Archive for October, 2007

Because people are actually reading my blog (thank you!!), I feel compelled to make an effort to say something that goes beyond my own mental masturbation: I should at least try to enter a territory of mutual masturbation and according to some article I read the other day, if I am lucky, prostitution (a book deal).

Am I using a lot of words of a sexual nature? If so, you can blame it on The Sex Movie, which is, along with Satoshi Kon’s groundbreaking anime films Paprika, Millenium Actress, Tokyo Godfathers and Paranoia Agent, probably one of the most stunning films that I have seen in the last decade. For those of you who saw Shortbus and heard me rave on and on about John Cameron Mitchell’s achievement when it came out last fall, let me tell you: this one may even surpass the glorious, wondrous Shortbus (although it definitely can’t touch the SB soundtrack).

The Sex Movie is a night in a windowless apartment with two men and two women. The Straight Guy, The Straight Girl, The Gay Guy, and The Lesbian. During this night, these four twenty/thirty-somethings participate in a discourse about attraction and assumptions. Frequently straight people ask gay folks, “How do you know you’re gay?” And teh gays have learned to reflex with, “How do you know you’re straight?” In this movie written and directed by Colton Lawrence, we are forced to ask and answer both questions at the same time in real, meaningful ways. Lawrence successfully penetrates the rhetoric and transforms these questions from devices into a meaningful way to talk about emotional existence in a sexual world (or sexual existence in an emotional world, depending on which character you’re talking to).

He doesn’t do it alone. Mike Fallon, Eleese Longino, Michelle Mosley, and Matthew Tyler turn in stunning performances in this low-budget indy film. We don’t just hear Lawrence’s subtext about the desire in the room, we see it on their faces and hear it in their voices. The violence between the four individuals is palpable, and when Rafe flinched at JD’s angry movements, I flinched with him. The layers of emotion and intellect that shield and comprise our sexual selves are all visible without being overly simplified.

At the very base of it, I also found that the ending was surprisingly satisfying. The dialogue turns in so many directions that even if the ending is predictable, which maybe it was or wasn’t, the journey to it is unexpected, thereby making the ending unpredicted as well.

You might be wondering why I say that this tops Shortbus. Shortbus, also a low-budget indy film, pushed the boundaries in a lot of ways. It’s an amazing piece of work that spoke to me so much that I saw it three times during the original one-week run at the Princess Theatre. (along with most of KW’s gay community, I am guessing!) The sex is all real, the cast wrote the film after they were selected, and it’s a story about how to have an orgasm. Whereas the characters in TSM believe they know what they are about, the people in SB are lost and in a sense the film follows them as they look for answers.

But in the end, I think The Sex Movie managed to capture a moment I have longed to understand and never imagined would be transferable to film. At the end of both TSM and SB, our characters (and audience) get answers. What I like about TSM is that the characters get answers that they either weren’t looking for or they were actively avoiding. This mirrors the coming out experience for so many of us who are gay, lesbian, intersexed, transgender, transexual, bisexual, pansexual, asexual, queer, not straight, or straight but not narrow. It is often gradual, it is at turns painful and then funny and both those things simultaneously, and most of the time, it is something that at one stage or another, we feel has been forced on us aginst our will.

I still have my days where I want to trade in my girlfriend for an Abercrombie Hunk because then I’d be closer to fitting in, and my kids, should I choose to have any, would have two biological parents as partners. I used to have a lot of those days. Luckily now they are only occasional, but I didn’t get there without some work and in the end, the jarring acceptance of a truth about who I could love and whom I could let love me. (And damn am I lucky that Lucy chooses to love me.)

So as Coming Out Week wraps up, I am thinking a lot about these moments when with violent and painful and crazy and loving emotions we come to terms with who we are and ask others to do the same. At GLOW (Gays and Lesbians of Waterloo) discussion group this week, I heard the sadness of those whose parents refuse to accept who they love and the triumph of those children, who found the strength to be honest anyway. And I remember my first coming out week, 7 years ago, when one of my blockingmates (Harvard-speak for housing group) told me that she liked me but I was still a sinner. I remember my friend in high school who became homeless when her parents found out she loved women.

What does all of this have to do with The Sex Movie? Well, for the first time, I have seen a movie that successfully grasped and captured these many narratives simultaneously, even if not always explicitly. It’s an uncomfortable film, and you may find yourself covering your eyes/ears at various moments. But it’s worth forcing yourself to keep watching.

Besides, it’s only 84 minutes run time

So I happened to run across this story about Mychal Bell, the first member of the Jena 6 to be convicted. If you take a moment to have a look at it, you will see that … it spends one paragraph vaguely explaining why he is in jail and the rest of the article regurgitating old news. At the end of the story I was thinking, “What the fuck? How did this kid start in a routine hearing and end up sentenced to 18 months in prison?”

Thanks to MTV apparently having a better news arm than CBS (now isn’t that scary … although, I believe they are actually owned by the same company, so it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense either … although to be fair, the CBS story is actually thanks to AP), there’s a story about it here at MTV which explains what happened.

In case you don’t want to go through the trouble of reading, I will summarize this shitastic piece of injustice for you:

• Mychal Bell, a minor, was unfairly convicted in adult court of certain crimes relating to the incidents in Jena, Louisiana, which are now famous, and if you don’t know what I’m talking about, and you live in North America, please remove your head from your sphincter and use google. If you don’t like in NA, I won’t assume you’ve had your head up your ass, but I kindly direct you to google “Jena Six” or follow either of the links to your right.
• Mychal Bell was scheduled to be sentenced a few weeks ago, but thankfully, a judge overturned his conviction, saying that his case should have been heard in juvenile court.
• It turns out that Mychal Bell had prior juvenile convictions. And it seems that in light of Bell’s altercation relating to the famed Jena 6 case, the judge at the hearing decided Bell had violated his parole and sentenced him to jail for 18 months.

This is outrageous. He has yet to be PROPERLY convicted of any wrongdoing in this case, yet he is essentially being punished for the crime. So much for innocent until proven guilty. I realize that legally, in the US, if you accept the status of parolee, you forfeit this right. And I won’t get into the yada yada of how this obviously disproportionately impacts young Black men just like Mychal Bell, ensuring that instead of walking away from lives of crime, they are packed into the justice system until they are past their youthful prime.

But I want to say that he is innocent until proven guilty, and as such, it’s disgusting that a judge would throw him in jail just because he technically can. Land of the fucking free, indeed.

Please meditate on the tragedy of this. This is a young man with his whole life ahead of him. All he did was try to stand up for his own. I don’t want to get into a debate about how he did it. Maybe he did commit assault — but not with a deadly weapon and not in any serious way — the guy was at a party the same night the fight happened. Does he deserve to pay for it with the next year and a half, maybe the next 20 years of his life for it?

Mychal Bell is 18. In October of 2000, two months after I turned 18, I was safely ensconsed in my first residential house at Harvard. Sure I was freaked out about a lot of things, but I knew that most things in life, most doors, they would open up to me. I can only imagine how to Mychal the world seems to be closing, shrinking. And as I sit and think about my freedom to get into my Jetta and drive across the US-Canadian as many times as I wish, I remember the young Black men who were held up at the border with me last September when I was kicked out of Canada as I attempted to get my study permit. They had the same names as people from completely different states as them with convictions and/or warrants out on their arrest. (Brooklyn yes, South Carolina was definitely not their point of origin) They were thrown out of Canada on the understanding that they are not to return. Mychal Bell is now one of those young men, confined to prison, confined to the nation that barely seems to want him.

If you haven’t already, sign the petition, donate money toward legal fees, head out to a local protest for the Jena 6 … and stand up for the young women and men of your communities who are tragically being locked up into a life in the justice system for errors that in the greater scheme of things don’t require a lifetime of penance. As his father said on Democracy Now a few months ago, “This is what it means to be Black. If he didn’t know that before, he’ll know it now.” I thought I knew it then, but I feel I know it even more now. We all begin to know it now, although not nearly as painfully as Mychal and his family.

To remind everyone of how powerful solidarity can be, I’m offering this image of Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Olympics after winning the 200m. They stood there, at the top, knowing that back home their people were suffering. And they helped turn the world’s eye toward American Injustice. Do the same as you can. Speak out against these legal lynchings. (and click on the image for more info on the 1968 Olympics Black Power Salute.)

In lieu of lyrics … Smith’s comments about his actions at the olympics: Smith later said “If I win, I am American, not a black American. But if I did something bad, then they would say I am a Negro. We are black and we are proud of being black. Black America will understand what we did tonight.”

More later on the Free Software movement. Or something else.