for those interested

[sparkle_shortz]

* Latest developments on Fred Phelps and the laws being passed in various states re. protesting outside funerals

* A piece that really impressed me on the queer response to Brokeback and Brokeback's Oscar loss

I don't agree with everything he says, and the ending is a little weird (seems like he had to use his last breath to appease the white gays

Comments

[qnetter]

Unfortunately, this depends on an implicit assumption that CRASH is a great film. I don't even believe it's a very good one.

[sparkle_shortz]

Yeah, I didn't think it was great either. But I think his criticisms of the way it was received and promoted as being (a) gay or (b) a love story pure and simple, and the way people shied away from talking about it as anything else (because, I believe he is suggesting, it is too painful) are spot on.

????

[kyooverse]

What article were YOU reading?

No, seriously. Did you miss where it talked about Crash being in the $5.50 bin at Target while Brokeback Mountain will be a classic?

Among queer people of color, there seems to be a consensus that white gay people are just really, really bitter about this and are showing their "true" colors (in parenthesis because I don't know what they were not seeing before).

*sighs*

Re: ????

[sparkle_shortz]

all the post-game analysis in the white gay media is such a privilege parade...

shocking, right?

[hedy]

Admittedly, BBM was the only candidate I saw, but I give a heart word to this piece.

[sparkle_shortz]

what is a heart word? *curious*

[hedy]

A hearty "word".
Bad typing day

[sparkle_shortz]

gotcha!

[badqueermonkey]

gah...I didn't really like this at all. It speaks of "those damn gays, they need to shut up and stop saying they are being discriminated against with the movie..stop whining" etc. I could be almost sure that's one of the reasons it lost, and that a movie is groundbreaking and people talk about it isn't the fault of the 'gays'. I saw both Crash and Brokeback Mountain, and I thought Brokeback was just the better movie in general and more well done. I don't know...I don't really care about the academy awards, but as a political showcase of hollywood I think it's telling.

[sparkle_shortz]

well, i don't think it's a foregone conclusion that it lost b/c of homophobia... and i think there's something to the idea that a complex reading of the film was discouraged by the public discourse about it, and maybe some of the voters wanted a film that could be read complex-ly.

[kyooverse]

Some of the arguments just don't fly with me.

Like the parodies... Um, have you heard about this? -- not work safe, folks.

I would rather some of the points we brought up about it... which only goes to prove... maybe some of us need to be writing up our own criticism. GLAAD is not to blame here, but perhaps our longstanding need to be loved and recognized.

Brokeback Mountain struck a real chord within our community. For example, I like to look at the M4M personals on Craig's list, right, and there were SO MANY post by various guys for MONTHS that discussed the film and their own real life stories and some of the guys would wonder about their Jack's or their Ennis's and the other guys would enthusiatically implore them to re-establish contact. Even I can relate a bit... I dated/had sex with a guy I loved in HS named Reedy who ended up in the Army. We never kissed, but I loved him so much. I came out; he got married

[sparkle_shortz]

I love that Bareback Mountain was a parody before it was a reality! (Meaning, some parodist "announced" that there was a Bareback Mountain before Brokeback even came out, and then it went on to get made.)

Yeah, I think that asking GLAAD to get on the parodists misses the point. It is just another way of wanting the media to sing us to sleep and being disappointed when it doesn't. But something spoke to me in that, about my own desire to focus on the hot sexy part of it to the exclusion of what the actual story was (which I knew quite well since I read the story collection when it came out years ago).

[kyooverse]

I actually had it in my New Yorker years ago... and it was thrown away last year. *shakes head* Imagine the bragging points I could have had (although I was not ga-ga about it).

[sparkle_shortz]

ps I wanna see Capote too. Munich I'm on the fence about. Tony Kushner wrote a really weird editorial about it, fightingwords had it a while ago.

[starstealingirl]

I have trouble with a lot of this writer's points.

First, the notion that mainstream America parodying Brokeback Mountain is somehow queer people's fault. Maybe instead of blaming the people who are affected by the homophobia that informs most of these parodies, we could blame the people who create and perpetuate them, and discuss the structural heterosexism and gender prejudices that informed these parodies, and stunted wider and more honest discussion of the film.

Secondly, did this writer even read the same reviews I did? Because I don't think that the impulse to peg BBM as a "gay" film really informed a lot of mainstream discourse surrounding the film. (Although, it certainly informed several of the parodies: a lot of the parodies seemed to strike at the discomfort that many mainstream Americans feel at seeing a kind of queer-- or at least not-entirely-straight-- masculinity that doesn't fit in neatly with common gay male stereotypes.) I read a lot of movie reviews which argued that BBM wasn't a gay movie-- not because of

[sparkle_shortz]

Interesting points--I don't think I read those reviews either, all the ones I saw lined up behind Ang Lee in describing it as a gay but universal love story the end.

The thing that I feel people missed about it is what it has to say about the estate of hetero-masculinity, and those reviews sound like they would be illuminating about that.