Joe Conason has an article about the well-populated Republican closet. Good reading.
It’s worth noting that Tony Kushner explained the psychology of the Republican closet a long, long time ago and put the explanation in the mouth of Roy Cohn.
Al Pacino’s overacting worked really well in that movie, in my opinion.
Also worth noting: Mike Rogers of BlogActive won a BlogPac Heroes award shortly before Yearly Kos. I had the pleasure to be recruited to be on the nominating committee and heartily seconded his nomination. Outing closeting Republicans is rather thankless work in a lot of ways, because the tradition of giving gay men closet protection so long as they support the conservative agenda has a long history and not many appreciate someone who stands up to it.
But it has to be done. Pam explains far better than I why the very existence of the closet must be called into question, and what’s nice about the Republican outings is that they demonstrate the sickness of the closet far better than any academic tract ever could.
32 Responses to “An explanation through the power of theatre”
Leave a comment
Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>
The Angels movie was great, and yet it left out some of my favorite parts. I had the privilege of seeing a 2-night stage production in San Francisco in 1995 (and getting class credit for it too, though we also had to pay huge fees to cover the tickets of all the shows we saw that semester in “Theatre In Action”), then Natasha bought the script books so I could read all the dialouge I couldn’t hear. (They had some headphones for us nearly-deaf folks but they were some kind of pretentious Made-In-Germany bizzarro gear that didn’t deliver much more volume than I could hear from the seats, and were painful to wear.) Anyway there’s even more stuff in the script than they put on stage.
Absolutely fabulous art, in every sense of the word. That’s culture.
As Fark.com said, “Craig’s so far in the closet, he’s in Narnia.”
Al Pacino’s overacting worked really well in that movie, in my opinion.
My fiancee heard Roy Cohn speak once. According to her, Al Pacino got Roy Cohn down to a T … evidently watching him in the movie was just like hearing/seeing him in person.
It’s an incredible play, one that hasn’t lost any of its staying power the way some works very specific to a moment do; instead, it brings that moment alive for us, making us both grateful we’ve progressed and painfully aware, as in this clip, of how far we haven’t. Thank you for posting this.
I normally don’t go for dramas, and I think that shows like Angels in America are why — when you have something that’s so completely heartbreaking, so well-written and well-acted as that, it’s hard to see stuff that’s less-than.
Did anyone else see back in 2001 when the NYT ran a feature on AIDS at 20? It had a year-by-year breakdown of every AIDS-related story that the paper ran, and at the start of every section they would say how many people had died of AIDS that year. I actually cried reading through that.
Regarding the GOP Closet, I’ll continue some back and forth from an earlier thread:
Me: In particular, one can build, based on the theories of Nisbet, an ideology wherein by making laws designed to strengthen our moral character and reign in vice, a society of virtuous citizens is created in which further government regulation is un-necessary.
Mnemosyne (sp?): Isn’t that pretty much what the Victorians tried, with a notable lack of success? I mean, lack of success if you were actually trying to stop vice. If you only wanted to drive it underground, the Victorians were wildly successful.
But maybe driving it underground is the point. Someone recently did a “market analysis” of the GOP closet. The idea is that if you have the mindset attributed in Angels in America to Roy Cohn — i.e. you want to be a heterosexual because heterosexuals have privileges denied to homosexuals even in the most liberal of cities like NYC — you want to stay in the closet and still keep the trappings of heterosexual “normalcy” — the wife, the kids, etc.. But if other gays are leaving the closet — e.g. because they can live openly as gays and even get married and such — then with whom do you get to have the gay sex you crave? The solution is to try and keep people from being able to lead “normal” lives and still be gay and to keep them in the closet.
So perhaps in general the idea is to keep certain behaviors underground so that way those people who, for whatever reasons, feel they have to lead double lives, have company, so to speak, in doing so.
The Angels miniseries is now item #52 in my Blockbuster Online queue. At this rate, I’ll probably get around to it sometime in 2010.
My absolute favorite play. Ever. I’ve watched the movie multiple times (only once straight through, usually in little installments), and read the script even more often.
Watching that, I wondered, who would want to have sex with Roy Cohn? I guess he either used prostitutes or guys looking for favors.
I would not overlook the “power” aspects of sex re: Roy Cohn. He probably did make people desperate for assistance be his “bitches” - the guy had issues. I also have no doubt he was able to influence so many judges in NY, because he knew their secret. He may even have coerced them into liasons or he would fight their appointment to the bench. Without the closet, his leverage and a lot of his power evaporates. That probably goes a long way to explaining the republican love affair with the closet.
I’m thinking that it’s worth it to specifically compare the Craig disaster with this:
I think it’s important to remember that the difference between the “progressive” and “conservative” visions of what America ought to be isn’t whether or not there are gay Americans. The difference is how, in that version of America, gays live. In our vision of America, gays live like the couples married in Iowa this morning. In their vision of America, gays live like Larry Craig.
The right wing closet is just one of the well appointed wings of the Crony Constitution that conservatives strive daily to maintain.
Have you seen the abortion services wing the moral values set has built for their own? Faaaaaaaaaaabulous.
And all of the reading in Equality for Me but Not for Thee suites has been edited of annoying crap like the Magna Carta and the disturbing long version of the constitution. (They end to burn the eyes.)
Watching that, I wondered, who would want to have sex with Roy Cohn? I guess he either used prostitutes or guys looking for favors.
Well, that and there is no lack of closeted men looking for the same.
I know Pandagon’s authors have no control over ads that run here, but sheesh, these JohnQ ads. It’s like they’re running them here just to be assholes.
And well, all things being equal, I’d do All Pacino in a heartbeat. Assuming that he was all down with being in an out and open relationship with a man.
Sorry for the off-topic comment.
On-topic, Angels in America took a while to sink in for me. I had heard so much about how powerful it is, how amazing, how life-changing, I guess I was expecting to be turned into a pillar of salt or something. I felt vaguely disappointed by the end.
In the ensuing time, however, I found myself thinking about it a lot and finding new things in it. Then I rented it again and saw what people were talking about.
Wow, weird, I was just telling someone that this scene is one of the greatest in contemporary theatre.
I still haven’t see AIA on stage yet, but the filmed version is really great.
I’d do Justin Kirk in a heartbeat. Assuming that he was all down with being in a relationship with a woman.
PS Ray Cohn went to my high school. So did, if I’m not mistaken, the first person to get a sex change, and (this one I’m sure of, because my history classroom, where I learned about him, was dedicated to him) Allard Lowenstein, the first openly gay Congressperson and victim of the original Twinkie defense. You find all types in NYC.
Isabel:
I wish I could claim that a Personage of Great Historical Importance™ went to my high school, but I can’t.
I can, however, claim Duke U. and long-time NBA player Grant Hill, whose mother turns out to have been Hillary Clinton’s freshman-year suite-mate at Wellesley.
My high school had only been open for a year when I started going there- so I guess it’s up to me
I often think of Baron Harrkonen (sp) when I hear about gay republicans.
Now I’m thinking of Sting Harkonen leering at his depraved uncle… damnit, Indy, this leaves scars on my soul.
pot on to those who noted how Ray Cohn and other closeted Republican did/do exploit the oppression they simultaneously suffer under.
It is really too bad that oftentimes co-opting to the enemy in order to survive can become a means to end in and of itself, wherein first the person masks their identity and then completely carves out one based on a binary of black/white. Although their behavior confounds and frustrates many, the real shame is that their warped identity constructions usually fall apart with tragic results.
Women who fight against women’s rights are a good example; the lie works well until husband leaves them and they are stranded and forced to collect welfare or stay in a shelter. Many never suffer such a fate, but woe be to the woman who must.
Those who don’t have a life changing epiphany after some crisis in their lives are just plain nuts and of course, I’m trying to draw a line here, which may or may not belong.
It’s good to know she’s still getting work after Airplane!.
When The Insider was being filmed in Louisville, a friend of mine worked as an on-set paramedic (in case, you know, someone got all mauled during a stunt). She came back from her first day on the set and said, “Three things most people don’t know about Al Pacino: he’s really short, wears an extremely fake-looking toupee, and smells really, really bad.” Just thought I’d throw that out there.
I might have to return the toaster I got when I joined The Homosexual Agenda for typing this, but I must:
I thought AiA was utterly ghastly. I saw both parts one Saturday back in the 90’s and by the end of it, I was wondering what I’d done in a past life to justify the hell I was being put through. I’ve been to hundreds of plays in my life and I’ve never been through something as excruciating at the appalling Oldest Living Bolshevik scene. Kushner didn’t write a play, he wrote pre-blog blog rants with all the theatricality of paint drying. By the end of the first part, I flinched every time the character of Louis came on stage, because I knew we were going to be subjected to another banal, deeply tedious political harangue.
The one moment where the play started coming alive for me was when the Angel was about to burst through Prior’s roof. Which Kushner then promptly undermined by having Prior turn to address the audience and say something like “It’s like a Spielberg movie, isn’t it”. Awful. He finally gets some theatrical momentum going and….he goes for a cheap, shitty joke.
I had no problem with the fact it was so long (I’m a big fan of Wagner’s operas) but it could have easily been pruned down in to a 2 - 2 1/2 hour play. The Normal Heart covered some of the same ground and said it’s piece in a quarter of the time.
David Marshall Grant sure was sexy as Joe Pitt, though.
Dang, that’s one of my favorite bits (left out of the HBO version of course). Well, someone listed A Scanner Darkly as their least favorite movie in Pam’s recent thread, and I thought it was a work of genius, so it takes all kinds I guess.
You say that like it’s a bad thing!
Well, that’s more or less Louis’s function, and that’s why all the other characters got so exasperated with him.
Naturally I identified with him, much to my mortification.
Allen Drury went to my high school, and AFAIK, I’m the only one from my high school to go to the “Harvard of the Midwest”.
Well, yes, “all things being equal” sort of implies that the celebrity crush doesn’t involve bad hairpieces or smells. (Does any celebrity crush include these things?) But mostly I was snarking as to the question of why would anyone find Cohn attractive, with one interpretation of this question being that Cohn was unattractive because as of the events fictionalized in this clip, he was old. My sense in looking at pictures of Cohn is that he’s probably the sort of person I’d find to be both extremely attractive and repellant. Which is annoying as shit when it happens, but still occurs now and then.
You say that like it’s a bad thing!
Hahahaha. I hate being lectured, whether it’s my parents, a playwright or a TV show. There’s ways to get political and social ideas across other than using the literary equivalent of a club to do so. I felt like a recipient of a Three Stooges beatdown the entire time I was in the theater.
I also felt insulted, that Kushner didn’t bother with subtlety at all, that he presumed we were all so clueless and uninformed that we *needed* to be lectured. Hey, asswipe playwright, *I* lived through the AIDS catastrophe from the get-go, I didn’t need *you* to yell at me about it. I’ve often felt the plays, despite their absurd “Gay Fantasia On American Themes” subtitle, were written for the Cletus and Brandine’s of this world.
Well, that’s more or less Louis’s function, and that’s why all the other characters got so exasperated with him
That’s fine, but we, the audience, shouldn’t be yearning for him to develop laryngitis so he’ll just shut. the. hell. UP. for the remainder of the play.
Speaking of long plays as I was, one of the best days I’ve spent in the theater was watching the two-part adaptation of the Cider House Rules that played here in Los Angeles at the Taper. It helped that I loved the book and the movie, but the time flew by watching it.
Really? I get kind of a Smeagol vibe off of his picture, but then I’m petty and shallow.
“Really? I get kind of a Smeagol vibe off of his picture, but then I’m petty and shallow.”
That is incredibly nasty and harsh. What did Gollum ever do (fictionally) that was anything like as evil as stuff Roy Cohn did in real life?…
I know Pandagon’s authors have no control over ads that run here, but sheesh, these JohnQ ads. It’s like they’re running them here just to be assholes.
I thought the exact same thing. How nice it must be to have so much cash you’re able to blow some of it just to annoy Amanda!
That’s why the scene with him and Belize is so fucking amazing.
Well I hate America, Louis. I hate this country. It’s just big ideas, and stories, and people dying, and people like you.
The white cracker who wrote the national anthem knew what he was doing. He set the word “free” to a note so high nobody can reach it. That was deliberate. Nothing on earth sounds less like freedom to me.
You come with me to room 1013 over at the hospital. I’ll show you America. Terminal, crazy and mean.
I live in America, Louis, that’s hard enough, I don’t have to love it. You do that. Everybody’s got to love something.
And Prior’s monologue with the Angels? amazing
WE WILL BE CITIZENS!