LETTERS From CAMP Rehoboth |
My Queer Life: When You Wish Upon a Star |
by Michael Thomas Ford |
I'm a bit of a pop culture junkie, and it's a little bit depressing to me when I see reports about celebrities who have died. As clip after clip flashes on the screen showing the most memorable contributions of the deceased, I feel a whole row of doors slamming shut at once. The problem is that we're running out of stars. I mean real stars, people like Bette Davis and Marlene Dietrich and Cary Grant. Stars who electrified audiences and made Hollywood seem like the most magical place on earth. As each one twinkles out, it seems that life becomes just the tiniest bit less exciting. Perhaps this is a form of depression peculiar to gay men. After all, we are the societal custodians of all things fabulous and artificial, right? We embrace the love stories and melodramas of the silver screen with open arms, finding in the lives of our stars the lives we maybe wish we had ourselves. Even the launching of our modern gay rights movement was in no small way contributed to by the untimely death of one of our greatest film icons, Judy Garland. Perhaps seeing her unable to stay in the world made us decide to change it for ourselves. All right, so maybe pining after dead celebrities is a little shallow. There are, of course, more important things to worry about. But I can't help but feel that the death of true stardom is something to be lamented, particularly by gay culture. I remember vividly the night a friend in New York took me to a screening of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? at the now- defunct Theater 80, a revival house that showed nothing but classics. The place was filled to capacity with gay men. Half of the audience played the Joan Crawford role, speaking her lines with perfection, while the other took up the Bette Davis part, complete with mannerisms. No, we weren't changing the world that night. But we had a great time, and it became an annual event for my friends and I, sort of the gay version of going to a Messiah sing-along at holiday time. That's something that we don't get much of any more in this era of impersonal multiplexes and films noted more for their budgets than for their stories. The sad fact is, we just don't have any stars to replace Bette and Joan. None of Hollywood's current elite has real style. Tom Hanks may be affable, but I doubt he makes many of us fantasize about being stranded on a desert island with him the way Rock Hudson did. And while Garbo said as much by not speaking as most actresses did in their scene-chewing monologues, the best today's hot actresses like Demi Moore and Meg Ryan can do is try not to put us to sleep. One of the things I am most proud of is that I have not seen James Cameron's Titanic. As far as I'm concerned, this piece of dreck is the ultimate example of how dim Hollywood's star has become. Leonardo DiCaprio as a romantic hero? Kate Winslet as the heroine who needs to be taken down a few rungs so she sees how the other half lives? Please. Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert's mismatched lovers fighting across a screen of strung-up laundry beats out this floundering version any day, and without a billion dollars' worth of special effects. The 13-year-olds mooning over Leonardo and Kate when they've never seen Casablanca or The Philadelphia Story have no idea how cheated they really are. Gay men searching for new icons to replace the ones we've lost are hard pressed to find anything worthy of adoration. We gave Madonna a chance, but she turned out to be more interested in self-promotion than in doing anything truly interesting. In forty years, when we turn on the television and hear that she's passed, we might feel some nostalgic pangs as we recall the first time we heard "Like A Virgin," but will we really be crushed? And while I admit that staring at Ben Affleck for a few hours is a wonderful way to pass the time, I don't think there will be a rush of queer moviegoers lining up to see the re-release of Armageddon in 2048 because they recall it fondly as the movie that made them long to be in love. When Lucille Ball died, I cried a little. When Myrna Loy died, I cried a lot. And yes, I felt a little silly doing it. I didn't know these women. They didn't know me. But they gave me something very special over the years. They made me laugh. They created characters and played out stories that I connected with. They helped me dream. And through them, I connected to other people who also loved them. No, it's not the same as taking someone's hand at Stonewall and standing up for gay rights. It's not the same feeling I got marching with thousands of other gay women and men to demand funding for AIDS research. But it was something very real, something uniquely queer, and I treasure it. I hope young gay people will find their own stars. Maybe they don't need them in the way that people my age and older did. Maybe they don't feel that need to escape into worlds where things are a little more interesting. But I hope they do. I hope that they find their own icons and their own common reference points, the lines from movies that they repeat over and over and still find funny or moving or empowering. I hope that one day they can all sit in a darkened theater, the kind with a really big screen, holding hands with their dates and watching one of their favorite movies play while they recite all the lines together and laugh until it hurts. Michael Thomas Ford won a Lambda Literary Award for his book Alec Baldwin Doesnt Love Me. His new book, Thats Mr. Faggot to You, is in stores now. He welcomes e-mail at Shopiltee@aol.com. |
LETTERS From CAMP Rehoboth, Vol. 9, No. 11, Aug. 13, 1999 |