1, 2 X U, Or Fuck You + Your Penis Too
Feeling adrift in a trans, nonbinary, pronoun puzzled world? Good.
In the midst of streaming wars, cable cutting, the death of DVDs, COVID cautions about the theater experience and an Internet full of everything you could ever want to know just about any film ever made, it might be hard to remember, how movies used to play out.
Like some kind of Gnostic dream play, filagrees of film work would find their way back to you. The blood sport of Bonnie and Clyde, Catch-22’s mordant humor topped by an evisceration by plane, bibles under pillows and beds post-The Exorcist, were all word of mouth lures much more significant at the time than RottenTomatoes.com is now.
So pulling up for a family night out, all 13 years old of me and my mother and stepfather, were excited to be seeing a double feature up on Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn. A double feature, when there were such things, that in this instance had us seeing…A Clockwork Orange and Deliverance. Yeah.
So, if you think you know what it is to be uncomfortable, then you should know this: watching about four hours of film about rape, while being 13 and sitting next to your mom, is gold circle uncomfortable. It’s presidential level shit. In fact I’ve experienced nothing more uncomfortable and I went to dinner at the Sing Sing Warden’s house largely naked, excepting the fire engine red posing trunks I was wearing. To make a point (don’t ask).
I had read A Clockwork Orange before seeing the movie, and I had seen Kubrick movies before, so it was not a surprise. To me. In fact I remember being surprised that it was a surprise for them and, of course, a later cause for upset.
But Deliverance? Well, I had been obsessed with canoeing and had already at that point canoed down the Delaware River and over and through fairly aggressive whitewater several times, but this was not at all a movie about canoeing. In fact calling Deliverance a movie about canoeing makes about as much sense as calling Taxi Driver a movie about urban transportation options.
The sine qua non though? If you haven’t seen the movie, spoiler alert, it’s on account of the extended homosexual rape scene. The number of movies that feature extended homosexual rape scenes are so few, in fact, that those of us who pay attention, as I have since then, of homosexual rape scenes, know why it’s necessary to understand why there are so few.
Hard to really capture the tone and timbre of how it hit back then but people, to put it lightly, lost their minds. Later, during an interview with Allen Ginsberg when I pointed out to him that James Dickey, the author of Deliverance, had just called him a “garbage man” in the New York Times the day before the interview, he was stunned. Then saddened. Then not surprised at all.
[T]he world is so aggressively dishonest about rape that I had figured out that homosexual rape is the only rape that people — read: men — will take seriously.
“It just so happens that I don’t view anal sex between men as disgusting and shameful,” Ginsberg finally sniffed.
When it was pointed out that it was maybe rape that people were justifiably seeing as disgusting, Ginsberg corrected: “that’s what I am seeing: it’s no mistake that Dickey used this as a vehicle of shame.”
All of which was in my head when I wrote A Long Slow Screw, a crime novel that bounced around excited New York publishers. Until people actually read it.
“Pop culture is so mean spirited these days don’t you think?” The Random House bigwig smiled and I agreed, also smiling. Same planet, different worlds though, and then something I knew that she didn’t. My novel was a homosexual rape parade. Semi-patterned after the ex-mafiosi Roy DeMeo, it was as hardboiled as it came and featured characters that were as irredeemable as they were unlikable.
And of course: homosexual rape.
“Why was there so much of it there?” My mother asked me after years, it seemed to me, of wanting to ask, but not asking. “I mean I loved the book but…” And it just hung there.
I told her straight out: the world is so aggressively dishonest about rape that I had figured out that homosexual rape is the only rape that people — read: men — will take seriously. Because even gay men are not excited about the prospect of being raped and in straight men it’s the only thing that effectively carries the terror that’s appropriate for the occasion.
“Explain,” she asked, digging in.
While ugly people get raped all of the time I have never seen Hollywood depict the rape of anyone that wasn’t attractive. There was a producer, I had heard through a friend who once worked at Paramount, that had an extensive collection of every rape scene in every movie ever made.
Absent? Deliverance. American Me. Scum. And the handful of other movies featuring homosexual rape. Rape that underscores most definitively that the name of the game is power and not so much sex.
It’s strong seasoning and A Long Slow Screw uses it as such. She got it.
But waking up today I got it. That is: something else. Janelle Monáe Robinson (no relation) just announced to the world that they are nonbinary. I have friends who present as women but are trans, nonbinary. I have friends who have kids who are anything and everything and have been comfortably embraced by all and sundry. “Comfortably” may be pushing it a skosh but California is not Florida and so the word stands.
And then a burst of something that was last publicly articulated for me in the Amiri Baraka (née LeRoi Jones) play Dutchmen. In an extended scene his main character Clay (Cassius? Adam of Adam & Eve fame?) says that what Bessie Smith and Charlie Parker are really saying is “Kiss my ass!”
Baraka then goes on to say, via his characters, that murder is the only cure for Black neurosis. If Smith “had killed some white people, she wouldn’t have needed that music. She could have talked very straight and plain about the world. . . . Just straight two and two are four. Money. Power. Luxury.”
[W]e may not have a real solid understanding of what causes cyclones but most of us now understand that cyclones are no cause for celebration.
And like a diamond through the forehead there it was: nonbinary is the best alternative to killing your way to sanity in the face of an unremitting cultural tendency to be over invested in a public understanding of what our private parts are doing. You’ve heard of people voting with their feet? This is just like that. But about a lot more than feet.
See, it’s a refuseniks paradise and a way for the weary to declare victory and go home. Though there are plenty who are not getting it — the same cohort that believes that the waitresses at Hooters are really digging on them and that buying a Corvette will somehow make your penis more attractive — I am going to be an optimist here and say there are plenty who are.
Proof?
Well, we may not have a real solid understanding of what causes cyclones but most of us now understand that cyclones are no cause for celebration. And believe me this weariness is not gender limited.
The artist Raymond Pettibon had had many occasions to do illustrations of Charles Manson but had done one, in particular, that really stuck. A jailed Manson was looking into a mirror that he had scrawled on with red lipstick a legend that read: I’m Sick of Sex.
Which rings true now more than ever because while the dance is as old as time, our time, here, our turning the dance into shit seems to be relatively “new”. And sitting where it does at the intersection of commerce, control, capital, consumerism and confusion, what we’ve done with both the impulse and the actuality is enough to have us all start heading for the exits.
So is there a way to rescue sex from the unimaginative, shopworn carpetbaggery into which it’s fallen?
Well we should all be aiming to find out.