Daily Archives: October 16, 2014



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Why <em>The Craft</em> Is Still the Best Halloween Coming Out Movie

Why <em>The Craft</em> Is Still the Best Halloween Coming Out Movie
October is National Coming Out Month and Halloween. For me, and many gay men in their forties and fifties, it is also time to watch the teen-witch and gay male coming-out movie The Craft. When the movie was first released in 1996, I was already very out. I was a full-time LGBT activist getting involved in state and local politics. Nevertheless, I became secretly obsessed with The Craft as one of films that reflected my coming out experiences. It’s also a great Halloween film with campy chanting, lots of candles, minimal adults and only symbolic opposite-gendered roles. In 1997, I wore out the first VHS tape of this film, but still told no one.

One night in a gay bar a few years later I randomly heard a leather queen shout “Hail to the Guardians of the Watchtowers of the East!” and turned to see him with arms up, in full chanting position. I knew only someone who had seen The Craft multiple times would know the chant used by the teen witches to cast their most dramatic spells. After asking around I found out that The Craft has a bizarrely large, and largely self-conscious, gay male following in my age bracket.

The movie is about four teenage girls who each grow up feeling different — simultaneously special and rejected — as so many LGBT teens have experienced. The girls end up at the same school and find each other essentially by cruising the hallways. Sideways looks and quiet nods to each other lead to hooking-up, which for them is going shopping for candles after school.

The best character is Nancy (Fairuza Balk), who is already fully out as a witch. She wears goth lipstick and black, lace-up Stevie Nicks boots. She has a sexual history and a noose hanging in her locker. She practices the craft. If this were about being gay, she would have been the kid with a rainbow button on her backpack.

Bonnie (Nev Campbell) has self-image issues because of scars that cover her back and arms. Like so many gay kids, she wants to be left alone, yet at the same time she fears that she will grow up lonely. Rochelle (Rachel True) the only African-American character, faces racist comments by the other kids. This angers her, but only in a pouty, look-at-what-she-did-to-my-cashmere-sweater, kind of way. Nothing in this movie’s script can get in the way of the real social justice issue, which is witch-phobia.

Sarah (Robin Tunney), the main character, isn’t sure about her identity in the beginning. She starts out craft-curious. This movie is about her journey. She is confronted with peer pressure and her own internalized witch-phobia. On their first night together, Sarah asks the others “do you guys really believe in this?” Back at school the next day she doesn’t want to get rejected by the popular kids so she downplays her relationship with Nancy, Bonnie and Rochelle. Chris, the football jock, persists in making bullying comments about the three spiritual deviants, whom he calls “the Bitches of Eastwick.” He explains, “when you’re a guy, and I am, people expect things.” Very similar to often heard statements, ‘Boys will be boys’ or ‘Don’t be such a f*gg*t.’

After the four witches have confirmed each other’s witchy tendencies, the four take a bus to the witchy part of town where a young person can go and be herself. A safe space with no anti-witch judgement. In the movie that neighborhood seems to be an empty grassy field with butterflies. For me, it was the the gay bar district in southeast Washington, DC. But in either case, the bus driver in the film knew exactly what kind of neighborhood it was. As the four step off the bus the driver says “Don’t let the freaks get you.” Nancy stops, turns back to look at the driver, lowers her Rick Springfield sunglasses, and says with a smile, “Mister, we are the freaks.” Yes, Nancy, own it.

Suffice it to say that there several scenes resembling Radical Faery gatherings where they call the corners and chant “Hail to the Guardians” etc. They also perform a ceremony that might someday constitute polyamorous marriage in some states, and they hold a Body Electric workshop in Rochelle’s room where the four play “light as a feather, stiff as a board.” The girls whisper and touch each other only with their index finger. Rochelle’s mom walks in and interrupts the magic. “Whats going on in here?” “Nothing Mom.” Tell me that didn’t happen to you.

Empowered by their chosen family, the girl’s inadvertently start causing their revenge fantasies to come true. These revenge scenarios are framed in classic locations of gay teen trauma. The white racist begins losing her blond hair while showering in the gym locker room. The football jock falls in love with one of the witches, and is then driven crazy when the love is unrequited. He finally meets his fate at a party at one of the rich kid’s houses — the party that the gay boys weren’t invited to.

Sadly, the film’s narrative wraps up as witchcraft backfires for the girls, thereby illustrating the dangers of nonconformity. The girls survive only by vowing to never practice the craft again. They all end up back in the closet, except one, who ends up in a straightjacket. This movie came out before Ellen did. It would be several years before a young Bella could respectably choose the dark side. So big deal. Ignore the ending. Click rewind.

www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-park/why-the-craft-is-still-th_b_5980820.html?utm_hp_ref=gay-voices&ir=Gay+Voices

MISC

North Carolina Magistrates Ordered to Perform Marriages for Gay Couples or Face Removal

North Carolina Magistrates Ordered to Perform Marriages for Gay Couples or Face Removal

Randy Jackson and Eddie Locklear

With same-sex marriage legal following a federal judge’s ruling last week overturning North Carolina’s ban on gay marriage, magistrates in the state have been ordered to perform marriages for same-sex couples or face suspension or dismissal from their state jobs.

The Associated Press reports:

A memo to state magistrates Wednesday said they would be violating their oaths of office if they refuse to marry gay or lesbian couples. The directive came after a magistrate in Pasquotank County on Monday refused to marry two men, citing religious objections.

That magistrate, Gary Littleton, will not be reappointed when his term expires in December due to an unrelated charge of assault a year ago. 

In other North Carolina news, a federal judge on Tuesday granted Republican state legislators the ability to intervene in lawsuits challenging the state’s gay marriage ban. 

WRAL reports:

That leaves the door open for a potential appeal of the ruling. However, constitutional and family law experts agree an appeal is unlikely to succeed. The court to which any North Carolina appeal would go would be the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the same court that ruled Virginia’s same-sex marriage ban unconstitutional.


Kyler Geoffroy

www.towleroad.com/2014/10/north-carolina-magistrates-ordered-to-perform-marriages-for-gay-couples-or-face-removal.html

MISC

Ebola, AIDS, and <i>Plague Inc.</i>

Ebola, AIDS, and <i>Plague Inc.</i>
A new video game uses an epidemic model with a complex and realistic set of variables to simulate the spread and severity of a plague. Available as an app from iTunes, it has been dowloaded 25 million times. Now, with Ebola, Plague Inc., as it is called, appears to have morphed from virtual into actual reality.

“I will say that in the thirty years I’ve been working in public health, the only thing like this has been AIDS, and we have to work now so that this is not the world’s next AIDS.” After they showed Dr. Thomas Frieden, former NYC Dept of Health Commissioner (2002-2009) and now Director of CDC, making this statement on the evening news, my life partner Arnie and I just looked at each other. Clearly, the spread of Ebola is already a public health catastrophe. Meanwhile, too much of what we’re still hearing from public health officials is weak reassurances and advice to stay calm.

It put into relief my own advisories to the gay community to try to stay calm and avoid panic in the earliest period of AIDS. Though panic is never a good thing, I was wrong then to be so cautious, and the health care officials who keep telling us to keep calm now are similarly wrong. With AIDS, only Larry Kramer somehow gleaned the true measure of what was happening, and the alarm he raised pulled out all the stops. CDC quickly called the emerging epidemic “the most important new public health problem in the U.S.”

Simultaneously, however, CDC AIDS Task Force reps balked on issuing stronger advisories. In the absence of certainty of the cause of the epidemic, and to avoid political and civil liberties confrontations and panic, they retreated from more substantial leadership. Alas, too many of us in the gay community took our lead from CDC. The resulting excessive caution and inadequacy in issuing tougher guidelines based on probabilities, like the sluggishness of the New York Times in giving the epidemic priority coverage, is well-documented in Randy Shilts’s And The Band Played On as well as in Kramer’s own The Normal Heart and Reports from the holocaust.

So what’s to be done for Ebloa? Airports have begun screening international passengers for fevers. That’s like the advice we were giving early on for what was later identified as HIV and AIDS, to limit the number of different sexual partners and try to make sure those partners were healthy. Vastly inadequate. Consider the case of Ebola patient Thomas Eric Duncan, who traveled to the U.S. from Liberia to Texas and is now dead. He would not have been detected either in Africa or the U.S. because he was not exhibiting fever or any other signs of the virus when traveling here.

U.S. public health officials shy away from infringements of civil liberties and rightly so. I’m certainly glad they never did what Cuba did to contain HIV/AIDS — put gays into camps. Civil liberties concerns are extremely important, but they do not always supersede much bigger life-and-death concerns. When and where quarantine needs to be implemented for Ebola, it must not be evaded but must be transparent and to the greatest extent possible implemented with the participation, cooperation and support of the individuals and communities involved. We keep getting reassurances that if the procedures that are currently in place are stringently followed, containment will be secured. Yet that security appears evermore fragile and elusive. As UN Deputy Ebola Coordinator Anthony Banbury admitted, “We need to [contain Ebola] within 60 days from 1 October. If we reach [this target], then we can turn this epidemic around … We either stop Ebola now or we face an entirely unprecedented situation for which we do not have a plan.”

Drug and vaccine trials are happening but not aggressively enough. As with AIDS, all experimental approaches in the pipeline need to be financed and expedited the way they were in the heyday of ACT UP’s responses to the spread of AIDS. Crucially, medical activists need to find out what drugs and vaccines are in various stages of research and testing, and then put pressure on the FDA and drug companies to finance and speed their development.

AIDS activists sensed that gays were considered an expendable population, alongside drug addicts and (later) African nationals, and that the resulting indifference and silence from governments and society were tantamount to genocide. It isn’t a big stretch to see that same history repeating itself when it comes to the black populations most affected by Ebola. The Ebola outbreak in West Africa is “unquestionably the most severe acute public health emergency in modern times,” Dr. Margaret Chan, the director general of the World Health Organization, said. “When a deadly and dreaded virus hits the destitute and spirals out of control, the whole world is put at risk … The rich get the best care. The poor are left to die.”

For the moment, one can only hope that these statements of candor from Drs. Frieden, Chan and Banbury will set the stage for subsequent responses. While we may not need an “Ebola czar” per se, remember how hugely important Surgeon General C. Everett Koop’s voice was as the AIDS crisis unfolded? At present, however, the U.S. has no Surgeon General. The president’s candidate, Dr. Vivek Murthy, has been stalemated by Republicans not only because he was selected by Obama and was a supporter of Obamacare but because he supports gun control. So as we face a plague that could spread with the scale and devastation of AIDS, Congress is once again playing partisan and petty politics. The NRA’s defense of its mass-murderous policies has now taken a quantum leap in its interference with the nation’s health, from being accessory to the unnecessary deaths of thousands to potentially much greater numbers.

Lawrence D. Mass, M.D. wrote the first press reports in 1981 on the epidemic that later became known as AIDS. He is a co-founder of Gay Men’s Health Crisis and the author/editor of We Must Love One Another Or Die: The Life and Legacies of Larry Kramer.

www.huffingtonpost.com/lawrence-d-mass-md/ebola-aids-and-plague-inc_b_5978304.html?utm_hp_ref=gay-voices&ir=Gay+Voices

MISC

Jon Stewart Takes Aim at the Fear-Fueled, Hate-filled Midterm Elections: VIDEO

Jon Stewart Takes Aim at the Fear-Fueled, Hate-filled Midterm Elections: VIDEO

Stewart

On last night’s Daily Show, Jon Stewart summed up the ongoing midterm elections across the country and how both parties seem to be running on a platform built on fear-mongering rhetoric and “how much they hate themselves.” 

“You can form a cogent argument…or you can stand there quietly and wait for your opponent’s d–k to slip out of his pants”

Watch, AFTER THE JUMP…


Kyler Geoffroy

www.towleroad.com/2014/10/jon-stewart-takes-apart-the-fear-fueled-hate-filled-midterm-elections-video.html

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