« Random Thoughts (so tired... must... blog) | Main | The Patriots Don't Play... »
November 9, 2007
Is That Really Gay?
Tonight's should-be-out-partying-but-instead-I'm-blogging-so-you-don't-have-to blog post is about two recent big gay events: this week's South Park episode, and J.K. Rowling's announcement that Hogwarts Headmaster Albus Dumbledore was actually a big sissy all along.
Let's start with South Park. It's been a while since Trey Parker and Matt Stone really had anything worthwhile to say with their little animated show. Yes, I know "Make Love Not Warcraft" won an Emmy. But the show was middling at best, and the day a subversive, satirical show accepts an Emmy Award is the day it officially announces that it is over.
Woody Hearn's GU Comics does a great job of pointing out the jumped-the-sharkness of yet another South Park episode attempting to skewer a popular video game:
And so we watched this week's episode: "Guitar Queer-o," an oh-so-clever rhyming slam on the popular guitar-simulator game Guitar Hero (and its sequels, Guitar Hero 2 and Guitar Hero 3 -- original, no?). The plot is simple: Stan and Kyle become really good at the game, fame drives them apart, and eventually they reunite to grasp the Holy Grail (allegedly) of Guitar Hero accomplishment: scoring 1,000,000 points in Expert Mode. Which they do in the thrilling conclusion. The game responds not with it's usual "YOU'RE A ROCK STAR!" but with this message:
"CONGRATULATIONS! YOU ARE FAGS!"
I'm going to be generous here and try to interpret what I think Parker and Stone meant by this. The kids today say things are "so gay!" when they mean that things are "so bad!" Therefore, we could translate the end-game message into something along the lines of: "CONGRATULATIONS! SCORING THIS MANY POINTS PROVES YOU HAVE NO LIVES! WINNING SHOWS THAT YOU'RE COMPLETE LOSERS!" Ha-ha. We've never heard that before. And we didn't see the exact same point with the "Warcraft" episode... oh wait. We did.
But please. "You are fags"?
Obviously Parker and Stone are just phoning it in these days. But the rest of the (straight) world sees no problem with this. See here and here and here and here and jeez... it just goes on and on.
This makes me so angry I want to blast someone with a killing curse.
Which reminds me, J.K. Rowling now tells us that Dumbledore was a Friend of Dorothy, as they say. I'd drop a link, but it's Friday, and you've already heard this a billion times.
I've been having interesting discussions with a good friend who is incensed that Rowling would do this. Not because she has a problem with gay literary (or real) characters/people, but because once a book is written, it shouldn't change, she says.
The Promiscuous Reader points our attention to an article in The Dallas Morning News:
Is Dumbledore gay? He is for you, apparently. But unless you said it in the actual books, must he be so for me? Your saying so now makes it harder for me to imagine anything different. Do you really want to limit your fictional world that way? …
For all of those years, until your books were published, the characters and settings were yours to command and control. But then you let them go.
And speaking for all of your happy readers I need to tell you: Now they are ours.
Which leads Promiscuous Reader to conclude that:
“Ours” evidently means “heterosexuals” here – it doesn’t occur to the writer that many of Rowlings’s happy readers are also gay, with opinions of their own on this subject. On Jeffrey Weiss’s planet, a gay character is somehow “limited” – can you imagine him making the same complaint about a heterosexual character?
Now, given my recent conversations with my friend, I'm a little more willing to cut Jeffrey Weiss a little slack. Of course, I grew up in Dallas reading the DMN, and the particularly tone-deaf writings in it are all too familiar to me. Maybe Weiss didn't mean that "we" are the straight majority who now own Rowling's imaginary characters, but it sure as hell sounds that way.
But hey, that's not the worst part. The ever-readable Gay Prof puts the fine point on what's going on here in Rowling-land, and it really doesn't have anything to do with the homophobic reactions of her readers. It has to do with what Rowling did and didn't do:
Now I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, but a gay Dumbledore is not much of an improvement on the same old queer images that we have seen elsewhere in the popular media. Rowling’s outing of Dumbledore hardly destroyed the closet around the fictional character. On the contrary, she only pointed out how tightly those closet doors were sealed.
And that's the real point here. It doesn't matter what Rowling says now. Authors frequently re-visit their creations, sometimes in print (every sequel ever written), sometimes on the stage (Falstaff was dead until audience demand forced Shakespeare to bring him back to life in The Merry Wives of Windsor), and sometimes in conversation, as with Dame Rowling.
Because the real problem here is that the only explicitly (now) gay character in the entire Potterverse was so deeply closeted (and arguably asexual) that only his author could detect it. That's not good for gays. That's not good for understanding.
If I were a different person, I'd call it so gay, but I'm not that person.
It's so straight. And I'm sick and fucking tired of it all.
Posted by reparent at November 9, 2007 7:08 PM
Comments
Wow. very true.
Especially how kids say gay when they mean bad..
Posted by: wow. at March 26, 2008 7:12 AM