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Sex truths and missing categories
Well, I've gotten my first "are you dead" notice from an Ardent Reader this morning (and it wasn't Kymm!) so I suppose I'd better update. But you'll be sorry!
On Friday I went shopping, then had dinner with Nonelvis, Molly, Marc, and Mark. Wore concealer out of the house again, looked good, but Molly ruined it by telling Mark. Oh, well. My fault for telling her in the first place, and besides, I still owe her karma points from a previous gaffe of mine.
On Monday Nonelvis and I had dinner with Rose and Eric. Rose kept assuming I was in a surly mood for some reason. I wasn't. Today I'm surly. If Rose were here, she'd be able to tell a difference.
We saw Better Than Chocolate at last - I think that was on Saturday. Somewhere in there I made a very nice batch of chili from scratch.
Those were the high points of my long weekend.
Every other spare moment I was in front of the computer finishing off the tiles for this damned game. I recognize the extent to which this is a colossal waste of my time. Thanks. Don't bother writing in and telling me.
So. That was the weekend. Now we must never speak of it again.
Better Than Chocolate was indeed a cute and sexy movie, but it wasn't quite the movie I expected, and after it was done, I had something unexpected to ponder.
The movie isn't really about the two cute little lesbian girls. (OK, I know some of my more feminist readers believe that "girls" is derogatory for women who have obviously reached their age of majority, but for goodness' sake - these two looked like they were in high school. In fact there isn't a featured character who looks over twenty-five except the lead character's mother.)
The movie is about the mother - a character so focused on her own inner problems that she is blind to everything that's going on around her. She doesn't realize that her daughter is carrying on a lesbian relationship in front of her nose, and she doesn't realize that her new friend Judy is actually a male halfway through sex change surgery.
This woman is so oblivious, so withdrawn in her own problems, that she's a little bit unbelievable - Nonelvis found her the least convincing character in the movie. The fun of the movie is seeing her gradually figure out that she's moved into a world where sexual fulfillment and sexual fluidity are the norms, where they're an expected right - and that she's just as entitled as anyone else to have them. It is also the saving grace of the movie. I mean, we could have had her just retreat further into her morass and eventually leave the film in a huff, or get killed off - but we'll come to that in the next entry, when I rant about a completely unrelated film.
The unexpected thing I had to ponder came about because of the truly amazing TG character Judy, played by Peter Outerbridge - who, in an irony I'm sure was deliberate, is the most classically femme person in the movie.
Judy claims, during a musical number that marks the exact point when Our Classical Three-Act Structure begins to move into the denouement portion, that she is not a drag queen - "I'm in the other bracket," that is, she is a transgendered person, and is not wearing women's clothes for theatrical effect but because she has a dead-serious need to be a woman.
But: If those are the two categories, where does that leave me?
I am certainly not interested in embarking down the long winding road to SRS. I am happy with the present equipment, and while I believe that my odd figure would probably look better with breasts, I have temporary appurtenances for that.
On the other hand, I am not doing the things I do for theatrical effect either - not usually. Sure, there are the occasional go-over-the-top sessions, but I had already begun burning out my shock-value instincts back in the Rocky Horror days. It was novel and daring - for about fifteen minutes. Now a lot of the more theatrical stuff just makes me wonder how much of a pain it's going to be to remove at the end of the night. I wear corsets only for photographs these days.
So I'm not a potential sex-change. But I'm not a drag queen anymore either.
Beats me.
Now that we've seen Better Than Chocolate, Rose and Eric insist that we see Trick, which they say is even better. When they mentioned this, I was dubious about the idea, but didn't remember or realize why. Today I looked the film up again. Now I remember why.
I hate to admit this, but ....
The problem is that Trick is a film about two young men where Better Than Chocolate has two young women. And it's not so much that I mind seeing men have sex or contemplating men having sex. Perish forbid!
The problem is, I don't want to see a movie about sex. I'd rather see a movie about falling in love. If I wanted to see a movie about sex divorced from passion, I'd go see this damned French film ... I can't remember the name, but I will before the next entry.
I have this idea - backed, I'm sorry to say, by field observations - that gay men don't really have relationships well or often, that they are interested in the sex first and foremost. I don't like this idea, and I am worried that the film will just make me grit my teeth.
Even the IMDB description makes Trick sound like it's a comedy of errors about two young men trying to find a nice safe quiet place to get it on. Why would I want to see that? I am interested in screwball comedy, which is basically a clash of personalities, not penises.
Oh, and the title offends me. No woman would ever refer to her sex partner as her "trick." But I've heard gay men actually say it.
On the other hand, and in all fairness, I didn't get the overcoming-differences-to-fall-in-love aspect from Better Than Chocolate either. As I said above, the movie isn't primarily about these two young women, as far as I'm concerned. They meet, they have sex, they move in together immediately afterward, they have no serious clashes until the last twenty minutes of the film.
The friction happens because the mother asks the daughter, "You don't honestly think you're in love, do you?" - in front of the lover - and the daughter won't or can't reply. Well, gosh, I can't blame her! I wouldn't say I was in love with someone I'd only known for a week either! I mean, these two have barely met!
Cliché territory on all sides, people. "What do lesbians do on their second date?" "Pick out curtains." Gay men are too slow to say they're in A Relationship, the conventional wisdom says; gay women are too quick.
I suspect that both films (and the conventional wisdom) may have more than a grain of truth, but that doesn't mean I want to watch that truth. I say again: I watch films to get away from the truth.
But we'll come to that in the next entry.
© Columbine
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I'm not a f**king drag queen
I'm in another bracket
What you see before you
Is not some midnight racket
Nothing here is padded
I've paid a mighty fortune
A few things have been added
And one or two subtractions
I'm not a f**king drag queen
I won't let you forget it
When you sneer "Good day" - "Sir!"
You stab me all the way through
My tender transgender heart
-from Better Than Chocolate
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