Not so queer as folk
iWe are living in an age when most of the repressive social taboos have themselves been suppressed, in our own society at least. A time when autopsies are performed live on primetime terrestrial television and the erect penis is no longer the sole preserve of the porno.
An era in which a film that dares to chart the love story between a ranch-hand and a rodeo cowboy • the deepest entrenched of all macho archetypes in cinema • gets past the studio executives and gets made with an elegant visual framing normally reserved for the great, straight Hollywood romantic epics.
Novelist Alan Hollinghurst’s return to Oxford this weekend for a reading as part of the Magdalen Arts Festival, reminded me of just how strong gay • once as unspeakable a taboo as any other • has become as a cultural currency. On face value, Hollinghurst’s 2004 Booker Prize-winning tome, The Line of Beauty, is just another society play told from the viewpoint of the outsider.
What lends the novel its brilliance is the way in which Hollinghurst imbues all human nature with a timeless, monumental quality. It is one of those rare instances of a book that surveys both the classic and the modern. And yet the frame of reference is firmly homosexual. Thatcherite Britain never seemed so fun. The flipside to the scenario is evident in the overwhelming mainstream reception to Ang Lee’s multi-award winning movie, Brokeback Mountain.
The purest essence of the film’s greatness stems from its daring to subvert the two bedrock genres of American cinema, the romance and the Western. One would think the result, and the resulting response to the film, to be a giant leap forward.
Yet is it not more the case that Brokeback Mountain, despite its elegant execution, has at its core the classic subject matter of the tragic homosexual love affair through the lens view of the heterosexual outsider? Is it not all more a case of gay pity which, in an ironic twist of fate, itself failed to ensure the film the highest honour at this year’s Oscars? “Nobody has ever looked to Hollywood for social advance,” Ian McKellen • one of our few notable, openly gay actors • mused on
cently being questioned of the whole debacle. “Hollywood is a dream factory. I love the way that conservatives think that Hollywood is a hotbed of radicalism • it couldn’t be more staid and oldladyship if it tried.” McKellen’s words could not ring truer. It is perhaps fitting then that Brokeback Mountain lost Best Picture to the saccharine stylings of Crash. While the old guard strive to maintain outmoded values, those working from within the revolution are themselves giving ground.
Only this week did Gay Men’s Press announce its closure after over a quarter-century of renegade, envelopepushing publishing. And while it is a sad day in terms of what GMP strived towards (fighting the corner for writers • and their implicit readers • with minority interests), the closure has in some ways greater extending import, in no way more significant than as a signal for the changing of the guard: the salient sign of the times for which we have been waiting.
The argument for GMP, that in mainstream publishing one has to be a great gay writer to succeed • in the league of Colm Tóibín et al • or to create fictional worlds set in rarefied social circles emphatically removed from modern gay lives • a frequent criticism levelled at Hollinghurst • no longer holds sway. Politicised nichetargeting is a dangerous thing.
Should not gay writers be competing in the mainstream anyway? “When you look at the big, ambitious, serious novels being written by Sarah Waters or Philip Hensher, you could say that the battle has been won,” says Jonathan Best, artistic director of the Big Gay Read, the current campaign that runs the gauntlet from contemporary classic to classic in the hope of discovering the nation’s most treasured gay novel.
It seems that to depict lesbian and gay experience in groundbreaking terms is reason enough to launch yet another reading poll-cum-literary prize. The result of this gay mainstreaming has permeated all aspects of our culture, bridging the sexuality divide that one can argue does not even exist in the arts anymore. What is most exciting about these products of the latest nouvelle vague is their distinct lack of parody.
Be it the highoctane visuals and glossed torsos of Madonna’s latest spew of videos, directed by emerging visualist Johan Renck, or the underplayed sensuality of Lucien Freud’s erotic male nudes in his latest Tate retrospective, the tongue is no longer placed in cheek. So subtle are their effect that they often work under the limen of our collective consciousnesses. The situation could not have been more different a decade ago, pre-Queer As Folk, pre- Calvin Klein androgyny.
The disparity between the two sides has since been blurred beyond distinction. What goes around, then, really does come around. There is a saying that commonly goes, “there’s nought so queer as folk”. For such a clipped statement it speaks volumes about the infinite peculiarities of all human existence. Perhaps one day we will be distinguished by the limitless nature of our similarities rather than that hackneyed repertoire of differences.
4th May 2006