gaying of America," in anticipation of the homosexuals' sweep of the Oscars, which she says was a definite indication of "the homosexualization of culture."

Homosexuals' dominance extends beyond the movies, and is especially strong in the fashion industry, and "they're finding only rearguard resistance to their influence in the culture.

"Homosexuals have marched out of the closet in fashions that determine what's chic, at least in some places," Fields writes.

"Trendy styles for women that de-emphasized curves and cleavage in favor of skinny bodies and flat chests are often attributed to homosexual designers. And now gays are achieving an astonishing influence in feminizing a lot of men.

"The spring issue of 'Men's Fashions of the {New York} Times' features models whose faces and figures make it difficult to tell the sexes apart. A glamorous Versace ad is so fetchingly fey that the male model looks more feminine than the female. Two men in a double-page spread for Gucci wear deep pink lipstick and shirts unbuttoned to the lower half of their chest. (Gone is the extra crispy chest hair; these male models wax their chests smooth.)…

"Male fashion has always appealed to male vanity, but masculinity was once the measure of the man. No longer. Walk up to any cosmetic counter and you'll find almost as many jars of ointments for men as for women. David Blum, who initially researched the subject of male makeup as a reporter, tells how he came to rely on an exfoliant cleanser, two moisturizers (tinted and white), and bronzing powder. He's grown accustomed to the glowing skin.

"Homosexual influence expands beyond fashion and cosmetics. The University of Michigan fall catalog describes a three-credit course on how to be a homosexual, examining cultural artifacts and clues for being gay: 'Hollywood movies, grand opera, Broadway musicals, and other works of classical and popular music, as well as camp, diva-worship, drag, muscle culture, style, fashion, and interior design.' The professor promises to teach his students to learn how certain works are essential parts of the gay male lifestyle.

"Susan Faludi, in Stiffed, a book about modern male dilemmas, argues that the man of the '90s has become 'ornamental,' a sex object like certain women in the '50s, 'pedestal-perching and mirror-gazing.' In the culture of fitness, 'pecs' are as important as breasts. Manliness, no longer defined by rugged work, descends into decoration."

American Ugly

For those who don't know much about American Beauty, L. Brent Bozell III captures its essence in a March 25 essay for The Washington Times:

"The cast of characters in this sordid effort begins with Lester Burnham, a journalist who hates his work so much he manipulates his boss into firing him, blackmails the company into giving him a hefty severance package, and embarks on a change-of-life journey where he all but abandons his wife and teenage daughter while pursuing his desire for carnal relations with his teeny-bopper daughter's slutty teeny-bopper friend Angela.

"Lester's wife, Carolyn, and their daughter, Jane, are no victims, however. Carolyn is a hypermaterialistic nag who's having an affair with a real-estate tycoon, while Jane discusses (with Angela) all manner of sexual activity so coarsely it would make a hardened sailor blush.

"Next door to the Burnhams lives another dysfunctional family. The father is a wacko military veteran who collects Nazi memorabilia and rages against homosexuals; his seemingly lobotomized wife simply stares; and their high-school-age son Ricky is suspected of being a Peeping Tom but, thank heavens, he isn't. He's only a drug pusher. Before long, Jane's sleeping with him. Oh, yes. We do meet two other neighbors: a gay couple, Jim and Jim, who are presented — of course — as the epitome of normality. ...

"Except for the depiction of the military veteran as being a fanatic, an utter hypocrite (the raging homophobe — surprise! — winds up making a pass at Lester), and, eventually, a murderer, no one in American Beauty is shown as doing anything really, well, wrong. Not Lester, the would-be pedophile. Not the adulterous Carolyn. Not the promiscuous Jane. Not the drug-dealing Ricky.

"No, in Hollywood, one doesn't rush to judgment about right and wrong. At most, one can say, as did one critic, that the movie 'explores like no other I can think of the spiritual and moral emptiness of the Me Generation's prosperity.' Empty, yes. Wrong — unequivocally, morally wrong — never.

"Welcome to the celebration of moral relativism… It would be well for Hollywood and the film critics' community to recognize that . . . in American Beauty, they [are] honoring a movie that celebrates not virtue, but decadence; and not nobility but moral cowardice — with a hefty sprinkling of narcissism, hedonism, and anarchy to boot."

© The Wanderer , 201 Ohio Street, St. Paul, MN 55107, 612-224-5733.

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