The love that dare not speak its name...

I believe I am a simple creature with simple pleasures and simple pains. But ever since I could read or watch television my preference has tended to be for the out of the ordinary, the unusual and the surprising. This is true for anybody, we don’t want to be reading or watching the same stories over and over again do we?

Growing up I remember those teeny bopper romantic flicks that caused the way I see relationships now. You remember Pretty in Pink, the ugly duckling story, for example. Now that was one of my favourites. Another book/movie that made a lasting impression on my young romantic mind was Wuthering Heights. It broke my heart it was beautiful.

The conclusion that my young self came to watching all these movies was that love was not easy and more often than not people who are meant to be together find it difficult to get together but eventually end up together, whether in death or in a relationship. But this is after conquering great difficulties, my favourite difficulty to conquer is the inner battle where you don’t want to admit to yourself that he/she is the one.

The greatest battle is the fight for the love that dare not speak its name. I don’t remember the first gay movie I watched or the first gay story I read. I remember I was always into Stephen Fry and loved the stories about the English public boys only schools. I remember Threesome and watched it over and over again all the way through varsity. I remember Maurice and Tales of the City, My own Private Idaho and Midnight Cowboys. Then came a different kind of gay movie for me which made me laugh and love and enjoy the art that is to be a drag queen. Pricilla Queen of the Desert comes to mind. Even Russell Crowe did it for me in the Sum of Us!

I loved these books and these movies because nothing beats ‘forbidden’ love and I search for this kind of intensity in my own life where I get into impossible situations where my attraction to someone is so intense but forbidden, I still have not found my happy ending.

There are however those gay movies that are just bad! There is nothing worse than a bad gay movie and even though we are bombarded by bad teeny bopper movies all the time starring buffy the vampire slayer they are still avoidable because you know not to go there.

Push Play (virtual video shop that has an amazing selection of DVD’s) has opened a whole new world to me. They have a great selection of movies and I am going through their gay movies. I am finding out that they are not always so great and it pains me to say that. What makes them so bad is that I feel that they are made for those dirty old gay men who have fantasies about under age kids and it is just so borderline. It’s like watching that horrible movie Kids. There might be a reason why Kids was made but I bet you the pedophiles out there love it to bits and they are the only ones renting it out.

But there’s also a different kind of bad gay movie where they stereo type gay men. Movies that think that gay men are only out there to turn straight men. Drag queens who are just a cliché and have no creative insults. These I also try to avoid but not having not seen the trailers it is difficult to judge what’s going to be bad. I am going through the list on push play and some of the movies are gems, like The Trip. Some just leave you feeling very dirty.

I have to say something about Brokeback Mountain. When I first watched this movie I cried for a week, and then I went back and watched it again and cried for another week, and then I found the short story it is based on and read it and cried for another week. This was the ultimate romantic tragedy for me and I hope more directors like Ang Lee make the choice to tell these stories. The love that dare not speak its name whose story needs to be told, in all its variations.

Is there hope for all us in the world? One of few things I remember from my education, a philosopher philosophied that in the beginning, we were all physically attached to our partners in life, something happened and we were separated. We now go through life trying to find the person we are meant to be attached to.

"The Origin of Love"
by John Cameron Mitchell and Stephen Trask

When the earth was still flat,,
And clouds made of fire,
And mountains stretched up to the sky,
Sometimes higher,
Folks roamed the earth
Like big rolling kegs.
They had two sets of arms.
They had two sets of legs.
They had two faces peering
Out of one giant head
So they could watch all around them
As they talked; while they read.
And they never knew nothing of love.
It was before the origin of love.

The origin of love.

And there were three sexes then,
One that looked like two men
Glued up back to back,
Called the children of the sun.
And similar in shape and girth
Were the children of the earth.
They looked like two girls
Rolled up in one.
And the children of the moon
Were like a fork shoved on a spoon.
They were part sun, part earth,
Part daughter, part son.

The origin of love.

Now the gods grew quite scared
Of our strength and defiance
And Thor said,
"I'm gonna kill them all
With my hammer,
Like I killed the giants."
But Zeus said, "No,
You better let me
Use my lightning, like scissors,
Like I cut the legs off the whales,
Dinosaurs into lizards."
And then he grabbed up some bolts
He let out a laugh,
Said, "I'll split them right down the middle,
Gonna cut them right up in half."
And then storm clouds gathered above
Into great balls of fire

And then fire shot down
From the sky in bolts
Like shining blades
Of a knife.
And it ripped
Right through the flesh
Of the children of the sun
And the moon
And the earth.
And some Indian god
Sewed the wound up into a hole,
Pulled it round to our belly
To remind us of the price we pay.
And Osiris and the gods of the Nile
Gathered up a big storm
To blow a hurricane,
To scatter us away,
In a flood of wind and rain,
And a sea of tidal waves,
To wash us all away,
And if we don't behave
They'll cut us down again
And we'll be hopping around on one foot
And looking through one eye.

Last time I saw you
We had just split in two.
You were looking at me.
I was looking at you.
You had a way so familiar,
But I could not recognize,
'Cause you had blood on your face;
I had blood in my eyes.
But I could swear by your expression
That the pain down in your soul
Was the same as the one down in mine.
That's the pain,
That cuts a straight line
Down through the heart;
We called it love.
So we wrapped our arms around each other,
Tried to shove ourselves back together.
We were making love,
Making love.
It was a cold dark evening,
Such a long time ago,
When by the mighty hand of Jove,
It was a sad story
How we became
Lonely two-legged creatures,
It's the story of
The origin of love.
That's the origin of love.