Cruising for a Bruising

First, we get this piece of shit and now this.
I'm thinking we should go back to the golden age of film and bring back the catty sissy character who is often found backstage hemming some actress' dress (and secretly wanting to be that actresses, so that he can wear the dress). Or maybe we should go back to gays being represented as sick, demented, cross-dressing serial killers.

Faggots are taking whatever they can get these days and calling it progress. I thought Brokeback was a step forward. Here was a film that showed dudes in love. It was okay. Getting there. Better than Broken Hearts Club.

Chuck and Larry pissed me off. And GLAAD supports it. My favorite quote from the interview: Through the disarming use of comedy, there is an exploration of homophobia, which often involves stereotypes and slurs, and it holds a mirror up to that and asks people to consider where it comes from. This is a film that has twenty something tiring jokes about "who's the woman" in the relationship. Or this(???):

Chuck Levine: What do you got?
Larry Valentine: Maxi Pads.
Chuck Levine: What, do we have vaginas now? Put it back!

Is this what GLAAD considers to be an 'exploration of homophobia'? This film isn't clever or smart or subversive or anything. It's fucking idiotic.

Now Cruising is back. In the theater? People are seeing it? I recently watched Cruising with M.T. and we cringed. It's campy, yeah. I laughed at Pacino high on Amyl Nitrate, dancing in his leather pants, pumping the air with his hairy knuckled fist. But I couldn't laugh at the representations of gays. I mean, every gay in that film is into S and M or fisting or into weird shit (one of the murdered gays carries with him a suitcase full of dildos, hand cuffs, and other instruments I couldn't figure out). Yeah, people are into all kinds of shit. I'm cool with that. But not one homosexual is represented in a positive light in this film. The world is dark and dirty and naughty and wrong. I can't believe Friedkin is out there talking about it. It's not a film to talk about.

Oops. And here I done talked about it.

Scare Tactics

I have to say I am very glad to see ads like the one above.

Takes me back. Remember this one:



Scared the shit out of me. Never wanted to have sex after seeing that one. And when it did finally come down to finally doing it, well, I had to put on a condom, cuz I was afraid of the consequences.

A few months back I bought an Advocate. Not one ad for condoms. Yet, I found two in a Maxim. Hm.

40,000 people are infected a year. That's a lot of people.

I wonder if young gays who see the ads put out by the drug companies promoting HIV/AIDS medications are getting the wrong idea. They may see these ads and think, oh it's manageable now. All I have to do is take a pill. Good for the drug companies, right. Put up some ads showing hot, young gay men sailing or mountain climbing. I mean, sure HIV/AIDS infected men are living longer and healthier lives, but what else is an ad like this showing the young people--and what's with all the side effects/warnings in very tiny print on the bottom of the ad (sometimes even continuing onto the next page) all about.

I don't know. I just want people to stop dying from this disease. It's preventable. I know it comes down to people not being educated or people being misinformed or people just not giving a shit. I want people to give a shit. Especially gay men. Look at our past. So many died. So many died because at that time nobody knew what the fuck it was. And even when we found out, nobody would do anything. President Reagan didn't even say the word AIDS publicly until 1987 and by that time 41,000 people were dead and 90 something thousand were infected.

I think I'm alive and well because of those ads in the 90's. It seems so stupid now thinking about Salt-N-Pepa rapping about wearing rubbers. But it worked. It may have been preachy. It may have been shameless at times. But it worked.

What will put the fear into youth today?

40,000 infected every year.

Makes me sad.