Celluloid Closet, Gay Docos & Plaster Caster

The Celluloid Closet is an excellent documentary about the history of Hollywood's portrayals of gays and lesbians. It is the sort of documentary that the people who most need to see, won’t. Even the documentary itself was restricted by refusals to cooperate.

The first sections, covering early openness to censorsed indirectness—the period when gays and lesbians were largely forced to "read in" into films, or pick up subtexts that were smuggled past the censors—are wistful and funny. The middle section gets rather more emotionally intense as increased openness largely meant more direct portrayal as weird, flawed, villainous (and usually doomed). The final section is hopeful as positive gay images became acceptable. The DVD includes parts of interviews and interviews not included in the documentary itself. (In both sections, Tom Hanks comes across as decent and self-knowing.)

The late Vito Russo’s lecture, given in 1990, which is one of the special features of the DVD, concludes with comments on the lack of black leading men or women, that the black actors who make money are comics. How quickly things change, when one considers that Samuel L Jackson, Will Smith and Morgan Freeman are among top-15 box office stars. Though Eddie Murphy is still box-office number two overall. So four of the top-15 box office stars are black (which means they are over-represented for their share of the US population: women only have two in the top 15) while only one of the black stars is a comic.

And one of the top-20 is openly gay (which is roughly proportional).

As for times changing, only three years after that lecture, Tom Hanks won an oscar for playing a gay man dying of AIDS in Philadelphia. Gay roles have since won Oscars for Philip Seymour Hoffman (Capote) and Sean Penn (Milk).

A certain box office success has also proved possible: Brokeback Mountain is the third highest grossing gay/lesbian movie (based on rating Interview with the Vampire as a gay/lesbian movie), the sixth highest grossing Western and the eighth highest grossing romantic drama (results not adjusted for inflation).

Other gay docos
Beefcake is a fun and informative mixture of “talking head” personal reminiscences, redone shorts and narrative dramatisation of the era of beefcake mags focusing on the life and vision of the founder of the American Model Guild.

Gay Sex in the 70s starts off as an examination of the amazing upsurge in sexual hedonism that followed Stonewall and becomes a touching portrayal of the effect of AIDS on the American gay community.

Fabulous!: A history of queer cinema is a pleasant, particularly dyke-aware, history of queer cinema in the US, from some very tentative beginnings to its established position as a distinct cinema.

Homo Promo is a series of trailers from films in have some sort of queer sensibility many of which are so camply dated as to be quite funny.

eXposed: the making of a legend is a fun, bouncy doco shot by redoubtable, bouncy, goth lady (Mr. Pam) about the making of the multiple-award winning gay porn movie Buckleroos. This is gay porn as professional, friendly, fun and self-aware.

Pagan capture
On a slightly different, and vaguely related note, I have rarely laughed so much watching a film as when I watched Plaster Caster. The subject is inherently funny, but the participants add to the humour and charm. Particularly Cynthia Plaster Caster herself, who comes across as sweet, everyday and determined (rather than obsessed). In between explanations of how it started, how it is done, organising an exhibition in New York of “her babies”, seeing how it is done, meeting Cynthia and her friends and reminisces from various rock stars, we have unexpected moments such as Camille Paglia informing us that Cynthia’s plaster-casting activities were what made her first start to think about rock music as pagan. Lots of fun.

Naked

Corey Taylor’s Naked: The Life and Pornography of Michael Lucas is about a gay Russian Jew porn actor and director who has turned himself into New York celebrity.

Covering Michael Lucas’s life from growing up in the Soviet Union to his current near A-list celebrity status, it is an admiring celebration of a classic immigrant-makes-good-in-the-US story.

The story bounces along nicely. Taylor conveys well the claustrophobic oppressiveness of the Soviet Union, the sheer unpleasantness of so much of daily life. One gets a good picture of the pervasive anti-Semitism of an officially atheist state (a case which ironically demonstrates the silliness of Marx’s understanding of Jew-hatred and how to solve it—get rid of religion).

Taylor also conveys the wounding and oppressive nature of fear and ignorance about human sexuality. He sees the Soviet Union as being, in sexual terms, like the US before the Kinsey Report(s), which seems not a bad analogy.

Ironically for a biography of a porn star and director, there are no pictures.
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Taylor takes us through Michael Lucas’s childhood, adolescence, education and early working life in the Soviet Union. Michael Lucas then moved to Germany, where he worked as a hustler and dabbled in porn. Clearly, Michael Lucas likes sex but he very much saw hustling as a business (he had previous business experience having run a travel agency in Moscow), and approached it as such.

Lucas then moved to New York and used the money he saved from hustling to start a business directing porn, with himself as the prime asset of Lucas Entertainment. The business opportunity he spotted was quality, New York-based gay porn, as all the major American porn companies were based in California. Which he has been very successful at building. His 10 tips on how to be successful porn star alone are worth reading.

Michael Lucas’s commercial success illustrates Voltaire’s point about commerce reaching across sectarian divisions and diversity encouraging a free society. As the same-sex oriented experience daily, commerce has generally been much friendlier to them than politics – hence, in the US, Fortune 500 companies have recognised same-sex relationships rather more readily than US States. The openness of commerce is a common experience of minorities: as Thomas Sowell has pointed out regarding the origins of the Jim Crow laws, which were imposed by governments since commerce would not waste money racially segregating.

Lucas has also been very successful at building a public profile for himself by the simple expedients of having lots of striking things to say and being available and consistently pleasant to journalists and photographers: to the extent of being profiled in The New Republic, to his public pleasure. Being clearly photogenic doesn’t hurt, of course.

Lucas’s rather conventional private life—even with recognisable pitfalls of gay emotional life—(apart from the having-public-sex-as-part-of-his-job thing) and his devotion to his family (most of whom he arranged to migrate to New York) are also covered.

The book ends with a nice epilogue one pornography, skewering the bad scholarship and abusive reasoning of Andrea Dworkin & Catherine MacKinnon—particularly Dworkin’s misandry-parading-as-feminism where all forms of male sexuality are illegitimate.

Lucas himself clearly inspires strong reactions: gay, expatriate, Jewish, porn-star and entrepreneur, Zionist, avid self-publicist – what is there not to react to? One’s reaction to Naked is likely to coloured by reactions to the package presented as Michael Lucas.

Michael Lucas himself is not so impressed with the book. His complaints about the writing style seem rather precious. Taylor cites and thanks various friends and acquaintances of Michael Lucas for their assistance in his acknowledgments, so they contradict each other about Taylor's sources. Michael Lucas's complaints are also surprising in that Naked is very much an admiring and respectful biography. It leaves you thinking that Michael Lucas is a driven, but also self-possessed and effective, person who is probably (when the mood takes him) lots of fun to be around.