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Are "Dallas Buyers Club" critics guilty of "respectability homophobia"?

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serious crayons:

--- Quote from: x-man on February 01, 2014, 03:57:05 pm ---Before I look at your points individually, I suggest that your argument in your last posting is something like this:  If we aren't talking about DBC then what ARE we talking about?  This is a sort of rhetorical question based on 4 points:
1) LGBT portrayals in the media have advanced.  You give a timeline, a spectrum stretching from a vicious "education" film from your youth through to the very accepting 2013/4 TV series "Looking."
2) The negative movie examples I gave are hopelessly dated, and thus no longer relevant.
3) You turn to what the focus of my anger is--what the mainstream may think of these portrayals whether they are relevant or not.
4) And you conclude that it doesn't really matter because such portrayals do not make anyone more homophobic anyway, the worst it will do is just reinforce existing prejudices.

Is this a fair summary?
--- End quote ---

Yes, pretty fair!  :)


--- Quote ---Regarding the first 2 points I am ambivalent.  I cannot deny that LGBT portrayals have become more realistic over the years,  just as the portrayal of blacks has come a long way from Birth of a Nation, or of women from the ditzy dumb-blondes of 30's comedies.  Nevertheless, and I emphasize this, with advances in media technology, old movies (and to a lesser extent old TV shows) are just as likely to show up on television--perhaps even more likely--  because they are cheaper to run,
--- End quote ---

Good point. I don't normally watch random TV, like whatever old movies and shows happen to be on when I turn on the set (I only watch specific pre-planned things), so I hadn't thought of this.


--- Quote --- and I doubt that most viewers discriminate between what represents an outdated viewpoint, and one that is current. 
--- End quote ---

I would disagree with this. I think the average mainstream viewer (in NA or Europe) is sophisticated enough to tell the difference, and even to realize that old depictions of gay people are dated or no longer socially acceptable. And yes, I even think even most homophobic viewers call tell the difference, even if they're alarmed about current sympathetic portrayals like BBM or Milk or Looking.


--- Quote ---I don't think it would be helpful to provide  list of gay-theme movies I object to.  We know they are there, and continue to see them on screen. 
--- End quote ---

I wasn't demanding that you provide an exhaustive list, just enough that we could discuss specific examples rather than vague and hypothetical ones. Without much else to go on, I'm going to have to reference Will and Grace a lot.


--- Quote ---notice too that TV series and movies showing LGBT life as something to be enjoyed, even celebrated, rather than endured or ridiculed, appear on specialty channels like HBO, Showtime, and OUTtv--safely away from the eyes of most who might risk changing their mind if they watched them.
--- End quote ---

You know, I bet plenty of homophobes subscribe to HBO. True, premium channels or even basic cable channels (and don't forget Netflix) do not command the audiences that the major networks do. But aside from their monthly cost drawing a slightly higher-income audience, I don't think they necessarily discriminate between the liberal and conservative, the well-educated and the average, the sophisticated and the provincial. And I certainly don't think there's any deliberate attempt by anyone to keep LGBT-friendly series "away from the eyes" of the mainstream. I think there's just more willingness to take risks because they don't need to appeal to large audiences.

However, I will say that NBC had a show (just canceled) starring Sean Hayes playing a gay man. As far as I know, it wasn't particularly offensive -- I saw one episode -- though it wasn't very good. But then, neither is the one starring Michael J. Fox as a straight man. Most sitcoms are bad.


--- Quote ---I have no idea how LGBTs are treated in magazine shows like Rosie O'Donnell or Ellen DeGeneres.
--- End quote ---

Um, I do, and that's without even watching those shows. The fact that two popular talk show hosts are themselves out lesbians is, I think, a pretty telling comment on the relative open-mindedness of the extremely mainstream audiences that those shows draw. And I have no idea what Ellen discusses with her LGBT guests, but obviously she's hugely popular and something of an advocate, or at least an admired icon, for the LGBT community.


--- Quote ---I can't believe that one would suggest that the stereotypical LGBT portrayals are not there, even if they have changed from being psychopathic to slightly less dangerous figures.
--- End quote ---

I don't know. I don't watch that much popular mainstream TV, which is why I asked you what ones you object to. I do know I've seen a lot of pretty popular movies and shows -- from Brokeback Mountain to Milk to Mad Men to Orange Is the New Black -- with nuanced, three-dimensional gay characters.


--- Quote ---We don't want to be "funny agreeable silly folks to invite into ones living rooms once a week."
--- End quote ---

Of course you don't, which is why I acknowledged that WaG was problematic. I was simply saying it was an improvement at the time over what had come before it. And more importantly, that it didn't seem like a show that would make anyone MORE homophobic than they already were. If a member of, say, the Westboro Baptist Church were to get enraged about WaG, it wouldn't be because they formerly felt that gays were fine but now realized they were silly and objectionable, it would be because they don't think the media should be embracing gay characters at all and the fact that a show starred gay people would be one more bit of evidence, to them, that Hollywood is a den of iniquity.


--- Quote ---In Canada and Western Europe the battle has been largely won, and we must be grateful for that.  In the US the battle is slower.  (I suspect this may be due to your Constitution giving all "residual rights" not specifically given to the Federal Government to the States, so that human rights issues have to be fought out state by state.
--- End quote ---

I think you're right about this.


--- Quote ---What I want to get across is that homophobic outrages do not necessarily begin with someone seeing a LGBT being depicted as dangerous, criminal, psychopathic perverts.  All that is necessary is for us to be viewed as people not to be taken seriously, to be discounted, to be "light in the loafers" as the anti-gay saying goes.  This is how it starts.  This makes us "other."  As we know from sociology, to be "other" leads to attempts to bring us into the fold, and when that doesn't work, it leads to isolation and exclusion.  (Sound familiar?)  Apply this paradigm to the LGBT situation worldwide, and it fits ominously well.
--- End quote ---

OK, but worldwide I'd still need more convincing that this can be blamed on poor Will and Grace. To the extent that attitudes are getting worse in some parts of the world, I think it has more to do with people in those cultures getting more conservative and religious, period. The same would apply to treatment of women, BTW -- either it was always as bad as it is now, whether we thought about it or not, or it actually is getting worse because the cultures are getting more conservative and intolerant in general. If depictions of gays in entertainment media are a factor at all, it's more about those cultures (like the Westboro Baptist referenced above) saying, "Look at the debauched West and their open celebration of sinners" or whatever. In which case, they could be pointing to anything from BBM to WaG to Looking.


--- Quote ---This brings me to the question of whom does stereotypical portrayals of LGBTs affect anyway?  You will tell me that my paradigm does not fit America.  I wonder if, in your posting, you were doing something you used to accuse me of doing--slipping in a change of point of view and then proceeding as if it had been there all along.  Isn't that what you were doing when you suddenly switched from talking about the "mainstream" world to the US mainstream? 
--- End quote ---

I may have. That's either because like a typical American I'm UScentric  ;D, or because we can either talk about Iran and Russia or we can talk about the U.S., but we can't very well talk about all of them at once as if they exhibited the same patterns because they're so different. The Utah Jazz coach's remark about BBM, disgusting though it was (and again, in that case the "mainstream" apparently agreed that it was bad or it wouldn't have been newsworthy in the first place), is hardly comparable to a government-sanctioned death penalty for homosexuality. And people outside of NA don't have the same kind of access to Hollywood products, so if they are influenced by them at all it would be in different ways.


--- Quote ---There is a big difference between the situation in, say, Africa or Brazil, and the situation for LGBTs in America,
--- End quote ---

Right, exactly.


--- Quote ---I suggest that in NA such things as the Matthew Shephard case and those like it, media depictions of LGBT people do play a part in feeding into the basic insecurity some people, especially some straight young men feel about their own sexuality, and give licence for them to torture, maim, and kill those who are, of course, just what they secretly fear in themselves.  Thus I am not as willing as you are to let "harmless" examples of media homophobia go by.  I know where it can and does lead.
--- End quote ---

I am not convinced that Matthew Shephard's murderers or others who attack gay people are responding to media depictions. Could you describe a scenario in which someone who previously wasn't inclined to attack gays becomes motivated to do so by watching Will and Grace (or whatever)? I think of that kind of hatred as a mixture of internal problems (whatever motivates people to bully in the first place, plus possible repressed homosexuality) and cultural influences -- not so much media depictions as family and community attitudes. To the extent that watching gay people onscreen turns people violent, I think they could as easily react that way to Milk or BBM as they do to Will and Grace -- again (see above) responding to the fact that they're onscreen at all.

Sorry to keep picking on WaG, but you haven't given me much more to go on beyond that and, I guess, some character on Big Bang Theory (which I've never seen).


--- Quote ---  Tied into this is my final point ("At last," I hear you sigh.)
--- End quote ---

 ;)


--- Quote ---  that media-reinforced LGBT stereotyping in the US does affect the situations in Central Africa and Brazil.  I am talking about the fact that the anti-gay frenzy in Africa and Brazil is being caused and promoted by evangelical missionaries from the US.  The clergyman who was instrumental in getting Uganda to introduce life-imprisonment for being gay acknowledged his role proudly, but did say that a life sentence was perhaps a bit harsh.  These religious crazies are for certain working out of "conservative religions and ancient  prejudices," but they are the ones who saw the movies you suggest are "outdated" and saw them as "suspicions confirmed."
--- End quote ---

Well, that's a good point. But I would say the same thing to this as I said about the murderers above -- the extent to which their attitudes are shaped by media depictions, even dated ones, is pretty minimal. At worst, those depictions reinforce existing prejudices. But they don't create new ones out of nothing.


--- Quote ---You will probably tell me to lighten up, to be glad my own country is as enlightened as it is, and that NA and my cultural world are making great advances in LGBT rights  It's just that every night on the news I see increasing LGBT oppression and suffering around the world.
--- End quote ---

Are they increasing, though? And to the extent they are, how much can really be blamed on unflattering media portraits? I think it might be useful to remember that we also see oppression and suffering among women around the world. But I don't think that's because of anyone watching old I Love Lucy episodes (or whatever). I think it's because a) to some extent the oppression and suffering have always existed, but as the West gets more enlightened about sexual orientation and gender the media are getting better at informing us of problems and b) to the extent that oppression and suffering are getting worse, it's because of much larger political and religious forces that don't really have all that much to do with Hollywood-generated stereotypes.


--- Quote ---SC, the way you referenced "Looking" was cute.  I wonder, in my "review" of it, who came off sounding more trashy--the show or me?  I hope it was me.
--- End quote ---

I'm sorry, I haven't seen your review!  :-\

x-man:
Why don't we bring this conversation round to getting out in the open the issue we have so far not spoken of?  For the most part I stand by the points I have made, but I must look at the intensity with which I press them.  This is because the central issue here is not whether or not my examples of bad portrayals of LGBT characters are outdated--but the fact that  I am outdated:  I am examining this question through lenses far older than those employed by the rest of you.  And that makes all the difference.

I first realized I was gay when I was 8 in 1946, although I couldn't put it into those words at the time.  High school was in a small town, '50 to '56.  Believe me, high school in the '50s was not "Grease," more "Last Picture Show."  It wasn't a great time for straight kids either, but for LGBTs it was a nightmare.  You have all heard the stories of how it was then for us in the bad old days--no need to run them by you again.  But I ask you consider not what it was like at the time, but the fears, insecurities, doubts--usually beginning with self-loathing--that were not easily jettisoned, but endured.  And the "wonderful" decades that followed--for LGBTs the possibility and reality of ostracism, job loss, even imprisonment if outed.  Times did change, here, but hearts and memories do not change so easily.  

Our conversation here may take on the character of a "glass-half-empty/half-full."  I want to let you know why for me it always seems to be half empty.  I wish it were not that way, but this is why I fear that the homophobic terrors in other parts of the world will spread to engulf NA; it is why I secretly fear that the sexual equality laws and attitudes of even my own country might quickly change, and the bad old days return.  That is why I brought up the comparison between LGBTs and Jews in Nazi Germany.  "Oh, it couldn't happen here, now."  But it did.  Mine are fears and paranoia that will probably always colour my thinking no matter how much I try to rid myself of them.

For people like me, vicious or stereotypical portrayals of us are beyond reason in confronting.  They awaken emotions we thought had been put away for good.  To my younger LGBT brothers and sisters: be very grateful you have been spared this.

milomorris:
The problems being faced by sexual minorities in Africa are old and deep.

To begin with, many people in African countries still have opinions of gender roles that are informed by ancient tribal standards. Add to that the spread of Islam across the continent which brough a religious prohibition on homosexuality. That was followed by a few centuries of European colonization, which brought new religions to the continent with prohibitions. Anything a handful of American evangelicals has contributed to homophobia across Africa amounts to little more than a nod of approval.

x-man:
Serious crayons, I am sure you understand where I am coming from, but perhaps I need to say to some others that while I stick to my points in principle, I recognize that your underlying argument is valid, and quantitatively--if not qualitatively--I must agree with you.  My posting was to explain why my position held me so tenaciously.  We both know there is no need to prolong the individual points in the debate.  These lines from Melville pretty well say it all for me:

From "Redburn: His First Voyage" by Herman Melville 1849, Chapter 2

Talk not of the bitterness of middle-age and after life; a boy can feel all that, and much more, when upon his young soul the mildew has fallen; and the fruit, which with others is only blasted after ripeness, with him is nipped in the first blossom and bud. And never again can such blights be made good; they strike in too deep, and leave such a scar that the air of Paradise might not erase it. And it is a hard and cruel thing thus in early youth to taste beforehand the pangs which should be reserved for the stout time of manhood, when the gristle has become bone, and we stand up and fight out our lives, as a thing tried before and foreseen; for then we are veterans used to sieges and battles, and not green recruits, recoiling at the first shock of the encounter.

 :)

serious crayons:

--- Quote from: x-man on February 03, 2014, 01:24:02 pm ---Our conversation here may take on the character of a "glass-half-empty/half-full."  I want to let you know why for me it always seems to be half empty.  I wish it were not that way, but this is why I fear that the homophobic terrors in other parts of the world will spread to engulf NA; it is why I secretly fear that the sexual equality laws and attitudes of even my own country might quickly change, and the bad old days return.  That is why I brought up the comparison between LGBTs and Jews in Nazi Germany.  "Oh, it couldn't happen here, now."  But it did.  Mine are fears and paranoia that will probably always colour my thinking no matter how much I try to rid myself of them.
--- End quote ---

Well, that makes sense. Part of the genius of the U.S. Constitution and the ideas that formed it is that they keep pushing us to do better (sorry to be so UScentric, but I'm just much more familiar with historical precedent here, but in terms of these issues I think Canada is on a parallel if more advanced path and was never quite as bad in the first place). That's why the 20th century was better for ethnic minorities and women than the 19th century was, and why the late 20th was better than the early 20th, and why so far the 21st is better than the late 20th. I obviously can't dismiss the possibility that things could take a turn for the worse here, for gays or any other minority or even for women. History is no guarantee of anything, and minorities of any kind will always be in a riskier position than majorities.

But when you see real progress happening before your eyes -- too slowly, I agree, which is understandably infuriating, but still -- it seems reasonable to accept it for what it is, and not to borrow trouble worrying about the possibility of something that's not even on the most distant horizon. It's like people who go around fretting that the United States is going to adopt sharia law. Oh really? And what signs do you see of that?

In fact, if anything I think people here react so negatively to those reports of homophobia elsewhere in the world that they become MORE open-minded and tolerant in reaction to them. I'm no historian, but I think it's possible that the horrors of the holocaust turned people here less anti-Semitic. I think American homophobes, having been socialized with ideas about human rights along with whatever homophobic socializing they experienced, probably want to distance themselves from what are obviously unacceptable attitudes in Russia and Africa.


--- Quote ---For people like me, vicious or stereotypical portrayals of us are beyond reason in confronting.  They awaken emotions we thought had been put away for good.  To my younger LGBT brothers and sisters: be very grateful you have been spared this.
--- End quote ---

Well, I can understand why you would react that way to "vicious or stereotypical portrayals." I would think younger LGBT people would, too, if not as viscerally. But again, it's not so much that your attitudes are dated as that your examples are. Jared Leto's character in "Dallas Buyer's Club" is not particularly vicious or stereotypical, in my opinion. "Will and Grace" isn't vicious, and though it is stereotypical, it's pretty benignly so, wouldn't you say? I mean, the men were very popular with audiences. Sean Hayes just got his own show (though canceled, because frankly I saw one episode and it was terrible, but he did play a three-dimensional gay man). That's more than you can say for any of the show's straight actors or characters.


--- Quote from: x-man on February 04, 2014, 02:32:16 pm ---We both know there is no need to prolong the individual points in the debate.  These lines from Melville pretty well say it all for me:
--- End quote ---

Fair enough. I do think we're more or less in agreement.


--- Quote ---Talk not of the bitterness of middle-age and after life; a boy can feel all that, and much more, when upon his young soul the mildew has fallen; and the fruit, which with others is only blasted after ripeness, with him is nipped in the first blossom and bud. And never again can such blights be made good; they strike in too deep, and leave such a scar that the air of Paradise might not erase it. And it is a hard and cruel thing thus in early youth to taste beforehand the pangs which should be reserved for the stout time of manhood, when the gristle has become bone, and we stand up and fight out our lives, as a thing tried before and foreseen; for then we are veterans used to sieges and battles, and not green recruits, recoiling at the first shock of the encounter.
--- End quote ---

Herman Melville would never make it on Twitter.   :laugh:

But that's an interesting paragraph. I had to read it a few times (it would take me forever to get through the whole book), but once I did I realized it's quite profound, if a bit bleak.

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