MOST STRAIGHT PEOPLE THINK THAT GAYS ARE COMICALLY TRAGIC AND CAN’T BE HAPPY
WARNING
This blog does contain adult and gay material. If you are under your country's legal age (18 or 21), do not scroll down and leave this page now. Thanks
For the longest time, at least since I have use of my memory; I can’t recall seeing characters in movies or television who were gay and were not portrayed as pathetic, ridiculous, comical failures. This was a given in all but some very rare exceptions.
We first saw a flamboyant Liberace…he made his money out of being outrageous…being over the top and in the process imparted upon the whole gay society a perception that all gays were like him. Then we saw how some Hollywood personalities avoided being “outed” because it meant the end of their professional careers. We saw how tragic an end Rock Hudson
had and what a shameful position it was to be if you were at one point famous and then relegated to ridicule and criticism.
There were some television shows that had gay characters in them but these were always caricatures and stereotypical clowns, ridiculed and made fun of. We saw a parade of these; like in: Barney Miller, Soap, Love Sidney, Will and Grace and many more.
Soap operas had more than their share of these stereotypes and were also regrettably tragic. Some of these were: Melrose Place, East Enders, The Young and the Restless and even Dynasty to name but a few.
Films were also in this mode of ridiculing and portraying gays in a negative light…such films as Dog Day Afternoon, Kiss of the Spider Woman, Myra Breckenridge,
Boys Don’t Cry, and who can forget the comedy “Some Like it Hot” where just about everybody has a good time in this fun, silly movie, with Lemmon and Tony Curtis in drag, hiding out from the mob in an all-girl band, and Marilyn Monroe as the dizzy blonde singer who keeps getting "the fuzzy end of the lollipop." But this film, funny as it was still carried with it the stigma of two men having to dress as women in order to get away from the mob.
We have seen also the emergence of Drag as a serious and important aspect of gay life. The likes of Rue Paul as the “King/Queen” of drag queens has everyone interested…but make no mistake about it…Rue Paul has more balls than John Wayne…and for that reason, he is not ridiculed or seen as a negative aspect…he has elevated drag to a new level and he looks better as a woman than most women.
PHOTO SOURCE: http://www.lyricseasy.net/s/sister+hazel/all-for-you-acoustic-version.html
http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.post-gazette.com/images4/20060517ho_WillGrace_
