Late Pride Month: In the movies

One of the movies that I was all set to watch was The Celluloid Closet, from 1995.

In retrospect, I am almost positive that I either read about the book version in Alternate Channels in my reading three years ago or that it was mentioned when I was watching Disclosure two years ago.  

Somehow in planning ahead I had only remembered the movie, but in watching the movie and reading about it there were clear references to the book. 

The Celluloid Closet (Revised Edition): Homosexuality in the Movies by Vito Russo  

Also, when I was looking up the DVD to borrow it from the library, this other movie kept coming up, Vito from 2011.  

Here's how it all went down:

Vito Russo was a film buff and critic who put on festivals, wrote, and gave lectures on film history. Through his connections he got some great archival access that eventually led to his writing of The Celluloid Closet book. (This is simplified, but there are resources to learn more.)

That came out in 1981 and he died in 1990.

Russo had wanted the book to be turned into a documentary. He was helping Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman with that from about 1986, but his health was declining and they didn't get any real traction until 1990 when a British television channel expressed interest. Then, about 21 years after that, Jeffrey Schwarz made a documentary about Vito's life, Vito.

For a little background information, Rob Epstein will be coming up with some other films. I was not previously familiar with Jeffrey Schwarz but he seems to focus on films that profile an individual, so one focusing on the person made sense.

For The Celluloid Closet, I saw the movie before I read the book. If I was amazed at how thorough the movie was, with that book as its inspiration it makes sense. Russo's knowledge of film was broad and deep.

As I was thinking about what films might come up, with one notable exception they were all covered. 

Also, there were movies in there that I had never heard of or that I knew but had things that went completely over my head.

I had been thinking about the Hayes Code on and off since our Warner Brothers Studio Tour, but I learned a lot from the book and movie. Perhaps most interesting was that Hitchcock liked pushing it and that Preminger was actively trying to break it. While the book's focus was the portrayal of homosexuality on film, of necessity it also deals with the perceived morals and purposes of film.

Possibly one reason it was hard getting interest in the documentary was that the book was seen as somewhat negative and maybe a little bitter. The documentary ended up being more positive.

There are two things with that. One is that Vito did want the documentary to be entertaining; he was not just a scold. He loved film even when it frustrated him. If he was at times negative, there was good reason for it. 

Another part of that, though, was that the filmmakers were feeling more optimistic. Part of that was the reception of Philadelphia (1993). (The Birdcage did not come out until after The Celluloid Closet, though I believe I remember references to La Cage aux Folles.) 

Here's the thing: one of the big themes of the book was the tendency to kill gay characters, even if they were very sympathetic. 

I kind of remember this as a phase that movies go through with multiple marginalized groups. When they are moving up from only being villains (and maybe some extras) but still not getting to be lead characters; they become the one you really like who dies.

Also, I can't help thinking that while there may be sensitive portrayals in Philadelphia, the guy dies. It's about an AIDS case, so that's expected, but still, death.

But what I was really thinking of was "Clexa."

Full disclosure, I have not seen a lot of these movies, and I never watched The 100, a series that ran from 2014 to 2020. 

I am, nonetheless, on the internet. There were people who 'shipped Lexa with Clarke (both girls), and as soon as they consummated the relationship, Lexa was shot and killed when Clarke was the target. (Then, later, Clarke marries a dude.)

Twenty years after The Celluloid Closet film came out, this led to much discussion about "bury your gays."

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/bury-your-gays-why-100-877176/

From the article there were three other prominent deaths at the time. Maybe those characters weren't part of ships.  

There are other shows and movies. Hallmark has some holiday romances and Heated Rivalry is really big now, but Elio and Strange World didn't really get promoted. I am not saying there hasn't been any progress, but I am not sure how optimistic Vito himself would have been. 

Therefore, when his final screed (I think this was from 1987 edition) was largely telling gay people not to look to Hollywood, but pursue independent films, I think he had a point. To be fair, there are other reasons to make that point as well. 

Anyway, this is a good read and watch list for anyone interested in film, and Vito will come up in one of the other films.

Now I would like to get to that exception.

In 1941's Suspicion, there is a subtle but pretty clear lesbian couple, Isobel and Phyllis. I read it as kind of a Gertrude Stein/Alice B. Toklas vibe, but it's there, and accepted without being a big deal. Neither Celluloid Closet mentions it.

One other film step for marginalized groups is to become background characters who don't do a lot but exist unmolested, which is still something. Maybe Hitch was trying to fast forward to that.

I did do some searches to see if anyone else cared. I do have the internet.

I found two posts: 

http://thefilmexperience.net/blog/2013/6/30/great-moments-in-gayness-suspicion.html 

https://grandillusions.wordpress.com/2017/11/29/a-moment-of-delicate-queerness-in-hitchcocks-suspicion/ 

So it's not just me. 

Reasons not to bank on socialism

Leftists continue to lie about Democrats sabotaging El-Sayed. 

Again, that ego issue where they can never accept any responsibility is very Republican. Worth thinking about.

Anyway, I had alluded to a belief in socialism being connected to an inability to admit error in Tuesday's post; let's get back to that.

In theory, I love the idea of everyone giving what they can and receiving what they need. 

The conservative mode of rejection focuses on most people being lazy and bad, so the system falls apart if you don't reward the true wealth creators by letting them exploit labor. This, as much as anything, is why Republicans keep on supporting racist and sexist policies: we keep the people already on top there by pushing everyone else down.

(That's dominator culture.) 

In truth, this has not been what has caused various governments to struggle in their apparent attempts to embrace a bounteous economic equality.

In fact, they end up suffering from a lot of the same problems that plague capitalism.

Even though this is not one of my Friday media posts, I am going to give books to go with my three examples.

(You could reasonably argue that two of these countries are Communist, not Socialist. I tend to think of Socialism as the later stage of capitalism, but I think there are enough similarities that treating them together is reasonable. There is room for respectful disagreement.) 

The reading recommendations are not as good for Cuba. 

Part of that may be that you often get a sharp divide in writings from Cubans. There are the ones who stayed and might have a hard time criticizing Castro, and who can be harder to hear from for a variety of reasons.

We mainly hear from the ones who left who (and their children) who are very bitter about having been called "gusano" (worm). Hatred of Castro is an issue and it isn't even an unreasonable one, but these are also often people who were wealthy and doing well under the previous dictator, Batista... that has its own skew.

I recently read a book featuring parents who hated both Batista and Castro, but a big part of it was that they would not talk about it because the memories were so painful. Probably that allowed the author to not take a side without further analysis, so I don't really recommend it for that. (That was Cuba 15 by Nancy Osa, and it was a little on the annoying side anyway for teenage reasons.)

The book I will recommend is The Memory of Silence by Uva de Aragón, where two sisters are separated by the war, and their husbands. The Communist believer and the one who left and supported the Bay of Pigs invasion both had serious issues and unhappiness. You can be grateful that the relationship of the sisters ends up enduring (possibly helped by both husbands dying), but you get both viewpoints.

That includes harvesting sugar cane in Cuba.

Castro wanted to prove that they could still be productive under his leadership. They could be even more productive. Therefore, everyone needed to help with the sugar cane harvest.

Sugar is a tough crop. People who had no experience or familiarity with it found it pretty miserable, but if you didn't do it, you were betraying the cause, right? 

Except, if the point of the revolution was to help everyone, is harvesting a lot to export the right goal, or should you be focusing on independently growing a variety of staples?

That question came up earlier. 

Okay, there is some disagreement on whether Stalin deliberately starved Ukrainians during the Holodomor, or whether that was a side effect of the push to collectivize farming but also continuing to export grain, because how else can you prove the superiority of your system?

While it is not merely about that, there is some great (and heavy) reading on this in Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. 

There is not disagreement about lots and lots of people dying, including outside of Ukraine. Would not have exporting grain, focusing on feeding their own people helped? Well, experiments in collectivism can have other problems.

Communist China had a stronger focus on getting people fed, but they still had problems doing so because of problems with farming techniques and inefficiencies with the system. Again, there was a laboring class and people who ordered them around that was not necessarily fair, but they did know what they were doing. That was cataclysmically disrupted.

There may have been extenuating factors at times, like weather, but they were exacerbated by Mao not being willing to take responsibility for any mistakes.

Deng Xiaoping was actually a bit better at figuring out how to make things work, but Mao saw that as a threat, causing Deng to be purged twice. 

That could have been worse -- in Deng's case it meant becoming a laborer in a tractor factory -- but he is probably lucky that Mao didn't live longer.

A good book to read on this is Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by June Chang. In the schooling that she and her siblings got, you can also get some real insight into the personality cult built around Mao, with Mao's own contributions, but she has another book, Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister, about the Soong sisters.

Big Sister and Little Sister married, respectively, Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek. Red Sister became a prominent Communist adviser. Their story gives a good exploration of personality cults and how people starting at the same place can end up so differently. (Also, marrying the guy at the center of a personality cult has some serious downsides, but so does communism.)

The point is that even if you are intending to have a strong collective that takes care of its members, feelings of ego and competition can lead to terrible decisions. At first some of those missteps can be very understandable, but the ego ensures that they keep getting worse.

Remember, bad intentions are not an absolute necessity for disaster.  

I sure do wish that as a country we had been immune to personality cults, but then a lot of that was based on the racism. We never did the necessary work on that.

Sigh.  

As long as we are reflecting...

I don't know if there is a lot of value in writing about politics right now; the election is Tuesday and most of us Oregonians have already dropped off our ballots.

However, if I am going to advise Harvard undergrad, Princeton MA and PhD Cornel West to take some time to reflect, I might as well keep going on that. 

There is plenty to reflect on.

As an aside, I was pretty sure he was an Ivy League PhD, but I thought I should check the details. Wikipedia informs me that he is on his fifth marriage after four divorces... that sure sounds like someone who would be more aligned with Republicans.

Anyway, some other trends in this election round include members of marginalized groups who have been supported more by Democrats criticizing Democrats for not doing enough.

This has included transgender people claiming they are being betrayed by various candidates not insisting on full sports participation for transgender athletes, even if in other ways said candidates are very supportive of their rights and even if not going to the mat may just mean leaving participation rules up to local sports bodies (remembering that sometimes the reasons the complaints start are that the local sports body was allowing transgender athletes to compete).

There is a kind of interesting thread on it here: 

https://x.com/Chinchillazllla/status/2114767071649104281 

There are people in this thread whom I do take with a grain of salt, but I think there are some reasonable points and a mostly respectful discussion.

That means that at least at the point that I posted this, it had not been discovered by worse people.

The other thing I am seeing is supposedly Black men angry that it is Black women being elevated and that Democrats will not get their vote unless they do something for Black men.

There are some interesting things in there. First of all, I don't know how much of it is real. Sure, we had a few data centers temporarily offline and it was beautiful, but there are still a lot of bots out there. Such bots do impersonate different races and genders.

In addition, Steve Bannon had declared Black men were the key, so were going to be targeted. Have those efforts been working? 

Certainly Black men are not immune to misogynoir, just like they are not immune to anti-Blackness. They could be falling for propaganda that would be against their self-interest. That is possible, but it mainly being bots and trolls is also possible.  

However, that is very interesting in light of parts of Project 2025 relying on Black people "rioting" so that martial law could be declared. They have not been taking the bait, but complaints about Black people not participating in demonstrations... are you feeling they should be doing the labor or are you hoping that it leads to martial law?

https://x.com/Chris4Perkins2/status/2115413763234881654 

I mean, there is just a lot to think about. You can't take everything at face level, though even things at face level can be pretty bad if you really think about it.

What can we learn from this?

First of all, you need an understanding of civics and the racist, misogynist structure of society to be able to have a good analysis. It's too baked into our culture to be ignored, but a lot of the smooth functioning of our culture has depended on ignoring it.

We need to get past that. I can sympathize if it hurts, but it's still necessary.

Also, and this feels like it is behind most of what I say, we have to care about each other. 

If I only care my specific interests in whom I support, I am most likely to be voting against my interests. Even the people who think they are supporting their own financial interests are most likely going to be giving more power to people who will exploit their voters, consolidating their own cash and power as much as possible, to ridiculous extremes. 

That's how it's been working and it's pretty noticeable. 

Oh, Brother!

The news broke  yesterday that the push to get Cornel West on ballots in 2024 was funded by Elon Musk:

https://readsludge.com/2026/10/26/musk-linked-dark-money-network-funded-the-group-behind-cornel-wests-ballot-push/ 

Many of us were not terribly surprised. 

That being said, there are people calling Brother Cornel a plant and various things like it was all conscious. I am not positive on that.

I will remain un-phased if West did know, but the funding came through dark money. It's possible that West just thought that he was doing something really good that a lot of people supported, as opposed to one more thing to strengthen Republicans and increase contempt for Democrats.

I am not trying to exonerate West; anyone who praised Brother Trump as authentic --  like Brother Sanders! --can't be taken too seriously.

However, I think there might be a lesson here.

Previous explanations for West's disdain for Obama were generally that West thought he deserved more inauguration tickets than he got.

If you live in such a way that people can easily believe you are that petty and volatile, that might be a good reason to take stock; are you going to look back on this some day and feel good about it? Are you living up to your possibilities?

For the DSA, that used the endorsement for Sanders but with the caveat that while both Trump and Sanders were authentic only Sanders was authentic for good... is this really the endorsement and the endorser that you want?

https://www.dsausa.org/blog/cornel_west_endorses_bernie_sanders/ 

Any chance of it backfiring?

You have to think about things like this. 

Except that if you believe that Republican rule is what will make things miserable enough that the glorious revolution will come and usher in paradise on earth, you are so far removed from reality that there may not be much hope for your thoughts.

I'm not saying that it can't get complicated. 

BrieBrie liked him too. 

I guess there were always signs. 

Trans-and...

This year's reading started out more as pulling together different leftovers than following a specific theme. Despite that, themes emerge.

One of the leftovers was that after reading several memoirs by transgender people, I suddenly remembered Tula and wondered if she had a book:

My Story by Carolyn Cossey   

Tula was a model who got some attention for being in a James Bond movie (For Your Eyes Only) and the video for "Some Like It Hot" by The Power Station. 

Tula was her modeling name, so the book, My Story, is by Carolyn Cossey. Also, I discovered that she has another book that she wrote before that, I am a Woman. 

As the books were published in England, they can take some tracking down. I may read the first one later.

There were two things that I found most interesting.

One was the ways in which it was similar to but different from Christine Jorgensen's autobiography. There were similarities with family and upbringing. Jorgensen tried to conform for longer, but that disconnect was always there. They both started feeling immediate improvements in mood and energy once they started getting estrogen, which apparently their bodies needed but were not making.

They were born about thirty years apart, which may be a part of why Jorgensen tried conforming for longer, but also affected what was available to them, as well as the awareness.

Cossey states that she has an XXY chromosome pattern; I don't know if that information would have been available to Jorgensen.

In addition, Cossey took pains to point out the difference between a transvestite and a transsexual.

Her book was published in 1992. There were two movies I watched in that time period, one of which gave that same definition, though added to it.

To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar (1995) 

The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994)  

From To Wong Foo...

Noxeema Jackson:  When a straight man puts on a dress and gets his sexual kicks, he is a transvestite. When a man is a woman trapped in a man's body and has a little operation he is a Transsexual.
Miss Chi-Chi Rodriguez: I know that.
Noxeema Jackson: When a gay man has way too much fashion sense for one gender he is a drag queen.

I am not sure if that was right. 

Well, the definition of drag queen seems to track, but I think there might be a wide spectrum of clothing choices and reasons for them and how it relates to gender and all of those things. 

I mean, I think the reason they were making a point of the definition is to help legitimize transgender people, and terminology changing over time is pretty normal. Like, yes, it's okay if you think transvestites are perverts, but that is not our issue. 

I really only hear "transvestite" now when people are talking about The Rocky Horror Picture Show. 

I guess it makes me wonder if there really were people who just put on the clothes for kicks, or if there were other things going on that they were not able to talk about and maybe did not yet have words for.

If people use different words now, that probably doesn't matter that much; the important this is being respectful to the people you are dealing with now.

For those movies, with all straight actors I questioned if I should even watch them. I figured that, if nothing else, that's where Hollywood was at the time. That will relate to some of the other material.

Priscilla was originally supposed to star the performers it was based on, but then they wanted bankable starts with no drag background. I think this is why the choreography wasn't that good. I thought the actors did a good job with their characters, but they were not good dancers. You can't tell me that in the country where they had just made Strictly Ballroom two years earlier that they could not do better than that. 

Anyway, I am going to say two more things, fully aware that this is not my wheelhouse. 

One, I mostly hate drag due to its tendency to be so garish and over-the-top. I know it can go many ways, yes from Paris is Burning but also from To Wong Foo (Vida Boheme especially was lovely), but a lot of what I see is just so clashing and loud! I understand it can be celebratory and that I can be repressed, but as preferences go, it's not my thing.

A memory that sticks with me is an episode of either Jerry Springer or Maury Povich. I didn't watch either regularly and I am not sure, but they were doing drag queen makeovers. Friends and family were there, and were thrilled with their straight looks. That seems like it might have been kind of awful for the made over people.

At the time, what really struck me -- and maybe my distaste for the over-the-top factor colored that -- was the way the drag seemed to scream "Look at me, but don't see me."

I totally could have misread that; some of it might have just been playing a role and one that didn't feel too close to them. If that was the case, their loved ones being glad to see those looks go might not have mattered. 

But maybe it did. 

This leaves me with a complicated, multi-part wish. It's for everyone, not just LGBTQIA+ people, but they need it too and possibly more.

I hope that you get to know yourself and find things that you like about yourself. Yes, that will probably be kind of a process.

I hope that you will find places and situations where you feel safe being you.

I hope that you will find people who like and respect you as yourself.  

If you don't show yourself to everyone all the time, that can be okay. I hope the times when you may be concealing things are not too awful, but I still hope you get all of those three. 

Related posts:

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2023/11/transgender-awareness-reading-memoirs.html 

Liars!

Several of the names on the "never trust again" list are associated with polling.

Maybe "polling" is the wrong term. What they have actually been doing is fabricating data that they claimed came from polling and then spreading it:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/a-company-says-its-polls-were-fake-heres-what-happened 

I mean, I assume that's why they are called "an alleged national pollster" in the title; just saying "crooks" or "fraudsters" wouldn't be specific enough.

It's not like many people (including myself) did not already have doubts about the polls.

Still, with the story out in the open, there are several things that make me angrier. Please allow me to vent:

Laziness: One of the things I hate about polls anyway is how easy it is to skew the data. Whom you contact, what technology you use, and how you phrase the questions can all affect the results. 

Apparently skewing still wasn't good enough; not if you want to back up a claim that four different staffers have leaked that a campaign has no path to victory anyway.

That leads to...

Pathological dishonesty: Yes, the poll information was dishonest, but they continued lying after that. 

I keep seeing blatantly false complaints about how Democrats are trying to make Abdul El-Sayed lose. This is despite the support of Barack Obama and Kamala Harris -- really the big guns on the Democrat side -- and the infusion of disproportionate amounts of cash. The cash is needed because the outsized support during the primary faded away when it was time to fight a Republican and El-Sayed is not as popular as you would want. 

That leads to...

Results: In an election where resources should be focused on vulnerable seats in areas that have been traditionally conservative, they are being funneled into protecting what should have been an easy seat. 

The funds available are not limitless. The time and energy it takes to support a candidate is not limitless.

You know what could have been a good seat to flip, not necessarily easy but with enough vulnerability that a strong candidate would have a chance? Maine. You know what we got? Nazi tatoo-having, sexual-assualting, became-a-mercenary-because-he-was-looking-forward-to-killing-people Platner. 

He finally had to drop out but he should never have been in serious contention.

Leftists do more to hold up Trump than some Republicans, but then it is all Democrats' fault. 

Leftists are now claiming that Democrats are doing damage by looking into the fraudulent polls. 

That is quite frustrating, but there is one more thing I am more aware of now. 

Flagrant disregard for ethics: This goes back to my extra school reading.

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2026/09/overachiever-18-books-for-school.html 

Yes, there was required reading on ethics, but I did extra because it was interesting and also because it was important.

In fact, this complaint goes back to dishonesty, because I don't believe for one minute that it was a "social experiment." They were manipulating elections on purpose.

However, if you were really going to conduct such an experiment, there are standards to research using human subjects. 

You have to consider the potential harm and weigh it against the potential benefits. 

You have to submit it to a review board. That is because even if you sincerely believe the perceived benefit is worth the risk of harm, you might not be objective about it. (And I do not believe in any sincerity.)

Also, submitting it for review means that there is a record of it. That means if you confess right when someone catches on, they don't have to take your word for your pure motives. 

Liars.  

I don't have a clever title. For all that can be understood about their motives and the effects and questioned about whether they really believe they can do any good but are too sheltered to understand how badly they are getting it wrong or any of that, ultimately it still comes back to the lies.  

Feeling some kind of way

While the phrase "silent majority" was used before Nixon (even as far back as Coolidge), that is probably the best-known use and it was used in a specific way.

What was known of public opinion indicated that most people were against the war in Vietnam, but Nixon invoked an image of a country where most people (the good people) were not so loud. They were the moral nad patriotic people.

That meant you could always look down on protesters, who were just being loud troublemakers. 

I don't know if he really believed that was the majority view, but I am not sure if he would have cared; truth was kind of a tricky area for him. 

With the bot farms and trolling and all, it affects different people differently.

There are some people who are going to feel encouraged; I was right all along. 

That encouragement is probably going to take place along racist and sexist, ignorant and hateful lines, but that's how it goes.

Linehan probably enjoys getting the bot likes, even if that is encouraging him to act like absolute garbage.

People who love that are not super-likely to be reading my blog, though. I am more concerned about the other side.

All the hate being spewed can make you feel like you are surrounded by horrible people. 

Remember that a lot of it is manufactured and fake.

It can make you feel less like speaking out, because even the most reasonable thing you say will draw abuse.

I still post my regular posts, but I do engage less with stupid comments. Often it's not a real person there. 

That is more of a factor with Twitter; when people on Facebook are saying stupid stuff, I know them and have some idea whether it's worth trying.

I do see a lot of people engaging with logic even when it might be a bot. While they do not have an effect on the posters, there may be people watching who do pay attention to the logic. That's why I do still engage sometimes, but it's not an easy call.

If you are feeling like you can't say what you want, it may make sense to block or find another outlet. 

I definitely see people becoming cynical. There is such a thing as a healthy amount of skepticism, but not believing anything -- including any possibility of good -- is also destructive.

While still not being able to say there are easy answers, there are things we can do.

Connect to facts.

How do you find facts? Maybe start with where you are. 

There should be some things that you know through experience and study. Build upon that. Sometimes the thing that gets people out of conspiracy theories is that there was something that they confidently knew that let them know that that the theory was false. With one person, it was that he worked in radio and knew about transmitting signals, and one of the theories was blatantly wrong. That brought the other information from that source into question.

Connect to people.

Don't stay scrolling and passively accepting the flow of information the algorithm gives you. Talk to people. Hear their voices. 

Maybe hug them.

Things don't have to be this way. It is a matter of choice.

It may not be conscious choice, but that can be changed.