What counts as political in the contemporary context is...out of touch with the longer history of queer experience. Rather than disavowing the history of marginalization and abjection, I suggest that we embrace it, exploring the ways that it continues to structure queer experience in the present. Modern homosexual identity is formed out of and in relation to the experience of social damage. Paying attention to what was difficult in the past may tell us how far we have come, but that is not all it will tell us; it also makes visible the damage that we live with in the present. (29)
-Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History, (emphasis mine)
There is something about The Boys in the Band that I find distinctly heartbreaking. This experience of heartbreak is a complicated one. Frankly, it’s not all bad. In fact, there is a distinct pleasure, a satisfaction in this version of catharsis. As I watched William Friedkin’s 1970 film adaptation of Mart Crowley’s play on my laptop recently, my pulse quickened, I got goosebumps, the tingling-neck-feeling of watching something important. This physical sensation was in direct contrast to the spinning wheels of my analytical mind, busy accounting for all the problems with this deeply flawed text.
This is a play built on a bed of tokenism. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a Black queer; a nelly queer; a passing queer; an ugly, Jewish, queer nihilist; a poor, alcoholic, queer sociopath; a non-monogamous cheating queer; a closeted queer; a gorgeous, hustling, teenaged queer; and one forgettable queer get together for this birthday party…. First there’s a dance number. Then they get drunk. Then they all yell at each other and cry.
A "Heatwave" on Fire Island
I can hardly imagine what it must have felt like to be a gay man and watch this play in New York in 1968. The tokenism and recycled plot may have felt like a small price to pay for the chance to see something, anything, of oneself in a proud, public capacity. For those who weren’t lucky enough to live in New York City with its bars and back-rooms and bathhouses, to see the film at a Midwestern movie theatre 1970 might have been even more mindblowing. The value of this audacious claim to visibility, to legitimacy, is not in question. The question, of course, is what we are to do today with a film that proudly demands visibility for a bunch of toxic, self-hating men we would perhaps rather forget.
While it may be tempting to dismiss Boys as backwards or counter-productive, I believe that to forget the boys would be a mistake. Somehow, despite the problematic aspects, for me the emotional core of this text remains intact, and perhaps more importantly, remains incredibly relevant. Underneath the flimsy scaffolding this is a play about the insidious nature of internalized homophobia. It is about shame. And furthermore, shockingly, the play seems concerned with revealing not only the redemptive power of community, but also the very real, at times physical danger of belonging to a community that hates itself. In other words, Boys acknowledges the empty, violent, and enabling potentialities of a community born of self-hated, fed on booze. And I might add that it does so several decades ahead of its time.
Many depictions of queer culture that my generation is likely to be familiar with tend to favor the progress narrative of “look how far we have come” and “never go back.” This is a project that requires depictions of affirming, thriving, supportive communities. While I’m not here to argue that there is something wrong with depicting such communities, to completely deny or eclipse a painful history seems to me misguided.
Queer Eye for the Straight Guy: "things just keep getting better"
In her 2007 book Feeling Backward, Heather Love explores the difficult question of how a marginalized group can navigate a past filled with shame, depression, regret, isolation, and violence. The challenge, she writes in the introduction to her book, “is to engage with the past without being destroyed by it” (1). While her central argument is one concerning queer literature that she sees as having a “backwards” relationship to modernism (Walter Pater, Willa Cather, Radclyfe Hall, and Sylvia Townsend Warner, for example) her approach seems particularly helpful when considering the troubling aspects of Boys.
Love sees early LGBT critics dismiss negative representations of queer life, those that paint “same-sex love as impossible, tragic, and doomed to failure” (1). She goes on, “texts or figures that refuse to be redeemed disrupt not only the progress narrative of queer history but also our sense of queer identity in the present” (8). In other words, it would be easy enough to dismiss a text like Boys as internally homophobic, as a relic that refuses to be redeemed, that has little value for us other than as a distant marker of how far we have come. Put simply, such a text implies an unfortunate past, but one we have moved past. To be positioned within a progress narrative, Boys can only be seen as a starting place, as that which is wrong and false, that which is no more.
The timing of Boys within this progressive narrative is truly remarkable, and may shed some light on why so many have dismissed the text as irredeemable. Debuting off-Broadway in April, 1968, this play was both produced and consumed in a pre-Stonewall climate. (Again, the visibility must have been thrilling.) Love, along with most scholars, sees the 1969 riot as a turning point, as the beginning of the progress narrative, of the “never go back” mentality. She writes, “the emergent field’s powerful utopianism, affirmation of gay identity, and hope for the future resonated with the seemingly magical power of this new movement to transmute shame into pride, secrecy into visibility, social exclusion into outsider glamour” (28). Imagine then, in the center of this utopian energy, a film that demanded its viewers reflect on just how bad things have been, and perhaps more importantly, to consider the implications of that not-so-distant past...
At worst it may feel like a slap in the face, at best perhaps a distinctly heartbreaking experience, but it remains as true today as it was in 1970: “Paying attention to what was difficult in the past may tell us how far we have come, but that is not all it will tell us; it also makes visible the damage that we live with in the present” (29).
Works Cited
The Boys in the Band. Dir. William Friedkin. Cinema Center Films, 1970. Web.
Love, Heather. Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. Print.
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