#19: Shock Corridor

(originally published Apr. 5, 2010)

I think that instead of having the typical angel-and-devil duo on our shoulders to represent conscience and temptation, we would benefit more by having a burlesque Constance Towers offer moral guidance. Added bonus: her feather boa doubles as a cottony ear swab.

After college, I worked for a year as an intern at the Washington Blade, in Washington, D.C., but I just wasn’t much of a journalist. I certainly didn’t have the gumption to get myself committed to a mental institution as Johnny Barrett does in Shock Corridor. And if I were attacked by a group of female nymphomaniacs… let’s just say that the Internet makes it seem much more pleasant than Samuel Fuller does.

The Blade, sadly, no longer exists, having fallen recently in the great gay print journalism implosion of 2009. The parent company of the Blade, Windows Media, also folded five other regional publications. The mighty news magazine, The Advocate, became an insert in Out, which, for all its strengths, is more a lifestyle magazine—it features, after all, a “nipple count” for each issue. News you can use, people.

Couple this with the closing of gay bookstores around the country, and it almost seems to augur the end of “gay” as a discrete community, if, indeed, it ever was one. But consider that this is happening to African-American magazines. And when was the last time you remember seeing a feminist bookstore—or better yet—bought something from a feminist bookstore? These are still businesses, and businesses collapse all the time. The failure of a business doesn’t necessarily equal the failure of a community. (Though if a community fails to support its businesses, bemoaning it during the liquidation sale is somewhat short-sighted.)

So no last rites for gay journalism just yet. The Philadelphia Gay News seems to be going strong, and back in Denver, Outfront Colorado still pumps off the presses regularly. While I was an intern for the Blade, one of my jobs was to read through gay newspapers from around the country and photocopy interesting stories for the managing editor. The gay newspapers had a sharing mechanism; if the Blade saw a story from, say, an Atlanta paper that they wanted to publish, they’d call up the editor and pay a licensing fee.

One of my stories, for instance, was re-published in the Houston Voice (obviously, this was long before Windows Media owned both the Voice and the Blade). I had followed the members of the Pro-Life Alliance of Gays and Lesbians in the annual Roe vs. Wade protest march. It was like finding a nest of ivory-billed woodpeckers. During the march, a pro-life (or anti-choice—pick your preferred terminology) woman looked at the group’s sign, rainbows and pink triangles and all, and said, seemingly without irony, “You should have been aborted.”

“Do you get a lot of that?” I asked the group’s leader.

“Yes,” the leader said. “But it’s usually more vitriolic when it’s the gays criticizing us.”

There’s a famous character in Shock Corridor, an African-American patient who believes himself to be a white supremacist. His identity can’t hold up against the double whammy of a violently racist society at large and the black community’s expectations of him. I wonder how pro-life gays handle being minorities several times over.

#18: The Naked Kiss

(originally published Apr. 1, 2010)

Poor Kelly, the kick-ass prostitute (and, really, I prefer my prostitutes kick-ass, rather than simpering,  naïve or strung-out) who tries to make a new life for herself in The Naked Kiss. In spite of the pimps and child molesters that she beats up, she never can escape her past, and even when she tries to do the right thing, it usually turns out wrong. Except for shoving the money down the madam’s throat—that was pure genius.

But I can relate to her want for a fresh start, even though I approached it from the opposite direction. Whereas Kelly tried to leave behind her checkered past, when I went to college, I wanted to shed my more recent history of—well, of nothing. I had been a good boy, scrupulously good. I remember being shocked at the realization that the other high school couples around me were having sex! It wasn’t all tongue kissing and heavy petting. I was a sophomore at the time, and I was playing the accompaniment for the production of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. Our high school’s golden boy, playing Schroeder, had missed a rehearsal—and curiously, his girlfriend, had been conspicuously absent from choir practice.

“Oh, I said, they must have gotten each other sick,” I said.

The choir director and the musical director looked at one another.

“That must be it,” the choir director said, in a tone that wouldn’t have fooled even the most sarcasm-deaf.

Shocked, I tell you. Shocked.

By the time freshman year of college had rolled around, I had concocted a new identity for myself. Not only had I had a girlfriend, but I’d had a boyfriend too. And we’d done—stuff! And because this was a foreign environment—half a country away from Denver—who was there to say otherwise? With those imaginary dalliances, I had become more worldly, more experienced, and whether or not this garnered respect among my newfound friends, I would never know, since they took me at my word. If that’s who I said I was, that’s who I was.

But, as everyone knows, you can’t escape your identity that easily, not even if you’re in a David Lynch film. The life I had created for myself collapsed towards the start of sophomore year. I met my first boyfriend, Bill C., and I told him the truth about my virginal past, and he and my friends compared notes, and then there was a reckoning to be had. I begged for forgiveness and somehow managed to keep both my friends and my boyfriend. (Later, of course, I lost both the boyfriend and the friends, but I tell myself that had less to do with my fabricated identity and more to do with their all being sociopaths. But that’s a story for another film.)