Hollywood's Heterophobia
I found this article by Daniel Jeffreys in the 4/1/00 Daily Mail.
AT THE start of the film American Beauty, Kevin Spacey's character, Lester Burnham, says: 'In a year, I will be dead' - and by the movie's end, he is, killed by his repressed homosexual next-door neighbour. In the meantime, his middle-class life implodes as he falls in love with his teenage daughter's best friend and his wife finds comfort in the arms of a reptilian estate agent. We are left feeling that suburbia is a hellish place where happiness will for ever be absent.
Everyone in the film is explosively dysfunctional, except for the Burnhams' other set of neighbours, an affluent gay couple who float through the mayhem with disarming serenity.
To some, the film is a thought-provoking lesson in the importance of not taking stereotypes at face value and of seeking out the joy and wonder we otherwise take for granted in modern life.
To the more sceptical, its main mesage seems clear: if only we could all be gay and out of the closet, we would be happy. The flip side to that message is that, as heterosexuals, we are doomed to unhappiness and strife. If we are lucky, the best we can achieve is manic depression. At worst, we will be murdered by some causality of heterosexual deviancy.
The film that dominated the Oscars is a triumph of dark cynicism with some wonderful acting and direction, but I believe that it was only made because of what I call its 'heterophobia' - the systematic denigration of heterosexual lifestyles - that has become part of the Hollywood mainstream.
American Beauty is heterophobia's propaganda masterpiece.
Its sweep of the Academy Awards' top categories thrilled Hollywood's gay community, who have been trying to prove for a long time that heterosexuality is a sad form of sexual dysfunction.
American Beauty is now regarded as a classic in the same mould as The Graduate, but far more interesting are the characters behind the movie and the agenda they hope to promote.
In the Seventies, homosexuals had legitimate grievances. They were persecuted for their sexuality and discriminated in ways that were repellent.
THE GAY rights movement that became increasingly vocal in the Eighties won deserved new freedoms for homosexuals.
Nobody should be persecuted for their sexuality, except those who prey on young children.
Yet at some time in the past ten years, a new theory gained currency among gays, especially in the entertainment business. This held that heterosexuality was a curse to be denigrated and mocked wherever possible, and that gays could never win the power they craved in society without undermining heterosexuals whenever possible.
At the same time, gays who held this view began agitating for homosexuality to be accepted as a form of behaviour on a par with heterosexual activity.
This was to be done in two ways.
On the positive front, these radical gays argued that homosexuals should be entitled to get married in the same way as heterosexual couples, and that schools should teach about gay sex as if it were no more normal or abnormal than male-female intercourse.
Academics began writing papers arguing for gay parenting, using statistics to suggest that children of gay couples had no more emotional problems that the average child of a 'straight' family.
On the negative end, gays began countering undesirable images of homosexuality - such as the spread of Aids - with a bleak picture of what they derisively called 'straight sex'. Lesbians began affirming that any woman who had a sexual relationship with a man must, at some point, submit to rape.
Workplace behaviour, such as mild flirting, once regarded as innocent, was lumped together with flagrantly intrusive and unacceptable advances, and all of it labelled 'sexual harassment'.
The point of this exercise was to demonise normal heterosexual behaviour, and to make the ordinary rituals of attraction and relationships seem aberrant, so that gays could advance their own cause by claiming 'straights' led lives that were much worse than theirs.
Along the way, sexual harassment law, and the industry which has developed around it, distorted from a sensible set of safeguards into something which could be used to attack heterosexuality at its roots, effectively conveying the idea that a heterosexual male was inherently dangerous and needed to be constrained by Draconian laws just as bars might hold back a rabid tiger.
Into this picture enter the men responsible for American Beauty, who must be stunned that their insidious attack on heterosexuality has not only become an Oscar-winner but has broken box office records.
The screenwriter, who won an Oscar for Best Screenplay, is Alan Ball. He grew up in the American South, in Georgia. ...
LONG before it became an Oscar hit, Ball's script was picked up by Dan Jinks and Bruce Cohen, who eventually produced the film and were on stage last Sunday to collect the Oscar for Best Picture. ...
Given their Out There affiliation, Jinks and Cohen knew just where to take the American Beauty script to get it made - to fellow Out There sympathizer David Geffen, Steven Spielberg's partner in Dreamworks.
As, The Operator, a new biography of Geffen makes clear, Geffen is a predatory homosexual who has devoted considerable energy to projects that target heterosexuality.
He is allegedly the main force in the Velvet Mafia, a loose association of powerful gay men who use their influence in Hollywood to advance gay issues.
Sources say Geffen has frequently changed scripts if they seem to be too sympathetic towards heterosexual love or if they show any hint of antipathy towards gays.
In 20 years of filmmaking, Geffen has become infamous for making or breaking careers based on whether the people involved are gay and willing to be part of his extremely active sex life.
His summer parties at Fire Island, a gay resort 30 miles outside Manhattan, are legendary as the place the Velvet Mafia meet to indulge in extraordinary bacchanals.
HIS GUEST list begins with designer Calvin Klein and includes other Velvet Mafia members such as Barry Diller (who helped create The Simpsons), George Michael and Sandy Gallin, the super-powerful talent agent who discovered Madonna, Tom Cruise and Julia Roberts.
In recent years, several guests at Geffen's Fire Island house have described weekend-long orgies, fuelled by drugs, at which Geffen and his powerful friends ran a 'meat market', selecting young men for either sex or stardom.
'If you weren't incredibly handsome and well-built, there was no way you would get in,' says a New York movie agent who has been to several Geffen parties. 'Dress was minimal or nonexistent, and Geffen would prowl with his friends, squeezing men like they were cattle.'
When Jinks and Cohen took American Beauty to Geffen, the billionaire producer was ecstatic.
He rushed the script through the approval process - virtually unheard of for a screenplay by a writer with no previous movie hits - and maintained a close personal interest in casting.
Geffen, Jinks, Cohen and Ball all attended half a dozen Oscar parties after the triumph of American Beauty. One producer who is close to Ball said they had good reason to be happy.
After all, he said, they have created a film that is both a masterpiece and the most corrosive satire of heterosexual life that has ever made $100 million from the very people it vilifies.
And that is the hard truth about American Beauty. It exists and triumphed because, for some gays, it is not enough to win civil rights and equality of opportunity.
They want more: a society in which heterosexuality is so condemned that homosexuals can win any increases in power they might choose. ................
Camille Paglia writes 5/26/99 in Salon.com: Would an admission of gayness hurt a young male singer's career? Of course it would: This junior Adonis type requires the electric charge produced by the mass projection of adolescent girls in erotic hysteria. Elton John, after his sham marriage, could afford to be openly gay because he caricatured himself as a sad-sack clown, crying through his sequins. Pretty boys, with their androgynous glow, have a more direct and dangerous sensual appeal. If Ricky Martin turned out to be just another buff gay clone, he'd cut himself off at the knees as an international artist. Current gay male culture is too shallow to provide the kind of psychological development that a performer needs.
http://www.lukeford.net/essays/contents/homo_mafia.htm
Courtesy Peter Myers news email
Last updated 10/10/2010