Parting Glances

Let’s go all the way tonight
No regrets
Just love
We can dance
Until we die
You and I
Will be young forever
Katy Perry ~ Teenage Dream

If any of you out there have Netflix on your Wii or PS3 or XBOX you can watch this one instantly just like I did. It’s been a while since I caught this movie all the way through and I admit it’s not one of my all time faves.

I probably should be more into this movie since it is pretty well made and there are several actors that went on to do bigger things like Mimi from The Drew Carey Show and Carl from Fargo and and… I am sorry I just can’t get into this film as well as others that are usually mentioned in the same breath like Longtime Companion and Angels In America.

I think those are full on AIDS films. I mean they put AIDS and it’s physical effects front and center and display it with not much to soften the blow. Can Parting Glances really be called an AIDS film if the two main characters it focuses on Michael and Robert do not have AIDS? In fact the one guy in the movie that does have AIDS Nick has more than enough energy to run off to Fire Island and make threatening phone calls to his best friend and ex-lover Michael knowing the idiot will come running.

That is one of the big things about this movie I disliked… The relationships! The manipulation you see from Nick and Robert towards Michael just plain sucks. You do not get that much background information in this flick about either of their relationships or how they came about or ended but from what we do see I think both of them have used Michael in order to do whatever they wanted despite how that might hurt him.

It’s not just about Robert running off to Africa to “get away” that turns me off to him and Michael as a couple it’s the whole setup even down to Michael feeling it necessary to personally take care of Nick that seems to be focused on everyone else and what they want and Micheal comes dead last in both these cases.

A welcome mat for a main character, how sweet.

Anyway, ignoring all the relationship trauma I do like the subtle take of this film and how it steers clear of the usual boring coming out setup or the typical “wisdom of the dying gay guy” stuff. It seems to be more about what AIDS “did” to the Gay Community as a culture.

Nick talking to the young kid in the stairwell underlines what this movie is really about in my opinion with his going on about how he and Michael partied their way through New York and how he misses those good old days. I think this movie is in some ways about all those stupid flashbacks and saying farewell to the promises of youth after the reality of age and experience come crashing down.

A very different and universal subject unfortunately I wish they would have given that promising storyline more room here than the relationship drama which did not work for me. It’s a good movie and all that for how early it was 1985. I just wish it had more mature issues and less toxic relationships I would have never put up with.

I posed a query to Erastes (which is not allowed; she/he banned me from her/his blog immediately after because one does not question the legitimacy of these writers or one will be smited with a dirty mirkin). I now pose the same to Lee Rowan: Let’s see an actual list of how many books you’ve sold. Eliza claimed to have read 1,553 M/M novels. (I told her that she might have less of a language problem if she were reading something less low-brow, but that was probably mean of me.) So if Eliza bought 1,553 and six of them were your books (don’t worry, this won;t be a difflcult math problem), Rowan, then you made at least $6 off of poor Eliza (another literary reference, but I don’t want to get too far off track here).

Wow, Lambda Literary is running a wonderful professional blog these days. Filled with intelligent well researched commentary.

UPDATE!

I just wanted to point out two things here.

1) How can you accuse another lesbian of “appropriation” and question their authenticity for writing Gay Romance when you yourself write Gay Porn?

2) So Lee Rowan & any other lesbians make enough writing “Gay Romance” for you to call them out on the Lambda Literary Blog but they do not sell enough to be considered your peers or to have their opinions held in equal measure?

Um yeah…

J.L. Langley ~ With Abandon
From: Samhain Publishing

This just came in!

First of all, Lambda Literary is an LGBT literary magazine. We’ve been around now for several decades. We aren’t just some fly-by-night fan fic site or someone’s livejournal blog.

I love this shit. If you cannot back your craptastic article up with supporting documentation and like real facts start publicly attacking and name calling a well known online promoter who supports Gay Male Authors.

Oh, and make sure we all know you speak for Lambda Literary and the Gay Male Literary Community as a whole so we know how much reverence to give your nut job analysis.

I can tell Lambda Literary is going to have a fun time fixing this mess. Dig that hole deeper!

From: Lambda Literary ~ The Fetishizing of Queer Sexuality. A Response.

That said, fetishizing the sexuality of others is still a blatant form of sexism, homophobia, racism. When you fetishize another’s sexuality, you make them less than. You make them Other.

From: Amazon ~ The Golden Age of Lesbian Erotica

Victoria A. Brownworth is the author of nine books, including the award-winning *Too Queer: Essays from a Radical Life* and editor of 14, including the award-winning *Night Bites: VampireTales of Blood and Lust. * A syndicated columnist, her work has appeared in numerous mainstream, queer and feminist publications, including the Baltimore Sun, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Village Voice, the Advocate, OUT and Curve. Her erotic writing has appeared regularly in anthologies and magazines, and she is a former contributing writer to the lesbian sex magazines, *On Our Backs* and *Bad Attitude.* She has published several erotica collections, including most recently, *Bed: New Lesbian Erotica.* She also publishes gay male porn under a psuedonym. She teaches writing and film at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia where she added two new courses to the literary curriculum: Writing Below the Belt and Smut. She has also taught safe-sex education classes as well as classes on S/M and B/D for various lesbian and bisexual venues. She lives in Philadelphia.

I smell a big fat hypocritical rat.

The first lesbian novels I ever read were purloined pulps found in the homes of people whose children I babysat for in high school. At the time I didn’t put together the fact that these straight couples were using my lesbian life to fuel their sexual fantasies, but that was definitely the case.

I really do not get where Victoria Brownworth is coming from at the beginning of this article. First she distances “real lesbians” from “Lesbian Pulp”. Anyone with half a brain or Google skills knows that there were several lesbians who wrote Lesbian Pulp Fiction back during it’s golden years including such well known authors as Valerie Taylor. Victoria Brownworth even admits to reading them but obviously she did not enjoy them because they had S. E. X. ewwwww!

So how is that really a good example of her argument?

We have lives beyond what we do in bed. And what we do in bed never involves a man.

I am sorry but from my point of view Valerie Taylor wrote whatever paid the fucking rent and sex sells and where the fuck does Victoria Brownworth get off judging the motives of a lesbian writer she obviously knows so little about besides having no clue what Valerie did in bed?

If you aren’t familiar with M/M fiction here’s what it is: Straight women fetishizing the lives of gay men.

So what about Josh Lanyon and Rick Reed or or ??? Oh fuck this “nice reasonable” shit! Victoria Brownworth has no clue what the hell she is talking about and could care less who she hurts with her incredible sweeping generalizations!

Victoria Brownworth assumes she knows the TRUE gender and sexuality of all authors writing Gay Romance. She assumes she knows the TRUE gender and sexuality of the readers. She assumes every Gay Romance is somehow exploitative.

The most insulting part of this whole article is she assumes that no one can easily verify the accuracy of these various false statements she presents. Does everyone at Lambda Literary still use snail mail and crayons?

When we give straight writers the power to say we got our own relationships wrong and they know better, we are embracing our own oppression.

Victoria Brownworth just shut up. No honestly, if you can not write a decent story that sells as well as Annie Proulx or Marion Zimmer Bradley then do not accuse me of “embracing my oppression”.

Accept the facts for what they are… You Victoria Brownworth have a distinct and questionable lack of any talent or intelligence and no one gives a fuck how loud you are or how politically correct or accurate YOU SAY your stories are… You suck! You can’t compete honestly for the simple fact you have no skill and you know this. So you run and hide behind your Gay Ghetto mentality and question everyone’s authenticity with no facts. How self serving can you get?

Sorry to be so blunt but your little irrational lashing out in public spewing highly prejudicial and demeaning lies left and right demanded it. I don’t care if you think the books I read are trashy porn and I don’t care if you and your Lambda Lit goon squad ignore this entire genre like Lambda has ignored Gay & Lesbian Pulp Fiction and it’s important place in our history for years now.

I don’t even give a flying fuck that you and the rest of your precious crowd snicker whenever such bestsellers as Larry Townsend and his Leatherman’s Handbook are brought up. Despite the fact he has obviously sold more books than any of you. Sex sells!

But do not negate me as a reader or my place in the Gay Community to sell your literary lies.

Fuck you, we like this!

PS… Thank you EREC for the wake up post this morning.

From: Publishers Weekly ~ Is Alyson Close to Sale?

The financial troubles at gay and lesbian house Alyson Books have been quietly bubbling up over the past few months as stories of unpaid advances and never published books circulated on blogs and in publishing circles. That quiet was officially broken Wednesday when Michael Musto published a piece in the Village Voice about his book being taken “hostage,” as he put it in his headline, by the publisher. Musto, whose scheduled February 2010 book has yet to be released, described how Alyson has been caught in a downward spiral, in part due to the woes of its struggling parent company, Here Media (formerly known as Regent Media), which owns other gay media properties like Out magazine and the Advocate.

From: Village Voice ~ Regent Media Is Holding My New Book Hostage

Have you seen my new book? Neither have I! The pub date on Amazon was February 1, but I’ve still barely heard a word back about the manuscript I sent off a year ago!

I’m not taking it personally, mind you. The publisher, Alyson Books,is part of Regent Media, which also includes here! TV, Out magazine, and the Advocate. Those outlets have long been a vital force in LGBT reporting, but as media—particularly gay media—keep getting hit with the one-two punch of the Internet and the economy, they’ve gotten patchy about paying people and apparently are only selectively publishing whatever they can.

Instigator Magazine

You might have heard me go on and on about Drummer Magazine and the HUGE influence it had on me growing up and the HUGE influence it once had on the Gay Community in general. Anyway, as you know Drummer is dead and gone but I have always kept an eye out for the next big thing.

I think that might be Instigator Magazine.

It does not quite replace Drummer. It’s just slicker and more advertisement oriented and frankly I wish they would spend less on the looks of the magazine and more space letting their sick twisted fucked up writers write about whatever. It is also a magazine that constantly gets in to trouble for exploring the type of Kinks and Sexualities that will shock the hell out of you.

So keep that in mind when you read about such things as Racial Sex Play and all sorts of crazy messed up things people do in those dark foreboding back rooms and bathrooms and wherever the sick and twisted perverts I love hang out at.

Also you will not find this magazine pumping content on the web. They just do not believe in such things and they frankly HATE most of the commentators and web denizens that have taken over the online “Leather Community”. In this case using the word HATE is not as strong a word as they would use. These guys believe in “actions not words” and “full on fucking” not a bunch of pontification on whatever pop psychology is being promoted at the moment.

Instigator Magazine is not a “How To Manual” it’s more of a catalog about what these guys who do this stuff think. They do not want you to join their club, they want you to look and listen and then do your own damn thing.

So take this as my full on FUCK YEAH recommendation of a resource meant to make you wince and wake you up and stimulate your mind for a change. Get a copy and take it for a ride or at least read it for the articles because these guys have some really important things to say.

Single issues can be found at the usual local Gay Bookstores or anywhere with an adventurous porn magazine section.

From: Lambda Literary ~ Can M/M Romance Challenge the Definition of LGBT Lit?

But isn’t it time to stop policing the gates of the LGBT community and begin to embrace the queerness that exists in even the most seemingly heterosexual spaces and places? Isn’t it about time that we allow writers to have as complicated identities as the defiantly queer heroine, Lisbeth Salander?

Brilliant!

From: Gawker ~ Why Are Straight Women So Obsessed with Gay Sex?

These homo bodice rippers are meant for the types of suburban ladies who pick up those paperbacks with Fabio on the cover.

OK um, can someone handle this? I stopped reading from this point on. Sad!

*sigh* Oh good someone did.

Do you ever get accused of being a misogynist?” I ask Beecroft.

“All the time,” she replies.

“In your sexual imagination, why are there no women at all?”

She levels her gaze and answers in a steady, grounded voice. “The plain and simple answer for me is that in my sexual imagination, I’m a gay man. I write to
satisfy a sexual desire that I can’t physically satisfy in this body.”

“I’m a penetrative gay man as well,” says Erastes.

I ask a hair-raisingly personal question. “If that’s your sexual identity, why wouldn’t you just buy a really good strap-on and be gay?”

This is why I like the Leather Community or at least the “Gay Men’s” Leather Community I am involved with. They respect and celebrate their kinks and sexual turn-ons with a wholehearted gusto that basically comes across as “fuck you, we like this!”.

Questions like the ones I see being asked about the author’s sexuality always seem to me to lead around an agenda or some type of “pop psychology” explanation that I find overly simplistic and mostly lacking any real form of acknowledgment that people are complex and sexual turn-ons in my opinion have absolutely nothing to do with your politics or your writing or what you consider to be a hot Romance story.

I hear this constantly in other types of discussions like for example transgender POVs. Gay men do not understand “us” because they are only into doing guys. Well yeah, that’s how I know I am Gay.

Suddenly a Gay guy’s sexual turn-ons become politically incorrect because they are not inclusive or representative of the current PC ideals. I am sure that my love of tall guys would also lead someone to calling me “size-ist” or my thing for red heads would get labeled “hair color-ist” too.

The thing is my sexual turn-ons and likes and dislikes are not formed or controlled by my conscious politics or real life choices. Wish they were, so I could adjust them to fit my current place and situation but that is so not going to happen.

So the questions like these reporters asked the writers just come across to me as…

What does that have to do with their talent? What does that have to do with the quality of books they have written? What does that have to do with what their fans enjoy about their writing?

It says more about what the reporter wants to pontificate or some ridiculous theory they want to use to frame our community instead of simply presenting the wonderful supportive writers I have met and talked to online who are involved in this Gay Romance thingy.

So great that we get the publicity and too bad we get stuck being treated like freaks.

UPDATE! Someone commented in email this reporter is THE Cintra Wilson… Who is ummm known for her rather “blunt” approach to subjects although I happen to agree with her disgust of JC Penwah.