Let’s stop paying attention to Sarah Palin. Please?

Sarah Palin’s recent American history gaffe represents just one more moment in a long line of moments that illustrate quite clearly that she should not be a candidate to lead any governing body, including the PTA at her kids’ school. No offense to the PTA presidents of the world.

Essentially, Palin said at an event at the Old North Church in Boston that Paul Revere’s ride to warn American colonists that the British were coming was actually a ride a to warn the British that the Americans were coming.  Then in the Fox TV clip below, she tries to defend her answer to what she calls a “Gotcha” the question.  Sorry, Sarah, but it’s basic American history.  If you don’t know the history of the country’s revolution, you probably shouldn’t be trying to lead one of your own.

Why the media pays attention to this woman is beyond my understanding.  I’m paying attention to her in this blog post, but after this, I’m stopping.  When we pay attention to Sarah Palin, it’s like paying attention to the child who is misbehaving in a classroom to get attention.  If we stop paying attention to the child, the child will sometimes stop acting out.  Palin is acting out because we give her a lot of attention.  If people would just stop giving her airtime, she might actually shrivel up and go back to Alaska.

Plus, now that Rick Santorum, Mr. Uber Social Conservative, has officially declared his intention to run for President, we should focus our energies on stopping someone who could really do some damage to humanity, rather than Ms. Palin, who just keeps looking and sounding more and more inept.

Stewart’s irony: “old gay” vs “new gay”

My trainer and friend, Jonathan, sent me this link, and I think it’s hysterical and spot on.  To keep my mind off the pain during our workouts, I sometimes start spouting off about what irritates me about many of the current gay rights activists and “the movement.”  Jonathan has to listen to all of it, and in this particular case, he forwarded this awesome clip that cuts right to the chase.

Jon Stewart lampoons “old gay” vs “new gay,” and it made me take pause around the assumptions that we as a US culture make about the construction of sexual identity.  What is “gay”?

Target.

Enjoy!

I’ll make this quick: quit it with the anti-gay slurs and grow up

I just read an article on CNN.com about three incidents in the last few months where adult male sports “heroes” are throwing around anti-gay slurs in heated moments when things aren’t quite going their way. Kobe Bryant is a hot mess anyway with his checkered past with women and alleged assault, and then the other two, Joakim Noah and Roger McDowell, have absolutely no excuses. But when it’s done, they each issue a public, “emotional” apology, pay a large amount of money to “the league,” and then everybody tells them “it’s ok,” including gay rights organizations. It makes me kind of sick to my stomach; the collusion factor here is ridiculous.

If I uttered an offensive slur every time something didn’t go my way, I’d spend the day issuing apologies all over the place. I don’t care how famous these guys are or how accomplished. Get your big boy pants on and learn how to have your tantrums without using words like “fag,” “faggot,” “homo,” “cocksucker,” and all the other lovely epithets that CHILDREN use to describe each other all the time.

My dad used to tell me to just let those words roll off my back when kids used them to taunt me in school. “People don’t mean anything by them.” I tried to believe him for a long time, but that was before either of us knew that I was gay. Now, I think we both feel differently.

People do mean something when they say these words. When you’ve been on the receiving end, and those words define something about you, even in a negative way, you know that they mean something. Trust me.

And trust me on something else. I’m not terribly interested in any pity parties and “woe is me” mentalities. Fines and public apologies don’t do it for me anymore. Cleaned clocks and modified behaviors do it for me. If people like Kobe, Joakim, and Roger need that explained, just let me know.

For a “fag” I hear I’m pretty good at explaining things.

Thoughts on The Normal Heart on Broadway

Last evening I attended a performance of the Broadway production of Larry Kramer’s landmark play, The Normal Heart, and I learned a lot of valuable information about the play in production.  I’ve taught this play a number of times in different classes that I teach at NYU, and I’ve used scenes from it in acting classes.  The current production directed by Joel Grey and George C. Wolfe takes a didactic script written in the early years of the AIDS pandemic and presents it in such a way that an audience stays with the story for much of the two and a half hours that it takes for the actors to move through the experience.  The production is largely successful, but it does not always overcome the limitations of the script.

Kramer’s play first ran off-Broadway in 1985 at the height of the AIDS pandemic in New York City, and it essentially serves as a call to arms in the fight against the disease.  The story of Ned Weeks, the play’s main character, is essentially Kramer’s own story, and the play follows his experiences creating Gay Men’s Health Crisis.  Because the play needed to teach and raise awareness in the 80s about the growing rate of HIV infection, the script contains long sections of exposition that sometimes hinder the narrative flow of the play.  Also, several of the characters are difficult to like, particularly the protagonist, Ned Weeks.  This presents a difficult challenge for the actors playing these roles, as if the audience can’t find a reason to like these people and root for them, the experience loses steam.  Quickly.

I’m happy to say that the acting in this production, for the most part, is the main reason that it has achieved popular and critical acclaim.  The action of the play takes place on a very simple unit set, and additional pieces of furniture are largely moved and manipulated by the actors.  It’s an actor-driven event, which also helps to keep the experience moving forward.  All elements of the design, including the projections, work well to remind of us of the overarching purpose of the play, which is to educate about the AIDS crisis.  Given that it’s now almost 30 years later, we know much of the information that’s being conveyed in the play.  It’s a testament to the actors that we still want to pay attention.  As my boyfriend pointed out to me last night, we know how the story ends, and it’s not good.  But these actors commit to the purpose of the play and its circumstances, and as a result, we stay with them.

Joe Mantello, known more now as a director than as an actor, plays Ned Weeks with an attention to likability that I appreciated from start to finish.  Ned’s tirades throughout the play can become tiresome, although they are filled with truth, but Mantello allows us to see Ned’s vulnerability, passion, and intelligence.  It was a privilege to see Mantello onstage, and I hope that he returns again in the future.  I thoroughly enjoyed watching the mechanics of his work as an actor.

John Benjamin Hickey plays Felix Turner, the eventual lover of Ned Weeks, and for me, his performance is the highlight.  Felix’s journey in the play is an unpleasant one, and Hickey takes that trip with very little assistance other than his own acting ability.  It’s an extraordinary progression that provides the audience with a cathartic moment in an otherwise preachy play.  Hickey calibrates his choices carefully and earns every moment that he has as the play draws to a close.  Felix also manages to help us see the tenderness in Ned Weeks, something no other character achieves in the play.  This stands to reason since Felix is the lover, but Hickey brings something to the portrayal that is genuine and thoughtful.

The rest of the cast is strong but not always in the same league as Mantello and Hickey.  Lee Pace as Bruce Niles is compelling in the second act when he delivers his monologue about the loss of his third partner.  The story is devastating to listen to, and Pace stays disconnected enough to force us to see every detail that he describes.  He holds back on the emotion, and it’s an effective technique to get the audience to listen carefully to the circumstances rather than simply weep for his loss.  Unfortunately in other moments in his performance, Pace takes on this stance with his upstage leg forward and leaning back on his downstage leg.  I think it’s an attempt to establish an archetypal image of this good looking gay man from the period, but instead it reads as George Washington standing in the row boat, crossing the Delaware River. I remember Pace’s work when he was a student at Juilliard, and I was surprised by this strange physicality.  I think he’s a great actor.

Jim Parsons of Big Bang Theory fame does an excellent turn as Tommy Boatwright, providing several great one-liners and moments of breath in a very heavy evening.  Ellen Barkin makes her Broadway debut as Dr. Emma Brookner, a tough, wheelchair-bound doctor handling most of the early AIDS cases in New York City at the time.  Her moments are well-played, but she’s got one of hardest pieces in the play, a second act monologue that basically stays on one emotional pitch from start to finish.  Barkin manages it well, and the audience acknowledged that at the conclusion of the piece last evening, but I couldn’t help but wonder if there’s a bit more to Dr. Brookner.  I think she’s written as a fairly two-dimensional character, but I think there’s more there.

At the top of the performance, we see the actors come onstage, place various set pieces, and Barkin gets into her wheelchair.  It’s an indication that we’re about to watch a play, and that we should not forget that these are actors playing characters, a Brechtian staging technique that stops the audience from having a catharsis.  As the performance unfolds, Grey and Wolfe add the actors not in the scenes, placing them in chairs upstage to witness what’s unfolding before them.  I typically love this technique of mirroring the audience’s experience with the actors onstage, but I did not love it as a convention in this performance.  As soon as it started, I knew why it was being used, but I was perplexed by the choice of when to start it.  I can’t even actually remember for sure where that moment was, but I’m curious why it’s not there from the beginning.

Overall, I was thrilled with the opportunity to see such an accomplished company of actors take on a truly difficult and important play.  The Normal Heart is an ancestor of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, and as a gay theatre artist living and working in New York, it presents a view that has certainly shaped how I move through the world.  I’m grateful for the play and for my experience last evening.

Strauss-Kahn and the Terminator: not the same thing

I’ve been following these stories about Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s rape charge and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s infidelity with quiet interest, not because I’m shocked at the revelations but more so because of the media frenzy around both incidents. Shocker.  If you read my blog, you know that media coverage pushes my buttons.

The Strauss-Kahn rape allegations are ugly, and his recent resignation from the IMF illustrates the gravity of the situation.  Based on his past reputation as a womanizer, this newest accusation does not sit well, but let’s be clear about something: womanizing and rape are two very different things.  Womanizing is not admirable; rape is criminal.  So when the media lumps Strauss-Kahn and the Terminator together and asks questions like, “Why do powerful men cheat?” (Anderson Cooper tweet on May 17), we need to take stock of how we’re thinking about these two very different incidents.

While Maria Shriver has every right to divorce Schwarzenegger over this new revelation involving his fathering a child with their housekeeper, we need to keep this in perspective.  Nothing has been revealed to indicate that the relationship that produced this child was not consensual.  Schwarzenegger did not rape the housekeeper.  But yet this newest piece of information has been added on to the Strauss-Kahn story, and people are now asking questions about infidelity and male sexuality and so on.

The Schwarzenegger incident is not only about male sexuality; it’s about honesty.  There are plenty of examples from throughout history of men having mistresses.  We know this, and to a certain extent, we accept it.  Far more easily in European countries.  The puritanical Pilgrims that many of us descend from have left us with a strong moral system in the US.  It’s not easy to get out from under notions of “right” and “wrong” when it comes to something like infidelity.  People have trouble accepting the grey.  But what about this?  How would the situation have been different for Maria and Arnold if they had discussed it?  Could an acknowledged mistress have been an option?  Does the infidelity say that Arnold doesn’t love Maria?

People question Hillary Clinton’s choice to stay with Bill, but she seems to be perfectly fine.  I would venture to say that Hillary and Bill have had some honest conversations with each other about what their relationship means and why they stay together.  Cynics say that they stay together to be a powerful couple.  I think that’s too easy.  People will now ask how Anne Sinclair could ever stay with Dominique Strauss-Kahn.  If he raped that woman in the hotel, I’d have to agree with them.  But maybe Anne Sinclair can live with the womanizing.  If it turns out that Strauss-Kahn is simply a womanizer, then maybe their relationship doesn’t change.

Love and relationships are complicated.  Judging actions like Schwarzenegger’s makes me think about throwing stones and living in a glass house.  Wondering about “male sexuality” raises flags for me.  Schwarzenegger and Shriver seem to have had some communication issues.  Strauss-Kahn may have some sex-power issues.  But let’s not reduce these very complex situations to a sound byte.  Our society needs to be smarter than that.