It’s a bit of a Tom-love-in today. Thanks to Mark Kevin Hall from Hidden City for the present and saying all that nice stuff about me.
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Thank you Kerry and Sean:
Thank you Kerry and Sean:
This detail of a wonderful card sent to me by two of my LA friends is perhaps less … spicy … than the original, but still demonstrates their amazing graphic design skill and sense of humour. Thanks guys!
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Today on Barbelith: Old is
Today on Barbelith: Old is the new young – “Being a glimpse – inexcusably yet unapologetically flippant – into the world of a wannabe Old Git.”
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On Will & Grace…
In the second post on gay issues in a row, Tom decides to take a certain amount of issue with Mark Lawson’s article in the Guardian today on Will & Grace. Tom decides particularly to take issue with this excerpt:
Presented as dramatic courage, Jack really represents cowardice, because he’s there as a contrast with Will’s discreet homosexuality. Jack goes to a gay gym, Will to a mixed one. In Will, the writers have created a gay character who neatly avoids the two aspects of gay men which most provoke homophobia: genital activity and effeminacy. It’s a bit like a sit-com about a football supporter in which the central character never bothers to go to matches and prefers to watch The South Bank Show instead of Match Of The Day.
There are such people, but the characterisation seems dictated by caution rather than authenticity. Another insurance against switch-off is built into the plot. At least in the early episodes – as in the first two reels of The Next Best Thing – there’s nothing to discourage Joe and Joanna Six-Pack from the belief that Will isn’t really gay and that he and Grace will eventually realise that they are Harry and Sally rather than Arthur and Martha.
How many gay people do you know? No really. Think about it. How many gay people do you know? Ok then – now take the number of people you know – not know well, just know – and divide it by twenty. Studies be damned, this is a guess – some people say it’s one in ten, some that it’s one in ninety. That’s irrelevant. The fact is that across work, friends, friends of friends, family, friends of family, people you knew at University, people you knew at school, that out of all those people, many many more were gay than you had the slightest idea.
So somehow these people ‘pass’ for straight – or to put it another way, somehow these people do not come across according to your preconceptions of what it means to be gay. They probably don’t work in the media. They probably don’t wear purple lurex or get dressed up in drag, or have a really big thing about Liza Minelli. Some people will. Good. Excellent. But we’re talking about a huge and diverse community here – of queens who like Travis, queens who like Bach, queens who like the Sex Pistols, queens who like Napalm Death, queens who like Britney Spears, queens who – for god’s sake – like Queen.
Now I’ve no doubt that Will & Grace is a fairly reactionary show which represents a fairly anaemic idea of what it means to be gay. But is Friends any less anaemic a view of what it is to be straight? Or are straight people really all super-annuated three years olds whose obsession with caffeine has driven them close to paranoid dementia? But we’re getting away from the point, now. So answer me this, Mr Lawson – would it be any less mentally closeted to fill a TV show with the kind of queer that you can identify readily? We are, after all, everywhere.
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So I've been watching Ultraviolet
So I’ve been watching Ultraviolet on DVD today in between spats of job-finding. And I’ve been loving it. And then I hit the fourth episode – one on paedophilia. And it happened again – as I watched it I became gradually more concerned about where the line was being drawn between gay people and paedophiles. Firstly, it was male-male paedophilia, which always alarms me, since sexual abuse is most often male-female and within families. Secondly, two men walking around in a park is used as an indication that it might be an area attended by paedophiles – as opposed to a cruising ground for a particular kind of exhibitionist or closeted poof. Thirdly, one of the paedophiles is shown disposing of an adult gay porn mag – adult male on male as well. Finally, the two main paedophiles are camp mincers – lip pursing bitches with high voices and limp wrists – semiotic indicators of gay men. A structuralist critic would no doubt have a lot to say about the grouping together of ‘unattractive’ and ‘unaccepted’ sexualities – I just saw a clumsy and insulting episode that was (possibly unintentionally) homophobic. It’s discoloured my whole view of the series.
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A brief theory of Fraggle
A brief theory of Fraggle Rock: “Doozers were capitalist over-consumption. Fraggles were the utopian hippies who enjoyed life at their expense. The dog was existential terror. Humans were dark, inscrutable Gods.”
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So I run a big
So I run a big message board, right? And there’s a job for a big Producer job involving running message boards, right? And I think I could do it pretty well, right? But I’m concerned that people in the web industry, more often than not, view extra-curricular web work as a hindrance rather than a boon to employment. When I went for a job a couple of years ago at a web publishing company, I said that I ran several successful personal websites. And the woman who interviewed me said “you won’t be able to build them while you are at work, you know”. And I kind of looked at her and said, after a pause, “I know”. Which kind of meant, “Duh”. So the question is, “IS BARBELITH A POSITIVE THING TO PUT ON A CV OR NOT?”
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For those of you who
For those of you who might have got concerned, I do not have a gun, nor did I view my last BBC job interview as the end of the known world: thanks for caring though…
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Interesting article on Big Brother
Interesting article on Big Brother in the Guardian [link] includes this paragraph, “The E4 transmission is on a 10-minute delay in order to prevent swear words and libels reaching daytime viewers. On an average day, Andrew Newman, director of programmes on E4, estimates that the housemates say “fuck” at least 1,300 times, “slightly less now that Bubble has been evicted”. On several occasions they’ve had to cut the volume when the housemates didn’t so much speculate as know that a major Hollywood actor is gay.”
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Two sites that I worked
Two sites that I worked on (HTML-building) while getting fill-in work at Arehaus a couple of months ago have now launched: eB-21 and cabe.org.uk. Which means I can finally link to this page and ask the very serious question – is Robert Bargery the hottest bitch you have seen in your life, or what?