It undoubtedly would come as a surprise to most American audiences that sexual reassignment surgeries are not only legal in Iran but also provided free of charge to anyone who seeks them. This is the focus of Iranian-born, American filmmaker Tanaz Eshaghian’s documentary Be Like Others, an intimate examination of the intersection of state power, science and religion, gender and sexuality. In the film, at the vortex of these various forces are the bodies of two young men who opt for the surgery: Ali and Anoosh.
Early on in Eshaghian’s probing film, she interviews a doctor who performs these surgeries, as well as Vida, a postoperative male-to-female, and both speak highly of the procedure as the only option for Iranians who have homosexual desires. Vida, who works as a kind of counselor for those who are going through the surgery, emphatically reiterates the official government policy on gender and sexuality: Homosexuality is a disorder that can and should, in the eyes of the religious leaders who prescribe it, be addressed by “straightening out” one’s gender; desire between two men or two women is not permissible. Vida, who as the film goes on appears more and more like a government mouthpiece, insists that she finds homosexuality repugnant, that she is not a homosexual; rather she is someone who was truly born the wrong gender. Other interviews throughout Be Like Others, from another doctor who completes sex reassignment operations to a cleric who explains the significance of the religious decree condoning the surgeries to the families of those who hope to have it, reemphasize Vita’s point.
Following the success of Casino Royale, an apocryphal story sprang up that Daniel Craig had requested the inclusion of a gay love scene in the next Bond outing, complete with full frontal nudity. Although the item was quickly squelched, as much by common sense as by Craig’s adamant publicist, its overtones nonetheless remain telling. Despite the evident absurdity, there was something peculiarly appropriate in its fabricated scenario. As not once in the rumor mill’s daisy chain was it ever suggested that Craig himself was homo- or bisexual—and as his bent performances in Love Is the Devil (1998) and Infamous (2006) rarely entered the picture—the story was clearly founded primarily upon Craig’s screen persona as Bond. This particular silly rumor thus helped to crystallize the quite complex layering process that had surrounded Craig ever since he had been announced for the role, and it testified as well to the seemingly impossible feat that Craig and the behind-camera collaborators had pulled off: to re-sexualize the figure of Bond, to make Bond himself a sexual object.
This claim might seem strange, as sex (and 007’s legendary potency) has always been one of the tentpoles of the Bond franchise—but has a single one of the films after the first Connery triumvirate actually qualified as sexy? The rough, dangerous, decidedly reactionary sexuality that Connery possessed in Dr. No (1962) and From Russia with Love (1963)—nicely complemented by Ursula Andress’s blow-up doll voluptuousness and Daniela Bianchi’s good-girl-playing-bad innocence—was already being smoothed out by the time of his smirking seduction of Honor Blackman’s (coded) lesbian Pussy Galore in 1964’s Goldfinger (the one Bond girl moniker that will obviously live forever, despite the total lack of chemistry between the stars and the brevity of their onscreen time together). Before Connery (twice) exited the series, Bond’s rapacious sexuality was already part of the joke that the franchise sought to make of itself, his conquests reassuring trail markers rather than titillating encounters, all the more so once Roger Moore began his long sojourn in the role. Even when the producers tried to restore the character’s dangerous edge with the casting of Timothy Dalton, that danger was confined solely to his dispensing of violence; Dalton’s grim, angry incarnation of Bond more often viewed women as impediments to his brutal trade rather than as savory pleasures.
As many a commentator has noted, for all their de rigueur chases and explosions the Bond films are an essentially comforting phenomenon, a ritual whose pleasures are more ones of familiarity than excitement—which goes for the sex as well, the striking beauty of certain of the series’ female adornments aside. The half-hearted embrace of Pierce Brosnan was always couched in that same key of the familiar: he “looked” the part, after all, and thus assured the faithful that no surprises would be forthcoming. How different the initial reception to the announcement of Craig as Brosnan’s replacement, and how fascinating the terms in which that displeasure was expressed. The disparity between Craig’s irregular, rocky features and Brosnan’s men’s-catalogue-handsomeness invited a chorus of nasty comments, almost all of which called attention to Craig’s masculinity, or perceived lack thereof. The actor was lambasted for being too short, mocked for his (reported) inability to handle the vintage Aston-Martin’s stick shift, derided for breaking some teeth during a fight scene (a strange inversion of something that would seem rather to testify to his manly credentials).
Thinking about Stanley Kwan’s Lan Yu, I find it impossible to separate the film from a memory of adolescence, one that I sometimes take pleasure in glorifying as a key moment in my cinephilic puberty. In the years before I got a driver’s license, I would nag my dad every week to take me to the one video store in our city with a substantial foreign-film selection. Though I was already out to my sister and a few close friends, it never occurred to me, compulsively strait-laced as I was, to be so transgressive as to venture into the gay section of the store—certainly not on my father’s watch. If I ever did have the thought I would have rejected it as a kind of betrayal, especially since my father had lovingly assumed the role of chauffeur just so I might cultivate a deeper passion for movies.
On each visit, though, I would make sure to stroll through the Asian aisle to steal another glance at the cover of Lan Yu, with its image of two Chinese men standing in pre-kiss proximity. Of course I lacked the nerve to smuggle it home, but in addition to being extremely curious about what simulated sex between two Chinese actors would look like, I was tantalized by the sense that this movie would surely contain some hint of a life or a sensibility I could understand, some alternative to the American gay culture I felt alienated from. I imagine Lan Yu will always toll me back to that initial desire.
As the audience of any form of storytelling, we are often pulled between the urge for an encounter with the new and unknown and the partly narcissistic wish to find ourselves reflected in characters with whom we can identify. My memory of Lan Yu provokes the perhaps unanswerable question of whether it’s a right or a privilege to see one’s ethnic or sexual identity represented and taken seriously on the big screen—a question that, depending on whom you ask, may be considered banal, sentimental, or unfashionable. With Harold Bloom having spent at least the past fifteen years lambasting the “School of Resentment” for prizing social concerns over great literature, and Paul Schrader recently blaming the “Nonjudgmentals” for precipitating “the fall of the canon,” is it possible anymore to note that spectatorship and aesthetic emotion are profoundly influenced by our politicized identities without being accused of advancing some uncritical, touchy-feely, anti-art dogma?
Like almost every other moviegoer at one point or another, I had a teenage self that was looking to cinema as both an antidepressant and a romanticization of my own grievances. I had also figured that if I was going to call upon queer movies to throw a pity party in my honor I didn’t want to end up feeling like the lone racial outsider in the crowd. The irony is that, when I finally did catch up with Lan Yu three years ago, it turned out to have as little to do with my experience as a Chinese-American gay man as those edgier, whiter films of the New Queer Cinema or the gay caricatures in Hollywood comedies. Not unlike the communities in which we find ourselves in real life, movies marketed to marginalized demographics try to extend the comforts of sympathy and unity, but usually only end up throwing the viewer’s individuality and separateness into sharp relief. It’s embarrassing to think I hadn’t predicted as much, since Kwan’s movie is clearly entrenched in the political anxieties of a specific time and place I never shared.
Omar (Michael K. Williams) lies naked, sleeping next to his boyfriend. He’s roused by a noise. Suspecting gunshots, he pulls a window curtain aside and sees a garbage truck below. He puts on pajama bottoms and a robe (both of blue silk) and walks to the kitchen to fix himself some cereal. His boyfriend, Renaldo (Ramon Rodriguez), has left the box empty. Preparing to go out for Cheerios, Omar tries unsuccessfully to conceal his gun. Frustrated, he leaves the apartment unarmed.
Omar is tall and sinewy. Physically, he’s not particularly imposing, but he has an almost mythic quality. Armed with a shotgun and assisted by a small band of followers, he has often stolen from some of the most powerful drug dealers in West Baltimore and managed to elude their retribution; he can clear a street corner from a block away, just by whistling “The Farmer in the Dell.” As he leaves home in his search for cereal, he walks with confidence in his outfit of bright, flowing silk, a colorful alternative to his typical long black trench. The children and dealers on the street call out a warning to one another— “Omar’s coming”—and scatter. He enters his local grocery store and buys regular Cheerios (they have no Honey Nut) and a pack of Newports. On his way home, he leans on a rowhouse and lights a cigarette; a package of drugs falls to his feet from the window above. Even unarmed and pajama-clad, Omar terrifies his neighbors enough that they’re willing to forfeit their product without even being asked.
Omar comes home and empties the bag of drugs on the kitchen table. He doesn’t even want them—“It ain’t what you’re taking; it’s who you’re taking it from.” Because for Omar, it isn’t just about drugs or money, it’s also about power. Renaldo, meanwhile, doesn’t seem to give any of it much thought. His first question to Omar: “They didn’t have Honey Nut?”
*****
Given the high level of visibility of gay, lesbian, and bisexual characters and performers on American television, it has now become relatively pointless to write about the state of queer American cinema without also considering TV. This certainly wasn’t the case twenty years ago, when New Queer Cinema was in its nascency. Regularly featured gay people had popped up on television shows in the 1970s—most prominently in the sitcom Soap and the landmark PBS documentary series An American Family—but the dominance of the broadcast networks through the 1980s meant that competition for audiences was limited to three vaguely distinguishable, unadventurous players, each regulated by the FCC. Most television series were made to appeal to a (straight, white, middle-class) mass audience, and programming was frequently a rush to the middle in which aesthetic and political boundary pushing weren’t rewarded. Exceptions, from All in the Family and Hill Street Blues to The Cosby Show and The Golden Girls (also created by Soap’s Susan Harris), largely proved the rule. At least movie audiences had an alternative to mainstream Hollywood fare. Independent films and film movements, including the New Queer Cinema, could sustain themselves on smaller audiences concentrated in urban centers. Television lacked an analogous alternative to the mainstream, in part because none of the Big Three networks could compete effectively for ratings—and by extension, ad revenue—by programming to niche audiences.
Remember November 4, 2008? Obama won! Gays lost! Many gay Americans had been hotly anticipating the end of the Bush Era, but their wide-scale repudiation in the form of the passage of Proposition 8 in California made the day’s triumph seem something like a Pyrrhic victory, especially since that bigot-fueled ballot measure overturning legalized gay marriage was just one of many pro-hate measures adopted across the country. However, only a scant hundred days into the Obama administration, there are signs of brighter times ahead. On March 18, our new president formally endorsed the U.N. declaration calling for worldwide decriminalization of homosexuality that his predecessor had refused to sign. And this April the country was stunned by the Iowa Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling that its state’s same-sex marriage ban violates the constitutional rights of gay and lesbian couples. In other words, these ongoing local civil rights battles—both won and lost—have ensured that gays and lesbians are now a major part of the nightly news media cycle in the U.S., and they have moved to the center of the American culture wars. The tide is turning decisively in favor of gay rights, despite occasional setbacks.
In cinemas, things seem as simultaneously hopeful and regressed as they do in the U.S. at large. In the past four or five years, there’s been something of an explosion of queerness on film—for better or worse—from the undercover “bromances” of Judd Apatow to the drag-pastiche of Todd Haynes to the overt politicization of Milk, to the ever-expanding circuit of gay exploitation knockoffs, including, as always, spoofs of mainstream popular culture and coming-of-age/coming-out narratives. And we mustn’t forget Brokeback’s multiple wins at the Academy Awards. A gay film isn’t necessarily ghettoized any more, but gay cinema is not exactly out of its niche market, either.
Then again, what constitutes (or ever has constituted) a “gay” film? With the days of the unofficial New Queer Cinema movement in American independent filmmaking now in the not-too distant past, who’s picking up the slack? Click here to read the rest of our introduction to our 24th symposium, RS Prop. 24: Defining a New Queer Cinema. And then, move on to the articles, including expansive takes on Broken Sky, The Wire, Be Like Others, The House of Mirth, Lan Yu, Far from Heaven, Milk, Casino Royale, and Hairspray, and essays on the Bromance and the Queer Prestige Film. And moving forward, each day we’ll highlight one of them right here on Reverseblog so you don’t miss one hot minute.
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