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Oct. 8th, 2012 03:05 pm
"Nobody's 'gay' around here."
One of my favourite quotes from the movie Celluloid Closet is the one of there being not so much a lack of stories about gays and lesbians in the cinema as a lack of real stories. And I think it was Maupin who once said that he was glad that there weren't more queer characters on television so we didn't have to suffer through seeing our experiences trivialised and insulted to the same degree as everyone else's. Obviously, that was a long time ago, because now mediocre sitcoms with one-dimensional gay leads are, quite literally, The New Normal.
Even the purveyors of that celebrated English kitchen-sink realism can't get away from the formula. Between last night and this morning I ended up watching Episode 9 of BBC's The Street, chiefly because of the hotness that is Vincent "Earn these shields, boys!" Regan as a married father who ends up fucking a fellow construction worker. I'm completely unsurprised to find that it was written by two straight males. The seduction scene comes off as particularly unconvincing, violating all the rules of the "wedding ring trade" as taught to me by a buddy from the South Side.
Overall, the episode is ridiculously well acted and works as melodrama, but take out a few trappings specific to the milieu and it's all pretty familiar. In order to hold our sympathy, the father must be noble to a fault: reacting violently to the seduction before giving in; pining away for his one-time lover instead of playing the field; breaking with him rather than having to sneak around; lying (badly) to protect his wife; telling her honestly it was Just This One Time; etc. To turn up the heat, we have to have a subplot about him being mugged during his one-and-only visit to a gay bar, leading ultimately to a violent altercation between his son and the son of the reporting officer.
Even for working-class Manchester, the crushing omnipresent homophobia seems somewhat overblown; you get the feeling the writers were writing more about their childhoods than about 21st-century Britain. (Contrast, for instance, the nudge-nudge tolerance of 1997's The Full Monty--making due allowance for its feel-good comic agenda.) The one part that really rang true for me was where he tells his wife that they have to stay together because they simply can't afford the financial cost of splitting up (though prefaced with "Besides the fact that I still love you" because he's So Noble). That's the story I would've liked to have seen because I haven't before: how you deal with irreconcilable differences because your limited means simply won't reach to the well-worn bourgeois solutions.
But then again, what would I really know about these sorts of lives? One thing the show made me consider is that I really know very little about modern-day working-class queers here or in Europe. Pretty much all the gay guys I've met from that sort of background have long since left it behind. Still I remain sceptical of the ability of people who haven't lived that experience to relate it, particularly within the confines of a one-hour television programme or a feature-length film.
Even the purveyors of that celebrated English kitchen-sink realism can't get away from the formula. Between last night and this morning I ended up watching Episode 9 of BBC's The Street, chiefly because of the hotness that is Vincent "Earn these shields, boys!" Regan as a married father who ends up fucking a fellow construction worker. I'm completely unsurprised to find that it was written by two straight males. The seduction scene comes off as particularly unconvincing, violating all the rules of the "wedding ring trade" as taught to me by a buddy from the South Side.
Overall, the episode is ridiculously well acted and works as melodrama, but take out a few trappings specific to the milieu and it's all pretty familiar. In order to hold our sympathy, the father must be noble to a fault: reacting violently to the seduction before giving in; pining away for his one-time lover instead of playing the field; breaking with him rather than having to sneak around; lying (badly) to protect his wife; telling her honestly it was Just This One Time; etc. To turn up the heat, we have to have a subplot about him being mugged during his one-and-only visit to a gay bar, leading ultimately to a violent altercation between his son and the son of the reporting officer.
Even for working-class Manchester, the crushing omnipresent homophobia seems somewhat overblown; you get the feeling the writers were writing more about their childhoods than about 21st-century Britain. (Contrast, for instance, the nudge-nudge tolerance of 1997's The Full Monty--making due allowance for its feel-good comic agenda.) The one part that really rang true for me was where he tells his wife that they have to stay together because they simply can't afford the financial cost of splitting up (though prefaced with "Besides the fact that I still love you" because he's So Noble). That's the story I would've liked to have seen because I haven't before: how you deal with irreconcilable differences because your limited means simply won't reach to the well-worn bourgeois solutions.
But then again, what would I really know about these sorts of lives? One thing the show made me consider is that I really know very little about modern-day working-class queers here or in Europe. Pretty much all the gay guys I've met from that sort of background have long since left it behind. Still I remain sceptical of the ability of people who haven't lived that experience to relate it, particularly within the confines of a one-hour television programme or a feature-length film.
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